Ladygrove. John Burke
there might have been some food that disagreed with you. But now we know.’
He waltzed her round the room until it seemed to her that the gas mantles so newly installed went into hissing, flickering protest. Next day he treated her like a fragile piece of china that might shatter if handled too roughly.
‘It’s so few weeks,’ Judith protested. ‘I’m in no need of coddling. And as for that nightmare in Ladygrove, I could hardly have been unsettled at such an early stage.…’
That nightmare. That night. Could the moment of conception be so immediately devastating, throwing her so wildly off balance?
She remembered—suddenly, vividly—that rapacious claw stabbing out to gouge her open and rob her.
When the news of a coming grandchild was broken to David’s father and mother, there was a swift and unexpected result. Sir Mortimer came post-haste to London. Judith had assumed, a trifle gloomily, that she and David would be summoned to Ladygrove to talk about the future and a choice of names and layette and the best place for the accouchement. Instead, here was Sir Mortimer in their Marylebone home with a glass of brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other, and a troubled look in his red-rimmed eyes.
‘You won’t bring yourselves to Ladygrove before the child is born.’ It was a patrician order. For all his undeniable dignity, his hand shook. Judith wondered how many drinks he had poured into himself before arriving on their doorstep.
David jibbed. ‘But father, I’d been counting on a true Ladygrove heir. Born on the premises, as they say.’
‘Stay where you are.’ Judith had never heard him so fierce and direct before. ‘Don’t expose him…to danger.’
‘Dr. Treharne up the valley is perfectly capable of—’
‘Damn Treharne. More important things to concern yourself with.’ Sir Mortimer turned a bleary but authoritative eye upon Judith. ‘You will lie in here—here in London. If you try to come to Ladygrove, I swear I won’t allow it.’
Judith felt she should have protested, but was overwhelmed by a great, inexplicable relief. Recognizing her thankfulness, Sir Mortimer smirked over another brandy and then another, and a lazily lecherous gleam came into both bleary eyes and he pinched Judith’s bottom, and there was such a devilish love of life in his grin that she could only take the pinch as a compliment.
‘I was born there,’ he confided. ‘But they didn’t get me. All that offering back, whatever it might be—they didn’t manage it. You hear some mad things in this world, isn’t it so?’ He belched. ‘But somehow I was kept away. For all the good it’s ever done me.’ His face twitched into what might have been puzzlement or a deep discontent. But the gleam was soon back and he was staring brazenly yet flatteringly at Judith’s bosom swelling from the olive green satin of her bodice. ‘Don’t often find myself in town nowadays. Really must treat myself to a stroll. Don’t wait up for me—I’m old enough to take care of myself.’
When he set off next morning, bleary and yellow-cheeked, on his homeward journey, he lectured Judith once more. ‘Stay here, my gel. Let’s have a Brobury born safely in London. Fool the old hag once again, hah?’
Judith asked David what his father had meant. David shrugged it off. It was a Brobury failing to grow wild and irrational in late middle age and talk rubbish. She asked if he, too, would talk rubbish at such an age, and he said he would talk rubbish here and now—sentimental rubbish—and he put his lips to her throat and kissed with mounting eagerness down the breast his father had looked at so appreciatively the previous evening.
She loved him, and felt safe.
Until, six months later, they received the telegram announcing Mortimer’s death in a riding accident on his own estate.
Now the estate was theirs.
David and Judith had overnight become Sir David and Lady Brobury. Of course they must attend to the funeral and of course David must meet the family solicitors and discuss the administration of his inheritance.
‘But we don’t have to leave London?’ begged Judith.
‘It’s ours now, all of it. Our home.’
‘But this is our home, here.’
‘It’s not Ladygrove. That’s the real Brobury home.’
‘Not until after the baby’s born.’
‘Well.…’
She insisted. He agreed. They would move into Ladygrove, so much more convenient for the threads he must now unravel and then weave into his own approved pattern. But she should have the baby in London. If that was how she wished it, that was how it should be.
Ladygrove Manor was empty without Sir Mortimer. It needed replenishing, restoring to life. It needed a new generation of Broburys.
Judith apprehensively sought the entrance to the maze, to persuade herself that the dream had died. But the hand thrust her back even more imperiously than before. She took David with her, and he demonstrated how easy it was to walk into the labyrinth and out again—‘There’s nothing in there, nothing at all, nothing to be scared of.’ But when he took her hand and tried to take her in with him, the pressure forcing her back was so stern and savage that she crumpled to the ground and had to be half-carried across the glade and through the trees.
She had been rejected. Hurled out. Yet deep down she was sure that the hand which thrust her back would one day close on her, claim her, draw her in and destroy her.
‘Why do I have to be here?’ she sobbed at David, who kissed her and sat with her and walked with her and said he understood—which grievously she knew he didn’t—and murmured those coaxing little phrases to which he knew she was most susceptible. For the first time ever she wanted to push him away and clutch herself to herself, clutch her swollen body and feel a fretful little kick against her hand.
‘What does this place want me for?’
Sir Mortimer had told her that she must not come back, not until her child was born. But Sir Mortimer was no longer master of the house and no longer able to enforce his wishes.
CHAPTER TWO
Doctor Caspian and his wife came down through Mockblane in the middle of a late August afternoon. The sun was still high as the carriage jolted over the humped stone bridge, but brightness on the western bank was already being sucked away over the river and up the far slope. Evening would settle early on this bank and on Ladygrove Manor.
The horses slowed on the climb to the entrance gates. Bronwen Caspian turned to watch the play of light and wispy shadow on the church tower and on thatched and red-tiled roofs of the village. Glints of sunshine sparkled in the river like fish skimming over and through the ripples.
David Brobury said: ‘I’m still not accustomed to being home. Home for good, I mean.’
‘You won’t find it dull after London?’
‘Dull? At school and university I couldn’t wait for the vacations. And when I’d set up practice in town, I never lost the opportunity of a weekend, or any weeks I could contrive. Father used to badger his friends to have their houses restored or totally rebuilt so that I could come and work for a while in the neighbourhood.’
They drove between red-brick gateposts towards the timbered house, sprouting red-brick Tudor chimneys too florid and heavy for the roofs above which they soared.
‘And. now you’ll set about refashioning your own house?’
‘Certainly not. I’ve always loved every corner of it, just as it is.’
He was in his early thirties but, thought Bronwen affectionately, at tunes showed all the lack of reserve of an endearing, exuberant little boy. He was so eager for them to see his domain through his own doting eyes.
‘You get a fine perspective of the east wing from here. Remarkable example of over-sailing. Stroke of genius. And