Chapter 4
FOUR
ELSEWHERE that night, in a neighboring village, a woman held her hours-old baby close, running her thumb against the tiny child’s peachy cheek.
Her husband would arrive home many hours later, tired from his night-watch duties, and the woman, still dazed from the unexpected and traumatic birth, would recount the details over tea, the way she’d gone into labor on the bus, the pain, the sudden, plunging pain, the bleeding and the savage fear that her baby would die, that she would die, that she would never hold her newborn son; and then she’d smile wearily, devotedly, and pause to press the tears that warmed her face, and she’d tell him about the angel who’d appeared beside her on the roadside, knelt at her knees, and saved her baby’s life.
And it would become a family story, retold, passed down, resurrected on rainy nights by the fire, invoked as a means to quell disputes, recited at family events.
And time would gallop on, month by year by decade, until on that baby’s fiftieth birthday his widowed mother would watch from her cushioned chair at the end of the restaurant table as his children made a toast, reciting the family story of the angel who’d saved their father’s life, and without whom none of them would exist.
THOMAS CAVILL didn’t go with his regiment when they headed into the slaughter of North Africa.
He was already dead by then. Dead and buried, cold beneath the ground of Milderhurst Castle.
He died because the night was wet. Because a shutter was loose.
Because he wanted to make a good impression.
He died because many years before a jealous husband had found his wife with another man.
For a long time, though, nobody knew. The storm cleared, the floodwater receded, and the protective wings of Cardarker Wood spread out around Milderhurst Castle. The world forgot about Thomas Cavill, and any questions of his fate were lost beneath the destruction and debris of war.
Percy sent her letter, the final, rotten untruth that would plague her all her life; Saffy wrote to decline the governess position—Juniper needed her, what else could she have done?
Planes flew overhead, war ended, the sky peeled back to reveal one new year after another.
The Sisters Blythe grew old; they became objects of quaint curiosity in the village, the subjects of myth.
Until one day, a young woman came to visit.
She had ties to another who had come before and the castle stones began to whisper with recognition.
Percy Blythe saw that it was time. That after fifty years of carrying her burden, she could finally take it from her shoulders and return to Thomas Cavill his closing date. The story could come to an end.
So she did, and she charged the girl to do the right thing with it.
Which left only one remaining task.
She gathered her sisters, her beloved sisters, and made sure they were fast asleep and dreaming. And then she struck a match, in the library where it had all begun.