Chapter One Man of Kent #2
For along with his professional triumph, Raymond Blythe’s personal life flourished again.
He had remarried in 1919, to a woman named Odette Silverman whom he met at a Bloomsbury party hosted by Lady Londonderry.
Though Miss Silverman was of unremarkable origins, her talent as a harpist gave her an entrée to social events that would most certainly have been closed to her otherwise.
The engagement was short and the marriage caused a minor society scandal due to the groom’s age and the bride’s youth—he was over fifty, and she, at eighteen, only five years older than the daughters of his first marriage—and their different provenances.
Rumors circulated that Raymond Blythe had been bewitched—by Odette Silverman’s youth and beauty.
The pair were wed in a ceremony at the Milderhurst chapel, opened for the first time since the funeral of Muriel Blythe.
Odette gave birth to a daughter in 1922.
The child was christened Juniper and her fairness is evident in the many photographs that survive from the period.
Once again, despite jocular remarks as to the continued absence of a son and heir, Raymond Blythe’s letters from the time indicate that he was delighted by the addition to his family.
Sadly his happiness was to be short-lived, for storm clouds were already gathering on the horizon.
In December 1924 Odette died from complications in the early stages of her second pregnancy.
I turned the page eagerly to find two photos.
In the first, Juniper Blythe must have been about four, sitting with her legs straight out in front and her ankles crossed.
Her feet were bare and her expression made it clear she’d been surprised—and not happily—in a moment of solitary contemplation.
She was staring up at the camera with almond-shaped eyes set slightly too wide apart.
Combined with her fine blond hair, the dusting of freckles across her snub nose, and the fierce little mouth, those eyes created an aura of ill-gotten knowledge.
In the next photo Juniper was a young woman, the passing of years seemingly instant, so that the same catlike gaze met camera now from a grown-up face.
A face of great but strange beauty. I remembered Mum’s description of the way the other women in the village hall had stepped aside when Juniper arrived, the atmosphere she’d seemed to carry with her.
Looking at this photograph, I could well imagine it.
She was curious and secretive, distracted and knowing, all at the same time.
The individual features, the hints and glimmers of emotion and intellect, combined to form a whole that was compelling.
I skimmed the accompanying text for a date—April 1939.
The same year my twelve-year-old mother would meet her.
After the death of his second wife, Raymond Blythe is said to have retreated to his writing room.
Aside from a few small opinion pieces in The Times, however, he was to publish nothing of note again.
Though Blythe was working on a project at the time of his death, it was not, as many hoped, a new installment of the Mud Man, but rather a lengthy scientific tract about the nonlinear nature of time, explicating his own theories, familiar to readers of the Mud Man, about the ability of the past to permeate the present. The work was never completed.
In the later years of his life, Raymond Blythe was subject to declining health and became convinced that the Mud Man of his famous story had come to life to haunt and torment him.
An understandable—if fanciful—fear, given the litany of tragic events that had befallen so many of his loved ones over the course of his life, and one that has been gladly adopted by many a visitor to the castle.
It is a prevailing expectation, of course, that a historic castle should come replete with its own spine-chilling stories, and natural that a well-loved novel like The True History of the Mud Man, set within the walls of Milderhurst Castle, should provoke such theories.
Raymond Blythe converted to Catholicism in the late nineteen-thirties and in his final years refused visits from all but his priest. He died on Friday the 4th of April, 1941, after a fall from the Milderhurst tower, the same fate that had claimed his mother sixty-five years earlier.
There was another photograph of Raymond Blythe at the end of the chapter.
It was vastly different from the first—the smiling young father with the pair of plump twins on his knees—and as I studied it my conversation with Alice in the bookshop came rushing back.
In particular, her suggestion that the mental instability that plagued Juniper Blythe had run in the family.
For this man, this version of Raymond Blythe, had none of the satisfied ease that had been so remarkable in the first photograph.
Instead, he appeared to be riddled by anxiety: his eyes were wary, his mouth was pinched, his chin locked by tension.
The photograph was dated 1939, and Raymond would have been seventy-three years old, but it wasn’t age alone that had drawn the deep lines on his face: the longer I stared at it, the more certain I was of that.
I’d thought, as I read, that the biographer might have been speaking metaphorically when she referred to Raymond Blythe’s haunting, but now I saw she was not.
The man in the photograph wore the frightened mask of prolonged internal torment.
DUSK SLUMPED into place around me, filling the depressions between the undulations and woods of the Milderhurst estate, creeping across the fields and swallowing the light.
The photograph of Raymond Blythe dissolved into the darkness and I closed the book.
I didn’t leave, though. Not then. I turned instead to look through the gap in the trees to where the castle stood on the crest of the hill, a black mass beneath an inky sky.
And I thrilled to think that the following morning I would step across its threshold.
The characters of the castle had come to life for me that afternoon; they’d seeped beneath my skin as I read and I now felt that I had known them all forever.
That although I’d stumbled upon the village of Milderhurst by accident, there was a rightness to my being there.
I’d experienced the same sensation when I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Bleak House.
As if the story were one I’d already known, that it confirmed something I’d always suspected about the world: that it had sat in my future all along, waiting for me to find it.