Finding Camlann (31 page)

THE SOUND OF
a car pulling up in front of Dyffryn Farm fills Julia with a sudden foreboding. Opening the front door, she is relieved to see that it is not Hugh, but Ralph Barnabas climbing out of his rusty white Ford van. His pickaxe comes out with him, swinging at his side as he walks towards the farmhouse.

‘I’ll be starting work on the walls up in the top fields,’ he says.

She feels a small surge of relief and gratitude. The news of Bowen’s accident will be common currency by now in Rhayader, but it seems that Ralph has not come here to talk about it. ‘It’s good of you to help my mother out,’ she says.

‘No, I don’t mind. I think it was hard for Dai to keep up, towards the end.’ It is a familiar puzzled expression he has, squinting against the brightness of the afternoon sun. ‘You’ll be off soon, then?’

‘They’re expecting me back at work tomorrow.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again before long.’

There is something too possessive in the way he says this, but she dismisses the thought. Casual conversation was never Ralph’s greatest strength. ‘Yes, I’ll be back up in a coupl uppossese of weeks.’

His gaze shifts awkwardly away from her. ‘There’s something I wanted to say to you now, before you go.’

Please don’t say anything to me at all, this is what she wants to tell him; but then again, there is no reason for her to show him such disdain. He is not to blame for anything, apart from still having feelings for her. ‘What is it, Ralph?’

‘It got me thinking, that’s all, what happened at the waterfall. There are some things you don’t know about Hugh Mortimer.’

Julia would ask him to stop, to go away and leave her in peace, if she could bring herself to do it. ‘Please just say what you have to say.’

Ralph stands there working the sharp end of his axe into the gravel. ‘I know you went to speak to my dad about the accident, but he won’t have told you the truth about it.’

‘Why should he lie to me?’

‘Because there are things you’re not supposed to know.’ It seems a prepared speech he gives her now, lines he has been rehearsing for fourteen years. ‘I was the only one who was with him, you see, when he woke up in hospital, and that’s the only time he ever said what really happened. He saw who it was, running away right there in front of him just as the explosion went off. There was no mistaking it, he said, Hugh Mortimer was the one he saw. I thought you should know, they could have your husband for murder if they could prove he was the one who set the fuse.’

Julia’s first reaction is simple disbelief. ‘You wouldn’t have said something before, if you’ve known about it for so long?’

‘That’s because of a promise I made to my dad. He said it was just a mistake, he couldn’t send a man to prison for it.’ There is something cold and calculating in Ralph, the way he looks at her now. ‘I want you to know what your man is capable of, that’s all.’

Now she turns away from him and walks back into the house, slams the door shut behind her. Her mother meets her at the foot of the stairs. ‘What did he say to you, love?’

Julia feels so utterly defeated, she hardly knows how to respond. ‘Nothing you want to hear.’

Cath Llewellyn lays a hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘Don’t forget, Ralph has loved you since you were seven years old. It’s like your father used to say, you were always the one to bring them hovering around you, the brightest flame they ever saw. I don’t think you ever really understood that.’

It is true, Julia has never viewed her life in quite this way before. She imagines shrieking black creatures in the air around her, the burned-out shells of those who have come too close.

In the end, she makes a more hurried goodbye than she intended, winds down her window and waves to her mother with a cheerfulness she does not feel as she drives off towards Cyncoed Lane. At the bottom of the hill, a left turn will take her towards Abbeycwmhir and the Ty Faenor estate. She turns to the right, in the direction of Rhayader and the main road to the south.

SETTLED LENGTHWISE ON
his sofa in the cottage at Iffley with the television on, Donald finds himself glancing frequently at the telephone, willing it to ring. It is rare for him these days to hear hisys the c mother’s voice, but she comes back to him now with one of her gentle, proverbial admonitions:
A watched pot never boils, Donald, go and do something useful while you wait
. Margaret Rackham’s envelope is there unopened on the table next to him, but he has no appetite for whatever glories of the Bodleian Library it might contain. For now, he is glad of the BBC and a rerun of a classic comedy, a pet rat on the loose in a seaside hotel.

It is close to midnight, and he is in the kitchen cracking eggs for an omelette, when the call finally comes. The third egg is a disaster. He abandons it at the side of the bowl, runs to his desk in the front room and picks up the phone.

‘Julia? I’m glad you called.’

‘I’m so sorry. It took me a long time to get home.’

Are you there on your own? Can I come and see you?
This is what he wants to ask her, but does not. On the desk in front of him is a formal notice from the University of Oxford.

A Memorial Service will be held in Jesus Chapel for Caradoc Hywel Rhys Bowen
,
B.Phil. M.A. Oxf., Emeritus Fellow and Tutor in Welsh History, Politics, and Literature, from 11:00 am to 12:00 noon on Wednesday, 26th November.

‘Will you go to the memorial service tomorrow?’ he says.

She hesitates, and he curses himself silently for asking the wrong question. ‘Honestly, I don’t think I can face it. I’ve seen a little too much of that kind of thing recently. I could meet you afterwards, if you like?’

Hearing the suppressed hope and expectation in her voice, he feels a small surge of elation. ‘I’ll wait for you at noon at the college gate,’ he says.

‘I’ll be there,’ she says. ‘I promise.’

An hour later, Donald is still wide awake, turning through the pages of Margaret Rackham’s document with a growing sense of excitement. It is a detailed description of manuscript TF 97B, the poetry book of Siôn Cent, which has been stabilised by a team of conservators at the Bodleian and then analysed in painstaking detail. The authors begin by describing what has been revealed about the provenance of the manuscript. Carbon dating carried out on the first section, the parchment folios that have been badly affected by a mould infestation, shows a surprisingly early date, within fifty years of the end of the sixth century
AD
. Detailed analysis of these folios has allowed some parts of the text that was originally inscribed there to be deciphered. The fragments that have been recovered were all written down by the same scribe, who freely announces his name in a colophon on the very first page via a simple Latin formulation,
Cantigernus me fecit
. At this point, the report makes a small digression into the hagiographical literature.

According to Jocelyn of Furness, in his life of Kentigern (in Latin,
Cantigernus
; in Welsh,
Cyndeyrn
) written in the late twelfth century, this saint during his exile from the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde (circa 570
AD
) travelled to Wales, where he founded the Celtic monastery of Llanelwy—the church on the River Elwy—as the Welsh still call the town of St. Asaph. Several converging lines of evidence lead us to the conjecture that the earliest parchment section of the present manuscript is one and the same as the ‘book of Cyndeyrn’ cited by the; ciden poet Siôn Cent as a source, and that its author is none other than St. Cyndeyrn himself. When appending his own bardic poems to the manuscript, Siôn bound them in as a separate section comprising the higher-quality vellum sheets found in the latter part of the book. His ‘lost’ ancient source was, as it were, hiding in plain sight in the same set of covers, camouflaged by the devastating effects of the penicillium mould.

Further analysis of the early pages has uncovered traces of numerous texts written in Cyndeyrn’s hand, together making a rudimentary history of the early British kings. These materials may be of some interest in their own right, although the extent of the mould damage has unfortunately limited what we have been able to recover. Transcripts and rough translations of what remains are presented in an appendix to this report.

Prefacing these historical texts, and also written in St. Cyndeyrn’s hand, is an unusual series of verses composed in an early form of Welsh. The extensive fragments of this poem that we have been able to read, together with its title in Welsh,
Cân Lailoken
(Song of Lailoken), indicate that this work is substantially the same as the similarly titled poem written down in the later (vellum) section of the same manuscript by Siôn Cent. Hence it is apparent that the Song of Lailoken was first written down not in the fifteenth century, as Professor Bowen supposed, but somewhere near the end of the sixth century. Siôn Cent was not its author, and the battles it describes predate the campaigns of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r by eight hundred years at least, prompting the intriguing suggestion that the poem offers a glimpse into a far older bardic tradition.

There are, however, some important differences between the two redactions of the poem, Siôn Cent’s and the earlier version written down by St. Cyndeyrn. First, Siôn has cleverly rendered his text from the sixth-century Brythonic or primitive Welsh into a form of Middle Welsh that would have been comprehensible to people of his own time, while retaining many of the archaisms of the original. Of particular note in this regard is his choice to translate the name of one of the characters in the poem, rendered by the original scribe as
Arto-uiros
(‘bear-man’, suggesting a totem or epithet applied to one deemed to have unusual strength or power), as the more recognisable Welsh
Arthur
.

Secondly, the rousing final stanzas of the poem, beginning with the line (from Professor Bowen’s translation)
Thus our champion fell to earth, not dead but deeply sleeping
, do not appear at all in the original version. This section of the text, we may suppose, is entirely Siôn Cent’s own work, thereby lending support to Caradoc Bowen’s assertion (which our analysis in no way contradicts) that Siôn intended to use his version of the poem as a call to arms to the men of Wales, urging them to rise up in support of Glyn D
ŵ
r’s rebellion.

It is almost too much to absorb at once. For now, Donald focuses his attention on the authors’ comment that certain texts found in the manuscript form a ‘rudimentary history of the early British kings’ and ‘may be of some interest in their own right’. He can only smile at the degree of their understatement. A glance at the translations in the report’s appendix shows him that Cyndeyrn compiled a chronology of real and mythical kings, from Aeneas to Bru Aef thtus to Androgeus and Tenvantius to Ambrosius Aurelianus and his brother Uther Pendragon. The obvious convergence with the early chapters of Geoffrey’s
Historia Regum Britanniae
seems evidence enough to support Donald’s idea that Geoffrey’s ancient book (the work he claimed as his source for the
Historia
) and the book of Cyndeyrn both drew from some earlier common source that has since been lost. And yet there is another, more dramatic interpretation of the evidence, one that he is at first hesitant to accept, lest some flaw in his logic should bring the tower of speculation crashing down.

A noise from outside, the wind catching at the branches of the old yew tree in St. Mary’s churchyard, brings Donald sharply back to the present. He closes the report, switches off the bedside lamp: not because there is any chance of sleep, but to make a quiet calm space for himself to think. As he lies there in the darkness in a state of intense awareness, he forces his thoughts back into their proper analytical track, examines his reasoning in almost painful detail. It is the episcopal ring of Geoffrey of Monmouth that finally seals the argument. This is the tangible proof he has hoped for, a physical object that connects Geoffrey to the original Cistercian monastery at Cwmhir. When the discovery of the ring is joined up with the findings in the Bodleian report and the story told by
Giraldus Cambrensis, a plausible chain of events begins to emerge.

Geoffrey’s ill-fated journey to his new diocese of St. Asaph ended prematurely at the Cwmhir monastery, where he died and was laid to rest along with his ring and his other tokens of office, as was the medieval custom. According to Giraldus, Geoffrey brought his precious ancient book with him on this final journey. It remained at the monastery after his death, and was later taken for safe-keeping by the monks when they were driven from that site by Hugh de Mortimer. The book remained in their possession, and eventually found its way to the new abbey when it was built on a site farther west along the valley. This is where Siôn Cent came upon it, this manuscript ‘which fate has brought to my hand’, when he went into hiding at the abbey more than two centuries later. He felt so intensely possessive of it that he bound a collection of his own bardic poetry, including his own version of the Song of Lailoken, into the back of the same book.