can see I’ll only be in the way.’
David went with her to the front entrance. Bronwen observed that when she was halfway down the arc of the drive and in full sight of the windows, she had acquired a limp.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Judith.
Caspian stood looking out, the jut of his trim beard silhouetted against the far hillside. ‘We’re not putting her out in any way?’ And as David returned, he added: ‘It must be difficult for her to grasp that your father’s no longer here.’
‘That’s what we tell ourselves when she grows particularly trying. There are times, though.…’
He checked himself as his wife shook her head at him.
‘But I do wish,’ Judith admitted, ‘that she wouldn’t put on such a show of being banished to the dower house.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘We didn’t want to push her out. She could have had her old bedroom here, her dressing room, her own little drawing room just as before. But she insisted on moving out.’
‘And letting us know how she suffers,’ said David.
His hand touched Judith’s shoulder. She smiled up at him, and they laughed the absurd irritation of it away.
A maid arrived with a silver tray and silver teapot. Conversation changed to the Caspians’ journey and what lay before them in Caernarvon. ‘Another case of family homes and old relics,’ said Bronwen, and David said,
‘Are you calling my mother an old relic?’ and they all began to talk at once, and it was like the convivial hours they had so often spent together in London.
The bedroom on the southeast corner of the house overlooked a long stretch of undulating parkland ending in thick beech woods. From this height a few village rooftops and a corner of the church were visible. Blobs like grey cotton wool further down the valley might be boulders or browsing sheep. Below the window a busy little stream cut its way down the slope, under the terrace, and disappeared into a plantation beyond which lay the slower river.
Before dinner, Judith suggested a stroll in the garden.
‘Take a shawl,’ David warned, ‘in case mother sees you and comes out predicting doom for the Brobury heir.’
‘Come on, Pippin.’ The retriever fell in beside Judith and padded beside her across the grass. Bronwen matched her pace to theirs.
Light was fading now from the tip of the eastern ridge. Judith looked up it and suddenly said: ‘London’s over that way, isn’t it?’
‘Roughly. A long way over.’
Judith nodded and let out a little sigh.
‘Aren’t you happy here?’ asked Bronwen quietly.
‘I…oh, I haven’t settled yet, that’s all.’
‘When the baby comes—’
‘Yes.’ Judith snatched at the idea. ‘It’ll all feel so much better when the baby comes.’
Behind them David Brobury was explaining something to Caspian, and behind the two men Bronwen was conscious of shrouded hills, 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,
