Chapter 3 #2
They walked a little way.
"It does not signify what I think, my lady. What signifies is that you are protected. Even from your own choices." He looked ahead of them at the house. "That is your father's will. And I am his man."
Amelia said nothing at all the rest of the way up.
◆◆◆
They came into Ashcombe after dark.
The lanes narrowed as they climbed, hedges rising black on either side, and the lamps threw their two weak circles out ahead of the horses and showed nothing but wet road and the wall of leaves. Benjamin sat forward with his hand on the doorframe and watched the country come.
He had not seen it in twenty-three years and he found he knew it anyway. The dip where the water always stood. The milestone with its face gone. The turn where the lane bent left around a stand of beech that his father had refused to have cut because his mother liked the sound they made.
The beeches were still there. Taller.
Then the road ran alongside a wall, and behind the wall a great expanse of lawn came open in the dark, and lights — three windows lit on the ground floor of a house set well back among its trees. Whitfield, that would be. He remembered a name and very little else.
A man was standing at the edge of the lawn where it met the lane.
He had a lantern down at his side and he was not working.
He was simply standing, watching the carriage come up, and as it drew level Benjamin saw him properly for a moment in the lamplight — an older man, grey, weathered, with the particular stillness of somebody who has been waiting to see what a thing turns out to be.
Their eyes met.
The man did not nod. He did not look away either. He watched the carriage go past him and Benjamin turned in his seat and watched him back, and the last thing he saw before the hedge closed in was the lantern being lifted, slowly, to shoulder height — not in greeting. To see better.
Benjamin faced front again.
"That did not take long," he said.
"No, sir." Hale did not turn his head. "They will know at breakfast."
The gate of Russell Hall was open, because there was no longer a gate.
Two stone piers stood at the top of the drive with nothing between them but grass, and the ironwork lay flat in the nettles where it had come off its hinges and stayed.
The drive itself was gone to turf. The carriage went up it almost silently and the horses did not like it and Hale had to speak to them twice.
At the top the limes had grown into each other over the track, and they went the last forty yards through a tunnel of dead branches that closed out the sky.
Then the trees opened, and the house was there.
Benjamin got down before the wheels had entirely stopped.
It stood black against a sky barely lighter than itself, and for a moment it was only a shape — long, low-shouldered, the roofline broken in two places against the stars. Then Hale swung the lamp round and the light went up the front of it and Benjamin saw what the years had done.
Ivy had taken the whole southern face. Not creeping — taken, a solid mass of it two feet deep, running up over the sills and into the window openings, and where it had reached the eaves it had gone in under them and pried the boards apart. The stonework beneath was black with wet.
Nine windows on the front. Four still had glass. The rest were open squares with the frames rotted soft, and one had lost its frame entirely and left a raw hole in the wall with the lintel sagging over it.
The steps had lifted. Grass in every joint, and at the foot of them a drift of dead leaves and rubbish two feet deep that had been accumulating since before he could grow a beard.
He walked up to the door.
The oak had gone silver-grey and split along the grain and there were black streaks running down from the hinges where the iron had wept rust for so many winters.
Above it, cut into the stone, the crest was still there.
Weather had eaten the fine work — the motto beneath was gone entirely, worn smooth — but the lion was legible, and Benjamin stood and looked up at it with the lamplight moving across it and did not say anything at all.
Somewhere off to the right, high up, something loose was moving in the wind. A slate, or a length of guttering. It knocked, and stopped, and knocked again.
He put his hand flat on the door.
The wood gave slightly under his palm, soft as cork, and he felt it and took his hand away.
"Twenty-three years," Hale said, behind him. "It is a wonder there is anything left standing."
"It is stone," Benjamin said. "Stone does not mind.
It is the roof that matters and the roof has gone in two places.
" He looked up along the line of it. "West end first. That is why the ivy is worst on that side — the water has been coming down inside the wall for years and the ivy has been drinking it. "
He turned around.
"Thank you," he said. "For the road, and for the rest of it."
Hale did not answer at once. He was looking past Benjamin's shoulder at the black doorway and the black windows and the ivy moving very slightly in the dark.
"Captain," he said. "I know we have slept in worse places than a house. I have slept in a ditch with three inches of water in it and been glad of the ditch." He shifted his grip on the lamp. "But are you certain you will sleep here? Tonight? Maybe we should go the local inn."
"Do not tell me my mother's house has put the wind up you."
"It has given me a chill I did not have an hour ago," Hale said, with dignity. "I would want my rifle to walk in there. I would want it in my hands and not on my shoulder."
Benjamin laughed.
"I shall be perfectly well." He clapped the man's arm. "Go on. You have got me here breathing, which was the whole of your orders, and I imagine the General will want to hear you say so. Your business is finished."
"Mm." Hale looked back down the drive, in the direction they had come, toward Whitfield. "After that fellow with the lantern, sir, I am not so sure it is."
"The gardener?"
"He did not look like a gardener. Who was standing at the lane at ten o'clock at night with a light, doing nothing at all, and had a good long look at our faces.
" Hale set his jaw. "I may have to come back this way.
With one or two of the others. Let the town have a look at what it is dealing with. "
"Hale."
"It has been known to settle an argument before it starts, sir."
"These are farmers and gentlemen," Benjamin said. "Not one man in this town has ever been shot at. They have threatening looks and, at the very best, sharp tongues. That is the whole of the arsenal."
Hale considered that, and then began — reluctantly — to grin.
"Aye," he said. "Now that you put it so, they ought to be the ones worrying."
"They ought."
"Still." The grin faded off him and something more careful came in behind it. "I would not go shouting your surname about for a while yet. Not until you have got the measure of the place."
"I shall take your advice under consideration."
"That is what you say when you have no intention of taking it whatsoever, sir. I have heard you say it to a colonel."
"Good night, Hale."
Hale snorted, and swung himself up, and turned the horses in the weeds with some difficulty. At the top of the drive he pulled up and looked back.
"Sir. You have only to send."
"I know it."
Then the carriage went down through the tunnel of limes, and the sound of it thinned out and was gone, and Benjamin was alone on the steps of his mother's house with the lamp Hale had left him and a slate knocking somewhere above in the dark.
He did not go inside.
He stood a while, and let his eyes get used to it, and then he walked round the side of the house instead, through knee-high grass that soaked him to the thigh in twenty paces.
The garden had not disappeared. That was the strange thing. It had simply gone on without anyone.
He could still see it. There was the line of the yew hedge his mother had planted the summer he turned six, and it was fifteen feet high now and had not been cut in a generation, and it had gone shaggy and enormous and had swallowed the gate that used to stand in it.
There was the gravel walk, still there under the moss — he could feel it under his boots, a hardness in the wet ground running dead straight where nothing else ran straight.
There was the fountain. Dry. Full of leaves, with a young ash tree growing out of the basin, taller than he was.
He stopped at the corner of the terrace where the balustrade had come down and lay in pieces in the long grass, and he looked back at the black bulk of the house, and up at the broken roofline against the stars.
Roses. There had been roses along this wall.
He had a memory of his mother out here at the end of a summer day with her sleeves pushed up and a basket at her feet, and his father standing on the terrace with a glass in his hand telling her that a duchess had a gardener for that, and his mother not answering, not even looking up, and his father giving it a minute and then setting the glass down and coming down the steps to hold the basket for her.
The roses were still along the wall. Six feet out from it now, a great thorny thicket gone entirely to briar, arching over into the grass and rooting where it touched.
Benjamin stood there a long time.
Then he set the lamp down on a fallen block of the balustrade and rolled his sleeves, and reached into the nearest of it, and began — carefully, one at a time, with no tools and no light to speak of and absolutely no reason to do it in the middle of the night — to pull the dead wood out.
He worked for perhaps a quarter of an hour. His hands were bleeding by the end of it and the pile he had made was pitifully small against the size of the thing.
He looked at what he had done. Then he looked up at the house.
"Right," he said.
He picked up the lamp and went inside.
◆◆◆
The house went quiet by half past nine, and by ten Amelia had the door locked and the lamp turned low and her sleeves pushed back.