“I have a picture in my mind. A very happy picture; I don’t want for that to change.”
Perhaps she thought I might try to convince her otherwise, but I didn’t. The castle was a sad place now, fading and falling to pieces, a little like its three inhabitants. “I can understand that,” I said. “It’s all looking a bit tired.”
“You’relooking a bit tired, Edie.” She frowned at my face as if she’d only just noticed.
As she said it, I began to yawn. “Well, itwasan eventful night. I didn’t get much sleep.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bird mentioned there was quite a storm—I’m very content to stroll around the garden. I’ve lots to keep me busy.” Mum fingered the edge of her manuscript. “Why don’t you go and have yourself a little lie-down?”
IWAShalfway up the first flight of stairs when Mrs. Bird caught my attention. Standing on the next landing, waving something over the rail, and asking whether she could borrow me for a minute. She was so emphatically eager that, although I agreed, I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of trepidation.
“I have something to show you,” she said, darting a glance over her shoulder. “It’s a bit of a secret.”
After the twenty-four hours I’d had, this did not thrill me.
She pressed a grayish envelope into my hands when I reached her and said, in a stage whisper, “It’s one of the letters.”
“Which letters?” I’d seen a few over the past few months.
She looked at me as if I’d forgotten which day of the week it was. Which, come to think of it, I had. “The letters I was telling you about, of course, the love letters sent to Mum by Raymond Blythe.”
“Oh! Those letters.”
She nodded eagerly, and the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall behind her chose that moment to spit out its pair of dancing mice. We waited out the jig, then I said, “You want me to look at it?”
“You needn’t read it,” said Mrs. Bird, “not if you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that something you said the other evening got me thinking.”
“It did?”
“You said that you were going to be seeing Raymond Blythe’s notebooks and it occurred to me that you’d probably have a very good idea by now of what his handwriting looks like.” She drew breath and then said, all in a rush, “I wondered, that is, I hoped …”
“That I could take a look and let you know.”
“Exactly.”
“Sure, I guess—”
“Wonderful!” She clapped her hands together lightly beneath her chin as I slid the sheet of paper from within its envelope.
I knew at once that I was going to disappoint her, that the letter hadn’t been written by Raymond Blythe at all. Reading his notebook so closely, I’d become very familiar with his sloping handwriting, the long looping tails when he wroteGorJ,the particular type ofRhe used to sign his name. No, this letter had been written by someone else.
Lucy, my love, my one, my only.
Have I ever told you how I fell in love? That it happened in the first instant that I saw you? Something in the way you stood, in the set of your shoulders, in the wisps of hair that had come loose to brush against your neck; I was yours.
I’ve thought of what you said when last we met. I’ve thought of little else. I wonder whether perhaps you might be right; that it is not a mere fancy. That we might just forget everything and everybody else and go far away together.
I didn’t read the rest. I skipped over the next few paragraphs and arrived at the single initial, just as Mrs. Bird had said. But as I looked at it, variables shifted by degrees and a number of things slipped into alignment. I had seen this person’s handwriting before.
I knew who had written the letter and I knew who it was that Lucy Middleton had loved above all others. Mrs. Bird had been right—it was a love that flew in the face of their society’s conventions—but it hadn’t been between Raymond and Lucy. It wasn’t anRat the end of those letters, it was aP,written in an old-fashioned hand so that a small tail emerged from the curve of the letter. Easy to confuse with anR,especially if that’s what one was looking for.
“It’s lovely,” I said, tripping over my words because I felt forlorn suddenly, thinking of those two young women and the long lives they’d spent apart.
“So sad, don’t you think?” She sighed, tucking the letter back inside her pocket, then she looked at me hopefully. “Such a beautifullywrittenletter.”
WHENI’Dfinally extricated myself from Mrs. Bird, having been as noncommittal as I could, I made a beeline for my room and collapsed sideways across the bed. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my mind, but it was no use. My thoughts remained tethered to the castle. I couldn’t stop thinking of Percy Blythe, who had loved so well and so long ago; who people thought of as stiff and cold; who had spent most of her life keeping a terrible secret to protect her little sister.
Percy had told me about Oliver Sykes and Thomas Cavill on condition that I did “the right thing.” She’d spoken a lot about people’s closing dates, but what I couldn’t work out was why she’d needed to tell me at all; what she wanted me to do with the information that she couldn’t do herself. I was too tired that afternoon. I needed a sleep and then I was looking forward to spending the evening with Mum. So I resolved to visit the castle the following morning, to see Percy Blythe one final time.
