The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton Read Online Free PDF Page B

will have seen it but this is the thinking behind it.’
    William flung back a baize cover with a magician’s flourish, to reveal two drawings. The largest was a plan of the house and garden. Paths, terraces and kitchen garden were all drawn to scale. Between the rear terrace lawn and the ha-ha was the new maze, geometric and drawn in dark pencil. A second, straight-on view had been done as if the viewer were standing on the far side of the ha-ha in years to come. The maze flourished, with Easton Hall in the background beneath a summer sky with small clouds. Flowering shrubs bloomed along a path leading to the arched maze entrance. Two marble statues, carrying urns, marked the way in.
    ‘Naiads,’ said William. ‘Water nymphs, given that the power for the house and the beauty of the gardens all come from water. They symbolise the meeting of old and new.’
    ‘Marvellous,’ Laurence said.
    William’s drawings were pretty but he was fascinated by the diagram of the maze itself and found himself wanting to follow its sinuous lines with a finger.
    ‘Well, none of us here will live to see the maze as mature as I’ve drawn it here. But it’s a bit of encouragement ... for Lydia mostly.’
    ‘How long...?’
    ‘Fifty years. Certainly it will take that long until the walls become impenetrable. But if all the plants take, it should look fairly substantial in ten to fifteen. It needs a lot of watering. By the time the fatherless children of Easton are old, they should be looking at a fine memorial. By the start of the next century, it may be a fact of life and nobody will remember the events that inspired its commission. But even now the intention is clear.’
    William laughed.
    ‘Foolish, really. Immortality in a well-pruned hedge.’
    He backed his chair away.
    ‘Before the war I designed buildings. Small buildings mostly. I was, as I believed then, right at the start of my career, which I fully expected to be a triumph.’ He beamed. ‘Or I would be asked to tackle tiny details on some important project. As a student I worked under C.W. Stephens on Harrods—my bit is the skylight over the staff tea room. But this feels different, a collaboration between me and nature.’
    He was watching Laurence to see whether he understood.
    ‘And not just because it is something, frankly. It’s come after years of doing nothing, with Eleanor and me both pretending that I would work again, because the second we conceded I might not was the moment we would condemn ourselves to a narrow life in a few tiny rooms—a cripple with no legs and the cripple’s nurse, not the promising architect and his wife the bluestocking fighter for political change.’ He paused, looked away. ‘Now, with this: escape.’
    ‘This is going to be a long project?’ Laurence said, with an awkwardly overemphasised sweep of his arm to embrace the plans and the lists, knowing he had cut William off. They had been young officers in the same war, the same area of France. They had both survived, which was more than many had done, but, apart from a bad back, all Laurence’s wounds had been to his mind; he could walk into the future when he was ready. William’s life, and Eleanor’s, had been irrevocably changed and diminished by events.
    William remained silent, sucking at his pipe. Small sounds seeped into Laurence’s consciousness: the rattle of waterpipes, a dog barking, right at the edge of audible sound. Someone walking about on an upper floor and coming downstairs. Laurence smelled soap and steam near by. Someone, Maggie or the cook Mrs Hill perhaps, was doing the washing. The footsteps drew nearer. William looked up just as Eleanor looked round the door.
    ‘Hello. Is this strictly a chaps’ conversation or can anyone join?’
    William’s face lit up. ‘Gardening, actually, we’re on to gardening.’
    As Eleanor came through the door, Frances followed her. Eleanor smiled, ‘I love this room,’ she said. ‘It feels properly old.’
    ‘It has