Free The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney Page B

early forties but aged and broken by her loss, died of influenza. My mother was eighteen, and alone.’ He paused, sipping his coffee and then gazing into the curling steam.
    â€˜Like Rose,’ I suggested, cautiously. He nodded, perhaps, or just stirred his head a little, without lifting his eyes.
    â€˜My mother’s uncle, Hartley, moved back in,’ he went on, ‘and the Combe became, for eleven years, a rectory. He was not a sympathetic guardian to my mother, attributing her unabated grief to a lack of faith. She spent most of her time alone, in her room or, more often, in some quiet corner of the gardens that still guarded happy memories of her childhood.
    â€˜One day she discovered in the woods a steep flight of steps leading up the hillside, half-buried by earth and leaf litter and concealed under brambles. She traced its path up to where the precarious trees give way to heathland, but was there defeated by a wall of ferocious western gorse. The next day she returned with gloves and shears, and fought her way up onto a small, steep-sided promontory that juts southward from the plateau, but that is screened from below by tall trees, and cannot be reached, or even seen, from above because of the massed gorse and bracken.’
    Here he paused again, reached his empty cup up to the mantelpiece, and took a long breath with his hands on his knees.
    â€˜There,’ he began, slowly, ‘my mother found the Temple of Light, consecrated by the elder Hartley Comberbache in seventeen seventy-nine, which had by then stood entirely forgotten for nearly a hundred years.’
    â€˜It was — some kind of folly?’ I asked, hesitantly — I had seen the temples at Stourhead and Castle Howard. The doctor looked particularly pained at this suggestion.
    â€˜No,’ he replied, sternly. ‘It was a temple: a place of reverence and sanctity — of worship, even.’
    â€˜The worship of what?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘Of light?’
    The doctor shrugged. ‘If you like,’ he murmured patiently, and then quickly continued: ‘Part of the roof had collapsed, and a birch tree was growing up through the floor. Crowberries crept up the walls and sprouted along the roof, which was home to a small colony of long-eared bats. It was however sufficiently intact for my mother to realise its beauty and strangeness, and it became her secret retreat.’
    â€˜Is it still standing?’ I interjected.
    â€˜Yes,’ he replied, smiling, ‘and now it is rather more easily reached. Even I still manage the climb sometimes, when my knees allow it. We have reclaimed the stair, and the temple itself, from the long fingers of nature — as you will see for yourself. It could be described as an observatory, too, I suppose — high above the valley, just as you suggested.’
    â€˜And did your uncle Hartley never discover it?’
    The doctor sighed. ‘Hartley was, as we know, a narrow-minded man, but also, fortunately for irreligious lovers of truth and beauty, a parsimonious one. The objects of his purges — the Taboni painting in the parlour was the first to go — were not destroyed but hidden away with the intention of discreetly selling them later, and after his death my mother discovered the ignominious hoard and reinstated everything. The temple, however, thanks to my mother’s ingenuity, he never discovered. Had he done so, and had he comprehended its purpose, he would undoubtedly have demolished it. But no,’ he added, rising from his chair with a quick smile, ‘I suspect he would not have comprehended, and would have had it restored as a summer house for his wife’s tea parties.’
    â€˜Or as a chapel?’ I suggested, rising also. The doctor seemed to consider this possibility for a moment.
    â€˜I doubt it,’ he said, returning to the window, where I had found him. ‘The advantages of its position would be quite