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 must be getting back to my little house, then.’
‘Mother you’ll stay and have another cup?’
‘I 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—’