by John Burke
‘I was born there,’ he confided. ‘But they didn’t get me. All that offering back, whatever it might be—they didn’t manage it. You hear some mad things in this world, isn’t it so?’ He belched. ‘But somehow I was kept away. For all the good it’s ever done me.’ His face twitched into what might have been puzzlement or a deep discontent. But the gleam was soon back and he was staring brazenly yet flatteringly at Judith’s bosom swelling from the olive green satin of her bodice. ‘Don’t often find myself in town nowadays. Really must treat myself to a stroll. Don’t wait up for me—I’m old enough to take care of myself.’
When he set off next morning, bleary and yellow-cheeked, on his homeward journey, he lectured Judith once more. ‘Stay here, my gel. Let’s have a Brobury born safely in London. Fool the old hag once again, hah?’
Judith asked David what his father had meant. David shrugged it off. It was a Brobury failing to grow wild and irrational in late middle age and talk rubbish. She asked if he, too, would talk rubbish at such an age, and he said he would talk rubbish here and now—sentimental rubbish—and he put his lips to her throat and kissed with mounting eagerness down the breast his father had looked at so appreciatively the previous evening.
She loved him, and felt safe.
Until, six months later, they received the telegram announcing Mortimer’s death in a riding accident on his own estate.
Now the estate was theirs.
David and Judith had overnight become Sir David and Lady Brobury. Of course they must attend to the funeral and of course David must meet the family solicitors and discuss the administration of his inheritance.
‘But we don’t have to leave London?’ begged Judith.
‘It’s ours now, all of it. Our home.’
‘But this is our home, here.’
‘It’s not Ladygrove. That’s the real Brobury home.’
‘Not until after the baby’s born.’
‘Well.…’
She insisted. He agreed. They would move into Ladygrove, so much more convenient for the threads he must now unravel and then weave into his own approved pattern. But she should have the baby in London. If that was how she wished it, that was how it should be.
Ladygrove Manor was empty without Sir Mortimer. It needed replenishing, restoring to life. It needed a new generation of Broburys.
Judith apprehensively sought the entrance to the maze, to persuade herself that the dream had died. But the hand thrust her back even more imperiously than before. She took David with her, and he demonstrated how easy it was to walk into the labyrinth and out again—‘There’s nothing in there, nothing at all, nothing to be scared of.’ But when he took her hand and tried to take her in with him, the pressure forcing her back was so stern and savage that she crumpled to the ground and had to be half-carried across the glade and through the trees.
She had been rejected. Hurled out. Yet deep down she was sure that the hand which thrust her back would one day close on her, claim her, draw her in and destroy her.
‘Why do I have to be here?’ she sobbed at David, who kissed her and sat with her and walked with her and said he understood—which grievously she knew he didn’t—and murmured those coaxing little phrases to which he knew she was most susceptible. For the first time ever she wanted to push him away and clutch herself to herself, clutch her swollen body and feel a fretful little kick against her hand.
‘What does this place want me for?’
Sir Mortimer had told her that she must not come back, not until her child was born. But Sir Mortimer was no longer master of the house and no longer able to enforce his wishes.
CHAPTER TWO
Doctor Caspian and his wife came down through Mockblane in the middle of a late August afternoon. The sun was still high as the carriage jolted over the humped stone bridge, but brightness on the western bank was already being sucked away over the river and up the far slope. Evening would settle early on this bank and on Ladygrove Manor.
The horses slowed on the climb to the entrance gates. Bronwen Caspian turned to watch the play of light and wispy shadow on the church tower and on thatched and red-tiled roofs of the village. Glints of sunshine sparkled in the river like fish skimming over and through the ripples.
David Brobury said: ‘I’m still not accustomed to being home. Home for good, I mean.’
‘You won’t find it dull after London?’
‘Dull? At school and university I couldn’t wait for the vacations. And when I’d set up practice in town, I never lost the opportunity of a weekend, or any weeks I could contrive. Father used to badger his friends to have their houses restored or totally rebuilt so that I could come and work for a while in the neighbourhood.’
They drove between red-brick gateposts towards the timbered house, sprouting red-brick Tudor chimneys too florid and heavy for the roofs above which they soared.
‘And. now you’ll set about refashioning your own house?’
‘Certainly not. I’ve always loved every corner of it, just as it is.’
He was in his early thirties but, thought Bronwen affectionately, at tunes showed all the lack of reserve of an endearing, exuberant little boy. He was so eager for them to see his domain through his own doting eyes.
‘You get a fine perspective of the east wing from here. Remarkable example of over-sailing. Stroke of genius. And that lattice window up there under the eaves—my favourite attic. I used to spend hours moaning and scratching up there, trying to frighten my sister into thinking I was the resident ghost.’
‘You have a ghost?’
‘Naturally. A very conventional lot, the Broburys.’
‘And your sister was duly frightened?’
‘Oh, not Margaret. She was always too matter-of-fact to be frightened of anything.’
Caspian looked up in leisurely appreciation as the house loomed over them.
The two men had known each other some six or seven years. When Caspian was at the height of his stage fame as the illusionist and prestidigitator Count Caspar, David had been the architect responsible for alterations to the Cavern of Mystery before the opening of the 1886 season; and after Caspian and Bronwen married, it was David who renovated the house they had taken in Chelsea. Now it was his turn to offer a commission: the Caspians, on their way to visit Bronwen’s old home in Wales, must break their journey in Herefordshire so that Bronwen could take architectural photographs of Ladygrove Manor.
The carriage wheels rustled to a halt on the gravel before the house. The sound brought a young woman out on the step.
Judith Brobury held out her arms in welcome. She and her husband were alike in their impulsive gestures, sketching in large parts of their conversation with their hands, sometimes semaphoring so vigorously that one wondered if they might not ultimately strike one another in their animation.
‘Bronwen, my dear. Alexander.’
Her stomach, heavy with child, was proudly thrust out as if to balance the bustle beneath her widely draped, swaying, brown and cream cashmere skirt. The baby was surely due within a few weeks at most but the burden did not appear to depress her: five or six years younger than David, she had a fine sparkle in her cheeks and hazel eyes, and her deep brown hair had lost none of its rosewood lustre.
Her expressive right hand fell and found a resting place on the head of a golden retriever, which had come out to stand beside her.
‘You ought not to rush out-of-doors like that, Judith.’
The thin but penetrating voice came from darkness within the doorway. David exchanged a little grimace of amusement with his wife, then led his visitors forward.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever met my mother.’
‘And do keep that dog away from your guests. It has become very treacherous lately.’
The widowed Lady Brobury was standing in the middle of the hall. At first it was difficult, coming in from the afternoon light, to make out her features. Then as Bronwen’s eyes adjusted to the change, she saw how richly that inner darkness
glowed in chestnut wall panels and in a great oak table polished to glossy blackness. Lady Brobury’s face emerged pale and thin-lipped, floating in space, with a strand of grey hair that seemed to slice off her forehead only a few inches above the eyebrows. Slowly she took on substance: clad in mourning, with a black bonnet trimmed with crape, she was an angular wraith reluctant to step out of the obscurity.
They shook hands. Her touch was brief and cold, the fingers snatching away in a few seconds.
‘David, do make Judith go back to the chaise-longue. In my day no young woman in that condition would have been allowed out into the cold air.’
‘It’s hardly cold, mother.’
‘Cold enough.’
Lady Brobury led the way towards a door opening out of the hall and was about to lead the way through; then stopped and turned.
‘I’m sorry. Of course, this is your house now.’
‘Mother, really.…’
But the Dowager Lady Brobury stood rigid at one side while her daughter-in-law preceded her into the drawing room. David took his mother’s arm and at the same time winked and waved Bronwen forward.
It was an airy, welcoming room, which came to life as they entered, as if it had been waiting for a long time for a new generation to revitalize it. Tall windows framed a vista of curving valley, lost round a distant out-thrust of green cliff. A line of elms masked the village save for the gleam of the weathervane, still catching the sunlight.
‘Judith and I have already taken tea. We waited as long as we could, but you were so late. But if you’d care for tea…or do you want to go to your room first…? David, do look after your guests.’
Lady Brobury was, Bronwen estimated, only in her early sixties; but she affected a painful shuffle, her shoulders slumping under the weight of an intolerable burden—if not of years, then of some indescribable injustice—and when she spoke, a plaintive little whine was left echoing on the air.
Parched after the train journey and the drive over dusty miles from the railway station, Bronwen admitted that she would welcome a cup of tea. As David rang, tugging the long bell-pull by the fireplace his mother turned back towards the door.
‘I must be getting back to my little house, then.’
‘Mother you’ll stay and have another cup?’
‘I can see I’ll only be in the way.’
David went with her to the front entrance. Bronwen observed that when she was halfway down the arc of the drive and in full sight of the windows, she had acquired a limp.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Judith.
Caspian stood looking out, the jut of his trim beard silhouetted against the far hillside. ‘We’re not putting her out in any way?’ And as David returned, he added: ‘It must be difficult for her to grasp that your father’s no longer here.’
‘That’s what we tell ourselves when she grows particularly trying. There are times, though.…’
He checked himself as his wife shook her head at him.
‘But I do wish,’ Judith admitted, ‘that she wouldn’t put on such a show of being banished to the dower house.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘We didn’t want to push her out. She could have had her old bedroom here, her dressing room, her own little drawing room just as before. But she insisted on moving out.’
‘And letting us know how she suffers,’ said David.
His hand touched Judith’s shoulder. She smiled up at him, and they laughed the absurd irritation of it away.
A maid arrived with a silver tray and silver teapot. Conversation changed to the Caspians’ journey and what lay before them in Caernarvon. ‘Another case of family homes and old relics,’ said Bronwen, and David said,
‘Are you calling my mother an old relic?’ and they all began to talk at once, and it was like the convivial hours they had so often spent together in London.
The bedroom on the southeast corner of the house overlooked a long stretch of undulating parkland ending in thick beech woods. From this height a few village rooftops and a corner of the church were visible. Blobs like grey cotton wool further down the valley might be boulders or browsing sheep. Below the window a busy little stream cut its way down the slope, under the terrace, and disappeared into a plantation beyond which lay the slower river.
Before dinner, Judith suggested a stroll in the garden.
‘Take a shawl,’ David warned, ‘in case mother sees you and comes out predicting doom for the Brobury heir.’
‘Come on, Pippin.’ The retriever fell in beside Judith and padded beside her across the grass. Bronwen matched her pace to theirs.
Light was fading now from the tip of the eastern ridge. Judith looked up it and suddenly said: ‘London’s over that way, isn’t it?’
‘Roughly. A long way over.’
Judith nodded and let out a little sigh.
‘Aren’t you happy here?’ asked Bronwen quietly.
‘I…oh, I haven’t settled yet, that’s all.’
‘When the baby comes—’
‘Yes.’ Judith snatched at the idea. ‘It’ll all feel so much better when the baby comes.’
Behind them David Brobury was explaining something to Caspian, and behind the two men Bronwen was conscious of shrouded hills, rising mountains, and then the lonely expanses of Wales to be crossed before she and her husband reached the coast and Caernarvon. Her homeland, Wales: in which, a married woman now knowing so many new worlds, she was afraid of finding herself a stranger. She wondered if David, in spite of his devotion to Ladygrove, felt altogether at home after having for so long made his home elsewhere. And if he would succeed in making Judith feel at home.
They went deeper into shadow. Oak and ash trees closed in about them. Leaves were uncannily still and there was not the faintest pipe of birdsong. Only the stream chattered a tune over its stony bed. A few yards into the unbreathing gloom and Bronwen came to one end of a narrow wooden bridge. Outlines at the other end were indistinct, but there seemed to be a tidily squared-up hedge between saplings and a tangle of bushes.
‘We’d better not go any further this evening.’
Not until Judith spoke did Bronwen realize that she had lagged behind and come to a stop on the edge of the grove.
‘Is there some sort of formal garden in there?’
‘A maze,’ said Judith stiffly.
‘Oh, we must explore that tomorrow.’
‘lf you can.’
‘It’s overgrown?’
‘No. At least, I don’t suppose it is. I…I can never get into it:’
‘You lose your way?’
‘I can’t even cross the bridge.’ Judith sounded tense and unhappy. ‘It was all right when we used to visit, but then something happened. And now that we’ve come to live here.…’ She drew the shawl more tightly about her and turned to meet David and Caspian as they came from the far side of the lawn.
‘Mother doesn’t have that trouble, anyway.’ David’s arm pressed the shawl even more closely over her shoulders. ‘There’s a fragment of an old chapel in the heart of the maze.’ he explained to Caspian. ‘Long ago it was an anchoress’s cell, and then sometime in the eighteenth century the maze was built round it—a bit of fashionable landscaping. Mother sits in there by the hour.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Goodness knows. Perhaps trying to lift the family curse.’
Caspian raised a saturnine eyebrow. ‘You have one, then?’
‘I told you, the Broburys have all the conventional things.’
‘Obviously, none of them worry you.’
A slight cloud darkened David’s brow. ‘Judith is starting to worry a little,’ he said with a quickly suppressed hint of asperity. His hand squeezed her shoulder fondly. ‘It’s ridiculous, of course.’
The dog edged in beside Judith’s skirt. From the distance came the clopping of hoofs, the note changing as they struck the gravel within the gateway.
‘That must be the vicar.’ David released Judith and started up the slope. ‘I’d better collect mother from the
lodge and bring her in to dinner.’
CHAPTER THREE
The Vicar was a tall young man with a smooth yet troubled face. It was difficult to conceive that such a girlish complexion ever needed shaving; but where other men might have had shadows of beard on cheeks and chin, he had odd little puckerings under his eyes, dark gashes tugging the corners of his mouth down, and he looked constantly from side to side as if fearing some unprovoked attack. He wore a dark coat, which, with its concealed buttons, had more the appearance of a robe, and his hair had been cut in such a way as to suggest a tonsure. Caspian had noticed that after saying grace the Reverend Frederick Goswell had swiftly crossed himself. Such a mannered high churchman, fashionable as he might have been in London or Oxford, was out-of-place in a rural community like that of Mockblane. One wondered what the villagers made of him.
‘And a priest-hole, naturally,’ David was saying. ‘Some say the ghost is the tormented spirit of a priest who died of starvation before it was safe to release him.’
‘And Charles the Second,’ said Bronwen, ‘doubtless hid in one of your oak trees?’
‘We’re a bit too far west for that.’
‘And the family curse?’ Caspian prompted.,
Lady Brobury snapped unexpectedly: ‘David wasn’t born in this house. What could he know about it?’
‘I believe,’ said Mr. Goswell, ‘we should think rather of family blessings than of curses.’
Lady Brobury melted at once and smiled at him. She still wore black, but for the evening had exchanged her bonnet for a lace cap with a long veil pulled back from her gaunt face. It bore some resemblance to a mantilla, and when she looked yearningly across the table she might well have been beseeching an audience with Mr. Goswell.
‘Such as the blessings,’ he went on, ‘which our benefactress has bestowed on this parish.’
‘I shall continue to do what I can—with my limited means.’
David frowned at his plate.