Ladygrove

by John Burke

  His mother raised her voice. ‘While you are restoring the chancel to its rightful significance, I should like to dedicate a window to Matilda of Mockblane.’

  ‘Lady Brobury! What a wonderful surprise—wonderful gesture!’

  Lady Brobury sat up proudly, then winced and put a hand to her back.

  David said: ‘Mother, it’s not healthy for you to spend so much time in that damp old cell.’

  ‘Who says it’s damp?’

  ‘You’re getting pains in your back.’

  ‘The old trouble,’ Lady Brobury sighed.

  ‘Which one, mother?’ David asked it in apparent innocence but gave Judith a quick wink.

  Lady Brobury rounded on her daughter-in-law. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Once you’ve had children, you’ll find out. Never be quite right again.’

  ‘Really, mother!’

  ‘You don’t know the pain I suffer. I don’t complain, but if you knew.… And now that I’m all on my own—’

  ‘Mother.’ David spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘You are not all on your own. We’re here with you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have come back if I hadn’t made you. As bad as your father.’ She looked uncertainly, almost apprehensively, up the table as if expecting to find Sir Mortimer still seated in his usual place. The candelabra in the centre shimmered with reflections of its own branched lights, and of the lamp brackets on the walls. ‘Your father.’ They let her sit in silence for a moment. Then in a burst of fretfulness she went on: ‘When I think how he whisked us away from Ladygrove when you were on the way! So inconsiderate. That was what started all my trouble. By the time we came back the damage was done.’ She clapped a hand to her side and winced again, more loudly this time. ‘But I don’t ask for sympathy.’

  ‘No, mother.’

  ‘But if I hadn’t gone down on my knees and begged you to come back—’

  ‘You didn’t go down on your knees.’ David was trying to make an easygoing joke of it. ‘You know perfectly well that we came as soon as we heard.’

  Lady Brobury sulkily prodded at a slice of roast pork and then, as if recognizing it for the first time, pushed it away. She glared at Judith’s plate. ‘How you can eat the way you do, in your condition, I don’t know. You’ll pay for it. I know I shall pay for it tonight.’ She mumbled her way into self-communing resentment.

  Judith took the opportunity of asking Bronwen about old acquaintances in London—about the girl from the Cavern of Mystery who had had twins, about a contemporary newly returned from New York, and about her photography of some friends’ children.

  Lady Brobury endured this for a few minutes, then emerged from her rumination as testily as she had sunk into it. ‘You’ve come here to take photographs of my house, Mrs. Caspian. That is, my son’s house.’ It was an accusation rather than a question.

  ‘I hope to make a few studies here, yes.’

  ‘An unusual occupation for a married lady.’

  ‘My father was a pioneer in the field. I like to keep up the tradition.’

  ‘Tradition,’ Lady Brobury echoed sceptically.

  ‘We’re on our way to Caernarvon to arrange for the removal of his collection of plates. My sister wants to sell the house, and we can’t let the archives be broken up or inadequately housed.’

  ‘They’re so important?’

  ‘My father and I spent many years making photographic records of buildings. Especially those of historic interest, threatened with decay or demolition, so that posterity won’t be entirely deprived of all memory of our architectural heritage.’

  ‘So that’s what it is?’ Lady Brobury pounced on her son. ‘You want a record of this house before you start playing about with it. Altering it, altering everything. It won’t suit me. I know it won’t.’

  ‘I have no intention,’ said David, ‘of altering anything. Repairs where necessary, yes: alterations, no.’

  ‘Hm. You won’t want me under your feet. And I won’t want to watch it happen.’

  Before David could argue there was the faint, remote sound of a doorbell. After a brief pause the butler tapped at the dining room door and came in.

  ‘Your Ladyship, there’s one of the Hoskyn family asking for the parson. Says old Mrs. Hoskyn’s sinking fast and she’d like him to be there.’

  Mr. Goswell rose, his pink face lengthening into a sort of lugubrious complacency.

  ‘I was afraid she was not long for this world. I must give her what solace I can. Dear Lady Brobury, you’ll excuse me?’

  She insisted on escorting him personally to the door. When she returned, she was wiping a tear from her eye.

  ‘Such a good man. Such a tower of strength.’

  David said warily: ‘He still worries me. I don’t see our old low-church villagers taking to all his Popish practices.’

  ‘How dare you call them Popish?’

  ‘The way he’s treating the altar; the form of service, and the way he’s encouraging you to set up your own little cult in that damned maze—’

  ‘What do any of you understand? Any of you?’

  ‘In this part of the world, folk have always been more used to men like old Haines.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Lady Brobury very quietly.

  ‘For enough centuries, anyway.’

  ‘Haines. A man of no insight whatsoever. Your father did right to offer the living to a man of true sanctity.’

  ‘Because you asked him to?’

  ‘When did your father ever pay any attention to anything I wanted?’ said Lady Brobury inconsequentially. She had not sat down again since returning to the room. Somehow frail and at a loss, she blinked above the candelabra. ‘Mrs. Caspian. Judith. Let’s leave the gentlemen to their port.’

  When the ladies had gone, David pushed his chair back and stretched out his legs. ‘I’m sorry to have exposed you to such family bickering. Mother does ramble on, and I know I ought to let it all roll over my head—but after these last few weeks of it I’m afraid I’m getting awfully snappish. On Judith’s account as much as my own.’ He waited until the butler had set the decanter between them and gone out again. ‘But you were right: she must find it difficult to accept that my father’s no longer here, and we must make allowances and go on making them.’ Thoughtfully he twirled the stem of a glass between his fingers. ‘She was always a bit vague, and one never knew which way a mood would take her, but the shock of finding my father—’

  ‘She was the one who found him after the accident?’

  ‘I wasn’t here at the time, of course. I can only go on what she told me, and by the time I got here she was scarcely able to tell anything coherently. But the coroner—a doctor from up the valley, an old friend of the family—he smoothed things over for her as well as he could, and told me as much as he could. It was simple enough. Father was out riding the bounds of the estate when something must have frightened his horse. It was unlike Jenny to go wild—she’s mettlesome, but father always knew how to handle her—but something must have set her off. She seems to have shied off into the woods for some reason, and thrown him. He was dragged by the stirrup through the undergrowth and’—David poured from the decanter and drank deeply—‘rather badly knocked about by some tree stumps and brambles.’

  ‘It must have been terrible for your mother.’

  ‘She remembers so little. Or prefers not to. When he was late coming home, several of the staff were sent out. And mother thought she knew which direction he’d be coming back in, and went there. She can’t say how or why, and I don’t fancy pressing her.’

  ‘And the horse?’

  ‘She’s perfectly all right. A few scratches, but less than I’d have expected. I wanted to have her put down so that mother wouldn’t be upset by the memory of it all. But that was one thing she was firm about it: she couldn’t bear to blame the animal, and wouldn’t let me destroy it.’

  If Lady Brobury had managed to be so rational about that aspect of the sad business, thought Caspian, she ought soon
er or later to see other aspects in a reasonable light and so shake of her aimless resentments. For the sake of the younger Broburys it was to be hoped so.

  ‘The death,’ he ventured: ‘no significant parallel with the family curse, or anything like that?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’ David relaxed. ‘But of course, I was forgetting. You’ve always been interested in occult mysteries, haven’t you?’

  ‘In the effect of beliefs and obsessions on the human mind, yes.’

  ‘And how they become real?’

  ‘Real to those who so wish it.’

  ‘I don’t wish to believe any such gibberish,’ said David. ‘But you do get these family legends, and a lot of things get passed down and distorted, and I suppose we’re all proud of having a little bit of colourful nonsense attached to our name. It becomes like a nursery rhyme that makes little sense in itself but continues to haunt you. Some silly, repetitive little jingle.’

  He held his glass up to the light and contemplated the rich radiance of the wine.

  ‘A jingle?’ Caspian nudged him.

  Self-consciously David recited:

  ‘Strife shall be ’twixt man and wife

  Till yielded back there be the life

  Of thy house’s first-born son.’

  ‘Meaning the house of Brobury in the family sense,’ said Caspian, ‘rather than the actual building?’

  ‘That’s something we’re not sure of. If you allow for the possibility of the original having been in Latin, and then being twisted into English doggerel over the years, it’s hard to be sure of any real interpretation.’

  ‘But things have happened—things to illustrate it?’

  ‘Well.…’ David looked momentarily uneasy. ‘Yes and no. Some odd coincidences, or…oh, I don’t know, I can’t help thinking some bits of family history have been misread in order to fit the curse from a long way back.’

  ‘How far back?’

  David drank, and began a brisk, matter-of-fact narrative as if to cancel out that uncharacteristic flutter of unease.

  * * * *

  The tradition of the Brobury curse dated from the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, but both family and site were of much older lineage. The first Brobury had come to England with William the Conqueror and, like many a knight, granted land and riches in return for supporting the Norman invasion; he had built himself a small castle above the bend of the river, incorporating a well-appointed chapel. During a succession of baronial squabbles, the castle and its defences had been slighted, and ultimately demolished by royal decree; but the chapel survived as the village church.

  To this church came a young anchoress.

  In the Middle Ages many a parish acquired its resident holy man or woman. A cell would be built into the outer wall of church or chapel, with a squint through which the recluse could devoutly follow the Mass without being observed by any other member of the congregation. In return for the anchorite’s unceasing prayers, food and drink and gifts were laid outside the cell, usually in such quantities that the priest or his bishop would acquire a large share as well as basking in the prestige of having their house of worship enhanced by the presence of such a holy hermit. The church of Mockblane in the Brobury demesne was blessed with the care of a young woman called to her vocation at the age of sixteen, her name coming down through later generations as Matilda of Mockblane. There were no records of miracles, little about Matilda’s life or the date of her death, and no suggestion of later beatification.

  ‘But my mother,’ said David dourly, ‘has chosen to start up a little local cult of her own. Whether she started it before my father died or afterwards—or before Goswell came or after—I don’t know. But that Goswell chap certainly connives at it.’

  It must have been shortly after the anchoress’s death that a new church was built on the other side of the valley, closer to the village. The old chapel and its hallowed cell were offered by the Broburys; to a strict sisterhood of Carmelites who maintained a small priory on the slope and declared themselves spiritual guardians of the memory of Matilda. There they remained until driven out by Henry VIII’s purge of religious houses. The property was returned to the Broburys, who had diplomatically opted to edge away from the old faith and support Henry in his dispute with Rome. The nuns were cursorily evicted, and reputedly the Brobury of the time behaved with especial callousness to the Mother Superior of the Order. It was she who, driven mockingly out into the turmoil of a world from which she had so long been secluded, was said to have laid the curse upon the family.

  ‘“Offered back”,’ mused Caspian. ‘Offered back in what sense, and to whom?’

  ‘That’s another of the puzzles. Earlier members of the family thought that if they could solve that, they’d be able to avert the consequences of the malediction. In recent times we’ve paid little attention.’

  ‘And hoped it would pay no attention to you, either?’

  David laughed wryly. ‘If one refuses to see a curse working in everyday incidents or misfortunes, does it in fact work?’

  ‘You’ll have to quote a few examples before I’d risk an opinion on that.’

  ‘Well, looked at in a certain light…if one’s in a gullible frame of mind…there have been some events uncomfortably close to the prophecy. I mean, if you’re determined to see such a closeness.…’

  The first Brobury son to be born in the Tudor house built on the convent foundations married young and soon found his marriage turning sour. After bearing him a son, his wife had the child secretly christened as a Catholic and then, when power came into the hands of Bloody Mary, contrived to have her husband handed over as a heretic and burnt at the stake. Was this the offering demanded by the curse? Or could the dedication of the son to the Church of Rome be taken as that offering back? But that same son managed in Queen Elizabeth’s time to fall foul of his wife, who with her lover engineered his being sent to the block for treason. For a while the lands were confiscated by the Crown; and during that time the surviving children and their children, living elsewhere, were untroubled.

  Later the property was restored to the penitent, Protestant Broburys. The next two cases of firstborn children delivered on the premises were of daughters, unaffected by the malediction. One of the girls, of devout turn of mind, also secretly returned to the Catholic faith and vowed herself to the life of a recluse, half hoping that such voluntary dedication might lift the cloud from the family. But the next time a son was born into the household the pattern had a grim familiarity: happy marriage turning to disaster, crazed wife ruining her husband and bringing about his early death.

  At last the family quit Ladygrove Manor and left it in the hands of a bailiff, building for themselves a Queen Anne mansion on the farthest extremity of their estate. Here they suffered no more tragedies. Until, early in this present century, the house was gutted by fire and, newly married and unable to afford rebuilding, Sir Mortimer’s father moved back into the old home. He had not been born at Ladygrove himself— ‘And so,’ observed David Brobnry, ‘seems to have been immune. But my father was born here.’

  Caspian framed a dozen questions, each stumbling more provocatively over the last. He could not tell whether David’s coolly dismissive telling of the history was genuine or whether it hid some unadmitted apprehension. He chose his words with care. ‘“Strife ’twixt man and wife”,’ he quoted. ‘Was there a lot of disagreement between your father and mother?’

  ‘Not that I remember. The usual domestic squabbles, I suppose—and mother did tend to harp on the fact that she was rushed away just before I was born—but on the whole I think they got on amicably enough. There were no great upheavals: certainly not when I was around.’

  ‘And your own child is going to be born here?’

  David hesitated. ‘There’s no good reason why not, but.…’

  ‘You see no reason why not,’ Caspian probed.

  ‘I wasn’t born here, so my wife won’t turn on me.’

 
‘So you do to some extent believe in the family curse.’

  ‘I only meant that if there were such a thing, and it sticks to its pattern, I have nothing to fear.’

  ‘And what about your son, in later life? If the child should be a son, that is.’

  David’s eyes were evasive. ‘Now you sound like Judith.’

  ‘Judith doesn’t like the idea?’

  ‘You know how women get at this stage. Or so I’m told. This is our first time. But they do indulge in all kinds of fancies, don’t they?’

  ‘Some fancies deserve to be humoured.’

  ‘In fact, I’ve more or less promised to take her away and look after her in London. I still have a lot of business to settle in town, and could be there with her. Though I’d still prefer an heir born under this roof.’

  ‘If she will feel more confident in London—‘

  ‘But why shouldn’t she feel confident here? It’s our home.’

  ‘Yours,’ said Caspian gently. ‘Not yet hers. You must be patient.’

  David gave a rueful nod. ‘Yes, yes, I’m afraid you’re right. The trouble is, I’ve had to deal with so many things at once. Taking over the estate and learning the ropes, and at the same time winding up the practice in London—and then there’s my mother, and Judith in the state she is.’

  ‘Which is the most important?’

  ‘Judith.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘It’s good to talk to you, Alex.’

  ‘I only state the obvious.’

  ‘When one gets tired and confused, the obvious often gets lost.’

  They sat for a moment in companionable silence. Then Caspian said: ‘You haven’t been putting ideas into Judith’s head? I mean, worrying her with too many jokes about the family curse?’

  ‘She’d never take such stuff seriously.’

  ‘She may be more susceptible than you think. People can be coaxed, or can coax themselves once given the initial tug, into believing many a strange fancy to be real.’

  ‘These old wives’ tales couldn’t be real.’

  ‘You’re not absolutely convinced of that, are you? Generations of your family have believed, or half-believed. Such a half-willing body of people can, shall we say, half-will a thing into existence. A state of mind can create an illness—can virtually create a physical entity.’