“The tower,” she said.
“Oh.”
“For your article.”
I nodded, and then, because she’d started up the narrow, winding staircase, I began to follow.
With each step, my sense of unease grew. It was true what she had said—seeing the tower was important for my article—and yet there was something indefinably strange in Percy Blythe suggesting that she should show it to me. She’d been so reticent thus far, so reluctant that I should speak to her sisters or see her father’s notebooks. To find her waiting for me this morning, outside in the cold, for her to propose showing me the tower room without my having to ask first—well, it was unexpected, and I am not made comfortable by unexpected things.
I told myself I was reading too much into it: Percy Blythe had selected me for the task of writing about her father, and she was nothing if not proud of her castle. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Or perhaps she’d decided that the sooner I saw what I needed to, the sooner I’d be on my way and they would be left once more to their own devices. But no matter how much sense I made, the niggling had started. Was there any way, I wondered, that she knew what I had found?
We’d reached a small platform of uneven stone; a narrow archer’s window had been cut into the dusky wall and I was able to glimpse through it a thick sweep of Cardarker Wood, so glorious when seen in full, yet ominous somehow in section.
Percy Blythe pushed open the narrow round-topped door. “The tower room.”
Once again, she stepped aside so that I might go first. I went gingerly, stopping in the center of the small, circular room on a faded rug of sooty shades. The first thing I noticed was that the fire had been freshly set, in preparedness for our visit, I supposed.
“There,” she said, closing the door behind us. “Now we are alone.”
Which set my heart to racing, though why precisely I could not say. My fear made little sense. She was an old lady, a frail old lady who’d just employed what scant energy she had in climbing the stairs. If the two of us were to engage in a physical tussle, I was pretty sure I’d hold my own. And yet … There was something in the way her eyes still shone, a spirit that was stronger than her body. And all I could think was that it was an awfully long drop from here to the ground and that a lot of people already had died plummeting from that window right there …
Happily, Percy Blythe was unable to read my mind and see written there the sorts of horrors that belonged only in melodramatic fiction. She rolled a wrist slightly and said, “This is it. This is where he worked.”
And hearing her say it, I was able finally to creep out from beneath my own clouded thoughts and appreciate that I was standing in the middle of Raymond Blythe’s tower. These bookshelves, built to mold against the curving walls, were where he’d kept his favorites; the fireplace had been that by which he’d sat, day and evening, working on his books. My fingers ran along the very desk at which he’d written theMud Man.
The letter whispered against my skin.If indeed he wrote the book himself.
“There’s a room,” said Percy Blythe as she struck a match and set the fire burning, “behind the tiny door in the entrance hall. Four stories below, but right beneath the tower. We used to sit there sometimes, Saffy and I. When we were young. When Daddy was working.” It was a rare moment of expansiveness, and I couldn’t help but watch her as she spoke. She was tiny, thin and wan, and yet there was something deep inside Percy Blythe, a strength—of character perhaps?—that drew one like a moth. As if sensing my interest, she withdrew her light, that twist of a smile breezed across her face, and she straightened. Nodded at me as she tossed the spent matchstick into the flames. “Please yourself,” was all she said. “Have a look around.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t go too near the window, though. It’s a long way to fall.”
Giving her what little smile I could manage, I began to take in the details of the room. The shelves were quite empty now; most of their former contents, I supposed, were lining the walls of the muniment room; but there were still framed pictures on the wall. One in particular caught my eye. It was an image with which I was familiar: Goya’sSleep of Reason. I paused before it, taking in the foreground human figure, slumped—in despair it seemed—over his writing desk, while a host of batlike monsters flurried above, arising from and feeding on his sleeping mind.
“That was my father’s,” said Percy. Her voice made me jump, but I didn’t turn, and when I looked again at the picture my perception had changed, so that I saw my own shadowy reflection, and hers behind me, in the glass. “It used to frighten us terribly.”
“I can understand why.”
“Daddy said to fear was foolish. That we’d do better to draw a lesson.”
“Which lesson was that?” I turned now to face her.
She touched the chair by the window.
“Oh no, I”—another weak smile—“I’m happy to stand.”
Percy blinked slowly and I thought for a moment that she might insist. She didn’t, though, saying only, “The lesson, Miss Burchill, was that when reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”
My hands were clammy and a spreading heat was climbing up my arms. But surely she had not read my mind. She couldn’t possibly know the monstrous things I’d been imagining since I found the letter, my morbid fantasies of being pushed from the window.
“Goya anticipated Freud by some time, in that respect.”
I smiled somewhat sickly, and then the fever hit my cheeks and I knew that I could stand the suspense, the subterfuge, no longer. I was not formed for games like these. If Percy Blythe knew what I had found in the muniment room, if she knew that I had taken it with me and that I was bound to investigate further; if this was all an elaborate ploy to have me admit to my deception, and for her to try, by whatever means she could, to prevent me from exposing her father’s lie, then I was ready. What was more, I was going to strike the first blow. “Miss Blythe,” I said, “I found something yesterday. In the muniment room.”
A dreadful look came over her, a leaching of color that was instant and absolute. As quickly as it had appeared she managed to conceal it again. She blinked. “Well? I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to guess, Miss Burchill. You’re going to have to tell me what it was.”
I reached into my jacket and retrieved the letter, tried to steady my fingers as I handed it to her. I watched as she dug reading glasses from her pocket, held them before her eyes, and scanned the page. Time slowed interminably. She shifted her fingertips lightly over its surface. “Yes,” she said, “I see.” She seemed almost relieved, as if my discovery was not what she’d feared.
