“He was ready for his lunch, but I said you’d be sure to arrive just as soon as I closed the door and put out the sign.” She laughed then, a smoky chuckle that rolled up from the base of her throat. I’d guessed her age as pushing sixty, but that laugh belonged to a much younger, far more wicked woman than first impressions suggested. “Alice tells me you’re interested in the castle.”
“That’s right. I was hoping to do a tour and she sent me here. Do I need to sign up somewhere?”
“Dear me, no, nothing as official as all that. I run the tours myself.” Her linen bosom puffed self-importantly before deflating again. “That is, I did.”
“Did?”
“Oh yes, and a lovely task it was too. The Misses Blythe used to operate them personally, of course; they started in the 1950s as a way to fund the castle’s upkeep and save themselves from the National Trust—Miss Percy wouldn’t have that, I can assure you—but it all got a bit much some years ago. We’ve all of us got our limits and when Miss Percy reached hers, I was delighted to step in. There was a time I used to run five a week, but there’s not much call these days. It seems people have forgotten the old place.” She gave me a quizzical look, as though I might be able to explain the vagaries of the human race.
“Well, I’dloveto see inside,” I said brightly, hopefully, maybe even a little desperately.
Mrs. Bird blinked at me. “Of course you would, my dear, and I’d love to show you, but I’m afraid the tours don’t run anymore.”
The disappointment was crushing and for a moment I didn’t think I’d be able to speak. “Oh,” I managed to say. “Oh dear.”
“It’s a shame, but Miss Percy said her mind was made up. She said she was tired of opening her home so ignorant tourists had somewhere to drop their rubbish. I’m sorry Alice misled you.” She shrugged her shoulders helplessly and a knotty silence fell between us.
I attempted polite resignation, but as the possibility of seeing inside Milderhurst Castle receded, there was suddenly very little in life that I wanted more fiercely. “Only—I’m such a great admirer of Raymond Blythe,” I heard myself say. “I don’t think I’d have ended up working in publishing if I hadn’t read theMud Manwhen I was a child. I don’t suppose … That is, perhaps ifyouwere to put in a good word, reassure the owners that I’m not the sort of person to go dropping rubbish in their home?”
“Well …” She frowned, considering. “The castle is a joy to behold, and there’s no one as proud of her perch as Miss Percy … Publishing, you say?”
It had been an inadvertent stroke of brilliance: Mrs. Bird belonged to a generation for whom those words held a sort of Fleet Street glamour; never mind my poky, paper-strewn cubicle and rather sobering balance sheets. I seized upon this opportunity as a drowning person might a raft: “Billing & Brown Book Publishers, Notting Hill.” I remembered then the business cards Herbert had presented at my little promotion party. I never think to carry them with me, not in an official way, but they come in very handy as bookmarks and I was thus able to whip one out from the copy ofJane EyreI keep in my tote in case I need to queue unexpectedly. I tendered it like the winning lottery ticket.
“Vice chairman,” read Mrs. Bird, eyeing me over her glasses. “Well, indeed.” I don’t think I imagined the new note of veneration in her voice. She thumbed the corner of the business card, tightened her lips, and gave a short nod of decision. “All right. Give me a minute and I’ll telephone the old dears. See if I can’t convince them to let me show you round this afternoon.”
WHILE MRS. BIRDspoke hushed words into an old-fashioned phone receiver, I sat in a chintz-upholstered chair and opened the brown paper package containing my new books. I slipped out the shiny copy of theMud Manand turned it over. It was true what I’d said: in one way or another my encounter with Raymond Blythe’s story had determined my entire life. Just holding it in my hands was enough to fill me with an all-encompassing sense of knowing precisely who I was.
The cover design of the new edition was the same as that on the West Barnes library’s copy Mum had borrowed almost twenty years before, and I smiled to myself, vowing to buy a Jiffy bag and post it to them just as soon as I got home. Finally, a twenty-year debt would be repaid. For when my mumps subsided and it was time to return theMud Manto Miss Perry, the book, it seemed, had vanished. No amount of furious searching on Mum’s part and impassioned declarations of mystification on mine, managed to turn it up, not even in the wasteland of missing things beneath my bed. When all avenues of search had been exhausted, I was marched up to the library to make my barefaced confession. Poor Mum earned one of Miss Perry’s withering stares and almost died of shame, but I was too emboldened by the delicious glory of possession to suffer guilt. It was the first and only thing I’ve ever stolen, but there was no help for it; quite simply, that book and I belonged to one another.
MRS. BIRD’Sphone receiver met the cradle with a plastic clunk and I jumped a little. By the tug of her features I gathered instantly that the news was bad. I stood and limped to the counter, my left foot numb with pins and needles.
“I’m afraid one of the Blythe sisters isn’t well today,” said Mrs. Bird.
“Oh?”
“The youngest has had a turn and the doctor’s on his way out to see her.”
I worked to conceal my disappointment. There was something very unseemly about a show of personal frustration when an old lady had been taken ill. “That’s terrible. I hope she’s all right.”
Mrs. Bird waved my concern away like a harmless but pesky fly. “I’m sure she will be. It’s not the first time. She’s suffered episodes since she was a girl.”
“Episodes?”
“Lost time, is what they used to call it. Time she couldn’t account for, usually after she became overexcited. Something to do with an unusual heart rate—too fast or too slow, I can’t remember which, but she used to black out and wake up with no memory of what she’d done.” Her mouth tightened around some further sentiment she’d thought better of expressing. “The older sisters will be too busy looking after her today to be bothered by disturbances, but they were loath to turn you away. The castle needs its visitors, they said. Funny old things—I’m quite surprised, to be honest; they’re ordinarily not keen on guests. I suppose it gets lonely though, just the three of them rattling around inside. They suggested tomorrow instead, midmorning?”
A flutter of anxiety in my chest. I hadn’t planned to stay, and yet the thought that I might leave without seeing inside the castle brought with it a profound and sudden surge of desolation. Disappointment darkened inside me.
“We’ve had a cancellation, so there’s a room free if you’d like it,” said Mrs. Bird. “Dinner’s included.”
I had work to catch up on over the weekend, Herbert needed his car to get to Windsor the following afternoon, and I’m not the sort of person who decides on a whim to stay for a night in a strange place.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
RAYMONDBLYTHE’SMILDERHURST
WHILEMrs. Bird started on the paperwork, transferring details from my business card, I disengaged myself with a mumble of polite noises and drifted over to peek through the open back door. A courtyard had been formed by the farmhouse walls and those of other farm buildings: a barn, a dovecote, and a third construction with a conical roof that I would later learn to call an oast house. A round pool meditated at the center and the pair of fat geese had launched themselves across the sun-warmed surface, floating regally now as ripples chased one another towards the flagstone edges. Beyond, a peacock inspected the edge of clipped lawn separating the tended courtyard from a meadow of wildflowers that tumbled towards distant parkland. The whole sunlit garden, framed as it was by the shadowed doorway in which I stood, was like a snapshot of a long-ago spring day, come back somehow to life.
“Glorious, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Bird, behind me suddenly, though I hadn’t noticed her approach. “Have you ever heard of Oliver Sykes?”
