The Wrong Rite (3 page)

Bert did burn over his pastures now and then. Often enough, as a kid, Janet herself had been one of the bunch stationed along the edges with wet sacks and old brooms to keep the fire from spreading. She’d enjoyed the excitement and the good-smelling smoke and the fun of beating out errant sparks. She’d realized the grass always grew better after a burning, but she’d never been aware that she was participating in a fertility rite. Janet thought perhaps she’d better not mention this back at the farm. Now that young Bert was stuck on the second Williamson girl, Annabelle was waxing a trifle edgy about fertility rites.

Reuel Williams was at her elbow again. Wickedly and deliberately Janet drew him into the Beltane fires, then slid away herself for a few words with the patriarch.

“Will you talk to me now, Uncle Caradoc? I barely got to say hello at teatime before you left me for a younger woman.”

“An infant enchantress! Is it sleeping our Dorothy is now?”

“I hope so. I’m going to run up before we go in to dinner. Betty’s great-niece Megan is baby-sitting. She seems like a nice kid.”

“Oh yes, Megan is a good child. She will be Dorothy’s seventh cousin once removed, you can be easy about her. Come now, I have a new treasure to show you.”

“Not another silver crosier?”

“No, not that. Such discoveries do not happen more than once. How well I remember the pride in my father’s voice as he told of drawing that beautiful thing forth from the dark, secret hole in which it had lain hidden for so many long years.”

Janet knew how many: all the way back to the twelfth century and the reign of Henry II, when Rhys ap Gruffyd, the Lord Rhys, had been the most prominent man in Wales. The Lord Rhys had been among those who had favored the Cistercian monasteries; these had greatly flourished and multiplied, then gradually declined. Four centuries later, by the time of the Dissolution under Henry VIII, the buildings and the monks had been in sad state. The neighbors hadn’t seemed to mourn overmuch at seeing the few remaining Cistercians ousted, but had set about lugging off their building stones to erect memorials in the utilitarian shapes of cottage walls and pigsties.

Janet hadn’t been told and didn’t quite like to ask how her husband’s branch of the Rhyses had come to build their manor house around the monks’ former dining hall, the one part that had always been kept in repair while outbuildings crumbled and even the chapel showed signs of decay. Various Rhyses had added to the manor from time to time, using what lay at hand. There were still a few oddments of ruins left here and there about the grounds, never removed nor dismantled lest some heir or other might take a notion to tack on another ell or build another cow barn.

With all the tearing down and rebuilding, various interesting artifacts had come to light. Some had been more than interesting, for the Cistercians in their heyday had waxed rich and spent freely to the greater glory of their God and the awe of the populace. It had been some Caradoc back around George IV’s time who’d discovered the cryptic parchment; but nobody had caught on to what it meant until the present Sir Caradoc’s grandfather had got a brainstorm one day and lowered his twelve-year-old son, Sir Caradoc’s father, on a rope through a curtain of spiderwebs down a half-ruined stairwell, with a miner’s lamp on his cap and a crowbar lashed to his belt.

Sir Caradoc’s lilt rose almost to a song, chanting of how the young lad had found the stone with the crooked line carved into it, pried it out with his crowbar, stuck in his arm as far as it would go, and finally, croaked in the voice of a bullfrog, “Send down the basket, Father!”

Treasure trove must perforce be reported to the Crown and investigated by a coroner appointed to maintain the royal private properties. There was no way word of the great find would not have got around to the servants, no way they wouldn’t have repeated it at the pub, no way that sole basketful wouldn’t have been multiplied many times over in the telling. The coroner assigned to the Rhyses had been an Englishman, holding to the then-current belief among his peers that Wales was the armpit of the empire, that all Welshmen were liars and petty pilferers, and that no good thing could come out of a Welsh monastery because Henry VIII’s trusty emissaries had well and duly snaffled everything worth taking three centuries before.

Wales had not then started to gear up for the tourist trade. The road had been vile, the inn worse. The coroner’s bed had been not only lumpy but also verminous. The food had been unfit to mention, much less eat. Being thus in a filthy temper and bearing in mind that, while the Crown was entitled to seize any treasure it had a mind to, it must also pay the finder full value for what it took, the coroner had condemned the golden chalice as copper and its jewels as bogus. He’d reviled the badly tarnished crosier as a pitiful attempt to deceive, and declared the fist-size uncut emerald set into its crook to be in fact no more than a lump of Roman glass.

Told
to take his junk away and dump it where he’d found it, Sir Caradoc’s grandfather had humbly agreed with the coroner that he was just a stupid Taffy who hadn’t known any better. The stupid Taffy had then placated the clever Englishman with a few noggins of homemade mead and talked him into writing a letter to the effect that there was nothing of value left at the site of the former monastery and no Rhys was ever again to pester the Crown with any more nonsense about hidden treasure. The Englishman had then departed with a sense of duty done and a slight buzzing in his ears. The crestfallen Welshman had watched him go, then slunk away to enjoy a quiet snicker while he wiped the carefully applied dirt off the golden chalice and got out the silver polish for the crosier.

Sir Caradoc’s grandfather hadn’t even bothered to mention the two golden sickles. That fine gentleman of a Sais wouldn’t have been interested. Besides, they dated from the long-ago time when Wales had been still a sovereign nation, perhaps even from before the Romans. Why should those smart-mouthed Londoners put any claim to them anyway? It had been Welsh artisans who’d beaten the little sickles out of the native gold, Welsh Druids who’d used them to gather with due ceremony the all-healing mistletoe off the oak trees on which it grew.

Gathering mistletoe had been a major industry among the Druids. Not only deemed to be good for whatever ailed you, the pretty parasite also came in handy around the house as a picklock, a lightning conductor, and a good-luck charm for the dairy. The mere gracious gesture of bestowing a bouquet of mistletoe on the first cow to drop her calf after the New Year would put a crimp in the plans of any witch bent on curdling the milk or laying an antibutter spell on the churn. There might still be farmhouses around where a bunch of mistletoe could be seen gathering dust on the chimney piece. The very monks who’d done the cooking here when the house was yet a monastery would likely have kept some on hand, just in case.

Just why they’d collected the golden sickles was open to conjecture. Sir Caradoc thought it likely, as had his father and grandfather before him, that some abbot had confiscated the pretty things and tucked them away in his treasure hole as part of an effort to stamp out the old religion. Why they hadn’t been melted down and the gold used for purposes the abbot deemed holier was anybody’s guess. Maybe he hadn’t needed the gold at the time, or maybe he hadn’t had the heart to destroy the sickles.

That the Cistercians could actually have employed these pagan instruments for the purpose of gathering mistletoe would have been hard to credit, were it not that strange things had happened in those last, lax years so long after the founders of their houses had vowed themselves to poverty, holiness, and good works. According to history, a monk had been caught doing a tidy business in counterfeit coins, which he’d forged in his own cell. Rumors had even been bandied about that some of the monks in another monastery had turned out not to be males.

Anyway, for whatever reason, it was certain that somebody—the abbot, one of his flock, or all of them together—had been more than a bit interested in Druidic golden sickles. There’d been two of them in with the chalice and the crosier. Sir Caradoc’s father, never forgetting that supreme moment at the end of his rope, had spent many hours thereafter prowling among the ruins, which were more abundant then than later, looking for another mystic mark. On the very eve of his eldest son’s birth, he had come upon a stone marked with that same little crook, and behind it another sickle. Now, in his old age, Sir Caradoc had quite literally stumbled upon yet a fourth. Just before his birthday, too. Now, wasn’t that a wonderful present for an old man?

He had it with him this very moment, a charming thing no bigger than a man’s hand. “You see, Jenny? The blade is the shape of the crescent moon, for reasons Robert Graves has no doubt discussed in that wonderful but occasionally tedious book of his about the White Goddess.”

“You could ask Mary,” Janet suggested slyly.

“So I could.” Sir Caradoc made no move to do so. “Would you like to hold it?”

“Oh, may I?”

This was the first time Janet had had any of the relics in her hand. The chalice was long gone. Sir Caradoc’s grandfather, upon reflection, had decided that the coroner, though wrong about everything else, had been right in calling it ugly. Nevertheless, he’d figured that so much gold, so many jewels, and so impeccable a provenance must have their appeal for some wealthy collector. Being a resourceful man, he’d found one. The proceeds from the sale he’d so cannily invested that his heirs and assigns had so far never even needed to think of selling the crosier or the sickles.

The treasures were still where the old man had put them, back in the monks’ dining hall, in a niche high on the wall that had most probably been there since the time of building, made to house a sacred relic of some sort. Sir Caradoc’s grandfather had installed a wrought-iron grille to protect his finds. When his son had added his own two sickles, he’d also lined the grille with a sheet of heavy plate glass. Sir Caradoc was keeping the key in his inside waistcoat pocket by day and under his pillow by night. If, by an evil sleight, some rogue should succeed in stealing the treasures, Madoc could go and get them back.

If only Uncle Caradoc might hang on long enough for Dorothy to hear the story from his own lips! Selfish of her to be thinking about an old man’s life in such terms, Janet realized, but maybe mothers couldn’t help it. She’d better just run upstairs and make sure Megan hadn’t run into any problems. With a twinge of regret, she handed back the newest golden sickle.

“Yes, you couldn’t have had a more beautiful birthday present. Thank you for letting me hold it. Is there still time enough before dinner for me to take a peek at the baby?”

“Dinner will wait for you.”

“Oh no, please. I shan’t be five minutes.”

As she headed for the stairs, Madoc, who’d been annexed by Iseult, managed to break away and intercept her. “What’s up, Jenny? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I just thought I’d better check on Dorothy before we sit down.”

“I’ll go.”

“And what if she’s hungry? Fat lot of help you’d be. This is women’s work, Betty said so. I’ll be right back, go talk to Iseult some more.”

“What about?”

“Ask her if she’s read any good books lately.”

Janet gave him a peck on the cheek and moved on. Once away from the drawing room, she picked up her skirts and ran, not that there was really anything to hurry for, but it did seem a long time since she’d left Dorothy up there alone with a stranger who was hardly more than a child herself.

J
ANET NEEDN’T HAVE BEEN
in a rush. When she opened the red-room door, silently so as not to startle the baby, Dorothy wasn’t making a peep. The fire was burning just right, the room was just pleasantly warm. Megan was sitting on a low stool beside the cradle, rocking it gently, crooning a lullaby. At least Janet supposed this must be a lullaby; the young nanny was singing in Welsh, so she couldn’t be sure. Anyway, the gentle sounds must be doing their job; Dorothy was curled up in her elegant nest with one fist to her cheek and her eyes tight shut. Nothing to worry about here. Janet smiled down at Megan, and Megan smiled timidly back.

“Everything all right?” she murmured.

“Yes’m,” Megan whispered.

“Good, then I’ll go on to dinner. Did Betty give you something to eat before you came up?”

“Yes’m.”

She must know more English than this; most Welsh people were either bilingual or exclusively Anglophonic. Maybe Megan just didn’t care to chat with strangers. As was right and proper. Janet wouldn’t want Dorothy talking to strangers, either. She adjusted Dorothy’s blanket a whisker, not that it hadn’t been fine the way it was but a mother had to get in a bit of mothering, assured Megan that she’d be back in a while, and left the girls together.

This being the new wing, its general flavor was early Victorian. Woodwork was mahogany, doors had shiny brass knobs, draperies were plush with scads of fringe. Floors were heavily carpeted, even out here in the hall. Why all these big cabbage roses? Roses were for England. The daffodil was the flower of Wales. Daffodils probably weren’t much in favor with carpet makers.

Anyway, the thick pile was agreeable to walk in. The heels of Janet’s blue evening slippers weren’t making a sound, even though she was walking briskly so as not to keep dinner waiting. In spite of all the food they’d been plied with in first class, the snack they’d had on the train, and Betty’s Welsh cakes at tea, she found herself quite ready to eat again. It must be something in the air. She was almost to the stairs when she saw the monk.

Of all the foolishness! The hooded figure in the long gray robe was lurking, silent and foglike, at the other end of the hallway, trying to look spooky. Danny the Boots, she assumed; according to Betty in her more acerbic moments, Danny’s mental capacity was about threepence to the pound. He’d better not go poking his head into the red room to scare Megan and wake the baby. Should she tell him so? As Janet hesitated with her hand on the newel post, the monk faded gently from view.