Juniper had tried ignoring him, hopeful that he might get the idea and stop trying to make conversation, but he’d persisted. He’d told her his name, Thomas Cavill. They didn’t usually have names. Not normal ones.
She’d dived into the pool herself, and he had made a hasty exit. She’d noticed then that there were clothes on the sun bed; his clothes, which was very strange indeed.
And then, the most peculiar thing of all. Meredith had come—released at last from Saffy’s sewing room—and she and the man had begun to converse.
Juniper, watching them from the water, had almost drowned in shock, for one thing was certain: her visitors could not be seen by others.
JUNIPER HADlived at Milderhurst Castle all her life. She had been born, like her father and her sisters before her, in a room on the second floor. She knew the castle and its woods as one might be expected to know the only world one had met. She was safe and loved and indulged. She read and she wrote and she played and she dreamed. Nothing was expected of her other than to be precisely as and who she was. Sometimes, more so.
“You, my little one, are a creature of the castle,” Daddy had told her often. “We are the same, you and I.” And for a long time Juniper had been perfectly content with this description.
Lately, though, in ways she couldn’t properly explain, things had begun to change. She woke at night sometimes with an inexplicable tugging in her soul; a desire, like hunger, but for what she couldn’t say. Dissatisfaction, longing, a deep and yawning absence, but no idea of how to fill it. No idea of what it was she missed. She’d walked and she’d run; she’d written with speed and fury. Words, sounds, had pressed against her skull, demanding release, and to put them on paper was a relief; she didn’t agonize, she didn’t ponder, she never reread; it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.
Then one day an urge had taken her to the village. She didn’t drive often, but she’d steered the big old Daimler into the High Street. As if in a dream, a character in someone else’s story, she’d parked it and gone inside the hall; a woman had spoken at her but by then Juniper had already seen Meredith.
Later, Saffy would ask her how she’d chosen, and Juniper would say: “I didn’t choose.”
“I don’t like to disagree, lamb, but I’m quite sure it was you who brought her home.”
“Yes, of course, but I didn’tchoose. I just knew.”
Juniper had never had a friend before. Other people, Daddy’s pompous friends, visitors to the castle, just seemed to take up more air than they should. They squashed one with their blustering and their posturing and their constant talking. But Meredith was different. She was funny and she saw things her own way. She was a bookish person who’d never been exposed to books; she was gifted with astute powers of observation, but her thoughts and feelings weren’t filtered through those that she’d read, those that had been written before. She had a unique way of seeing the world and a manner of expressing herself that caught Juniper unawares and made her laugh and think and feel things anew.
Best of all, though, Meredith had come laden with stories of the outside world. Her arrival had made a small tear in the fabric of Milderhurst. A tiny, bright window to which Juniper could press her eye and glimpse what lay beyond.
AND NOWjust look what she had brought! A man, a real man of flesh and blood. A young man from the outside, the real world, had appeared in the pool. Light from the outside world had shone through the veil, brighter now that a second hole was torn, and Juniper knew that somehow she must see more.
He’d wanted to stay, to come with them up to the castle, but Juniper had told him no. The castle was all wrong. She wanted to watch him, to inspect him like a cat—carefully, slowly, unnoticed as she drifted past his skin; if she couldn’t have that, it was better to have nothing. He would remain that way a sunlit, silent moment; a breeze against her cheek as the swing tilted back and forth across the warming pool; a new, low pull within her stomach.
He went. And they stayed. And she draped her arm over Meredith’s shoulder and laughed as they returned up the hill; joked about Saffy’s habit of sticking pins into legs as well as fabrics; pointed out the old fountain, no longer working; paused a moment to inspect the stagnant green water sulking inside, the dragonflies hovering fitfully about its rim. But all the while her thoughts drew out behind her like a spider’s thread, following the man as he made his way toward the road.
She began to walk, faster now. It was hot, so hot, her hair was already drying, sticking to the sides of her face; her skin seemed tighter than usual. She felt oddly animated. Surely Meredith could hear her heart, hammering away against her ribs?
“I have a grand idea,” she said. “Have you ever wondered what France looks like?” And she took her little friend’s hand and together they ran, up the stairs, through the briars, beneath the long row of tunneled trees. Fleeting—the word came into her head and made her feel lighter, like a deer. Faster, faster, both of them laughing, and the wind tore at Juniper’s hair, and her feet rejoiced against the baking, hard earth, and joy ran with her. Finally, they reached the portico, tripped up the stairs, panting, both of them, through the open French doors and into the cool stillness of the library.
“June? Is that you?”
It was Saffy, sitting at her writing desk. Dear Saffy, looking up from behind the typewriter in the way that was habit with her; always just a little bewildered, as if she’d been caught in the middle of a rosepetal, dewdrop dream and reality was a slightly dusty surprise.
Whether it was the sunlight, the pool, the man, the clear blue of the sky, Juniper couldn’t resist planting a kiss on the top of her sister’s head as they hurried by.
Saffy beamed. “Did Meredith—Oh yes, she did. Good. Oh, I see you’ve been swimming; be careful that Daddy …”
But whatever the warning, Juniper and Meredith had gone before it was finished. They ran along looming stone corridors, up narrow flights of stairs, level by level, until finally they reached the attic at the very top of the castle. Juniper went swiftly to the open window, eased herself onto the bookcase, and swiveled so that her feet were on the roof outside. “Come,” she said to Meredith, who was still standing by the door, a strange look on her face. “Quickly now.”
Meredith let out a tentative sigh, propped her spectacles back on the bridge of her nose, then followed, did exactly as Juniper had done. Inched her way along the steep roof until they came upon the ridge that pitched south like a ship’s prow.
“There, see?” said Juniper, when they were seated side by side, settled on the flat behind the edging tiles. She pointed, a scribble on the far horizon. “I told you. All the way to France.”
“Really? That’s it?”
Juniper nodded, but she paid the coastline no more heed. Squinted instead at the wide field of long, yellow grass skirting Cardarker Wood; scanning, scanning, hoping for just one final glimpse …
A jolt. She saw him then, a tiny figure, crossing the field by the first bridge. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, she could tell that much, and he had his palms out flat beside him, brushing the tops of the long grass. He stopped as she watched, lifted and bent his arms so that his hands rested on the back of his head, seemed to embrace the sky. She realized he was turning; had turned. Was looking back now at the castle. She held her breath, wondered how it was that life could change so much in half an hour when nothing much had changed at all.
“The castle wears a skirt.” Meredith was pointing at the ground below.
He was walking again, and then he disappeared behind the fold of the hill and everything was still. Thomas Cavill had slipped through the crack and into the world beyond. The air around the castle seemed to know it.
