Very good, interesting and emotional and I liked it a lot. It’s one of those books that require a lot of words to explain; if someone asks “what’s it about?” you can’t just say “it’s a mystery novel” or “it’s a family drama” or else, although it’s a little of both.
First of all: the title! Raymond would “think of all the people who’ve lived within these walls” and “if he didn’t go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide”, or like I read in the back cover “ the truth of what happened in the distant hours has been waiting a long time for someone to find it”.
It’s a thick book, the cheap edition I have is 670 pages and in the first 500 or more pages, let’s be honest, not much actually happens, I will sum it up in a few lines:
Edie Burchill loves books and works for an editor. She was never very close to her mother Meredith, until one day a fifty-year-old-letter arrives and Meredith cries reading it; Edie finds out something about her she never knew: during the war she was sent away to the country and was a guest at Milderhurst Castle and loved it so much there she never wanted to go back home. Edie can’t let it go, she wants to know who her mother was, and goes there. The castle belongs to the Blythe family: Raymond Blythe wrote “The true history of the Mud Man”: Edie read it as a young girl and fell in love with books because of it. He died a mad man many years ago, but his three daughters still live there: the twins Seraphina ‘Saffy’ and Persephone ‘Percy’ Blythe, and their younger sister from another mother Juniper. Percy loves the castle and is very protective; Saffy is sweet and used to dream about leaving and seeing London and the world, but never left the castle; Juniper requires constant supervision by her sisters because she went mad many years ago when her fiancée Thomas Cavill who was expected to dinner never showed up. Nobody knows what happened that night, Tom was thought to have deserted his unit but his brother never believed it and kept looking for him wondering on his fate.
Still, it’s not a boring book because it doesn’t lose itself in long description of places or useless things, it’s so long because it describes emotions and gestures and looks… Meredith was always so private and appeared so cold because she never talked of the past that made her sad; Edie is so curious because she starts to know a woman she never suspected: not the woman who stuck to reality and never understood her dreamy world and her love for books but a very lively girl who wanted to read and learn and write instead. She also becomes fascinated with the Blythe sisters, their lives spent together in the big empty castle taking care of each other, and all the secrets they hid in their hearts and the deep feelings they shared with no-one.
In the last 200 pages everything is finally revealed, slowly, all their stories mingled together. Meredith who found in Juniper her first friend and who was in love with her teacher Thomas, the girl who send Juniper her first complete manuscript and never heard from her again, who felt betrayed when she learned that Juniper and Thomas loved each other and believed they forgot about her, but she was never forgotten. Despite her madness, Juniper kept her manuscript for all those years and gave it back to Edie believing she was her mother.
Raymond, a spoiled child whose mother committed suicide after the death of her youngest son, a strange man full of himself and his art, a hard man who always wanted to have his way. He was so proud of Juniper’s art with words he made a selfish will: he thought that for female artists marriage was an obstacle to their art and wanted Juniper to be free of all that. He left the castle to Juniper so she’d never have to worry about money and included a selfish clause: if she ever married, it would all go to the Church.
Saffy, her life marked forever by a traumatic event in her childhood, who had an episode of hysteria while watching a play on the Mud Man and was therefore never allowed to leave the castle alone. The truth about the Mud Man’s origins, and how Raymond came to write it. It is revealed at the end, when Percy tells Edie that she’s dying and wants to tell her the truth so she can put things right. Percy knows that Edie is Meredith’s daughter and therefore thinks of her of ‘family’, in a way. What happened was: when the twins were born their mother fell into depression for quite a while so they always stayed with daddy; he loved them so much he spent all his time with them, teaching them new words and things, so that when she found herself again she was a stranger in her house, her daughters didn’t want to stay with her and spoke a different language so she wouldn’t understand and she felt so lonely that in the end she took a lover. When Raymond found them together one day they fought and he accidentally started a fire that caught to her dress and she went up in flames like everything in the room. Raymond tried to save her, but never tried to save him, in his jealousy he left him there to die. His wife died too, however, she could never recover such deep injuries. Saffy was a little girl who woke up and went to the window and saw the dying man covered in mud, all blackened and screaming for help. She didn’t know what it meant, but from that night she kept having this nightmare of a Mud Man who tried to reach her. He used to talk to her sister about it, but when they were separated because Percy was ill, she had nobody but her father. In 1917 he had come back from the war a changed man, empty inside, but when his daughter told him of her nightmare he started writing again. Saffy was happy of her father’s attentions and didn’t realize what was going on, until he wrote the book and made her dream real for the world to read. Saffy never knew what the nightmare really was, of her father’s crime, but Raymond told Juniper all he had done because he thought she was like him, and Juniper told Percy and lived her life afraid to really be like him.
Percy spent her life trying to protect her sisters, from the dangers of the world and from themselves.
Her personal secret, never revealed but then understood by Edie when she sees a letter and recognizes her handwriting, was not a revelation to me. As I said before, for many pages it’s a book about emotions, not facts, so it was never said that she had been in love with Lucy who worked in the castle, but the emotions were there. How she was angry when Lucy married a man so she could have a family and children, how it hurt her, it was as if I could see the expression on her face. That’s what I found beautiful: I’m one on whom descriptions are often wasted, I can’t ‘really’ picture in my mind the places and faces usually described in books, and yet here I could feel the emotions so vividly it was as if I was looking into their eyes. Percy was the strong one, the cold one, the pragmatist, the family champion who always knew what to do, and nobody ever knew the sadness in her heart.
Thomas reached the house that night; a terrible, stormy night. Juniper had arrived much earlier with blood on her shirt, and they gave her pills to sleep. Saffy was very much agitated, she drank and fell asleep and had her terrible nightmare again. Thomas was very late, it was wartime after all, it had been an adventure to get there. It was dark, there was a storm, nobody heard him when he knocked. He saw a light at a window and went that way. He saw Saffy asleep, then she sort of woke up and saw the Mud Man in front of her and struck him on the head with something before falling again into sleep. Percy had tried her best to revive him but he was dead, so she buried him in the pet graveyard to save her sister who never knew what she had done.
Juniper was always different, playing with imaginary friends who were real to her, writing things down in a frenzy to get the voices out of her head, who once attacked a boy with a knife after he had hurt her dog, and then she forgot all about it. They were all afraid of what she might do and then forget. She used to have these lapses of memory, and she had one that night when she came home waiting for Thomas. Juniper knew about the will, but her love was so strong and deep that she wanted to marry Thomas anyway, she didn’t want to lose him the way Saffy had once lost her fiancée because she couldn’t leave the castle and her sisters and her father when he was still alive. She knew she wasn’t supposed to leave the castle ever but she had run away to London where she had fallen in love. That night, she was terribly agitated, it had been an adventure to get home and she had lost memory of what had happened and couldn’t explain the blood on her. She wasn’t hurt, but as much as she tried she couldn’t remember what had happened. Neither of them ever knew the truth: she had helped a woman who had suddenly gone into labour, she had helped her and by doing that she had saved the child’s life. The woman never knew who she was, but her family kept telling each other the story of the angel that saved her son’s life one stormy night during the war.
At the end, Percy gathered her sisters and after they were asleep she sat a fire that burned everything down, and they died together. Edie told the Chief Inspector where he could find the bodies of the two men and who they were, so that their story could have an ending like Percy wanted. Thomas’ brother finally had closure. Edie’s relationship with her mother is much better now that they know each other better and Meredith has found her old self again, taking lessons and writing again, feeling again how good writing feels like :-)
This is the whole story, but I want to add one more thing. I haven’t mentioned Edie’s father. He doesn’t have a big part in the story but he’s important to them and it’s a nice scene when he speaks to Edie and she’s surprised: he knows that for whatever reasons his wife is suffering, he says she always felt things too deeply, she was crying when he met her the first time so he took her out for some cake and they fell in love. Later on in the story, Meredith tells her how she kept writing for a while, sending her things to publishers, and once tried to apply for a job at the BBC, a dream coming true, but when she got there she saw a lot of younger girls, educated and confident, and she felt bad about herself, sad and lonely, and she entered a cinema so she could cry without being looked at. There she met her future husband… firm, solid, “honest, kind, reliable, there’s a lot to be said for that” indeed there is. ❤︎❤︎❤︎
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