Chapter 2
TWO
TOM had brought flowers from London, a small bunch of orchids.
They’d been hard to find, fiendishly expensive, and as day had dragged into night he’d come to regret the decision.
They looked rather the worse for wear, and he’d started to wonder whether Juniper’s sisters would like shop-bought flowers any more than she did.
He’d brought the birthday jam, too. Christ, he was nervous.
He checked his watch, then resolved not to do so again.
He was beyond late. It couldn’t be helped: the train had been stopped, then he’d needed to find another bus and the only one heading east had gone from a nearby town, so he’d had to run cross-country for miles only to find it was out of service that afternoon.
This bus had come along three hours later to replace it, just as he was about to set out on foot and see if he could hitch himself a ride.
He’d worn his uniform; he was heading back to the front in a few days, and besides, he was used to it now, but his nerves made him stiff and the jacket caught on his shoulders in a way that was unfamiliar.
He’d worn his medal, too, the one they’d given him for the business on the Escaut Canal.
Tom wasn’t sure how he felt about receiving it—he couldn’t feel it there against his chest without remembering the boys they’d lost as they scrambled madly out of hell—but it seemed to matter to others, his mother, for one, and seeing as it was his first time meeting Juniper’s family, he supposed it was best.
He wanted them to like him, for everything to go as well as possible.
For her sake more than his; her ambivalence confused him.
She’d spoken of her sisters and her childhood often, and always with affection.
Listening to her, and recalling what he could of his own glimpse of the castle, Tom had begun to envisage an idyll, a rural fantasy; more than that, a fairy tale of sorts.
And yet, for a long time she hadn’t wanted him to visit; had been almost wary if he so much as hinted at the possibility.
Then, not two weeks before—with characteristic suddenness—Juniper had changed her mind.
While Tom was still reeling from the shock of her having accepted his proposal, she’d announced that they must visit her sisters and break the news together.
Of course they must. So here he was. And he knew he must be getting close because they’d stopped a number of times already and he was one of the only passengers remaining.
It had been overcast when he left London, a mask of white cloud covering the sky, gathering more darkly in the corners as he approached Kent, but now it was raining hard and the windshield wipers were shushing in a way that would have made him sleepy if he wasn’t so nervous.
“Going home, then, are you?”
Tom searched the dark for the person attached to the voice, saw a woman sitting across the aisle.
Fifty or so years old—it was difficult to know for sure—a kind enough face, the way his mother might have looked if her life had been an easier one.
“Visiting a friend,” he answered. “She lives on the Tenterden Road.”
“She, eh?” The woman wore a knowing smile. “A sweetheart, I think?”
He smiled because it was true, then let it drop again because it also wasn’t.
He was going to marry Juniper Blythe, but she was not his sweetheart.
“Sweetheart” was the girl a fellow met when he was home between postings, the pretty girl with the pout and the legs and the empty promises of letters at the front; the girl with a taste for gin and dancing and late-night groping.
Juniper Blythe was none of those things.
She was going to be his wife, he would be her husband, but Tom knew, even as he clutched at absolutes, that she would never belong to him.
Keats had known women like Juniper. When he wrote of his lady in the meads, the beautiful fairy’s child with the long hair, the light foot, and the wild, wild eyes, he might have been describing Juniper Blythe.
The woman across the aisle was still awaiting confirmation, and Tom smiled. “Fiancée,” he said, enjoying the word’s pregnant expectation of solidity, even as he cringed beneath its unsuitability.
“Well now. Isn’t that lovely. So nice to hear happy stories at a time like this. Meet around here, did you?”
“No—well, yes, but not properly. London, that’s where we met.”
“London.” She smiled sympathetically. “I go up to visit my friend sometimes, and when I last hopped off at Charing Cross …” She shook her head. “Brave old London. Terrible, what’s happened. Any damage to you or yours?”
“We’ve been lucky. So far.”
“Taken you long to get here?”
“I left on the nine twelve. It’s been a comedy of errors since.”
She was shaking her head. “The stopping and starting. The overcrowding. The identity checks—still, you’re here now. Almost at the end of your journey. Pity about the weather. Hope you’ve got an umbrella with you.”
He hadn’t, but he nodded and smiled and went back to thinking his own thoughts.
SAFFY TOOK her writing journal to the good parlor.
Its fire was the only one they’d lit that evening, and despite everything, the room’s delicate arrangement still gave her some small pleasure.
She didn’t like to feel enclosed, so she eschewed the armchairs in favor of the table.
Cleared away one place setting. She did it neatly, careful not to disturb the other three—it was mad, she knew, but a tiny part of her still clung to the hope that they might yet dine, the four of them together.
She poured herself another whisky then sat and opened her notebook to the most recent page, read it through, reacquainting herself with Adele’s tragic love story. She sighed as the secret world of her book stretched out its arms to welcome her home.
A tremendous clap of thunder made Saffy jump and reminded her that she’d wanted to see about rewriting the scene in which William broke off his engagement to Adele.
Poor, dear Adele. Of course her world should be broken apart during a storm in which the heavens themselves seemed likely to be rent asunder! It was only right. All life’s tragic moments should be granted such elemental emphasis.
It ought to have stormed when Matthew broke off his engagement to Saffy, but it hadn’t.
They’d been seated, side by side, in the love seat by the library’s French doors, sunlight streaming across their caps.
Twelve months since the ghastly trip to London, the play’s premiere, the dark theater, the hideous creature emerging from the moat, climbing up the wall, bellowing with hideous pain …
Saffy had just poured tea for two when Matthew spoke.
“I believe the best thing now would be for us to release one another.”
“To release …? But I don’t …?” She blinked. “You no longer love me?”
“I’ll always love you, Saffy.”
“Then … why?” She’d changed into the sapphire blue dress when she knew that he was coming.
It was her best: it was the one she’d worn to London; she’d wanted him to admire her, to covet her, to want her as he had that day by the lake.
She felt foolish. “Why?” she said again, despising the weakness in her voice.
“We can’t marry; you know that as well as I. How can we live as man and wife when you refuse to leave the castle?”
“Not refuse; I don’t refuse, I long to leave—”
“Then come, come with me now—”
“I can’t …” She stood. “I’ve told you.”
A change came upon him then; a bitter knife twisting his features.
“Of course you can. If you loved me, you would come. You’d climb into my motorcar and we’d drive away from this ghastly, mildewed place.
” He stood beside her, implored her. “Come on, Saffy,” he said, all trace of resentment dropping away.
He gestured with his hat to the top of the drive where his car was parked.
“Let’s go. Let’s drive away this instant, the two of us together. ”
She’d wanted to say again, “I can’t,” to beg him to understand, to be patient, to wait for her; but she hadn’t.
A moment of clarity, a struck match, and she’d known that there was nothing she could say or do to make him comprehend.
The crippling panic that crept upon her if she tried to leave the castle; the black and groundless fear that dug its claws into her, wrapped her in its wings and made her lungs constrict, her vision blur that kept her prisoner in this cold, dark place, as weak and helpless as a child.
“Come,” he said again, reaching for her hand. “Come.” He said it so tenderly that sitting in the castle’s good parlor sixteen years later, Saffy would feel its echo trickling down her spine and settling warm beneath her skirt.
She’d smiled, she hadn’t been able to help it, even though she’d known herself to be standing at the top of a great cliff, dark water swirling beneath her, the man she loved urging her to let him save her, unaware that she couldn’t be saved, that his adversary was so much stronger than he was.
“You were right,” she’d said, leaping from the cliff, falling away from him. “The best thing for us both would be to release each other.”
She’d never seen Matthew again, nor her cousin Emily, who’d been lurking in the wings, waiting for her chance, always coveting that which Saffy wanted …
A LOG. Nothing but a piece of driftwood, washed downstream by the fast-rising current.
Percy pulled it off the drive, cursing the weight, the branch that snagged her shoulder, and wondering whether she was relieved or dismayed that the search must now continue.
She was about to press on down the drive when something stopped her.
A strange sense, not a presentiment exactly, rather one of those odd twin things.
A swirl of misgiving. She wondered whether Saffy had taken her advice and found some occupation.
Percy stood in the rain, undecided, looked down the hill towards the road, then back at the blackened castle.