“There was no electricity in the house back then. Not until the midthirties, and then only half voltage. Father couldn’t abide all those wires. He was terrified of fire, and understandably so considering what happened to Mother.
“He devised a series of drills after that. He’d ring a bell, down on the lawn, and time us on his old stopwatch. Shouting all the while that the place was about to go up like a mighty pyre.” She laughed, that glass-cuttingack-ack,then stopped again suddenly when she reached the top step. “Well,” she said, holding the key in the lock a moment before turning it. “Shall we?”
She pushed open the door and I almost fell backwards, bowled over by the flood of light that came rolling towards me. I blinked and squinted, gradually regaining my vision as the room’s contrasting shapes sharpened into view.
After the journey to reach it, the attic itself might have seemed an anticlimax. It was very plain, with little of the Victorian nursery about it. Indeed, unlike the rest of the house, in which rooms had been preserved as if the return of their inhabitants was imminent, the nursery was eerily empty. It had the look of a room that had been scrubbed, whitewashed even. There was no carpet, and the twin iron beds wore no covers, jutting out from the far wall each side of a disused fireplace. There were no curtains, either, which accounted for the brightness, and the single set of shelves beneath one of the windows was naked of books and toys.
A single set of shelves beneath the attic window.
I needed nothing more to make me thrill. I could almost see the young girl from theMud Man’s prologue, woken in the night and drawn to the window; climbing quietly onto the top shelf and gazing out across her family’s estate, dreaming of the adventures she would one day have, utterly unaware of the horror that was about to claim her.
“This attic housed generation after generation of Blythe family children,” said Percy Blythe, her eyes making a slow sweep of the room. “Centuries of peas in a pod.”
She made no mention of the room’s bare state or its place in literary history and I didn’t press her. Since the moment she’d turned the key and led me in, her spirits seemed to have sunk. I wasn’t sure whether it was the nursery itself that was having such an enervating effect, or whether the increased light of the stark room simply allowed me to see her age writ clearly within the lines of her face. Whatever the case, it seemed important to follow her lead. “Forgive me,” she said finally. “I haven’t been upstairs in a time. Everything seems … smaller than I remember.”
That I understood. It was strange enough for me to lie down on my childhood bed and find that my feet had grown past the end, to look sideways and see the unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where Blondie had once been pasted and remember my nightly worship of Debbie Harry. I could only imagine the dissonance for someone standing in a bedroom they’d outgrown some eighty years before. “All three of you slept up here as children?”
“Not all of us, no. Not Juniper; not until later.” Percy’s mouth contorted a little, as if she’d tasted something bitter. “Her mother had one of the rooms off her own chamber converted to a nursery instead. She was young, unfamiliar with the way things were done. It wasn’t her fault.”
It seemed an odd choice of words and I wasn’t sure that I understood.
“Tradition in the house was that children were permitted to move downstairs to a single room when they turned thirteen, and although Saffy and I felt very important when our time finally came I must confess to missing the attic room. Saffy and I were used to sharing.”
“I suppose that’s common for twins.”
“Indeed.” An almost smile. “Come. I’ll show you the caretakers’ door.”
The mahogany cupboard stood quietly against the far wall, in a tiny boxlike room that opened out beyond the twin beds. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck to enter, and the fruity smell entrapped within the walls was almost suffocating.
Percy didn’t seem to notice, bending her wiry frame to pull at a low handle on the cupboard, creaking the mirrored door open. “There it is. Right in there at the back.” She eyeballed me, hovering near the doorway, and her blade-thin brows drew down. “But surely you can’t see; not from all the way over there?”
Manners forbade me actually covering my nose so I took a deep breath, holding it as I moved quickly towards her. She stepped aside, indicating that I should come closer still.
Suppressing the image of Gretel at the witch’s oven, I climbed, waist-deep, into the cupboard. Through the grim darkness, I spotted the small door cut into the back. “Wow,” I said on the last of my breath. “There it is.”
“There it is,” came the voice from behind me.
The smell, now I had no choice but to breathe it, didn’t seem so bad and I was able to appreciate the Narnia thrill of a hidden doorway in the back of a cupboard. “So that’s where the caretakers get in and out.” My voice echoed around me.
“The caretakers perhaps,” said Percy wryly. “As to the mice, that’s another story. The little wretches have taken over; they don’t need a fancy door like that one.”
I climbed out, dusted myself off, and couldn’t help but notice the framed picture hanging on the facing wall. Not a picture: a page of religious script, I could see when I went a little closer. It had been behind me on the way in and I’d missed it. “What was this room?”
“This was our nurse’s room. When we were very small,” said Percy. “Back then it seemed like the nicest place on earth.” A smile flickered briefly before failing. “It’s little more than a closet, though, isn’t it?”
“A closet with a lovely outlook.” I’d drifted towards the nearby window. The only one, I noted, whose faded curtains remained.
I drew them to one side and was struck immediately by the number of heavy-duty locks that had been fitted to the window. My surprise must have shown because Percy said, “My father had concerns about security. An incident in his youth that had stuck with him.”
I nodded and peered through the window, experiencing, as I did so, a frisson of familiarity; I realized that it wasn’t for something I’d seen, but for something I’d read about and envisaged. Directly below, skirting the footings of the castle and spanning twenty feet or so, was a swathe of grass, thick and lush, an entirely different green from that beyond. “There used to be a moat,” I said.
“Yes.” Percy was beside me now, holding the curtains aside. “One of my earliest memories is of being unable to sleep and hearing voices down there. It was a full moon and when I climbed up to look out of the window our mother was swimming on her back, laughing in the silvered light.”
“She was a keen swimmer,” I said, remembering what I’d read about her inRaymond Blythe’s Milderhurst.
Percy nodded. “The circular pool was Daddy’s wedding gift to her, but she always preferred the moat, so a fellow was engaged to improve it for her. Daddy had it filled in when she died.”
“It must have reminded him of her.”
