The Mountain of Gold by J. D. Davies Read Free Book Online Page B

and Flanders, constituted a vast dynasty of tedium. It was less true of the Quintons, a line that was almost extinct; but even I had a living mother, a brother, a sister and an uncle (as well as innumerable cousins on my mother's and grandmother's sides of the family, including even a few who were both sane and not French).
    Francis nodded. 'Quite, Mistress. But the Master has written to tell me that he has been conducting some discreet researches into Lady De Vaux's history. He has no conclusions as yet, but as he writes in a letter I received only today, neither does she. No conclusion to any branch of her family's history, for there seems to be no family.'
    The juxtaposition of Master and Mistress confused me momentarily. Then I realised that 'the Master' could only be my uncle Tristram, the Master of Mauleverer. So Tris was looking into our new countess's past.
    I looked at my wife, and at my friend Francis Gale, and knew in that moment that I was looking upon the beginnings of a conspiracy. My heart cried out to me to join it, there and then, but my head urged different counsels. You have not spoken with your brother, said my head, and after all, it is his marriage. My heart protested that it might indeed be his marriage, but that it was my inheritance, for good or ill, sought or unsought; my duty to the past and future of the House of Quinton. Besides, my brother was far away, inspecting the bleak and barely economical estate in Northumberland that a complex marriage-settlement had brought to our family a century or so before. That may be, said my head, but neither have you spoken with the two who urge this marriage more than any others. This was so, but I could hardly seek an audience of Our Sovereign Lord the King to demand to know why he wished my brother to marry a suspected murderous whore. But as for the other...
    As if summoned by angels or demons, the state coach of the Earls of Ravensden thundered into the stable yard beyond the library window, an unjustifiably extravagant team of six horses pulling it home. Two young Barcocks rushed forward to the door that bore our ancient blazon of arms, opened it, and helped a tall but stooped old woman to descend. Still clad in mourning black, some eighteen years after her husband's death, the Lady Anne, Dowager Countess of Ravensden, looked about her with a satisfied air and made her way slowly towards our old house, bent almost double, her two sticks striking the cobbles and giving her the unsettling sight and sound of a vast and ancient spider, moving relentlessly towards its next fly.
    My mother had returned.
     
    The crooked hand extended toward me, and I leaned forward to kiss it. Mother was seated in her room in the former monks' infirmary, a little way down the corridor from the one which Cornelia and I shared. Thus she, too, had a view over to the ruins of the abbey quire, but the demolition of part of the wall by Henry VIII's agents when the monastery was dissolved meant that she had an uninterrupted view down to the grave of her husband. James Quinton, Earl of Ravensden for less than half a year, lay there, forever in her view: poet, warrior, fallen legend of the Cavalier cause, and the father who had died when I was only five. My mother's chair was carefully positioned so that she did not have to look down upon the adjacent grave of my grandfather Matthew, the previous earl, whom she had hated with a passion equal to that with which she had loved his son. Or as I thought she had loved him until I had heard the enigmatic words of a dying man, in Scotland the year before.
    'Matthew,' she said. 'You should have sent Musk or another ahead of you, to inform us of your coming.'
    'There was much to do, mother. There always is when a ship pays off.' This was invention, for the end of the Wessex's cruise was the first time I had paid off a ship in the normal way. My first command had been wrecked on the coast of Kinsale, my second almost blown apart in the Scottish