“Protect her from what? From whom? Fromyou?”
“No, not from me!”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. It was just a feeling. As if they were worried about what she might say. How it might reflect.”
“On them? On their father?”
“Maybe. Or else on her.”
I remembered then the strange feeling I’d got when I was at Milderhurst, the glance that had passed between Saffy and Percy when Juniper shouted at me in the yellow parlor; Saffy’s concern when she discovered that Juniper had wandered off, that she’d been talking to me in the passage. That she might have said something she shouldn’t. “But why?” I said, more to myself than to him, thinking about Mum’s lost letter, the trouble hinted at between its lines. “What could Juniper possibly have to hide?”
“Well,” said Adam, lowering his voice a little, “I must admit to having done a bit of digging. The more adamant they were about keeping her out of it, the more interested I got.”
“And? What did you find?” I was glad he couldn’t see me. There was no dignity in the way I was practically swallowing the telephone receiver in my eagerness.
“An incident in 1935; I guess you could call it a scandal.” He let the final word hang between us with a sort of mysterious satisfaction, and I could just picture him: leaning back against his bentwood desk chair, smoking jacket drawn taut against his belly, warm pipe clamped between his teeth.
I matched his hushed tone. “What sort of scandal?”
“Some ‘bad business’ is what I was told, involving the son of an employee. One of the gardeners. The details were all rather imprecise and I couldn’t find anything of an official nature to verify it, but the story goes that the two of them were involved in some sort of a scrap and he came out of it beaten black and blue.”
“ByJuniper?” An image came to mind of the wisp of old woman I’d met at Milderhurst, the slender girl in the old photos. I tried not to laugh. “When she was thirteen years old?”
“That was the implication, though saying it out loud like that makes it seem rather far-fetched.”
“But that’s what he told people? That Juniper did it?”
“Well,hedidn’t say any such thing. I can’t imagine there are too many young fellows who’d admit freely to being bested by a slim young girl like her. It was his mother who went up to the castle making claims. From what I hear, Raymond Blythe paid them off. Dressed up as a bonus for his father, apparently, who’d worked his whole life on the estate. The rumor didn’t go away, though, not completely; there was still talk in the village.”
I got the feeling Juniper was the sort of girl people liked to talk about: her family was important, she was beautiful and talented—in Mum’s words, enchanting—but still: Juniper the Teenage Man-Beater? It seemed unlikely, to say the very least.
“Look, it’s probably just groundless old talk.” Adam’s tone was breezy again as he echoed my thoughts. “Nothing at all to do with why her sisters vetoed our interview.”
I nodded slowly.
“More likely, they just wanted to spare her the stress. She’s not well, she’s certainly not good with strangers, she wasn’t even born when theMud Manwas written.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “I’m sure that’s all it was.”
But I wasn’t. I didn’t really imagine that the twins were fretting over a long-forgotten incident with the gardener’s son, but I couldn’t rid myself of the certainty that there was something else behind it. I put down the phone and I was back in that ghostly passage, looking between Juniper and Saffy and Percy, feeling like a child who is old enough to recognize nuance at play but hopelessly ill-equipped to read it.
THE DAYthat I was due to leave for Milderhurst, Mum came early to my bedroom. The sun was still hiding behind the wall of Singer & Sons, but I’d been awake for an hour or so already, as excited as a kid on her first day of school.
“There’s something I wanted to give you,” she said. “To lend you, at any rate. It’s rather precious to me.”
I waited, wondering what it might be. She reached inside her dressing-gown pocket and took an object out. Her eyes searched mine for a moment, then she handed it over. A little book with a brown leather cover.
“You said you wanted to know me better.” She was trying hard to be brave, to keep her voice from shaking. “It’s all in there.She’sin there. The person that I used to be.”
I took the journal, as nervous as a novice mother with a brand-new baby. Awed by its preciousness, terrified of doing it damage, amazed and touched and gratified that Mum would trust me with such a treasure. I couldn’t think what to say; that is, I could think of lots of things I wanted to say, but there was a lump in my throat, years in the making, and it wasn’t about to budge. “Thank you,” I managed to say before I began to cry.
Mum’s eyes misted in instant response and at the very same moment each of us reached for the other and held on tight.
THREE
MILDERHURST,APRIL20, 1940
