The Distant Hours (64 page)

I nodded, remembering the notebooks downstairs, the changed handwriting, heavy with confidence and intent from first line until last.

Lightning struck and Percy Blythe flinched. She waited out the answering thunder. ‘The words in that book were his, Miss Burchill; it was the idea he stole.’

From whom?
I wanted to shout, but I bit my tongue this time.

‘It pained me to write that letter, to dampen his enthusiasm when the project so sustained him, but I had to.’ Rain began to fall, an instant sheen. ‘Soon after Daddy returned from France, I contracted scarlet fever and was sent away to recover. Twins, Miss Blythe, do not do well with solitude.’

‘It must have been awful—’

‘Saffy,’ she continued, as if she’d forgotten I were there, ‘was always the more imaginative. We were a balanced pair in that way, illusion and reality were kept in check. Separated, though, we each sharpened to opposing points.’ She shivered and stepped back from the window; spots of rain were falling on the sill. ‘My twin suffered terribly with nightmare. The fanciful among us often do.’ She glanced at me. ‘You will notice, Miss Burchill, that I did not say night
mares
. There was only ever one.’

The glowering storm outside had swallowed the day’s last light and the tower room fell to darkness. Only the fire’s orange flicker provided jagged relief. Percy returned to the desk and switched on its lamp. Light shone greenly through the coloured glass shade, casting dark shadows beneath her eyes. ‘She’d been dreaming about him since she was four years old. She would wake in the night screaming, bathed in sweat, convinced that a man coated in mud had climbed from the moat to claim her.’ A slight tilt of the head and Percy’s cheekbones leaped into relief. ‘I always soothed her. I told her it was just a dream, that no harm could come while I was there.’ She exhaled thornily. ‘Which was all well and good until July 1917.’

‘When you went away with the fever.’

A nod, so slight I might have imagined it.

‘So she told your father instead.’

‘He was hiding from his nurses when she found him. She was no doubt in quite a state – Saffy was never one for reserve – and he asked her what was wrong.’

‘And then he wrote it down.’

‘Her demon was his saviour. In the beginning, anyway. The story fired him: he sought her out, hungry for details. His attention flattered her, I’m sure, and by the time I returned from hospital things were very different. Daddy was bright, recovered, delirious almost, and he and Saffy shared a secret. Neither of them mentioned the Mud Man to me. It wasn’t until I saw proof copies of
The True History of the Mud Man
, on this desk right here, that I guessed what had happened.’

The rain was teeming now, and I got up to close the window so that I could hear. ‘And so you wrote the letter.’

‘I knew, of course, that for him to publish such a thing would be terrible for Saffy. He wouldn’t be convinced though, and he lived with the consequences for the rest of his life.’ Her attention drifted to the Goya again. ‘The guilt of what he’d done, his sin.’

‘Because he’d stolen Saffy’s nightmare,’ I said. Sin was taking it a bit far, perhaps, but I certainly understood how such a thing might impact upon a young girl, particularly one with a bent for the fantastic. ‘He sent it out into the world and gave it new life. He made it real.’

Percy laughed, a wry, metallic sound that made me shiver. ‘Oh, Miss Burchill, he did more than that. He inspired the dream. He just didn’t know that then.’

A growl of thunder rolled up the tower and the lamplight dulled; Percy Blythe, however, did not. She was possessed by her story’s purpose, and I leaned closer, desperate to know just what she meant, what Raymond Blythe could possibly have done to spark Saffy’s nightmare. Another cigarette was lit; her eyes shone, and perhaps she smelled my interest for she shifted the spotlight. ‘Mother kept her affair secret for the better part of a year.’

The change of subject was a physical blow and I deflated. Rather obviously, I’m afraid, for it did not escape my host’s attention. ‘Am I disappointing you, Miss Burchill?’ she snapped. ‘This is the story of the
Mud Man
’s birth. It’s quite a scoop, you know. We all played our part in his creation, even Mother, though she was dead before dream was dreamed or book was writ.’ She brushed a trail of ash from the front of her blouse and picked up her story. ‘Mother’s affair carried on and Daddy had no idea. Until one night when he came home early from a trip to London. He’d had good news – a journal in America had published an article of his, to great acclaim – and he was of a mind to celebrate. It was late. Saffy and I, just four years old, had been put to bed hours before, and the lovers were in the library. Mother’s lady’s maid tried to stop Daddy, but he’d been drinking whisky all afternoon and he wouldn’t be calmed. He was jubilant, he wanted his wife to share in his good mood. He burst into the library, and there they were.’ Her mouth darted to form a grimace, for she knew what was coming. ‘Daddy was enraged and a terrible fight ensued. He and Sykes, then when the other man lay injured on the floor, he and Mother. Daddy berated her, called her names, and then he shook her, not hard enough to hurt but with sufficient force that she fell against the table. A lamp toppled to the ground and broke, the flames catching the hem of her dress.

‘The fire was immediate and fierce. It raced up the chiffon of her dress and within an instant she was engulfed. Daddy was horrified, of course, dragging her to the curtains, trying to smother the flames. It only made matters worse. The curtains caught, the whole room soon after; fire was everywhere. Daddy ran for help: he dragged Mother out of the library, saved her life – albeit briefly – but he didn’t go back for Sykes. He left him there to die. Love makes people do cruel things, Miss Burchill.

‘The library burned completely but when the authorities arrived, no other body was found. It was as if Oliver Sykes had never existed. Daddy supposed that the body had disintegrated under such intense heat, Mother’s maid never spoke of it again for fear of tarnishing her mistress’s good name, and no one came looking for Sykes. In a great gift of fortune for Daddy, the man was a dreamer who’d spoken often of his desire to escape to the continent and slip from the world.’

What she’d told me was awful, that the fire that killed their mother had been caused in such a way, that Oliver Sykes had been left to die in the library, yet I knew I was missing something for I still couldn’t see what it had to do with the
Mud Man
.

‘I saw none of this myself,’ she said. ‘But someone did. High up in the attic, a small girl had woken from her sleep, left her twin alone in bed, and climbed up on the bookcase to see the strange and golden sky. What she saw was fire, leaping from the library, and, down on the ground, a man all black and charred and melted, screaming in agony as he tried to climb out of the moat.’

Percy refilled her water and drank shakily. ‘Do you remember when you first visited, Miss Burchill, and you mentioned the past singing in the walls?’

‘Yes.’ The tour that seemed a lifetime ago.

‘I told you it was nonsense, the distant hours. That the stones were old but that they didn’t tell their secrets.’

‘I remember.’

‘I was lying.’ She lifted her chin and set her eyes on mine, a challenge. ‘I do hear them. The older I get, the louder they become. This has not been an easy story to tell, but it’s been necessary. As I said, there is another type of immortality, a far more lonely one.’

I waited.

‘A life, Miss Burchill, a human life, is bracketed by a pair of events: one’s birth and one’s death. The dates of those events belong to a person as much as their name, as much as the experiences that happen in between. I am not telling you this story so that I might feel absolved. I am telling you because a death should be recorded. Do you understand?’

I nodded, thinking of Theo Cavill and his obsessive checking of his brother’s records, the ghastly limbo of not knowing.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘There must be no confusion on that count.’

Her talk of absolution reminded me of Raymond’s guilt, for that was why he’d converted to Catholicism, of course. Why he’d left a great deal of his wealth to the Church. The other recipient had been Sykes’s Farm Institute. Not because Raymond Blythe admired the group’s work, but because he was guilty. I thought of something. ‘You said before that your father didn’t know that he’d inspired the dream at first: did he realize later?’

She smiled. ‘He received a letter from a doctoral student in Norway writing a thesis on physical injury in literature. He was interested in the Mud Man’s blackened body because at times, the student felt, the descriptions painted him in a way that mirrored other representations of burn victims. Daddy never wrote back, but he knew then.’

‘When was that?’

‘The mid-thirties. That’s when he began to see the Mud Man in the castle.’

And when he added a second dedication to his book: MB and OS. Not the initials of his wives, but an attempt to atone in some way for the deaths he’d caused. Something struck me: ‘You didn’t see it happen. How do you know about the fight in the library? Oliver Sykes being there that night?’

‘Juniper.’

‘What?’

‘Daddy told her. She suffered a traumatic event of her own when she was thirteen. He was always on about how similar they were: I expect he thought it would comfort her to know that we are all capable of behaving in ways we might regret. He could be grand and foolish like that.’

She fell silent then, reaching for her glass of water, and the room itself seemed to exhale. Relief, perhaps, that the truth had finally been disclosed. Was Percy Blythe relieved? I wasn’t so sure. Glad that her duty had been discharged, no doubt, but there was nothing in her bearing that seemed lightened by the telling. I had a feeling I knew why: any comfort she might have drawn was far exceeded by her grief.
Grand and foolish
. They were the first words I’d heard her speak ill about her father and on her lips, she who was so fiercely protective of his legacy, they’d weighed especially heavily.

And why shouldn’t they? What Raymond Blythe had done was wicked, no one could argue with that, and it was little wonder he’d been driven mad by guilt. I remembered that photograph of the elderly Raymond in the book I’d bought from the village shop: the fearful eyes, the contracted features, the sense that his body was burdened by black thoughts. A similar appearance, it occurred to me, to the one his eldest daughter presented now. She had shrunk into the chair and her clothing seemed oversized, draping from one bone to the next. Her story had left her spent, her eyelids sagging and the fragile skin shot through with blue; it struck me as wretched that a daughter should have to suffer the sins of her father in such a way.

Rain was falling hard outside, beating against the already sodden ground, and inside the room had darkened with the passing afternoon. Even the fire, which had flickered alongside Percy’s story, was dying now, taking the last of the study’s warmth with it.

I closed my notebook. ‘Why don’t we finish up for the afternoon?’ I said, with what I hoped was kindness. ‘We can pick up again tomorrow, if you like.’

‘Almost, Miss Burchill, I’m almost done.’

She rattled her cigarette box and tipped a final stick onto the desk. Fiddled with it a bit before her match took and the cigarette end glowed. ‘You know now about Sykes,’ she said, ‘but not about the other one.’

The other one. My breath caught.

‘I see by your face, you know of whom I speak.’

I nodded, stiltedly. There was an enormous crack of thunder and I shivered where I sat. Let my notebook fall open again.

She drew hard on her cigarette, coughed as she exhaled. ‘Juniper’s friend.’

‘Thomas Cavill,’ I whispered.

‘He did arrive that night. October 29th, 1941. Write that down. He came as he’d promised her. Only she never knew it.’

‘Why? What happened?’ Perched on the fringes of enlightenment, I almost didn’t want to know.

‘There was a storm, rather like this one. It was dark. There was an accident.’ She spoke so softly I had to lean very close to hear. ‘I thought he was an intruder.’

There was nothing I could think to say.

Her face was ashen and in its lines I read decades of guilt. ‘I never told anyone. Certainly not the police. I was concerned they might not believe me. That they might think I was covering for someone else.’

Juniper. Juniper with the violent incident in her past. The scandal with the gardener’s son.

‘I took care of it. I did my best. But nobody knows and that, finally, must be set to rights.’ I was shocked then to see that she was weeping, tears rolling freely down her old, old face. Shocked, because it was Percy Blythe, but not surprised. Not after what she’d just confessed.

Two men’s deaths, two concealments: there was much to process – so much that I could neither see nor feel distinctly. My emotions had run together like the colours in a set of waterpaints so that I didn’t feel angry or frightened or morally superior, and I certainly wasn’t feverish with glee at having learned the answers to my questions. I just felt sad. Upset and concerned for the old woman sitting across from me, who was weeping for her life’s spiny secrets. I wasn’t able to alleviate her pain, but I couldn’t just sit there staring either. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘let me help you downstairs.’