Ladygrove

by John Burke

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  David Brobury lay in a drugged sleep, his arms sprawling slack on the counterpane and his lips parted half an inch or so. Margaret spoke to him, shook his elbow, and spoke more sharply; but he was too deeply blanketed by the miasma of some potion to hear or be commanded back to wakefulness.

  She glared round at the butler. ‘Whatever was he given to put him in this state?’

  ‘I couldn’t be saying, Miss Margaret. It was her ladyship—Lady Charlotte, that is—was—tending to him.’

  Bronwen said urgently: ‘Where are they now—the two ladies?’

  ‘They…went out into the grounds, ma’am.’

  ‘Where in the grounds?’

  ‘It was my impression, ma’am, they went walking down towards the stream.’

  Bronwen turned towards the door. Behind her, Margaret said: ‘Whatever this nonsense may mean, Jephson, I think you had better accompany us. And perhaps bring one of the footmen.’

  ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t be doing that, miss…er, begging your pardon, ma’am, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know what you do mean, Jephson.’

  ‘We don’t want no part in anything that’s going on, that’s what. Bad enough last time, all them goings-on up and down stairs. But out there…no, that’d be ten times worse.’

  Bronwen did not hear Margaret’s reply. She was in too much of a hurry to be out of the house and on Judith’s trail. Then Margaret was panting indignantly after her.

  ‘What has got into this place?’

  Bronwen said: ‘Go back to David. Stay with him.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing. Where’s Judith? Where’s mother? What do they think they’re playing at, at this time of night, out here in—’

  ‘Go back to David. I’ll try to save Judith.’

  ‘Save her? What are all these mystifications of yours, Mrs. Caspian? Really, you’re as bad as my mother.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Bronwen soberly.

  She could not delay in argument with Margaret. The time was approaching, and she must face Judith’s dangers with her. There was nobody else to help: nobody now but herself, nothing but the strength that she alone could summon.

  The slope down to the footbridge was frosted by a faint starshine. Even without this pallid illumination Bronwen could have trod surefootedly to the edge of the stream and the end of the bridge. She was guided by the sound of Judith’s mind, now at the entrance to the maze.

  Margaret brushed past her, less sure of her footing but determined to take charge. ‘I think this is a family matter, Mrs. Caspian.’

  She had one hand on the rail of the bridge when light gleamed faintly on four smooth, sharp tusks at the other end. Two sentinel hogs with dipped heads waited to tear at any intruder. And from beyond, from the grove and from within the woven yew hedges of the maze, there came a slow, harsh rustling like ripples over shingle: the restless snuffling and prowling of the hungry, waiting herd.

  Margaret took a courageous step forward. There was a threatening grunt, and the bridge swayed.

  ‘Morris! Are you in there? I warn you—if you don’t come out at once and move these beasts, it’ll be the worse for you.’

  It was vain, grotesque: the cry of social discipline, of well-ordered normality, into the heart of seething primordial chaos.

  ‘Go back,’ Bronwen commanded fiercely. ‘I can do nothing with you here. Go back! The servants know what they’re talking about.’

  She was so compelling that Margaret retreated. When Bronwen settled herself on the damp grass as close as she could get to the edge of the stream barring her from the grove, there was an instant in which Margaret was about to try a last protest. Then she backed slowly away, a forlorn, bewildered shadow against the shadowy hulk of the house.

  Bronwen crossed her wrists over her knees. She closed her eyes and let consciousness of Margaret, the slope, and the gardens, and the house drain away. Picturing the stream a few inches below, she let everything else trickle over the bank into it.

  And then, when her mind was cleared of all sight and memory and sensation, she began to draw in awareness of the grove, the maze…and Judith, and what was living and throbbing in Judith.

  All at once it came in a flood: all the past in one stunning cataract so that she was battered and thrown about and in danger of drowning. She was no longer pacing out a succession of steps from the past, sharing spasmodic flashes of pain and love and despair. In a few seconds she knew and was Matilda, knowing and reaching out for the physical anguish of creation and re-creation. As Judith knew, and accepted.

  Pain stabbed. Bronwen felt her own womb racked by it. She carried a child, felt it struggling to be born, longed to deliver it and hold it briefly in her arms.

  Briefly, because it must be delivered again: offered back.

  So it must be. She remembered what had been done and knew what now had to be done.

  She remembered all.

  * * * *

  I remember my cell and the cold, which became heat, and the fear that became fire, and what it taught me about myself and the things beyond myself. Though what I was taught made little reason until the teachers in the hills took me in and taught me so much more.

  Yet this is not memory. It is as real and present as it ever was. I am what I always was and shall be so until my defilers are brought down and do at last yield up what I enjoined upon them.

  The mother waits for me. I, the mortal mother, shall offer back to the eternal mother what was stolen from me, and so from her this time the gods shall be appeased.

  Pain is a knife through me. And again, and again. So much torment within my body before I deliver the son who will be spared all save a few seconds of the pain of living.

  I remember the tearing of my flesh by the father, as more shall now be torn by the son.

  The man is with me again, in me again. I hate the despoilment but yearn for it again. He laughs because he is happy to have been proven right.

  ‘Truly it was a lie, my fair.’ He is handsome, and swaggering, and laughs again when I drag my torn habit down about the ravages he has wrought on me. ‘You did indeed have a taste for a man.’

  ‘You have treated me most shamefully.’ It is true, yet he is right to shake that fine head of his and go on smiling in those fine Brobury eyes of his.

  ‘I will find you a place to rest.’ He says it gently enough now that the blaze of his passion has died away, and offers me his hand as a gentleman would offer it to the gentlest lady of his choice.

  It is a game for him, but one I am ready to learn.

  So I am in a barn, sheltered and hidden away, some fair distance from the manor but close enough that he may visit me when the need takes him.

  It is often, but not as often as my own need.

  ‘Often I mused upon you,’ he says one night as we lie in the sweet-smelling hay in the loft, ‘sealed away in your cell, where I could steal no glance at you to find what manner of woman you were.’

  At first I turned my head away from the heat of his glances, which were in no wise stolen but rather bold and stealing, robbing me of all modesty. But now I wait for his gaze, and meet it, and tell him things he is glad to be told. My wretched coarse gown he has taken away, and in its place I have some fine linen and a warm blanket of rough cary cloth. When I wash the linen or myself, I must do so in the stream which runs down past the house and then on through the gully by what was once my cell; and must do this only at night, when there will be no one to see. I am his secret diversion, imprisoned here as I was once imprisoned in that cell.

  When I ask, he tells me that no other recluse has wished to enter the cell. It has been declared unclean. And there is no one now to intercede for the peasants and sinners.

  I too am a sinner, I who renounced the evils of the flesh and now am prey to those evils and welcome them. I am in sin and afeared of what may befall me. But I am most cast down not when the man is using me, but when he is not there across that tumbled hay, not here
beside me, and I go hungry. All this, laughing, he knows.

  But often he waxes serious and we talk as man and wife might talk, and I pretend it is so. We walk at night and he finds I can talk of many things beyond his own knowledge. I have had those many years for meditation and for listening to the prayers and problems of serf and freeman, and there is much I know. But too much I still do not know.

  Once he speaks of love and then tries to laugh it away. But I am content that the jest should have been made.

  Now the weeks pass and he comes no more. For the first time I see another man. I am fed by a serf who would like to make mock but dare not; and, I am bound, would relish the telling of jokes to his fellows, but knows he will have tongue and ears cropped if he so much as whispers of me.

  And when at last my true master returns, he is graver than before but will speak nothing of his concerns.

  Now I carry his child. This I have known for weeks but have waited until there shall be no mistake.

  Now surely it is time that he declared me to the world? For he loves me, I am sure it is true: and if true only when he is with me, then that is truth enough, and all the greater reason for my asking that he shall be always with me.

  When he hears and believes, he laughs. It is not the old laugh nor a gentle one. I would dare swear he is frightened, which I have never seen in him till now. And, being frightened, he grows angry and hateful.

  I am a fool. How should I be other than a fool? I have spent much of my life away from the world in one secret place and now have let time run by in another such place, learning one thing in one and another thing in another, but still learning little of the ways of the world.

  For of course as a Brobury he must marry the daughter of a neighbour, so that as they unite then also their manorial lands may be united. Wherefore his dalliance with me is ended. How should it be otherwise?

  I am to be sent away with a gift to ease the parting. But I must go in secret and not return and not speak of this. He promises that we shall meet later, but I think it is of no importance to him. Once I have gone he will find other sport. He is as impatient for me to be gone as he once was to possess me.

  All this I must accept. But as the fever came upon me in my cell and in my lonely mind, to fill my imaginings with a fearful joy, so a fever comes on me again and I am in a rage against him and will not let him go, and am of a mind to go out across his father’s lands like a wandering mendicant, telling all I meet of my fate and of the firstborn child he shall have by me.

  This is folly indeed. Now it is all turned against me and I see I am in danger from all of it: his fear, anger, and hatefulness. From the passion that is now the passion of hatred.

  I will not be led away by him or by his servants. It would be too easy, in those woods and copses and hidden vales on the Brobury estate, for me to be struck down and buried where none will ever seek for me. That is what I read in his eyes—eyes which I have known lustful, eager, loving…and now murderous.

  When he has left me this night it is easy for me to leave on my own way. I have no possessions, nothing to carry but his child within me. Beyond the hills where no word of me has been noised there may be those who will take pity.

  Yet, even as I silently depart and walk in darkness up the slopes I know I shall not need to go far. In the woods below the hilltop there waits for me what has waited a long time.

  I remember. I remember the secret woods and the secret people who cared for me and taught me their ways. I remember those who crept up from the valleys to dance silently round the sacred places and offer their sacrifices, and those who took back from the rites the consecrated branches and their undying thoughts.

  It was as if the knowledge had been in my mind all my life, waiting to be awakened. Here was the old true religion of my ancestors, anathematized by Roman, Saxon, and Norman, but enduring and unconquerable.

  The old ones have never really deserted us.

  I have been wronged, and the father of my child is not one of us, but still in the all-mother’s mercy the child shall be cleansed and dedicated.

  It is my own wish that the dedication to Ceridwen shall be made where I was granted the first intimations of the truth. I shall be sustained now by the truth, and bear my child before the stone of the sacred well. There I was imprisoned and then found freedom; and now of my own free will I return to cleanse it by the birth of my child and the rebirth of the old truth.

  The stone is there, within the cell. I am in pain, I cannot set one foot before another save with pain, but I shall be given the strength to reach the place.

  It is so close now, and the stone mother waits there to bless the mother of flesh.

  But it is not to be. As I am stricken to the ground by the joyous agony of the child’s coming, the night is full of them—of Brobury kinsmen and their hirelings, tearing the baby from me before I can kneel to Ceridwen, before the ash and oak leaves can be most propitiously laid out. I hear one cry—the cry of birth—and then my own cry, and then there is a bloody darkness and I am thrown this way and then that way, and there are voices thundering denunciations at me. My arms reach out but are empty. I am dying. And I know that my child is dying, and feel within myself the moment of his death.

  He is gone.

  And when I can hear and see, there before me is the priest in the full panoply of his self-righteousness, telling me that God is just and merciful and has taken unto himself the fruit of my sin. I must pray. There is nothing left for me now but to pray for the soul of my lost child and, in the hope of mercy, for my own soul.

  Oh, I will pray. But not to their usurping idols. The truth makes me strong even in this moment of despair and humiliation.

  They accuse me of abominable practices and heathen sacrifice, and it is proclaimed that for my own good and that of the faithful I am to be walled up alive and spend what little time is left to me in repentance. So I am thrust back into my cell and the wall is built up solid, even to the window, and I am in darkness, and there will be no light and no food and my time will not be long. Day and night without cease there come brethren to pray and chant so that none may hear the prayers I cry out at them, until I am too weak to cry any more, and when they are quite sure I am close to death, they offer up a last prayer and depart.

  So I die. Yet will not die. I do not rest and will have no rest until the child stolen from its rightful altar is avenged. They tried to sing down the curse I laid upon the Broburys, but could not undo it. There shall be no peace for the Broburys, and their womenfolk shall turn upon them as the traitors they are, until a firstborn is offered back to the sacred stone.

  It is to be fulíllled. I walk through the pathways they have made, and with each step I am nearer to the stone and nearer to my time. The boy is eager to be free from me. A child was offered to Ceridwen as fruitful mother of earth, but Ceridwen was robbed. Now the balance must be set right. This Brobury child is offered to Ceridwen, the destroyer and devourer.

  She waits, stone mother with stone knife, upon the stone that was once my floor.

  So few steps to take now.

  * * * *

  Bronwen knew Judith and knew Matilda, allowed herself to be Judith and Matilda in this timeless swirl of past and present, without obtruding one vestige of her own self. She saw through their eyes and felt through their skin. And she felt every increasing, quickening pang of the child within the body that had become as much her own as Judith’s—or the guiding, dominant Matilda’s. Of the three of them, Judith was the weakest. Judith had surrendered mind and body to the spirit, which had been waiting in this grove for so many centuries—had given flesh and power to the wraith whose vengeance was so close now to fulfilment.

  Through Judith’s ears Bronwen heard the rustling and faint, hungry whistling between the hedges. Judith looked straight ahead, but was calmly aware of the shadowy tremor of leaves and branches as heavy bodies blundered against them from the other side. They were all of them, women and beasts, making their slow predestined wa
y to the stony heart of the maze.

  Matilda knew what waited there and saw it adoringly in her mind; so that Judith, too, saw it ahead and went on towards it; and Bronwen was with her.

  They saw Lady Brobury utterly still, with a face of stone, cross-legged upon the cell floor with a broad stone-bladed knife across her knees. Her eyes were slits, her mouth a slit almost ready to open.

  Bronwen flinched. But it was her own mind that rebelled, without striking the faintest echo from the others. She could lie dormant no longer. She had come this far without disclosing herself. But now Judith must be torn free from her trance. Whatever the dangers of such a mental shock, they were less than the dangers waiting at the end of this last avenue.

  Bronwen reached out and declared her presence, demanding that Judith should hear her and stop, look round, discover herself again.

  Three women in one, they went unfalteringly on.

  Judith, listen to me. She must be shaken into consciousness, must hear and understand the meaning of those hungry noises behind the hedges: turn and walk back to the entrance.

  Judith passed a side alley of the maze without a glance.

  Bronwen struck savagely out into that captured mind. Turn back. I am holding your hand, you must feel that I am holding your hand and turning you round. Like this. We will walk back together. Now!

  Judith, neither listening nor rejecting, walked on.

  Bronwen struggled to convey the sensation of another, outer world. She would make herself feel the grass beneath her and hear the sound of the stream by which in reality she knew herself to be sitting—and would make Judith feel and hear it too.

  She bent her will to the summoning up of that awareness.

  And felt only what was in Judith’s mind, and felt her birth pangs.

  Bronwen tried to cry out. But Judith was mute.

  They were held, both of them. Bronwen, too, was trapped in the web of the past. She could not draw Judith out of it; and could not even free herself. They walked on, driven by Matilda and all she had known and all she had left resonating on the air of this haunted place.