Joss sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘She’s going to die.’
‘Lyn – ’
‘I can’t bear it if she dies.’ There were tears running down Lyn’s cheeks.
‘She won’t die.’ Joss put her head in her hands and took a deep unsteady breath. ‘She won’t, Lyn. She’s going to be all right. I’m sure she is.’ She had to be. She couldn’t cope, she realised suddenly, if her mum, the woman who had been her mother all her remembered life, was not there in the background to support her. She looked down at Tom. Suddenly engrossed in his toys his wails had ceased as he examined a large yellow beaker and she was overwhelmed by a sudden rush of love for him. It was love that made everyone so vulnerable, in the end. She sighed again. That was what made families such a joy and such a heart-break.
Gerald Andrews drew his cup towards him and raised it with difficulty in arthritic fingers. He beamed at Joss however as he got it at last to his lips. ‘My dear, it was good of you to ask me to tea. You don’t know how much I have longed to come to see this house. It seems extraordinary that I should have written a history of it and yet never set foot across the threshold.’
The history in question, a slim booklet in pale buff cardboard covers, lay between them on the kitchen table. On the front an eighteenth-century woodcut showed the front of the house with the beech tree perhaps half as big as it now was.
‘I couldn’t believe my luck when I found myself talking to David Tregarron and he said he knew you!’ He picked up a biscuit.
‘It’s lucky for me too.’ Joss was dying to look through the book. ‘I have so much catching up to do. I know so little of my family.’
He nodded. ‘I wrote to your mother several times asking if I might come and see her when I was writing that, but I understand she had not been well. Miss Sutton wrote back and each time said it was not convenient. Then your mother left and it was too late.’
‘You lived in the area a long time?’ Unable to resist it any longer Joss picked up the pamphlet and opened it. The first chapter was called Early Days.
‘About ten years. I compiled some half dozen of these little books. All on the notable houses of the district. The Old Rectory, Pilgrim Hall, Pickersticks House …’
‘Pilgrim Hall?’ Joss looked up. ‘My father’s home?’
‘Your grandfather’s home. John Duncan was appointed guardian to your mother and her brother Robert when their mother and father died – I suppose it was inevitable that his son should fall in love with Laura – he kept both houses going for a while, then after Robert died he took Laura back to live at Pilgrim Hall with them. This place was practically derelict for a bit, but of course it was Laura’s inheritance and they couldn’t sell. John Duncan came into a lot of money, late in life – an inheritance as far as I remember from some relative who had lived in the Far East. He was a strange man, John. He hated Belheddon and Pilgrim Hall with equal loathing. He settled money on the two children, Philip and his ward, Laura, and went to live abroad. His wife, Lady Sarah, stayed on for several years, until the children got married, then she sold Pilgrim Hall which is much smaller than this, and went off to join him. He never came back, not even for the wedding. It was a frightful scandal at the time. People locally thought he’d gone off with a dusky lady,’ he gave a delighted chuckle. ‘I don’t somehow think Lady Sarah would have stood for that. She would have beaten any rivals to death with her umbrella. Powerful lady, your grandmother on the Duncan side.’
Joss smiled. ‘They died abroad, did they?’
‘John did, I believe. He had vowed never to come back to England. I never found out why. Some kind of quarrel with the family, I suppose. After he died, Lady Sarah came home. She even tried to buy back Pilgrim Hall. That must have been in the sixties, but by then they had built a huge annex and turned it into a country house hotel. I met her once, because I had already published the booklet on Pilgrim Hall. She wanted a copy for herself. It must have been the mid to late sixties because your father, Philip, was already dead – that dreadful accident with the horse – so sad – but I expect you know all about that. She suggested that I write about Belheddon. She was very scathing about the place. Thought it was cursed. She thought Laura was mad to stay here, but Laura seemed to be unable to tear herself away. I can remember her telling me that she was fixated on the house. She would walk about on her own, even at night, for hours, sometimes talking to herself.’ He glanced at Joss. ‘She thought Laura had finally lost her mind when she gave you up for adoption. The whole village took it very badly. Your mother was virtually ostracised afterwards. Lady Sarah said she would never speak to her again, and not long after that she moved somewhere up north.’ He hesitated. ‘It was her theory that the house was cursed which attracted my attention. I don’t normally believe in these things,’ he smiled almost apologetically, ‘but this place has had more than its share of tragedy by any standards.’
‘So many of the children die.’ Unconsciously Joss put her hands protectively over her stomach.
He frowned. ‘You shouldn’t perhaps read too much into infants’ deaths. Such high mortality is profoundly shocking, but remember, in every age but our own such things were normal.’
‘I suppose so.’ She was staring at the booklet in her hands:
Four major rivers find their sources in Belheddon Ridge, a sandy, gravel escarpment which cuts across the clays of East Anglia in an east west slash through the landscape, visible for miles, she read. Such a place was an obvious candidate for early settlement and indeed there is archaeological evidence of an iron age camp under what is now the west lawn of the house …