Lady of Hay (62 page)

“Bet—” The muscles in her stomach were clenching nervously as Jo sat forward on the edge of her seat. “What exactly does Pete say?”

“Listen. I’ll read it to you.” Bet read the article aloud in a fast monotone. She paused expectantly when she had finished. “Well?”

For a moment Jo said nothing. Her hands were sweating. She could feel the receiver slipping as she held it to her ear. The room was spinning slowly around her.

“Jo? Jo, are you there?” Bet’s insistent voice cut slowly through the pulsing in her head.

Jo managed to speak at last. “Where did he get the story from?”

“He doesn’t say. Quote “Close friend of Nick’s” unquote. He’s timed it well with Nick abroad. It is true, I suppose?”

“I don’t know,” Jo said. “He never told me he’d been regressed. I asked him but he avoided telling me. It’s…it’s grotesque.” Her voice sank to a whisper.

Her suspicions, her worst secret fears—they were true, then, and now the whole world knew. She suddenly felt sick.

“Are you going to call him?”

“No.”

“But you must! You’ve got to ask him if it’s true.”

“Over the phone? When he’s three and a half thousand miles away? If it’s true and if he had wanted me to know, he’d have told me.” Jo took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Leave it, Bet. I can’t cope with all this. Not now. Please, leave it alone—”

“But, Jo—”

“Bet, you told me Nick wanted to kill me. It wasn’t Nick. It was John. It was John who ordered Matilda’s death.”

There was a long silence. At the other end of the phone Bet’s eyes had begun to gleam. “Jo,” she began cautiously.

“No,” Jo said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She changed the subject abruptly. “I called your Mr. Clements in Brecon.”

“Oh, good.” Bet contained her excitement about Nick with an effort. “When are you going to interview him?”

“On Tuesday. I’ll drive down on Monday afternoon and stay with Mrs. Griffiths again. That’ll give me a week to write and polish the article for you.”

“I knew you’d do it, Jo. And then, if while you’re there anything should happen—”

“It won’t.” Jo’s voice was repressive. “Believe me, Bet, it won’t. Especially now.” Her last words were barely audible.

Bet bit her lip, trying to keep her voice casual. “When was Nick planning to come back?”

“He didn’t know. It depended on how things were going in New York.”

“And you’ll still be going out there when you’ve finished the article?”

There was a long silence. “I don’t know, Bet,” Jo said at last. “I’ll have to think about it now.”

***

The lane was steep and very rutted when Jo finally arrived at Pen y Garth. Nervously she put the MG into first and crawled up it, waiting to hear the hard-crusted earth ripping out the bottom of the car. At the top of the hill the pitch debouched suddenly onto a mountainside ablaze with gorse and ended in front of a low, whitewashed farmhouse. After drawing up with relief, Jo climbed out and reached for her bag. The familiar smell of mountain grass and wild thyme and bracken filled her lungs, mixed with the acid sweetness of the pale-pink roses that clung and tumbled around the sentry-box porch at the front of the house. Above the white walls there was an uneven roof of thick Welsh slates, green with lichen and speckled with yellow stonecrop.

Jo stared around. The farm faced east toward the Wye Valley. She could see for miles.

“You like our view?” A figure had appeared in the doorway.

Jo smiled. “It’s quite breathtaking.”

Ben Clements laughed. “In every sense, if you’d walked up from the road. Come in.”

She followed him into the single large room that made up the ground floor of the farmhouse. Half kitchen, half living room, the stone floor was scattered with brightly colored rag rugs and littered with toys, the walls crammed with books and pictures.

Jo looked around, startled by the color and the untidiness of it all. “I didn’t realize you had small children!” she hazarded as she avoided a wooden train set.

He threw back his head and laughed. “One of the penalties of growing old is insanity in our family! I got married at the age of fifty-seven and, unequal to the horrors of family planning, found myself pregnant, as you might say. Have a drink. I never ask anyone up here before twelve and then I don’t have all this silly social nonsense of poncing about with coffee and what not. You can have Scotch or beer.”

Jo grinned. She could feel she was going to like this man. “Scotch. Please.”

He nodded approval. “I hope you didn’t want to see Ann and the kids particularly. She’s taken them to Hereford for the day to see some cousin or other who’s paying a flying visit.”

Jo felt her heart sink. “It would have been nice. I’m writing for a woman’s magazine. So the woman’s angle is important.”

“Ah.” He grimaced. “I’ve screwed things up, haven’t I? Conceited male thought it was me you would want to see. My usual interrogators are nearly always men, my dear. Forgive me.” He handed her half a tumbler of Scotch, undiluted.

Jo laughed. “I wanted to see you both. Perhaps I could come back when Mrs. Clements is at home and interview her then, and interview you now?”

It would mean staying longer in Hay. Was that what she wanted really? Pushing away the thought, Jo concentrated on the gentle face of the man in front of her. He was still smiling. “Fair enough. So, do you want to see the farm at all?”

Jo reached into her bag for her notebook and camera. She nodded. “I’m going to take some snaps if I may, then we’ll send down a proper photographer if mine aren’t good enough!”

“Of course they’ll be good enough.” He led the way to the door. “You mustn’t be defeatest, my dear. That won’t do at all.” He turned. “Ann told me you were a formidable lady, whose articles are nearly always very scathing. That true?”

“Often. Does it worry you?”

“Not a bit!” He ducked under the low doorway and preceded her around the farmhouse to the back, where a stone wall surrounded a large vegetable garden. “I’ve had everything thrown at me by the farming guys who think I’m crazy. Luckily more and more people are seeing it my way now, and I think people of the organic persuasion are slowly winning through.”

Quickly and methodically he showed Jo around the smallholding, supervising her notes and taking most of her photographs for her. Then he led the way back inside and refilled her glass.

“Ann’s left a cold lunch for us. Shall we eat outside?” He glanced at her. “I amuse you, don’t I?”

Jo smiled. “No. I was just thinking you might as well have given me duplicated notes at the door. You are too used to giving these interviews.”

“Okay, I stand reprimanded. Now, you interview me.” He carried the plates out to a table outside the back door where the blazing sun was partially deflected from them by a trellis hung with honeysuckle. “Ask me all the questions I haven’t answered yet.”

Jo sat down. “Does your wife get lonely up here?”

“Shouldn’t you ask her that?” His face lit with humor.

“I shall. I just wondered what you thought she felt about it.”

“Well.” He took a huge mouthful of food. “Ann is a remarkable woman. She has enormous inner resources. Of course, I am presupposing her genuine love of the country, but there is more to it than that. She loves the mountains and the rivers and the loneliness. She loves the soil, the joy of making things grow, just as I do. She likes the people, the villages, the towns—we’re not antisocial just because we live up here alone, but neither do we miss people when we don’t see them for a while. Like me, she came to Wales as a foreigner. I’m a north countryman; she, God help her, is American! But we have both been completely absorbed by this country with its people and its traditions, its history. These hills may look lonely to you, but they are full of life and dreams and memories. Fascinating. What is it? What have I said?” His shrewd blue eyes had noticed Jo’s sudden tenseness.

She forced a smile. “Nothing. Go on.”

“You’re a skeptic? A townie?”

“No.” Jo met his gaze. “I’ve lived up here too.”

“Ah. I wondered why they’d sent
you
particularly. So you understand what I meant. Whereabouts did you live?”

Jo hesitated. Now she had said the words she could hardly retract them, and besides, she had an overwhelming urge to confide in him. After glancing across at his face briefly, she looked away across the falling mountainside toward the misty distance and took a deep breath.

“You’ll probably think I am mad. It was a long time ago. In a previous existence.” She paused, waiting for his laughter.

He said nothing, however, watching her intently, and after a minute she went on.

She told him everything. When she fell silent at last he did not speak for several minutes, gazing silently out across the panoramic view.

“That is a truly amazing story,” he said at last. “Truly amazing. I had heard of Moll Walbee, of course. Who hasn’t around here? But to have entered so completely into her life, that is extraordinary.”

“You believe me, then?”

“I believe it has happened to you, yes. As for the explanation—” He shrugged. “I think I must seek for a more mundane explanation than reincarnation.” He smiled enigmatically. “To do with the relativity of time perhaps. I would suggest that you have an area of your brain particularly sensitive to what one might call the echo of time. You have tuned in, as you might say, to Matilda’s wavelength and can, when in a state of receptiveness, ‘listen in.’” He put his head on one side. “How does that theory sound to you?”

Jo grinned. She leaned forward and pulled her plate toward her again, helping herself to a slice of Ann Clements’s crumbling stone-ground bread. “To be honest, my brain has given up asking how and why. The last few times it happened I wanted to fight it. I don’t want it to happen again. And I think I know how to stop it now. One must not let one’s brain be distracted into blankness. It is only receptive when it’s idling, like a car engine out of gear.”

“Fascinating,” Ben said again. “You know, you must talk to Ann about this. She was a psychology major at UCLA and past life recall was a particular interest of hers. She wrote an article about it for one of your sister magazines some time ago. Your editor might even have seen it.”

Jo stared at him. Then she gave a wry smile. “I think she may indeed,” she said. “It would have been almost too great a coincidence, my coming here otherwise, I suppose.” She sighed. “But I am glad I’m here now. Talking about it has helped. Perhaps Bet has done me a favor after all.”

He glanced at her under his heavy eyebrows. “I’m not surprised that it has worried you, though. It would scare the pants off me!” He reached for some bread and applied a rich lump of cheese to the crust, then, munching thoughtfully, he sat back in his chair. “But from what you have said it’s not your journeys into the past that have upset you and put you off repeating the exercise. It is the involvement of other people in the present. If you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds to me as if you’ve allowed yourself to be too much used by people who seem to have points they all want to prove at your expense, from your journalist colleagues to your boyfriend.”

“But they are all involved—”

“Perhaps.” He reached forward and touched her hand. “It’s a nice theory, but don’t be too ready to believe what others say, my dear. Look in your own heart for the answer. That is the only place you’ll find the truth. Now, let me get you some cheese. This is our own cream cheese from Aphrodite and her daughters, or there is a curd cheese from Polyphema, the one-eyed goat.” He twinkled at her mischievously. “You must keep your brain fully alert while you are here, Joanna. I am not sure I could cope with a visitation from a baron’s lady as well as afternoon milking!”

30

Jo took the wrong road at the bottom of the hill and found herself heading northwest instead of back along the Wye Valley toward Hay. She almost stopped to turn, then on a sudden defiant impulse she drove on into the narrow busy streets of Brecon itself, slowing the car to a standstill in the knotted traffic. She found a place to park, then wandered slowly around the town before climbing to the cathedral with its squat tower. By the time she had reached it she had made up her mind.

After pushing open the door, she walked in, staring around. The guidebook was very informative. It was during the lifetime of Bishop Giles de Breos and his brother Reginald that the eastern part of the original Norman church of Bernard of Newmarch had been replaced by the chancel, tower, and transepts that exist today. Her eye traveled down the lines of close print. Reginald was the only Lord of Brecknock to be buried in the Priory Church. She bit her lip, staring around. Reginald was buried there. There, somewhere beneath the lovely arching vault of the chancel…Suddenly she didn’t want to know. Reginald, that sturdy, cheerful boy, her third son, whom she loved in such an uncomplicated way and who had loved her. Her eyes filled with tears, and it was only with an effort that she pulled herself together. After all, she had not needed to come into the cathedral. If she had really wanted no more to do with the de Braose family she should not have gone to Brecon at all. She stood staring up at the high altar with its carved reredos and its offering of flowers below the huge stained-glass window, then forced herself to look back at the guidebook that told about the church of the de Braoses.

There wasn’t much left of the castle. A mound and an ivy-covered fragment of wall, that was all, but she was used to that now. She climbed the worn staircase carefully and stood staring out across the rooftops toward the vivid toothed outline of the Beacons. Yes, this view she did remember; the outline in the mist and the sunset behind that faraway bastion of mountains. She dug her nails into the stone blocks of the wall, then, taking a deep, relaxing breath, she deliberately began to empty her mind.

***

The room was dark and there was a pounding in her temples. She tried to raise her head, then, with a groan, let it fall back on the pillows, lights flashing and searing behind her eyelids. She lay, exhausted, for what seemed a long time, then dazedly she realized there were people in the room with her. Someone helped her to vomit and she lay back again, a cool wet cloth across her burning forehead. She heard Elen’s voice, alternately scolding and soothing, and a man’s voice intoning something. Was it prayers or a magic charm? She tried to concentrate, but her mind slipped away and wandered again.

Two men in Aberhonddu had died of the plague and one of William’s clerks had succumbed, with suppurating boils beneath his armpits. She had visited him, holding a bunch of rue to her nose, and laid a gentle hand on his forehead, trying to ease his pain, before they realized what illness it was that had struck him down.

The summer was cursed. No rain had fallen. The harvest was failing. Heat shimmered and hung over the mountains like an oppressive cloud. Lord Rhys was dead. His sons still fought one another ceaselessly and Gruffydd was imprisoned now at Corfe. There was no news of Tilda, nor of the little son that Gerald had told them she had borne. No news…no news…

Desperately she called for her nurse, but Jeanne did not come, and Matilda could feel the tears wet on her cheek as the delirium swept her once more into darkness.

A cursed summer. A summer where William had quarreled with Trehearne Vaughan, her kind, scholarly friend, their neighbor at Hay, the man who had given her her Welsh bard, a kinsman of the Welsh princes. His face floated in and out of her dreams with William’s. William who never came. William, who kept away from the plague-bound castle and left her to her fate.

It was a long while later that she woke and, for a time, looked around. The pain in her head seemed to have eased for a moment and then she became conscious of the terrible burning in her groin. She groaned and closed her eyes. It had been dark beyond the unshuttered window, but the flickering light from the sconce by her bed seared her eyes; the room was pungent with burning herbs from a brazier. She tried to call out and tell them all to go away—to leave her, to save her children, her babies—but her tongue was swollen and dry in her mouth and no words came. One or two angry tears squeezed out between her swollen eyelids and she slid once more into a half-sleeping dream. When she awoke again her bed was wet with sweat and vomit and there seemed to be no one there to help her. “They have left me to die.” The whole of her left side pained her and there was an agonizing cutting pain beneath her arm now as well as on her side.

“Christ! Christ, be with me!” This time she managed a whisper, but at once someone was there, sponging her face. “Be brave, Mother dear. You will be well.” It was Margaret’s voice, shaking, pleading. “Please, Mother. You must get well.” The girl was bending over her, trying to ease away the foul pillow. Matilda heard herself scream as the girl jarred her body and she saw the terror in Margaret’s eyes. Then she saw nothing more.

When she next awoke it must have been dawn. The sconces had gone out and the brazier was cold. A pale light was beginning to filter through the unshuttered window opposite the bed, and she could hear the clear, joyful caroling of a thrush from the rowan tree outside in the bailey. She lay quite still, shivering beneath the damp covers, wondering where she was. The room smelled terrible. She tried to lick her lips, but her tongue was too dry. She could feel the sticky pus running down beneath her arm and shoulder. After closing her eyes, she drifted into an uneasy sleep. She did not know it yet, but her indomitable body had won the battle against the plague.

As soon as she was strong enough, she sat in the high arched window of her solar, looking down toward the town and out across the river to the mountains. It worried her that her legs were feeble and unsteady still, but it was pleasant to lose herself for a while in the broad view, resting from her study of the accounts and figures that she had had brought to her bedside. The people of Aberhonddu had suffered terribly from their losses in the plague and the poor harvest, and she knew that they and all her vast estates faced untold hardships, if not starvation, in the coming winter. With her hand pressed to her aching forehead she tried once again to calculate how the meager contents of the granaries within the castle and its farms could be made to stretch.

Her eye was caught suddenly by a flurry of activity near the Honddu Bridge and she sat forward with interest. A small group of horsemen seemed to be waiting there, stirring the dust on the roadway as their impatient animals pawed the ground. Then she saw for whom they were waiting. A party of men-at-arms were riding two by two up the track from the east. Before them, clearly recognizable under his banner, rode William, his surcoat emblazoned with the rising eagle, shimmering in the sun, the black horse on which he rode prancing slightly, resenting the firmly held rein.

The party on the bridge rode forward to meet him and for a moment the two groups of horsemen drew to a halt, facing each other in the dusty road.

Matilda passed her hands over her eyes again, sighing. Her sight had seemed weaker since her illness and all this peering into the glare gave her a headache. She thought at first the flashes of light catching her vision were from her own head but then, with a shock, she realized they came from the sunlight reflecting on drawn swords. She leaned forward suddenly, her heart thumping, and the accounts slid unheeded from her knees to the floor.

The smaller group of men were being beaten back toward the bridge and they seemed to be fighting for their lives. She tried to follow William, lost sight of him, then saw him again. He was determinedly fighting one man, the leader of the other group. Then suddenly it was all over. The man was disarmed. Matilda saw his sword fly, at William’s savage stroke, in a great arc, flashing in the sunlight as it fell into the undergrowth by the side of the road. The man was dragged from his horse and his hands bound behind him. Then the victors remounted and at a yell from William set off at the gallop toward the bridge. The man tried desperately to run with them, lost his balance and fell, to be dragged mercilessly behind the horses of his captors. Matilda watched, sickened, until they were out of sight at the gates of the township, and then she turned from the window. So William had come back.

Elen dressed her in her scarlet surcoat as she asked and then went down to find Dai, a shepherd who had come in from the hills to sell his flocks to the drovers and had stayed, working for a while, in the stables of the castle. Somehow it had become his self-appointed task to carry Matilda up and down the steep, winding stairs to her solar and out into the herb garden whenever she required, handling her with such gentleness and ease that she had grown dependent on him in her weakness, although she knew he pined for his hills and would long since have been gone but for her pleas that he stay.

“I will wait for Sir William in the great hall, Dai bach,” she said with a smile, and she was rewarded with a long slow grin as with a quiet “
Ie, fyng arglwyddes
” he bent over her.

But William did not come into the hall, although she waited for what seemed like an eternity. When she had almost given up, leaning with closed eyes against the narrow, high-backed carved chair by the hearth, she heard the clatter of hooves and the shouts of men in the bailey outside. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she pushed herself up from the chair to be standing when William appeared.

“
A hanging! There’s to be a hanging!
”

She heard the excited page call across the hall and saw him scamper out again into the sun. With a quick look over their shoulders in her direction the three men who had been sweeping out the old rushes cast aside their brooms and ran after the page, pushing each other in their haste to leap down the flight of steps outside the hall.

Matilda looked around for Dai but he had gone. The man she had seen must have been some felon William had encountered on his way from Hay and he was going to administer summary justice before bothering to come to greet her. She sighed, thinking of the poor scoundrel she had watched them drag away.

Slowly, with shaking steps, she made her way to the doorway and, clinging to the doorpost for support, looked out at the scene below her in the bailey. The open area between the walls of the keep and the outbuildings that clustered round the outer walls was full of men and horses. Her husband was the only man still mounted. She saw him at once, and near him a soldier on a ladder was easing a rope across a beam that jutted beyond the rough stones of the wall.

She could see no sign of the prisoner. William’s face shocked her. It was cruelly twisted, full of hatred and malice, and though he looked straight at her, she knew that he hadn’t seen her.

She glanced up, shuddering, at the serene sky and at the heavy fruit on the rowan tree growing in the bailey above the teeming, shouting men. The women of the castle had gathered together near the kitchens and gossiped quietly as they waited curiously, their eyes on the crowd of men. Matilda felt a touch on her arm. Margaret was standing behind her. “Come away, Mother. Don’t watch.”

Matilda shrugged her off. “I’ve seen hangings before, child. I was looking for your father.”

A sudden noise, half shout, half sigh, made her turn back to the scene below. They had thrust the prisoner up onto the back of a raw-boned horse and were leading him beneath the noose. His face was covered in mud and blood, but as she glanced at him compassionately, Matilda suddenly gave a gasp.

“It’s Trehearne Vaughan from Clyro! It’s Trehearne,” she cried desperately. “Dear God, is William out of his mind? We’ve got to stop him. Margaret, help me quickly!” She pushed forward, gripping her daughter’s arm.

“William, for Christ’s sake, stop!” she screamed. “Don’t do it! At least take time to decide—” But her cry was lost in the roar of the crowd as, with a thwack on its rump, the horse was sent careering across the cobbles, leaving Trehearne hanging from the beam. His legs kicked violently.

“Cut him down, for God’s sake!” she screamed again above the noise of the crowd. “Oh, God! Oh, God, stop it! Save him!” She never knew how she found the strength to cross the bailey, but at last she was by her husband. “William, you can’t know what you’re doing!” She grabbed at his bridle and his horse reared back, its eyes wild. “Cut him down, for the love of God.” She groped at him frantically, her eyes blinded with tears.

William glanced down at her for a moment unseeing, his face a twisted mask, then suddenly he seemed to realize she was there as she pulled desperately at his mantle. He smiled, and abruptly she stepped back in fear. “Cut him down. A good idea.” He forced his plunging horse toward the man and sliced through the rope with one stroke of his sword. Trehearne fell to the cobbles and lay there twitching, his face swollen and purple beneath the mask of drying blood.

Looking down at him for a moment, William, in the expectant hush around him, suddenly laughed. “I think we’ll have his head,” he said in a tone so quiet that Matilda scarcely heard it. He beckoned and two men-at-arms caught up the spasmodically jerking body and dragged it to the stone mounting block. There, at a nod from William, one of them struck off the man’s head with one blow from his heavy two-edged sword. A great sigh ran round the bailey, followed by a yell and wild cheering.

All around her men and horses had begun to move again, the spectacle over. There was work to be done. Ignoring the fallen trunk of the man and the bloodied head that lay on the cobbles where it had fallen, William reined back his terror-stricken horse and rode past Matilda to the steps of the great hall. Dismounting, he flung his rein to a squire and stamped up into the doorway without a backward glance.