Death in Summer Read Free Page B

all thought is shaded by sorrow and by guilt it is reassurance of a kind that the house seems greater than its passing occupants, that effortlessly it oncecarried the mores of one dying century into the next, has been part monument part deity to its generations, benevolent in sunshine, bequeathing gloom through the grimness of its aspect in certain weathers. Secrets are locked into its fabric, its windows seeing and yet blind. His secrets are there too, Thaddeus knows, to be left behind one day. His wife left none, for secrets were not her way.
    But given to romantic speculation, Letitia sometimes wondered if their child would be taken from the house a bride: waiting for the response to his advertisement, Thaddeus remembers that. He wonders, himself, about the brides of the past, not knowing that when the cherry trees rose hardly six feet above the earth the first bride drove with her father to the country church of St Nicholas and experienced a moment of doubt on the way to the altar, where Nevil James Limewell waited to make her his wife. There were more than a hundred guests at Quincunx House that day, with extra servants hired. The photographs taken found their way long afterwards into a collector’s accumulation of such material, these nameless people of the past given an incidental place in the history of photography. The foxterriers of the household ran among the bridesmaids and the wedding guests, and were made to beg for crumbs of cake. In the bedroom that had always been hers, while changing into the clothes she had chosen for her wedding journey, the bride experienced her second moment of doubt. Yet for months, she told herself – almost a year – she had longed for the proposal and had not hesitated when it came. She was to live in Shropshire and would be happy: this latter anticipation she spoke aloud.
Sweet visage, linger with me
, a cousin who was in love with her wrote, secretlythat same evening, in the room that is now the Maidments’ sitting-room.
    It rained in the twilight of the first wedding day, when everything was being set to rights again and spirits were deflated after the celebration. ‘We took Annie Talbot in,’ Augusta Davenant reminded her husband, having held back the necessity for this conversation while all the preparations were under way. ‘We gave her a home. Then this.’ A parlourmaid had run off in the early hours two days ago, taking her clothes and her belongings with her. She did so at the instigation of a local groom, Robert Bantwell, who later deserted her. ‘How fortunate we were with the weather!’ Augusta’s husband responded, seeking a distraction from prolonged talk of the servant’s flight. Vexation between the two developed and for a while there were recriminations. Then children knelt in dressing-gowns to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a drawing-room tradition of that time.
    Three generations later – in the same month that the central cherry tree was cut down when its growth began to spoil the garden – a picture was painted on the nursery floor and is still there now. The rooks that began to nest in the oaks when the house was built have had their generations too, and rooks still claim their branches, building high or low depending on their predictions for the months to come. In the present and the past chaffinches have flown into the drawing-room; once a rabbit came, through the open french windows. Bees have stung in the kitchen and the bedrooms, wasps have nested in chimneys, flies have struggled on flypapers, spiders have experienced the destruction of their cobwebs, workmen have scrawled their names on the bareplaster of walls. There have been thirty-one births and nineteen deaths in the house, swathed infants carried for christening to the church of St Nicholas, the dead conveyed for burial by black-plumed horses, and motor-hearses later.
    By the time Thaddeus was first conscious of his surroundings the days of the Davenants’ enterprise and prosperity were