Finding Camlann (34 page)

Donald finds the phone number under Mortimer, makes a note of the address and the house name:
Cair Paravel
, one of the self-important donnish residences of north Oxford.

‘I don’t suppose I could use the phone?’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of an emergency.’

The porter taps the side of his nose. ‘I shan’t tell,’ he says. ‘Be my guest.’

There is no answer at the Mortimer house. Donald walks back up to Broad Street, finds a wooden bench near the entrance to Trinity College and sits there watching the passing cyclists. After a while, he takes Lucy’s envelope out of his pocket, fumbles it open with chilly fingers. There are two folded pages inside, the introduction to a book:
The Last Prophetess
, by Lucinda Macaulay Trevelyan. She begins in her trademark hyperbolic, provocative style.

The British soil is finally giving up her deepest secrets. The recent unburyings at Devil’s Barrow have bequeathed to us a magical chalice whose like has never before been seen, the arms of its protector still wrapped about it, the wracked remains of her guardsmen piled beneath her in the burial mound. We picture this woman as the earthly interlocutor of the mother goddess, perhaps the last of the great prophetesses of Old Europe. Are we not entitled to ask whether her magic is still alive in the landscape of Britain?

He screws the sheets of paper into a ball. A little while later, with a small twinge of guilt, he smooths them out as best he can, tucks them into the back of his notebook. As he does so, something falls out from between the pages, a drawing done in p
encil, the one Julia gave him at Trevethey Mill. The picture shows an imposing cliff-face in a landscape of desolate Welsh hills. This is Craig-y-Ddinas, where Arthur and his knights have been sleeping for centuries in a cave deep within.

There was something Donald’s father said to him when they were talking about his book.
If only we could get back to the original names of things, names that are settled deep into the bones of the landscape, we would learn a great deal about our distant ancestors
. He digs in his bag for the geological map, traces his finger from the lower part of the valley to the top of the third cascade. Two inches to the right, just beyond the densely massed contours that indicate the face of the eastern cliff, is something he did not pay much attention to when he first looked at the map. It is the symbol for an ancient long barrow or burial chamber, and written next to it in a small antique smalked atcript is its traditional local name: a name that is unremarkable in its way, but now fills him with a sudden exhilaration.

He tears out a blank sheet from his notebook, pauses to gather his thoughts, pencil in hand, then sets down the most careful letter he has ever written in his life. At the end, he adds detailed directions and a small hand-drawn map. He tucks the sheet inside Lucy’s empty envelope, reseals it and writes Julia’s name on the front, then runs back to his car parked at Gloucester Green, drives up to St. Giles and on in the direction of north Oxford.

The Old Way Down
from the Mountain

I
T IS A
comfort to Julia, seeing Emma Speedwell pulling her battered blue Volvo into the gravel drive shared by the two neighbouring houses. Emma, always in a hurry, shouts a cheerful hello as she runs inside. Turning the key in the front door, Julia sees a letter there, a brown envelope pushed half-way through. She opens it, takes out a single sheet of paper filled with Donald’s precise, angular handwriting. The first line hits her like a blow to the stomach.
I looked for you at the college gate, but perhaps you changed your mind
. What follows is a beautifully crafted letter telling her of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his bishop’s ring, his desperate final journey and the fate of his ancient book, the true meaning of the verses that are written there. The letter closes with a vision that first came to Donald at Trevethey Mill, when Julia was drawing a map of the Welsh mountains on a paper napkin. In his mind’s eye, they are walking hand in hand as they climb up to a high valley and look out together on a view described in an old poem they both know by heart.

Within minutes she is in the car, reversing out of the drive. As she pulls away, she glimpses something in the rear-view mirror that stops her short, freezes all logical thought. Hugh’s Land Rover is coming along the street from the other end. The traffic light is amber changing to red at the Woodstock Road as she makes the turn too quickly, heart pounding, then drives away as fast as she dares, cutting through the back streets, heading out of Oxford to the north and west.

By the time she reaches the Cheltenham road, making slow but steady progress through the banks of fog still lying heavily across the Thames valley, the crisis is over. In time the traffic thins out, the fog lifting as the land rises gradually to the west. The Oxfordshire farmland slips easily by, the faint green haze of the winter wheat now making its mark on the November fields.

She turns on the radio, tunes to the BBC playing music that is twenty years old, a nostalgic soundtrack of her youth. There are sharp memories of her final summer living at Dyffryn; then a song that transports her to the springtime of her first year at Wadham College, not long after she and Hugh first met. They are walking hand in hand along a narrow, penumbral space between high college walls. Somebody familiar is coming towards them from Radcliffe Square, a tall boy with reddish-brown hair, good-looking in an awkward, gangly way. She feels the colour coming to her cheeks, thinks to disengage her hand from Hugh’s, but it is too late, the gauntlet must be run. It is only a couple of weeks since she was with Donald at the Ashmolean Museum, listening to his earnest explanations of cartouches and scarabs and hieroglyphs, then to the Randolph for tea, all the while sensing him falling for her, basking in the glow of his evident admiration. She cannot recall precisely what was said as they passed each other on Brasenose Lane, perhaps just an uncomfortabililf baskinle greeting tersely returned, then on with their lives.

DEEP INTO THE
lower reaches of the Wye valley beyond the Welsh border, Donald finds himself in the state of heightened awareness that sometimes comes upon him when he is alone on a country road. This sensation grows to a spine-tingling intensity, as if some old British magic is speaking to him along the quiet, meandering lanes and the hills and dells where the morning mist is still gathered. He looks out on the passing landscape with a rare depth of understanding, sees banks and ditches and sunken lanes with their own stories to tell, hedgerows anchored by ancient pedunculate oaks with twisted arms outstretched towards the sky. Fragments of poetry are in his head,
On a green hilltop we made our stand, spear-tips trapping gold of sunset . . . At nightfall we fell like thunder down the slope . . . think’st thou yon sanguine cloud has quench’d the orb of day? . . . To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, and warms the nations with redoubled ray
. Then the outskirts of a small town, drab grey cottages, a petrol station and a pub, enough to banish this temporary enchantment. His thoughts return to the present world, and to Julia Llewellyn, and to his hopes for what the day might bring.

It is early afternoon by the time he reaches the old drovers’ track that leads alongside the river to the base of the falls. It seems a far different place, the river much diminished, flowing smooth and tranquil over the rocks, a fine mist veiling the upper slopes. He gets out of the car, takes out the map to orientate himself, then looks in vain for a path that might lead up to the higher ground on the eastern side of the valley. The slopes on either side are steep and topped by treacherous crags. As far as he can see, the only way forward is along the river to the lower waterfall, where he climbed up with Julia and Caradoc Bowen.

He walks a little way back along the track, follows it around a few bends of the river. Finally, as he is retracing his steps to the car, he sees what he is looking for. Ahead of him, the track seems to come to an abrupt end as the valley narrows towards the waterfall. Now he can see that it would at one time have turned sharply to the left and crossed over the bridge that once spanned the river at this point. The original path can still be traced on the far side, running up a hillside now thickly clad with bushes and small trees. This is the old way down from the mountain. He walks over to the riverbank and sits down with his back against one of the ruined stone footings of the bridge. For now, there is nothing for him to do but wait.

JULIA CAN SEE
the Land Rover five cars behind her. The first rush of panic soon subsides to a quieter, more rational anxiety. She might have expected it: seeing her drive away from the house at speed, Hugh has followed her all the way from Oxford. In any case, there is no way to avoid this confrontation. Ahead of her now are long, straight stretches with nowhere to stop, then a series of sharp bends as the road climbs up to the higher ground of the Forest of Dean. He is gaining steadily on her, and making no attempt to keep out of sight. She puts on her indicator, dives off to a steep, narrow lane on the right. It is signposted to a village they once visited on a long-ago happy weekend spent exploring this landscape of secret woods and hills. They always meant to come back.

She drives no more than two hundred yards, pulls over in a narrow passing-place and waits there with the engine running. She crunk.

‘Ralph Barnabas told me he was going to speak to you,’ he says, almost casual, not looking at her. ‘Is that why you’re running away from me?’

She feels wrong-footed by this statement, thrown off balance. ‘I can hardly believe it’s true, what he said to me.’

‘Why is that? Because you don’t think I’m capable of such a thing?’

Looking at her husband leaning against the gate, the grim set of his face as he stares out across long sloping fields left fallow for the rough winter grazing, Julia sees someone who has become a stranger to her, who has nothing to do with the Hugh Mortimer she used to know, so bold and strong and inspired with the noble possibilities of the world. She opens her mouth to speak, but he holds up his hand.

‘No, don’t say anything, please just hear me out.’ He turns away from her, the words coming now with a quiet intensity. ‘I don’t think you ever quite understood about Caradoc Bowen. He was such an extraordinary figure in the early days, not like anyone else we had ever seen. We were young and idealistic and determined to change the world, and he spoke to us as if we had some grand purpose in life. He filled us with the romance of the Welsh rebellion, told us Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r was Arthur returned to the aid of his people, and he alone knew how to find the place where Glyn D
ŵ
r fell in battle and crossed over to the otherworld. If Bowen chose to cast himself as a modern-day Merlin, who were we to say he was not?’

Hugh looks sharply at Julia, as if to see if his words have meant something to her. His face is pale, his eyes rimmed with red. ‘Then he offered us his greatest challenge. Where, he said, was the next Arthur, the next true champion of Wales? He was looking at me when he asked that question. He was looking straight at me, with my anger and my self-confidence and my pedigree coming all the way from Glyn D
ŵ
r. He saw something in me, and I responded to it. If he was prepared to put his faith in me, how could I not believe myself to have all the makings of a Celtic hero from the past?’

‘It was what you wanted for yourself,’ Julia says. ‘Bowen didn’t force you—’

‘No, he didn’t force me into anything,’ Hugh says, ‘but he had a real power over me, and he knew how to use it. The plan to dam the Cwmhir valley was the catalyst he had been waiting for, the perfect opportunity to exploit my anger. He told me about the deal my father had made years before with the British government, trading away the future of the Ty Faenor estate in return for some tawdry aristocratic favour. Then he said it wasn’t just Ty Faenor, that Dyffryn Farm would also go under the flood.’

Julia knows this story from Caradoc Bowen, but the thought of it still has the power to shock her. ‘So the two of you told my father about it, but said nothing to me.’

‘Should we not have spokenot about itn to him?’ In the look Hugh gives her now, so full of unconscious condescension, she reads the whole story of their marriage. ‘Dai met us at the Black Lion with Gareth Williams and some of the local Plaid Cymru men, all of them fired up to do whatever was necessary to stop the construction of the dam. Some people thought your father was the ring-leader, but it wasn’t that way at all. He was the voice of reason, telling us we should steer clear of violence. We should remember what happened at Cwm Tryweryn, how the bombing there hadn’t done any good in the end, Capel Celyn still went under the flood. But Bowen was a captivating speaker, and Dai stood no chance against him. I remember your father took me to one side just before he left, tried his best to calm me down. He said he had been like me in some ways, in his youth, and he knew what was burning inside me. But I was not strong enough to walk away from Caradoc Bowen.’

Hugh falls silent for a moment, concentrates on flexing the toe of his boot against the metal gatepost. ‘In the autumn, we met up in secret at Ty Faenor with Gwyn Edwards, one of the Plaid Cymru men who had been at the Black Lion. It was agreed that Gwyn would work from the inside. He was used to handling explosives from the time he spent with his father in the slate quarries, and he was already working for Dafydd Ellis as a junior engineer. It would be a simple matter for him to stay late one evening and set the whole thing up. All I had to do was stand outside and keep watch. But something went wrong, he was standing over the dynamite when it went off.’

It is a cruel trick of Julia’s imagination, the colourful picture that paints itself: the destructive effect of explosives on the human anatomy, a wave of blood and body parts. She finds herself clinging to the only redemptive thought she can find, that her father was not responsible for what happened. He tried to prevent it, and he would be bitterly dismayed if he knew she had ever thought otherwise.

Now she would like Hugh to stop, but there is a relentless quality to his catharsis. ‘Just as Gwyn Edwards was being blown to pieces, and just as Stephen Barnabas was having his legs ripped from his body, I was running away like a helpless coward. The explosion knocked me off my feet, and I picked myself up, and I ran off along the railway tracks without so much as a glance over my shoulder.’

The way he is looking at her now, it seems he is waiting for some reaction. What is there to say? She has been trying to get to the truth of what happened, and now she knows, and does not want to know. For a bewildering moment, she wonders what crime her husband has just confessed to. Accomplice to something: murder, attempted murder, manslaughter? She speaks quietly to him now. ‘I’m not sure what you expect from me.’

‘I expect nothing at all,’ Hugh says. ‘Perhaps you’ll want to go to the police. I’ve never had the courage to do it myself.’ He pushes himself away from the gate, turns to face her. ‘But I hope you will find a way to forgive me.’