Ladygrove. John Burke

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      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN BURKE

      The Black Charade: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#2)

      The Devil’s Footsteps: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#1)

      The Golden Horns: A Mystery Novel

      Ladygrove: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#3)

      Murder, Mystery, and Magic: Macabre Stories

      The Nightmare Whisperers: A Novel of Horror

      The Old Man of the Stars: Two Classic Science Fiction Tales

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1978 by John Burke

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Jean, who helped conjure strange things from the forest.

      PART ONE

      THE BARRIER

      What has signs exists, and what has prophecies will come.

      —Fechner

      Buchlein Vom Leben nach dem Tode

      CHAPTER ONE

      The house stood in a fold of the valley half a mile from the village and divided from it by a meandering river. Beyond the western slope of the vale there rose in sombre cloud shapes the shoulders of the Black Mountains. In that sheltering arm, chequerwork of timber and plaster was sharply etched in black and white against soft blue-green background.

      Judith Brobury first set eyes on it one fine spring day in 1887, and could understand at once why it meant so much to the man who was soon to be her husband. Until this moment she had only once seen a trace of nervousness in him: when he proposed to her. Now he was again on edge. Bringing her to meet his parents, he was anxious that they should like her and she like them, but even more that she would like Ladygrove Manor. One day, when it fell on him to become Sir David, and she Lady Brobury, it would inevitably be their home.

      Not for a long while yet, she hoped. They had met in London; David worked hard and successfully in London; and they had already chosen the town house they would buy. Herefordshire, the village of Mockblane, and the manorial estate were too far away. Later she might be content with the remoteness and serenity of it all. For there was no denying at first glance its serenity and beauty.

      ‘Beautiful,’ she said.

      David could not doubt the sincere note in her voice. He smiled, and took her hand; and the trap carried them down the hill and across the river to Ladygrove.

      On that first visit she was shy and as wishful as he was to please and be pleased. In return David’s father, Sir Mortimer, was extravagantly boisterous; while Lady Brobury, fluttery and shrill, made such an effort to put Judith at ease that she agitated everyone, starting impulsive sentences which remained unfinished, and appealing in fits and starts to her husband for confirmation of small points which clearly meant nothing whatsoever to him. They made an oddly matched couple. Sir Mortimer was domineering yet erratic, stumping off at a second’s notice and not reappearing until hours later

      ‘Somewhere on the estate,’ his wife would mutter. ‘Always up to something.’ One might have supposed that she resented his need to keep an eye on his staff and property and would have preferred him attentively at her side; yet, when he did sit with her she talked at random, often not looking at him, and rarely listening to him. Once he got up in the middle of one of her remarks and went out of the room, not in a temper but as if his mind had simply ceased to register the sound she was making and hurried off on its own concerns.

      But there was no denying their hospitality or their readiness to accept Judith. Sir Mortimer several times put his arm round Judith and squeezed her in a more than paternal manner. ‘Deuced good fortune some young chaps have these days. If I were twenty years younger.…’ He chuckled, and Judith wondered—half amused half ashamed at the thought—where he really went during some of those absences of his, and whether he really needed to lament not being twenty years younger. Lady Brobury, for her part, said, ‘Thought he was never going to settle down’, and asked Judith’s preferences for the flowerbeds, and talked at length about the rooms which would be set aside here for her and David, not so much signifying approval of their forthcoming marriage as taking it amiably for granted, and drawing her future daughter-in-law into the pattern of life at Ladygrove.

      Not yet, thought Judith.

      ‘Now, when you next come down, my dear.…’

      When she next came down, Judith was Mrs. David Brobury. Not a stranger to be welcomed and set at ease, but one of the family.

      She explored, hand in hand with David, the places he had loved best in childhood. ‘Margaret and I built a tree house in the wood here.’ Margaret was his elder sister, whom Judith had not met: living in Malaya, she was the wife of a government engineer doing something important somewhere in the Straits Settlements. David’s scattered references to her burgeoned into the picture of a brisk girl who had been sometimes dictatorial, sometimes derisive, but more often tomboyishly cooperative in his schemes and daydreams. ‘I built the house in that elm tree—my first architectural venture, I suppose you could call it—and Margaret furnished it, and we spent hours there making up stories and games. If one of us was in disgrace and went off out of sight, the other never came near the tree house. I knew Margaret would want to be left to herself. And she knew when I was there alone.’

      He took Judith’s arm and stumbled down with her into a bramble-choked hollow, pulling her close to shield her from scratches, and kissed her.

      ‘And did she stay away when you brought some pretty girl here?’

      The grip of his fingers into her arms was as painful as the brambles would have been. ‘I always knew there would have to be somebody like you to come and share all this with me. And now I’ve got you, and I was wrong.’

      ‘Wrong?’

      ‘There’s nobody like you.’

      They went together into the trimly clipped maze half hidden within a grove of oak and ash, between the river and a stream that had carved itself a way down from the hill behind the house. There were some cunning deceits between those yew hedges. Ten or twelve inches higher than the average man or woman, they nevertheless seemed to present no major obstacle—one could surely get one’s bearings by peeping through the twigs and interstices?—until one ventured inside. Then there were alleys that doubled back on themselves, and culs-de-sac tantalizingly finishing against the outer hedge or a thick inner clump. Once Judith chose a right turn while David went to the left: it took a great deal of retracing steps and hallooing before they came face to face again and she rushed into his arms.

      ‘Nobody,’ he said: ‘nobody like you in the whole world.’

      Once conquered, the ingenuities of the maze rarely perplexed again, Judith could soon find her way without fail to the crumbling ruin at its centre: the fragmentary wall of a small chapel, with a narrow stone outbuilding set against it, in a fair state of preservation.

      ‘All that’s left of an old priory,’ СКАЧАТЬ