Ladygrove

by John Burke

  Margaret expelled breath in a snort rather than a sigh. She had led Judith round to the coach-house and rapped the newly repaired wheel with her knuckles as if she personally had been responsible for its restoration; and now she was impatient to see it turning.

  ‘David went to a lot of trouble to have this done. And I really can’t stay one more day. I’ve the children to think of, and a hundred things to do. And you’ve a child to think of. You’re close to your time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Judith. ‘And this is where my child is meant to be born.’

  ‘But we agreed—’

  ‘I didn’t know how silly I was being. Now I’m over it.’

  ‘We’ll see what David has to say about that. After all we’ve done. After all we’ve gone through!’

  Margaret stalked irascibly into the house.

  Judith looked at her reflection in the polished paintwork of the carriage door. The slight curve of the door made her appear even more swollen than she actually was. The image slid away as she walked on across the stable-yard, floating off the woodwork into nothingness, just as that phantom woman had blurred and disappeared forever after the exorcism.

  She looked back from the corner of the yard. Only a week or two ago, she had been so anxious to climb into the coach and be carried away. Today she had said aloud that she no longer wanted to leave Ladygrove.

  Strange. So strange. She felt that there were two of her, but one has only emerged and begun to take control since.… Since when?

  She wondered where the other, worried Judith had gone. For herself she was no longer troubled. She would let herself be carried wherever it was right—but not carried away from these grounds.

  Lady Brobury was standing at the gate other lodge. Judith made a long sweep of the garden to pass her on the way down to the maze. Her mother-in-law waited patiently for her to reach the gate.

  ‘They want me to go,’ said Judith. ‘But I can’t go away now, can I?’

  ‘It would be very wrong.’

  ‘It’s the others who ought to go away.’

  ‘Quite right, my dear. The fuss these interfering people have caused!’

  ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘Be guided by your own heart. It will tell you what to do.’

  Lady Brobury remained at the gate and went on placidly watching Judith as she went down towards the peace of the maze.

  Peace—but not the peace of somnolence. It was a living, breathing organism, and Judith was becoming part of it. Sometimes with one part of her mind she seemed to see the labyrinth from outside, from above, as if she were floating over its convolutions: it was a diagram, then, of a bloodstream, its coils weaving in and out, but always commanded by the centre, that pulsing heart whose beat grew daily stronger just as her son’s heart within her pounded more strongly and eagerly.

  Judith reached the footbridge.

  David, half running down the grass, was there at the same moment.

  ‘Judith, you’re not to go in there.’

  ‘I need some time to myself.’

  ‘You can have it when we get to London.’

  ‘London?’ she said vaguely. The name had a pleasurable ring, and there were other friendly, reminiscent echoes behind it.

  ‘I’m taking you there now,’ he said. ‘We’re going together, just as you’ve wanted us to.’

  She shook her head. Yes, it had been an enjoyable idea once. It had been terribly important once. Now it did not matter. She heard his voice, but she was looking along the narrow line of the bridge…into the woods and the clearing where she could stroll and sit and be at ease. That once-cold slab in the cell had grown so warm and comforting.

  ‘Judith, you’re not listening.’

  She turned to him, and as he tried to take her in his arms his face was close, too close, bending towards her. Suddenly she hated that face: it came out of nightmare at her, the face of a betrayer, one who had ravaged and ravished her but never loved her. And it was his child within her, hated seed of a hated father.

  ‘My dearest, why are you looking at me like that?’

  She broke away from him. But now he was blocking the way to the bridge.

  She wanted to run, but was too tired.

  Now came the others. Bronwen and Caspian were on their way towards her, closing in on her: friends who were no longer friendly, persistent in their attempts to lead her footsteps astray, away from the truth.

  ‘It’ll be a bit of a squash for a few miles,’ said Caspian cheerfully, as if everything could now be taken for granted. ‘We’ll manage, though. See you safely on your way.’

  ‘But I’m not going anywhere,’ said Judith.

  She faced David and waited for him to step aside. He made no move. She tried to advance on him, but faltered. He was too strong and would be too brutal.

  Slowly she began to walk back towards the house.

  Behind her she heard the murmur of the two men conferring. Plotting against her, as she had heard them plotting last night. Caspian’s voice at the foot of the stairs: ‘David, it’s essential that you get Judith away from here—you personally, to make sure of it, without delay.’

  Margaret was waiting for her. They would give her no quarter.

  ‘There we are, then.’ Margaret was bright and assertive. ‘All packed and ready to leave.’

  Judith shook her head again. There was no point in arguing with any of them.

  She was hemmed in from behind. At her shoulder David said: ‘All of us. All ready.’

  Judith took them by surprise by turning and holding out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Bron. Goodbye, Alex. You must come and see us again when the baby’s born. When…when everything has been put right. We’ll have so much more time to spare then.’

  ‘We are all going,’ said David steadily. She would not even glance into that wicked face. ‘You, Margaret, Bronwen, Alex. And myself. All of us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. There are going to be no mistakes this time.’

  She was being abducted; kidnapped. There were too many of them. They were hemming her in ever more tightly, like some dangerous prisoner who might make a bolt for it.

  Still, she might be rescued. Lady Brobury was approaching.

  ‘Cruel,’ she said. ‘Cruel, David. First you neglect her on the excuse that you’ve too much work to do. Now you dismiss the work and want to rush her away. And I suppose when you get to London there’ll be too much to do, there. So much to occupy you. Just like your father.’

  ‘I’ve done your packing as well as my own.’ Margaret overrode her mother, and tried to jolly her sister-in-law along towards the house.

  ‘But how do you know what I’d want to take?’

  ‘I know what you’ll need. Don’t worry. I won’t let you go short of anything.’

  In a way it was a relief to succumb. If they would not let her be, then she must give in. The responsibility was theirs. If someone, somewhere else, would not look after her, then she had no choice but to go along with them.

  Nevertheless, it was hard to believe that she was really leaving Ladygrove.

  Surely it was folly, when she must so soon return?

  Margaret went indoors with her. Margaret had become a bluff busybody of a nursemaid. There was no resisting her. Judith’s own maid cowered well back. And when Judith asked, ‘But will there be room for Eileen?’ she received only an airy, ‘Oh, David says he will make other arrangements in London.’ When they came out again to find the carriage waiting, and Judith, cowed, stepped in, she felt that Margaret only just restrained herself from patting her on her head, as one would pat an obedient dog.

  The dog…Judith thought of Pippin, and shuddered. But then, it must have deserved its fate. It had been opposing…opposing what? Something right and inevitable which must come to fulfilment.

  She was being carried away from all that.

  Lady Brobury came close to the carriage door. ‘It’s all right, my dear. They’re being intolerably stupid, but you mustn’t worry. Yo
u’ll come back.’

  ‘Of course we’ll come back, mother,’ said David impatiently, ‘when it’s right for Judith to come back.’

  ‘It’s too late for them to do any lasting harm,’ said his mother.

  * * * *

  As the carriage gathered speed between the gateposts and down the hill, Margaret said: ‘That’s so typical of mother, you know. Always making meaning remarks without any real meaning. And then putting on that weightily mysterious air of hers. I really don’t know what you’re going to do with her, David.’

  David’s hand closed over his wife’s. Caspian, tactfully averting his gaze, nevertheless saw from the corner of his eye how Judith flinched away.

  The two of them sat side by side, with the Caspians and Margaret squeezed onto the facing seat. It would be less crowded after Lenhale: Bronwen and Caspian would collect the luggage they had left there and take a train to Hereford to meet a London connection, while the Broburys went onto Hereford at their own more leisurely pace.

  Looking out of the window, Caspian conjured up in the opening a memory of Lady Brobury’s face as she made her farewells to Judith. The memory was an uneasy one. There were questions he wanted to ask and warnings he was trying to formulate. They could not be discussed in the presence of the others. least of all Judith, and the strain of attempting a telepathic conversation with Bronwen would be too great. Later they would talk.

  And would that be too late?

  On one thing at least he relied: Judith’s removal from Ladygrove Manor ought to put her out of danger. Even without knowing precisely what the danger was, he was convinced of this.

  Still, the sense of Lady Brobury’s insidious presence fretted him. Was she in fact only the warped old woman delineated by Margaret, striving clumsily to improve her standing in the eyes of others by pretending to knowledge which she did not possess, dabbling in amateurish mysticism and hinting at secrets of her own concoction? Or were the private rituals, the exorcism, and the concentration on Judith part of something more sinister?

  Something macabre enough to bring about the murder of her husband.…

  The chill in Caspian’s mind was more than the chill of advancing autumn. Either the woman was dangerously rather than pathetically mad; or she was being used by some power stronger than herself—used by the swineherd and whatever it was that drove him. Her original vagueness, when they had first come to Ladygrove and first met her, had had all the characteristics of the most successful mediums. Caspian had once scorned the claims of such people; but through intensive investigation he had found among the army of charlatans a few who were genuinely receptive—uncontrolled telepaths, resonating to snatches of thought from the ether, sometimes running graver risks than they realized as their wayward minds grappled with manifestations beyond nature, beyond time and space. Lady Brobury could be one of them, releasing psychic energies of which she was not consciously aware and over which she had no authority.

  But her husband: how could there be such a thing as an unwitting murder? One came grimly back to that calculated killing—calculated to ensure that David Brobury would bring his wife to their home and inheritance in time for the birth of their first child.

  Questions clamoured in Caspian’s head. But now there was another, more turbulent clamour from outside. As the carriage bumped along the village street, it was assaulted by shouts and caterwauling from the roadside and from twisting lanes and alleys. Someone was drunkenly singing. Someone else bawled abuse too slurred to be intelligible.

  The carriage slowed. David pushed down the window and leaned out.

  ‘Damnation! Some idiot has been ladling out the harvest cider with too generous a hand.’

  ‘Hullo there, squire.’

  ‘Tell him…aye, now he’s here, tell him we’ll not be standing| for any more of it.…’

  A labourer waving a scythe that threatened to slice off his own ear made a jump on to the coach springs, pressed a mud-streaked face to the edge of the door, and then fell backwards.

  ‘Drive out the harlot.…’

  There was a ragged chorus of curses. Further along the street a scuffle broke out.

  ‘Take your hands off!’ David opened the door and sprang down. ‘Let go, I say—I order you to let Mr. Goswell through. Dimmock, I warn you, you’ll be out of your cottage and off my land by nightfall if you don’t stand back.’

  Caspian got down beside him. They waited as the dishevelled vicar staggered through the throng of villagers. Only the men were in the street: a few wives peered out fearfully between their net curtains, and one or two vainly entreated their menfolk to come inside.

  ‘It’s blasphemy,’ panted Goswell. ‘Sir David, they’ve run wild. They’re desecrating the church.’

  ‘You’re the one as has been doing that,’ growled one of the nearest men, leaning unsteadily on his pitchfork

  ‘Papist!’

  ‘Sir David, they must be stopped. The devil’s in them, there’s no telling what mischief they’ll do before the morning’s out.’

  David closed the door of the carriage on the ladies. The three men turned towards the church. A little knot of labourers came together in the lych-gate, but when David’s pace did not slacken, they wavered and fell apart. Some scuttled to the far wall of the churchyard and lined up, scared of what they had been doing but drunk enough to want to do more.

  ‘Idolater!’

  There was a splintering of glass, and the coloured panes of one of the aisle windows fell out on to the path and a neighbouring headstone.

  Mr. Goswell agitatedly waved his two companions on into the church.

  Half a dozen men with sickles, sheep knives, and shepherds’ crooks were clawing and scratching at the walls of the chancel. An embroidered banner, slashed across its haloed face, came down. Candles and candlesticks had been thrown from the altar and trampled on the floor.

  One man, soberer than the others, was trying to slow them down.

  ‘That’ll be enough, now. Take the stuff away, be done with it, but mind the damage. Enough, don’t you know when you’ve done enough?’

  David raged up to him. ‘What’s the meaning of this shameful business, Hopton?’

  ‘There’s no holding ’em, Sir David. I’ve done my best, I swear it. But feelings have been running high, you know. The way our church has been dressed up—it hasn’t been right, there’s a lot of us against it.’

  ‘But this is no way to settle such matters.’

  ‘No, sir. No.’

  ‘It’s as good a way as any,’ bellowed one man, stumbling down the chancel steps and steadying himself against the rail.

  ‘It’s the drink turned ’em loose, sir,’ said Hopton apologetically.

  ‘And their own wickedness,’ cried Mr. Goswell.

  ‘Wickedness?’ A billhook swung erratically. ‘And what would you call the goings-on up at the manor, then, if not wicked. Eh?’

  ‘What goings-on?’ David demanded.

  ‘Arsk him, if you wasn’t there.’ The hook was waved under Goswell’s nose. ‘All that wavin’ and mumblin’, and unnatural practices.’

  ‘Mr. Goswell, does this mean anything to you?’

  ‘Blasphemy and wickedness, that’s what it means.’

  ‘We want our church clean and Christian, the way it used to be—’

  ‘Quiet, man! I’ll have the lot of you before the magistrates.’

  ‘He’s the one should be before magistrates. Bringing the Scarlet Woman of Rome into our church.’

  The Reverend Frederick Goswell drew himself upright as if preparing for martyrdom.

  Caspian thought of the exorcism, and what just one eye-witness’s surreptitious inspection and later embroidering of the story could have provoked in the village.

  ‘And what’s he keep in there?’ The voice was muffled, behind one of the pillars to the side of the chancel.

  There was a snarl from the same corner. ‘Statues, most likely. Holy pictures. Waiting to put them up—more idolatry!’
>
  David and Caspian hurried under the tower and up the two steps. In the wall opposite the memorial plaque to Matilda was a small wooden door. Two men had their shoulders to it, pushing and grunting. There was a creak of woodwork. At this damp, hitherto neglected end of the church both wood and stonework were rotted and in need of repair.

  ‘Not in there!’ David shouted. ‘That’s the entrance to—’

  A crack, and the badly hung door gave way. The two men, caught off balance, reeled in and there was a curse and then a splintering of stone.

  David, beside himself with fury, stormed in after them.

  ‘Appalling,’ moaned Mr. Goswell. ‘We are in the Dark Ages again. The Dark Ages!’

  Caspian stood in the doorway.

  He saw the reason for David’s rage. The little door was in fact an inner entrance to the Brobury vault. Light through the outer grille fell across a tier of stone coffins against the west wall, and across four stone plinths in the centre of the mausoleum. Three of the plinths were unoccupied. The fourth was half obscured by a stone coffin which, blundered into by the two hulking rustics, had slid aside and tilted over. One end had cracked, so that the lid was loosened and knocked awry.

  The vandals scrambled to their feet, subdued and sobered by the enormity of what they had done.

  David stood looking down into the coffin, his face white in the sepulchral twilight. Caspian stepped closer and put a hand on his shoulder. It was the first instinctively friendly contact he had made since seeing David’s lascivious face swimming through Bronwen’s mind. Now there was only pain and regret in that face.

  And what was left of Sir Mortimer Brobury’s face stared up at them.

  Decomposition had not advanced as far as might have been expected. Where it had eaten away the cheeks and corners of the mouth, the dark and viscous incursions might have been hastened by the tearing of tree stumps and brambles, which had already disfigured the features. But looking down into that crumbling corpse, Caspian saw not the ravages of wood and thorns, but those of savage tusks and of demented animals biting, tearing, gorging themselves.…

  In a tremulous voice David said: ‘You two men will lift the coffin back on to its table.’