The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

was, as Percy led, and I listened and looked and nodded, that a small ghostly Londoner stepped silently beside me: wide-eyed, nervous, glimpsing the house for the first time, too. And it turned out I liked her being there; if I could’ve, I’d have reached down across the decades to take her hand in mine. I wondered how different the castle must have been in 1939, how much change had occurred in the past fifty years. Whether even then Milderhurst Castle had felt like a house asleep, everything dull and dusty and dim. An old house biding its time. And I wondered whether I’d have the chance to ask that little girl, if she was still at large somewhere. If I’d ever be able to find her.
    It is impossible to recount everything that was said and seen that day at Milderhurst, and, for the purposes of this story, unnecessary. So much has happened since, subsequent events have bowed and bent and mixed in my mind so that it’s difficult to isolate my first impressions of the castle and its inhabitants. I will stick, then, in this account, to the sights and sounds that were most vivid, and to those events pertinent to what came after, and what came before. Events that could never – will never – fade from memory.
    Two important things became clear to me as I took the tour: first, Mrs Bird had been underplaying matters when she’d told me Milderhurst was a little shabby. The castle was distressed, and not in a glamshackle way. Second, and more remarkably, Percy Blythe was blind to the fact. No matter that dust smothered the heavy wooden furniture, that countless specks thickened the stagnant air, that generations of moths had been feasting on the curtains, she continued to speak about the rooms as if they were in their prime, as if elegant literary salons were staged, and royalty mingled with members of the literati, and an army of servants bustled unseen along the corridors doing the Blythe family’s bidding. I’d have felt sympathy for her, caught as she was in a fantasy world, except that she wasn’t at all the sort of person who engendered sympathy. She was resolutely un-victim-like and therefore my pity was transformed into admiration; respect for her stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the old place was falling apart around them.
    Another thing I feel compelled to mention about Percy: for an octogenarian with a cane she set a cracking pace. We took in the billiard room, the ballroom, the conservatory, then swept on downstairs into the servants’ hall; marched though the butler’s pantry, the glass pantry, the scullery, before arriving finally at the kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from hooks along the walls, a stout Aga rusted beside a sagging range, a family of empty ceramic pots stood chest to chest on the tiles. At the centre, an enormous pine table balanced on pregnant ankles, its top scored by centuries of knives, flour salting the wounds. The air was cool and stale and it seemed to me that the servants’ rooms, even more than those upstairs, bore the pallor of abandonment, They were disused limbs of a great Victorian engine that had fallen victim to changing times and ground to a final halt.
    I wasn’t the only one to register the increased gloom, the weight of decline. ‘Diffi cult to believe, but this place used to hum,’ said Percy Blythe, running her finger along the table’s crenelation. ‘My grandmother had a staff of over forty servants. Forty. One forgets how the house once gleamed.’
    The floor was littered with small brown pellets I took at first for dirt but recognized, by their particular crunch underfoot, as mouse droppings. I made a mental note to refuse cake if it was offered.
    ‘Even when we were children, there were twenty or so servants inside and a team of fifteen gardeners keeping the grounds in order. The Great War ended that: they all enlisted, every last one. Most young men did.’
    ‘And none came back?’
    ‘Two. Two made it home, but they weren’t the men they’d been