He was breathing evenly but audibly, as he often did after his asthma had been severe. “Yes,” he said. “I had to come.” He looked past me at the flowers, and suddenly his eyes shone with tears. “Vicky,” he said, “Vicky, please … forgive me and come home. Please, Vicky. Please.”
I looked at him, and when I saw myself reflected in his eyes I saw a justice which none of us, not even Scott, had even begun to imagine. I saw too that natural justice was terrible in its merciless purity, far more terrible than any justice engineered by man, and in that moment I knew not only what I had to do; I knew that I had no alternative. It was as if I were an instrument wielded by forces which could never be more than imperfectly understood. At the most I was merely an individual deprived by circumstances of any freedom of choice.
I said politely to my father, “We shan’t meet again.”
He began to struggle for breath. “But, Vicky … oh, God, Vicky … Vicky, please, you’ve got to listen to me …”
I could see his future so clearly. He would live on alone long after all his friends were dead; he would live on knowing that I lived too, though we might never meet; he would survive to a great age, for his punishment was not to be death; he was going to have to live with the consequences of what he had done.
“Vicky, you must forgive me, you’ve got to …”
The moment had come. It was time to pass sentence, and as I listened, I heard myself say, annihilating him with the words he had so often used to annihilate others: “It’s over. It’s finished. I have nothing else to say.”
X
Leaving him among the graves, I walked away down the path, and as the church clock chimed the hour, I paused in the shadow of the lych-gate.
With the exception of my father’s black limousine and Sebastian’s red mini, all the cars had gone, and at first I thought there was no one in the lane. Then I saw Sebastian. He was some yards away, tugging a sprig of holly from its bush in the hedgerow.
It was only then that I noticed the branches of the wild roses, and suddenly I could see the hedgerow in spring as clearly as I had seen the cherry tree in the graveyard: I saw the whole lane in full bloom, rose after rose, spots of light in a dark incomprehensible universe, ravishing symbols of a triumph over time.
I called Sebastian’s name. He turned, smiled, and walked toward me, the sprig of holly glowing in his hand.
The strength flowed back into me. Stretching out my hand, I raised the latch of the lych-gate and walked at last, through the door I had never opened, into the rose-garden.
A Biography of Susan Howatch
Susan Howatch is a bestselling British novelist who has published twenty books ranging from murder mysteries to family sagas. Her work deals with complex relationships in a range of settings and explores themes revolving around sex, power, ambition, forgiveness, redemption, and love.
Howatch was born in a small town in Surrey, England, on July 14, 1940. Her father was a stockbroker who was killed in World War II. She grew up an only child in an era of post-war austerity, but had a happy childhood, particularly enjoying her time at Sutton High School in the London suburbs. In 1961, she obtained a law degree from King’s College London, then a part of London University, but dropped out of a law career in order to write. She had started writing novels when she was twelve and had been submitting manuscripts since the age of seventeen.
Eventually Howatch despaired of being published in England, and in 1963 she emigrated to New York, where—almost at once—her novel The Dark Shore was accepted for publication. In 1964, she met and married Joseph Howatch, an American artist and writer. (He passed away in 2011.) They had one daughter, Antonia, who was born in 1970.
The Dark Shore was followed by five other short novels, which, with one exception, were all twentieth-century whodunits or suspense stories. Then, in 1971, Howatch published Pennmaric, a family saga that became her first international bestseller. Using multiple narrators, Howatch follows the fortunes of the Castallack family from 1890 to 1945 and shows what happens when a grand passion leads to dire results for all concerned. This novel was based on the true story of the early Plantagenet kings of England, a story that Howatch updates to modern times.
She took another Plantagenet slice of history for her second family saga, Cashelmara (updated to the mid-nineteenth century). This novel was followed by The Wheel of Fortune, based on the last Plantagenets and updated to the twentieth century. However, although the Plantagenet history concerns only one family, the three novels are not interrelated and describe different families in different settings and eras.
In contrast to these stories, Howatch’s novel The Rich Are Different is not a family saga. It tells a topical story about freewheeling cutthroat bankers in New York and London during the 1920s and 1930s, and is based on the life of Cleopatra, her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her final battle with Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. The sequel, Sins of the Fathers, describes what has happened to the survivors.
By the 1980s Howatch’s novels had sold millions of copies and had been translated into many languages. She had also returned to Europe. In 1975, she and her husband separated (they were never divorced) and she and Antonia lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before moving to England in 1980. Eventually, they spent three years in Salisbury and then settled in London, where Howatch lived from 1987 until 2010.
While in Salisbury, the cathedral inspired Howatch to write the Starbridge series, six related novels about three very different Church of England clergymen and their families. The novels explored many ideas—religious, mystical, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and psychological—and focused with a new intensity on the subjects of obsessive love, addiction to power, the evil of violence, and the redemptive nature of forgiveness and love. One of the books, Scandalous Risks, won a literary prize, and the launch of the final novel took place at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Howatch used money from the Starbridge series to set up a lectureship at Cambridge University in theology and natural science, and is now a member of the Cambridge Guild of Benefactors as well as the Salisbury Cathedral Confraternity.
Her last three books, the St. Benet’s trilogy, form a spin-off from the Starbridge series and are set in London in the late twentieth century. They explore the borderlands where Christianity meets medicine, psychology, and the paranormal.
Howatch retired after publishing the final St. Benet’s novel, The Heartbreaker (2004), and now helps out with her family in Surrey.
Susan Howatch, age four, with a friend in 1944.
The first page of the penultimate draft of The Dark Shore, Howatch’s first published novel (printed in the United States in 1965). The final draft was typed. The Dark Shore was written in England, and Howatch sent for it after she immigrated to America in 1964.
Howatch in 1971, at the time of publication of her first international bestseller, Penmarric.
Howatch in 1977, around the time of publication of her bestseller The Rich Are Different. This photo was taken in Ireland, where she was living then.
Howatch in 1978 with her eight-year-old daughter, Antonia.
Howatch in the mid-1980s, at the time of publication of The Wheel of Fortune.
During a 1992 publicity tour, Howatch’s Mystical Paths took over the windows of a paperback shop in Oxford.
Howatch at a 1993 dinner party for fifty people at the Ritz Hotel London, given by Eddie Bell, then CEO and chairman of HarperCollins, to celebrate Howatch’s Starbridge novels. Bell is on the right; on the left is the Very Reverend Michael Mayne, who was then Dean of Westminster Abbey.
In 1999, Howatch was elected Fellow of King’s College London, from which she graduated with a law degree in 1961.
Four generations of Howatch’s family in 2006: Susan (standing, third from left), with her daughter Antonia (second from left), her mother (holding baby), and her three grandchildren.
Howatch in 2007 with her three best friends from high school
—“the three sisters I never had,” says Howatch. They are celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of their first meeting. From left to right: Hazel, Susan, Gay, and Jan.
Certificate recording the Honorary Doctorate of letters conferred on Howatch in 2012 by Hope College, Holland, Michigan.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author is grateful for permission to reprint excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Family Reunion on pages 608, 609, 610, 677, and 733, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1971 by Esmé Valerie Eliot) and by permission of Faber and Faber (copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1971 by Esmé Valerie Eliot). And for lines from “May You Never Be Alone” by Hank Williams, copyright © 1949 by Fred Rose Music, Inc., copyright renewed 1976. Jointly controlled in the U.S.A by Fred Rose Music, Inc., and Aberback Enterprises, Ltd. (Unichappell Music, Administrator). Controlled outside the U.S.A. by Fred Rose Music, Inc. International copyright secured. Made in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.
copyright © 1980 by Susan Howatch
cover design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-6344-0
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Sins of the Fathers Page 86
