The Distant Hours

by Kate Morton

  ‘I have a story. I am the only one who knows it. I am going to tell it to you.’

  ‘Why?’ It came out little louder than a whisper and I coughed, then asked again. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it needs to be told. Because I value accurate records. Because I cannot carry it further.’ Did I imagine that she glanced then at Goya’s monsters?

  ‘But why tell me?’

  She blinked. ‘Because of who you are, of course. Because of who your mother was.’ The slightest of smiles and I glimpsed that she was taking certain pleasure from our conversation, from the power, perhaps, that she wielded over my ignorance. ‘It was Juniper who picked it up. She called you Meredith. That’s when I realized. And that’s when I knew you were the one.’

  The blood drained from my face and I felt as shameful as a child caught telling lies to their teacher. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, I only thought—’

  ‘Your reasons don’t interest me. We all have secrets.’

  I caught the rest of my apology before it tumbled from my lips.

  ‘You are Meredith’s daughter,’ she continued, her pace quickening, ‘which means you are like family. And this is a family story.’

  It was the last thing I’d expected her to say and I was floored; something inside me beat with glad empathy for my mother, who had loved this place and long believed herself so poorly used. ‘But what do you want me to do?’ I said. ‘With your story, I mean.’

  ‘Do with it?’

  ‘Do you want me to write it down?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Not write it down, just set it right. I need to trust you to do that . . .’ She pointed a sharp finger but the stern gesture was weakened when the face behind it fell to repose. ‘Can I trust you, Miss Burchill?’

  I nodded, even though her manner gave me grave misgivings as to precisely what it was she asked of me.

  She seemed relieved, but her guard dropped only for an instant before she picked it up again. ‘Well then,’ she said bluntly, turning her gaze towards the window from which her father had fallen to his death. ‘I hope you’re able to go without lunch. I haven’t time to waste.’

  Percy Blythe’s Story

  Percy Blythe began with a disclaimer. ‘I am not a storyteller,’ she said, striking a match, ‘not like the others. I only have one tale to tell. Listen carefully; I won’t be telling it twice.’ She lit her cigarette and leaned back in her chair. ‘I told you that this has nothing to do with the Mud Man, but I was wrong. In one way or another, this story begins and ends with that book.’

  An arm of wind reached down the chimney to tease the flames and I opened my notebook. She’d said it wasn’t necessary, but I nursed a strange feeling of disquiet and it soothed me in some way to hide behind the purpose of my creamy black-lined pages.

  ‘My father told us once that art was the only form of immortality. That was the sort of thing he used to say; something, I imagine, that his own mother told him. She was a gifted poet and a great beauty, but she was not a warm woman. She could be cruel. Not intentionally; her talent made her cruel. She gave my father all sorts of odd ideas.’ Percy’s mouth twisted and she paused to smooth the hair at the nape of her neck. ‘He was wrong, anyway. There is another type of immortality, far less sought or celebrated.’

  I leaned forward a little, waiting for her to tell me what it was, but she didn’t. I would become used to her sudden shifts of topic that stormy afternoon, the way she shone a spotlight on a certain scene, brought it to life only to turn her abrupt attention to another.

  ‘I’m quite sure my parents were happy once,’ she said, ‘before we were born, but there are two types of people in this world. Those who enjoy the company of children and those who don’t. My father was of the former type. I think he surprised even himself with the force of his affection when Saffy and I were born.’ She glanced at the Goya painting and a muscle twitched in her neck. ‘He was a different man when we were young, before the Great War, before he wrote that book. He was an unusual man for his time and class. He adored us, you see – never mere fondness; he delighted in us and we in him. We were spoiled. Not with objects, though there was no shortage of those, but with his attention and his faith. He thought that we could do no wrong and indulged us accordingly. I don’t imagine it is ever good for children to find themselves the subject of such idolatry. Would you like a glass of water, Miss Burchill?’

  I blinked. ‘No. No, thank you.’

  ‘I will, if you don’t mind. My throat – ’ She set her cigarette in the ashtray and took up a jug from a set of low shelves, filling a cut-glass tumbler. She gulped, and I noticed that despite her clear, flat tone, those piercing eyes, her fingers were shaking. ‘Did your parents spoil you when you were small, Miss Burchill?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think they did.’

  ‘I don’t think they did either. You don’t carry the sense of entitlement of a child who’s been placed front and centre.’ Her gaze drifted again to the window, where the weather was gathering greyly. ‘Daddy used to put the two of us in an old perambulator that had been his when he was small and take us on long walks about the village. When we got older he’d have Cook make up elaborate picnics and the three of us would explore the woods, stroll across the fields, and he would tell us stories, speaking to us about matters that seemed grave and wonderful. That this was our home, that our ancestors’ voices would always speak to us, that we could never be alone as long as we were within reach of our castle.’ A faint smile tried to settle on her lips. ‘At Oxford, he’d been a great one for languages, the old tongues, and bore a particular fondness for Anglo-Saxon. He used to do translations for his own pleasure, and from a very early age we were allowed to help. Up here in the tower, usually, but sometimes in the gardens. One afternoon we lay together, the three of us on a picnic rug, looking back towards the castle on the hilltop, and he read to us from “The Wanderer”. It was a perfect day. Those are rare and it’s as well to remember them.’ She paused then, her face relaxing somewhat as she slipped deeper into memory. When finally she spoke again, her voice was reedy. ‘The Anglo-Saxons had a gift for sadness and longing, and heroics, of course; children, I suspect, are predisposed to all three. Seledreorig.’ The word was like an incantation in the round stone room. ‘Sadness for the lack of a hall,’ she said. ‘There’s no word like it in the English language, and yet there ought to be, don’t you think? . . . There now. I’ve drifted off track.’

  She straightened in her chair, reached for her cigarette only to find it fallen to ash. ‘The past is like that,’ she said, as she battled another from the pack. ‘Always waiting to lure you away.’ She struck the match, drew impatiently and squinted at me through the haze. ‘I’ll be more careful from here on.’ The flame extinguished swiftly, as if to underline the intention. ‘My mother had struggled to have children and when she did she was waylaid with a depression so strong she could barely raise herself from her bed. When she finally recovered, she found that her family were no longer waiting for her. Her children hid behind her husband’s legs when she tried to hold them, cried and fought if she came too close. We took to using words from other languages, too, those that Daddy had taught us, so she wouldn’t understand. He would laugh and encourage us, delighting in our precocity. How ghastly we must have been. We hardly knew her, you see. We refused to be with her, we only wanted to be with Daddy and he with us, and so she grew lonely.’

  Lonely. I wasn’t certain that a word had ever sounded quite as ominous as that one did on Percy Blythe’s lips. I remembered the daguerreotype images of Muriel Blythe I’d seen in the muniment room. I’d thought it odd then that they’d been hung in such a dark, forgotten place; now it seemed positively menacing. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  She looked at me sharply. ‘All in good time.’

  An explosion of thunder sounded outside and Percy glanced towards the window. ‘A storm,’ she said with disgust. ‘Just what we need.’

  ‘Wou
ld you like me to close the window?’

  ‘No, not yet. I enjoy the air.’ She frowned at the floor as she pulled on her cigarette; she was collecting her thoughts and when she found them she met my eyes. ‘My mother took a lover. Who could blame her? It was my father who brought them together – not intentionally. This isn’t that type of story – he was trying to make amends. He must’ve known he was ignoring her, and he arranged for extensive improvements to the castle and gardens. Shutters were added to the downstairs windows to remind her of those she’d admired in Europe, and work was carried out on the moat. The digging went on for such a long time, and Saffy and I used to watch from the attic window. The architect’s name was Sykes.’

  ‘Oliver Sykes.’

  She was surprised. ‘Well done, Miss Burchill. I knew you were astute but I didn’t suspect you of such architectural erudition.’

  I shook my head and explained about Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst. What I didn’t tell her was that I also knew of Raymond Blythe’s bequest to the Pembroke Farm Institute. Which meant, of course, that he hadn’t known of the affair.

  ‘Daddy didn’t know,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we did. Children know such things. It never occurred to us to tell him, though. As far as we were concerned, we were his world and he cared as little about Mother’s activities as we did.’ She shifted slightly and her blouse rippled. ‘I do not hold stock with regrets, Miss Burchill, nonetheless we are all accountable for our actions and I’ve wondered many times since whether that was the moment when the cards fell ill for the Blythes, even those not yet born. Whether it all might have turned out differently had Saffy and I only told him about seeing Mother and that man together.’

  ‘Why?’ Foolish of me to break her train of thought, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why would it have been better if you’d told him?’ I should have remembered that the stubborn streak in Percy Blythe took interruption hard.

  She stood up, pressed her palms against the small of her narrow back and bowed her pelvis forward. Took a last draw on her cigarette stub, then tapped it out in the ashtray and walked stiffly to the window. I could see from where I sat that the sky hung dark and heavy, but her eyes narrowed at the distant glare still quavering on the horizon. ‘That letter you found,’ she said, as thunder rumbled closer, ‘I didn’t realize Daddy had kept it, but I’m glad he did. It took a lot for me to write it – he was so excited by the manuscript, the story. When Daddy returned from the war he was a shadow of himself. Skinny as a stovepipe with a horrid glassy shallowness to his eyes. We were kept from visiting much of the time – too disruptive, the nurses said – but we sneaked in anyway, through the castle veins. He’d be sitting by this window, looking out yet seeing nothing, and he’d speak of a great absence within him. His mind itched, he said, to be put to creative use, yet when he held a pen nothing came. “I am empty,” he said, over and over, and he was right. He was. You can imagine then, the restorative thrill when he began work on the notes that would become the Mud Man.’

  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 nightmares. 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 terr
ible 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.’