Read Online Shadows & Lies by Marjorie Eccles - Free Book Online

might eventually turn out to be an improvement on the previous day, though moisture still dripped from the tree branches, heavy in the full leaf of late summer, and the formal bedding that blazed around the house, already tired with the end of the season, had a bedraggled and beaten look from the recent heavy rains. As he strode along the wide, paved paths running between dark yew hedges, Sebastian wondered sardonically what new thing might have arrived in the garden to surprise him.
    Several years ago Adele, unbeknownst to Sir Henry, had ordered in at great expense a dozen classical statues to line the path that ran in a descending prospect from the terrace outside the drawing room, with the purpose, she said, of leading the eye down to the focal point of the lake. Sebastian would not easily forget the ensuing uproar.
    â€œBut the gardens are so dull, Henry,” she’d remonstrated, watching him from under her lids. “Surely you don’t begrudge a few guineas to make them a little more attractive?”
    â€œA few guineas! Dull? How can you possibly say that? My father had them redone at unbelievable expense when I was a boy.”
    â€œYes, darling, I know. All that Victorian shrubbery. Too, too dreary.”
    Enraged, Henry had stumped off. Had he suspected she might be laughing at him? It was possible, but at last, after months of wrangling, he’d conceded the point to the extent of promising that he would see what he could do. Or perhaps he’d only agreed in case Adele should ever take it upon herself to do such a thing
again. After which, never one to do things by halves, he had astonished everyone by getting caught up in the project himself: not only did he commission the parterre in front of the house that Sebastian found so particularly nasty, but on every visit to Belmonde, there were all manner of unexpected – mostly not altogether felicitous – pieces of statuary, obelisks, follies and goodness knows what else to be found popping up in unexpected places. What Sir Henry had initially reluctantly agreed to in order to please his wife had grown into a dotty obsession of his own. A fountain and a lily pond with a grotesque grouping of mythological figures in the centre now graced the lower terrace, and a monstrous folly had been constructed from what remained of the stone walls that had once been part of the original abbey. Better than either were the replanted rose gardens, with a cascade behind them that tumbled from the rocky upper reaches of the grounds outside the garden proper. But also, alas, a laburnum walk (which led nowhere) had appeared on one of the lawns. Sebastian doubted whether much of this was what his mother had had in mind.
    Nothing new appeared this time, however, at which to marvel or grimace. He strode through to the copse which marked the end of the formal gardens, leaving behind the nine marble Greek Muses Henry had unhappily grouped beneath old Sir George’s two hundred foot Wellingtonia. The tree had become the roosting place for generations of pigeons, and the statues had consequently acquired a patina not originally intended, and were not now a pretty sight, his mother’s bête noire.
    Belmonde was set on a southward-facing hill that sloped up gradually from the river towards the house, and then more steeply behind it; beyond the trees and behind the house rose a series of thickly wooded hills. Sebastian whistled up the frisky young springer spaniel, Dizzy, and the more sedate Sophie, a curly-coated black retriever bitch, and went through a ruined, ivy-clad arch that was a remnant of the old cloisters and was indeed the only part of the abbey left standing, then he took a familiar pathway, steep and rocky, his still angry strides leading him to his objective, a bosky, rowan-shaded clearing halfway up the hill.

    Entering the clearing, there appeared before him a small, silent pool surrounded by huge outcrops of red rocks and clumps of ferns, fed