Stone of Destiny

by Rowan Casey

  “It’s time for you to go home, Mr. Matthias.”

  “How do you…” he started to ask how he knew his name, but that question was no more important than knowing how he had found him, or why he had followed him. There was a whole list of questions that he wanted to ask, but somehow none of them came out. They were all caught up in a confusion of thoughts that were tangled around each other. There was something in the man’s eyes that he had not seen before, a steely menace that demanded he remain silent for the moment at least.

  “Go home and forget everything you have learned in the last few days. I have no wish to remove you from this quest by force, but I will do it if I need to. You have no idea what you have gotten yourself involved with, no idea of the danger you are putting yourself in. You are the one being put in danger while Grimm remains out of harm’s way. You take the risks but he is the one who will reap the rewards.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Matthias was doing his best to pretend but the other man was having none of it. His eyes held him fixed and he seemed to be staring deep inside, examining his every secret, until he tilted his head to one side at last and blinked. There was something of the reptile about the way that his eyelids flicked closed and open again.

  “I seem to have misjudged you,” he said at last.

  “You have?”

  “Oh, yes. I thought that you were no more than a lackey sent out on an errand. A fool’s errand maybe, though that makes little difference. But you are no mere lackey, you are far more important than that.”

  Matthias knew that he had an overblown sense of his own importance, but he had been brought down to earth on that score during his time in the States. He wasn’t the big shot he had thought himself to be. All they had managed to show him was that he was a nobody; he was ordinary, at least in the eyes of Hollywood. Ordinary was the biggest insult that could have been leveled at him, it was only one rung on the ladder below ‘nice’, but in what way was he important? Desperate to know, but unwilling to reveal the fact, he kept his mouth closed.

  “Clearly Grimm thinks this is an important job or he would not have sent someone so special. Now why would he do that I wonder? To give you the chance to prove that you are not just second best?”

  “Second best? What the fuck are you talking about?” There was an anger building inside him that was threatening to turn into rage. The man sitting beside him, drinking the coffee that Matthias had bought for himself, seemed to know more about what was going on than he did. A middle-aged couple at the next table turned their heads and tutted but he ignored them.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” The man laughed. “You don’t know anything at all.”

  “Then how come you know so fucking much? How about you start putting me straight?”

  “Really!” The indignant couple on the neighboring table said. Matthias turned for a moment, caught between the desire to tell them to stay out of it, and to apologize, but all he did was stare at them until they looked away, pretending that he did not exist. When he looked back, the stranger was gone.

  12

  There was a moment of panic and confusion. Somehow Matthias found himself behind the wheel of the car, his eyes threatening to close as the traffic sped past him. An instant later he realized that the exit for the service station as less than a mile away. It had all seemed so real and yet it had only been inside his head. Illusion, that was all. Matthias cursed Grimm for dragging him into all this when he could have walked away, but he knew that it had been his choice. He could have chosen not to get involved, but he had seen easy money to help him out when he was in danger of having to give up on the dream of getting back to where he used to be.

  He was still gripping the wheel tightly when he found a parking space in more or less the same place as in his dream. Spotting a bin close by, he gathered up the debris from his early meal and climbed out of the car. He walked towards the bin without looking and stepped back, startled as a car’s horn blared a warning. He glanced at the driver, knowing almost before he did that it was going to be a woman, maybe even the same woman from his drifting dream, but she was almost past him before he had the chance to see.

  “Shit!” He dropped one of the empty water bottles to the ground where it skittered under the car to be crushed under its wheels. Matthias watched as the car drove away, then bent to pick the debris up. Coincidence; it had to be.

  He paused when he reached the door to the bathroom, almost expecting the stranger to emerge and hold it open for him. His heart skipped a beat when the door started to open and he took a step back only for a young boy to emerge, drying damp hands on his jeans, a fussing father close behind him. The relief was immediate and total. He had to keep reminding himself that it had only been some kind of dream he had experienced, not the truth. No one had actually told him that he was any more important than a lackey, it was something his mind had grasped hold of. Did he really need the recognition that much?

  Back on the concourse he picked up a burger and a coffee. He didn’t want to tempt fate and buy a second cup, just in case. He needed the caffeine, but he would buy another one to take away with him before he hit the road again. Matthias constantly scanned the faces of the people seated all round him as he ate, having chosen a table where he could keep his back pressed against the window. This way at least he did not need to worry about anyone creeping up behind him. The dream had spooked him completely and there seemed to be nothing he could do to shake it off. All he knew was that the sooner this was over, and he could get Hautdesert to tell Grimm where to stick the stone, the happier he would be.

  He decided to pass on the second coffee. He was less than twenty miles from his destination and the day was fading fast. He had lost so much of the daylight while he had been traveling, but at least he would get there before it was dark. He was not going to shake off the thought that he might be being followed, but he had a choice; he could either carry on, or go home and there was nothing to return home for. There was no real choice at all.

  At that moment he knew that he had bought into the dream, maybe not of some stone with magical properties, but the idea of something that would bring a big enough reward to make life comfortable for a while. Maybe it would even last long enough to buy him the time to restart his career without sinking to the kind of work that brought no satisfaction. For him this wasn’t a quest, it was a treasure hunt. It was a chance to make sure that he was someone again, rather than become a nobody. That thought continued to nag at him as he started the car and returned to the motorway to cover the final miles.

  THIRTEEN

  Matthias had not been sure what he expected to find when he visited the cathedral the next morning. Winchester was not as blessed with small hotels as Llandudno but it wasn’t too difficult to find a guesthouse with a room available. The entrance hallway had a stand that was well equipped with leaflets about local attractions, and he seized a selection. The leaflets gave the opening times and entry fees along with a few photographs, but little more than that. One image caught his attention and now that he was standing in front of it he felt a tingle up his spine that reached into the back of his skull.

  The only thing he knew about Winchester was that it had a cathedral, and that only because of a song his nan used to sing. Given the connection to the church in Llandudno, he assumed that was where his search was going to start, but then he saw the picture. He felt an instant connection.

  He was standing in the Great Hall, the only surviving section of the castle that had once defended and controlled the town. Mounted on the wall, just as it had been in the leaflet, was the top of a circular table divided into segments radiating from the center which contained the image of a rose with inner petals of white and outer ones of red. In the central upper segment a king was depicted. Matthias somehow knew that this was not King Arthur. This was not his round table.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Matthias was startled by the woman standing beside him, but he quickly recovered
and smiled.

  “It is indeed,” he said, surprised at the woman’s appearance. Her clothes were stained and disheveled, her hair tangled and unbrushed. She looked for all the world as if she was living on the streets, and yet she must have been able to pay the entrance fee unless she had slipped past the attendant at the entrance without being noticed. It seemed an unlikely place for a homeless woman to seek refuge.

  “Is this your first time?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing you here before, though you do look familiar somehow.”

  “Yes, first time,” Matthias said, puzzled at the idea she would feel she recognized everyone who had come through the doors of this place. “You spend a lot of time here?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m here every day when I’m not at the university.”

  “The university?”

  She gave a fleeting smile that seemed to take twenty years off her face. “I’m a professor in the Medieval History department for my sins, even if I don’t always look the part, but this place keeps drawing me back.”

  Matthias felt the need to apologize even though he had not actually said what he had been thinking. There was a moment when he thought that she might be making it up, but that soon vanished. Appearances could clearly be deceptive, Matthias realized belatedly, despite it being his stock in trade.

  “This isn’t like, the original though is it? Not the real King Arthur’s round table.” The realization that the woman was not what she appeared had been a reminder of who he was. Of what he was. He decided that playing dumb might get him the answers he needed without it seeming like he was interrogating her.

  “Sadly not,” she said. “But it is pretty old. We know that the paintwork was done during the reign of King Henry the Eighth. That’s him sitting on the throne at the top, though he’s meant to look like King Arthur, and that’s the Tudor rose in the center.”

  “Ah, yes,” Matthias nodded enthusiastically. “I can see it now.”

  “The table itself is certainly older though, somewhere around 1250 to 1280.”

  “You can be that accurate, after all this time?”

  “The wonder of dendrochronology. This is made of 121 separate pieces of oak.”

  Matthias maintained his blank expression, though this time he really didn’t know what she was taking about. “You know we can work out the age of the tree by the number of rings in the trunk? Well, the size of the ring is determined by things like climate. A series of two good years followed by a bad year means that there will be two wider rings and a narrower ring. If you can make the pattern in the tree you can match it up to the series of years they correlate with. That’s a bit of a simplification, I know, but I think that covers the general idea.”

  “Sounds like a pretty tedious job to me,” Matthias said.

  The woman laughed. “Thankfully most of it’s done by computer nowadays, but there as a time when this kind of thing was done without them.”

  “They’ll be doing us all out of a job eventually.” Matthias didn’t believe it. Machines would never replace humans in the acting world, at least not as the live theater remained a form of entertainment

  “You may well be right,” the woman laughed. “I already feel surplus to requirements a fair amount of the time.”

  “Anything else link this place to King Arthur in any way? Isn’t there a statue?”

  He laughed but quickly apologized, waving a hand. “Sorry, but the Internet has a lot to answer for. The statue is of King Alfred, not Arthur, but so many people have posted pictures which they have mislabeled that people are convinced that it really is supposed to be Arthur. The only surviving manuscript copy of Thomas Mallory’s Mort d’Arthur was discovered in the college library here, though. It’s in the British Library now, of course.”

  “How fascinating.”

  “Is that an interest of yours?”

  “It was when I was a kid. My grandfather used to read old Welsh stories to me.”

  “Ah, I thought I detected the accent. Of course there would be no mention of Winchester in the Mabinogi as far as I know, though I have to admit that I’ve only read the stories in translation.”

  “Me, too. Not that many Welsh speakers in the part of Cardiff where I grew up, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, yes, but you’ve not lost the accent.”

  “I’ve tried not to.” In his attempt to sound less knowledgeable than he actually was he had reverted to the voice he had grown up with, before drama school had taken the edge off it. He was pretending to be someone he no longer was. He was acting.

  She looked at him again, this time taking a little longer to take him in. Matthias had seen that look before, it was the look of someone who knew they had seen his face somewhere but couldn’t quite remember where. “Have we met before?”

  “I’m sure I would have remembered,” he said. “But I do meet a lot of people.”

  There was a possibility in her mind, drifting just out of reach, and she waived a finger as if it would help. Then there was a moment of enlightenment.

  “You’re Bryn Matthias!”

  “Are you asking me, or telling me?” he couldn’t keep the smile from his face. Fame was a fickle thing and this woman was the first stranger to have recognized him. Even the guy who had met him for dinner back in Cardiff had needed to be introduced to him.

  “Sorry,” she smiled, a hand going to her lips like a giggling schoolgirl though it must have been at least forty years since she had been one of those. She extended the hand to shake his. “Annie Goodhead.”

  He accepted her hand, surprised to find that she had a firm grip. This was a woman used to meeting people on her own terms.

  “I think I saw you in Stratford. You were in Othello, playing Iago. You were very good.”

  “Thanks, but you’re being kind.” It seemed like a lifetime ago, even though it was one of the last roles he had performed before heading to America.

  “Not at all. You really were wonderful, but I never heard any more about you. What happened?”

  “Long story. Let’s say I went to seek my fortune and found that the streets of Hollywood are not paved with gold.”

  “Ah, the same old story. I’m sorry to hear that, you deserve success. But what brings you here?”

  For a moment he thought about telling the woman the truth, or at least a version of it. She was the one who was most likely to be able to point him in the right direction, but he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking for if he could avoid it. If anyone else got wind of it there was the chance that they might beat him to it. He had already become side tracked into talking about one legend instead of the one he was supposed to be chasing. And yet there was a kind of magic about the table that stirred something inside him; a distant memory that he could not recall.

  “I had some time on my hands and realized that I’ve never seen much of the UK. I did plenty of traveling around but there was never time to get a real look around.” He hoped the lie was convincing and she certainly showed no sign of doubting him.

  “Well, I hope you think it has been worth calling in here to see this. You must take a look at the cathedral while you’re here, too, unless you’ve been there already, of course.”

  “I fully intend to,” he said, his attention returning to the table on the wall. “I don’t suppose you know if there’s any connection to the Knights Hospitallers in the area?”

  “The Order of St. John? My word, you really do have some interests don’t you, Mr.. Matthias? It’s not every day that I get asked about them and here you are, the second and it’s not even lunchtime.”

  “The second?” He could barely disguise the moment of panic in his voice. He hoped that she didn’t notice it. The idea that someone else might be on the same trail was something he dreaded.

  “Indeed. Another visitor to the town. There isn’t some kind of treasure hunt going on is there? You know, cryptic clues you have to follow, the fastest to complete the course wins a prize? How exciting!” She suddenly stopped an
d looked around the room. “We’re not being filmed, are we?”

  “Filmed? Why would we be being filmed?”

  “For some television program, you know.”

  “I couldn’t possibly say I’m afraid.”

  “Ah,” she said tapping one finger against the side of her nose. “I get the picture. Mum’s the word.”

  Matthias moved closer, conspiratorially. “What did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t like him if I’m honest and I might have been a little rude. I hope that gets edited out of the program. Will you have a word with them for me, and say that I’m sorry. If I’d known…” She paused for a moment as she considered it then broke out laughing. “I would probably still have done the same.”

  “You didn’t help him then?”

  “Not exactly, but I might have misled him a little.”

  “How?”

  “I told him about the chapel at Godsfield. It used to belong to the Order but it’s far from the closest connection. Have you heard of Henry of Blois?”

  Matthias shook his head, though this time there was no pretense in his ignorance.

  “No matter,” the woman said. “No reason why you should. Henry was the grandson of William the Conqueror. His older brother was King Stephen.”

  Matthias caught the look the woman gave as she checked for his understanding. He could imagine her doing this with her students, giving them the opportunity to confirm that they were following her train of thought. He nodded and smiled to show that he was following her.

  “Anyway, Henry became the Bishop of Winchester and was involved in the foundation of a number of churches and hospitals which were connected with the Order of St. John, including Godsfield. He’s buried in a crypt in the cathedral. If you a looking for a connection between King Arthur and the Knight’s Hospitallers he may well be your man.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked. He could tell by the grin on her face that she was holding something back. She had some kind of big secret that she was itching to reveal.