She was testing me, I realized; this was her way of ascertaining whether I still believed her story. Whether Juniper had told me anything in the night. This was my chance to reveal what I had learned, to ask her outright who had really killed Thomas Cavill. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand completely.’ To what end would I have told her? To satisfy my own curiosity at the expense of the sisters’ peace of mind? I couldn’t do it.
She was visibly relieved. ‘I’ve suffered endlessly. I never intended for it to happen.’
‘I know. I know you didn’t.’ I was touched by her sisterly sense of duty, a love so strong that she would confess to a crime she didn’t commit. ‘You must put it out of your mind,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen before, one which I am hard pressed to describe. Part anguish, part relief, but with hints of something else mixed in as well. She was Percy Blythe, though, and she didn’t go in for sentiment. She coolly composed herself and nodded sharply. ‘Don’t forget your promise, now, Miss Burchill. I’m relying on you. I am not the sort who likes to trust to chance.’
The ground was wet, the sky was white, and the entire landscape had the blanched look of a face in the aftermath of a hysterical rage. A little the way I imagined my own face might be looking. I went carefully, keen to avoid being swept away like a log downstream, and by the time I reached the farmhouse Mrs Bird had already moved on to lunch preparation. The strong, dense smell of soup hung thickly in the air, a simple but tremendous pleasure for someone who’d spent a night in company with the castle’s ghosts.
Mrs Bird herself was setting tables in the main room and her plump, apron-wrapped figure was such an ordinary, comforting sight, that I felt possessed by a strong urge to hug her. I might have, too, had I not then noticed that we weren’t alone.
There was someone else, another guest, leaning forward to pay close attention to the black-and-white photographs on the wall.
A very familiar person.
‘Mum?’
She looked up and offered me a tentative smile. ‘Hello, Edie.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘You said I should come. I wanted to surprise you.’
I don’t think I’d ever been so pleased or relieved to see another person in my life. I gave
Perhaps my vehemence showed, perhaps I held on just a mite too long, for she blinked at me and said, ‘Is everything all right, Edie?’
I hesitated as the secrets I’d learned, the grim truths I’d witnessed, shuffled like cards in my mind. Then I folded them away and smiled. ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. There was quite a storm last night.’
‘Mrs Bird was telling me, she said you’d been rained in at the castle.’ The buckle in her voice was only slight. ‘I’m glad I didn’t set off in the afternoon as I’d planned.’
‘Have you been here long?’
‘Only twenty minutes or so. I’ve been looking at these.’ She pointed to a nearby photograph, one of the
I bent closer to read the annotation beneath the photo:
‘Can I get you ladies some lunch?’ Mrs Bird said.
I turned away from Sykes’s smiling face. ‘What do you say, Mum? You must be hungry after the drive.’
‘Soup would be lovely. Is it all right if we sit outside?’
We sat at a table in the garden from which we could glimpse the castle; Mrs Bird had made the suggestion and, before I could demur, Mum had declared it perfect. As the farmhouse geese kept busy in the nearby puddles, ever hopeful that a crumb might fall their way, Mum began to talk about her past. The time she’d spent at Milderhurst, the way she’d felt about Juniper, the crush she’d had on her teacher, Mr Cavill; finally, she told me of her dreams of being a journalist.
‘What happened, Mum?’ I said, spreading butter on my bread. ‘Why did you change your mind?’
‘I didn’t change my mind. I just – ’ She shifted a little in the white iron seat that Mrs Bird had towel-dried – ‘I suppose I just… In the end I couldn’t…’ She frowned at her inability to find the words she needed, then continued with new determination. ‘Meeting Juniper opened a door for me and I desperately wanted to belong on the other side. Without her, though, I couldn’t seem to keep it open. I tried, Edie, I really did. I dreamed of going to university, but so many schools were closed in London during the war and in the end I applied for work as a typist. I always believed that it was temporary, that one day I would go on and do what I’d intended. But when the war ended I was eighteen and too old for school. I couldn’t go to university without my Higher.’
‘So you stopped writing?’
‘Oh no.’ She drew a figure eight in her soup with the tip of the spoon, round and round again. ‘No, I didn’t. I was rather stubborn back then. I set my mind to it and decided I wasn’t going to let a small matter like that stop me.’ She smiled a little without looking up. ‘I was going to write for myself, become a famous journalist.’
I smiled too, unfeasibly pleased by her description of the intrepid young Meredith Baker.
‘I embarked on a programme of my own, reading whatever I could find in the library, writing articles, reviews, stories sometimes, and sending them off.’
‘Was anything published?’
She shifted coyly in her seat. ‘A few small pieces here and there. I got some encouraging letters from the editors of the bigger journals, gentle but firm, telling me that I needed to learn more about their house style. Then, in 1952, a job came up.’ Mum glanced over to where the geese were flapping their wings and something in her bearing changed, some of the air went out of her. She set down her spoon. ‘The job was with the BBC, entry level, but exactly what I wanted.’
‘What happened?’
‘I saved up and bought myself a smart little outfit and a leather satchel so I’d look the part. I gave myself a stern talking to about acting confidently, speaking clearly, not letting my shoulders slouch. But then – ’ she inspected the backs of her hands, rubbed a thumb across her knuckles – ‘then there was a mix up with the buses and instead of taking me to Broad casting House, the driver let me off down near Marble Arch. I ran most of the way back, but when I got to the top of Regent Street, I saw all these girls sallying out of the building, laughing and joking, so smart and together, so much younger than I was, and looking as if they knew the answers to all life’s questions.’ She swept a crumb from the table to the ground before meeting my eyes. ‘I caught sight of myself then in a department store window and I looked such a fraud, Edie.’
‘Oh, Mum.’
‘Such a bedraggled fraud I despised myself and I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I might belong in such a place. I don’t think I’d ever felt so lonely. I turned away from Portland Place and walked in the other direction, tears streaming. What a mess I must’ve looked. I felt so desolate and sorry for myself and strangers kept telling me to keep my chin up, so when I finally passed a cinema I ducked inside to be miserable in peace.’
I remembered Dad’s account of the girl who’d cried the whole way through a film. ‘And you saw
Mum nodded, drew a tissue from somewhere and dabbed at her eyes. ‘And I met your father. And he took me to tea and bought me pear cake.’
‘Your favourite.’
She smiled through tears, fond of the memory. ‘He kept asking what the matter was and when I told him that the film had made me cry he looked at me with total disbelief. “But it’s not real,” he said, as he ordered a second slice of cake. “It’s all made up.” ’
We both laughed then; she’d sounded just like Dad.
‘He was so firm, Edie; so solid in his perception of the world and his place in it. Astonishingly so. I’d never met anyone quite like him. He didn’t see things unless they were there, he didn’t worry about them until they happened.
