by Fay Sampson
But could this hope itself gnaw away at the serenity she sought for these last precious months?
“Can you show us our rooms?” she asked.
“Of course. There’s a lift.”
Sian seized a pair of keys from the rack behind the desk and led the way.
Jenny gasped as Sian flung open the door. Light flooded across the centre of the room. A tall window gave on to a balcony. Beyond, above the darker woods, the purple ridge of the Berwyn Mountains was bathed in afternoon sunshine. The sky over the hills was the singing blue of springtime.
She sank down on the folkweave bedspread. Everything about the room spoke of this locality. The timber walls, the framed watercolours of Welsh landscapes, the slate top of the dressing table. There was a vase of wild flowers on the chest of drawers.
“It’s lovely.”
Sian beamed. “It is, isn’t it? I’ll say that for Thaddaeus, he’s got taste.”
Melangell ran to the balcony. Aidan followed her.
“There’s a swimming pool!”
“It’s got a cover over it.”
“It’ll be a bit cold yet,” Sian laughed, crossing to join them. “If the house does well, Thaddaeus wants to heat it. He’s thinking of solar panels, though the sun goes down early below the hills.”
Jenny made an effort to rise from the comfortable bed and join them. Behind the house, the trees that, at the front, screened it from the road had been cleared. There was not just the swimming pool to the right, but a tennis court, and to the left… she craned further to look…
“Are those archery butts?”
Sian nodded. Her broad smile tightened. “Thaddaeus has big ideas. He had a big fight to get planning permission. There was a lot of local opposition. Still is. He told them he wanted facilities that guests could enjoy even if they’re… not on top form.” She glanced anxiously at Jenny. “Swimming’s good for that, isn’t it?” Jenny nodded. “I was all for that. I gave up my job as a PE teacher to be the warden here. But… I don’t know. Today he’s been talking about waterfall walking and rock-climbing.”
“You’d have to count me out.”
“That’s what I mean. I thought I heard them say something about extending the clientèle with team-bonding for executives. I hope he’s not losing the plot. Maybe Caradoc Lewis had a point… He’s the leader of the anti-brigade…” She frowned, staring down at the wide gardens of the house. In a low, bitter voice she said, “If he did anything to change the character of this valley, it would break Lorna’s heart. I think I’d kill him.”
Jenny saw her go suddenly rigid. When she looked down, following Sian’s eyes, she saw Thaddaeus and Lorna walking round the corner of the house. An expression, almost of fear, twisted Sian’s face. She backed away from the balcony, as Thaddaeus lifted his hand to wave to them.
Next moment, she snapped back into her professional smile. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking out of turn. Don’t tell him I said that. I don’t want to lose my job!”
But Jenny sensed it was not a laughing matter.
Aidan smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ll be discreet.”
“Mummy’s good at archery,” Melangell said from the balcony.
“Was.” Jenny gave a difficult smile.
“Really? That’s great!” Sian’s laugh was back. “We must get you out there.”
Jenny’s tired arms remembered the strength it had needed to bend the stave and draw the bowstring back to its fullest extent.
As if she read Jenny’s thoughts, Sian reassured her. “Don’t worry. You can do archery sitting down, if it helps. Did you know that? They have it in the Paralympics. We’ve got a wheelchair you can borrow. Really, you’ll be fine.”
Jenny felt herself brighten in the warmth of the young woman’s enthusiasm. “That sounds great. I might give it a try. I’m not sure I could handle a full-strength bow, though.”
“No problem. I’ll help you choose a suitable one.” Sian turned for the door. “I’ve put Melangell across the corridor. Is that all right? Give me a shout if there’s anything you need. Supper from half past six.”
She left them. Jenny heard her steps bouncing down the wooden stairs.
Melangell grabbed the second key and darted across to the room opposite, faster than they could follow her. When they caught up with her, she was laughing with joy.
“Look! I can just see my yew trees, and the tower of the church.”
This room was smaller and had no balcony. Through the screening branches outside there was indeed a sidelong glimpse of the churchyard with its massive dark trees, of the little church of St Melangell and the cottages around it.
“Can we go and see the church now? Can we? And the carvings?”
“But you already know what they look like. They’re in your book. Daddy’s photographs.”
“I know. But I want to see them really.”
So do I, Jenny thought.
She felt Aidan’s eyes on her. He knew how much this meant to her. Bringing Melangell to the place where her story began. Showing her the church with the carvings of St Melangell’s legend. Reliving their first discovery of it, when it had been just herself and Aidan. Jenny researching for another of her books on Celtic saints. Aidan taking the photographs to illustrate it. Both of them falling in love with this place.
“When your mother’s rested,” Aidan said, “we’ll all go.”
Jenny lay back on the bed, letting her body relax. “I can see the mountains without even getting up. Bliss.”
Aidan came over and kissed her. “I’m glad it’s worked out as you wanted. It’s a lovely place. And we always said we must bring Melangell here.”
“‘One day’, we said. ‘One day, we’ll take her.’ As if we had forever.” She rolled over and drew his sandy-haired head back down to hers. She placed her finger on his lips, feeling the brush of his beard. “No regrets. Remember? We have today. We’re here. Let’s make the most of it.”
“You’re amazing,” he murmured. “And you’re right. As always.”
She watched him struggle to hold his smile in place.
He sat down on the bed and caressed her hand.
“This Thaddaeus is an amazing guy, isn’t he?” she asked. “To do all this.” Her hand gestured at the room and the tall window. “I bet there was a lot of opposition to building here. But he’s done it so sensitively. It… fits. As though it grew here.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way, then. Sian seemed worried about it. I think she’s scared of him.”
She sat up. “Scared of Thaddaeus? I thought he seemed a lovely man.”
She did have a momentary recall of the sudden change in Sian’s face when she thought Thaddaeus might have overheard her. But her memory went back more vividly to their meeting in the foyer. The dark brown eyes that had held hers for such long moments. Her face softened, remembering that look.
“And the girl. Lorna? She looked nervous too.” Aidan’s face was sober.
Jenny turned a wondering face to him. “Did she? I didn’t notice.” She lay back on the pillows and settled herself comfortably. “You’re imagining things.”
Chapter Three
MELANGELL RAN TO ONE of the yew trees as though it was an old friend. She tried to throw her arms around the trunk, but could not encircle even a quarter of it.
“It must be hundreds of years old!” she laughed. “Hundreds and hundreds.”
“Two thousand, they reckon, the oldest,” Aidan said.
Melangell dropped her arms and turned to face him, frowning. She flicked her fingers as she calculated.
“That’s silly,” she pronounced. “Isn’t it? Jesus was born 2,000 years ago, so there couldn’t have been a church here then.”
She was not, Aidan thought, the daughter of a church historian for nothing.
It was Jenny who answered. “Do you notice anything funny about the shape of the churchyard?”
Melangell’s eyes flashed as she accepted the challenge. She looked around her, ca
refully. It did not take her many moments to make the discovery.
“It’s round. Most of them have corners and straight walls.”
“Good girl. This is a llan. The traditional shape of a Celtic monastery or hermitage site. The church is on a raised circular mound. But this one is older than that. A llan can mean any sacred enclosure. The yews show this must have been a holy place long before the Christians got here. Perhaps that’s why St Melangell chose it.”
Aidan smiled. Jenny had lost none of her enthusiasm for Celtic history.
Melangell’s eyes encompassed the setting with new awe. “That’s kind of shivery, isn’t it? A holy place just waiting for her to find it.”
They walked past the guardian yews. Aidan let his fingers brush over the deeply grained bark. Automatically, his hand reached for his camera case, but he let it fall.
“They sometimes say that yews were planted in churchyards to supply the bows for medieval archers. But that can’t be the reason for these.”
“No,” Jenny said. “These trees were sacred too.”
They stepped inside the church, and Aidan was surprised all over again by its proportions. Where the nave of other churches occupied most of the space, leaving only the eastern end for the choir and sanctuary, here the chancel with the shrine of the saint formed half the building.
Jenny sat down in one of the pews near the back and bowed her head in prayer. Was she putting off approaching the shrine of St Melangell because it was so important to her?
But the saint’s little namesake ran forward. Melangell was not yet looking at the stone-canopied tomb that rose behind the altar in the chancel. All her eager attention was on the woodwork frieze above the screen that separated the two halves of the church.
She looked up at the carvings and her brilliant smile greeted them like old friends.
“That’s Brochwel!” She pointed to the figure on horseback on the left.
“Brochwel Ysgithrog, Prince of Powys,” Aidan agreed.
“And there’s that funny man kneeling down. He looks as if he’s got a telescope, but really it’s a horn.”
“Brochwel’s huntsman, trying to blow his horn to urge the hounds to the kill.”
“Only he can’t, can he?” She bounced with joy. “And that’s Melangell, sitting in the middle.”
“She’s got her crozier in her hand, to show she’s Abbess of a monastery.” Jenny had joined them. “Though that came afterwards.”
“And the hare is running towards her. The hounds are howling and howling, and the prince is shouting, ‘Get it, hounds, get it!’ but they can’t catch the hare, can they, because she’s protecting it? God won’t let the hunt kill either of them.”
“So he asks her to marry him.” Jenny took up the story. “And she won’t. She’s an Irish princess who’s run away to Wales because she didn’t want to marry the man her father chose. And Brochwel is so impressed by her courage and compassion that he gives her land for a monastery. And he says he’ll never hunt hares again in this valley. So she sets up a house and a church for her nuns, right here.”
“Right here, where we’re standing?” Melangell looked down at her small sandalled feet in wonder.
“Yes. Right here.”
There was wonder in Jenny’s voice too.
Aidan watched as they moved on up the step to the chancel. St Melangell’s shrine reared its gabled canopy of pinkish sandstone. Leaf sculptures sprouted from the slopes of its eaves like the raised wings of birds. It was covered in pink-and-green brocade. Low, decorated pillars supported the roof over a stone slab.
He winced. The ancient shrine, which had been the site of medieval pilgrimage, was evidently still the focus of prayer. A profusion of cards lay heaped on the slab. Pink, blue, turquoise, white. Some decorated with pictures. Something in him, a lifetime of plain Methodism, shied away from these pious tokens. Superstition, he wondered? Like the coloured rags people hung above holy wells?
Jenny was examining the cards. “These are the names of people someone lit a candle for, or entered in the Book of Remembrance. So much prayer.” Her voice fell quiet. “For both the living and the dead.”
Something wrenched his heart. Aidan was caught between his nonconformist aversion to the veneration of saints and the possibility that he was overlooking something of real importance. He studied Jenny’s face. Calm, serious. What was she thinking? What was she hoping?
Would it make a difference to her if he left a token of his own faith here?
He watched her move on, towards the archway behind the altar. It led through to the apse where the saint’s original grave had been found. The apse was a place for private prayer. He saw her halt in disappointment. Someone else was already there.
“Look!” cried Melangell. “Here she is!”
The moment passed.
The effigy of St Melangell his daughter had discovered was not on the stone slab under the canopy, like the tombs of bishops and knights in a cathedral. She lay to one side of it. Her hands were clasped serenely in prayer. His fingers caressed the stone.
“Look,” he said to his own Melangell, “you can just see two hares peeping out from under her.”
As he studied the sculpture, his hand itched for his camera. It was silly, really. Jenny’s book on St Melangell had been published years ago, with Aidan’s photographs to accompany her story. He did not need more.
But cameras had moved on since then. Would his Nikon D5100 capture more subtleties? The grain of wood in the carvings? The play of light and shadow which threw the figure of St Melangell into relief? Perhaps he would come back tomorrow with his tripod and try a longer exposure, using more of the natural light.
“You found her, then?”
He looked up, startled. A dumpy, middle-aged woman stood between the choir stalls. Her wide shoulders and short stature made her body almost square. The elastic of her black skirt strained at her waist. Her light blue shirt was parted at the neck to show a glimpse of a clerical collar. Above her black-rimmed spectacles, her greyish hair was dragged back over her skull so tightly that it might have been hidden under a veil.
Melangell evidently thought so.
“Are you a nun?”
The glasses flashed in the light of the east window.
“No. But I am a priest. Not the Priest-Guardian of the shrine. She’s away this week on holiday. I’m just minding the shop.”
Melangell looked uncertainly towards the room at the base of the tower, where racks of greetings cards showed through the glass partition.
“That shop?”
“Well, yes, that too. But I meant I was minding things in general. I’m here some days, or at the Centre, for people in need.”
She looked directly at Aidan. He was disconcerted. It was Jenny who was dying of cancer. But the penetrating grey eyes were on him. She held out a business card.
The Reverend Joan Banfield
Spiritual counselling and psychotherapy
“Some people call me Mother Joan,” she added, with a faint smile. “You know where to find me. My number’s on the card.” She turned to Jenny and held out her hands. “May I?”
Slowly, Jenny extended her own hands and the priest enfolded them in her own. They stood in silence for long moments.
Aidan felt a flash of disquiet that was almost fear. What was she doing? What did Jenny believe she was doing?
Melangell’s clear voice rang from the other end of the nave. She was standing in the tower gift shop.
“Mummy! They’ve got your book here.”
Jenny dropped her hands from the other woman’s. With an apologetic smile she hurried down the aisle to join her daughter. Aidan followed.
Melangell was waving the book with Aidan’s photograph of St Melangell’s effigy on the cover. He heard the gasp behind him.
“Jenny Davison? You’re the Jenny Davison?”
Jenny blushed. “If you mean did I write that, yes. The photos are Aidan’s.”
“My dear! So you won
’t need me to tell you about the shrine, and what a very sacred place this is.”
“No, we knew that. This little brat is called Melangell.”
The glasses glinted again as Mother Joan turned her gaze on the child.
“Lucky girl. It’s a very special name.”
There were voices on the path outside. A group of some fifteen people came crowding into the chapel, talking eagerly. In the stone-flagged shadows, and the muted colours from the windows, they fell silent. Some crossed themselves and went to sit, as Jenny had done, in the pews. Aidan, watching them, felt that prayer was palpable in the nave.
Then they were off, heading towards the screen with its carvings and the sandstone shrine itself. Voices rose again.
“A minibus party,” Mother Joan said. “They can’t get a full-sized coach up the road, thank God.” The grey eyes darkened behind the lenses. “Yet.”
Chapter Four
JENNY CAST HER EYES ROUND the almost empty dining room. In the far corner were the two young walkers they had passed on the road. They looked barely in their twenties. Relieved of his large rucksack, the fair young man’s body looked even slighter. His companion was more generously built. As she leaned towards him, her curtain of straightened black hair hid her face. They were tucking into large platefuls of home-cooked food with enthusiasm.
A little way behind Jenny were an older couple they had not seen before.
Evening sunshine threw fingers of light across the lawns between the trees. But the shadows of the hills were closing in.
Sian came bustling from the kitchen with three loaded plates.
Jenny smiled at her. “You’re warden, receptionist, sports coach and waitress too? They keep you busy.”
“We had Mair from the village helping out over Easter. Comes from Llangynog on her bicycle. Her mother helps with the cleaning. But Mair’s only free in the college vacs. Besides…” Sian set down their meals and ran her fingers through her blonde hair. “We’re not so busy now.”