“How do you know that?” he asked her sharply.
She knew positively, but she had forgotten how she knew and, as she repeated that she was sure, she felt that she must seem very stupid to Mr. Grandison.
“Well, he danced in a scarlet coat with lace ruffles, which he had brought back from France, with the gipsy girls in their rags, and Maggie Pattle joined in for the sake of the beer, but all the respectable tenants stood under the oak trees looking glum and hating him. But how do you explain that the monument is still standing and that, though it is the most striking thing in the village, nobody ever looks at it or knows anything about it? If one asks a question they just shake their heads and change the conversation.”
“The young cavalier lived to be eighty-eight,” answered Anne. “It is natural that nobody would dare disturb his maze while he was living, or to pull down the stone column sculptured with his arms. All the Puritans were dead before he was, and the significance of the monument was forgotten by 1729.”
“But the civil war isn’t forgotten,” said Richard.
“I have often heard a villager say when someone has got into trouble for poaching hares: ‘We want another of the Cromwells in this country. There were no game laws in Nolly’s time.’”
“I expect there is a tradition that the maze represents something out of harmony with the village: they have ignored it for so long that they have forgotten everything except that it is something which ought to be ignored,” said Anne.
Richard agreed with her, and an hour passed before she remembered the drawings she had brought to show him.
“Leave them for me to look at,” said Richard, but she would not be put off. As she untied the portfolio she felt that her fingers were trembling, and she became confused as she explained that she knew her drawings were not fashionable: she had done them at Dry Coulter in ignorance of what the latest fashions might be, thinking that they would serve as specimens to show her workmanship. Instead of explaining this clearly, what she said was something very silly, but Richard did not smile at her absurdity, and there was an absolute silence as she laid the first of the drawings on the table, propping it up against a wine bottle.
For a long while Richard Sotheby stood wrinkling his nose and Gerald and Ginette stood silent.