The Distant Hours. Kate Morton, Mantle, 576 pages, $26
There's something warm and comforting about Kate Morton's latest book, The Distant Hours. Like a fluffy blanket, it's something to curl up with, in front of an open log fire on a cold wintry night, keeping your imagination fully open to all possibilities.
Romance, intrigue, murder, love, betrayal, madness and history intertwine perfectly inside the decaying Milderhurst Castle, to which lead character Edie Burchill is drawn.
Her mother — Meredith — receives a letter 50 years after it is supposed to have been delivered. It jogs such memories that it makes the old woman burst into tears.
It is this letter that takes Edie on a journey of discovery — not only to discover what the letter is about but to discover who her mother was and is, and why she is the way she is today.
The letter leads Edie to a crumbling castle, which houses three elderly sisters: Juniper, Percy and Saffy Blythe. The latter two are twins.
All are unmarried and live together in the huge, ancient building.
The youngest sister, Juniper Blythe, is like a modern-day Miss Havisham — one of the lead characters in Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. Miss Havisham is due to marry Compeyson but receives a letter from him 20 minutes before their wedding, informing her that he has run off with her money.
She wears her wedding dress from that moment on and lets the wedding cake and feast rot on the table where it was originally laid out. All the clocks in the house are symbolically stopped at the time that she discovers her betrayal.
In Juniper's case, Tom Cavill — her love — never arrives to announce their engagement to her twin sisters Percy (Persephone) and Saffy (Seraphina).
Juniper can be found wandering around the castle, looking for him, asking when he is going to arrive, sometimes wearing her engagement dress, even though she is now an old lady. She plunges into madness at the thought that he betrayed her.
The crumbling Milderhurst Castle has always played witness to the romance, intrigue, murder, love, betrayal, madness and history happening within its stone walls.
Its ‘distant hours' are the secrets it keeps, having been witness to it all. "Ancient walls that sing the distant hours," is how Percy Blythe describes the phenomenon.
She continues, writing about her father, author Raymond Blythe: "He used to tell us stories when we were small, tales of the past. He said that if he didn't go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide. …
"He would come upon them, playing out in the dark, deserted corridors. Think of all the people who've lived within these walls, he'd say, who've whispered their secrets, laid their betrayals…"
Percy tells Edie that the stones are old but they don't tell their secrets: "Ours are old stones but they're still just stones."
Later, she takes back her comment, saying she does hear the stones telling their secrets: "The older I get, the louder they become".
At almost 700 pages, take a week off work, hire a log cabin on a snowy mountain and buy a supply of hot chocolate to enjoy this tome.
