Authors: Mary Stewart
Rose Cottage
| Rose Cottage |
| Mary Stewart |
| 2011 |
It is the summer of 1947 and Kate Herrick, widowed in the war, returns to her childhood home in Todhall to retrieve some family papers before Rose Cottage is sold. Rose Cottage, a tiny thatched dwelling with fragrant roses in the garden, is unchanged and the villagers seem friendly. But there is evidence of a break-in at the cottage and then her nearest neighbours – three elderly ladies from what the villagers call ‘Witches’ Corner’ – come with tales of night-time prowlers in the cottage garden and even ghosts. The solution to these mysteries sheds new light on Kate’s past, and offers her a rosy future.
MARY STEWART
Praise for Mary Steward and Rose Cottage
First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Mary Stewart 1997
The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN: 9781444715101
Book ISBN: 9781444715095
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To the gentle shades of Henry, George,
Patsy, Nip, Rosy, Maudie and Muffin,
and all the other friends whom I met again in
my stroll down Memory Lane.
Praise for Mary Stewart and
Rose Cottage
:
‘A rattling good yarn’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A sunset touch … a gentle love story … a happy return’
The Times
‘She set the bench mark for pace, suspense and romance – with a great dollop of escapism as the icing’ Elizabeth Buchan
‘A comfortable chair and a Mary Stewart: total heaven. I’d rather read her than most other authors.’ Harriet Evans
It is 1947, a calm, still day of June. On the wide spreading moorland the ling is dark and as yet unflowering, but the bell heather is out, and bees are busy. Sunday afternoon peace. A grouse calls somewhere, safe still for a few weeks from men and guns.
The weather has been fine, and the hillside is dry, but a little way down the slope the cotton-grass shows fluffy-white among the reeds and dwarf thickets of bog myrtle. A tiny burn drips and trickles down to where the bog water gathers in dark brown pools, to soak away gently towards the river that winds along the base of the strath.
Strathbeg, the valley is called on the maps, the small glen. To its few inhabitants it is just ‘the glen’, and the big house, Strathbeg Lodge, to be glimpsed among its sheltering trees some way below, is simply ‘the House’. Built originally as a shooting lodge, it has belonged for some years to the Brandons, who used to come here each year in summer from their home in the north of
England. From a distance the Lodge is imposing, with its baronial turreting and stepped roofing, its well-grown timber and its lawns reaching to the river with its series of salmon pools, but from nearer can be seen the signs of the neglect enforced by the recent war; the woodwork could do with a coat of paint, the rhones all too obviously need to be cleaned out, the lawns are no longer lawns, but pastures cropped by sheep. It is still not possible, two years after the end of the war, to find the labour and the materials necessary to restore the place to good order, but the family make the best of it, and the best, in fact, is very pleasant. After the traumas and shortages of the war years the glen is a haven of peace, and a steady supply of milk, eggs, fish, mutton and venison goes a long way to make up for threadbare carpets and unmended pipes and the eccentricities of the plumbing.
The family, what is left of it, came here to stay in 1940, when their English home was requisitioned by the RAF. Lady Brandon settled in with her married daughter and the daughter’s two children. Sir James spent his war in London, only travelling north for brief leaves. The son, Gilbert, who was unmarried, was killed at El Alamein. Now that the war is over the son-in-law, Major Drew, is home, and taking over on behalf of his own small son, William, who is the heir. Sir James is home, too, but feels his age these days – he is well into his sixties – and the family seems to have settled happily enough into the quiet glen. Tod Hall, their home in England, having housed a series of high-spirited airmen dedicated to living the brief span of
their doomed young lives to the full, has suffered so much damage that Sir James, without too much regret, has decided to use the compensatory cash to turn it into an hotel, and himself retire for good into the peace of Strathbeg. A peace which, at this moment, one could believe never to have been broken.
The burn, lapsing in whispers, is, apart from the bees, the only sound in the day. Both are drowned in the sudden
hear ye, hear ye
preliminary whistle of a curlew, and then the sky is filled, it seems, with the beautiful long, liquid call that is perhaps the loveliest, the most thrilling of all birds’ songs. ‘The silver chain of sound’ was how George Meredith described the lark’s singing, and poet after poet has added praise to the nightingale; but it would take all the poets, from Wordsworth down, to do justice to the curlew’s call. I, certainly, cannot describe it, other than to say that every time that liquid gold pours and bubbles through the sky, my skin furs up like a cat’s and my throat tightens with tears.
This was the effect that the song was having on the young woman who sat near the brow of the hill. She sat at ease on the heather, apparently with no other thought than to listen to the curlew’s song. She was a tall girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in a tweed skirt that looked expensive, and a silk shirt. Her hair was dark and fashionably cut, slightly ruffled in the shifting hilltop air. Her eyes – dark, too – were fixed on the curlew which, suddenly falling silent, was gliding to the heather some two hundred yards away. It would land, she knew, well short of its objective, and make a long
and circuitous approach to the hiding place of its lurking, all-but-invisible young. It had, while pouring out that glorious, heart-piercing song, most certainly had both beady eyes on her, and would be watching her still.
As the thought touched her, she saw the foolish, long-beaked head pop up against the skyline, then vanish again swiftly, as no doubt the scuttling babies were herded away to safety. She smiled, and with the smile her face – which in repose was perhaps too serious, too set with some sort of private effort at self-rule – lighted, as she had been told at various times that it did, to a kind of beauty.
As she had been told
. As I suppose I may not say for myself, since the girl (who was getting to her feet and brushing the heather dust from her skirt, in preparation for setting off downhill) was myself. Myself when young, some fifty years ago. Mrs Kate Herrick, aged twenty-four, widowed, well-to-do, and here in Strathbeg to visit her grandmother, who was employed as cook at the House.
Somewhere deep in the heather the grouse called again, ‘Come back! Come back!’ And indeed Mrs Kate Herrick, who had been Kathy Welland, and who had helped in the kitchen and sometimes in the gardens of the House, had at last, and after more than four years, come back.
I looked at my watch. Gran would be awake now and, after the comings and goings of the morning, there would be time at last for that private talk. I had not arrived till late on the previous night, and still did
not know why she had so urgently summoned me north ‘to have a real talk. No, not on the phone, hen, I’ll tell you when you come.’ Then as an afterthought: ‘You do remember Rose Cottage, don’t you?’
Of course I remembered Rose Cottage. It was one of the cottages on the Brandons’ English estate, and lay some two miles from the village of Todhall. My grandfather as a young man had been a gardener at the Hall, and one summer, when the family (as the Brandons were locally known) went north to their newly purchased Scottish estate, he went with them, to help with the recovery and re-making of the long-neglected garden. There he met and fell in love with Mary Campbell, the kitchen maid. They were married the following spring, in Todhall. A year later their daughter was born. In an uncharacteristically poetic moment they called her Lilias, a name taken from one of the portraits of long-dead Brandons that hung at the Hall. Lilias was my mother. I barely remembered her, but the memory was all delightful. Deliciously pretty, full of joyous spirits and invariably kind, she danced her way up from scullery maid to the heights of housemaiding at the Hall with a light heart and, as was found to my cost, what her eighteenth-century namesake would have called a light skirt.
I had never been told who my father was. My mother was of course banished from service at the Hall when she was found to be pregnant. Her parents, defying the customs of the time, took her in, and cared lovingly for her and, in due time, for her baby, while the Brandons,
without a word on the subject, left their gardener and their cook to manage their own affairs. Which showed their good sense, since cooks as good as my grandmother were even in those days hard to come by.
When I was five years old, my grandfather died. I could barely remember him; a comfortable, earth-smelling giant who when my mother was elsewhere used to take me up to the walled garden and let me play – ‘helping Granddad,’ he called it – in the back premises behind the glasshouses. Soon after his death Gran’s elder sister came from Scotland ‘to keep her company’. This was Aunt Betsy, and with her came change.
Aunt Betsy was religious. Her religion, which kept her very strictly in the paths of righteousness, also obliged her to see that other people trod the same thorny path. Things which had never been said before, were said now, and frequently. (So much I did hear, later, from my grandmother.) Rose Cottage was no longer a place of kindness, but of Godliness with a capital G. My mother stood it for a year, then one night, soon after my sixth birthday, she left.