‘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.
Lady Brobury endured this for a few minutes, then emerged from her rumination as testily as she had sunk into it. ‘You’ve come here to take photographs of my house, Mrs. Caspian. That is, my son’s house.’ It was an accusation rather than a question.
‘I hope to make a few studies here, yes.’
‘An unusual occupation for a married lady.’
‘My father was a pioneer in the field. I like to keep up the tradition.’
‘Tradition,’ Lady Brobury echoed sceptically.
‘We’re on our way to Caernarvon to arrange for the removal of his collection of plates. My sister wants to sell the house, and we can’t let the archives be broken up or inadequately housed.’
‘They’re so important?’
‘My father and I spent many years making photographic records of buildings. Especially those of historic interest, threatened with decay or demolition, so that posterity won’t be entirely deprived of all memory of our architectural heritage.’
‘So that’s what it is?’ Lady Brobury pounced on her son. ‘You want a record of this house before you start playing about with it. Altering it, altering everything. It won’t suit me. I know it won’t.’
‘I have no intention,’ said David, ‘of altering anything. Repairs where necessary, yes: alterations, no.’
‘Hm. You won’t want me under your feet. And I won’t want to watch it happen.’
Before David could argue there was the faint, remote sound of a doorbell. After a brief pause the butler tapped at the dining room door and came in.
‘Your Ladyship, there’s one of the Hoskyn family asking for the parson. Says old Mrs. Hoskyn’s sinking fast and she’d like him to be there.’
Mr. Goswell rose, his pink face lengthening into a sort of lugubrious complacency.
‘I was afraid she was not long for this world. I must give her what solace I can. Dear Lady Brobury, you’ll excuse me?’
She insisted on escorting him personally to the door. When she returned, she was wiping a tear from her eye.
‘Such a good man. Such a tower of strength.’
David said warily: ‘He still worries me. I don’t see our old low-church villagers taking to all his Popish practices.’
‘How dare you call them Popish?’
‘The way he’s treating the altar; the form of service, and the way he’s encouraging you to set up your own little cult in that damned maze—’
‘What do any of you understand? Any of you?’
‘In this part of the world, folk have always been more used to men like old Haines.’
‘Not always,’ said Lady Brobury very quietly.
‘For enough centuries, anyway.’
‘Haines. A man of no insight whatsoever. Your father did right to offer the living to
