A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  ‘I’m afraid we are rather too late.’ The librarian speaks with a kind of grim professional resignation, as if she were a physician commenting on the status of a terminal patient. ‘This manuscript has never been touched by the conservators, you see, nor has there been a formal dating.’

  ‘Surely Professor Bowen would have asked for those things?’

  ‘You might have thought so, but Cranc was insistent that the manuscript not be touched, for fear of further damage. In reality, I think, he wanted to keep it to himself, though no one challenged him on it. Those were very different times.’

  ‘Could it not be remedied now?’

  ‘Perhaps, at least to some extent. The first thing we need is for someone to show some interest, to tell us what we might be looking for. Cranc brought this book here from Ty Faenor not long after he wrote the letter I showed you, and it has remained in the Bodleian ever since. I have double-checked the records, and it seems that only two people have asked to see this manuscript since then. Cranc Bowen is one of them, and you are the other.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I understand.’

  Margaret Rackham sighs deeply. ‘In the beginning, there was some interest in Cranc’s discovery. He wrote up a detailed study for a medieval studies journal—you should look it up, I’m sure they’ll have it across the road—and that paper, controversial though it may have been, was given a polite enough reception. But later on he seems to have become obsessed with the Song of Lailoken. He made some very far-fetched statements about it, which lost him a good deal of credibility with his peers. As far as I know, he never published on the topic again, and certainly his standing in the field never quite recovered.’

  ‘So the entire manuscript was simply ignored after that?’

  ‘I’m afraid that is what has happened, yes. It is rather a question of being tarred with the same brush.’

  Julia has meanwhile continued to turn through the obliterated pages. About half-way through, there is a change from the fragile parchment to a heavier vellum, which has remained largely untouched by the mould. Areas of well-formed script can now clearly be seen, a patchwork text written in medieval Welsh: this is a version of the language she knows well enough from her years at the OED. Here she finds the early bardic poems of Siôn Cent, sombre, finely crafted verses in the cwydd meter, seven-syllable lines in rhyming couplets. At the end of the manuscript, written in the same strong scribal hand, there is one poem composed in a different style. The title can easily be made out, Cân Lailoken, the Song of Lailoken.

  Margaret Rackham has been watching Julia closely. ‘There is one thing you may not have noticed,’ she says, her voice shifting subtly to a higher, more didactic pitch. ‘It is not obvious to the untrained eye, but this manuscript was rebound when the new folios were added. The first section consists of a low-grade parchment, and the inferior quality of the materials probably accounts for the catastrophic effects of the mould damage. The later section, a further nine quires made of a more durable vellum, seems to have been added much later. This is where Siôn Cent’s writing is found.’

  ‘Do we know where the manuscript came from originally?’ Julia says.

  ‘Not definitively,’ the librarian says, ‘though there is strong evidence connecting the entire collection to the scriptorium at Cwmhir Abbey. We believe the manuscripts were removed from the abbey for safe-keeping in the early years of the Reformation, probably in the 1530s, and later found their way to Ty Faenor when the manor house was built in the mid-seventeenth century. We assume, but cannot say for sure, that this manuscript originated at the abbey and remained with the collection throughout this period.’

  Julia turns back to one of the opening pages, looks more closely at the ruined surface of the parchment. She imagines some priceless story waiting there to be discovered, a lost epic by Homer or Virgil, a forgotten work of Dante Alighieri. ‘Is there no chance of restoring it?’

  ‘I rather think those pages are beyond redemption,’ Margaret Rackham says. ‘But only a proper analysis will tell.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ Julia says.

  The librarian meets her in the eye. ‘I dare say I could call in a favour or two,’ she says. ‘But do be careful.’

  Her tone is surprisingly sharp, and Julia, thinking that she is being scolded for carelessness, pulls her hand away from the book. But the expression on the librarian’s face makes it clear that she means something else altogether.

  ‘This is an odd thing to say, I know, but I want you to be aware that this manuscript has brought nothing but misfortune to Caradoc Bowen. I have watched it all with a great sadness. My advice to you is to keep your distance, don’t get too involved with it.’

  If she had intended to encourage the precise opposite of this, Margaret Rackham could not have phrased her warning any more effectively. As Julia leaves the office of the Bodley’s Librarian, she is filled with a kind of cautious exhilaration. Her most pressing thought is to call Donald and tell him what she has found.

  From Farthest West

  THE LOBBY OF the Randolph Hotel makes a dignified but curiously lifeless setting, heavy with wood panelling and richly upholstered furniture of the kind that absorbs all ambient sound. As Donald sits there waiting interminably, it seems, fending off the advances of the elderly, hush-voiced waiter, he finds himself beginning to regret his choice of venue. This strikes him now as a superficial world of polish and veneer, a space too self-consciously designed to invite the decorous sharing of confidences.

  At last he sees Julia coming through the door, gets up from his chair, his pulse quickening. She seems happy, radiant with a concealed excitement. ‘Over here,’ he says, and she walks over to join him.

  ‘Am I late?’

  ‘No, I was early. It’s a bad habit of mine.’

  Julia takes off her coat, sits down on the plush red sofa. Without her glasses, she has a charming, faintly myopic look. Donald has the strange impression that he is seeing her properly for the first time.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting here?’

  ‘Where else?’ she says, in her half-satirical way.

  The hovering waiter offers them tea or coffee, a slice of a rather fine fruit cake if they would like something to go with it. They opt for the tea on its own, causing the waiter to acquiesce with a reverent but faintly disappointed nod. He makes a small annotation on his pad, paces solemnly away along his well-worn path.

  Julia reaches for her bag, then seems to change her mind, leaves it where it is. ‘Have you ever come across the work of Caradoc Bowen?’ she says.

  Donald smiles at the lack of preamble; still, the question stirs a flicker of interest. ‘I have a book of his at home. It’s the best thing I’ve read on Glyn Dŵr, though it’s quite old now. His later work has been mostly dismissed or ignored, as far as I know.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why that might be?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for sure. My thesis advisor at Bangor used to say that Bowen’s poetry went to his head, and the historians stopped taking him seriously after that. Why do you ask?’

  Julia takes two copies of a thin stapled document out of her bag, hands one of them to Donald. ‘I’d like to know what you make of this,’ she says.

  It is an article from a back issue of a medieval studies journal, nearly fifty years old; its author is listed as C. H. R. Bowen of Jesus College, Oxford. The title immediately compels Donald’s attention: Arthurian resonances in the mythology of Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Welsh rebellion, 1401–15. He skims the first page, then reads it again, more slowly, soon finds himself deeply absorbed in Bowen’s description of his discovery, quite by chance, of a previously unstudied book of poetry in a manuscript collection held at the manor house of Ty Faenor in Radnorshire, the Welsh seat of the Mortimer family. The collection was originally assembled there in the seventeenth century by Sir John Mortimer, a well-known antiquarian and a leading member of the border aristocracy.

  When Donald reaches the end of Bowen’s translation of t
he Song of Lailoken, he looks up to find that Julia is watching him closely. ‘This is extraordinary,’ he says. ‘How did you find it?’

  The waiter chooses his moment to return with the tray, settling it wordlessly on the table between them. Julia lifts up the pot, deftly pours tea into bone china cups. ‘A friend of mine at the Bodleian told me where to look,’ she says. ‘Keep reading to the end, then I’ll explain.’

  Bowen goes on to give a brief account of Owain Glyn Dŵr and his Welsh rising. In 1401, this shrewd politician and tenacious fighter seized power in Wales from the English under Henry IV, proclaiming himself Owynus dei gratia princeps Wallie—Owain, by the grace of God, Prince of Wales—in the presence of emissaries from Scotland, France, and Castile. For a while it seemed that Glyn Dŵr might succeed in securing the borders of an independent principality, but his vision was destroyed by the faithlessness of his French allies and by the overwhelming strength of his adversaries. Following a bitter defeat at Harlech castle, he spent his last desperate years in hiding in the remote high country of Wales. It is not known when or where he died, nor has his burial place ever been found. He became a legendary figure even in his own lifetime, one of the greatest heroes of the Welsh imagination.

  Caradoc Bowen then makes the critical assertion that the poet Siôn Cent in his earlier years held a singular position in the Welsh bardic order as prophet and seer of Owain Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion. The Song of Lailoken was composed while Siôn was in hiding at the Cistercian Abbey of Cwmhir (the remains of which are to be found not more than a mile away from Ty Faenor house) as a celebration of Glyn Dŵr’s famous battles against the English crown. Claiming inspiration for his verses from Lailoken, a Welsh bard of the sixth century who was the historical archetype of the prophet Merlin, Siôn wrote in a highly archaic style, drawing deeply on the imagery of Arthurian battle-verse and Merlinic prophecy to promote the idea that Glyn Dŵr was ‘Arthur’ returned to the aid of his people. He intended to bequeath to his former master a cult-like status as one who, like Arthur, would never truly die. In so doing, he would give solace and encouragement to future generations of Welshmen in their ongoing struggle against the white serpent of English hegemony.

  At length, Donald lays the article back down on the table. ‘That’s quite a story,’ he says.

  Julia calmly hands him a full teacup. ‘When I was a student at Wadham, Caradoc Bowen gave a talk on the Song of Lailoken. It was the news about Devil’s Barrow that made me think of it again. There was an archaeologist from St. Anne’s talking about it on the BBC.’

  There is no avoiding the confession. ‘That would be Lucy Trevelyan,’ Donald says. ‘I used to be married to her.’

  Julia’s scrutiny is not entirely comfortable. ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘Six years. No, five.’ It has become an unfamiliar arithmetic. ‘We were divorced a few months ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ There is something ambiguous in the way Julia says this, as if she might want to take Lucy’s side. ‘I thought she had some interesting ideas.’

  Reflexively, Donald finds himself on the defensive. ‘Interesting in what way?’

  ‘As I was listening to her, it crossed my mind that the description of the first battle in the Song of Lailoken seems to match the discoveries at Devil’s Barrow—the terrifying woman perched on her sacrificial stone, the remains of the British warriors subjected to a gruesome death.’

  Donald looks sceptically at the opening lines of the poem. This is exactly the sort of dubious leap of faith that he most dislikes. ‘Are you suggesting that the poem might be an account of what happened at Devil’s Barrow?’ He picks up his cup and saucer, takes a slow sip.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything that might make you choke on your tea.’ Julia smiles at him now, entirely disarming. ‘But I did want to see how you would react. It’s at least an interesting coincidence, don’t you think?’

  He forces a smile in return, cursing himself for his petulant reaction. ‘Not really, to be honest with you. Siôn Cent was writing in the early fifteenth century, so the poem can’t have been composed until at least nine hundred years after the events at Devil’s Barrow. I would say that the two are entirely unconnected. Siôn took the motif of the threefold death straight from the old Welsh story of Lailoken, then dramatised it a little, gave it a Merlinic aura to make it more inspiring to his listeners.’

  Julia takes this in her stride. ‘That’s what I thought you would say. But the giants’ ring? Is that a coincidence too?’

  ‘It could mean almost anything,’ Donald says. ‘If Siôn wanted to add a convincing reference to a stone circle, there were plenty in Wales for him to choose from.’ This is really not an argument he wants to engage in; he tries to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘The last I heard, Bowen was still going strong at Jesus College. We could try asking him what he thinks about Devil’s Barrow?’

  There is a small silence now, Julia tugging at a fingernail. ‘I would rather not have to speak to Caradoc Bowen.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  She looks up, meets him in the eye. ‘Did you ever happen to know someone at Oxford called Hugh Mortimer? He was a student of Bowen’s at Jesus, studying for a doctorate in politics.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Is he related to the Mortimers of Ty Faenor?’

  ‘Yes, the Ty Faenor estate has always belonged to his family. Hugh spent his childhood summers there with his grandfather—that’s where he first met Caradoc Bowen, who later helped to secure a place for him at Jesus. As soon as Hugh got to Oxford, Bowen invited him to join a Welsh political group he had founded. They called themselves Tân y Ddraig, the Dragon’s Fire.’

  ‘I used to see them sometimes,’ Donald says. ‘At the Eagle and Child on a Thursday night.’ At the time he thought them merely foolish, these self-important young Welshmen sitting in a circle next to the fire, debating their weighty topics with a kind of fake messianic intensity. ‘They were militant Welsh nationalists. I’m not sure I would have described it as politics.’

  ‘I know that now,’ Julia says. She picks up her empty teacup, stares down into it as if to divine some essential truth in the tea-leaves. ‘But I didn’t really understand it at the time. Certainly I was worried about Hugh when I realised how deeply he had become committed to the group, even though he had promised me they had no interest in any kind of violent action.’ She sets her cup down on its saucer, rotates it to some precisely defined angle. ‘Hugh and I have been married for fourteen years,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you earlier.’

  ‘That’s all right, I never asked.’ A memory comes back to Donald now, Julia on the arm of a tall, dark-haired man, walking along Brasenose Lane only a couple of weeks after their visit to the Ashmolean. Silently, he forces his way past a sharp spike of jealousy. ‘Is there more to the Bowen story?’

  ‘Yes, there’s more. The year we were married, the government announced a plan to dam up the Cwmhir valley in central Wales to supply drinking water to the English midlands. The farmhouse where I grew up, where my parents still live, is at one end of that valley. The Ty Faenor estate, which belongs to Hugh’s family, is at the other. Later the same year, one person was killed and another was badly injured in an explosion at an office in Rhayader where some of the engineering work for the dam was being done.’

  ‘I remember hearing about it when I was up at Bangor,’ Donald says. ‘I thought it was ruled an accident, though.’

  ‘That was the verdict of the official inquiry,’ Julia says, ‘but most of the local people thought it was just a government whitewash. There was a lot of speculation that the more militant members of Tân y Ddraig were involved. Hugh certainly thought the rumour was true. He had a bitter falling-out with Caradoc Bowen, and they haven’t spoken since. I am quite sure Bowen blames me for it.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Why should he still care?’

  ‘Because I think he was a little bit in love with Hugh, and I was the one who
took him away.’

  ‘Let me speak to Bowen,’ Donald finds himself saying, though it seems almost an irrelevance now. ‘I can ask him what he thinks about the Devil’s Barrow finds.’

  They say goodbye at the corner of Broad Street, the same place where they parted nearly seventeen years before. Donald’s easy wave of the hand as he walks away from Julia is meant to disguise the surprising, bitter disappointment that he feels. There is no logic to it, but Hugh Mortimer, a complete stranger, now feels like his enemy.

  IT IS A cheap red wine, bitter on Julia’s tongue. She refills her glass nevertheless, takes another sip, balances the cork on the rim of the bottle where it sits silently reproaching her. She makes herself focus again on the final page of Caradoc Bowen’s journal article. As she rereads the closing paragraphs, she thinks back to the early days with Hugh, when he would tell her about Bowen’s strange poems and prophecies, the stirring lines he would recite to fire up the nationalist spirit in his protégés during the weekly meetings of Tân y Ddraig. There is one passage in particular that catches her eye.

  That the Song of Lailoken draws abundantly on Merlinic themes is evident even to the casual observer. Geoffrey of Monmouth, through his prophecies spoken in the voice of the famous sorcerer, was primarily responsible for the medieval cult of Welsh deliverance from the Saxon impostor. It was quite natural for Siôn Cent, writing his poem some three hundred years after Geoffrey’s time, to tap into this well-matured nationalistic spirit by claiming the ‘words of Merlin’ as the basis for his own mythological concoction. Owain Glyn Dŵr was an ardent disciple of the Merlinic cult, a man who believed himself—or, at least, wished others to believe him—chosen for a singular role in shaping the destiny of his country. In the inspiring imagery of the Song of Lailoken, we may read for ourselves Siôn’s bold intention to fortify this image of Glyn Dŵr as a predestined Celtic hero, to make of him a new Arthur.