Ladygrove

by John Burke

  It was so agreeable to turn over documents and yellowing tomes, alert for the authentic nuances of history, piecing together the mysteries of the past with no urgent need to relate them to present exigencies. But he could never permanently immure himself within some academic sanctuary.

  The thought of immurement brought him back to the crabbed lettering on the pages he was slowly turning over.

  Enoch Vaughan said: ‘You see—how the ancient truths have been perverted by these clerical sycophants, you see? Oh, the shameful falsehoods they’re capable of! Shameful, every word of it. You’re with me, I’m sure?’

  Vaughan was a shrunken little man of about seventy, with a disproportionately large head and an expansive, flowing white beard. His eyes under a mop of white hair were like bright jet, darting and sparkling and querulous. He had received Caspian with the most courteous suspicion; denied the existence of any papers on the Mockblane matter whatsoever; then denied the right of anyone else to inspect them or the worthiness of anyone to attempt an understanding which only he could achieve; and then thawed as Caspian slipped in an anti-clerical joke which the canon had obligingly told him would go down well, and added a reference to his own Welsh wife, who was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.

  ‘Ah, then you’ll be one who understands, won’t you?’ Vaughan’s head was quizzically cocked to one side. ‘Sort of one of us, like?’

  Now, disgorging one chest of scrolls, parchments, and books after another, scrabbling and digging out a folio here, a package there, he talked in fits and starts irrespective of what stage Caspian had attained in his reading.

  ‘A poor, ignorant peasant girl,’ he was ranting on, ‘sold into the bondage of a wicked church for the sake of her wretched family’s prestige…unctuous hypocrites…a child who might have known the old natural truths, sacrificed to the miseries of the new falsehood. Christianity!’ said Mr. Vaughan with all the severity of a Methodist minister condemning the devil and all his works. ‘A shallow mask created by cowards to disguise the face of truth.’

  The sonorous condemnations came oddly from that mild, generous face swathed in its shimmering patriarchal mane. From time to time Caspian looked up and nodded politely, while fitting together the fragments he had unearthed in Hereford and trying to relate them to the uncatalogued relics preserved by Enoch Vaughan. As a pattern began at last to emerge, and he saw how his theories were overshadowed by the immediate reality, Caspian began to worry.

  But Judith was safe. He had time to browse; time to conjecture what dangers she had escaped.

  From the cartularies and bishops’ registers in Hereford cathedral library he had winnowed a number of references to the original church of St. Alkmund, including mention of the anchoress Matilda. But these did little more than record her arrival, list pious donations during a number of years, and then state baldly that she had been absolved from her vows. There was no documentation of her appeal to the bishop for release, or of his formal declaration. It was not too surprising: medieval records tended to be sketchy, and many could have been scattered or destroyed over the centuries.

  More substantial documentation came with the endowment of a Carmelite priory by a Sir Henry Brobury, granting use of the existing church as a cornerstone of the convent buildings, while another church was built for the laity on the other side of the river.

  The priory buildings enshrined the cell of the dead Matilda. A register from the priory scriptorium made early reference to the protection of her holy relics, but in very formal language. Later, all mention ceased. If there had been any actual physical relics, they could have been destroyed at the Reformation or taken away, as so many objects of veneration were secretly taken away by monks and nuns fleeing to the protection of Continental houses or into hiding in their own country.

  What did come across consistently was a strong sense of mission: the duty of guardianship, never relaxed. The devout attendants of St. Edmund or St. Thomas à Becket could not have been more rigorous than these austere sisters in their watch over the cell of the anchoress Matilda of Mockblane, who had gone out into the world but returned to her final immurement. But whereas St. Edmundsbury and Canterbury had welcomed pilgrims to their shrines, the nuns of Mockblane not only shunned the world themselves, but kept people away from the anchoress’s cell.

  On some pages of their cartulary were a few disturbing passages, one of them supplemented by a loose copy of an actual letter from the prioress. She reported to the mother abbey on the illness of a sister who had asked to spend a night of devotion in the cell. It seemed that the young woman had been feverish for more than a week, seeing visions of devils and crying for a mother who did not, as far as could be gathered from her ravings, resemble her own mother. Not long after, a novice died from an unspecified ailment; but it was mentioned that she had disobediently strayed unattended into the cell.

  At no stage was it ever suggested that the cell itself should be demolished.

  The wording of one of the sisterhood’s vows, given a full page to itself and more elaborately lettered and illuminated than the rest, was strange: ‘We vow eternal watchfulness against what lies below, that it may not again rise within our walls or our souls.’

  Caspian mentally set that alongside another line he had recently pondered over. Pray for deliverance from Matilda…thrust back in for her own good.

  There were two missives to a fourteenth-century bishop, and part of his reply to one of them. Some nuns wished to leave the convent and the order, and return to the world. Three were allowed to do so, but evidently only after long examination and prayer and heart-searching. It was stipulated by the bishop that they must live far away and speak nothing of their experiences, and never return to this part of the country. One who wished to remain within the order but begged she should be freed from this priory was sent to France, and there was a reference to ‘instructions’ being given to her new mother superior. No further word was ever recorded of those who had left.

  The story came to a brutal end with the fell phrases of the order of expropriation, and the Royal Commissioner’s report confirming that this had been carried out. After all the altar furnishings, the priory bell, and roof leading had been removed by the Crown, the property was handed back to the Broburys. It was here that the commissioner recorded the ‘intemperate and irreligious conduct of the woman but lately prioress of this house, who did not only refuse the dole and comforts offered by His most generous Majesty our Sovereign Lord the King, but did cry out a curse upon the most worthy family by whose grace her very house was founded and maintained.’ The wording of the curse was as Caspian had already heard it from the lips of David Brobury:

  Strife shall be ’twixt man and wife

  Till yielded back there be the life

  Of thy house’s first-born son.

  Knowing more of the background now, Caspian found it odd that the prioress, however dismayed by her ejection into the perils of the outer world, should have directed her wrath at the Broburys rather than at the king and his commissioners. True that the family had wavered in its religious allegiance; but it would have been of no advantage to her if they had remained faithful.

  As he lifted the chained volume back into its slot on the shelf, the canon observed: ‘There is another version of the Brobury curse, incidentally, in the Lambeth Palace library in London.’

  ‘Another version?’

  ‘The wording itself is little changed. But the circumstances of its delivery are different. According to that other report, the prioress seemed to one witness to be quoting rather than voicing the malediction herself. It is agreed that she was distraught, and much of what she cried was lost: but this interpretation suggests that she warned of the ills which would befall if the pious guardians of the site were driven away, and reminded them—if it meant anything to any of them—of an ancient curse. She was recalling ancient vindictiveness, not voicing her own.’

  ‘But this one’—Caspian tapped the spine of the book—‘is the pr
eferred version?’

  ‘Preferred and disseminated by Henry VIII and his minions.’ said the archivist, ‘to help in the campaign of discrediting those whose religious houses they had seized.’

  Caspian thought of the dedicated woman’s despair as her words fell on deaf ears. Could she simply wash her hands of responsibility and walk away? Or, like her predecessors, guardians of the anchoress’s cell and its secrets, had her sense of vocation remained so strong that even after death she could not allow herself to abandon the task? He thought of that spirit resonating on the air of Ladygrove, of a devotion so strong that down the centuries it watched over the site, shielding any Brobury wife from the cell and its environs when she was pregnant, preferring the Brobury curse to continue from generation to generation rather than open the way to an ending infinitely, hideously worse.…

  And now that phantom guardian, which had striven to prevent the ‘offering back’, had been dismissed by the inept Goswell and his far more powerful manipulator, Lady Brobury.

  The canon was looking lovingly along his rows of books. Caspian said: ‘You mentioned having known Sir Mortimer. Did he ever consult you about his family history?’

  ‘Sir Mortimer was not a scholarly man. Our meetings were purely fortuitous. He lived more by…well, shall we say his instincts?’

  Yes, thought Caspian dourly. By his instincts and appetites. Yet at least his instinct had told him to keep David and Judith away from Ladygrove at a crucial time. Even if Sir Mortimer had not been interested in the documentation of the Brobury curse, he believed in some aspects of it.

  With all these speculations shuffling and readjusting in his mind, Caspian began to insert what he could glean from Enoch Vaughan’s contributions.

  One of the more important was a story bearing on the menacing elements of the Matilda cult. A nun released at the time of the Dissolution claimed that she had wished to leave earlier but had been prevented and cruelly disciplined by the prioress. She had been forbidden her freedom on the grounds that she would be a gossip and a mischief-maker. Now she had her revenge by proving how well-founded this judgment of her had been. Many of the nuns were mocked as they emerged from their years of seclusion; but because of her readiness to denounce the prioress she was sheltered by one of Thomas Cromwell’s men. There was an intimation, impossible to verify after three and a half centuries, that she might have married him; or she could have been, if only briefly, his mistress. Her story was written down by one of Cromwell’s scribes, then lost, then rediscovered and added to Enoch Vaughan’s collection. It could have been an outpouring of pure malice, forced from her or distorted by her own spiteful imagination. Or it could have been true.

  If it were true, it tended to confirm the evidence that guardianship of the anchoress’s cell was not in devotion to a sacred memory, but as a stern duty to keep others safe from what had been unleashed within. The anchoress Matilda had, according to this version, been released from her cell without due investigation of her motives, and once free had behaved so shamefully and practised such abominations that it had been necessary to recapture her. It was rumoured that she had fled into the hills to join acolytes of the old religion there, had been made one with them and the villagers who still in secret worshipped the ancients, and had been got with child. It was the lord of the manor who finally trapped her and returned her for final imprisonment and repentance. ‘And she did curse most abominably then and thereafter, and call down wickedness and revile the godly, until her voice wearied and was stilled forever by our most merciful Lord.’

  There was no mention of the Broburys in all that cursing. But such mention would have won no favour with those who, like the Broburys, had supported Henry VIII and been rewarded with property and monastic riches.

  Out of remembered nightmare Caspian saw David Brobury’s face descending on the girl writhing in the grass. She had burned with unholy joy in the ravishment; but if she had mothered his child and then been thrust back again into her solitude, well might she have cursed him and all who came after him.

  With a dry throat he said: ‘What happened to the child?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve reached that bit, have you?’ Vaughan bowed his massive head over the page. ‘Yes, one wonders, of course one wonders. It may have been taken away and brought up elsewhere. Left for the priests in the hills to care for. Or…disposed of by the poor girl’s persecutors.’

  A firstborn Brobury, disposed of like a superfluous kitten.

  If a wrongdoer escapes them, they will even slaughter the innocent. Again he was reminded of Julius Caesar’s words. If a human life is not given for a human life, the gods cannot be appeased.

  He said: ‘You speak of the priests in the hills. And you’ve referred more than once to the old truths. How far down into these valleys did those…those truths reach?’

  Vaughan chuckled gleefully. ‘There now, you do know. Didn’t I say you’d be one who’d understand?’

  Of course the Celts had slyly pursued their old ways and worshipped their old gods, and in secret there had been enclaves of Druid priests long after the Romans had thought them exterminated. Christians had built over the old pagan sites, sometimes adopting features of the old religion to incorporate in their own, sometimes striving to nullify such survivals by setting their own altars atop the ancient ones. But in those consecrated stones there might linger something too mighty for suppression by new prayers, new rituals—like a mammoth preserved in ice, waiting to be released, resurrected from the heart of the solid prison.

  He said bluntly: ‘Was the anchoress’s cell, to your knowledge, on the site of some old Druid holy place?’

  ‘Yes, you do know.’

  ‘So that was what terrified the girl out of her wits. And terrified those charged with looking after the storm centre once she had been destroyed.’

  ‘Destroyed!’ cried Vaughan indignantly. ‘It was not the old ones who destroyed her, but the wicked usurpers. If she cursed before they walled her in and left her, it was not the folk of the old persuasion she cursed, but the new sects, which brought guilt and bitterness to our ancient lands. The Christians denied the oak and the ash, perverted the meaning of the mistletoe, defiled the places they stole.’

  The shrillness of it suggested a fanaticism which could turn violent. In the closing years of this materialistic century Caspian had encountered a score of perverse cults and a thousand unstable practitioners of ill-conceived rites in shabby back rooms and gas-lit meeting halls; had depressingly explored down too many contaminated streets and alleys. But Enoch Vaughan, in spite of his fervour, did not belong with the shabby sorcerers. He was one of the romantics substituting daydreams of ancient splendour for drab reality. There were those who equated the Druids with the sages of Persia and India; and those cranks who swore that their faithful invented rituals were inspired by the arcane precepts of Druid Britain. Harmless—provided the poetic daydreams were all.

  ‘But praise be,’ Vaughan was saying, ‘they never really left, you know: the old ones never actually went away.’

  Carefully Caspian ventured: ‘But suppose Matilda the anchoress didn’t understand that? She had been schooled in other beliefs.’

  ‘Barbarities!’

  ‘Suppose that for her, an innocent in spite of all she may have gone through, the horrors were not those of ecclesiastical punishment but of Celtic echoes still pulsating in her cell? That to her the ultimate terror was to be thrust back into the one place she knew to be devil-ridden with old beliefs which were anathema to all she had been taught?’

  ‘What could there possibly be on that ancient site but sweetness and tranquillity? These monstrous tales of—’

  ‘Ceridwen!’ Caspian knew he was being unwise, but the day was drawing on and he wished to be finished. ‘The sow goddess—how can you fit her into a pantheon of sweet, enriching beliefs?’

  ‘Barbarous! Ceridwen, the goddess of spring and the corn, of rebirth and renewal.’ Vaughan stood up. ‘You are not the man I thought you. I have
been deceived.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but as a scholar yourself you must surely know the different incarnations of—’

  ‘Take your slanders elsewhere.’

  Vaughan was scooping up papers and books, shovelling them willy-nilly into the nearest open box.

  ‘Thank you for your patience,’ Caspian said, too late. ‘You’ve been most helpful. I wouldn’t want you to think—’

  ‘I was right not to entrust my secrets to those Hereford blasphemers. Wrong to let you misinterpret them with your impious eyes.’ Vaughan began edging Caspian towards the door. It was clear that he had no intention of shaking hands. At the door he declaimed: ‘You will learn, when it is too late. You will all of you learn, when it is too late. The old ones…they never left.’

  Caspian would have been glad of his wife’s company on the journey back to Hereford. There were so many points to be discussed—so many which would have stung a sharp, stimulating response from her.

  ‘Lady Brobury.’ He said it in an undertone, questioning, as if the mere name would provoke an answer.

  It might be that the old woman was not entirely responsible for all that had happened and been meant to happen. But without her the tide of evil might not have found a channel. Evil does not flourish on its own, in a vacuum. It needs an Aeolian harp through which to breathe and make itself heard: without instruments tuned to the right resonance, it cannot play its fearsome tunes. If human beings are not ready for evil, it cannot take on substance.

  By peevishness and a growing spitefulness, by willing injury and then death, Lady Brobury had opened herself to forces that now possessed her and would use her. No longer scraping disjointedly at a few petty resentments, she had been taken over by a vast hellish symphony, which she was no longer capable of directing. She, not it, was being directed now.

  But all to no purpose. The theme of that infernal music would not be heard by the destined victim. Judith, thought Caspian with renewed thankfulness, was out of range, out of hearing.