Ladygrove

by John Burke

  After the Lord’s Prayer had died away into the silence, he opened his breviary and lifted the lantern so that he could read out the first lines he set eyes on.

  The silence was chill and unreal. The servants had been told to stay below stairs unless sent for, during what Lady Brobury had referred to as ‘a private discussion’, and might, in that stillness, be thought all to have fled away into the night.

  Mr. Goswell placed himself experimentally before the panel, which opened into the priest’s hole.

  ‘I exorcise thee, most unclean spirit, incursion of the enemy, every spectre, every legion.…’

  After a few minutes he began to mount the stairs, intoning his incarnations over and over again until the syllables became a sombre music without meaning or change of stress.

  ‘Hear, therefore; and fear…procurer of death, destroyer of life.…’

  At one stage he stopped on the landing, looking down, and in his own voice said beseechingly: ‘Will you not rest? Seek eternal rest.’

  Judith could have sworn that she heard the breath of a sigh. Lady Brobury, motionless, appeared to have heard nothing. She in her mourning and the vicar in his long dark habit were like two pious black crows, faintly mirrored in the panelling against the sway of the lantern’s light.

  Something as flimsy as a cobweb brushed against Judith’s shoulder but then was gone, unable to get a purchase.

  Goswell opened the door and the three of them paced out into the cold of the garden. Faint starshine silvered the treetops. As they approached the grove, Goswell was making strange, convoluted motions with the hand holding the breviary. He stopped at the end of the still unrepaired footbridge; and his words now lost all meaning. It took Judith a moment or two to realize that he was no longer speaking English. To what would have been the dismay of his usual congregation, he was intoning the exorcism in Latin.

  ‘…proditor gentium, incitator invidiae, origoa varitiae, causa discordiae, excitator dolorum.…’ He sang on, insistently and emphatically repeating, ‘causa discordiae, causa discordiae’.

  Lady Brobury’s half-veiled face swam against the flicker of leaves. From her trance she was straining to add a power of her own to that of the vicar. In the eerie light she seemed incongruously to be directing him, setting the pace for every word and gesture.

  ‘Adiuro te,’ he exhorted the unanswering shadows, ‘cum metu et exercitu furoris tui festínus discedas.…’

  Thrice they walked up and down the bank, parallel with the shrouded grove, then made a long circuit of the garden and returned to the house, Judith wondered what the villagers would make of it if any of them chanced to glimpse the little procession, or one of the servants disobeyed orders and peered out—or what story some skulking poacher might take home to Mockblane.

  Back indoors, Goswell knelt and prayed. Then he stood up, straining to his full height, and unleashed one final storm of words.

  Judith heard a sound that was no sound save in her own head. Not true—before God, not true. She was sure someone had held out a hand to her, but when she turned there was nobody there. Nobody, nothing. Nothing save for a strange distortion of light and shade in the panelling behind Goswell. As he raised the lantern yet higher, the shapes twisted in on one another. For the briefest of instants Judith could believe that she saw the dissolving outline of a woman’s face, a despairing, imploring face pinched in by a coif, which tightened until the features deliquesced into the restful glow of the woodwork. Arms seemed to be skeletally spread wide in a last appeal. But they could only have been the reflections of Mr. Goswell’s arms, stretched wide as his voice rose and then fell.

  He was drained, exhausted by a more than physical exhaustion. Lady Brobury turned the lamps up and led the way into the drawing room. It was silent and bleakly empty, as if someone had gone out and drawn the air away through the open door: someone who would not be coming back.

  Lady Brobury tugged the bell-pull. Mr. Goswell had come there fasting, and after the ordeal admitted that he would welcome a slice of game pie and a glass of claret.

  ‘I think,’ he ventured, ‘we have succeeded. It has departed.’

  Lady Brobury’s head was on one side, listening.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There, now.’ She beamed at Judith. ‘Now you’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

  * * * *

  Next morning Judith made her way apprehensively down the drive and out of the gates. At the beginning of the path she hesitated. There was no sound, no whisper of movement along the edge of the grove.

  And no bird sang.

  She set out along the path. Nothing touched her or warned her back as she drew closer to the glade.

  At the entrance to the maze she stopped and took a deep breath. Then she stepped one step forward. And another. Without the slightest hindrance she walked to the fanged ruin at the centre of the maze.

  PART TWO

  THE PREY

  CHAPTER SIX

  Around the next corner she would meet him. She was sure of it. They had become aware of each other in a chime of telepathy like a single resonating bell, so high-pitched that it had to insinuate itself into the brain on a level above and beyond hearing. Even in the years before he came into her life she, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, had experienced moments of such precognition when she had known a few seconds before a friend appeared just who that friend would be, preparing a greeting before they met face to face. But it was infinitely more delightful when the encounter was a lovers’ meeting.

  Bronwen quickened her pace.

  Lurching in towards the kerb, a farmer cracked his whip above his horse. The gig slid out again and across the road. It would reach the corner at a speed and at an angle that displayed the driver’s conceit rather than his skill.

  At the same moment Bronwen, silently greeting her husband as he neared the corner where they would meet, glimpsed through a multitude of conflicting impressions a dray that had crossed his vision. Returning empty from a delivery, it was rattling erratically over the cobbles in the middle of the road and jolting the driver from side to side.

  Bronwen and Caspian were, in sudden fearful unison, in two places at once. They saw simultaneously the collision there must be. Saw the angle at which gig and dray would converge; saw that the farmer must be thrown off and down, under the iron-hooped wheel of the dray.

  Saw that the farmer would die.

  ‘No!’

  Caspian blurred in Bronwen’s consciousness. He was leaping sideways, clutching, hauling himself up and grabbing the drayman’s arm. She felt his hand as if it were her own, getting a grip on the reins. Hoofs skidded on the cobbles; the dray slithered sideways.

  The drayman was shouting.

  Round the corner came the gig. The farmer swore as he missed the end of the dray, aslant against the pavement, by inches. But he did not reduce his pace: cursing, he thrashed his horse on out of sight.

  Bronwen’s concentration on Caspian’s tussle around the corner had driven her into collisions of her own: one with an elderly lady who leaned on her umbrella to regain her balance, and one with a lolloping youth who cannoned into her and scraped his knuckles against the nearest wall. She hastened round the corner to rescue her husband from a torrent of wild Welsh malediction. Her own contribution rose keening in a Cymric hwyl into the face of the awe-struck drayman, who knew his match when he met it.

  ‘He’ll never understand,’ she said as they made their escape, ‘how lucky he is not to be seriously injured. Or to have a horse with a broken leg.’

  ‘Nor will the other one know that by now he ought to be dead.’

  She took his arm and they walked with due circumspection back to the house.

  There was not a great deal left to be done. Most of the remaining furniture had been put into a local sale, save for items which Bronwen’s sisters wished to keep or offer to some of the Powys cousins. Several of these paraded through the house on the pretext that they ‘Just wanted to see, like, if there’s any littl
e thing I’d like for a souvenir’, but really to inspect Dr. Alexander Caspian. He was foreign in their eyes, fuelling a broth of respect and amusement, which at times incensed Bronwen and at others warmed her to thankfulness. ‘Fancy you marryin’ our Bron, then!’ She was so glad that he had indeed fancied marrying her. A marriage of true minds—and of bodies with a taste for truth. Dismantling the dark-room in which she and her father had worked so assiduously, labelling the scores and scores of boxes preserving his finest plates, she felt a wistfulness for days when the two of them had been here together; but it was an undemanding, unregretful nostalgia, incapable of competing with the sheer reality of her husband’s presence.

  The last photographic task carried out in this house had been the developing and printing of the Ladygrove subjects. On the whole they were satisfactory, though her attempt to capture the mural and inscription turned out as obscure as she had expected.

  Caspian riffled through the prints. ‘I wonder if we ought to post them to David instead of presenting ourselves there on the way back.’

  ‘But they’re expecting us.’

  ‘I had the impression that Lady Brobury the elder would be well content never to see us again.’

  ‘Whereas Lady Brobury the younger,’ retorted Bronwen, ‘pleaded with me to come back.’

  Caspian plucked meditatively at his beard. ‘You’re worried about her, aren’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t you? Don’t deny it. You felt those weird emanations just as strongly as I did.’

  ‘We went there so that you might take photographs,’ he reminded her; ‘not to offer advice on psychic matters. Unless invited, it is not our policy to intervene. That is still our policy, isn’t it?’

  ‘We weren’t invited to intervene in that near-accident half an hour ago. We saved one man from death and another from probable injury—without being asked.’

  ‘That was an emergency. An alarm signal. Involuntary reaction.’

  ‘David and Judith are our friends. Aren’t we allowed to act voluntarily, against a long-drawn-out danger?’

  ‘What danger?’

  ‘I feel—’

  ‘I feel.’ he said, ‘that you should abandon your packing programme and come out with me this afternoon. You’ve been spending too much time stirring up the dust and gossiping with your relatives.’

  ‘You make it sound as if they were both the same thing.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’

  In the early afternoon they crossed the straits to the isle of Anglesey and looked back on the grey Palisade of Caernarvon’s castle wall. its battlemented towers stern and steady against the sky, their reflection unsteady and shivering in the water. Rain clouds threatened from the west, rolling in from the ocean and darkening the island. But they broke on neither coast nor town: thickening and sinking, they blanketed the tops of the mainland mountains.

  Caspian and Bronwen took a winding road making a leisurely, unpredictable way towards the heart of the island. After they had been walking for twenty minutes a dolmen on a hummock, some distance off the road, offered an obvious vantage point. They climbed a stile and followed a path, which reached the foot of the hummock and then reverently circled it. As Caspian gave Bronwen his hand and helped her up the slope, wind moaned faintly through the gaps below the capstone. They stood by the ancient megalith and looked down on a small dell and undulating pasture beyond.

  Jagged slivers of stone stuck out from the sides of the dell, blunted by earth and grass. Wind whipped the top of the dell, but down there the blades of grass were still. Bronwen poised herself and ran down. The slope was steeper than she had thought, and reaching the bottom she almost sprawled over a protruding stone slab that might once have been the footing for some Celtic hut, or the end of a burial chamber set beneath the dolmen.

  Caspian shuffled down more cautiously.

  The place was desolate; but they were out of the wind, private, secluded.

  He began, at first playfully and then with mounting desire, to fondle her. He was on one side of the hollow, she the other, but awareness of his body and his caressing hands and tongue grew stronger against her and within her. She let herself sink to the ground while he stood erect, smiling his love into her eyes. When he thrust into her they were as closely entwined as if they had been at home, naked, on a warm bed.

  I love you.

  They played every variation of love that their telepathic powers could devise; touching and seeking, achieving a peak of ecstasy without physical consummation.

  Father me a child.

  He swelled within her and she sought to draw him in deeper. But of course there would be no child. Not yet, though she knew intuitively in every pulse of her being that this was the day of the month when she was most likely to conceive. On such days it was wiser to play the game of remote, mental, teasing love.

  For the first time Bronwen felt a spasm of resentment against the man around whose passion she was so passionately wrapped. Judith Brobury was close to her time, ready to bring forth a child. A man and a woman, loving like this, ought to see the physical fruits of such a union.…

  There will come a time.

  Caspian’s promise, torn from the turmoil of his mind, was true…yet not enough.

  Bronwen, impaled by a final frenzy close to anger, twisted a few feet along the ground, and came to rest against the stone slab.

  At once they both went cold. Her breath was drawn out of her. And Caspian withdrew from her body in swift pain, leaving her empty and with cold searching into her.

  When he could speak he said: ‘What is this place?’

  She put a hand on the stone to support herself. He moved closer, kicking against a lump in the grass. It jerked free: a sheep’s skull, bleached to the whiteness of smooth stone, one eye socket staring upwards, momentarily a caricature of a squashed and improbably elongated human head.

  ‘The Celts used to cut off their enemies’ heads,’ said Bronwen abstractedly, ‘and bury them beneath altars or stick them on posts and on the entrances to their forts.’ She thought of the long ages that had made the Celts, from prehistoric hunters with their stone axes and arrowheads to the men of bronze and iron, subjugated when their gods and goddesses were banished by the Roman despoilers, yet somehow never defeated, in spirit somehow never annihilated. And they put heads into sacred wells and temples to promote fertility.

  The word and its undertones brought Judith Brobury to mind. Still attuned to his wife’s thoughts, Caspian caught the tenor of her longings and shied away from it. Silently they went back up the side of the dell to the bleak dolmen.

  ‘This must have been one of the last Druid bastions before the Romans put Anglesey to the sword.’ She surveyed the landscape. ‘The stain of the massacre hasn’t faded.’

  ‘Not one escaped?’

  ‘Roman chroniclers boast that the cult was exterminated. It was one of the few indigenous religions they refused to assimilate or tolerate. If any got away, it must have been into the Welsh mountains, or some valley unknown to the Romans where their secrets could be preserved.’

  ‘They had few secrets by then. Caesar,’ Caspian recalled, ‘knew a lot about their practices. “If a wrongdoer escapes them”,’—he half closed his eyes, searching through memory and conjuring the text off the page—‘“they will even slaughter the innocent. If a human life is not given for a human life, the ruling gods cannot be appeased”.’

  They made their way back to the road.

  ‘Patterns.’ Bronwen, too, spoke aloud, for now they were veiling their innermost thoughts from each other. Discussion now was ordinary, matter-of-fact.

  ‘You see some design—something perpetuated?’ he asked.

  ‘Giving back a human life because of.…’ She faltered, confused. ’Haven’t we heard something about giving back very recently?’

  ‘If you’re trying to force a connection between arcane Druid lore and the vague traditions of Ladygrove,’ Caspian said. ‘you’ll have to invent some pretty strange theories.’


  ‘I only meant that in all religious settings, on all ancient sites, there are repetitions of certain elements—’

  ‘At Ladygrove,’ he said severely, ‘the elements should surely be agreeable rather than disruptive. The devout anchoress, the priory of contemplative nuns—what could be more peaceful and reassuring?’

  ‘Judith hasn’t been reassured.’ They had almost reached the water’s edge before Bronwen ventured: ‘Do you suppose a family curse, however intrinsically crude and muddled, could be carried on like…well, like some hereditary taint in the blood? So that the minds and bodies of successive generations are gradually warped without their realizing the danger?’

  ‘People who wish to talk themselves into believing nonsense,’ said Caspian dismissively, ‘will undoubtedly finish by believing nonsense.’

  But she sensed that he was restless, as he rarely was: restless because of a suspicion at the back of his mind that something was wrong—something too indeterminate to be coolly analysed, summarized, and filed away.

  Not our policy to intervene.…

  When they got back to the house, where crates and boxes were piled in the hall and the large, bare front room, he went to the set of prints they had left on the mantelpiece. She knew, somehow, that he was going to pick out the dim grey picture she had attempted in the chancel of Mockblane church.

  He brought it closer to the light from the window and set it on top of a packing case.

  ‘If you stand to one side,’ he observed, ‘you do get a better idea of possible lettering on that inscription. I wonder if the glass plate itself.…’

  Bronwen opened the box in which her most recent plates had been secured. She set the one of the chancel down in the light; and handed Caspian a magnifying glass. He stooped, edging his way round the packing case and tilting the glass at experimental angles. Then, abruptly, he stopped and was utterly still.

  ‘Yes. My God, I believe one can read it. But there must be a mistake.’