Ladygrove

by John Burke

  There was no escaping now. She must endure it all, to the end.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The ostler mistrustfully picked at the mole on his chin. He had been on the verge of lowering the bar across his stable-yard doors, and now resented the delay.

  ‘Wouldn’t fancy one o’ my nags being ridden off over the top there, not by a stranger, not when it’s dark as this.’

  Caspian said: ‘It’s a matter of life and death. I have to get there as soon as possible.’

  ‘And wouldn’t do it no good being hard-pressed, neither. You’d do better going round the road—and even then, this time o’ night it’s no easy ride for a stranger.’

  ‘I’ll guarantee whatever extra fee you want. But I can’t stand about here, I’ve got to get there.’

  Still the man dawdled. Caspian longed to take him by the throat and shake him as one would shake a rat. But that would hardly endear him to the fellow.

  ‘Well, if I could be sure you’d be sticking to the proper road, like.…’

  The train from which Caspian had alighted let out a croaky whistle and pulled away from the station. As the level-crossing gates swung back, a woman in a creaking little donkey-cart drove out from the lane beyond the station and clattered in beside the ostlery. Hunched over the reins, it appeared that she was urging herself and the animal on; but when she stopped and spoke she still did not straighten up, and it was evident that she was permanently stooped forward.

  ‘Evenin’, Ben. You seen my boy about?’

  The ostler shrugged a shoulder at her and shook his head in much the same welcome he had offered Caspian. Remembering the man’s joviality a few days previously, Caspian could only assume that there were moods in which he enjoyed pleasing customers, and others when the world disappointed him and he wanted everyone to suffer with him.

  ‘Not today,’ he grunted. ‘Nor yesterday, now I think on. Nor God knows when.’

  ‘He told me they’d be expecting me over there at Ladygrove about now. Reckoned her time would come today, but nobody ain’t sent for me.’

  ‘Then it’s not come. Or they made other arrangements.’

  ‘And who’d do better than me? I ask you—who’d do them better?’

  The ostler parried. ‘Didn’t I hear the lady was going away?’

  ‘According to my boy, she was sure to come back when her time’d come.’

  The ostler said grumpily: ‘Looks like everyone’s set on getting to Ladygrove. This gentleman, too, he’s in a mighty hurry.’

  The old woman’s eyes peered out keenly and acquisitively from under the scarf knotted about her head. ‘Would that be so, then? You’ve heard something, is it?’

  ‘I know young Lady Brobury needs help.’

  ‘Just what I was saying.’ She was triumphant. ‘Knew it in my bones. So I’m not waiting to be sent for, I’ll be off and see how she’s faring.’

  The ostler allowed himself to cheer up. ‘You could take this gentleman with you. I’ll tell you, sir, you’ll be safe enough with Mrs. Morris. Knows every road hereabouts, and she’ll not waste a minute getting you there.’

  ‘Ain’t never been late yet,’ the woman said. ‘Least of all on this kind of work.’

  She patted the seat beside her, grinning an invitation. Caspian sprang up.

  ‘Shall I take the reins?’ he asked, making a polite offer out of his desire to get his hands on them and force the pace along the winding route to Mockblane and Ladygrove.

  ‘I’ve handled it often enough, thanking you all the same.’

  When they set off he had to admit it was true enough. Mrs. Morris set a confident, spanking pace, knowing every twist and rise and fall on the road, slowing and then taking a tight corner, urging or holding back the donkey with perfect calculation. Still he raged with impatience and fear, longing to annihilate the distance between here and whatever might be happening to Judith Brobury.

  And to Bronwen.

  If she had disobeyed him, had emotionally thrown herself headlong into Judith’s mind and problems.…

  ‘There’s been a sight of coming and going at Ladygrove,’ said Mrs. Morris chattily. ‘You had any part in it, then?’

  ‘My wife and I were staying there until a few days ago.’

  ‘Oh, that’d be you, would it? Yes, my boy told me there was folk there.’

  ‘Your son’s on the staff?’

  ‘Not my son. My grandson, he is, sir. My poor daughter Lily’s boy. Evan, we called him. She didn’t live long enough to give him a name of her own.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, shaken, Caspian said: ‘Evan? Not Evan Morris?’

  ‘You’ve met him, then?’ The old woman glowed.

  ‘If it’s the swineherd who—’

  ‘That’s what he’s doing for them now, yes. Indeed. Evan Morris it had to be, ’cos there weren’t no father to give the lad his name—not one that was going to own up, that is, though he wasn’t mean with the money to help me along with him. No, you couldn’t say he was mean.’

  They swerved round a corner, the oil lamps casting a flickering glow on the donkey’s flanks and on the hedgerows which lurched closer and then fell away again. Only once did they encounter another traveller, a man shuffling along and somnolently blurting out the odd belch of a refrain as he swung his lantern to and fro. And once, just as they turned the end of the vale and crossed a bridge that would lead them on to Mockblane and another bridge, there was a distant red cough in the sky from an engine’s firebox.

  Caspian said: ‘It was you who brought Evan up—and put him into service with the Broburys?’

  ‘They took him without me or Mr. Morris having to ask. Only right, when you think of it. There at the start, you might say, so who’d got a better right to stay on there?’ She was driving more recklessly, but Caspian was in no mood for her to slacken the pace. ‘A night like this, it was.’

  ‘When he was born?’

  ‘I was a sight younger then, when I was called over to bring him into the world. Came on very sudden, he did. It was that as much as anything, him coming early, that killed her. My own daughter, and one of the few I ever lost.’

  ‘You were sent for because—’

  ‘Because everyone sends for me, why else? I’ve delivered nearly every babe you’ll find round these parts. Hardly a one in Lenhale or Mockblane I haven’t brought into the world. And my own daughter one of the few I couldn’t see safely through.’

  Mrs. Morris began to snivel, and the cart swayed perilously close to the ditch on an unfenced comer. Caspian reached over and tugged skilfully on a rein. When they were safely back on course he drew a hip flask from his back pocket.

  ‘A drop of this will warm you.’

  The woman cast it a sly glance, then resumed her concentration on the road. ‘Best not, with the work I may have to do.’ Her gaze strayed again. ‘Wouldn’t want to get like old Dr. Treharne, would I? Hope they’ve not called him in. Wasn’t none too sober when he did that inquest on Sir Mortimer, was he?’

  ‘Was he not?’ said Caspian—too keenly, for she clicked her tongue at the donkey and pretended not to be interested in the flask in his hand. Then, succumbing, she said:

  ‘Well, just a little warmer wouldn’t do no harm, would it?’

  He filled the cap and passed it to her.

  ‘When I think of our Lily and him.…’ Mrs. Morris drank half the brandy, tightened the rein, and then drained the cap. ‘Our Evan. If everyone had his due.… But then, I’ll not be a tittle-tattle.’

  Caspian took the cap from her, and she said, ‘No, I oughtn’t to take another drop from you, sir,’ and he refilled it and she took it gratefully from his hand.

  ‘If everyone has his due?’ He altered her phrase slightly, temptingly.

  ‘After all these years, I don’t suppose it makes no odds. And he’s dead and gone.’

  ‘Sir Mortimer?’ Caspian hazarded.

  ‘I never said a word, now.’

  ‘Your grandson’s father,’ he said.


  The shoulder of the hill against the sky was familiar now. A few dim lights in the valley marked the windows of Mockblane. Mrs. Morris flicked the reins, and her tongue chattered encouragement along the backs of her uneven teeth.

  ‘Evan is Sir Mortimer’s son, isn’t he?’ Caspian insisted.

  She passed the empty cap back to him, and wiped the back of her hand appreciatively along her mouth. ‘Well, after all these years.…’ She giggled, and at the same time made an effort to straighten her bent back in a thrust of family pride. ‘Oh, yes, if everyone had his due!’

  ‘When was he born?’

  ‘Before he was. Maybe only a day or a day and a half, as I recall, and ahead of time he was—but before Sir David, as that one calls himself. And maybe my Lily was only a slavey, but she was good enough for Sir Mortimer when the fancy took him. And it took him often enough, the Lord knows, specially when that lady of his was carrying and hadn’t got no time for him. So why shouldn’t our lad have been Sir Evan? Or maybe they’d have called him Sir David.’ She shook her bowed head, bemused. ‘But it don’t ever work out like that, does it?’

  They were rattling through the village. Light glowed in the window of the inn, and a curtain flickered in a corner cottage as they turned down towards the bridge.

  Caspian was tense, pleading, reaching out ahead for some intimation of Bronwen.

  The donkey slowed on the hill, then was in through the gateway.

  ‘Stop here!’ said Caspian.

  ‘I’ll set us down at the door and—’

  Not stopping to argue, Caspian vaulted out of his seat and came down heavily on the grass verge of the drive. He ran down the slope to the huddled shape which might have been a bush on the edge of the stream but which he knew to be Bronwen. Sliding down to the cold, wet grass beside her he touched her hand; and found it as cold as death.

  As his hand moved over hers, so his mind settled beside hers and then gently embraced it.

  And was jerked galvanically in a moment of stabbing torture before he could steady himself and hold firm.

  In the middle of torment Bronwen knew he was with her at last, and sobbed her love. If on the journey here he had been pricked by anger at the thought of what risks she might madly have taken, and now saw how truly she had lost herself in a consuming hell, that was banished. They were together in the web and must be together to the end. They were in tune. He enfolded her, she enfolded him, they would need all their strength.

  There had ceased to be any true consciousness of Judith or Matilda. There were no longer any individuals. All their minds seethed and began to dissolve in the same fearful cauldron.

  Caspian clung to his wife. There was no firm ground, yet they must be firm. They must retain their identity or they would be engulfed.

  As if the walls of the anchoress’s cell had turned to glass, they saw within it Lady Brobury, possessed by what she had so long and so devoutly invited. The slits of her eyes were opening; the eyes were gleaming jewels. Her mouth drooped, slack yet avid. Saliva trickled from one corner down her jaw like the glistening path of a snail.

  Moving closer at his mistress’s command was Evan Morris, neither person nor spirit, but a mindless gape of murderous greed, as predatory as the animals that followed him from the dark interstices of the maze.

  Bronwen and Caspian spoke Judith’s name silently, beseechingly, repeatedly.

  They had almost reached the end of the avenue. The woman with the stone knife waited.

  Through every muscle and the straining flesh they could feel Judith ready to sink to her knees as the child fought to get out; but could not hear her mind or get any grip on it.

  And blustering in as if to thrust them deeper into the cauldron and drown them, the weight of Evan Morris splashed with all the bestial ferocity of the great boars crashing through the hedges.

  Suddenly a mental shout was torn from Caspian.

  Judith, your son is not the one. Stone mother, sow goddess, avenger and destroyer, she has no call on your son. Not while a firstborn still lives.

  Rage bubbled about them. He felt that great claws were tearing confessions from the depths of his mind, and tearing the soul out of him at the same time Lady Brobury’s right arm was dragged up with infinite slowness, as if flexing anguished life through unyielding stone. She raised the knife, but the blankness of her face was that of bewilderment.

  There is a firstborn here, a firstborn Bradbury of another generation before this.

  From pandemonium thundered a cosmic question. Lady Brobury staggered under the flail of the answer. And out of chaos the Caspians heard Judith at last, whimpering as she groped to the surface of her trance.

  Turn aside…now!

  With all their power Caspian and Bronwen conjured up a vision of a hedge blocking that final, fatal avenue. They saw it and made Judith see it. Insisted to her that there was no way ahead. She faltered. The maze was warped, knotted into a new complexity. Judith could not walk ahead, there was no path, she must turn.

  She stumbled to the left. They made an opening for her in their minds and the opening became real and she felt her way into it.

  As far in as you can go. Lie down there, stay there, you are safe. Stay there and you will be safe.

  A furious enemy tore at the picture they were creating and slashed it across, mangled it and threw the fragments on to the storm wind. But Judith was already collapsing at the end of the cul-de-sac. The child’s head was emerging. She could not get up now, and it was too late to drag her to the stone floor where what had once been Lady Brobury crouched, rearing up, howling in the insane abandonment of evil.

  Evan Morris was confronting the priestess, his arms outstretched, raging, demanding the fulfilment of her promises to him.

  The stone blade was raised.

  ‘You will serve.’ Lady Brobury was drawn up to her full height. ‘If you are the one, then let it be you. You.’ The shout drove the knife down. Morris stood quite still, held by the stone stake lodged in his heart. In that last instant the eyes staring at him were Lady Brobury’s, wide and pleading for meaning. ‘So be it, then, so be it. Let it be done thus and let there be an end to it.’

  Morris crumpled. Lady Brobury, still clutching the haft of the knife, was drawn down with him. Then her fingers slackened, so that he fell free and rolled off the edge of the smooth, shining stone.

  There was a whistle of triumph. Two huge boars hurled themselves bodily through a hedge. A frenzy of tusks and foraging snouts followed, descending on the corpse, treading and trampling into a mass, which was tugged and chewed out on to the ground.

  Lady Brobury went down on her knees.

  The heat of the stone floor was dying away, cooling.

  When the nightmare too had lost its heat, Bronwen and Caspian freed themselves and rose to their feet on the bank of the stream. Across the bridge and into the grove and the maze they went to face the reality. They found Judith sobbing quietly but happily above her wailing, newborn son, and Bronwen shed her cloak to wrap it round the child and carry him out into the world.

  And Caspian found Lady Brobury, still kneeling, with her eyes still wide and unknowing, and her mouth twisted in the last petrified spasm of death.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The stone slab was prised away by picks and crowbars to reveal a wide round hole and the shaft of a well. The estate workers who had freed it backed away, leaving it to Sir David Brobury and Dr. Caspian to lean over the rim and peer down.

  Although David had ordered the demolition of the entire cell, so that the centre of the maze was now only a heap of rubble and the site was open to the sky, still the daylight struck only a short way down the exposed shaft. A lantern was brought and lowered on a rope. It shone on the sides of the well and dropped a glimmer like a dull coin into the muddy water at the bottom.

  ‘Obviously fed by a subterranean inlet from the stream,’ commented Caspian. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that the workmen were out of earshot. ‘And if i
t’s Celtic, it would have been revered as one of the gateways to the underworld, and suitably guarded.’

  Halfway down, the lantern revealed an earth-spattered skull in a niche to one side. When the light was swung round, it fell upon a companion across the shaft.

  Later in the day, some clumsy fishing with a bucket brought up votive offerings of stone and iron arrowheads, and one small stone figurine from which they had to wipe away a long accumulation of mud.

  The effigy was that of a woman with grotesquely inflated breasts and hips, and a small head with pitiless slits for eyes and mouth.

  David Brobury shivered. ‘I want that taken away from here,’ he said. ‘As far away as possible.’

  ‘I’m sure the British Museum will be delighted to accept her,’ said Caspian.

  It was tacitly agreed that the figure should not be shown to Judith.

  ‘And I shall have the maze torn up,’ said David, ‘root and branch. Just suppose that Judith had been in there, in one of those moods of hers, when those swine stampeded…no, I’ll have the maze and the herd exterminated.’

  He said it again when they were sitting at Judith’s bedside that evening, having admired the healthy-looking son and congratulated the pale but contented mother. Judith looked momentarily puzzled, trying to remember something that did not quite fit what David had been talking about; but then leaned back luxuriously among her pillows.

  ‘Since you were unfortunate enough to witness some of what happened,’—David looked across the bed at Caspian—‘could you possibly stay on for the inquest?’

  ‘Of course. We’ll…give as accurate an account as possible.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it. I can’t see how…and how I could have slept all through it, and the rest of you come back and.…’

  ‘The coroner will almost certainly find,’ said Caspian levelly, ‘that the herd for some inexplicable reason ran wild. There’s little enough left of Evan Morris to identify, and what there is tallies well enough with that assumption. And coming on the scene, your mother died of a heart attack.’