Sleeper’s Castle

  She turned and looked back at the house. It had changed. The season had changed. It was raining hard now; Graham had gone. The table on the terrace was deserted, raindrops bouncing off its surface. Before going in he had tipped the chairs against it so the rain ran off their seats. It was the last time they had sat outside together.

  Running up the steps she put out her hand to the door. ‘Let me in, Graham,’ she called. But the door was locked. There was no Graham there.

  Rhona shivered as she walked down the passage towards the back of the house. It was a dull wet day and the building felt empty and cold and sad. Pushing open the door and switching on the lights she walked into the kitchen and stopped short. There was a figure outside on the terrace, peering in through the glass of the French doors. Miranda. She could see her clearly. With an exclamation of utter fury she turned and ran back into the hall. With only the smallest hesitation she picked up the phone in the living room and dialled 999.

  There was a clean wash of cold sunshine across the garden next morning as Andy walked into the kitchen and switched on the radio. There was no sign of Pepper but she filled his bowl with biscuits, rather hoping the familiar rattle would bring him bouncing in through the cat flap. There was still no sign so after a minute she put it on the floor anyway; he was probably celebrating the return of the sunshine and would come in later. She reached for the jar of muesli and was stooping to take the jug of milk out of the fridge when there was a knock at the back door.

  The policeman was tall and fair-haired and accepted a cup of tea with alacrity. ‘I just need to establish your whereabouts last night, Miss Dysart.’ Sitting at the kitchen table he smiled at her as he reached for his notebook.

  She stared at him, confused. ‘I was here. Why?’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  She frowned. ‘My mother was here until about four o’clock. She’d been spending the weekend with me. I saw her off down there in the lane.’ She had glanced down at the parking space when he arrived and seen the blue-and-yellow squares of the police car with the Welsh word Heddlu inscribed across the doors parked in the space where her mother’s Citroën had been.

  ‘And your mother could vouch for your presence here and the time she left?’

  ‘Yes, of course she could. Why? Is she all right? Oh my goodness, she hasn’t had an accident?’ Andy was suddenly frantic.

  ‘No. No. Nothing like that.’ He smiled at her reassuringly. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. It must be a case of mistaken identity. There has been a complaint that you were harassing someone in Surrey last night.’

  ‘Oh no. Not Rhona.’ Andy looked at him in despair. ‘Rhona Wilson? In Kew?’

  ‘So you do know the lady?’

  Andy sighed. ‘Oh yes, I know the lady. She’s the former wife of the man I lived with for ten years. She can’t forgive him, or me, for being happy together after she left him. She’s a vindictive bitch.’ She smiled at him apologetically. ‘Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said that. But really … No, I wasn’t harassing her last night. I was here. I can’t prove it, though; there wasn’t anyone else here to back me up.’

  ‘Your mother left at about four o’clock, you say?’

  Andy nodded.

  ‘Well, the complaint was made at six fifteen last night. So unless that car out there is a great deal faster than it looks …’ he looked up and gave her an apologetic grin, ‘I don’t see how you could have driven to Surrey in the time. Would your mother confirm the time she left?’

  Andy nodded again. ‘I’m sure she would. She’s very accurate about things like that.’

  ‘Perhaps you could give me her address and one of my colleagues can take a statement from her. Then we can put Mrs Wilson’s mind at rest. Have you any idea why she should think you were at her house yesterday evening?’

  Andy gave a groan. ‘If anyone was being harassed it was me. She drove me away after Graham died a couple of months ago. He left me the house in his will, but the will disappeared.’ She paused. ‘I can’t prove that either. She just upped and moved in. I decided it was better I leave the area, and I was lucky that Sue, the lady who owns this place, was going away and needed a house-sitter. So I quietly faded out of Rhona’s life. Or I thought I had.’

  He was staring at her, his elbows on the table, his yellow jacket crackling slightly as he lifted his mug to drink. ‘That’s Sue Macarthur? She’s gone to Australia?’

  Andy nodded. ‘You know her?’

  He smiled even more broadly. ‘Everyone knows everyone round here, you’ll find.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking how you knew where I was?’ Andy shivered. ‘Rhona was very unpleasant after Graham’s death. She rang me constantly and made life very unhappy for me. I was anxious she shouldn’t know where I was living after I came to Wales.’

  He flipped the page back on his notebook. ‘Mrs Wilson said a James Allardyce would know where you were. He was contacted and he gave your address to the constable in charge of the case.’

  ‘James,’ Andy whispered. One of the trusted few who had sworn not to tell Rhona where she was. ‘Will the police have told her I’m here?’

  He hesitated. ‘They will tell her that we have proved you couldn’t have been in her back garden. I will mention to my Surrey colleague that you want your whereabouts protected. I’m sure they would keep it confidential anyway.’

  ‘I hope so. James shouldn’t have told anyone where I was. I thought I was safe here.’

  ‘Mr Allardyce had no option but to tell the police,’ he replied reproachfully. ‘But I will make sure they understand the situation. They’re used to dealing with domestics.’

  Andy gave a small laugh. ‘A domestic? Is that what this is?’

  ‘Well, I admit it is unusual. And the fact remains, if it wasn’t you banging on her kitchen door, then who was?’ He glanced up at her again. ‘Perhaps she was dreaming.’

  His quick look had been casual, but she could see him trying to read her mind, double-check, form a judgement.

  He pushed away his mug, standing up at last. ‘Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you so early. I will report back and make sure they understand the situation. Obviously Mrs Wilson was mistaken. I’m sure we won’t have to bother you about this again.’

  Andy watched from the window as his car reversed out of the parking space and turned down the lane. She sighed and glanced at her watch.

  ‘James? You swore you wouldn’t tell anyone where I was!’ She was clutching her phone as she stared out of the window a few minutes later. The watery sunlight was throwing a pale wash of colour across the garden.

  ‘Oh God!’ she heard James’s voice so clearly he could have been in the room. ‘I am so sorry, Andy. The police came over late last night. They insisted on knowing where you were. I gather Rhona told them I knew you and would know how to get hold of you. What’s happened? They wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘She’s accused me of harassing her. A policeman has just been here to check on my whereabouts.’ Andy scowled. ‘I think Mum can give me an alibi. She’s been here for the weekend, and although she’d gone by the time Rhona thought she saw me, the policeman pointed out I couldn’t have driven from here to Kew in that time.’ She heaved a deep sigh. ‘I wish that woman would leave me alone, James. I hope to goodness the police don’t tell her where I am.’

  ‘I explained the situation to the chap who came here. I emphasised that she was paranoid and had threatened you,’ James said. ‘I am sorry, Andy. God, Graham would be so angry if he knew what was happening!’

  Andy nodded sadly. ‘Well, thanks for making it clear what the situation was. Hopefully that will be the end of it. Come and see me, James. Bring Hilary.’

  ‘We might well do that, Andy.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘I’m due some holiday, so perhaps we can work something out. And if we come, I promise we will drive round in circles to make sure we’re not followed.’

  She stood for a while, continuing to stare out of the
window after they had ended the conversation. She should have known that James would not have given her whereabouts away willingly. He and his wife Hilary were the most trustworthy people she knew and she missed them dreadfully, she realised, as she missed so much of her previous life. She sighed with a rueful smile. So, who had been looking into Rhona’s window last night? She thought back to her solitary daydream. Had Rhona been right? Was it her? She remembered the last time she had thought about the garden; Rhona’s angry shout, her pointed finger. She shivered. If Rhona could see her back there in Kew, could she also somehow see Andy here, where she was now, in Wales?

  She looked round thoughtfully. This was a house of dreams. For generations it had had the reputation for being a magical place where Druids and poets dreamed of the future. Did it have the power to make dreams of the past real as well?

  Slowly, carefully, Dafydd, Catrin and Edmund wound their way northwards from house to house and castle to castle, following ancient trackways and drove roads, newer cart tracks and roads. Over mountains and along river valleys they made their way from Presteigne to Bryn y Castell, near Knighton and on towards Newtown, then spent a week at the great castle at Welshpool. By the end of July they were at Oswestry then Chirk. After a discussion they decided to avoid Wrexham, where on their previous trip Dafydd had encountered the town’s resident bard who had vociferously resented their arrival. Instead they turned west towards Llangollen, where in past years they had found a far more favourable reception in the houses of one or two richer merchants and in a farmhouse on the hillside. From there they planned to travel south across the Berwyn Mountains towards Sycharth, the home of Dafydd’s most generous patron, the Lord of Glyndŵr. From there they would continue south, heading back towards home.

  It had been a good summer. On the whole Catrin had enjoyed herself. Her father’s health had improved with good food and the stimulating company. He had blossomed and put on weight. They had visited old friends, made new ones and earned good payment; buried in the panniers on the pack mule was enough in gifts and coin to keep them over the following winter. Only their outward appearance of poverty and Edmund’s trusty sword kept them safe from being robbed, but this year they had been lucky and seen little of footpads and thieves, and those they had witnessed had been but shadows in the distance, on their way to accost other more wealthy-looking travellers.

  But the time had come to think of home. It was imperative they reach the end of the journey before the weather broke and the roads became impassable. Besides, Catrin was finding it increasingly difficult to hide her dislike of Edmund from her father.

  It had started with a disagreement over the places they were to visit. They were sitting beneath the shade of a copse of trees, resting the horses, and Dafydd was dozing, his back against the trunk of an ancient rowan.

  ‘You must wake him.’ Edmund had led each of the horses in turn down to a mountain brook and allowed them to drink. He had grown impatient, his eye on the horizon and the huge clouds piling up in the west. ‘There is a storm coming and it would be nice to be safely under cover before it breaks.’

  Catrin stretched lazily. ‘Not yet. Let him sleep. He so seldom manages to find rest.’

  ‘He is always resting!’ Edmund snapped. ‘You wear yourself out running after him and he sits and allows you to wait on him hand and foot. You earn as much as him; you are as good a poet as him. Give yourself a little leeway for once.’

  She scrambled to her feet. ‘Don’t you dare talk about him like that!’

  ‘Why not? It’s the truth. And you will be the first to worry and fret if he gets wet in the storm. Then it will all be “Hurry, Edmund, Tad mustn’t get soaked. Hurry, Edmund, Tad is shivering, we must find him shelter!”’ His voice slid into a falsetto parody of hers.

  ‘He’s right, Cat.’ Their raised voices had awoken Dafydd. He stretched and with a groan dragged himself to his feet. ‘I do not like getting soaked and that storm is obviously coming this way.’

  ‘I just wanted to allow you a few more moments of sleep,’ Catrin retorted.

  ‘And then you wake me with your shrieking,’ Dafydd grumbled. ‘Get the horses saddled, Edmund, and let’s be on our way.’

  He stamped away from them and stood gazing out across the waving grasses of the sunlit moorland towards the mountains, where already they could see the occasional flash of lightning against the black of the western sky.

  Catrin turned on Edmund furiously. ‘Now you’ve upset him!’ she snapped.

  ‘I’ve done nothing of the sort. He can see that storm as easily as I can. I’m amazed you don’t seem to understand it’s coming this way. You will be soaked too. Your cloak will be sodden. Your belongings in those bundles will be drenched as much as your father’s, and we will arrive looking like drowned rats!’ He turned away and reached for one of the saddles, humping it onto Dafydd’s horse. ‘What if your father’s books and scrolls get wet again?’ he called over his shoulder as he reached under the horse’s belly for the girth. ‘And your harp. It won’t be my fault if they are ruined one of these days!’

  ‘It will be your fault. It’s your job to pack them properly and look after us!’ she cried. She began to stuff all her own things into her saddlebag and turned to pick up her cloak. She had been sitting on it and it was creased and grass-stained. She shook it angrily. Edmund left Dafydd’s cob and turned to her pony. He lifted her saddle with ease, cinched it into place and then took the cloak out of her hands. ‘I’ll roll this for you and you can carry it in front of you. You will need it when it rains.’ His face was set with anger.

  Her fury flared to meet his. Without giving herself time to think, she stepped away from him and turned to face the storm. A gust of wind caught her skirt and pulled it out behind her as she raised her right hand and whispered the words of command that would chase the storm away. Silently she breathed a thank you to Efa and knew that the woman would hear. It was ancient magic and powerful, invoking the gods of thunder. As she watched she saw the lightning slice across the horizon, a vicious spark, resentful of her command, but the next flash was further away. Turning back, she smiled.

  Edmund had seen her. She saw the shock on his face. Weather magic was witchcraft.

  She glared at him defiantly.

  He said nothing.

  It took only minutes to put the three of them on the road once more, the two riders following Edmund as he led the mule down the steep track. Catrin did not glance over her shoulder towards the retreating storm. Somehow it seemed important not to acknowledge its existence.

  Andy hadn’t wanted to wake up. She had lain still, her eyes tight shut, grasping for the dream, but it had gone. With a sigh she went downstairs into the living room, and stood there looking at her piles of books. Her head was resonating with the story. So was it the house itself which was the custodian of Catrin’s narrative? And perhaps Rhona’s as well. If so, how? The idea was too exciting to ignore. House as an echo chamber. House as receiver of messages. House as medium for contact, not only with the past, but with parallel present existences.

  Sitting cross-legged on the rug on the floor in front of her book collection, Andy began to shuffle through them, pausing every now and then to greet an old favourite, sorting them into different categories, discarding a few as not relevant to her present sphere of interest, piling others closer to read again soon. She had forgotten so much of this stuff, the fascination of combining serious scientific theory with the completely subjective nature of the actual experience.

  What she needed was a couple of notebooks to start writing down the experiences so as not to lose the freshness of describing the moment. Even the best scientist must find it hard sometimes to resist the urge to improve on an account of things that had come up in the course of an experiment. She wanted to keep her record accurate.

  She sat back at last, pushed her hair out of her eyes, then scrambled to her feet. Scooping up an armful of books, she carried them back to the kitchen and stacked them on the table. Sh
e was tempted to go down to Hay now, to buy a notebook. She eyed her car keys, lying on the dresser.

  But she was desperate to go back and see what happened to Catrin and Edmund. They were so real in her head. That spark of anger between them had been so spontaneous, his shock as she murmured that spell to divert the thunderstorm so obvious she couldn’t bear to leave them like that, on the road in the middle of nowhere. Where were they going? What happened next? She had to find out and maybe she had had a long enough break to be able to go back to sleep?

  But, did she have to be asleep? Could she just retreat into some sort of meditative state as she did when she visited Kew? This was what her books could tell her. Or her father. It was the sort of thing he would probably know. She reached for the phone.

  ‘How are you, pet?’ Her father’s second wife, Sandy, was a lovely Northumbrian woman who had taken Andy to her heart. ‘When are you going to come and see us?’

  Her father it appeared was away at a conference. Sandy promised to make sure he rang as soon as he got back. They chatted for a while and Andy found herself immersed in news of her half-brothers’ school exploits, the adventures of their two border terriers and Sandy’s mother’s operation. When at last she laid down the phone she stared at it sadly, astonished at how lost and lonely she felt.

  She sighed. They were far away and part of another life and Catrin was here, waiting for her. Without her father’s help it was up to her to work out a way of travelling back to that thundery Welsh mountain.

  Aware that Pepper was sitting on the windowsill watching her with apparent interest, his paws tucked sleepily into his chest, she sat down and closed her eyes.

  And found herself in the kitchen of her old home. The room was tidy, the only sign of occupation a carefully rinsed mug upside down in the draining rack beside the sink. She stared at it with a painful pang of nostalgia. It was a mug Graham had bought for her when they visited Chartres Cathedral together. It was decorated with the pellucid blues and reds of the beautiful medieval windows.