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 a man of true sanctity.’
‘Because you asked him to?’
‘When did your father ever pay any 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