were all there, in the shadowy room: the servants, the family, the priest. White faces turned towards him as he burst in, his spurs ringing on the boards and catching in the soft sweet hay which had been spread everywhere to muffle the noise.
‘Katherine?’ He stopped a few feet from the high bed, his breath rasping in his throat, his heart thudding with fear. Her face was beautiful and completely calm.
There was no sign of pain. Her glorious dark hair, free of its coif, lay spread across the pillow; her eyelashes were thick upon the alabaster cheeks.
‘KATHERINE!’ He heard his own voice as a scream and at last someone moved. The woman who had so often shown him up to this very room and brought him wine, stepped forward, a small bundle in her arms.
‘You have a son, my lord. At least you have a son!’
Uneasily Joss turned to Luke and snuggled against his back. The moonlight disturbed her. It was relentless, hard, accentuating the cold. Shivering she pulled the covers higher, burying her head in the pillow beside that of her husband, feeling his warmth, his solidity, reassuring beside her.
Frozen with horror he stared down at the woman on the bed.
‘Katherine.’
This time the word was a sob; a prayer.
Throwing himself across the body he took her in his arms and wept.
With a sigh Joss slept at last, uneasily, her dreams uncomfortable and unremembered, unaware of the shadow which drifted across the moon throwing a dark swathe across the bed. She did not feel the chill in the room deepen, nor the brush of cold fingers across her hair.
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine!
The name rose into the darkest corners of the room and was lost in the shadows of the roof beyond the beams, weaving, writhing with pain, sinking into the fabric of the house.
His face wet with tears he looked up. ‘Leave me,’ he cried. ‘Leave me with her.’
He turned to the servant, and his mouth was twisted with hate. ‘Take that child away. He killed her. He killed my love, God curse him. He killed the sweetest, gentlest woman in the world!’
When she woke it was with a splitting headache, and only seconds later the realisation that she was going to be sick. Not pausing to grab her dressing gown she threw herself out of bed and ran for the bathroom, falling on her knees in front of the lavatory. It was Luke, gently stroking her head while she vomited, who wrapped something round her shoulders and later brought her a cup of tea.
Dr Robert Simms was rector of the church at Belheddon from 1914 until 1926. Standing in front of the stained-glass window which had been erected to his memory in the church Joss wondered just how much he had been able to comfort Lydia in her last months. Had he sprinkled Holy Water around the house? Had he buried her son? Presumably he had buried her. The grave out in the churchyard was overgrown now with nettles and covered in ivy but, scraping away the moss she had found the inscription:
Samuel Manners, born 1882, died 1926 also his wife Lydia Sarah Manners, born 1902, died 1925 also their children Samuel, born 1920, died 1921 John, born 1921, died 1925 Robert, born 1922, died 1936
What happened to the sons of this house that they died so young? Walking back slowly up the path from the church towards the gate into the garden Joss stopped for a minute beside her brothers’ graves. Luke had cut the nettles now, and she had scraped away some of the moss and planted bulbs in the cold earth between them. She shivered. Edgar Gower’s words kept returning to her: ‘Don’t embroil yourself in the affairs of the Duncans; Belheddon Hall is an unhappy house, my dear. The past is the past; it should be allowed to rest.’ Was there something terribly wrong at Belheddon? And if there was, why did she feel so happy here? Why did Luke love it so much? Why had they not felt the evil which had so terrified Lydia and Laura?
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