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 that lattice window up there under the eaves—my favourite attic. I used to spend hours moaning and scratching up there, trying to frighten my sister into thinking I was the resident ghost.’
‘You have a ghost?’
‘Naturally. A very conventional lot, the Broburys.’
‘And your sister was duly frightened?’
‘Oh, not Margaret. She was always too matter-of-fact to be frightened of anything.’
Caspian looked up in leisurely appreciation as the house loomed over them.
The two men had known each other some six or seven years. When Caspian was at the height of his stage fame as the illusionist and prestidigitator Count Caspar, David had been the architect responsible for alterations to the Cavern of Mystery before the opening of the 1886 season; and after Caspian and Bronwen married, it was David who renovated the house they had taken in Chelsea. Now it was his turn to offer a commission: the Caspians, on their way to visit Bronwen’s old home in Wales, must break their journey in Herefordshire so that Bronwen could take architectural photographs of Ladygrove Manor.
The carriage wheels rustled to a halt on the gravel before the house. The sound brought a young woman out on the step.
Judith Brobury held out her arms in welcome. She and her husband were alike in their impulsive gestures, sketching in large parts of their conversation with their hands, sometimes semaphoring so vigorously that one wondered if they might not ultimately strike one another in their animation.
‘Bronwen, my dear. Alexander.’
Her stomach, heavy with child, was proudly thrust out as if to balance the bustle beneath her widely draped, swaying, brown and cream cashmere skirt. The baby was surely due within a few weeks at most but the burden did not appear to depress her: five or six years younger than David, she had a fine sparkle in her cheeks and hazel eyes, and her deep brown hair had lost none of its rosewood lustre.
Her expressive right hand fell and found a resting place on the head of a golden retriever, which had come out to stand beside her.
‘You ought not to rush out-of-doors like that, Judith.’
The thin but penetrating voice came from darkness within the doorway. David exchanged a little grimace of amusement with his wife, then led his visitors forward.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever met my mother.’
‘And do keep that dog away from your guests. It has become very treacherous lately.’
The widowed Lady Brobury was standing in the middle of the hall. At first it was difficult, coming in from the afternoon light, to make out her features. Then as Bronwen’s eyes adjusted to the change, she saw how richly that inner darkness glowed in chestnut wall panels and in a great oak table polished to glossy blackness. Lady Brobury’s face emerged pale and thin-lipped, floating in space, with a strand of grey hair that seemed to slice off her forehead only a few inches above the eyebrows. Slowly she took on substance: clad in mourning, with a black bonnet trimmed with crape, she was an angular wraith reluctant to step out of the obscurity.
They shook hands. Her touch was brief and cold, the fingers snatching away in a few seconds.
‘David, do make Judith go back to the chaise-longue. In my day no young woman in that condition would have been allowed out into the cold air.’
‘It’s hardly cold, mother.’
‘Cold enough.’
Lady Brobury led the way towards a door opening out of the hall and was about to lead the way through; then stopped and turned.
‘I’m sorry. Of course, this is your house now.’
‘Mother, really.…’
But the Dowager Lady Brobury stood rigid at one side while her daughter-in-law preceded her into the drawing room. David took his mother’s arm and at the same time winked and waved Bronwen forward.
It was an airy, welcoming room, which came to life as they entered, as if it had been waiting for a long time for a new generation to revitalize it. Tall windows framed a vista of curving valley, lost round a distant out-thrust of green cliff. A line of elms masked the village save for the gleam of the weathervane, still catching the sunlight.
‘Judith and I have already taken tea. We waited as long as we could, but you were so late. But if you’d care for tea…or do you want to go to your room first…? David, do look after your guests.’
Lady Brobury was, Bronwen estimated, only in her early sixties; but she affected a painful shuffle, her shoulders slumping under the weight of an intolerable burden—if not of years, then of some indescribable injustice—and when she spoke, a plaintive little whine was left echoing on the air.
Parched after the train journey and the drive over dusty miles from the railway station, Bronwen admitted that she would welcome a cup of tea. As David rang, tugging the long bell-pull by the fireplace his mother turned back towards the door.
‘I
