The Wrong Rite

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “God bless Danny the Boots.”

  “Not Danny,” said Madoc. “He’s strict Chapel—he’d think it a black sin to be handling another man’s wife’s underwear.” Madoc himself was kicking off his shoes and slinging his trousers over the foot of the bed. “Either Uncle Caradoc’s hired a new housemaid or else the fairies have been around. We must remember to leave a saucer of milk on the hearth tonight. Come here, darling.”

  Two hearts may beat as one when love is true, but jet lag conquers even the most devoted. It was Dorothy who woke them; she wanted her supper, and she wanted it now. That was no problem; Janet didn’t even have on a blouse to unbutton.

  “Enjoy it while you can, precious. One more tooth and this milk bar’s going to shut down.”

  Dorothy burped and went on nursing.

  “What are we going to do with her at dinnertime, Madoc? You’ll want to be with the family. Maybe I’d better just have my supper here on a tray, if there’s anybody to bring it.”

  “Not to worry, love. Betty will have set something up. I’m going to have a quick bath and get dressed, then I’ll go see.”

  “Don’t take all the hot water. I want one too.”

  “There’ll be plenty.”

  The Romans had introduced the concept of indoor plumbing to Wales sometime after A.D. 50. There might be places here as in Canada where it still hadn’t quite caught on, but in Sir Caradoc’s house, at least in the less ancient parts, the amenities were not lacking. Madoc was shaving and Janet, wearing a tricot robe bought for the trip because it would pack well and wishing she’d brought her old blue fleece instead, was getting her child into fresh sleepers when Lady Rhys knocked at their door. Cowering behind her was a rosy-cheeked lass of about sixteen.

  “This is Megan. She’s going to sit with Dorothy while you go down to dinner.”

  “Oh good, we were wondering how to manage. Are you used to babies, Megan?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “She’s Betty’s great-niece and the eldest of six, she’s been to nanny college, and she doesn’t have anything contagious,” Lady Rhys amplified. “Isn’t that so, Megan?”

  “Yes’m.”

  After all, they’d be right downstairs. Janet needn’t fuss. “Then why don’t you come back in about twenty minutes, Megan, after I’ve had a chance to get dressed? Was it you who unpacked for us so nicely, by the way?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “That’s two things we have to thank you for, then. What time does Uncle Caradoc want us downstairs, Mother?”

  Not having a mother of her own, Janet had fallen easily into the familial form of address. “Lady Rhys” would have been too formal toward someone she had every reason to love, “Silvestrine” was too much of a mouthful, and she could never have brought herself to say “Sillie,” even if Sir Emlyn did.

  “Dinner’s at eight, but come as soon as you’re ready. There’ll be drinks in the hall, and people will be wanting to chat.”

  People would already be chatting, Janet was sure. Awkward silences were never a problem at Sir Caradoc’s. Janet had got by last time mostly on nods and smiles and had therefore been a smash hit from the first; she had no qualms about meeting a fresh batch of relatives, even that one with the hair. Madoc was out of the bathroom now; she gave him a smile and a nod for practice and went to take her bath.

  Chapter 2

  THE REDHEAD TURNED OUT to be Iseult Rhys, Madoc’s father’s second cousin once or twice removed. The chap who’d come with her was not a Rhys, and gave the impression that he wouldn’t have wanted to be. So far he’d shown no degree of cordiality except toward the waiter who’d brought him a drink; at the moment he was over by the sideboard consuming cheese straws in gloomy silence. Iseult, on the other hand, was standing directly under the crystal chandelier. Its light was catching her hair; the hair was catching Dafydd’s eye. Iseult was an actress, Janet had learned; Dafydd was clearly warming up to play Tristan. Women did tend to go in and out of Dafydd’s life with startling rapidity.

  They made a handsome pair, Dafydd tall as Uncle Caradoc, elegant in the tailcoat and white tie he wore for his concert performances; Iseult in a long gown of emerald green with her white bosom swelling out—quite a long way out—of the skimpy bodice. “She looks like an upside-down leek,” Madoc murmured, and Janet felt warmed and comforted.

  She herself was feeling pretty darned classy tonight, for a girl from Pitcherville, New Brunswick; she’d welcomed the prospect of dressing up for the dinners at which Uncle Caradoc liked to retain the formal customs of earlier days.

  Being a nursing mother and being Janet, she hadn’t frittered away any great fortune on clothes she wouldn’t get much use out of back home. Instead, she’d gone shopping for some interesting materials and, with her sister-in-law’s help, run up a couple of simple, rather medieval-looking gowns that fell to her feet in soft, uninterrupted folds from modestly scooped-out yokes. Tonight’s was a midnight-blue silk in a rough weave that caught the candlelight with a genteel hint of a shimmer. Her arms were bare, but Annabelle had stitched a leftover strip of the material into a long stole that could fall loosely or be wrapped snugly around her shoulders, depending. Her jewels were the heirloom diamond ring that Lady Rhys had taken off her own finger to seal her son’s impromptu engagement, the pearls Madoc had given her the next day, and the diamond-stud earrings—not vulgarly big ones, of course—that Sir Emlyn himself, all on his own, had gone out and bought her to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild.

  Compared to the designer model and the freight of gold and emeralds Iseult was wearing, Janet’s modest toilette wasn’t much; but it was enough. Even the inscrutable type who’d come with Iseult was resting his eyes on Janet with a certain air of relief. His name, it transpired, was Reuel Williams, and he was a writer. He must, Janet decided, be the kind of writer whose name you’re supposed to recognize, and if you don’t, you try not to let on. Nobody was letting on; nobody knew either what his relationship to Iseult was, though it stood to reason that there was a certain amount of wonderment going around.

  Anyway, Reuel didn’t appear to be much bothered by the attention Dafydd was paying his lady, if in fact she was his lady. Maybe Iseult was one of Tom’s actresses and Reuel a scriptwriter or something. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, though rather pale and haughty-nosed like somebody who spent most of his time indoors feeling superior. To other writers, Janet wondered, or to the world in general?

  Maybe Reuel Williams wasn’t a writer but a critic. Now that he’d had his fill of ogling Janet, he was casting a connoisseur’s eye over the other women in the room. Gwen in scarlet silk with ropes of pearls down to her knees and a red satin headache band confining her curly black hair got a long, thoughtful stare. Tall, handsome Lady Rhys in black lace and lots of diamonds was well worth looking at; Mary the Mouse in dowdy gray was easy to ignore. Lisa’s pretty daughter, Tib, ruffled like a yellow double daffodil, drew a reluctant smile. But it was Lisa herself, standing a little apart from the rest, wearing a stiff, somewhat arty-looking long brown dress with a high cowled neckline, whom Reuel chose as the object of his attention.

  Janet felt a twinge of annoyance at his doing so; she herself had been hoping for the chance to chat with Lisa before dinner. She’d liked what little she’d seen of the youngish widow while they were being introduced; she thought Dafydd was lucky to have so attractive a hostess and wondered why he wasn’t paying Lisa more attention.

  Lisa was a few inches taller than Janet, perhaps five foot five or six. She had lots of fine brown hair worn in an old-fashioned psyche knot, hazel eyes with delicate black rims around the irises, one of those divine British complexions compounded of cream and roses, and a voice that made a person think of still waters running deep. She gave Reuel a polite smile when he addressed her, and made some inconsequential remark.

  Whatever Reuel said in reply had a most peculiar effect. Lisa went chalk white/then seemed to disappear. Even though she hadn’t moved a muscle, Janet got the
distinct impression that she’d drawn her head down inside that upstanding brown cowl and didn’t intend to come out.

  Was Lisa having some kind of turn? Janet was wondering whether she ought to do something when Tib fluttered up quick as a butterfly, slid an arm around her mother’s waist, and began chattering at Reuel nineteen to the dozen. A second or two later, Dafydd had remembered his duty as a guest, excused himself to Iseult, and made the trio a foursome. So that was all taken care of. Janet decided she might as well go be nice to Mary the Mouse.

  Mary was not difficult to strike up a chat with, nor was she all that mousy once she got going. She was, Janet learned, agog over Great-uncle Caradoc’s upcoming birthday gala, not because of him but because it fell on Beltane, the old May Day, when bonfires must be lighted and folk who understood the importance of these ancient rites must jump over them to protect the land from sorcery and assure good crops for the harvest. Mary herself had been among the leapers on numerous occasions; she had even, she admitted with a decent pretense of modesty, received accolades for her agility in the cause of fertility.

  Mary warmed to her subject, describing in detail various Beltane fires she had hurdled. She did not hold with the degenerate custom of just lighting two bonfires side by side and running between them; although this sounded to Janet like a much more sensible thing to do, if one happened to be seriously concerned about baneful warlocks in the neighborhood. Janet couldn’t recall that her brother Bert ever was.

  Bert did burn over his pastures now and then. Often enough, as a kid, Janet herself had been one of the bunch stationed along the edges with wet sacks and old brooms to keep the fire from spreading. She’d enjoyed the excitement and the good-smelling smoke and the fun of beating out errant sparks. She’d realized the grass always grew better after a burning, but she’d never been aware that she was participating in a fertility rite. Janet thought perhaps she’d better not mention this back at the farm. Now that young Bert was stuck on the second Williamson girl, Annabelle was waxing a trifle edgy about fertility rites.

  Reuel Williams was at her elbow again. Wickedly and deliberately Janet drew him into the Beltane fires, then slid away herself for a few words with the patriarch.

  “Will you talk to me now, Uncle Caradoc? I barely got to say hello at teatime before you left me for a younger woman.”

  “An infant enchantress! Is it sleeping our Dorothy is now?”

  “I hope so. I’m going to run up before we go in to dinner. Betty’s great-niece Megan is baby-sitting. She seems like a nice kid.”

  “Oh yes, Megan is a good child. She will be Dorothy’s seventh cousin once removed, you can be easy about her. Come now, I have a new treasure to show you.”

  “Not another silver crosier?”

  “No, not that. Such discoveries do not happen more than once. How well I remember the pride in my father’s voice as he told of drawing that beautiful thing forth from the dark, secret hole in which it had lain hidden for so many long years.”

  Janet knew how many: all the way back to the twelfth century and the reign of Henry II, when Rhys ap Gruffyd, the Lord Rhys, had been the most prominent man in Wales. The Lord Rhys had been among those who had favored the Cistercian monasteries; these had greatly flourished and multiplied, then gradually declined. Four centuries later, by the time of the Dissolution under Henry VIII, the buildings and the monks had been in sad state. The neighbors hadn’t seemed to mourn overmuch at seeing the few remaining Cistercians ousted, but had set about lugging off their building stones to erect memorials in the utilitarian shapes of cottage walls and pigsties.

  Janet hadn’t been told and didn’t quite like to ask how her husband’s branch of the Rhyses had come to build their manor house around the monks’ former dining hall, the one part that had always been kept in repair while outbuildings crumbled and even the chapel showed signs of decay. Various Rhyses had added to the manor from time to time, using what lay at hand. There were still a few oddments of ruins left here and there about the grounds, never removed nor dismantled lest some heir or other might take a notion to tack on another ell or build another cow barn.

  With all the tearing down and rebuilding, various interesting artifacts had come to light. Some had been more than interesting, for the Cistercians in their heyday had waxed rich and spent freely to the greater glory of their God and the awe of the populace. It had been some Caradoc back around George IV’s time who’d discovered the cryptic parchment; but nobody had caught on to what it meant until the present Sir Caradoc’s grandfather had got a brainstorm one day and lowered his twelve-year-old son, Sir Caradoc’s father, on a rope through a curtain of spiderwebs down a half-ruined stairwell, with a miner’s lamp on his cap and a crowbar lashed to his belt.

  Sir Caradoc’s lilt rose almost to a song, chanting of how the young lad had found the stone with the crooked line carved into it, pried it out with his crowbar, stuck in his arm as far as it would go, and finally, croaked in the voice of a bullfrog, “Send down the basket, Father!”

  Treasure trove must perforce be reported to the Crown and investigated by a coroner appointed to maintain the royal private properties. There was no way word of the great find would not have got around to the servants, no way they wouldn’t have repeated it at the pub, no way that sole basketful wouldn’t have been multiplied many times over in the telling. The coroner assigned to the Rhyses had been an Englishman, holding to the then-current belief among his peers that Wales was the armpit of the empire, that all Welshmen were liars and petty pilferers, and that no good thing could come out of a Welsh monastery because Henry VIII’s trusty emissaries had well and duly snaffled everything worth taking three centuries before.

  Wales had not then started to gear up for the tourist trade. The road had been vile, the inn worse. The coroner’s bed had been not only lumpy but also verminous. The food had been unfit to mention, much less eat. Being thus in a filthy temper and bearing in mind that, while the Crown was entitled to seize any treasure it had a mind to, it must also pay the finder full value for what it took, the coroner had condemned the golden chalice as copper and its jewels as bogus. He’d reviled the badly tarnished crosier as a pitiful attempt to deceive, and declared the fist-size uncut emerald set into its crook to be in fact no more than a lump of Roman glass.

  Told to take his junk away and dump it where he’d found it, Sir Caradoc’s grandfather had humbly agreed with the coroner that he was just a stupid Taffy who hadn’t known any better. The stupid Taffy had then placated the clever Englishman with a few noggins of homemade mead and talked him into writing a letter to the effect that there was nothing of value left at the site of the former monastery and no Rhys was ever again to pester the Crown with any more nonsense about hidden treasure. The Englishman had then departed with a sense of duty done and a slight buzzing in his ears. The crestfallen Welshman had watched him go, then slunk away to enjoy a quiet snicker while he wiped the carefully applied dirt off the golden chalice and got out the silver polish for the crosier.

  Sir Caradoc’s grandfather hadn’t even bothered to mention the two golden sickles. That fine gentleman of a Sais wouldn’t have been interested. Besides, they dated from the long-ago time when Wales had been still a sovereign nation, perhaps even from before the Romans. Why should those smart-mouthed Londoners put any claim to them anyway? It had been Welsh artisans who’d beaten the little sickles out of the native gold, Welsh Druids who’d used them to gather with due ceremony the all-healing mistletoe off the oak trees on which it grew.

  Gathering mistletoe had been a major industry among the Druids. Not only deemed to be good for whatever ailed you, the pretty parasite also came in handy around the house as a picklock, a lightning conductor, and a good-luck charm for the dairy. The mere gracious gesture of bestowing a bouquet of mistletoe on the first cow to drop her calf after the New Year would put a crimp in the plans of any witch bent on curdling the milk or laying an antibutter spell on the churn. There might still be farmhouses around where a
bunch of mistletoe could be seen gathering dust on the chimney piece. The very monks who’d done the cooking here when the house was yet a monastery would likely have kept some on hand, just in case.

  Just why they’d collected the golden sickles was open to conjecture. Sir Caradoc thought it likely, as had his father and grandfather before him, that some abbot had confiscated the pretty things and tucked them away in his treasure hole as part of an effort to stamp out the old religion. Why they hadn’t been melted down and the gold used for purposes the abbot deemed holier was anybody’s guess. Maybe he hadn’t needed the gold at the time, or maybe he hadn’t had the heart to destroy the sickles.

  That the Cistercians could actually have employed these pagan instruments for the purpose of gathering mistletoe would have been hard to credit, were it not that strange things had happened in those last, lax years so long after the founders of their houses had vowed themselves to poverty, holiness, and good works. According to history, a monk had been caught doing a tidy business in counterfeit coins, which he’d forged in his own cell. Rumors had even been bandied about that some of the monks in another monastery had turned out not to be males.

  Anyway, for whatever reason, it was certain that somebody—the abbot, one of his flock, or all of them together—had been more than a bit interested in Druidic golden sickles. There’d been two of them in with the chalice and the crosier. Sir Caradoc’s father, never forgetting that supreme moment at the end of his rope, had spent many hours thereafter prowling among the ruins, which were more abundant then than later, looking for another mystic mark. On the very eve of his eldest son’s birth, he had come upon a stone marked with that same little crook, and behind it another sickle. Now, in his old age, Sir Caradoc had quite literally stumbled upon yet a fourth. Just before his birthday, too. Now, wasn’t that a wonderful present for an old man?