Cashelmara
Page 84
“I was going to ask you about John. Do you think you could spare him to live with us? I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have John to organize the garden for me.”
“But I …” She checked herself. She couldn’t look at me. At last all she said was “I’ll miss Johnny so much. But I’ll still have the girls, won’t I?”
I didn’t answer.
After a long pause she said, “You’re going to take the children away from me. You’re not going to let me have them.”
“It would be a temporary arrangement, Mama. At present you’re unwell, and I’m offering to look after them until you feel better.”
“I’m not giving them up!” she said fiercely. “I’d rather die!”
“Would you?” I said. “You mean I killed Drummond for nothing and you’re prepared to go to the gallows?”
She went chalk-white. Then she lost control of herself and began to rage at me. I said nothing, and at last she stopped. That was when I saw how strong she was, and as I watched her draw back from the brink of hysteria I knew that one day in the very distant future she would recover from her sickness and become herself again.
“Will you come and see me?” she whispered at last when she was calm.
“Of course I will, Mama,” I said. “I shall come every year to visit you and I shall write to you every week.”
Tears streaked her face. “And the children … grandchildren …”
“You’ll see them all again,” I said, “when you’re well.”
She managed to dry her tears, but when she looked at me again there was an odd, fearful expression in her eyes.
“What is it, Mama?” I said gently.
“You’re not Ned any more,” she said, “and yet you’re not a stranger either. I saw you long ago, long, long ago when I was only a child and Marguerite was seventeen. I was always a little frightened of you, and now at last I know why.”
I stooped and kissed her. “You’re very tired and overwrought, Mama. Try and sleep some more.”
“I’m not mad,” she said. “I know you think I am but I’m not.”
“You’ve survived, Mama. I’ve survived. Nothing else matters at present except that.” I kissed her again, then left her.
It was dark in the corridor, and the hall was clammy with memory. I stumbled down the stairs, ran across the marble floor and looked into three rooms before I realized I was searching for Kerry. I was in the morning room when I glanced out of the window and saw her. She was playing with the baby on the lawn, and beyond her the wide border was brilliant with summer blooms.
I waved as I opened the side door, and when she waved back gaily I escaped from the gloom of the house at last and walked into the sunlight of my father’s 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.
copyright © 1974 by Susan Howatch
cover design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-6342-6
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