Ladygrove. John Burke
rising mountains, and then the lonely expanses of Wales to be crossed before she and her husband reached the coast and Caernarvon. Her homeland, Wales: in which, a married woman now knowing so many new worlds, she was afraid of finding herself a stranger. She wondered if David, in spite of his devotion to Ladygrove, felt altogether at home after having for so long made his home elsewhere. And if he would succeed in making Judith feel at home.
They went deeper into shadow. Oak and ash trees closed in about them. Leaves were uncannily still and there was not the faintest pipe of birdsong. Only the stream chattered a tune over its stony bed. A few yards into the unbreathing gloom and Bronwen came to one end of a narrow wooden bridge. Outlines at the other end were indistinct, but there seemed to be a tidily squared-up hedge between saplings and a tangle of bushes.
‘We’d better not go any further this evening.’
Not until Judith spoke did Bronwen realize that she had lagged behind and come to a stop on the edge of the grove.
‘Is there some sort of formal garden in there?’
‘A maze,’ said Judith stiffly.
‘Oh, we must explore that tomorrow.’
‘lf you can.’
‘It’s overgrown?’
‘No. At least, I don’t suppose it is. I…I can never get into it:’
‘You lose your way?’
‘I can’t even cross the bridge.’ Judith sounded tense and unhappy. ‘It was all right when we used to visit, but then something happened. And now that we’ve come to live here.…’ She drew the shawl more tightly about her and turned to meet David and Caspian as they came from the far side of the lawn.
‘Mother doesn’t have that trouble, anyway.’ David’s arm pressed the shawl even more closely over her shoulders. ‘There’s a fragment of an old chapel in the heart of the maze.’ he explained to Caspian. ‘Long ago it was an anchoress’s cell, and then sometime in the eighteenth century the maze was built round it—a bit of fashionable landscaping. Mother sits in there by the hour.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Goodness knows. Perhaps trying to lift the family curse.’
Caspian raised a saturnine eyebrow. ‘You have one, then?’
‘I told you, the Broburys have all the conventional things.’
‘Obviously, none of them worry you.’
A slight cloud darkened David’s brow. ‘Judith is starting to worry a little,’ he said with a quickly suppressed hint of asperity. His hand squeezed her shoulder fondly. ‘It’s ridiculous, of course.’
The dog edged in beside Judith’s skirt. From the distance came the clopping of hoofs, the note changing as they struck the gravel within the gateway.
‘That must be the vicar.’ David released Judith and started up the slope. ‘I’d better collect mother from the lodge and bring her in to dinner.’
CHAPTER THREE
The Vicar was a tall young man with a smooth yet troubled face. It was difficult to conceive that such a girlish complexion ever needed shaving; but where other men might have had shadows of beard on cheeks and chin, he had odd little puckerings under his eyes, dark gashes tugging the corners of his mouth down, and he looked constantly from side to side as if fearing some unprovoked attack. He wore a dark coat, which, with its concealed buttons, had more the appearance of a robe, and his hair had been cut in such a way as to suggest a tonsure. Caspian had noticed that after saying grace the Reverend Frederick Goswell had swiftly crossed himself. Such a mannered high churchman, fashionable as he might have been in London or Oxford, was out-of-place in a rural community like that of Mockblane. One wondered what the villagers made of him.
‘And a priest-hole, naturally,’ David was saying. ‘Some say the ghost is the tormented spirit of a priest who died of starvation before it was safe to release him.’
‘And Charles the Second,’ said Bronwen, ‘doubtless hid in one of your oak trees?’
‘We’re a bit too far west for that.’
‘And the family curse?’ Caspian prompted.,
Lady Brobury snapped unexpectedly: ‘David wasn’t born in this house. What could he know about it?’
‘I believe,’ said Mr. Goswell, ‘we should think rather of family blessings than of curses.’
Lady Brobury melted at once and smiled at him. She still wore black, but for the evening had exchanged her bonnet for a lace cap with a long veil pulled back from her gaunt face. It bore some resemblance to a mantilla, and when she looked yearningly across the table she might well have been beseeching an audience with Mr. Goswell.
‘Such as the blessings,’ he went on, ‘which our benefactress has bestowed on this parish.’
‘I shall continue to do what I can—with my limited means.’
David frowned at his plate.
His mother raised her voice. ‘While you are restoring the chancel to its rightful significance, I should like to dedicate a window to Matilda of Mockblane.’
‘Lady Brobury! What a wonderful surprise—wonderful gesture!’
Lady Brobury sat up proudly, then winced and put a hand to her back.
David said: ‘Mother, it’s not healthy for you to spend so much time in that damp old cell.’
‘Who says it’s damp?’
‘You’re getting pains in your back.’
‘The old trouble,’ Lady Brobury sighed.
‘Which one, mother?’ David asked it in apparent innocence but gave Judith a quick wink.
Lady Brobury rounded on her daughter-in-law. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Once you’ve had children, you’ll find out. Never be quite right again.’
‘Really, mother!’
‘You don’t know the pain I suffer. I don’t complain, but if you knew.… And now that I’m all on my own—’
‘Mother.’ David spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘You are not all on your own. We’re here with you.’
‘You wouldn’t have come back if I hadn’t made you. As bad as your father.’ She looked uncertainly, almost apprehensively, up the table as if expecting to find Sir Mortimer still seated in his usual place. The candelabra in the centre shimmered with reflections of its own branched lights, and of the lamp brackets on the walls. ‘Your father.’ They let her sit in silence for a moment. Then in a burst of fretfulness she went on: ‘When I think how he whisked us away from Ladygrove when you were on the way! So inconsiderate. That was what started all my trouble. By the time we came back the damage was done.’ She clapped a hand to her side and winced again, more loudly this time. ‘But I don’t ask for sympathy.’
‘No, mother.’
‘But if I hadn’t gone down on my knees and begged you to come back—’
‘You didn’t go down on your knees.’ David was trying to make an easygoing joke of it. ‘You know perfectly well that we came as soon as we heard.’
Lady Brobury sulkily prodded at a slice of roast pork and then, as if recognizing it for the first time, pushed it away. She glared at Judith’s plate. ‘How you can eat the way you do, in your condition, I don’t know. You’ll pay for it. I know I shall pay for it tonight.’ She mumbled her way into self-communing resentment.
Judith took the opportunity of asking Bronwen about old acquaintances in London—about the girl from the Cavern of Mystery who had had twins, about a contemporary newly returned from New York, and about her photography of some friends’ children.