“Juniper, Edie”—Mum’s voice was strange and thin and she cleared her throat—“how was she? How did she seem?”
I wondered where to start: the girlish joy, the disheveled appearance, the final scene of desperate accusations. “She was confused,” I said. “She was wearing an old-fashioned dress and she told me she was waiting for someone, a man. The lady at the farmhouse where I stayed said that she isn’t well, that her sisters look after her.”
“She’s ill?”
“Dementia. Sort of.” I continued carefully: “Her boyfriend left her years ago and she never fully recovered.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Fiancé to be precise. He stood her up and people say it drove her mad. Literally mad.”
“Oh, Edie,” said Mum. The slightly ill look on her face resolved into the sort of smile you might give a clumsy kitten. “Always so full of fancy. Real life isn’t like that.”
I bristled; it gets tiresome being treated like an ingénue.
“I’m just telling you what they said in the village. A lady there said Juniper was always fragile, even when she was young.”
“Iknewher, Edie; I don’t need you telling me what she was like when she was young.”
She’d snapped and it had caught me unawares. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I—”
“No.” She lifted a palm then pressed it lightly against her forehead and stole a surreptitious glance over her shoulder. “No,I’msorry. I can’t think what came over me.” She sighed, smiled a little shakily. “It’s the surprise, I expect. To think that they’re all still alive, all of them at the castle. Why—they must be soold.” She frowned, affecting great interest in the mathematical puzzle. “The other two were old when I knew them—at least they seemed that way.”
I was still startled by her outburst and said guardedly, “You mean they looked old? Gray hair and all?”
“No. No, not that. It’s hard to say what it was. I suppose they were only in their midthirties at the time, but of course that meant something different back then. And I was young. Children do tend to see things differently, don’t they?”
I didn’t answer; she didn’t intend me to. Her eyes were on mine, but they had a faraway look about them, like an old-fashioned silver screen on which pictures were projected. “They behaved more like parents than sisters,” she said, “to Juniper, I mean. They were a lot older than she was, and her mother had died when she was only a child. Their father was still alive, but he wasn’t much involved.”
“He was a writer, Raymond Blythe.” I said it cautiously, wary that I might be overstepping again, offering information that was hers firsthand. This time, though, she didn’t seem to mind, and I waited for some indication that she knew all that the name meant, that she remembered bringing the book home from the library when I was a girl. I’d kept an eye out when I was packing up the flat, hoping I might be able to bring it to show her, but I hadn’t found it. “He wrote a story calledThe True History of the Mud Man.”
“Yes,” was all she said, very softly.
“Did you ever meet him?”
She shook her head. “I saw him a few times, but only from a distance. He was very old by then and quite reclusive. He spent most of his time up in his writing tower and I wasn’t allowed to go up there. It was the most important rule—there weren’t many.” She was looking down and a raised vein pulsed mauve beneath each eyelid. “They talked about him sometimes; he could be difficult, I think. I always thought of him as a little like King Lear, playing his daughters off, one against the other.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother reference a character of fiction, and the effect was to derail my train of thought entirely. I wrote my honors thesis on Shakespeare’s tragedies and not once did she give any sign that she was familiar with the plays.
“Edie?” Mum, looked up sharply. “Did you tell them who you were? When you went to Milderhurst. Did you tell them about me? Percy, the others?”
“No.” I wondered whether the omission would offend Mum, whether she’d demand to know why I hadn’t told them the truth. “No, I didn’t.”
“Good,” she said, nodding. “That was a good decision. Kinder. You’d only have confused them. It was such a long time ago and I was with them so briefly; they’ve no doubt quite forgotten I was there at all.”
And here was my chance; I took it. “That’s just it though, Mum. They hadn’t, that is, Juniper hadn’t.”
“What do you mean?
“She thought I was you.”
“She …?” Her eyes searched mine. “How do you know?”
“She called me Meredith.”
Mum’s fingertips brushed her lips. “Did she … say anything else?”
A crossroads. A choice. And yet, it wasn’t really. I had to tread lightly: if I was to tell Mum exactly what Juniper had said, that she’d accused her of breaking a promise and ruining her life, our conversation would most certainly be ended. “Not much,” I said. “Were you close, the two of you?”
