thoughts on paper. Spinning, like a spider does, but using words to make the pattern. Juniper has given me this fountain pen. I think it might have come from the tower, and I’m a little frightened that her father will decide to go looking for whoever stole it, but I use it nonetheless. It is truly a glorious pen. I think it is quite possible to love a pen, don’t you?
Juniper suggested that I write about my life. She is always asking me to tell her stories about Mum and Dad, Ed and Rita, and Mrs Paul next door. She laughs very loudly, like a bottle that’s been shaken then opened, bubbles exploding everywhere: alarming, in a way, but lovely, too. Her laugh is not at all how you might expect. She’s so smooth and graceful, but her laugh is throaty like the earth. It’s not only her laugh that I love; she scowls, too, when I tell her the things that Rita says, scowls and spits in all the right places.
She says that I am lucky – can you imagine? Someone like her saying that of me? – that all my learning has been done in the real world. Hers, she says, was acquired from books. Which sounds like heaven to me, but evidently was not. Do you know, she hasn’t been to London since she was tiny? She went with her entire family to see the premiere of a play from the book that her father wrote, The True History of the Mud Man. When Juniper mentioned that book to me, she said its name as if, surely, I would be familiar with it, and I was very embarrassed to admit that I was not. Curses on my parents for having kept me in the dark about such things! She was surprised, I could tell, but she didn’t make me feel bad. She nodded, as if she quite approved, and said that it was no doubt only because I was far too busy in my real world with real people. And then she got the sad look that she gets sometimes, thoughtful and a bit puzzled, as if trying to work out the answer to a complex problem. It is the look, I think, that my mother despises when it sets in on my own face, the one that makes her point her finger and tell me to shake off the grey skies and get on with things.
Oh, but I do enjoy grey skies! They’re so much more complex than blue ones. If they were people, those are the ones I’d make the time to learn about.
It’s far more interesting to wonder what might be behind the layers of clouds than to be presented always with a simple, clear, bland blue.
The sky outside today is very grey. If I look through the window it’s as if someone has stretched a great, grey blanket over the castle. It’s frosty on the ground, too. The attic window looks down upon a very special place. One of Juniper’s favourites. It’s a square plot, enclosed by hedges, with little gravestones rising from beneath the brambles, all stuck out at odd angles like rotting teeth in an old mouth.
Clementina Blythe
1 year old
Taken cruelly
Sleep, my little one, sleep
Cyrus Maximus Blythe
3 years old
Gone too soon
Emerson Blythe
10 years old
Loved
The first time I went there, I thought it was a graveyard for children, but Juniper told me they were pets. All of them. The Blythes care very much for their animals, especially Juniper, who cried when she told me about her first dog, Emerson.
Brrr… But it’s freezing cold in here! I’ve inherited an enormous assortment of knitted socks since I arrived at Milderhurst. Saffy is a great one for knitting but a terrible one for counting, the upshot of which is that a third of the socks she’s made for the soldiers are far too tight to cover so much as a burly man’s big toe, but perfect for my twiglet ankles. I have put three pairs on each foot, and another three singletons on my right arm, leaving only my left exposed so that I might hold a pen. Which explains the state of my writing. I apologize for that, dear journal. Your beautiful pages deserve better.
So here I am, alone in the attic room, while Juniper is busy downstairs reading to the hens. Saffy is convinced that they lay better when they’re stimulated; Juniper, who loves all animals, says that there is nothing so clever or soothing as a hen; and I enjoy eggs very much indeed. So there. We are all happy. And I am going to start at the beginning and write as quickly as I can. For one thing, it will keep my fingers warm
Fierce barking, of the sort that makes one’s heart contract like a slingshot, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
A dog appeared above me, Juniper’s lurcher; lips pulled back, teeth bared, a low growl emanating from deep within him.
‘There, boy,’ I said, my voice tight with fear. ‘There now.’ I was debating whether to reach out and stroke him, whether he might that way be calmed, when the end of a stick appeared in the mud. A pair of brogue-clad feet followed, and I looked up to see Percy Blythe glaring at me.
I’d quite forgotten how thin and severe she was. Hunched over her cane, peering down, and dressed in much the same fashion as the last time we’d met, pale trousers and a well-cut shirt that might have seemed manly if not for her incredibly narrow frame and the dainty watch that hung loosely around her gaunt wrist.
‘It’s you,’ she said, clearly as surprised as I was. ‘You’re early.’
‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you, I-’
The dog growled again and she made an impatient noise, waving her fingers. ‘Bruno! That’s enough.’ He whimpered and slunk back to her side. ‘We were expecting you tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I know. Ten in the morning.’
‘You’re still coming?’
I nodded. ‘I arrived from London today. The weather was clear and I know it’s expected to come in rainy over the next few days so I thought I’d take a walk, make some notes, I didn’t think you’d mind, and then I found the shelter and – I didn’t mean to be a nuisance.’
At some point during my explanation her attention had waned. ‘Well,’ she said, without a whiff of gladness, ‘you’re here now. I suppose you might as well come in for tea.’
A Faux Pas and a Coup
The yellow parlour seemed more down at heel than I remembered. On my previous visit I had thought the room a warm place, a patch of life and light in the middle of a dark, stone body. It was different this time, and perhaps the change of seasons was to blame, the loss of summer’s brilliance, the sneaking chill that presaged winter, for it wasn’t only the alteration in the room which struck me.
The dog was panting hard and he collapsed against the tattered screen. He, too, had aged, I realized, just as Percy Blythe had aged since May, just as the room itself had faded. The notion popped into my head then that Milderhurst really was somehow separate from the real world, a place outside the usual bounds of space and time. That it was under some enchantment: a fairy-tale castle in which time could be slowed down, speeded up, at the whim of an unearthly being.
Saffy was standing in profile, her head bent over a fine porcelain teapot. ‘Finally, Percy,’ she said, as she tried to replace the lid. ‘I was beginning to think we might need to gather a search – Oh!’ She’d looked up and seen me at her sister’s side. ‘Hello there.’
‘It’s Edith Burchill,’ said Percy, matter-of-factly. ‘She’s arrived rather unexpectedly. She’s going to join us for tea.’
‘How lovely,’ said Saffy, and her face lit up so fully that I knew she wasn’t just being polite. ‘I was about to pour, if only I could get this lid to sit as it should. I’ll lay another setting – I say, what a treat!’
Juniper was by the window, just as she had been when I’d come in May, but this time she was asleep, snoring lightly with her head tucked into the pale green wing of the velvet chair. I couldn’t help but think, when I saw her, of Mum’s journal entry, of the enchanting young woman whom Mum had loved. How sad it was, how terrible, that she should have been reduced to this.
‘We’re so glad you could come, Miss Burchill,’ said Saffy.
‘Please call me Edie – it’s short for Edith.’
She smiled with pleasure. ‘Edith. What a lovely name. It means “blessed in war”, doesn’t it?’
‘I’m not sure, I said apologetically.’
