Finding Camlann (22 page)
Authors: Sean Pidgeon
‘Just one more thing,’ Donald says. ‘Can you tell me anything about how he died? I’ve heard he met an unpleasant end.’
‘Yes indeed, that is true. The story goes that he was crossing the River Monnow when he was set upon by the kt us true. Devil himself wielding sharpened stakes made to gore out the hearts of those who opposed him. Siôn was left for dead at the river’s edge, his skin all scored and blistered where the weapons of the enemy had touched him. He had used all his strength to save himself, but his injuries were too great to be sustained. He took on a mortal fever, and died some days later here at Kentchurch Court.’
‘Do not Heavenly Lord I beseech thee, take me from the world in a state of burning.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Rhys says, looking at Donald with what seems a renewed respect. ‘I can see that you have studied the matter, Dr. Gladstone.’
‘I’ve been wondering, though, do you think people really write poetry on their death-beds?’
‘Ordinary people do not, I am sure. As Professor Bowen has shown us, however, Siôn Cent was a much deeper mystery than has generally been understood.’
Abruptly, Gerald Rhys draws the curtain back across the window. Donald takes a last look at the portrait, tries to fix it in his mind, but by now the image of the elusive bard has been lost in the cracks and flakes of the brittle old paint.
T
HE SIGN ABOVE
the window of the ironmongers in Rhayader, Jack Edwards & Son, makes a poignant reminder of the younger Edwards, Gwyn, who would perhaps by now have inherited this business from his father had he not been killed in the explosion at the Ellis engineering works at the age of twenty-two. For Julia, walking past just after opening time on a Saturday morning, it is less a sign over a shop window than the engraved headstone of a tomb.
She is not surprised to see Ralph Barnabas standing there unkempt in his farmer’s overalls and mud-encrusted boots at the open door of the shop. Gwyn was Ralph’s best friend when they were growing up, and Ralph is often to be found here at the Edwards family shop. He has a dangerous-looking pickaxe in his right hand, holding it as someone else might carry a briefcase or a grocery bag.
‘Are you looking to do some damage with that?’ Julia says.
‘Maybe, if the right person happens by.’ Ralph’s smile has not much humour in it, the daylight showing up new lines in the reddened, weatherbeaten skin of his face. ‘Short of that, there’s plenty of good Welsh rock needs breaking.’
Julia reaches for something else to say. ‘How are things at Ty Faenor?’
‘You’d have to ask your husband about that.’ Ralph’s shrug is casual, dismissive. ‘He’s sent me away, says he doesn’t need me any more.’
This is a disturbing thing for Julia to hear, though in a way it is not very surprising. ‘I’m sorry about it, Ralph. I didn’t know.’
‘You wouldn’t have, given how it’s only happened yesterday afternoon. We got into an argument, you see, shared a few home truths. It’s been a long time coming.’
It is more sad than insulting to her, to hear so much bitterness layered into his voice. ‘I wish I could have done something to help.’
‘You’re the one who married the man, as I recall.’ Ralph hefts his axe, lifts it over his nt us >
The overcast has broken up to form dark shower clouds chased by a brisk north-westerly breeze, mottling the streets in a restless pattern of brightness and shadow. There is a new clarity in the air, buildings and trees glowing faintly as the sun glances across them, thrown back into twilight as the racing clouds cast their dark outlines across the town. They walk to the end of West Street and then to the Rhayader bridge, stop there to watch the rain-swollen river surging over the remains of the once-famous cascade that gave the town its name:
Rhaeadr Gwy
, falls of the River Wye. The last time she was here with Ralph was on her sixteenth birthday.
‘It’s as high as I’ve seen it,’ he says. ‘There’ll be banks overtopped by tomorrow night, with the next storm coming in.’
Julia finds it almost hypnotic to look down into the dark river water rushing through the arch of the bridge. She searches for the right words to describe the mysterious sound that it makes, the sibilance of a mistuned radio, the hissing of her grandfather’s old gramophone records, the gathered whisperings of a great throng of people: the river telling its old Welsh secrets in a voice that merges almost imperceptibly with the rustling of the wind in the trees. A dead branch is carried through on the flood, making her think of Donald and his sticks thrown into the Trevethey stream. He will be on his way from Oxford by now; she imagines him persuading the Morris along some steep and lonely mountain road.
‘It’s beautiful to watch,’ she says.
‘Not if it’s your best pasture gone under the flood.’ Julia catches the look on Ralph’s face, just as he casts his eyes to the ground. It is all written there, the feelings he once had for her, the years they have known each other, his disconnectedness from the world she now lives in. At St. Padarn’s primary school in Rhayader, their differentness threw them together early on. They were the two strange kids, always out of the mainstream, Julia with her awkward quirks and precocious insights, Ralph the eternal misfit, rebelling against his father’s impossible standards of virtue and scholarship, the vicar’s wayward son. In time, Julia’s childhood foibles became her greatest gifts, while Ralph could never quite find the right path. What was once a real friendship became a one-sided infatuation, another reason for him to look out with a certain bitterness on a future life whose physical boundaries would be no wider than the Cambrian mountains and the valleys between.
Ralph shrugs, takes a deliberate step away from the parapet. ‘Would you ask your mother if there’s something I can do for her, up at the farm?’
‘Yes, of course I will.’ Ralph has always made an effort to stay in touch with her parents, even after his father fell out with Dai, and she has never thanked him properly for it. ‘I’m sure she’ll be glad of the help.’
They walk back in a heavy silence to the corner of Bridge Street. Ralph stops there and sets down his pickaxe, makes a play of rubbing his shoulder where the wooden handle has chafed. ‘I’m told there’s Oxford people coming up tonight,’ he says.
Julia hesitates a moment too long. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘From Jack Edwards. He told me Gareth Williams was bragging about it in the pub. I’m wondering if it’s someone you know.’
She smiles at hi s smmeone yom, though the worry is twisting inside her. ‘There are a lot of people in Oxford, Ralph.’
‘Bowen’s the name that was given,’ he says, equably enough. ‘Professor Caradoc Bowen. He’s been up this way before, though not many people know it. It was just after you were married, around the time we had that trouble up at Ellis the engineers.’
The uneasy feeling comes back in full force, solid ground shifting beneath Julia’s feet. She sits down on a small wooden bench at the street corner, bows her head, pulling at a ragged fingernail. Her last conversation with Hugh is still fresh in her mind. ‘How do you think it really happened, Ralph?’
‘The explosion, you mean? It was an accident, that’s what my dad will tell you.’ There is something uncomfortable now in the directness of his gaze. ‘I don’t think Dai was behind it, if that’s what you’re asking me, though I can see why some might have believed it.’
Julia’s world tilts a little further off its axis. ‘Why would you even suggest a thing like that, when you know it’s not true?’
Ralph picks up his axe, begins to work the pointed end of it into a crack in the paving stones. ‘You should speak to my father. He’s the one who knows the whole story, though I’m not sure he’ll tell it to you.’
FROM KENTCHURCH, DONALD
drives north along the Golden Valley of the River Dore through pleasant, faintly ecclesiastical villages set between undulating lines of pale-green hills. From Abbey Dore to Vowchurch and Peterchurch, the road sweeps him westward to less hallowed ground at Hardwicke, then finally back down to the Welsh border at Hay-on-Wye.
With time still in hand, he parks close to the site of the old Hay castle and walks into one of the second-hand bookshops for which this Welsh border town has latterly become famous. The shop is comfortably haphazard in its arrangement, its closely spaced shelves making numerous small passageways and cosy reader’s dens, chairs and sofas placed strategically to trap the idle browser. The deep, almost oppressive silence is broken by a persistent mournful whistling that floats out from some hidden recess,
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary
.
On the way to the history and archaeology section, Donald finds himself forced to squeeze past an overstuffed armchair in which a rosy-cheeked woman with round tortoiseshell glasses and a knitted Fair Isle cap is turning the pages of an early edition of Mrs. Beeton, murmuring to herself as she makes various annotations in a small notebook. Just across from her, a youth with scruffy blond hair and sideburns is sipping at something in a thermos flask as he turns casually through the pages of Aesop’s Fables: The Frog and the Ox (‘Self-Conceit May Lead to Self-Destruction’), The Wolf and the Lamb (‘The Unjust Will Not Listen to the Reasoning of the Innocent’). From the untroubled look on his face, it seems that these lessons are not necessarily being taken to heart.
In his own quiet corner, Donald runs his eye along a shelf of local history books. Near the end of the row, a title catches his eye:
Journey Through Wales
, by Giraldus Cambrensis. This zealous Welsh churchman and scholar, who lived a generation after Geoffrey of Monmouth, is familiar to Donald as a rare critic of the fanciful histories of his time, especially those encouraged by Geoffrey’s heroic tales of Arthur an s ofnaldd Merlin. Giraldus’s famous travelogue is an account of his expedition through the remoter reaches of Wales in the year 1188 with his distinguished travelling companion, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. The translation is an old one that Donald has not seen before, made in the 1840s by the Reverend J. A. Giles of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He takes it down from the shelf and turns to the preface, in which the essential details of Giraldus’s life and work are described. As he reads, he experiences the familiar pleasing sensation of connectedness that comes from absorbing these words written long ago by one of the foremost Victorian scholars of medieval history. Giles alludes several times to his subject’s preoccupation with Geoffrey, including a quotation from a long commentary by Giraldus that offers some extraordinary new insights.
I cannot neglect to tell a story I have heard of one Walter Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford in the time of King Stephen. This Walter, however commendable in some particulars, was remarkable for his insufferable pride and ambition. Finding his archdeaconry at Oxford wanting in respect of worldly riches, he became a fawning creature of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec, ready to do the archbishop’s bidding in all matters however large or small, in hope of a swift preferment in the English church. Thus it was that he came to make a journey to north Wales at Theobald’s behest, wherein his charge was to travel to the tiny church of Llan-Elwy, itself built on the site of the monastery established by St. Cyndeyrn some six hundred years before our present time, and there to make an inventory of certain saintly relics held at the church since Cyndeyrn’s day. Walter’s audit was required in preparation for the new Cathedral of St. Asaph, to which the relics were eventually to be transferred.
It is well known that another grasping man of the church, one Geoffrey who was sometime canon of St. George’s in Oxford and archdeacon of St. Teilo’s church at Llandaff, claimed Walter Calenius as his friend and indeed named Walter as the very instrument of the fame and fortune that attended him upon publication of the fabulous history of British kings for which his name is unjustly on the lips of every scholar in Christendom. For it was Walter who brought him a certain ancient book which he had found in the reliquary at Llan-Elwy church, and which Geoffrey duly translated, as he would have us believe, to make his own stirring tale fit for the entertainment of children, claiming for himself the corrupted histories of the bards and dressing them up as the learning of greater men.
So far was Geoffrey consumed by the cleverness of his own historical inventions that he began in his later years to believe in their authenticity, revering Walter’s book to such a degree that he found himself drawn to the place of its origin. Thus we have seen that Geoffrey aspired to, and was in due course granted by Archbishop Theobald, the bishopric of St. Asaph. Against the common wisdom I have heard, that Geoffrey failed to visit his new see, dissuaded by the wars of Owain Gywnedd and the consequent dangers of travel through the border country, I must now tell the story that was given to me by an aged deacon at Llandaff who was a subordinate of Geoffrey’s in his time at St. Teilo’s. This man’s tale has it that Geoffrey, in a state of vexation knowing himself to be in failing health, set out from Llandaff disguised in the robes of a Cistercian monk and bearing with him his precious book. By travelling between the religious houses under cover of darkness, he hoped in time to make his way safely to his bishopric, which is to be found in the far north of the country. After many hardships, Ge shar hopoffrey arrived at a small monastery then recently established at a place called in Welsh ‘Cumhyr’ which means ‘long valley’, in the lordship of Maelienydd and yet no more than half-way to his destination. There he was taken to his bed with a paralytic attack from which he sadly did not awake, and the monks not knowing what else to do buried him in their own crypt.
As Donald reads and rereads Giraldus’s sly and worldly account of the final days of Geoffrey’s life, he finds himself at first struggling to grasp its full significance. This commentary unearthed by the Reverend Giles has since been lost to, or ignored by, the world of Arthurian scholarship. Certainly he has not come across it in his years of studying the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth.
It is clear enough that
Cumhyr
is an earlier form of the placename
Cwmhir
: given the stated location in Maelienydd, part of modern Radnorshire, there seems little doubt of this. According to Caradoc Bowen, Siôn Cent composed the Song of Lailoken in the same valley, while in hiding at Cwmhir Abbey some two and a half centuries after Geoffrey’s time. If Giraldus’s story is to be believed, it would seem to place Geoffrey and his ancient book in closer geographical proximity to Siôn Cent and the book of Cyndeyrn than could otherwise have been imagined.
