attention to anything I wanted?’ said Lady Brobury inconsequentially. She had not sat down again since returning to the room. Somehow frail and at a loss, she blinked above the candelabra. ‘Mrs. Caspian. Judith. Let’s leave the gentlemen to their port.’
When the ladies had gone, David pushed his chair back and stretched out his legs. ‘I’m sorry to have exposed you to such family bickering. Mother does ramble on, and I know I ought to let it all roll over my head—but after these last few weeks of it I’m afraid I’m getting awfully snappish. On Judith’s account as much as my own.’ He waited until the butler had set the decanter between them and gone out again. ‘But you were right: she must find it difficult to accept that my father’s no longer here, and we must make allowances and go on making them.’ Thoughtfully he twirled the stem of a glass between his fingers. ‘She was always a bit vague, and one never knew which way a mood would take her, but the shock of finding my father—’
‘She was the one who found him after the accident?’
‘I wasn’t here at the time, of course. I can only go on what she told me, and by the time I got here she was scarcely able to tell anything coherently. But the coroner—a doctor from up the valley, an old friend of the family—he smoothed things over for her as well as he could, and told me as much as he could. It was simple enough. Father was out riding the bounds of the estate when something must have frightened his horse. It was unlike Jenny to go wild—she’s mettlesome, but father always knew how to handle her—but something must have set her off. She seems to have shied off into the woods for some reason, and thrown him. He was dragged by the stirrup through the undergrowth and’—David poured from the decanter and drank deeply—‘rather badly knocked about by some tree stumps and brambles.’
‘It must have been terrible for your mother.’
‘She remembers so little. Or prefers not to. When he was late coming home, several of the staff were sent out. And mother thought she knew which direction he’d be coming back in, and went there. She can’t say how or why, and I don’t fancy pressing her.’
‘And the horse?’
‘She’s perfectly all right. A few scratches, but less than I’d have expected. I wanted to have her put down so that mother wouldn’t be upset by the memory of it all. But that was one thing she was firm about it: she couldn’t bear to blame the animal, and wouldn’t let me destroy it.’
If Lady Brobury had managed to be so rational about that aspect of the sad business, thought Caspian, she ought sooner or later to see other aspects in a reasonable light and so shake of her aimless resentments. For the sake of the younger Broburys it was to be hoped so.
‘The death,’ he ventured: ‘no significant parallel with the family curse, or anything like that?’
‘Good heavens, no.’ David relaxed. ‘But of course, I was forgetting. You’ve always been interested in occult mysteries, haven’t you?’
‘In the effect of beliefs and obsessions on the human mind, yes.’
‘And how they become real?’
‘Real to those who so wish it.’
‘I don’t wish to believe any such gibberish,’ said David. ‘But you do get these family legends, and a lot of things get passed down and distorted, and I suppose we’re all proud of having a little bit of colourful nonsense attached to our name. It becomes like a nursery rhyme that makes little sense in itself but continues to haunt you. Some silly, repetitive little jingle.’
He held his glass up to the light and contemplated the rich radiance of the wine.
‘A jingle?’ Caspian nudged him.
Self-consciously David recited:
‘Strife shall be ’twixt man and wife
Till yielded back there be the life
Of thy house’s first-born son.’
‘Meaning the house of Brobury in the family sense,’ said Caspian, ‘rather than the actual building?’
‘That’s something we’re not sure of. If you allow for the possibility of the original having been in Latin, and then being twisted into English doggerel over the years, it’s hard to be sure of any real interpretation.’
‘But things have happened—things to illustrate it?’
‘Well.…’ David looked momentarily uneasy. ‘Yes and no. Some odd coincidences, or…oh, I don’t know, I can’t help thinking some bits of family history have been misread in order to fit the curse from a long way back.’
‘How far back?’
David drank, and began a brisk, matter-of-fact narrative as if to cancel out that uncharacteristic flutter of unease.
* * * *
The tradition of the Brobury curse dated from the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, but both family and site were of much older lineage. The first Brobury had come to England with William the Conqueror and, like many a knight, granted land and riches in return for supporting the Norman invasion; he had built himself a small castle above the bend of the river, incorporating a well-appointed chapel. During a succession of baronial squabbles, the castle and its defences had been slighted, and ultimately demolished by royal decree; but the chapel survived as the village church.
To this church came a young anchoress.
In the Middle Ages many a parish acquired its resident holy man or woman. A cell would be built into the outer wall of church or chapel, with a squint through which the recluse could devoutly follow the Mass without being observed by any other member of the congregation. In return for the anchorite’s unceasing prayers, food and drink and gifts were laid outside the cell, usually in such quantities that the priest or his bishop would acquire a large share as well as basking in the prestige of having their house of worship enhanced by the presence of such a holy hermit. The church of Mockblane in the Brobury demesne was blessed with the care of a young woman called to her vocation at the age of sixteen, her name coming down through later generations as Matilda of Mockblane. There were no records of miracles, little about Matilda’s life or the date of her death, and no suggestion of later beatification.
‘But my mother,’ said David dourly, ‘has chosen to start up a little local cult of her own. Whether she started it before my father died or afterwards—or before Goswell came or after—I don’t know. But that Goswell chap certainly connives at it.’
It must have been shortly after the anchoress’s death that a new church was built on the other side of the valley, closer to the village. The old chapel and its hallowed cell were offered by the Broburys; to a strict sisterhood of Carmelites who maintained a small priory on the slope and declared themselves spiritual guardians of the memory of Matilda. There they remained until driven out by Henry VIII’s purge of religious houses. The property was returned to the Broburys, who had diplomatically opted to edge away from the old faith and support Henry in his dispute with Rome. The nuns were cursorily evicted, and reputedly the Brobury of the time behaved with especial callousness to the Mother Superior of the Order. It was she who, driven mockingly out into the turmoil of a world from which she had so long been secluded, was said to have laid the curse upon the family.
‘“Offered back”,’ mused Caspian. ‘Offered back in what sense, and to whom?’
