castle?’
‘Not refuse; I don’t refuse, I
‘Then come, come with me now-’
‘I can’t…’ She stood. ‘I’ve told you.’
A change came upon him then, a bitter knife twisting his features. ‘Of course you can. If you loved me, you would come. You’d climb into my motorcar and we’d drive away from this ghastly, mildewed place.’ He stood beside her, implored her. ‘Come on, Saffy,’ he said, all trace of resentment dropping away. He gestured with his hat to the top of the drive where his car was parked. ‘Let’s go. Let’s drive away this instant, the two of us together.’
She’d wanted to say again, ‘I can’t,’ to beg him to understand, to be patient, to wait for her; but she hadn’t. A moment of clarity, a struck match, and she’d known that there was nothing she could say or do to make him comprehend. The crippling panic that crept upon her if she tried to leave the castle; the black and groundless fear that dug its claws into her, wrapped her in its wings and made her lungs constrict, her vision blur that kept her prisoner in this cold, dark place, as weak and helpless as a child.
‘Come,’ he said again, reaching for her hand. ‘Come.’ He said it so tenderly that, sitting in the castle’s good parlour sixteen years later, Saffy would feel its echo trickling down her spine and settling warm beneath her skirt.
She’d smiled, she hadn’t been able to help it, even though she’d known herself to be standing at the top of a great cliff, dark water swirling beneath her, the man she loved urging her to let him save her, unaware that she couldn’t be saved, that his adversary was so much stronger than he was.
‘You were right,’ she’d said, leaping from the cliff, falling away from him. ‘The best thing for us both would be to release each other.’
She’d never seen Matthew again, nor her cousin Emily, who’d been lurking in the wings, waiting for her chance; always coveting that which Saffy wanted…
A log. Nothing but a piece of driftwood, washed downstream by the fast-rising current. Percy pulled it off the drive, cursing the weight, the branch that snagged her shoulder, and wondering whether she was relieved or dismayed that the search must now continue. She was about to press on down the drive when something stopped her. A strange sense, not a presentiment exactly, rather one of those odd, twin things. A swirl of misgiving. She wondered whether Saffy had taken her advice and found some occupation.
Percy stood in the rain, undecided, looked down the hill towards the road, then back at the blackened castle.
The not completely blackened castle.
There was a light, small but bright, shining from one of the windows. The good parlour.
The bloody shutter. If she’d only fixed it properly in the first place.
It was the shutter that decided her absolutely. The last thing they needed tonight was the attention of Mr Potts and his Home Guard platoon.
With a last backward look at the Tenterden Road, Percy turned and headed for the castle.
The bus stopped at the side of the road and Tom hopped out. It was raining hard and his flowers lost their valiant bid for life the moment he disembarked; he debated for a second, whether ruined flowers were better than no flowers at all, before tossing the stems into the overflowing ditch. The mark of a good soldier was knowing when to call retreat, and he still had the jam, after all.
Through the dense, wet night he glimpsed a set of iron gates and laid his hand on one, pushing it open. As it gave way with a shriek beneath his weight, he tilted his face towards the black, black sky. He closed his eyes and let the rain slide clean across his cheeks; it was a bugger, but without a raincoat or umbrella, he had little choice but to surrender. He was late, he was wet, but he was here.
He closed the gate behind him, hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder and started up the drive. By God, it was dark. The blackout was one thing in London, but in the country, and with foul weather having switched off all the stars, it was like walking through pitch. There was a looming mass to his right, blacker somehow than the rest, that he knew must be Cardarker Wood. The wind had picked up and the treetops gnashed their teeth as he watched. He shivered and turned away, thought of Juniper, waiting for him in the warm, dry castle.
One drenched foot after another, he kept on. He rounded a bend, crossed a bridge, water gushing fast beneath it, and still the drive wound on ahead.
A flash of jagged lightning then, and Tom stopped in wonder. It was magnificent. The world was drenched in silvery white light – a great heaving wrangle of trees, a pale stone castle on the hill, the winding driveway carving on ahead through shivering fields – before falling unevenly back to black. Imprints of the lit-up image remained, like a photographic negative, and that’s how Tom knew he was not alone in the dark and the wet. Someone else, a thin but mannish figure, was making its way up the driveway ahead of him.
Tom wondered idly why anyone else would venture out in such a night; whether perhaps there was another guest expected at the castle, someone else as late as he was, also caught in the rain. His spirits rose on the back of such a notion, and he considered calling out – it was better, surely, to arrive in tandem with another tardy fellow? – but the clap of murderous thunder decided him against trying. He pressed on, eyeing the spot in the darkness where he knew the castle stood.
Tom saw it only when he drew near; a tiny relief in the darkness. He frowned, then blinked; realized he wasn’t imagining things. There was a small patch of golden light ahead, a chink in the fortress wall. He pictured it as Juniper waiting for him, like a mermaid in one of the old stories, holding out a lantern to bring her lover in from the storm. Filled with ardent determination, he walked towards it.
As Percy and Tom climb through the rain, deep within Milderhurst Castle all is still. High in the attic room, Juniper is darkly dreaming; down in the good parlour, her sister Saffy reclines on the chaise longue, drifting on the verge of sleep. Behind her, a room with a crackling fire; before her, a door opening onto a picnic by the lake. A perfect day in the late spring of 1922, warmer perhaps than expected, the sky as blue as fine Venetian glass. People have been swimming and are sitting now on blankets, drinking cocktails and eating dainty sandwiches.
A few young people break away and the dreaming Saffy follows; watches in particular the young pair at the back, the boy called Matthew and a pretty girl of sixteen whose name is Seraphina. They have known one another since they were children, he is a family friend of her strange cousins from the north and has thus been deemed acceptable by Daddy; over the years they have chased one another through countless fields, fished generations of trout from the brook, sat wide-eyed by annual harvest bonfires; something, though, has changed between them. She has found herself on this visit tongue-tied in his presence; has caught him watching her, eyes heavy with something like intent; has felt her own cheeks warming in response. They haven’t exchanged more than three words since he arrived.
The group the pair are trailing stop; blankets are spread with an extravagant lack of care beneath the trees, a ukulele is produced, cigarettes and banter lit; he and she remain on the fringe. They neither speak nor look at one another. Each sits, pretending interest in the sky, the birds, the sunlight playing on the leaves, while thinking only of the inch between her knee and his thigh. The pulse of electricity that fills the space. Wind whispers, leaves spiral, a starling calls…
She gasps. Covers her mouth lest anyone else should notice.
His fingertips have grazed the very edge of her hand. So lightly she mightn’t have felt them had her attention not been focused with mathematical precision on the distance between them, his breath-stopping proximity… At this moment, the dreamer merges with her young self. She no longer watches the lovers from afar, but sits cross- legged on the blanket, arm stretched out behind her, heart pounding in her chest with all the unblemished joy and expectation of youth.
Saffy doesn’t dare look at Matthew. She glances quickly around the group, shocked that no one else appears to have noticed what is happening; that the world has swung on its pendulum and everything is different, yet nothing around them seems to have been altered.
She lets her gaze drop then, lets it skim down the length of her arm, past her wrist, and onto her supporting hand. There. His fingertips. His skin on hers.
She is gathering the courage to lift her eyes, to cross the bridge he’s made between them and allow her gaze to complete its journey, to trace its way along his hand, across his wrist and all the way up his arm to where she knows his eyes will be waiting to meet her own, when something else catches her attention. A darkness on the hill behind them.
Her father, always protective, has followed and is watching now from the crest. She feels his eyes on her,
