“I feel I must explain,” she said in an undertone, “about Percy, about yesterday. When you asked about Juniper, when you mentionedhim,and Percy was such a tyrant.”
“You really don’t need to explain.”
“But I do, I must, only it isn’t easy to find a private moment”—a grim smile—“such an enormous house and yet one is never really alone.”
Her nervousness was contagious, and although I was doing nothing wrong, a strange feeling came over me. My heart had started to race and I matched her subdued voice. “Is there somewhere else we could meet? The village perhaps?”
“No.” She said it quickly, shook her head. “No. I couldn’t do that. It isn’t possible.” Another glance at the empty doorway and she said, “It’s best if we speak here.”
I nodded agreement and waited as she gathered her thoughts carefully, like a person collecting scattered pins. When she had them together, she told her story quickly, in a low, determined voice. “It was a terrible thing,” she said. “A terrible, terrible thing. Over fifty years ago now, yet I remember the evening as if it were yesterday. Juniper’s face as she came through the door that night. She was late, she’d lost her key, so she knocked and we answered and in she came, dancing across the threshold—she never walked, not like an ordinary person—and her face—I’ll never stop seeing it when I close my eyes at night. That instant. It was such a relief to see her. A terrible storm had blown up during the afternoon, you see. It was raining and the wind was howling, the buses were running late … We’d been so worried.
“We thought it was him when we heard the knock. I was nervous about that, too; worried about Juniper, nervous about meeting him. I’d guessed, you see, that they were in love, that they planned to marry. She hadn’t told Percy—Percy, like Daddy, had rather fixed opinions about such things—but Juniper and I were always very close. And I desperately wanted to like him; I wanted him to be worthy of her love. I was curious, too, on that count: Juniper’s love was not easily won.
“We sat together for a time in the good parlor. We talked at first, of trivial things, Juniper’s life in London, and we told each other that he’d been held up on the bus, that transport was the culprit, the war was to blame, but at some point we stopped.” She glanced sideways at me and memory shadowed her eyes. “The wind was blowing, the rain was hammering against the shutters, and the dinner was spoiling in the oven … the smell of rabbit”—her face turned at the thought—“it was everywhere. I’ve never been able to stomach it since. It tastes like fear to me. Lumps of horrid, charred fear … I was so frightened, seeing Juniper like that. It was all we could do to stop her from running out into the storm, searching for him. Even when midnight passed and it was clear he wasn’t coming, she wouldn’t give up. She became hysterical, we had to use Daddy’s old sleeping pills to calm her—”
Saffy broke off; she’d been speaking very quickly, trying to get her story told before Percy arrived, and her voice had dwindled. She coughed against a delicate lace handkerchief she’d pulled from her sleeve. There was a jug of water on the table near Juniper’s chair and I poured her some. “It must have been awful,” I said, handing her the glass.
She sipped gratefully, then cradled the glass in both hands on her lap. Her nerves were stretched taut it seemed; the skin around her jaw appeared to have contracted during the telling and I could see the blue veins beneath.
“And he never came?” I prompted.
“No.”
“And you never knew why? There was no letter? No telephone call?”
“Nothing.”
“And Juniper?”
“She waited and waited. She waits still. Days went by, then weeks. She never gave up hope. It was dreadful. Dreadful.” The last word Saffy allowed to hang between us. She was lost in that time, all those years ago, and I didn’t probe further.
“Madness isn’t sudden,” she said eventually. “It sounds so simple—‘she fell into madness’—but it isn’t like that. It was gradual. First she withdrew. She showed signs of recovery, she talked about going back to London, but only vaguely, and she never went. She stopped writing, too; that’s when I knew that something fragile, something precious, had been broken. Then one day she threw everything out of the attic window. All of it: books, papers, a desk, even the mattress …” She trailed off and her lips moved silently around things she thought better of adding. With a sigh, she said, “The papers blew far and wide, down the hillsides, into the lake, like discarded leaves, their season ended. Where did they all go, I wonder?”
I shook my head: she was asking the whereabouts of more than papers, I knew, and there was nothing I could think to say. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been to see a beloved sibling regress in such a way, to watch countless layers of potential and personality, talent and possibility, disintegrate, one by one. How hard it must have been to witness, especially for someone like Saffy, who, according to Marilyn Bird, had been more like a mother to Juniper than a sister.
“The furniture remained in a broken heap on the lawn. We none of us had the heart to carry it back upstairs, and Juniper didn’t want it. She took to sitting by the cupboard in the attic, the one with the hidden doorway, convinced that she could hear things on the other side. Voices calling to her, though of course they were in her head. The poor love. The doctor wanted to send her away when he heard that, to anasylum…” Her voice caught on the ghastly word, her eyes implored me to find in it the same horror she did. She’d started kneading the white handkerchief with a balled hand, and I reached out to touch her forearm very gently.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She was trembling with anger, with distress. “We wouldn’t hear a word of it;Iwouldn’t hear a word of it. There was no way I was letting him take her from me. Percy spoke to the doctor, explained that such things were not done at Milderhurst Castle, that the Blythe family looked after its own. Eventually he agreed—Percy can be very persuasive—but he insisted on leaving stronger medicine for Juniper.” She pressed the painted fingernails of her hand against her legs, like a cat, releasing tension, and I saw in the set of her features something I hadn’t noticed before. She was the softer twin, the submissive twin, but there was strength there, too. When it came to Juniper, when it came to fighting for the little sister whom she loved, Saffy Blythe was rock hard. Her next words shot like steam from a kettle, so hot they scalded: “Would that she’d never gone to London, never met that fellow. The greatest regret of my life is that she went away. Everything was ruined afterwards. Nothing was ever the same; not for any of us.”
And that’s when I began to glimpse her purpose in telling me this story, why she thought it might help to explain Percy’s brusqueness; the night Thomas Cavill failed to arrive had been life-altering for all of them. “Percy,” I said, and Saffy gave a slight nod. “Percy was different afterwards?”
There came a noise then in the corridor, the deliberate gait, the unmistakable beating of Percy’s cane, as if she’d heard her name, intuited somehow that she was the subject of an illicit conversation.
Saffy used the arm of the sofa to push herself to standing. “Edith has just arrived,” she said quickly as Percy appeared at the door. She gestured towards me with the hand that held her handkerchief. “I was telling her about poor Bruno.”
Percy looked between us: from me, still seated on the sofa, to Saffy, standing right beside me.
“Did you reach the young man?” Saffy pressed on, her voice wavering a little.
A short nod. “He’s on his way. I’m going to meet him at the front door, give him some idea of where to look.”
“Yes,” said Saffy, “good. Good.”
“Then I’ll take Miss Burchill downstairs.” She met my unspoken query. “The muniment room. As promised.”
I smiled, but instead of continuing the search for Bruno, as I’d expected, Percy walked into the parlor and went to stand by the window. She made a show of scrutinizing its wooden frame, scratching at a mark on the glass, leaning closer, but it was apparent that the impromptu inspection was a ruse so she might remain in the room with us. I realized then that Saffy had been right. For some reason Percy Blythe didn’t want me to be alone with her twin, and I returned to my suspicion of the day before—that Percy was worried Saffy might tell me something she shouldn’t. The control Percy wielded over her sisters was astonishing; it intrigued me, it caused a small voice inside my head to urge prudence, but more than anything it made me greedy to hear the conclusion of Saffy’s story.
