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thought better of expressing. ‘The older sisters will be too busy looking after her today to be bothered by disturbances, but they were loath to turn you away. The castle needs its visitors, they said. Funny old things – I’m quite surprised, to be honest, they’re ordinarily not keen on guests. I suppose it gets lonely though, just the three of them rattling around inside. They suggested tomorrow instead, mid-morning?’
    A flutter of anxiety in my chest. I hadn’t planned to stay, and yet the thought that I might leave without seeing inside the castle brought with it a profound and sudden surge of desolation. Disappointment darkened inside me.
    ‘We’ve had a cancellation so there’s a room free if you’d like it?’ said Mrs Bird. ‘Dinner’s included.’
    I had work to catch up on over the weekend, Herbert needed his car to get to Windsor the following afternoon, and I’m not the sort of person who decides on a whim to stay for a night in a strange place.
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

 
Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst

    While Mrs Bird started on the paperwork, transferring details from my business card, I disengaged myself with a mumble of polite noises and drifted over to peek through the open back door. A courtyard had been formed by the farmhouse wall and those of other farm buildings: a barn, a dovecote, and a third construction with a conical roof that I would later learn to call an oast house. A round pool meditated at the centre and the pair of fat geese had launched themselves across the sun-warmed surface, floating regally now as ripples chased one another towards the flagstone edges. Beyond, a peacock inspected the edge of clipped lawn separating the tended courtyard from a meadow of wild flowers that tumbled towards distant parkland. The whole sunlit garden, framed as it was by the shadowed doorway in which I stood, was like a snapshot of a long-ago spring day, come back somehow to life.
    ‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Bird, behind me suddenly, though I hadn’t noticed her approach. ‘Have you ever heard of Oliver Sykes?’
    I indicated that I hadn’t and she nodded, only too happy to enlighten me: ‘He was an architect, quite well known in his time. Terribly eccentric. He had his own place in Sussex, Pembroke Farm, but he did some work at the castle in the early 1900s, soon after Raymond Blythe married for the first time and brought his wife here from London. It was one of the last jobs Sykes worked on before he disappeared, off on his own version of the Grand Tour. He supervised the creation of a larger version of our circular pool, and did some tremendous work on the moat around the castle: turned it into a rather grand bathing ring for Mrs Blythe. She was a terrific swimmer, they say, very athletic. They used to put . . .’ She glued a finger to her cheek and wrinkled her forehead. ‘A chemical – oh dear now, what was it?’ She removed the finger and raised her voice. ‘Bird?’
    ‘Copper sulphate,’ came a disembodied male voice.
    I glanced again at the canary, fossicking for seed in his cage, then the picture-hung walls.
    ‘Yes, yes, of course it was,’ Mrs Bird continued, unfazed, ‘copper sulphate to keep it azure blue.’ A sigh. ‘That was a long time ago now though. Sadly, Sykes’s moat was filled in decades ago, and his grand circular pool belongs only to the geese. Full of dirt and duck mess.’ She handed me a heavy brass key and patted my fingers closed around it. ‘We’ll walk up to the castle tomorrow. The forecast is clear and there’s a beautiful view from the second bridge. Shall we meet here at ten?’
    ‘You’ve an appointment with the vicar tomorrow morning, dear.’ That patient, wood-panelled voice drifted towards us again, however this time I pinpointed its source. A small door, barely visible, hidden in the wall behind the reception counter.
    Mrs Bird pursed her lips and seemed to consider this mysterious amendment before