Finding Camlann (28 page)

DONALD FOLLOWS CLOSE
behind as Caradoc Bowen makes a fretful, laboured ascent with many feverish glances over his shoulder. Perhaps his anxiety is not to be wondered at; they are, after all, on a journey that may in a sense complete his life’s work. Bowen may truly believe that the academic world is watching, that others are hot on the same trail, that his peers have not, after all, entirely dismissed or forgotten his work. Is it Cambridge he fears, or the Welsh universities? This all seems a harmless enough conceit.

For now, Donald has other, more immediate preoccupations. Thirty yards below him on the path, Julia could as well be a thousand miles away. It seems a self-imposed exile on her part, a deliberate closing-off of communication, as if she means to pretend they are complete strangers: as if she is already regretting their ephemeral romance, and would undo it if she could. The uncertainty he senses in her is an injustice he finds very hard to take.

A final turn, and Bowen is waiting for him at the point where the path comes out of the trees. He is breathing heavily, leaning on a smooth-sided rock for support as he looks out on one of the wildest and most starkly beautiful settings that Donald has ever seen. The second of the three waterfalls is now some way below them, lesser in height than the first, but equally powerful in the force of the water flowing over the top. A long and treacherous slope of tumbled boulders leads down to a narrow rocky channel through which the river continues its rush to the brink of the fall, where for an instant it seems to pause, its turbulence gathered into a smooth edge like molten glass, before slipping over for its plunge to the pool below.

All around them now, the mountain slopes come sweeping down in complex, overlapping folds that keep the higher reaches of the valley hidden from view. Donald’s eye is drawn inexorably to the sunlit upper slopes with their many shades and hues of grey and green and (this he sees with a sudden rush of recognition) a dark reddish-brown exposed in the upper strata. Without a doubt, they have found his father’s promised St. Maughans formation, the famous Welsh red sandstone.

‘You will note something of particular interest up on the heights,’ Caradoc Bowen says, his hand shaking a little as he points with his walking stick. Donald sees it straight away, three huge interlocking stones in silhouette at the top of the ridge. ‘It is known to us in Wales as a
cromlech
, the entrance to a neolithic portal-tomb.& po in#x2019;

Donald has come across many such structures along the Celtic fringe of Europe, though he has never seen one in quite so majestic a location. He is reminded of Giraldus Cambrensis and his account of the grave-digger of Tregaron.
This man shared with us his grandmother’s tale, that the valley is haunted by the magic of the ancient Britons, and that we should climb up there at our peril
. Lucy would say that this is a sacred valley, a place where the aura of the old gods is at its strongest.

Now he sees something he did not notice at first, a thin grey line running across the steep slope beneath the clifftop tomb. It may be no more than a quirk of the rock strata, but it looks more purposeful than that, perhaps a track made by mountain goats in ages past. Looking more closely, he can make out a second path separating from the first and climbing up to the top of the cliff.

‘Such locations play a particularly important role in Welsh mythology,’ Bowen is saying. ‘They reputedly make a gateway between the world of mortal men and the otherworld, where the heroes of the past live on.’

Donald recognises the professor’s oblique reference to the Song of Lailoken, to the poet’s description of the death of his ‘Arthur’, Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r, at the hands of the giant Madarakt, and the events that follow:

  We bore him up to the highest clifftop, gate of the otherworld

  Laid him beneath a linden tree, the shield-wood powerless now

  The words unspoken on his lips, the life we saw still behind his eyes

  No more than the trick of light and shadow on the rock.

Bowen’s evident excitement is sharply contained. ‘We must find a way to climb higher, if we are to prove our case.’

His meaning is clear enough. The scene does not yet fit the description in the Song of Lailoken, the last desperate refuge below cliffs raised like bloodied fists high above. That place must lie in the upper section of the valley, somewhere beyond the last waterfall. But now they have reached the end of the path, whose makers intended it only to bring sightseers safely to the top of the second cascade for a chance to see the stunning view that now confronts them. Somewhere up ahead, the third waterfall can be heard but not seen, hidden from view by a turn in the valley. If they are to continue, they must improvise a route down the steep, boulder-strewn slope to the river’s edge.

Donald is glad to feel Julia’s hand on his arm as she comes up behind him. ‘I’m sorry to be so slow,’ she says to him, quietly. ‘I’ll try to keep up.’

After a tense few minutes of scrambling, they find their way safely back down to the river. They follow its twisting course for another half-mile until at last the uppermost of the three waterfalls comes into view, a pure white cataract dropping to a tumultuous landing in a pool ringed with sharp-edged rocks. It is a daunting sight at first, a steep cliff-face whose top section is partly obscured by an overhanging ledge of rock. Looking more carefully, Donald can see many natural steps and handholds that should make it possible even for Caradoc Bowen to find a way up.

Julia comes to stand next to him, close enough that they are almost touching. It cannot be entirely in his imagination, the confusion he senses in her, the wish to make things right. His pretended indifference flies away to thin air; he wants nothing more than tng ntirelo take her by the hand. Instead they stand there in silent communion no more than a finger’s breadth apart as the waterfall surrounds them with its chaotic, elemental sound.

‘Are you ready to carry on, Professor?’ Donald says, when he can bear it no longer. ‘I think we’re almost there.’

He is on the verge of leading them forward when he is stopped in his tracks by a new intensity in Bowen’s expression, a series of murmured imprecations that he cannot quite catch. There is a noise from behind, boots scuffing on rock.

JULIA
’
S FIRST THOUGHT
is that Hugh knows everything, that he has followed her here, hunted her down like an errant lamb escaped from a field. She stares mutely at him, wondering how she should feel, glad that Donald is standing guardedly, resolutely next to her.

But Hugh seems genuinely shocked to see her. She can sense the effort it costs him to keep his voice under control. ‘I didn’t know this was going to be quite such a party.’

It is Bowen who responds to this. ‘You are very bold, Hugh, to come here speaking such mockery.’

‘I am hardly mocking you, Professor Bowen. As I recall, you were the one who invited me to join you today. I didn’t expect we would have so much company, that’s all.’ Hugh’s gaze flickers to Donald, then back to his wife. ‘Why didn’t you say something to me, Julia?’

She remembers now, Bowen’s phone call to Hugh at Ty Faenor. Seeing him standing there gazing coolly at her, she feels a twist of guilt and shame. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea he had asked you to come.’

‘Why should you be surprised? I have stood with Professor Bowen in a dozen valleys just like this.’ Hugh’s restless glance falls back on Donald. Abruptly, he offers his hand. ‘My name is Hugh Mortimer.’

‘Donald Gladstone.’ They shake hands in a brief, perfunctory way.

‘Dr. Gladstone is an archaeological colleague of mine, from Oxford,’ Bowen says.

‘A new recruit for the search party, Professor? Does this mean it’s the real thing this time?’

Caradoc Bowen raises his rasping voice above the sound of the falls. ‘It seems to me, Hugh Mortimer, that you are a man without true convictions. Or perhaps it is merely the courage that is lacking. Once I thought we might have changed the world together, but I have badly misjudged you. For that I shall forever be sorry.’

‘Changed the world?’ Hugh’s words seem to summon half a lifetime of contempt. ‘We were just boys playing games, and you did everything you could to exploit us.’

‘For some of us, it was never a game,’ Bowen says. ‘It was the fate of Wales that was at stake, the survival of our ancient homeland. But it is clear to me that I have been wrong to put my faith in the Mortimer family. Over the centuries, there has been a great deal of Welsh blood on their hands.’ The professor turns away from them now, takes his walking stick in hand and begins to pick his way through the tumbled boulders in the direction of the waterfall.

HUGH MORTIMER TAKES
a step towards Bowen, but Donald moves to block his path. They are both tall, Donald an inch taller. ‘I think you had better stay where you are,’ he says.

His adversary stops three feet in front of him, holds his ground. ‘Those are brave words,’ he says.

‘Please just let him go, Donald,’ Julia says. ‘They need to work it out for themselves.’

Hearing the urgency in her voice, he steps reluctantly to one side, allows Hugh to brush past him with a cursory glance and follow Bowen to the base of the waterfall. There is a brief, animated conversation between them; then Hugh approaches t
he cliff-face and begins to climb. He makes swift and easy progress until his upward path is blocked by the overhanging ledge. By this time the professor, following more slowly in his wake, has reached a long, smooth section of rock. Hugh is shouting something, gesturing with his hands, his voice lost in the rushing of the water. Finally he seems to turn away from Bowen in disgust. He resumes his climb, works his way around the overhang and on up to the hidden section above.

Looking back later on this moment, Donald will find it impossible to say precisely what happened, whether a foothold gave way beneath Hugh Mortimer as he tried to find his next step, or whether something else caused the cascade of loose stones that fell towards the professor from above. What he sees is the sickening sight of Caradoc Bowen sliding off the cliff-face, clutching at a last desperate handhold, losing his grip and slipping almost gracefully into the violent downward rush of the waterfall. It is only a matter of seconds before Donald is there waist-deep at the edge of the pool, clinging with one hand to a sharp-edged rock, desperately lunging, missing, lunging again, unable to reach the professor in time. In the end he can only watch helplessly as Bowen’s lifeless body is swept away downstream.

Ty Faenor

J
ULIA IS AWAKE
late into the night, her chance of peaceful sleep destroyed by images of a drowning man. Less than half a day has passed since she drove away with Hugh from Three Devil Falls with Caradoc Bowen’s body laid out in the back of the car, leaving Donald alone in the wilderness. The events at the waterfall are imprinted vividly in her mind, Donald’s desperate efforts to reach Bowen, Hugh joining him at the riverbank, helping to pull the lifeless body out of the water, Julia somehow calmly directing their futile attempts at resuscitation. In the end, there was nothing they could do but carry him back down the valley, the famous professor reduced to a slight bundle of cold, damp, empty skin and bone, his eyes unseeing, all his knowledge vanished from the world.

Hugh is the one who has borne the brunt of what happened, taking charge of Caradoc Bowen, all the gruesome banality of it. He dropped Julia at Dyffryn, then drove away in the Land Rover with the professor’s body wrapped up in an old oil-stained blanket. There was a phone call from him later, telling her he had taken care of everything, there would be no need for her to speak to the police. A cousin of Bowen’s in his home town of Dolgellau would handle the funeral arrangements. Hugh had spoken to the chaplain at Jesus College, and a small service would be held in the college chapel as soon as it could be arranged, though Hugh made it clear he would not go to it. He has done more than anyone could have asked, and Julia is grateful for that. She tells herself she will drive over to Tye a fas done mo Faenor, try to find a way to talk to him properly, though she hardly knows what she will say to him.

As she creeps to the top of the stairs, she hears her mother stirring in the room next door, on the verge of waking from some troubled dream. ‘Is that you, Dai? Where have you been?’

‘It’s only me, Mam. Go back to sleep.’

Julia sits down in the kitchen with pen and paper, begins writing a note to Donald, explaining everything to him. She has promised to stay with her mother for another couple of days before heading back to Oxford on Tuesday night. She will call him as soon as she gets home. It seems a thin and inadequate means of communication, but she will not try to see him again in Rhayader, where she feels beset on all sides by people who know too much about her, who are watching her every move.

Now she can hear the creaking of her mother’s footsteps on the floorboards above. She finishes more hurriedly than she intended, seals the envelope, writes Donald’s name on the front. First thing in the morning, she will drive down to the Black Lion and leave the note with Olwen, who can be relied upon to make sure he gets it before he leaves.

DRIVING ACROSS THE
wooded lower slopes of the Cwmhir valley, Donald winds down the windows, lets the cool air flow over him as he tries to make some sense of where he stands with Julia Llewellyn. What should have been the best thing to happen in his life has been followed only by death and destruction. The note she left for him, with all its uncertainties, the things she did not say, offers no useful evidence as to her true state of mind. There is the promised phone call, and whatever the future may bring. For now, it is best to remove himself from the confusion, to find some wide-open space where he can clear his head and be on his own.

An interminable hill brings him down at last into the hamlet of Abbeycwmhir with its small and diverse collection of buildings, a pub, a parish church, a Victorian gothic mansion. He leaves the car at the side of the road near the river, then walks out across an expanse of muddy green fields strewn with the broken remnants of Cwmhir Abbey. A smooth marble slab marks the traditional burial place of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, who died by the treachery of the Mortimers in December 1282. His body was laid to rest here in holy ground as the White Monks sang a mass for his soul.

More than a century later, the poet Siôn Cent came down from the hills with an English price on his head as the spiritual architect of Glyn D
ŵ
r’s rebellion, finding refuge in the simpler guise of a Cistercian monk, Brother Siôn of Cwmhir. According to Caradoc Bowen, it was here at the abbey that Siôn composed the Song of Lailoken, the poem that became the professor’s greatest obsession. In his mind’s eye, Donald tries to raise up the shattered walls, join up the massive bays of the once-imposing nave, but his imagination fails at the task. This seems a lonely place, oppressed by its sense of lost history, the weight of the silence in the depths of the valley.

A small plaque tells something of the history of the abbey. Donald’s mild interest soon turns to an intense curiosity.

THE BUILDING WHOSE RUINS ARE SEEN HERE WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1176 TO HOUSE A MONASTIC COMMUNITY THAT WAS DRIVEN OUT OF THE CWMHIR VALLEY A DECADE EARLIER BY HUGH DE MORTIMER, EARL OF HEREFORD. THE SITE OF THE ORIGINAL MONASTERY, FOUNDEDSTED IN IN 1143 AT THE EASTERN END OF THE VALLEY, IS NOW OCCUPIED BY THE MANOR HOUSE OF TY FAENOR.

He does not allow himself to stop and think, in case he should change his mind. From where he has left the car, it is a walk of perhaps a mile along the course of the river with rough pastures rising to tree-lined escarpments on the right and left. There is a northward turn on to a narrow lane, not much more than a track heading through a tunnel of foliage, then over the river and on between thick hedgerows opening out to gently sloping water-meadows on the farther side. A sharp left-hand turn brings him face to face with the seventeenth-century manor house of Ty Faenor, a substantial three-storey structure: the Welsh seat of the Mortimer family.

Having ticked away a slow minute waiting for a response at the front door, Donald walks around to the back, where he finds Hugh Mortimer leaning against a wooden fence in torn blue overalls stained with mud and engine oil, drawing deeply on a cigarette.

‘It’s the archaeologist,’ he says, betraying no surprise, and Donald can tell from something in his voice that he has been drinking. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve come to ask if I can have a look around your house.’

Hugh’s smile has a faintly acerbic edge. ‘Are you thinking of buying the old place?’

‘No, it’s not quite my style. I’m more interested in what’s underneath it.’

‘So you would be. And there was I thinking you might at least name a good price.’ Hugh stubs out his cigarette, pushes himself away from the fence and heads in the direction of the back door. ‘You’d better come in.’

They walk up a short flight of steps into a crooked entrance hall, then through to a spacious drawing room with a frayed old French sofa and armchairs arrayed in front of a wide brick fireplace filled with congealed grey ash. Hugh takes a whisky bottle and two heavy crystal glasses from a shelf.

‘Drink?’ Donald nods his assent, watches as his host adds a generous measure to each, hands him a glass and points him towards an armchair. ‘I’m curious, how long have you known Julia?’

Conscious of Mortimer’s eyes on him, Donald settles himself carefully into what must once have been a lavish woven upholstery. ‘We met at Oxford. I was a student at St. John’s.’

‘An old flame?’

‘No, that’s not it at all. We hardly knew each other back then.’

‘But you know her now?’ Hugh drinks half of his whisky, stares down into the glass. ‘Are you having an affair with my wife?’

Donald’s reply will fall well short of answering the question, but he holds his nerve. ‘Do you think I would have come here, if I was?’

‘That would be a bold move, certainly.’ Hugh smiles grimly at this, and it seems to Donald that he makes an abject figure, standing there radiating an aura of tobacco and alcohol and some less tangible thing, broken dreams or frustrated ambition. ‘So, perhaps you would like to tell me why you’re suddenly so interested in my property?’

Donald takes a sip from his glass, sets it down on the wooden floorboards. However poor the remaining card in his hand, this is the moment to play it. ‘I think something important was once buried here.’

‘What kind of thing?’

It is pure instinct that has brought Donald to Ty Faenor; he has no idea at all of what he might expect to find. ‘I can’t say for sure, but it’s related to the Cistercian monastery that once occupied this site. I’ve read that it was one of the Mortimers who forced the monks to abandon it.’

Hugh sits down on the armrest of the sofa. ‘Ah yes, the unfortunate Cistercians. I’m afraid my family did them no favours at all. Are you familiar with the noble history of the Mortimers, Lords of the Welsh March?’ His irony is reinforced by a faint expression of disdain. ‘It was my own ancestor, Hugh de Mortimer, who drove the monks out. They returned a few years later to build a new abbey on a site a mile to the west. When that building was destroyed in turn, bits of it were used in the walls of this house, which always struck me as a double injustice.’

‘Have any traces of the monastery been preserved here at Ty Faenor?’

Hugh gives him a long, searching look, then empties his glass, gets abruptly to his feet. ‘There is something I can show you. I suggest you drink up—you might need it.’

Back in the entrance hall, a heavy batten door with ornate black ironwork is opened to reveal a set of brick steps falling away into the darkness. ‘The house was completed in the 1650s,’ Hugh says, ‘with three upper storeys and a basement floor for the servants and the kitchen, which we are about to see. Another forebear of mine, Sir John Mortimer, drew up the plans and was the first to live here.’

Donald remembers the name from Caradoc Bowen’s journal article. ‘The book collector?’

‘That’s far too simplistic a label,’ Hugh says. There is a hint of impatience now in his voice. ‘John Mortimer was a devout Catholic who took his inspiration from his faith. He made it his mission to find and preserve what had been lost in the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. There were manuscripts, certainly, but also many religious artefacts that he had collected on his travels.’ Hugh does not expand on this comment, instead picks up a large electric torch that has been left just inside the door. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with this,’ he says. ‘We were flooded down here recently, and we haven’t been able to get the power back up.’

By the time they step down on to the brick floor of the cellar, they have reached a surprising depth below ground. There is a powerful smell of damp, a waft of chilly humid air. Hugh scans the torch beam back and forth, revealing heavy stone walls and a high ceiling festooned with wires and pipes. The space around them is reverberant with the sound of dripping water, the creaking of timbers above their heads, a strange metallic clicking and scratching from some distant recess.

They walk on into the shadows, Hugh lighting the path ahead as best he can, revealing a profusion of antique domestic debris: wooden boxes full of mildewed papers, brown bottles still half-full of dark liquids, a rusted mechanical device with springs and levers that looks like an old animal trap. Donald counts ten paces to the farther wall, where they stop in front of a broad, deep recess in the crumbling brick.

‘This is the original kitchen fireplace,’ Hugh says. ‘When my grandfather first came here sixty years ago, he installed a modern kitchen on the ground floor, and moved everything upstairs with the intention of having this chimney blocked up. One of the workmen was laying a row of new bricks when h brn one accidentally put his hammer through the back wall, uncovering a disused passage running down behind the chimney.’ Hugh plays the torch beam over a small square door set into the back of the fireplace. ‘As far as we can tell, the passage was sealed up during the original construction of the house. This door was added in my grandfather’s time.’

‘I assume you know what’s on the other side?’

‘Yes, only too well. When I was eight years old, I got myself shut in there overnight.’ Hugh speaks as if this might have been a deliberate accomplishment, an obscure rite of passage for younger members of the Mortimer family. ‘I had only the rats for company, and then the pitch darkness, after my batteries ran out. But I take it you’re not scared of the dark?’

Far from being afraid, Donald is busy finding his archaeological bearings, computing the probable ground level in the seventeenth century versus the twelfth. There is a heavy bolt, rusted but easy enough to slide, and the door yields to a few sharp tugs. ‘I’ll need to borrow the torch,’ he says.

Rather than the expected muddy tunnel, the beam illuminates a set of stone steps leading down into the darkness. Donald notes the quality of the dressing, the squareness of the edges and the snugness of the joins: the hallmarks of a master mason. He is forced to crouch low through the door, then descends a dozen steps to a flagstone floor submerged in several inches of water. Ahead of him is a long narrow chamber supported by a series of perfectly executed Romanesque arches. Matching them instinctively to the familiar architectural sequence, he decides that they must predate the early English gothic with its pointed lancet style: this stonework is at least as old as the mid-twelfth century. At the far end of the chamber, a series of long stone receptacles have been pushed up against the walls on either side.