under strict instructions to present to her hosts on arrival; behind it, a half-dozen bulky terry towels Mum had insisted she bring, in a mortifying conversation that had made Meredith cringe with embarrassment. ‘There’s every chance you’ll become a woman while you’re away, Merry,’ her mum had said. ‘Rita will be there to help, but you need to be prepared.’ And Rita had grinned and Meredith had shuddered and wondered at the slim chance that she might prove a rare biological exception. She ran her fingers around her notebook’s smooth cover, then – Bingo! Beneath it she found the paper bag filled with biscuits. The chocolate had melted a little, but she managed to liberate one. Turned her back on Rita as she nibbled her way around the edges.
Behind her one of the boys had started singing a familiar rhyme -
– and Meredith’s eyes dropped to her own gas mask. She stuffed the rest of the biscuit in her mouth and brushed crumbs from the top of the box. Stupid thing with its horrid rubbery smell, the ghastly ripping sensation as it pulled off her skin. Mum had made them promise they’d wear their masks while they were away, that they’d carry them always, and Meredith, Ed and Rita had all given grudging agreement. Meredith had later heard Mum confessing to Mrs Paul next door that she’d sooner die of a gas attack than bear the horrid feeling of suffocation beneath the mask, and Meredith planned to lose hers just as soon as she was able.
There were people waving to them now, standing in their small backyards watching as the train steamed past. Out of nowhere, Rita pinched her arm and Meredith squealed. ‘Why’d you do that?’ she asked, slapping her hand over the stinging spot and rubbing it fiercely.
‘All those nice people out there just lookin’ for a show.’ Rita jerked her head towards the window. ‘Be a sport now, Merry; give ’em a few sobs, eh?’
Eventually, the city disappeared behind them and green was everywhere. The train clattered along the railway line, slowing occasionally to pass through stations, but the signs had all been removed so there was no way of knowing where they were. Meredith must have slept for a time because the next she knew the train was screeching to a halt and she was jerked awake. There was nothing new to see, nothing but more green, clumps of trees on the horizon, occasional birds cutting across the clear blue sky. For one brief elated moment after they’d stopped, Meredith thought they might be turning around, going home already. That Germany had recognized that Britain was not to be trifled with after all, the war was over, and there was no longer any need for them to go away.
But it wasn’t to be. After another lengthy wait, during which Roy Stanley managed to vomit yet more tinned pineapple through the window, they were all ordered out of the carriage and told to stand in line. Everyone received an injection, their hair was checked for lice, then they were told to get back on board and sent on their way. There wasn’t even an opportunity to use a toilet.
The train was quiet for a while after that; even the babies were too worn out to cry. They travelled and they travelled, on and on, for what seemed like hours and Meredith began to wonder how big England was; when, if ever, they’d reach a cliff. And it occurred to her that perhaps the whole thing was really a great big conspiracy, that the train driver was a German, and it was all part of some devious plot to abscond with England’s children. There were problems with the theory, holes in its logic – what, for instance, could Hitler possibly want with thousands of new citizens who couldn’t be relied on not to wet their beds? – but by then Meredith was too tired, too thirsty, too utterly miserable, to fill them, so she squeezed her legs together even tighter and started counting fields instead. Fields and fields and fields, leading her to God knew what or where.
All houses have hearts; hearts that have loved, hearts that have billowed with contentment, hearts that have been broken. The heart at the centre of Milderhurst was larger than most and it beat more powerfully. It thumped and paused, raced and slowed, in the small room at the top of the tower. The room where Raymond Blythe’s many times greatgrandfather had sweated over sonnets for Queen Elizabeth; from which a great-aunt had escaped to sweet sojourn with Lord Byron; and upon whose brick ledge his mother’s shoe had caught as she leaped from the little archer’s window to meet her death in the sun-warmed moat below, her final poem fluttering behind her on a sheet of fine paper.
Standing at the great oak desk, Raymond loaded his pipe bowl with a fresh pinch of tobacco, then another. After his littlest brother Timothy died, his mother had retreated to the room, cloaked in the black singe of her own sorrow. He’d glimpsed her by the window when he was down at the grotto, or in the gardens, or on the edge of the woods, the dark shape of her small, neat head facing out towards the fields, the lake: the ivory profile, so like that on the brooch she wore, passed down from her mother before her, the French countess Raymond had never met. Sometimes he’d stayed outside all day, darting in and out of the hop vines, scaling the barn roof, in the hope that she would notice him, worry for him, shout him down. But she never did. It was always Nanny who called him in when the day was spent.
But that was long ago and he a foolish old man becoming lost amidst fading memories. His mother was little more than a distantly revered poetess around whom myths were beginning to form as myths were wont to do – the whisper of a summer’s breeze, the promise of sunlight against a blank wall –
The room belonged to him now: Raymond Blythe, King of the Castle. He was his mother’s eldest son, her heir and, along with the poems, her greatest legacy. An author in his own right, commanding respect and – it was only honest, he countered when a wave of humility threatened – a certain fame, just as she had done before him. Had she known, he often wondered, when she’d bequeathed the castle to him along with her passion for the written word, that he would rise to meet her expectations? That he would one day do his bit to further the family’s reach in literary circles?
His bad knee seized suddenly and Raymond clutched it hard, stretching his foot in front of him until the tension eased. He hobbled to the window and leaned against the ledge while he struck a match. It was a damn near perfect day and as he sucked on his pipe to get it smoking, he squinted across the fields, the driveway, the lawn, the quivering mass of Cardarker Wood. The great wild woods of Milderhurst that had brought him home from London, that had called to him from the battlefields of France, that had always known his name.
What would become of it all when he was gone? Raymond knew his doctor spoke the truth; he wasn’t stupid, only old. And yet it was impossible to believe that a time was coming in which he would no longer sit by this window and look out across the estate, master of all that he surveyed. That the Blythe family name, the family legacy, would die with him. Raymond’s thoughts faltered; the responsibility to avoid this had been his. He ought to have remarried, perhaps, tried again to find a woman who could deliver him a son. The matter of legacy had been very much on his mind of late.
Raymond drew on his pipe and puffed with soft derision, just as he might in company with an old friend whose familiar ways were becoming tiresome. He was being melodramatic, of course, a sentimental old fool. Perhaps every man liked to believe that without his presence the great foundations would crumble? Every man as proud as he, at any rate. And Raymond knew he ought to tread more carefully, that pride comes before a fall, as the Bible warned. Besides, he had no need of a son: he had a choice of successors, three daughters, none of them of the marriageable type; and then there was the church, his new church. His priest had spoken to him recently of the eternal rewards awaiting men who saw fit to honour the Catholic brethren in such a generous way. Canny Father Andrews knew Raymond could use all the heavenly goodwill he could arrange.
He took in a mouthful of smoke, held it a moment before exhaling. Father Andrews had explained it to him, the reason for the haunting, what must be done to exorcise Raymond’s demon. He was being punished, he knew now, for his sin. His sins. To repent, to confess, even to self-flagellate had not been enough; Raymond’s crime was greater than that.
But could he really hand his castle over to strangers, even to smite the wretched demon? What would become of all the whispering voices, the distant hours, caught within her stones? He knew what Mother would say: the castle must stay within the Blythe family. Could he really bear to disappoint her? Especially when he had such a fine natural successor: Persephone, the eldest and most reliable of his children. He’d watched her leave by bicycle that morning, watched as she stopped by the bridge to check its footings, just as he’d once shown her. She was the only one amongst them whose love for the castle came close to matching his own. A blessing that she’d never found a husband, and wouldn’t now, certainly. She’d become a castle fixture, as much his own possession as the statues in the yew hedge; she could be trusted never to do wrong by Milderhurst. Indeed, Raymond sometimes suspected she, like he, would strangle a man with her bare hands if he so much as threatened to remove a stone.
