A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  All Donald’s instincts rebel against this idea; of all the explanations for Caradoc Bowen’s death, it is the one he least wants to believe. He can still picture it in the sharpest detail, the moment when the professor slipped from the rock. There was a cascade of stones from above, enough to cause him to lose his footing. If he had wanted to jump, he would simply have jumped. ‘No, I don’t think that can be true,’ he says. ‘It would make no sense at all. He was only thirty feet from the top of the waterfall. It was everything he wanted, his ambition of almost half a century, to climb up there and see Glyn Dŵr’s lost valley for himself.’

  It was a simple, tragic accident, this is what Donald tells himself, though another unsettling thought comes to him now. From where he was standing on the cliff-face, Bowen might have been able to see that the way up was too steep, that it would be impossible for him to get to the top, to reach the highest part of the valley where he hoped to find the place where Glyn Dŵr fought his last battle.

  The librarian holds him for a moment in her shrewd gaze. ‘Well, perhaps he was still haunted by the ghost of Belak-neskato, whoever she was. Meanwhile, we must honour Cranc’s wishes, and do what we can to take care of his books. I shall first need to make some arrangements by telephone. Would you kindly meet me in his rooms at Jesus College in, say, an hour’s time?’

  JULIA HAS SPENT the morning cleaning the upstairs rooms, concentrating on the details, leaving everything spotless and shining. When she was younger, growing up alone with her parents, she used to think of the farmhouse as a member of the family, a watchful elderly uncle with its own bluff, reliable personality, always to be treated with respect. Something of this feeling returns as she goes about her work; there is some comfort in the thought that she is helping to ease the old house into this quieter new phase of its long and arduous life.

  When she comes back down to the kitchen, she finds her mother briskly sorting and organising, working with a fierce determination to take control of her domestic world. Every pot and pan has found its appropriate shelf, every ladle and spoon its proper hook. Dai’s favourite corner has been tidied up, his drawing things put away, his fleece-lined slippers no longer there on the floor next to the chair.

  Cath Llewellyn takes off her apron, comes over to the kitchen table. ‘Sit down and talk to me for a moment, before you rush off.’

  ‘You’re not making it any easier,’ Julia says, pulling up a chair.

  ‘Don’t be thinking I’m going to fall apart without you, my love.’ There is a combative note in her mother’s voice. ‘I always used to tell your father when he wouldn’t stop talking, I’d give anything for a bit of peace and quiet. I suppose it would have been simpler just to send him out to the shed.’ They share a knowing glance, then burst into laughter at this perfectly drawn image. If Dai were here with them, he would be laughing the hardest of all.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ Julia says, when they have fallen silent again, ‘Ralph Barnabas offered to help out on the farm, if you need it.’

  ‘That’s thoughtful of him, but I don’t want to hear any more fussing about how I’m going to manage. My life is going to be simple enough from now on. It’s you I’m more worried about.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Of course you will, my dear, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. Have you thought about what might happen next?’

  Now they have reached the crux of it, but Julia has no good answer. ‘I just need to get back to my ordinary life,’ she says.

  Her mother looks at her dubiously. ‘I’m not sure what’s going to be ordinary about it. Will Hugh go back to Oxford as well?’

  ‘I have no idea. We haven’t discussed it.’

  Cath Llewellyn smiles wearily, reaches for Julia’s hand. ‘I’m guessing it might all depend on your archaeologist friend. Well, you’ll do what you must do, my love.’

  WALKING INTO THE study that Caradoc Bowen made his own for half a century or more, Donald is shocked by the quality of blankness and absence in the cold, musty air. Bowen’s secretary, who has unlocked the door for him, seems uncomfortable being in the room at all.

  ‘I worked with him for nearly forty years,’ she says. Her formidable presence is much reduced, her face drawn in severe lines that speak of a staunch refusal to betray her true feelings. ‘It’s hard to believe what’s happened.’

  ‘I am sorry, Mrs. Frayne.’ There is nothing else to be said.

  ‘Well, I’d best leave you to it. Dr. Rackham should be up soon.’

  Left on his own, Donald paces over to the other side of the room, where Bowen’s map of the old cantref of Maelienydd is hanging on the wall next to the fireplace. As he runs his eye along the dark contours of the valleys, he is filled with grim thoughts of cliffs and waterfalls, the professor’s dreams of his own death.

  Now there are footsteps outside the room, a murmur of conversation. Margaret Rackham comes bursting in, her bold presence dispelling all lingering ghosts. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting? One doesn’t like to spend too much time alone in the mausoleum.’ She takes a thick envelope out of her bag and hands it to him. ‘I think you might find this of some interest. It was waiting for me in my office, hot off the press, so I haven’t had a chance to read it properly myself. I’ve sent a copy to Julia as well. Anyway, first things first. Help me with these, would you?’

  Following the librarian’s precisely delivered directions, Donald drags a stack of large plastic crates into the room, then separates them into three groups. ‘It’s a straightforward system,’ she says, ‘tried and tested on more than a few Oxford dons who are sadly no longer with us. Over here, books that should go to the Jesus College library or the Bodleian for proper cataloguing. Here, other items that may have a residual value to the university. And here, things to get rid of or donate to some worthy cause.’

  Violet Frayne now reappears at the door. ‘Do you have everything you need, Dr. Rackham?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mrs. Frayne. Perhaps you would like to stay here and keep an eye on us?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t think I could bear it, if it’s all the same to you.’ With this, the secretary turns her back on them and hurries out of the room.

  ‘In which case,’ Margaret Rackham says, ‘I’m going to start with these awful old tea things, which have been in constant use for fifty years, if I had to guess.’ A teapot and several heavily chipped mugs depicting Welsh churches and cathedrals are tossed unceremoniously into a crate in the third group. ‘If you would start on the bookshelves, I’ll see what I can do with all this paperwork on the desk.’

  A fierce quietness falls on the room as Donald begins work on an impressive collection of history books, early editions of works by famous deceased authors, Myres, Stenton, Collingwood, Gibbon, Tacitus, Herodotus. After a while, he begins to see that the whole collection is arranged in a reverse chronological order based on subject matter rather than authorship, with occasional volumes shelved incorrectly as if to entrap the unwary reader, A. J. P. Taylor’s Bismarck set alongside the History of the Peloponnesian War, Salway’s Roman Britain next to Jacob’s The Fifteenth Century. Donald’s efforts to discern a pattern or code in these misplaced titles prove fruitless, however. In the end, everything goes to the Bodleian crates.

  He has reached the end of the last shelf when his hand falls on a book that had been pushed back behind the others. The title is embossed in gold on a faded blue cloth cover: Three Lives of the Poet, edited by C. H. R. Bowen. He sits down on the corner of the desk and begins to read, finds a surprising dark poetry of war and death and futility, raw bardic verses that were made to be spoken from a hilltop in the wrenching aftermath of battle.

  To red-sky hill we flew like arrows in the night

  Through the lands of our kinsmen blighted by strife

  The dark host behind us, blooded, blades eager in hand

  Death’s herald beckoning us with black-glinting eye.

  To red-sky hill we came, it was where our world
ended

  They could not know how hard we would fight

  A hundred spears in hand, hale and strong we held them

  Death’s herald beckoning us with black-glinting eye.

  ‘Some of those poems are quite striking,’ Margaret Rackham says, breaking a long silence. ‘I persuaded him to publish them, though I rather think he would have preferred not to.’

  ‘Is this his own work?’

  ‘Cranc was always a bit mysterious about that. He claimed these were bits of old verse that just happened to be in his head, as if they were nursery rhymes he had learned as a child, even though he could not remember having done so. I’d like to take that book with me, if you don’t mind. He never did give me a copy.’

  Donald hands the slim volume to her. ‘That’s the bookshelves finished, anyway.’

  ‘Which just leaves us with the store cupboard. Violet tells me it hasn’t been much used in recent years, but I suppose we should have a look. You never know what skeletons we might find.’

  Donald forces open the cupboard door, causing flakes of white paint to drift to the floor. Inside is a cramped, musty space fitted on three sides with heavy wooden shelving, leaving just enough room to walk inside. The shelves are filled with ageing stationery supplies, boxes of pencils, bottles of ink and other writing paraphernalia, stacks of yellowed, curling paper, an old manual typewriter.

  ‘I should think we can just throw all this stuff out,’ Margaret Rackham says.

  ‘Just a moment.’ Something pushed against the back wall catches Donald’s eye, a large wooden chest with heavy iron bands and an elaborate lock. He crouches down to examine it more closely. The method of construction and the quality of the patina suggest that this object is at least a few hundred years old. Gently, he manoeuvres it out into the room.

  ‘I think I know where this came from,’ the librarian says. ‘Cranc brought it back from Ty Faenor with the book collection. He promised me he would send it over to the Ashmolean.’

  The chest opens easily enough, revealing several compartments containing a collection of religious objects, cups and chalices and chains, most of them so heavily rusted as to be almost crumbling to dust. There is a separate drawer in the bottom with a jumble of smaller artefacts, simple metallic crucifixes, some decaying fragments of cloth, several brooches and clasps of the type that might be used to secure a monastic robe.

  ‘It’s a sacristy chest,’ Donald says, ‘a place where vestments and religious vessels would be kept in a church or a monastery.’ He has not forgotten what Hugh Mortimer told him about his antiquarian forebear and his collection of religious artefacts. ‘If I had to guess, I would say it once belonged to Sir John Mortimer, the original owner of Ty Faenor house.’

  Margaret Rackham breathes out slowly. ‘And Cranc just stuck it in the cupboard and forgot about it? I must say, I’m not very surprised. If he didn’t consider it interesting, he would have assumed that no one else would, either.’

  ‘He was probably right to doubt its significance. These items are too far decayed to be of much archaeological value.’

  ‘That’s a pity. Shall we get it moved out?’

  ‘I just want to check one thing.’ Looking at the design of the chest more closely, Donald can see that there is something not quite right about the carpentry, the proportions of the top rail. ‘We may yet be in luck,’ he says. ‘Chests of this kind often included secret compartments where valuable documents or other items could safely be stowed. Let’s see what we can find.’

  Running his hand around the inside of the rail, he is not surprised to find a small wooden key which, when depressed, allows him to open a small compartment built into the rim. Inside, there are several objects made of gold: a cross and bracelet, a jeweled chain, a ring formed of two delicate rosettes joined by diamond-shaped connectors. Donald cautiously picks up the ring and lays it in the palm of his hand.

  The librarian takes out a beautiful antique silver magnifying glass, just as an ordinary person might pull out a handkerchief or a set of keys. ‘Here, try this.’

  Donald trains the glass on the larger of the two rosettes, which was presumably intended to face upwards when the ring was on the wearer’s finger. There is a classic floriated border, then what seems to be a single stylised letter in the centre, though it is crusted with dirt and difficult to make out. He turns the ring over to examine the second rosette. There is a similar floral design around the edge and another single letter in the middle, which at first glance looks like a capital N.

  ‘I have an idea of what this might be,’ Donald says, ‘but I’ll need a second opinion.’

  ‘We’ll ask Violet to find a box for it,’ Margaret Rackham says, ‘and then you can run it over to the museum. I shan’t come with you, though. I’ll only slow you down.’

  Twenty minutes later, Donald is sitting in the office of Dr. Elaine Standish, assistant keeper of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval collections at the Ashmolean. She is young, in her early thirties, with the wiry build of a distance runner and a faintly superior air of well-informed scepticism. Donald knows her only slightly, from a chance meeting at a symposium where she spoke with impressive authority on the archaeology of parish church graveyards in the English midlands.

  ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up, if I were you,’ she says. ‘Ecclesiastical jewellery often turns up in medieval church burials, but bishop’s rings are not the usual thing one stumbles across. What exactly is its origin, do you know?’

  ‘Yes, I believe I do. It was removed from a Welsh monastic crypt in the seventeenth century by an overly zealous antiquarian collector.’

  She raises an incredulous eyebrow. ‘That’s an impressively detailed provenance. Let’s have a look, shall we?’

  Donald opens up the small padded box and hands her the ring. ‘It’s not my area of expertise,’ he says, ‘but I’ve seen a similar design somewhere before.’

  Elaine Standish turns it over to look at the underside, whistles faintly. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she says. ‘It is similar in some details to the ring of Ahlstan, ninth-century Bishop of Sherborne, which is now in the V&A. Ahlstan’s ring seems to have been the archetype for a style that became very popular in the later medieval period. This looks like the real thing—it’s one of the finest examples I have ever seen.’

  ‘Can you make out the letters?’

  ‘It needs some cleaning up, but I’m seeing a G and an N. No, perhaps an M. GM—does that mean something to you?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Donald says. ‘May I?’ He cradles the ring delicately in his palm. ‘I think what we have here is the episcopal ring of Galfridus Monemutensis—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bishop of St. Asaph.’

  THE SOUND OF a car pulling up in front of Dyffryn Farm fills Julia with a sudden foreboding. Opening the front door, she is relieved to see that it is not Hugh, but Ralph Barnabas climbing out of his rusty white Ford van. His pickaxe comes out with him, swinging at his side as he walks towards the farmhouse.

  ‘I’ll be starting work on the walls up in the top fields,’ he says.

  She feels a small surge of relief and gratitude. The news of Bowen’s accident will be common currency by now in Rhayader, but it seems that Ralph has not come here to talk about it. ‘It’s good of you to help my mother out,’ she says.

  ‘No, I don’t mind. I think it was hard for Dai to keep up, towards the end.’ It is a familiar puzzled expression he has, squinting against the brightness of the afternoon sun. ‘You’ll be off soon, then?’

  ‘They’re expecting me back at work tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again before long.’

  There is something too possessive in the way he says this, but she dismisses the thought. Casual conversation was never Ralph’s greatest strength. ‘Yes, I’ll be back up in a couple of weeks.’

  His gaze shifts awkwardly away from her. ‘There’s something I wanted to say to you now, before you go.’

  Please don’t say anything to me at all
, this is what she wants to tell him; but then again, there is no reason for her to show him such disdain. He is not to blame for anything, apart from still having feelings for her. ‘What is it, Ralph?’

  ‘It got me thinking, that’s all, what happened at the waterfall. There are some things you don’t know about Hugh Mortimer.’

  Julia would ask him to stop, to go away and leave her in peace, if she could bring herself to do it. ‘Please just say what you have to say.’

  Ralph stands there working the sharp end of his axe into the gravel. ‘I know you went to speak to my dad about the accident, but he won’t have told you the truth about it.’

  ‘Why should he lie to me?’

  ‘Because there are things you’re not supposed to know.’ It seems a prepared speech he gives her now, lines he has been rehearsing for fourteen years. ‘I was the only one who was with him, you see, when he woke up in hospital, and that’s the only time he ever said what really happened. He saw who it was, running away right there in front of him just as the explosion went off. There was no mistaking it, he said, Hugh Mortimer was the one he saw. I thought you should know, they could have your husband for murder if they could prove he was the one who set the fuse.’

  Julia’s first reaction is simple disbelief. ‘You wouldn’t have said something before, if you’ve known about it for so long?’

  ‘That’s because of a promise I made to my dad. He said it was just a mistake, he couldn’t send a man to prison for it.’ There is something cold and calculating in Ralph, the way he looks at her now. ‘I want you to know what your man is capable of, that’s all.’

  Now she turns away from him and walks back into the house, slams the door shut behind her. Her mother meets her at the foot of the stairs. ‘What did he say to you, love?’