Named of the Dragon (20 page)

"Is that a fact?"

"It is. Everything you write is brilliant," I told him honestly, and was rewarded with a pleased look that informed me I had scored another point.
Take that, Ivor Whitcomb,
I thought.

A second cattle grid jolted me out of my self-satisfaction. We were leaving the firing range, from the looks of things. A barracks compound loomed up on our right, its gates guarded by two enormous tanks, guns pointed outwards. After that the hedged road ran without much incident to another roundabout, where a sign informed us that the road to St. Govan's was open.

I had to endure one final cattle grid before we came out on to a level stretch of vibrant green that ran along the cliff-top, and a long, deserted car park with a dizzying view of the sea. There didn't appear to be anything here that would warrant a car park, except for the view, but I gamely followed Christopher and James as they got out and walked without fear to the edge of the cliff.

Here a winding set of steps wound downwards through a fissure in the grey, imposing limestone, and between us and the sea below, a steep slate-tiled roof sat angled in among the boulders as though some giant hand at play had wedged it there, a square peg forced into an oddly shaped hole and forgotten.

"There's a legend," said Christopher, "that the steps to the chapel can't ever be properly counted."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"I haven't a clue. But I always get a different number going down than coming up."

Careful not to lose my footing on the sea-slicked stone, I counted the steps as I followed him down: Fifty-two. Lodging the number away in my memory, I ducked through the open stone doorway and into the chapel proper, blinking to adjust my eyes to the sudden dimness.

St. Govan, Christopher informed me, had been a sixth-century hermit, and his chapel reflected a hermit's austerity. It was small and high ceilinged, with one tiny window that looked on the sea and an even tinier square hole beside that, above the piscina. Stone benches had been built into the two side walls, and to my left, beside the rustic stone altar, a half-flight of steps scrambled up to a cleft in the naked rock, lit from above by a pale shaft of daylight.

It was definitely, as Bridget had promised, my kind of place.

And in return, as thanks to Bridget, I did my level best to keep the men occupied, taking my time as I poked my way round every nook of the chapel. Not that James really needed occupying. He'd retreated into private thought, showing as little interest here as he had at Pembroke Castle, and leaving it up to his brother to lead me around. My favourite feature proved to be an odd little rock-cleft with strange rib-like markings to show where the saint had supposedly pressed himself into the cliff in an effort to hide from marauders.

"And the rock opened up," Christopher said, telling the story, "and closed around St. Govan, sealing him inside, and he hid there until his pursuers had gone."

I touched the damp and time-worn stone. "So these are the marks of his ribs, then."

"Presumably. Just like a fossil. It's said to change shape to accommodate anyone, no matter how big or how small they are. See?'' he said, fitting himself to the wall. ' 'Now you try it."

Curving my back to the marble-like smoothness, I closed my eyes tightly and tried to imagine the feeling of being entombed in the cliff-face, surrounded by stone. Something dripped in the darkness. A sigh, like the breath of a man, floated past me. I opened my eyes.

Christopher watched me, indulgent, hands thrust in his pockets. "There's not much more to see, after this."

He was clearly suggesting I might want to leave, but knowing that Bridget would want us to stay out till tea-time at least, I tried to extend the tour. Venturing outside the chapel, I spent as much time as I could climbing over the boulders that tumbled down into the sea. It was slow going anyway. The boulders were huge, some as tall as me or taller, and I had to use my hands to climb, and set my feet with care. And then there were the limpets, whole colonies of them, stuck to the rock where the tide had abandoned them, pointy hard shells that I tried to avoid for fear of crushing them underfoot.

"You needn't bother," said Christopher, stepping firmly to show me. "They're indestructible."

"Still, it can't be much fun to be trodden on," I said. I didn't go down to the water—I'd always had a healthy respect for the sea, and having just been reminded of how Elen's husband had died, I felt no great desire to go any nearer the waves. Christopher was braver. Picking his way through the limpets, he slipped through a shadowy cleft in the rock—more like a narrow tunnel than a proper cave— and disappeared.

"He's only gone around the corner," James assured me. "He'll be back."

He lit a cigarette while we waited. Bending, he plucked something from the edge of a tidal pool, near his feet, and straightened to show me. "Something for Bridget," he said, pocketing the empty limpet shell.

I smiled. "I don't know why she doesn't like them."

"They cling. Bridget isn't fond of anything that clings." He exhaled, rather thoughtfully, and watched the wind gather the smoke. "Her last two husbands, I believe, both tried to keep her on the lead. A mistake I intend to avoid." His tone was mild, confiding, as he turned his gaze to mine. "You should know that I'm planning to ask her to marry me."

"Oh?" I held my smile with an effort, recognizing the recipe for disaster. I could see it now—James proposing, Bridget amusedly turning him down, and me being stuck in the middle of everything. Smashing. "How ... wonderful. When?"

"Christmas morning. Have you ever agented a husband and wife? No? Then we might be your first."

I wouldn't hold my breath, I thought. And if James's decision to sign with me depended on Bridget's accepting his ring, I was doomed. All my efforts were wasted. I looked away, watching the spray of the incoming waves on the boulders. "You're sure that Christopher's all right? He's been an age."

James raised his voice and called his brother. When nothing came back, he pitched his cigarette away and headed down towards the cave himself, to please me. "Won't be a minute," he promised. "He likely can't hear me, because of the waves."

Left alone, I watched the tidal pool awhile, seeing no real sign of life in the murky green water. The waves crashed again and the shadows shifted at the mouth of the cave, but the man who came out was neither James nor Christopher.

He was an older man, tall and thin with stooped shoulders and wispy white hair that blew wild in the wind. He was wearing some sort of a dark woolen wrap, like a cape,

and its tattered edge trailed in the pools on the rocks as he made his way over the boulders towards me. But as odd as he looked, he seemed friendly enough. He stopped a short distance off and nodded a greeting.

"Hello," I said back. "It's a lovely afternoon, isn't it?"

But the weather didn't interest him. His eyes on mine were uncommonly wise, sharp as chips of grey granite, and his voice, when he spoke, held a melody hard to describe.

"Take you care of the boy."

And with that quite remarkable speech he moved on again, smiling a secret, and vanished round the headland as the sea spat up a violent spray of mist.

XXIV

Here are snakes within the grass.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Merlin and Vivien"

I saw him, too," said Christopher. "Quite the character. He recited that rhyme for me... you know the one, James. Mother used to say it. The one about the bell."

"Oh, right." We were passing through the dimness of the chapel, and I could only see the edge of James's smile. "How does that go, again?"

Christopher, having just heard it afresh, had no trouble remembering. "There is nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, when the wind sounds low on Bosherston Mere," he said, dramatically. " "There is much to fear and little to hope, when unseen hands pull St. Govan's rope. And the magic stones, as the wise know well, promise sorrow and death, like St. Govan's bell.' " And then, to me, he added, "There, you see? I have a memory, too, for poetry."

"So you do," I congratulated him. "But what, exactly, does your poem mean? There's no bell at the chapel—the bellcote was empty. I looked."

"There used to be a silver bell, but it was supposedly stolen by pirates, and lost until a sea-nymph brought it back to shore and sealed it for safety in one of the rocks by the water. Tradition says that if you tap the rock, it rings."

Resisting the impulse to climb down again and experiment, I started up the curve of stone steps after James, counting silently as I went. "Fifty-three," I announced, as I came to the top of the cliff. One more than I'd counted before.

Christopher, behind me, made it fifty-one. "It never fails."

So at least one of the legends appeared to be true, I thought—none of us had been able to number the steps of St. Govan's.

"Where did St. Govan come from?" I asked, as we started across the car park.

Christopher shrugged. "Nobody knows. He was probably one of the old Celtic monks who came over from Ireland around the same time as St. David, but I always preferred the Arthurian angle."

"And what might that be?"

"That St. Govan was really Sir Gawaine."

"Of the Round Table?" James glanced back. "I thought Sir Launcelot finished him off."

Christopher shrugged in defence of his argument. ' 'Perhaps it was only a flesh wound."

"Like something out of Monty Python," I suggested.

"More like something out of Mother's daft imagination," said James. "She goes all potty over Arthur, always did. She'd have named me Galahad, if Father hadn't put his foot down."

Christopher admitted that his father's intervention had saved them both the trauma of countless playground fights. "Although I must say that Galahad Swift would have looked smashing on a book jacket."

"Well, I'm happy being James, thanks all the same. Bad enough that she read us those same bloody stories, over and over."

I looked at him. "So how did you escape hearing about the prophecies of Merlin?''

"What?"

"Escape?" Christopher laughed. "You must be joking. I can practically recite the prophecies. We both can, can't we, James?"

"My memory, as you're so fond of reminding me, is not as keen as yours."

We'd reached the car. The conversation died. But I couldn't help feeling uneasy, as I always felt when I suspected someone wasn't being truthful—a sort of sixth sense that I'd learned to rely on after all my years of contract negotiations and dealings with difficult people. Of course, I reasoned, James might not be lying—he might really have forgotten the tales that he'd heard as a child. It happened. But if that were the case, why then hadn't he suggested I ask Christopher about the prophecies, instead of sending me to Gareth?

James felt my sideways glance, and turned. "Are you bored, yet?"

"Not a bit."

"Good, because I thought we might make a short stopover. .."

His brother knowingly pointed out that it was only half past three. "The pubs are closed."

"Well, naturally," said James, whipping the Merc round the bends in the village of Bosherston. "But we haven't stopped in yet to say happy Christmas to dear old Aunt Effie, at Stackpole. She always keeps a little something tucked away, for visitors."

I hadn't stopped to think that James had gone since lunch without a drink. He must be near exploding. I thought I detected a certain urgency in his driving, now, and he did seem unusually focused on the road ahead.

Again, it was left to Christopher to tell me what sights we were passing.

"... and if you can bear yet another local legend," he said, leaning forward so his head drew level with my shoulder, "King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, supposedly lies just a stone's throw over there. You'll be able to see better, in a moment."

I turned to look past James, the way Christopher was pointing, as we turned again along a road with forest to the right of us and a steep field rising to the left. Through the thick screen of trees I could see the flash of sunlight on still water. ·

"Bosherston Pools," announced Christopher.

I looked at the lily ponds, frowning. "I thought Excalibur got given back to the Lady of the Lake, when Arthur died."

"That's right. Arthur told Sir Bedivere to take it to the nearest lake and chuck it in the water, and then the hand came up and caught the sword and waved it round three times, and took it under."

"And that happened over there?"

He nodded. "That's what they tell me."

As he spoke, something moved at the edge of my vision, and Christopher noticed it, too. He squinted to see better. "That's not our friend from St. Govan's, surely?"

I'd wondered that, too, when I'd glimpsed the dark clothing and wild white hair, but already the tangle of branches had swallowed the shape of the man, and I couldn't be certain.

"Not unless he grew wings," James pointed out the obvious.

He was quite right, of course. No one could possibly have walked this far in such a short time. Still, I thought, the man that I'd just seen had looked familiar, just as the man from St. Govan's had looked familiar, though I couldn't for the life of me think where I would have met him.
Take you care of the boy,
he had said. I assumed he'd meant Christopher, since they'd just been talking to each other and it would have been quite natural for him to think I was Christopher's girlfriend. A word of friendly romantic advice, from an old man.

"Whoever it was," James remarked, "he's gone now." The wind hit my window and, over its laughter, I fancied I heard in the distance the faint silvery warning of St. Govan's bell.

*-*-*-*-*

It always amazed me how quickly the sun dropped in winter. Five o'clock brought the dark and a bone-chilling cold that breathed round my window and huddled me into my seat as James opened his car door. The fumes of the idling engine mingled sharply in the night air with the thicker scents of coal smoke and, from somewhere, roasting chicken.

"I'll just run in and fetch her," James said. "Keep the car warm."

Christopher woke as the door slammed. He'd slept all the way back from Stackpole, having dropped off the instant we'd left their aunt Effie's house. She had turned out to be a delightful old woman who, not being much of a drinker herself, thought that Scotch should be poured to the top of the tumbler. "And where are we now?" he asked, groggily.

I twisted round. "Owen and Dilys's."

"Terrific." He watched the front door open in a flood of light as Dilys came to answer James's knock. "We'll be stuck here the rest of the night, now. Just watch."

"Oh, I don't think so." I watched Dilys's gestures. "I believe Bridget's already gone home."

"I don't blame her. This place would be hell with a headache. That woman would drive me to drink." Returning Dilys's wave with a forced smile, he went on, "She used to be a nurse, you know."

"Oh, really?"

' 'God, yes. Sister bloody Casualty. You want to get her started on
those
stories, sometime," he said darkly. "I tell you, it's a treat."

It didn't surprise me that she'd been a nurse. In fact, it explained a good deal—her bustling, take-charge manner and her open impatience with what she perceived to be Elen's incompetence. And her tidiness, too. That would come from the nursing.

"Well," I said, "Owen seems quite happy with her, so she must have some good qualities."

"I can't think of any."

"Not even one?"

"Her cooking," he conceded, "is a cut above average."

"There, you see?"

"And she's quite good with children, believe it or not. It's a shame that her own is such a flaming idiot."

"She only has the one son?"

"One's enough, believe me. We're of an age. I used to have to play with him when we came down for summer holidays, and even then I couldn't stand him. And he's not the perfect angel Dilys makes him out to be. You know he got a young girl pregnant in the village, here? Quite the scandal, that was. Everything worked out all right, the baby was adopted, but Dilys damn near died of shame."

I could well imagine. She looked the sort of woman to whom shame was a palpable thing, a great burden to carry.

She was still in the doorway and talking to James, hands on hips, her face firm with righteousness. Christopher yawned and sat back again, closing his eyes. "We'll run out of petrol before she stops talking."

But a minute later James returned to join us in the car. "It seems we've missed a bit of excitement."

"Where's Bridget?" asked Christopher.

"She went home. Drank one of Dilys's healing teas and felt immediately better, so I'm told."

"Clever girl," said his brother.

"I doubt she found much peace and quiet back at Castle Farm," said James, stretching his words out for maximum effect. "Elen had some company this afternoon."

Christopher frowned. "Oh? What sort of company?"

"A couple of social workers from the local authority."

"Christ."

I felt something flip in my own breast. "They didn't take Stevie?"

"Not yet. Elen must have impressed them."

"Well of course she did." Christopher's words came out hard, like a slap. "Damn it all, she's a good mother."

"Anyway," James said, "I'm quite sure we'll get all the details from Bridget."

But Bridget, when we arrived back at the house, proved to be of little help.

"I was sleeping," she defended herself, stretching like a kitten in her chair beside the Christmas tree. Her eyes caught mine and glanced away, and I knew that she was lying. Besides, I had a good idea how she'd really spent her afternoon. "You'll want to ask Owen, he knows the whole story. Or Gareth—he's over there, now."

Something in the offhand way she spoke his name made me seek her gaze a second time. She shook her head faintly in warning as James crossed to pour himself a before-dinner brandy. "Oh, I'm sure I can wait," he said smoothly. "I've had most of the story already from Dilys."

"Well, I haven't." Christopher, not so patient, left us abruptly to check for himself.

James shook his head. "I can't get used to seeing Christopher this way, it's not his style. I mean, it wasn't so long ago he was trying every trick he knew to get in Elen's knickers, and now he's gone all noble ..."

"James," Bridget interrupted, "would you be a darling and fetch me a couple of aspirins?"

"Still have the headache?"

"Yes."

"Dilys's miracle cure didn't work?"

Bridget pulled a face. "Dilys's miracle cure tasted rather like pond scum. I had to tell her I felt better, or she would have made me drink the whole pot."

"Poor baby." He smiled. "Yes, I'll get you your aspirins. Where are they, upstairs? Right."

She waited until he had gone to recover. Shifting forwards in her chair, she rolled her eyes expressively. ' 'God, what a day!"

I took the chair opposite, stretching my legs. "I thought you liked a challenge."

"Challenge, hell. It took me an hour to break free of that woman, and then she only let me go because her bloody son rang. Although," she admitted, "she did send me off with a plate of mince pies to deliver to Gareth. That worked rather well with my plan. Now, if Owen says he saw me coming out of Gareth's cottage, I have an excuse."

I agreed that she'd been fortunate. "And was it all you'd hoped for?"

"What?"

"Your interlude with Gareth."

"No." Again the rolling eyes. "Why didn't you tell me the man was so
dull
?”

I lifted my eyebrows, surprised. "Well, I—"

"Honestly, Lyn, it took all of my effort to keep my eyes open. He just went on and on ..."

"About what?"

"Bloody everything. He knew your husband, did you know that?"

"Gareth knew Martin?"

She nodded. "They went to the same parties, apparently."

Which was possible enough, I thought, in retrospect. Martin had had several friends within the theatre circles. But still, I found it strange to be reminded just how small the world could be.