‘She told you that?’
‘Yes.’
There were no saints that resembled Mai’s description of Galar who had a feast day on the first of August.
*
I returned to Llanelyn below the hill and took my evening meal in the White Dragon, a small hotel that served also as the local pub, where I had reserved a room. Afterwards, I wrote up my notes neatly. Two things in particular interested me about this case. First, the fact the visions revolved around what appeared to be a fictional saint. ‘Saint Galar’, with her association with sorrow, had correspondences with ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, an aspect of the Virgin Mary, but Mai Davies had been emphatic Galar was a different person entirely. Second, the healings. I would need to speak to the families concerned. I decided not to visit the parish priest until the following day, but would certainly consult with him before calling on the Evanses and Morgans.
The local church was dedicated to St Helen, a Welsh woman of high birth, canonised for founding churches in the country during the fourth century. Her name is an anglicised version of Elen, said by some scholars to be a Christianised reflection of an older, pagan deity. There was both an historical Elen and a literary one – she is mentioned in the book of Welsh folklore, The Mabinogion. But I could make no immediate link between her and Mai’s vision of ‘Saint Galar’. Llanelyn translates roughly as the Parish of Elen.
Father Brynn received me in the parochial house mid-morning, a dark-haired man in his late thirties, who clearly took good care of himself. He appeared sceptical about Mai Davies’ visions. ‘The Church has taken the place of the dead father for her,’ he said ponderously. We sat drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the garden of his house, in the shade of a modest orchard because the day was heating up fiercely. ‘Mai’s always been a serious type of girl,’ Brynn said. ‘Very devout, even at an early age. Evelyn, on the other hand . . .’ He laughed, flicked ash onto the roughly mown grass. ‘Well, she shows her face in church but only till Mai’s old enough to go everywhere by herself. The mother’s attendance has always been of the weddings and funerals kind.’
‘You think then that Mai’s visions are merely hallucinations?’
‘Yes, but . . .’ He looked at me warily. ‘Nothing too serious. She’ll grow out of it. Too much imagination. Children have make-believe friends and such, don’t they?’
Not usually saints, I thought.
‘What are your thoughts on the healings Mai’s supposed to have accomplished?’
‘Coincidence,’ he answered, shrugging. ‘And people wanting to believe. Huw’s injury was old, perhaps a memory of pain, and what Mai did helped him believe God had cured it.’ He looked faintly embarrassed and added hurriedly, ‘God can heal, of course, and sometimes through unusual methods, but in this case . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t see it. As for the little girl, she was under the doctor, so who saved her? Mai with a touch, or the doctor with his medicine, or indeed the prayers of her parents?’
‘Some might say a combination of all three.’
‘Everything is for a reason, as we know,’ said Father Brynn. ‘I’d very much like to believe that Mai Davies can work miracles, but my instincts say no. She’s an odd child, who’s always been that way. If I were Bronwen, I’d have her at the doctors now, not . . . well, I know you have to investigate these things when there’s an official report.’
‘You didn’t report it?’
‘I was obliged to report to the Bishop. Someone contacted me anonymously and insisted upon it. Bronwen and I decided we had no alternative.’
‘The mother believes, then.’
‘It’s her daughter. If we have to do something, rather than let the poor child grow out of it, we’d be wiser to care for her mind, in my opinion, rather than making a fuss of it or subjecting her to upsetting situations that might make things worse.’
I grinned. ‘Mai is not being interrogated by the Inquisition, you know.’
Brynn laughed. ‘But isn’t that what you are?’
I shook my head. ‘We are modern now. I’m not seeking heresy, if that’s what you think. The Office now seeks only to shine the light of truth upon cases like this, where the claims might be dubious. I don’t carry thumb screws.’
Again, Brynn laughed. ‘In this job, sometimes I wish I had them.’
We sipped our tea in silence for some moments, then I put down my cup. ‘You must know there is no Saint Galar. Why would Mai come up with the idea of a saint at that pool? I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.’
‘The pool has folklore associated with it,’ Brynn said. ‘It’s said that in centuries past people would take dead children to be blessed there before burial. Perhaps that’s why it’s a well of sorrows. Many mourned there.’
‘And yet Mai sees an entity who makes her feel happy. That’s a strange contradiction.’
Brynn shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There probably isn’t a well or spring in the whole country that isn’t regarded as sacred in some way – such things linger from olden times. Mai no doubt heard the stories and she has such a spring in her back garden. Children are imaginative, and why should she invent something frightening? No, to my mind, a girl is more likely to dream up a lady in a long dress who’s beautiful and kind.’
‘Such as fairytale princesses,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t a princess. From the child’s description, what she’s seen is more like the Virgin Mary, yet she’s invented a personality for it.’
Brynn shrugged. ‘She probably has mixed her invention up with what she knows of the Holy Mother. That’s all there is to it. I don’t think there’s much of a mystery here.’
*
Father Brynn came with me to visit the recipients of Mai’s healing, saying that they would feel more comfortable if he was there. I didn’t disagree. Huw Evans was at work but we were able to interview him in his lunch hour, after Brynn had a word with his supervisor. Huw was a man in his forties, with a wife and three children, and a regular job, who did not appear to be a credulous sort of person. Brynn had told me the Evanses attended church on Sundays but were otherwise not overly devout. We took Huw to a pub where he might get some lunch – a luxury small freedom for him on a working day – and here he showed me his damaged hand. I couldn’t stop myself flinching. More accurately, he showed me what was left of his hand, this disfigured two-fingered claw, far worse than Father Brynn had implied. Turning it before him, Huw said, ‘I don’t care what others say. When that girl put her light into me, she snuffed out the pain. I’d lived with it for nigh on eight years. Strong medicine could barely touch it. Now it doesn’t hurt at all.’
‘How did this healing come about?’ I enquired. ‘Did you ask for it?’
‘No, she just passed me in the High Street one Saturday afternoon, and caught hold of my arm to stop me. She said, “Let me see your hand”. Well, I thought she was just curious about it, being cheeky even, but for the look on her face . . . I let her touch me.’
‘What did you see or feel?’
‘I felt warmth,’ Huw said. ‘What I saw . . . ?’ He stuck out his lower lip and shook his head. ‘I thought I saw a radiance like the summer sun. But afterwards, it was like the memory of a memory . . . Can’t explain it.’
‘Was there any reason she picked you in particular?’ I asked. ‘I mean, rather than some other person in pain or who was ill. We can only suppose there were many like that on a Saturday afternoon in town.’
Huw stared at me through the pub’s smoky air, skeins of it made almost solid by the sunlight coming through the window behind him. ‘I’ve no idea. I wondered about it, of course I did, but no . . . I was just there at the right moment, I suppose.’
‘What did your doctor say? I assume you went to him.’
‘He said I’d got better,’ Huw said stonily, and took a long drink of his pint.
*
The Morgans lived in a newly converted old cottage on the edge of town. Brynn drove us there in his car, having telephoned Marie Morg
an in advance so she expected us. She answered the door quickly, a baby balanced on her hip. After the introductions, she took us to her sitting room, where we had to wait for the inevitable cup of tea. The house was neat and clean and furnished fairly expensively.
Once we were sitting with our refreshments, Marie told me details of herself: thirty-two, a housewife. Her husband Joe had a good job as a car salesman in a nearby town. Neither of them was Catholic or even a church-goer. They had lived in the village for three-and-a-half years, so would no doubt be regarded as newcomers for at least another twenty. ‘I know you’re here about Mai Davies,’ she said, ‘and I expect you want to prove she’s lying or something. But I know what I saw, and I’m not a stupid person.’
‘What did you see?’ I asked gently. ‘And where did this happen?’
Marie directed a misty gaze at her daughter, who was now playing on the floor with coloured bricks. ‘Mai just knocked on my door,’ she said. ‘It was evening, a Wednesday. Lizzie was so ill we thought . . .’ Marie couldn’t prevent tears welling at the memory. ‘Well, it was perhaps an hour before she would go to hospital. Then there was this skinny girl at the door saying she’d come to see Lizzie, that she could help.’ Marie ran her hands through her well-cut, dark hair. ‘To this day I don’t know why I didn’t question it more. I just let her in, like I was half asleep. She walked upstairs, went straight to Lizzie’s room. By the time I got there, she had her hands on my baby . . . The room . . . I can’t describe it, but something was there. I just fell to my knees on the floor and put my hands together. All I could say was “thank you, thank you”. I wasn’t thanking Mai either.’ She uttered a shaky laugh. ‘Now you’ll think I’m crazy.’
I shook my head. ‘Not at all. I’m simply here to find out what happened. How long ago was this?’
‘Oh, maybe two months now. The doctors were astounded. Lizzie didn’t have to go to hospital. Her fever fell . . . she was just the same as she was before. But they say that can happen with childhood illnesses and that the treatment she was on just took effect. I don’t believe that, though. I know what I saw, what I felt.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Morgan. I appreciate you giving us your time.’
‘Mai’s not in trouble over this, is she?’ Marie asked, her glance flicking from me to Brynn and back again.
‘No, please don’ t worry about that. It’s simply that she claims her ability comes from a saint, so the Church has to investigate the matter.’
‘It can come from Mickey Mouse for all I care,’ Marie retorted. ‘She saved Lizzie’s life.’
*
‘They sound pretty convincing, don’t they?’ Father Brynn said as we drove away. We both wound down our windows because the air was so hot; it was difficult to breathe. ‘Marie Morgan and Huw Evans believe they experienced miracles.’
‘Yet you don’t.’
‘What do you think about it all?’
I drew in my breath. ‘Well, I don’t doubt they believe Mai helped them. Coincidence? The doctors would say that. In Marie Morgan’s case, she was desperate and, like she said, if Mickey Mouse had turned up saying he could heal Lizzie, she’d have let him in. And maybe Huw Evans was desperate too, in a different way. So therefore they believed, and somehow their minds and bodies used that belief to effect cures, although it’s more likely in Huw’s case than in a baby’s, who lacked the faculties to analyse what was happening around her. Perhaps it was due to a special kind of mother and baby connection, but that’s beyond my field.’
‘So will you talk to the doctors, or are you ready to write up your conclusions?’
‘I will write up what I’ve witnessed and heard,’ I said. ‘It’s not my job to provide conclusions.’
‘Careful answer. Where do you want dropping off?’
‘Just at the Dragon. I’m going to visit the Davieses again. I’ll take a walk up the hill.’
‘In this heat?’ Brynn laughed. ‘Now who sounds mad?’
We drove past the church. Branches from an immense and ancient yew behind the graveyard wall draped, as if exhausted from heat, over the dedication board, partly obscuring it, so that it appeared the dedication was to Elen not Helen. For some reason, this made me shiver, but what kind of shiver that was I couldn’t honestly tell.
*
By the time I made the climb once more, it was late afternoon. As I followed the path I considered that Brynn had been right; it was far too hot for such exertions and I should have waited until later when it was cooler. My head began to ache and it was almost painful to look around the landscape, which seemed to shimmer and undulate as if invisible waves coursed through it. I took off my jacket and rolled up my shirtsleeves. The hills swept away from me, from green at my feet to a lavender haze in the distance. The mournful bleat of sheep echoed about me. There were no other people around. I realised how alone I was. The village far below was a glisten of shining windows, mica gleaming from walls. It seemed unbelievably distant, as if in another, abandoned world.
I am not a fanciful individual, but at that moment I became aware of what I can only describe as a vast sentience. I remembered what my mother used to say to me as a child, ‘At Lammas, ghosts walk at midday.’ I used to love hearing that, giggling with delicious terror at the thought of the bright summer landscape infested with phantoms. Now I felt a little of that same fear: primal, inexplicable, gut-deep. Lammas, the first of the harvest festivals, is of course the Christian name for this time, being yet another holy day tacked on to earlier pagan celebrations. It was – and often still is – observed by farming communities, as thanks for a successful harvest, but for some it goes deeper than that. The land is alive to them, with its own intelligence: a personality to be appeased. Without its cooperation people would starve. And now I felt some vast, muscular yet invisible presence undulating through and over the land. I fancied I could even see it, an intense shimmer of heat, coming like the thresh of ocean waves upon me, up the hill, blaring with unheard trumpets and victorious cries. Then it passed through my flesh and for a brief instant I felt the most incredible joy – no, beyond joy, ecstasy. Then it was gone, as swiftly as it had come. The heat? My imagination? What strange tricks the mind can play, coupled with an ancient memory.
*
Mai was in the garden of the cottage, sitting next to a woman I took to be her mother, who was doing some mending, a sewing basket at her feet. When she saw me she remarked, without introduction or preamble, on how red I was and sent Mai to fetch me some lemonade. I sat in the shade of an apple tree, panting, and fanning my face with my hat. Bronwen was silent, concentrating on her work, apparently comfortable with the lack of conversation between us. She was a strong-looking woman with thick black hair, which was iced with the faintest threads of grey. The heat was becoming increasingly uncomfortable; even sitting down I still felt breathless, light-headed.
When the girl returned, and had sat down on the grass before me, I asked if we could continue our conversation from before.
‘Of course,’ Mai said. ‘What else do you want to know?’
‘Well,’ I began, ‘there isn’t a saint called Galar known by the Church, and no saint like how you described her who has a festival today . . .’
Mai interrupted me in a shocked voice. ‘I didn’t make her up!’
I raised my hands to placate her, noticed a sharp glance in my direction from the mother. ‘I’m not saying you did, but what do you know about her?’
Mai regarded me carefully for some moments. ‘She’s very old and has lived for ever and ever at the spring.’
Bronwen paused in her sewing. ‘She was once joy but now she is sorrow, for some things are fading away.’
My head was pulsing with pain and I held the lemonade glass to my face before I took a swig of the contents. It was warm and the liquid itself was hardly quenching, being sickly sweet. I wished Mai had brought me water. ‘What things?’
Bronwen looked around, at the copse behind the garden, the sky. ‘The old ways. She doesn�
��t like modern things, like cars, I suppose, and radios, and things like that. Neither do we.’
‘And churches?’ I asked crisply. The conversation was now between Bronwen and myself; Mai had fallen silent.
Bronwen’s dark eyes were cold. ‘What do you mean?’
I rubbed my neck, pulling my shirt collar away from my skin. ‘I mean, is this Galar older than the church, say St Helen’s in the village?’ I looked at Mai, who was regarding me curiously and spoke to her directly. ‘You do know that Helen was once Elen, a lady of ancient Wales, don’t you?’
Mai nodded. ‘We learned that at Sunday school.’
‘Well, before that, she was a goddess in folklore. Are there people who perhaps still see Helen as that? Were you ever told that?’
Mai’s mouth dropped open a little and she stared at me, as if horrified. ‘You want to make her bad!’ she cried abruptly. ‘You don’t want her to be part of God, because she’s not in a book or written down, but everything is part of God, you stupid man!’
‘Mai!’ I cringed at her ferocity, which had seemed to come out of nowhere.
Bronwen did not chastise her daughter for insulting me, which was equally insulting.
‘Go away!’ Mai scrambled to her feet and pointed at me. The air shimmered with heat all around her. My vision was blurred, my head pounding. Mai pointed at me with a stiff arm, her hair over her eyes. I couldn’t dispel the absurd idea that she was some ancient, vengeful priestess, somehow manifesting in the body of a girl. ‘You’re not wanted,’ Mai hissed. ‘None of us want you here. We don’t need to be investigated.’ With these words, she turned and ran into the house, slamming the back door behind her.
I felt as if the girl had slapped me.
Bronwen picked up her sewing again, her fingers moving deftly. ‘People have always known Mai is different, sees things differently,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘Mr Coombe, our ways are not your ways, or anybody else’s. If Mai sees the lady as a saint, and calls her Galar after the well, it doesn’t matter. She’s Helen, Elen, or merely the light of the land. I think you’ve learned all you can. You should go now.’
Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more Page 48