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Title: Lady Audley’s Secret

 

Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon

 

Release Date: September, 2005 [EBook #8954]

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[This file was first posted on August 29, 2003]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET ***

 

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LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

 

By

 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

 

CHAPTER I.

 

LUCY.

 

It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant

pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on

either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked

inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted;

for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court

you had no business there at all.

 

At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with

a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand—and which jumped

straight from one hour to the next—and was therefore always in

extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of

Audley Court.

 

A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which

grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the

right there were the kitchen gardens, the fishpond, and an orchard

bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places

thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy,

yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad graveled

walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the

quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and

shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape,

and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter.

 

The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It

was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven;

some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained

glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others

so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of

chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as

if they were so broken down by age and long service that they must have

fallen but for the straggling ivy which, crawling up the walls and

trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and supported them.

The principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle

of the building, as if it were in hiding from dangerous visitors, and

wished to keep itself a secret—a noble door for all that—old oak, and

studded with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick that the sharp

iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound, and the visitor rung a

clanging bell that dangled in a corner among the ivy, lest the noise of

the knocking should never penetrate the stronghold.

 

A glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with;

feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to stay there

forever, staring into the cool fishponds and counting the bubbles as

the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water. A spot in which

peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on

every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady

corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the

painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenues—ay, even upon

the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old

place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle

handle that was never turned and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had

broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.

 

A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place—a house in which

you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt

to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any

sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an

inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a

door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from

which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have

been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork

of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and

knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with

the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking

down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing

in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining

on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I,

to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived,

in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere

to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a

house there were secret chambers; the little daughter of the present

owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of

one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she

played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose,

and so removed, revealed a ladder, leading to a hiding-place between the

floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below—a hiding-place

so small that he who had hid there must have crouched on his hands and

knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint

old carved oak chest, half filled with priests’ vestments, which had

been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man

was in danger if he was discovered to have harbored a Roman Catholic

priest, or to have mass said in his house.

 

The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the

orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew

fantastical shadows upon the green slope. Within this moat there was, as

I have said, the fishpond—a sheet of water that extended the whole

length of the garden and bordering which there was an avenue called the

lime-tree walk; an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so screened

from observation by the thick shelter of the overarching trees that it

seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a

place in which a conspiracy might have been planned, or a lover’s vow

registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty paces from

the house.

 

At the end of this dark arcade there was the shrubbery, where, half

buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the

rusty wheel of that old well of which I have spoken. It had been of good

service in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn the cool

water with their own fair hands; but it had fallen into disuse now, and

scarcely any one at Audley Court knew whether the spring had dried up or

not. But sheltered as was the solitude of this lime-tree walk, I doubt

very much if it was ever put to any romantic uses. Often in the cool of

the evening Sir Michael Audley would stroll up and down smoking his

cigar, with his dogs at his heels, and his pretty young wife dawdling by

his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet and his companion would

grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the

spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the

broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the drawing-room, where

my lady played dreamy melodies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her

husband fell asleep in his easy-chair.

 

Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a

second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big

man, tall and stout, with a deep, sonorous voice, handsome black eyes,

and a white beard—a white beard which made him look venerable against

his will, for he was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest riders

in the country. For seventeen years he had been a widower with an only

child, a daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no means too well

pleased at having a stepmother brought home to the Court; for Miss

Alicia had reigned supreme in her father’s house since her earliest

childhood, and had carried the keys, and jingled them in the pockets of

her silk aprons, and lost them in the shrubbery, and dropped them into

the pond, and given all manner of trouble about them from the hour in

which she entered her teens, and had, on that account, deluded herself

into the sincere belief, that for the whole of that period, she had been

keeping the house.

 

But Miss Alicia’s day was over; and now, when she asked anything of the

housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak to my

lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it should be

done. So the baronet’s daughter, who was an excellent horsewoman and a

very clever artist, spent most of her time out of doors, riding about

the green lanes, and sketching the cottage children, and the plow-boys,

and the cattle, and all manner of animal life that came in her way. She

set her face with a sulky determination against any intimacy between

herself and the baronet’s young wife; and amiable as that lady was, she

found it quite impossible to overcome Miss Alicia’s prejudices and

dislike; or to convince the spoilt girl that she had not done her a

cruel injury by marrying Sir Michael Audley. The truth was that Lady

Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Michael, made one of those

apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the

envy and hatred of her sex. She had come into the neighborhood as