I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’
Those scar-like eyebrows arched, dubious; but it was true. I didn’t find it peculiar at all. The great heartbreak in my dad’s life was his separation from the home of his childhood. It was a simple enough story: a small boy fed on fables of his family’s grand history, an adored and moneyed uncle who made promises, a death-bed change of heart.
‘Old buildings and old families belong to one another,’ she continued. ‘That’s as it’s always been. My family lives on in the stones of Milderhurst Castle and it’s my duty to keep them. It is not a task for outsiders.’
Her tone was searing; agreement seemed to be required. ‘You must feel as if they’re still around you – ’ as the words left my lips, I had a sudden image of my mum, kneeling by the dolls’ houses – ‘singing in the walls.’
A brow leaped half an inch. ‘What’s that?’
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the last aloud.
‘About the walls,’ she pressed. ‘You said something just now, about the walls singing. What was it?’
‘Just something my mother told me once,’ I swallowed meekly, ‘about ancient walls that sing the distant hours.’
Pleasure spread across Percy’s face in stark and brilliant contrast to her usual dour expression. ‘My father wrote that. Your mother must have read his poetry.’
I was sincerely doubtful. Mum had never gone in much for reading, and certainly never for poems. ‘Possibly.’
‘He used to tell us stories when we were small, tales of the past. He said that if he didn’t go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide.’ As she warmed to recounting the memory Percy’s left hand drifted forth like the sail of a ship. It was a curiously theatrical movement, out of character with her thus-far clipped and efficient manner. Her way of speaking had altered, too: the short sentences had lengthened, the sharp tone softened. ‘He would come upon them, playing out in the dark, deserted corridors. Think of all the people who’ve lived within these walls, he’d say, who’ve whispered their secrets, laid their betrayals . . .’
‘Do you hear them too? The distant hours?’
Her eyes met mine, held them earnestly for just a moment. ‘Silly nonsense,’ she said, breaking into her hairpin smile. ‘Ours are old stones, but they’re still just stones. They’ve no doubt seen a lot but they’re good at keeping secrets.’
Something crossed her face then, a little like pain: she was thinking of her father, I supposed, and her mother, the tunnel of time and voices that must chatter to her down the ages. ‘No matter,’ she said, more for her own sake than mine. ‘It doesn’t do to brood on the past. Calculating the dead can make one feel quite alone.’
‘You must be glad to have your sisters.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve always imagined that siblings must be a great comfort.’
Another pause. ‘You haven’t any of your own?’
‘No.’ I smiled, shrugged lightly. ‘I’m a lonely only.’
‘Is it lonely?’ She considered me as if I were a rare specimen deserving of study. ‘I’ve always wondered.’
I thought of the great absence in my life, and then of the rare nights spent in company with my sleeping, snoring, muttering cousins, my guilty imaginings that I was one of them, that I belonged with somebody. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s lonely.’
‘Liberating, too, one would expect.’
I noticed for the first time a small vein quivering in her neck. ‘Liberating?’
‘There’s none like a sister for remembering one’s ancient sins.’ She smiled at me then, but its warmth fell short of transforming her sentiment to humour. She must have suspected as much, for she let the smile fall away, nodding towards the staircase. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Let’s go down. Careful, now. Make sure you hold the rail. My uncle died on those stairs when he was just a boy.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Hopelessly inadequate, but what else does one say? ‘How awful.’
‘A great storm blew up one evening and he was frightened, or so the story goes. Lightning sliced open the sky and struck right by the lake. The boy cried out in terror, but before his nurse could reach him, he leaped from his bed and fled the room. Silly lad: he stumbled and fell, landed at the bottom like a rag doll. We used to imagine we heard him crying in the night sometimes, when the weather was particularly bad. He hides beneath the third step, you know. Waiting to trip someone up. Hoping for someone to join him.’ She pivoted on the step below me, the fourth. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Burchill?’
‘I don’t know. Sort of.’ My gran had seen ghosts. A ghost, at any rate: my uncle Ed after he came off his motorbike in Australia. He didn’t realize he was dead, she’d told me. My poor lamb. I held out my hand and told him it was all right, that he’d made it home and that we all loved him. I shivered, remembering, and, just before she turned, Percy Blythe’s face took on a cast of grim satisfaction.
The Mud Man, the Muniment Room, and a Locked Door
I followed Percy Blythe down flights of stairs, along gloomy corridors, then down further still. Deeper, surely, than the level from which we’d climbed initially? Like all buildings that have evolved over time, Milderhurst was a patchwork. Wings had been added and altered, had crumbled and been restored. The effect was disorientating, particularly for someone with no natural compass whatsoever. It seemed as if the castle folded inwards, like one of those drawings by Escher, where you might continue walking the stairs, round and round, for eternity, without ever reaching an end. There were no windows – not since we’d left the attic – and it was exceedingly dark. At one stage I could have sworn I heard a drifting melody skating along the stones – romantic, wistful, vaguely familiar – but when we turned another corner it was gone, and perhaps it had never been. Something I certainly did not imagine was the pungent smell, which strengthened as we descended and was saved from being unpleasant by sheer virtue of its earthiness.
Even though Percy had pooh-poohed her father’s notion of the distant hours, I couldn’t help running my hand against the cool stones as we walked, wondering about the imprints Mum might have left when she was at Milderhurst. The little girl still walked beside me but she didn’t say much. I considered asking Percy about her, but having gone this far without announcing my connection to the house, anything I thought to say carried the stench of duplicity. In the end I opted for classic passive-aggressive subterfuge. ‘Was the castle requisitioned during the war?’
‘No. Dear God. I couldn’t have borne it. The damage that was done to some of the nation’s finest houses – no.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Thank goodness. I’d have felt it as a pain to my own body. We did our bit though. I was with the Ambulance Service for a time, over in Folkestone; Saffy stitched clothing and bandages, knitted a thousand scarves. We took in an evacuee, too, in the early years.’
‘Oh?’ My voice trilled slightly. Beside me the little girl skipped.
‘At Juniper’s urging. A young girl from London. Goodness, I’ve forgotten her name. Isn’t that a pip? – Apologies for the smell along here.’
Something inside me clenched in sympathy for that forgotten girl.
‘It’s the mud,’ Percy went on. ‘From where the moat used to be. The groundwater rises in summer, seeps through the cellars and brings the smell of rotting fish with it. Thankfully there’s nothing down here of much value. Nothing except the muniment room, and it’s watertight. The walls and floor are lined with copper, the door is made from lead. Nothing gets in or out of there.’
‘The muniment room.’ A chill rippled fast up my neck. ‘Just like in the Mud Man.’ The special room, deep within the uncle’s house, the room where all the family’s documents were lodged, where he unearthed the mouldy old diary that unravelled the Mud Man’s past. The chamber of secrets in the house’s heart.
Percy paused, leaned on her cane and turned her eyes on me. ‘You’ve read it then.’
It wasn’t
a question exactly, but I answered anyway. ‘I adored it growing up.’ As the words left my lips I felt a stirring of old deflation, the inability to express adequately my love for the book. ‘It was my favourite,’ I added, and the phrase hung hopefully before disintegrating into specks, powder from a puff that drifted unseen into the shadows.
‘It was very popular,’ said Percy, starting again down the corridor. No doubt she’d heard it all before. ‘It still is. Seventy-five years in print next year.’
‘Really?’
‘Seventy-five years,’ she said again, pulling open a door and issuing me up another flight of stairs. ‘I remember it like yesterday.’
‘The publication must have been very exciting.’
‘We were pleased to see Daddy happy.’ Did I notice the tiny hesitation then, or am I letting things learned later colour my earliest impressions?
A clock somewhere began its weary chime and I realized with a stab of regret that my hour was up. It seemed impossible, I’d have sworn black and blue that I’d only just arrived, but time is an odd, ungraspable thing. The hour that sagged between breakfast and my setting out for Milderhurst had taken an age to pass, but the sixty brief minutes I’d been granted inside the castle walls had fled like a flock of frightened birds.
Percy Blythe checked her own wristwatch. ‘I’ve dallied,’ she said with mild surprise. ‘I apologize. The grandfather is ten minutes fast, but we must get on nonetheless. Mrs Bird will be here to collect you on the hour and it’s quite a walk back to the entrance hall. There’ll be no time to see the tower, I’m afraid.’
I made a gasping noise, a cross between ‘Oh!’ and a sharp reaction to pain, and then I recovered myself: ‘I’m sure Mrs Bird won’t mind if I’m a little late.’
‘I was under the impression you had to be back in London?’
‘Yes.’ Though it seems unfathomable, for a moment I’d actually forgotten: Herbert, his car, the appointment he had to make in Windsor. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Never mind,’ said Percy Blythe, striding after her cane. ‘You’ll see it next time. When you visit us again.’ I noticed the assumption, but I didn’t think to query it, not at the time. Indeed, I gave it little thought other than to pass it off as a rather fun and meaningless rejoinder, for as we emerged from the stairwell I was distracted by a rustling sound.
The rustling, like the caretakers, was only very faint and I wondered at first if I’d imagined it, all that talk of the distant hours, people trapped in the stones, but when Percy Blythe also glanced around, I knew that I had not.
From an adjoining corridor, the dog lumbered into view. ‘Bruno,’ said Percy, surprised, ‘what are you doing all the way down here, fellow?’
He stopped right beside me and looked up from beneath his droopy lids.
Percy leaned forward to scratch him behind the ears. ‘Do you know what the word “lurcher” means? It’s from the Romany for thief. Isn’t that right, boy? Terribly cruel name for such a good old boy as you.’ She straightened slowly, one hand in the small of her back. ‘They were bred by the gypsies originally, used for poaching: rabbits and hares, other small creatures. Pure breeds were forbidden to anyone who didn’t belong to the nobility and the penalties were severe; the challenge was to retain the hunting skills whilst breeding in sufficient variation that they didn’t look like a threat.
‘He’s my sister’s, Juniper’s. Even as a small girl she loved animals specially; they seemed to love her too. We’ve always kept a dog for her, certainly since the trauma. They say everyone needs something to love.’
As if he knew and resented being made the topic of discussion, Bruno continued on his way. In his wake, the rustling came again faintly, only to be drowned out when a nearby phone began to ring.
Percy stood very still, listening the way people do when they’re awaiting confirmation that someone else has picked up.
The ringing continued until disconsolate silence closed around its final echo.
‘Come along,’ said Percy, a note of agitation clipping her voice. ‘There’s a shortcut through here.’
The corridor was dim, but no more so than the others; indeed, now that we’d emerged from the basement, a few diffuse ribbons of light had appeared, threading their way through the castle knots to spill across the flagstones. We were two-thirds of the way along when the phone began again.
This time Percy didn’t wait. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, clearly flustered. ‘I can’t think where Saffy is. I’m expecting an important telephone call. Will you excuse me? I shan’t be a moment.’
‘Of course.’
And with a nod she disappeared, turning at the end of the corridor and leaving me stranded.
I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained, twiddling my thumbs, until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.
The handle was black and smooth, shaped like a shin bone and cool beneath my palm. Indeed, a general coldness seemed to leach from the other side of the door; though how, I couldn’t tell.
My fingers tightened around the handle, I started to twist, then—
‘We don’t go in there.’
My stomach, I don’t mind saying, just about shot through the roof of my mouth.
I spun on my heel, scanned the gloomy space behind. I could see nothing, yet clearly I wasn’t alone. Someone, the owner of the voice, was in the corridor with me. Even if she hadn’t spoken I’d have known: I could feel another presence, something moving and hiding in the drawing shadows. The rustling was back now, too: louder, closer, definitely not in my head, definitely not mice.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the cloaked passage. ‘I—’
‘We don’t go in there.’
I smothered the panicky surge in my throat. ‘I didn’t know—’
‘That’s the good parlour.’
I saw her then, Juniper Blythe, as she stepped from the chill darkness and slowly crossed the corridor towards me.
Say You’ll Come Dancing
Her dress was incredible, the sort you expect to see in films about wealthy debutantes before the war, or hidden on the racks of upmarket charity shops. It was organza, the palest of pink, or it had been once, before time and grime had got busy, laying their fingers all over it. Sheets of tulle supported the full skirt, pushing it out as it fell away from her tiny waist, wide enough for the netted hemline to rustle against the walls when she moved.
We stood facing one another across the dull corridor for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she moved. Slightly. Her arms had been hanging by her sides, resting on her skirt, and she lifted one a little, leading from the palm, a graceful movement as if an unseen thread stitched to her inner wrist had been plucked from the ceiling behind me.
‘Hello,’ I said, with what I hoped was warmth. ‘I’m Edie. Edie Burchill. We met earlier, in the yellow parlour.’
She blinked at me and tilted her head sideways. Silvered hair draped over her shoulder, long and lank; the front strands had been pinned rather haphazardly with a pair of baroque combs. The unexpected translucence of her skin, the rake-like figure, the fancy frock: all combined to create the illusion of a teenager, a young girl with gangly limbs and a self-conscious way of holding them. Not shy, though, certainly not that: her expression was quizzical, curious, as she took a small step closer into a stray patch of light.
And then it was my turn for curiosity, for Juniper must have been seventy years old and yet her face was miraculously unlined. Impossible, of
course; ladies of seventy do not have unlined faces, and she was no exception – in our later meetings I would see that for myself – but in that light, in that dress, through some trick of circumstance, some strange charm, it was how she appeared. Pale and smooth, iridescent like the inside of a pearl shell, as if the same passing years that had so busily engraved deep imprints on her sisters had somehow preserved her. And yet she wasn’t timeless; there was something unmistakably olden days about her, an aspect that was utterly fixed in the past, like an old photograph viewed through protective tissue in one of those albums with the sepia-clouded pages. The image came to me again of the spring flowers pressed by Victorian ladies in their scrapbooks. Beautiful things, killed in the kindest of ways, carried forward into a time and place, a season, no longer their own.
The chimera spoke then, and the sensation was compounded: ‘I’m going in to dinner now.’ A high, ethereal voice that made the hair on my neck stand to attention. ‘Would you like to come too?’
I shook my head, coughed to clear a tickle from my throat. ‘No. No, thank you. I have to go home soon.’ My voice was not itself and I realized I was standing very rigidly, as if I was afraid. Which, I suppose, I was, though of what I couldn’t say.
Juniper didn’t seem to notice my discomfort: ‘I have a new dress to wear,’ she said, plucking at her skirts so that the top layer of organza pulled up a little at each side, like the wings of a moth, white and powdery with dust. ‘Not new exactly, no, that isn’t right, but altered. It belonged to my mother once.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘I don’t think you ever met her.’
‘Your mother? No.’
‘Oh, she was lovely, so lovely. Just a girl when she died, just a girl. This was her pretty dress.’ She swirled coyly this way and that, peered up at me from beneath her lashes. The glassy gaze of earlier was gone, replaced by keen blue eyes, knowing somehow, the eyes of that bright child I’d seen in the photograph, disturbed while she was playing alone on the garden steps. ‘Do you like it?’