Cashelmara (105 page)

I had to see my mother. I wanted desperately to escape outside, but I couldn’t leave the house until I had seen her.

I want to write about what happened when I saw her, but it’s very difficult. Many years have passed since that day. I’m living in a different world, even in a different century, but still I don’t want to think about that moment when I walked into my mother’s room and heard her speak for the first time since Drummond’s death.

“Get out of my sight! You killed him just as surely as if you’d stabbed him yourself, and don’t dare lie to me by saying you didn’t deliberately plan his death. I never want to see you again.”

Yes, she said all those things to me, and I can still see her face as she said them.

“I did it all for you, Mama,” I said, but she wasn’t listening. She was saying over and over again how much she had loved David.

“… but he found out,” I heard her say. “He tricked me. Poor David, I’m sure he thought he was being so clever. He’d invented this preposterous story. He said I must save myself while I could, because one day Patrick was going to return and indict Maxwell for attempted murder. I couldn’t think what on earth he meant! I was hopelessly confused. I said, ‘But Patrick’s dead!’ and David—poor silly David, who loved those ridiculous detective stories so much—David said, ‘You never saw the body, did you? One of the servants saw Drummond poisoning the cordial and Patrick was warned in time.’ Oh, if only I’d stopped to think, but I flew into a panic, and before I could stop myself I was saying, ‘But the poison wasn’t in the cordial—I put it in the poteen!’ ‘
You
put it in the poteen!’ said David, and I saw that he had expected me to say that Maxwell had done it. Dear God, I don’t know who was more appalled, David or I. Eventually he said he’d keep my secret, but of course it was impossible for me to let the matter rest. I knew he’d tell Thomas, and Thomas is so hard and … unsympathetic. I suddenly realized my whole future was at stake again, Maxwell’s and mine, just as it was when Patrick tried to claim the children and drive us out. It would have been the end of everything if that had happened, because Maxwell would have left and I would have been quite alone without any of the children to love. You do understand, don’t you, Ned? I didn’t want to kill anyone, you see. It was simply that I couldn’t have endured a future without Maxwell and the children. That was all it was.”

She looked at me, then looked away quickly, as if I somehow personified those unendurable fears.

“I shall be better soon,” she said presently in a more natural voice. “I feel better already. I’m sorry I said all those dreadful things to you when you came into the room. I know I must have seemed quite irrational, but I’m calm again now, as you see, and I know I can be very strong. I’ve survived all sorts of dreadful things in the past, and I expect I shall survive this. Maxwell said once I was the bravest woman he’d ever met.”

I mentioned a nursing home, a quiet place in the English countryside where she could recuperate from the shock while receiving the best possible care and attention.

“Oh no, that won’t be necessary,” she said quickly. “It’s sweet of you to suggest it, darling, but there’s no need for me to leave Cashelmara. I couldn’t bear to leave the children, you see. At least, even though I no longer have Maxwell, I still have them.”

I told her that I thought the most important thing at present was that she should receive good medical care.

“I don’t need medical care,” she said. “Why do you keep talking about a nursing home? Oh, I suppose you’re afraid I might commit suicide now Maxwell’s dead. But I wouldn’t do that. Suicide’s such an act of cowardice, I’ve always thought, and I’m so brave. Maxwell always said I was brave.”

“I know you are, Mama,” I said. “You’re brave enough to rest for a few weeks in a nursing home, and then when your nerves are better you’ll be brave enough to make a fresh start. I have every confidence in you.”

She smiled uncertainly. “A fresh start?”

“Yes, I thought I would buy you a little house in England—some village in Surrey or Hampshire, perhaps. I know you always liked being in England. You wouldn’t be lonely because of course I’d engage a nice companion to look after you, and perhaps you could even have a nurse living there too in case you felt unwell from time to time.”

“Oh darling, how kind, but I really couldn’t impose on your generosity like that—such an expense—and besides, John would so hate to leave the garden here.”

“I was going to ask you about John. Do you think you could spare him to live with us? I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have John to organize the garden for me.”

“But I …” She checked herself. She couldn’t look at me. At last all she said was “I’ll miss Johnny so much. But I’ll still have the girls, won’t I?”

I didn’t answer.

After a long pause she said, “You’re going to take the children away from me. You’re not going to let me have them.”

“It would be a temporary arrangement, Mama. At present you’re unwell, and I’m offering to look after them until you feel better.”

“I’m not giving them up!” she said fiercely. “I’d rather die!”

“Would you?” I said. “You mean I killed Drummond for nothing and you’re prepared to go to the gallows?”

She went chalk-white. Then she lost control of herself and began to rage at me. I said nothing, and at last she stopped. That was when I saw how strong she was, and as I watched her draw back from the brink of hysteria I knew that one day in the very distant future she would recover from her sickness and become herself again.

“Will you come and see me?” she whispered at last when she was calm.

“Of course I will, Mama,” I said. “I shall come every year to visit you and I shall write to you every week.”

Tears streaked her face. “And the children … grandchildren …”

“You’ll see them all again,” I said, “when you’re well.”

She managed to dry her tears, but when she looked at me again there was an odd, fearful expression in her eyes.

“What is it, Mama?” I said gently.

“You’re not Ned any more,” she said, “and yet you’re not a stranger either. I saw you long ago, long, long ago when I was only a child and Marguerite was seventeen. I was always a little frightened of you, and now at last I know why.”

I stooped and kissed her. “You’re very tired and overwrought, Mama. Try and sleep some more.”

“I’m not mad,” she said. “I know you think I am but I’m not.”

“You’ve survived, Mama. I’ve survived. Nothing else matters at present except that.” I kissed her again, then left her.

It was dark in the corridor, and the hall was clammy with memory. I stumbled down the stairs, ran across the marble floor and looked into three rooms before I realized I was searching for Kerry. I was in the morning room when I glanced out of the window and saw her. She was playing with the baby on the lawn, and beyond her the wide border was brilliant with summer blooms.

I waved as I opened the side door, and when she waved back gaily I escaped from the gloom of the house at last and walked into the sunlight of my father’s garden.

Susan Howatch is a bestselling British novelist who has published twenty books ranging from murder mysteries to family sagas. Her work deals with complex relationships in a range of settings and explores themes revolving around sex, power, ambition, forgiveness, redemption, and love.

Howatch was born in a small town in Surrey, England, on July 14, 1940. Her father was a stockbroker who was killed in World War II. She grew up an only child in an era of post-war austerity, but had a happy childhood, particularly enjoying her time at Sutton High School in the London suburbs. In 1961, she obtained a law degree from King’s College London, then a part of London University, but dropped out of a law career in order to write. She had started writing novels when she was twelve and had been submitting manuscripts since the age of seventeen.

Eventually Howatch despaired of being published in England, and in 1963 she emigrated to New York, where—almost at once—her novel
The Dark Shore
was accepted for publication. In 1964, she met and married Joseph Howatch, an American artist and writer. (He passed away in 2011.) They had one daughter, Antonia, who was born in 1970.

The Dark Shore
was followed by five other short novels, which, with one exception, were all twentieth-century whodunits or suspense stories. Then, in 1971, Howatch published
Pennmaric
, a family saga that became her first international bestseller. Using multiple narrators, Howatch follows the fortunes of the Castallack family from 1890 to 1945 and shows what happens when a grand passion leads to dire results for all concerned. This novel was based on the true story of the early Plantagenet kings of England, a story that Howatch updates to modern times.

She took another Plantagenet slice of history for her second family saga,
Cashelmara
(updated to the mid-nineteenth century). This novel was followed by
The Wheel of Fortune,
based on the last Plantagenets and updated to the twentieth century. However, although the Plantagenet history concerns only one family, the three novels are not interrelated and describe different families in different settings and eras.

In contrast to these stories, Howatch’s novel
The Rich Are Different
is not a family saga. It tells a topical story about freewheeling cutthroat bankers in New York and London during the 1920s and 1930s, and is based on the life of Cleopatra, her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her final battle with Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. The sequel,
Sins of the Fathers
, describes what has happened to the survivors.

By the 1980s Howatch’s novels had sold millions of copies and had been translated into many languages. She had also returned to Europe. In 1975, she and her husband separated (they were never divorced) and she and Antonia lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before moving to England in 1980. Eventually, they spent three years in Salisbury and then settled in London, where Howatch lived from 1987 until 2010.

While in Salisbury, the cathedral inspired Howatch to write the Starbridge series, six related novels about three very different Church of England clergymen and their families. The novels explored many ideas—religious, mystical, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and psychological—and focused with a new intensity on the subjects of obsessive love, addiction to power, the evil of violence, and the redemptive nature of forgiveness and love. One of the books,
Scandalous Risks
, won a literary prize, and the launch of the final novel took place at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Howatch used money from the Starbridge series to set up a lectureship at Cambridge University in theology and natural science, and is now a member of the Cambridge Guild of Benefactors as well as the Salisbury Cathedral Confraternity.

Her last three books, the St. Benet’s trilogy, form a spin-off from the Starbridge series and are set in London in the late twentieth century. They explore the borderlands where Christianity meets medicine, psychology, and the paranormal.

Howatch retired after publishing the final St. Benet’s novel,
The Heartbreaker
(2004), and now helps out with her family in Surrey.

Susan Howatch, age four, with a friend in 1944.

The first page of the penultimate draft of
The Dark Shore
, Howatch’s first published novel (printed in the United States in 1965). The final draft was typed.
The Dark Shore
was written in England, and Howatch sent for it after she immigrated to America in 1964.