When the tide of fighting withdrew, Bertram was left high and dry with a grown daughter and an infant boy, his wife having died in the lowest point of the war in 1917. Thanks to Bertie, she had made one too many forays on her no-man’s land of childbirth. Gallant House was plunged into gloom, ashes cold in all the home fires. The lone daughter was unable to stand it any longer. She could not move around the hallways without hearing the ghosts of her dead brothers whispering, echoes of ball games in the attics on wet days, laughter on the lawns as they cartwheeled. She declared she was leaving to make a home with her grandmother and her artist lover in a place with no memories. Bertram called her ugly names and sent her to perdition. She said she was going to her salvation as by then the house had become a place fit only for the most deadly of the pure in heart.
I sighed for them both. They would never understand each other and the damage the preceding generation had done to them both. The boy from the well had his revenge on the legitimate seed. I could hear him sniggering in the dark as they fumed and fretted. What my Bertram did not understand was that if he wished for saints then his children were doomed from birth to disappoint him; that the blackness was imbibed with the water. It might now come through lead pipes into the kitchen (no one ever touched the old water supply after the baby had been dragged from the well), but the source was ever the same: the heart of Blackheath.