I thought, too, about Dad’s suggestion that Mum had blamed herself when Daniel died. Her conviction that she’d deserved to lose a child. Something in the way he’d said it, his use of the wordlostperhaps, his suspicion that it had something to do with a fight she’d had with Gran, made me think of Mum’s final letter home to her parents. Her pleas to be allowed to remain at Milderhurst, her insistence that she’d finally found the place where she belonged, her reassurances that her choice didn’t mean Gran had “lost” her.
Links were being made, I could feel them, but my stomach didn’t care one whit. It issued an unceremonious interruption, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten a bite since Herbert’s lasagne.
The house was quiet and I went carefully along the dark corridor towards the stairs. I’d almost made it when I noticed the thin strip of light issuing from beneath Mum’s bedroom door. I hesitated, the promise I’d made to Dad ringing in my ears; the small matter of patching things up. I didn’t like my chances—there’s no one quite like Mum for skating airily along the surface of a frost—but it was important to Dad, so I drew a deep breath and knocked, ever so lightly, on the door. Nothing happened and for a moment I thought I might be spared, but then a soft voice came from the other side: “Edie? Is that you?”
I opened the door and saw Mum sitting up in bed beneath my favorite painting of the full moon turning a licorice black sea to mercury. Her reading glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose and a novel calledThe Last Days in Parisleaned against her knees. Her expression as she blinked at me was one of strained uncertainty.
“I saw the light under the door.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” She tilted the book towards me. “Reading helps sometimes.”
I nodded agreement and neither of us spoke further; my stomach noticed the silence and took the opportunity to fill it. I was making movements to excuse myself and escape back towards the kitchen when Mum said, “Close the door, Edie.”
I did as she said.
“Please. Come and sit down.” She took off her glasses and hung them by the chain over her bedpost. I sat carefully, leaning against the wooden end-rail in the same place I’d occupied as a kid on birthday mornings.
“Mum,” I started, “I—”
“You were right, Edie.” She slid the bookmark into her novel, closed its cover but didn’t relinquish it to the bedside table. “I did take you back to Milderhurst. Many years ago now.”
I was seized by a sudden urge to cry.
“You were just a little girl. I didn’t think you’d remember. We weren’t there for long. As it happens, I lacked the courage to go any further than the front gates.” She didn’t meet my eyes, hugging her novel firmly to her chest. “It was wrong what I did, pretending that you’d imagined the whole thing. It was just … such a shock when you asked. I was unprepared. I didn’t mean to lie about it. Can you forgive me?”
Is it possible not to wilt before a request like that? “Of course.”
“I loved that place,” she said, lips drawing. “I never wanted to leave it.”
“Oh, Mum.” I wanted to reach out and touch her.
“I loved her, too: Juniper Blythe.” And then she looked up and the expression on her face was so lost, so forlorn, that my breath caught in my throat.
“Tell me about her, Mum.”
There was a pause, an enduring pause, and I could see by her eyes that she was far away and long ago. “She was … like no one else I’d ever met.” Mum brushed a phantom strand of hair from her forehead. “She was enchanting. And I say that quite earnestly. She enchanted me.”
I thought of the silver-haired woman I’d met within the shadowy corridor of Milderhurst; the utter transformation of her face when she smiled; Theo’s account of his brother’s love-mad letters. The little girl in the photograph, caught unawares and staring at the camera with those wide-apart eyes.
“You didn’t want to come home from Milderhurst.”
“No.”
“You wanted to stay with Juniper.”
She nodded.
“And Gran was angry.”
“Oh, yes. She’d wanted me home for months, but I’d … I’d managed to persuade her that I should stay. Then the Blitz happened and they were pleased, I think, that I was safe. She sent my father to get me in the end, though, and I never went back to the castle. But I always wondered.”
“About Milderhurst?”
She shook her head. “About Juniper and Mr. Cavill.”
My skin actually tingled and I held the bed rail very tightly.
“That was my favorite teacher’s name,” she continued. “Thomas Cavill. They became engaged, you see, and I never heard from either one of them again.”
