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'Oh, hell!' Judith muttered with force. 'Why did you let me make a fool of myself? Why didn't you tell me right away?'
'It was sweet of you to take such an interest in my welfare,' he said, grinning, and she could have hit him.
'And I was impressed by your powers of observation; I must tell those guys to be less obvious in future. They're | supposed to be discreet; if events did take a nasty turn their arrival unexpectedly could make all the difference. I rely on the element of surprise.'
'I'll remember that,' said Judith. She was learning a lot about him very quickly; some of it was surprising, but all of it was very illuminating. Was that how Luke timed his raids on unsuspecting companies—discreet observation from a distance followed by a surprise swoop out of the blue?
Very effective, no doubt, and difficult to fight him off once he had arrived, you wouldn't know for a while what had hit you.
Just before they reached Canterbury he turned off on a narrow road which meandered away across the Kent countryside with low hedges on each side and beyond them grassy fields full of black and white cows and elms just coming into leaf; in the orchards in the distance pink blossom made a lacy pattern on the blue sky and beyond the swaying blossom she saw the white cowls of a pair of oasthouses. Luke slowed as they approached a pair of open gates; he swooped through them and headed down a drive bordered with lime trees. The blue car followed and parked at the end of the drive, a stone's throw from the black and white timbered Elizabethan house in front of which Luke had halted.
'Damsels,' he said to Judith; leaning his folded arms across the wheel and watching her as she stared at the house with delight. 'Originally it was called Damsel's Piece, according to the earliest deeds—probably because it was given to somebody's daughter when she got married, a sort of dowry, I suppose. Some time in the eighteenth century they dropped the word Piece and just called it Damsels. My mother has a theory that it was the land which was the dowry, not the house—the house came later.'
She was barely listening; her eye following the crooked line of the roofs, wavy and spotted with green moss, the pink tiles faded by time to a gentle rose. Barley-sugar chimneys twisted upwards; the windows were diamond-latticed, the black beams wandering like the road on which Luke had just driven, the house had a stubborn eccentricity as though determined to draw attention to the fact that it was a remarkable survival from a less uniform age, and the gardens surrounding it were laid out in period with low box hedges around the lush green lawns, yew trees trimmed into shapes here and there and in the distance a little wicker arbour overhung with climbing roses and ivy.
'How romantic!' Judith sighed, looking beyond the garden to the small park which stretched away to a belt of trees on one side and on the other to an obviously ancient red brick wall. 'What a dreamy place; has your mother lived here long?'
'Let me see—nearly ten years now, I suppose. She used to know the people who owned it years ago and when she heard it was on the market she rushed over to buy it at once. She was in love with it when she was just a little girl, I think; she said it was her great dream to live here.'
'I'm not surprised—it's that sort of house, it has magic'
He smiled. 'I've a strong feeling you and my mother are going to get on like a house on fire! Come in and meet her. She'll have heard the car, nothing happens here that she doesn't know about, she'll be waiting for us.'
Judith got out of the car and then saw that the front door stood open and an old woman was walking slowly to meet them. She was tall and very thin with snow-white hair and a wrinkled, sallow face; her dark blue dress blew about in the wind and she hunched her shoulders against it with a cross frown. Judith stared, thinking; no, his mother is nothing like him at all—but then did I really expect to see an immediate resemblance?
'Midday, you said, Luke! That means twelve o'clock to me, I don't know what time you call this, but the clock just struck one and I set that clock by Big Ben on the News at Ten every night, so I know it isn't wrong. If you're going to arrive at one, you should say so and not be so vague. It's very thoughtless of you. We've been very fidgety for the last hour, I can tell you; my legs have almost worn down to the anklebone running up and down stairs to say there hasn't been a phone call and you haven't crashed the car or been hijacked and taken off to South America in a laundry basket. When you specify a time, you should stick to it. If the lamb is ruined don't blame me, you only have yourself to blame!' Without drawing breath she turned and stared at Judith, demanding: 'Who's this, then? That's not your fiancée, she had fair hair. You didn't say you were bringing someone with you, is she staying for lunch? I don't know if there's enough.'
'Of course there is, Fanny,' said Luke, quite unperturbed by the scolding. He kissed her cheek. 'How are you? You look well. I'm sorry we're late, I hope the lamb isn't uneatable. This is Miss Murry, my new personal assistant.’
Judith offered her hand rather nervously under the penetrating stare the old woman gave her. Without taking it Fanny turned and stumped away towards the house, leaving Judith with the realisation that in Fanny's eyes guests did not shake hands with housekeepers. Luke gave her a rueful grin.
'Fanny has been looking after my mother for years, I don't know what my mother would do without her,' he said in a voice pitched loud enough to reach the departing Fanny's ears.
'Lunch will be ten minutes—and you've got to go up and see your mother before you sit down at the table, so don't dawdle,' the old woman flung over her shoulder, ignoring his flattery. Judith found it suddenly very funny, but when she looked down, smiling to herself, Luke gripped her arm, muttering: 'One day your sense of humour is going to get you into trouble!'
She looked down at the hand curled around her forearm. 'One day you're going to get a kick on the shins if you keep grabbing me like that!'
'Charm itself, aren't you?' he said drily, but he removed the hand, adding: 'You can come up with me and meet my mother right away. Keep that expression on your face—that's the one I want her to see; it would curdle milk at forty paces!'
Judith immediately assumed an angelic smile, dark eyes wide and innocent. 'This one?' she asked, and Luke gave her a strange, intent stare before which her eyes fell instinctively, although she had no idea why they should.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE wasn't sure, afterwards, exactly what she had been expecting to see when she followed Luke into the large, sunlit bedroom, but it certainly had not been the vision she did see, sitting up against banked pillows, watching the door as they came through it. Mrs Doulton was beautiful. That was Judith's first thought—a flash of realisation which came with a jab of sharp surprise. Her second thought came hard on the heels of the first; beautiful? she asked herself, staring, was that the right word to describe someone who was obviously almost sixty and so thin and frail that as you looked at her you felt a pang of anxiety?
'Luke, you're so late—I was worried!'
'You shouldn't have been.' Luke sat on the edge of the bed and took the hand his mother held out to him; it was engulfed in his long fingers, Mrs Doulton's skin looked impossibly white against the hard brown strength of her son's large hand.
Judith waited and a moment later Mrs Doulton looked past Luke, smiling, and at once Judith saw the beauty again and this time knew where it came from—this was not a beauty you could pin down to any one feature. It was not in the wide-open grey eyes or the small delicately formed nose or the pale mouth. It was in that smile, that eagerness and radiance, in the impression of luminosity—Mrs Doulton was so insubstantial that the mind inside the body had become what you saw and reacted to, the physical shell so worn down that her inner light shone through it visibly.
Luke glanced round and got up. 'Mother, this is Judith Murry—Judith, my mother.'
Judith quickly went over to take the hand Mrs Doulton held out. 'Sit down, Judith, it's good of you to give up your Sunday to come and see me—I hope Luke didn't bully you into it.'
'Not much,' said Judith, sitting down, and Mrs Doulton looked surprised and then laughed.
'Careful, Mother, she has an annoying habit of telling the truth,' Luke warned in a dry voice.
