Longbow Girl (5 page)

M
erry returned home to a strangely tense house. Her father sat at the small table in the hallway, bent over the farm accounts, his face taut. Her mother was closed away in the kitchen with Gawain for company. It sounded like she was cooking up a storm, banging pots and pans and muttering.

Merry hurried up to her room, hid the chest back under her bed, then headed out to see to her chores – checking ponies and foals and troughs. She didn't want to talk to anyone human for a while. The company of ponies was far less taxing. She took Jacintha out for a ride, deliberately avoiding the Black Wood and instead heading up to the Beacons, making the most of the late sunshine.

Finally, as the sun was setting, she headed home and arrived back in time for a late dinner.

Gawain was already in bed so it was just the three of them tucking into a roast leg of lamb, green beans and goose-fat-browned potatoes.

They didn't talk much. The food was good and they were all hungry but it was odd. They were usually a talkative household. When they'd finished, Merry's father got up and poured himself a glass of whisky. He downed it in one gulp, then sat down again.

‘There's no easy way to put this, so I'm going to cut to the chase. We're in trouble. I kept it from you both while I tried to find a way out . . .' He rubbed his hands over his face.

Merry stared at her father: the farmer, the fighter, the longbowman, the soldier, decorated several times over for conspicuous bravery. Now he looked as if he faced an enemy he could not fight. The expression in his eyes made Merry feel a quiver of fear. She glanced at her mother. Elinor was twisting a strand of her long black hair around her finger. Her eyes were grave.

‘We owe the bank sixty thousand pounds,' Caradoc went on. ‘I borrowed money to build the extension, to rebuild the barn. We'd have been fine if things had gone well.' He gave a bitter laugh. ‘But things often don't, do they, especially when you need them to. We simply haven't made enough to meet the mortgage payments for the past six months. I was relying on the stallion's stud fees to pay the mortgage.' He paused, fisted his hands on the table. ‘He had eight bookings over the next six weeks.'

‘What about the insurance money?' Elinor asked, voice
high. ‘The company'll have to pay out for his death . . . won't they?' she asked her husband. Her skin had turned ghostly white.

Caradoc's face became even more grim. He took in a deep breath. ‘I forgot to renew the insurance.'

Merry looked at him in confusion. ‘No, you didn't. I heard you on the phone about a month ago. You complained about the size of the premium to me. I remember.'

Her father turned to her, shaking his head with a kind of horrible regret that made Merry feel sick to her stomach. ‘Trust you to remember,
cariad
.'

‘I did remember!' she said hotly. ‘So why did you lie?'

‘All right, the truth of it is this,' he replied, his voice heavier than Merry had ever heard. ‘Because you shot the horse yourself rather than letting him suffer in agony for the hour or so it would have taken the vet to get here and put him out of his misery, the insurance is invalid.'

Elinor opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.

Merry covered her face with her hands, trembling in shock. She felt a huge hand, warm on her shoulder.

‘What you did was brave,' her father said, urgently. ‘Humane. You must not blame yourself,
cariad
. You must
not
.'

Merry uncovered her face, looked into his eyes, saw so many things there, most of all a horrible, unspoken pain.

‘So this is where we are,' he said, going back to his seat. ‘Selling the mare only buys us time. The bank manager phoned this morning. He was short and not so sweet:
pay off the
arrears and meet the new payments or else he'll have no choice but to foreclose
. He's given us six weeks.'

Elinor gasped. ‘Six weeks?
Six weeks?
To come up with how much exactly?'

‘Six thousand pounds,' Caradoc replied, voice hollow.

Elinor reached across the table and grabbed her husband's hand.

‘How on earth are we going to find that kind of money?'

‘Sell the mare. And the little silver we have. These old dining chairs must be antique. They'll be worth something,' he said, glancing around.

‘And if we don't find the money,' said Elinor slowly, each word like a hammer blow, ‘we lose the farm? We just hand it over to the bank?'

‘Either that, or sell. Bits of it. Or all of it.'

‘And we all know who'd buy it, quicker than you can say
knife
,' shouted Elinor in a rush of emotion. She pushed herself to her feet and strode to the window, gazing out towards the Black Castle. ‘Makes me wonder if the earl didn't let out his hounds deliberately.'

‘We'll never know, will we,' Caradoc said, the muscles clenching in his cheek.

‘Merry and Gawain's inheritance,' said Elinor in a whisper. ‘And the longbow tradition . . .'

She sat down heavily, propped her arms on the table, stared at the aged wood.

‘I know. Don't you think I know?' snapped her father.

Merry felt dazed. She gazed from one parent to another,
appalled by the news, distressed by their misery, horrified by the part she had played in adding to their trouble . . . but then an idea came together in her head. ‘There might be a way out,' she said, fists clenched, digging her nails into her palms, hoping, praying . . .

Her parents turned to her, faces edged with grief. They didn't really think she had a solution. They didn't know what she knew.

‘It seems the book I found might be quite valuable.' She paused, sucked in a breath, let it out in one smooth go. Maybe fate was helping her family, just when they needed it most. ‘I showed it to an expert. He reckons it might, just might, be one of the lost tales of the
Mabinogion
.'

Her parents looked stunned.

‘What on earth have you been up to, Merry Owen?' Elinor asked, at last.

So Merry told them about taking the book to show James, about the earl walking in on them, and everything that followed.

Her parents sat leaning forward, eyes wide, listening in amazed silence.

‘So it comes down to this,' Merry finished. ‘Dr Philipps will discuss the book with his colleagues and show them pictures he took with his phone. And Professor Parks, who is an archaeologist and a historian, says to help authenticate the book he needs to excavate the burial mound, get more information.'

Her father stared into the distance for a while, processing it
all; then he turned his gaze back to Merry. There was a new hope in his eyes and a kind of steely calculation.

‘Presumably if this Professor Parks authenticates the book, then it will be worth much more?' he asked.

‘He implied as much,' replied Merry. ‘He also said that according to the treasure laws the proceeds of anything found there is split fifty-fifty between the landowner and the finder.'

‘Well, that means we get hundred per cent of the book anyway,' said Elinor. ‘It was Merry who found it.' She paused. ‘It
was
on our land, wasn't it?' she said urgently to her husband. ‘It's hard to tell in the forest and we went quite far in.'

The look in Caradoc's eyes became distant again, and Merry knew he was going over the geography in his head.

‘I'm sure it's on our side,' he said. ‘Not by much, though. Maybe as little as a hundred yards or so.' He turned to Merry. ‘We'll set out at first light tomorrow to check. Set your alarm for five.'

She nodded. She couldn't speak. It
had
to be on their side . . .

‘Parks thinks there might be other things there too, that were buried with the book,' Merry managed to say. ‘Things that will help authenticate the book but that might be valuable in themselves.'

‘Whoever this Professor Parks is, we need his help,' declared Caradoc. ‘We need to get him to start work on the burial mound immediately and authenticate the book. Then we can sell it and go fifty-fifty with him on anything else he finds.'

‘He's coming here tomorrow at eleven o'clock to discuss it with you,' said Merry.

‘Thank God for the burial mound and whoever's buried there,' said Caradoc, exhaling slowly. ‘And thank God for his book.'

‘Thank God,' echoed Elinor, slumping back in her chair.

Merry sat straight-backed, looking ahead, seeing not the walls of her kitchen but the upturned oak, the chest, and the book hidden inside. As if the earth had offered it up like a gift.

But she had the feeling even then that some gifts come at a price.

N
ews of the book spread quickly. Elinor told their nearest neighbours, the Joneses. Mrs Jones told her sister Christine, who told her best friend, Jemima, who told Mrs Ivy, the barmaid at the Nightingale, Nanteos's pub, who told a selection of the regulars. From his guest room in the Black Castle, Dr Philipps called his colleagues at the Museum of Wales and other experts at the British Museum and discussed the book with them, emailed them pictures he'd taken with his phone, created a veritable frisson in museums and universities around the country and beyond. Meanwhile, the Countess de Courcy, eager to discover how much such a book might fetch on the open market, telephoned two of London's leading auction houses and told them all about it. They in turn made enquiries consulting experts and collectors around the world.

As darkness fell, the lost tale of the
Mabinogion
was anything but a secret.

Merry was in her bedroom, oblivious to all this. She was standing on the tapestry carpet in the middle of her room, holding on to her new bow as if it might give her strength, get her through the next weeks and months in which the future of the Owens' farm,
her
future, would be decided.

The Owens normally stored their bows and arrows, the ancient deeds to their land with the fourth Earl de Courcy's signature on them, and the little of value they owned in the tallboy, a massive old piece of furniture, seven feet tall, that sat in the downstairs hall, but Merry had a habit of keeping every new bow in her room for a good few weeks. She'd done this since she'd been given her first bow.

Finally, she propped her bow in the corner and changed into her flannel pyjamas. It was still cold at night in these parts of Wales and she always liked to sleep with the window open, letting in fresh air. But, even in her thick PJs, she shivered suddenly. Something more than cold air, a sort of sudden chill of apprehension hit her.

Maybe she felt something of the reverberations, the ripples her book was causing, because she suddenly called to mind the warning of Dr Philipps.

She had been keeping the book wrapped in its chest, pushed under her bed, but now she thought maybe that wasn't good enough. She lay down on the floor, pulled out the chest.

There was a loose board beneath where the chest had sat. She hadn't used it for years. When she was younger she used to
hide things underneath it: a secret stash of chocolate, smooth stones she found in the river swimming with James, all the little treasures that pleased her childish mind. She remembered that and smiled and then coughed as a wave of dust tickled her nose.

The space wasn't big enough to fit the chest but it would fit the swaddled book in its plastic bag perfectly.

She hid the book, replaced the floorboard and then put the empty chest on top of it. She felt better immediately

She turned off her lamp, slid into bed, pulled the duvet up high, tucking it under her chin, and quickly fell asleep.

The light from a full moon slipped through a gap in the curtains, silvering the stave of Merry's new bow, which cast a shadow so long it disappeared under the bed. It was as if it crawled up to the chest, lifted the floorboard, took out the book and leafed through it because Merry's dreams were a mad mix of book and bow. It was as if each were a talisman, powerful in its own right, but infinitely more so together. Halfway between sleep and wakefulness, the words Dr Philipps had translated ran through Merry's head:

There is a cave where the green turns blue . . . only the strong pass through . . .

The Merry of her dreams rode out, bow in her right hand, book in her left, hunting for the riddle cave. There was nothing to suggest it was the single biggest decision she would ever make, that her own life, and the lives of those she loved, would be marked by it for ever.