Sleeper’s Castle

  It took her a moment to realise that Pepper was there on his chair. He had been curled up asleep when she switched on the light. Now awake, he watched her calmly, clearly wondering what she was doing in his kitchen in the middle of the night. He might not be a dog, but he would have let her know if there was something dangerous outside. He would have fled.

  With an exclamation of impatience she turned the key and pulled open the back door. The impenetrable darkness of the garden was full of noise, the rush of wind, the roar of water, the sound of rain on the flagstones. She stood on the doorstep, shivering in the cold night air, then she stepped back inside and closed the door, turning the key firmly in the lock.

  Upstairs once more she sat down on the edge of her bed with a sigh, realising there was no way she would go back to sleep now. Reaching for her notebook, she began to write down everything she remembered about the dream. Half an hour later she was asleep, the notebook lying on her chest, the pen fallen on the floor. Outside in the garden the storm began to subside.

  Waking slowly to the sound of a blackbird whistling mournfully outside her window, Andy lay still for several minutes in total confusion. She had dreamed again. After waiting so long, she had dreamed of Catrin’s return home and she had dreamed of a battle. With a groan she turned over and jumped at the thump as her notebook fell off her bed and hit the floor. She reached over and picked it up. Had she written anything in it? There were several pages of scrawl. Once again part of it was illegible, but some was clear enough to read.

  Andy read to the end of her notes and closed the book. She lay for a while staring up at the ceiling then wearily climbed out of bed. After her shower she felt marginally better; at least enough to pick up the phone to call Sian.

  They met for lunch in the Blue Boar, choosing a table by the window in the corner near the fire.

  ‘So have you dreamed about Glyndŵr again?’ Sian had collected two menus and passed one to Andy.

  Andy nodded. ‘It was amazing. So real. I saw their homecoming, and then the scene switched to a battle. That was weird, because I think it was Catrin’s dream. A dream within a dream. When I woke up I wrote it down, or as much as I could remember. It was pretty scrappy and incoherent. I don’t remember waking up at all, but I must have. I obviously turned on the light, and I picked up the pencil and my notebook, but then I fell asleep again while I was doing it.’

  ‘And you’re still not afraid?’

  ‘No. If the dreams get more warlike, I might be. There was a lot of screaming and blood and cannons and swords and flying arrows.’ She paused. Without realising it, her eyes had filled with tears.

  Sian pushed back her chair. ‘I’m going to get us both a glass of wine.’

  It was ten minutes before she came back after queuing at the bar and by then Andy had recovered. ‘Sorry. Not like me to be such a wimp.’

  ‘It was obviously very real.’

  ‘It was real, I’m sure of it. I think it really happened.’

  ‘And Catrin witnessed it?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was a kind of seer, like her father. A prophetess. Perhaps she saw it before it happened.’

  ‘You know what they called Glyndŵr? Mab Darogan. That means the son of the prophets.’

  Andy was sniffing into a tissue. ‘Sounds a bit Islamic.’

  Sian laughed. ‘In the Middle Ages it meant his arrival was foretold by people who saw the future; seers. I think we’re talking Celtic prophets rather than Old Testament, although I might be wrong. Like King Arthur, he was to be the saviour of the country. He stepped up to the plate when he was needed most. The Welsh were downtrodden and bullied by the English. The English didn’t make good neighbours, did they. Look at the way the Scots feel to this day. There you go. Henry was fighting the Scots the whole time he wasn’t fighting the Welsh. Or the French,’ she added.

  ‘You know your history.’

  ‘I know my Shakespeare. Didn’t you ever read Henry IV Part 1 and 2?’

  Andy smiled. ‘Alas. There you have the better of me. I’m not a literary scholar.’

  ‘Never mind. You have other strengths.’ Sian flapped the menu under her nose. ‘But you won’t have if you don’t eat. You will fade away. Choose something and I’ll go and order.’

  Later, over coffee, they returned to the subject of Glyndŵr.

  ‘Are you in danger of becoming obsessed by all this?’ Sian was holding her cup in both hands, staring at Andy across the table.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And that’s OK?’

  ‘I think so. After all, I’m not really there, am I? I’m not going to get shot by an arrow or anything—’

  She broke off, her gaze falling on her hand. It was still red and peeling from Rhona’s fire.

  Sian followed her gaze. ‘Exactly.’

  Andy bit her lip. ‘What happened with Rhona is different from Catrin’s story.’

  In Catrin’s past she was safe; an observer, a traveller from a distant land. Where did that quote come from? So, she had remembered something from her school English lessons.

  ‘It is exciting, Sian. When I came up here I was a miserable, lonely wreck, unable to see any way forward. Now …’ she looked out through the window, trying to arrange her thoughts. ‘Graham was a bit of a Luddite really. And single-minded. I see it now. I abandoned my interests for him, but not any more. I’ve let myself get involved again. These dreams are reawakening the real me!’

  ‘Wow.’ Sian smiled. ‘Then Meryn is the man for you. I do hope he returns soon.’

  ‘And we won’t mention any of this to anyone else,’ Andy went on. ‘The last thing I want is crowds of people coming and sitting on the lawn cross-legged, communing with the spirits of ancient Wales.’

  Sian laughed. She drew an imaginary zip across her mouth. ‘My lips are sealed. I promise.’ She reached for her jacket. ‘I must go. The dogs need walking. Keep me posted, won’t you. And, Andy, take care. Don’t get sucked in too far.’

  When Rhona arrived downstairs for breakfast the next morning she found her fellow guests had already eaten and gone off to pursue their various projects. Blaming her late start on her long drive the day before, she ate breakfast quickly, grabbed her coat and camera and headed for her car.

  She had had a sleepless night, much of it spent thinking about Sleeper’s Castle. She had only caught a quick glimpse of the place, but it had gripped her imagination in a way she couldn’t quite understand. She did not like country houses or cottages; she didn’t like the countryside. She especially didn’t like wild places with mountains, and yet here she was thinking obsessively about the place Miranda had chosen to hide herself away after nothing more than a brief glance in passing as the sun went down.

  The night before when she had driven up past Sleeper’s Castle onto the open hillside she had been swallowed in mist and darkness and managed to get herself thoroughly lost. The satnav refused to function and the place had had an eerie, lonely feel; all she had wanted to do was to obey the wretched machine and turn round and go back. It had been a relief when she had seen a signpost, crookedly standing alone at a crossroads, pointing back to Hay down another unfenced track in the sheep-cropped grass. It had been a long time before she had found her way back to the B & B.

  She sat in the car trying to decide what to do. Part of her desperately wanted to return to Sleeper’s Castle but she knew she must resist. She knew it was the right place, she had seen Miranda’s car, and she had the advantage. Miranda didn’t know she was here and she meant to keep it that way. For now. It seemed obvious to drive down to Hay, but if she did that there was always the risk of running into Andy, something she had no intention of doing until she had fully formulated her plans.

  In the end she drove to Brecon, sixteen or so miles away, found a large car park in the middle of town and headed into the tourist centre where she bought several guidebooks and carried them triumphantly to the nearest coffee shop so that she could sit in comfort and formulate her cover story.
br />   Photography was a given. She loved it and had almost been a professional in her younger days. When she and Graham were first married she had taken the photos to illustrate his books, before he and his publisher had decided that watercolours were more sensitive and crowd-pleasing – another factor in her list of grudges against Miranda.

  She skipped through her new guidebooks. This was obviously a very photogenic part of the world. She had never been to Wales before and in spite of all her preconceived notions about the place it was beginning to appeal to her. Quite apart from the weirdest foreign language she had ever come across in a lifetime of travel, blazoned unpronounceably across all the road signs, the town was charming, the views were spectacular and it had stunningly beautiful cloudscapes. To her surprise her fingers were itching for her camera before she had even finished her cinnamon Danish and coffee. Here the Brecon Beacons were the local mountains, but the mountains she was interested in because they cradled Sleeper’s Castle, were the Black Mountains. The Beacons were pointed and wild and looked pretty threatening; the Black Mountains were rounded, many of them with flat plateaued tops that looked more gentle. Deceptively so, according to her books. Those were the ones she had to get to know.

  She would avoid Sleeper’s Castle today and instead use the time to get her bearings and take a few photos so that, should anyone ask this evening or tomorrow at breakfast, she would have something to show them. So, she needed to find some yew trees.

  Bryn was working near the house when Andy returned from lunch. He had pruned back a bed of herbs, piling the prunings into the wheelbarrow. She walked up to him before he had the chance to move away round the back somewhere and looked at the barrow, puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t you be drying all those herbs?’

  He studied the contents of his barrow. ‘Sue isn’t here to use them. She told me to compost it all. It will make a fabulous rich mixture to go back into the soil for next year.’

  She remembered what she had been going to ask him. ‘Do you know anything about the history of this place, Bryn?’

  ‘I’m not really one for history.’

  ‘Aren’t you a local man?’

  ‘I suppose I am, yes.’ He sounded doubtful.

  She glanced up at his face. It was tanned and laced with fine wrinkles around the eyes beneath his thatch of wild brown hair and it was hard to guess how old he was. Early to mid forties perhaps. The tattoo on his arm, she could now see, was a small celtic knot.

  ‘So, your family has lived round here for generations.’ It was not a question and he didn’t take it as such. He merely nodded. ‘Up in the Golden Valley. Near enough.’

  He was a good-looking man but when, as now, he was in surly mode he looked nothing but grim and discouraging. He turned back to the barrow. ‘Was there anything else?’

  She tried a smile. ‘Am I asking too many questions?’

  He looked taken aback. ‘My life isn’t really very interesting, Ms Dysart.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’ She was careful to keep innuendo out of her voice. She paused, then she went on: ‘Please call me Andy.’ She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile, ‘I was hoping you would be a repository of ancient stories and legends about this valley and Sleeper’s Castle. Everyone seems to have a different take on the place, and as you’ve been here a long time, I thought you might know more than they do. You have been here a long time?’

  He gave a reluctant nod.

  ‘Since before Sue bought it?’

  He hesitated. ‘I knew it before, but I didn’t work here then.’

  Wow! He had volunteered some information! She tried to keep the note of triumph out of her voice. ‘So, you knew the old man who lived here before.’

  ‘I didn’t know him. No one really knew him.’

  ‘He was something of a wizard I’ve been told.’

  ‘Then you’ve been told wrong. He was a plantsman. A loner perhaps, but he was kind and very knowledgeable. I used to come here sometimes on my bike and he would tell me the names of the plants and what they were used for. He befriended a lonely small boy when I came to stay with my uncle in Hay.’

  Andy went on eyeing him surreptitiously. She felt he had not intended to say so much.

  She thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps you can tell me something. We’re so near the border here I’m finding it hard to work out who is English and who is Welsh. Some you can tell easily by their accents and their names, but others are more enigmatic about it.’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘Not enigmatic. Careful.’

  ‘Careful? Not wanting to admit anything?’

  ‘We have a long tradition of that round here. The March has been a place of conflict and mystery for centuries. Forever perhaps. We are Marcher people.’

  ‘And the March is a liminal place,’ she said almost to herself. ‘A border, between one thing and the other. Like a river or the edge of the sea. A place where magic happens, where people disappear and wizards and prophets and poets feel at home.’ She gave a small embarrassed smile. It was her turn to give too much away and he was going to think she was crackers.

  But he didn’t seem to think her words odd. After a moment he inclined his head gravely.

  ‘Do you think that’s why Hay became a town of books? It attracts people who like to live on the edge of things.’

  He laughed out loud. ‘It does that all right!’

  ‘No, you know what I mean. People who are thinkers and dreamers; people who paint and write; musicians and poets and people who imagine things.’

  ‘And which are you, Andy?’ He held her gaze.

  ‘I’m a painter.’ She did not flinch at his direct stare.

  ‘And a dreamer?’ He took a firm grip on his shears and stepped away from her. ‘If you live in this house, I think you have to be a dreamer.’

  With that he turned away. She didn’t try to stop him.

  She walked back towards the kitchen. If she was a painter and a dreamer, what was he? A plantsman, obviously, and a thinker; an educated man, at a guess; and what else? Why had he chosen such an isolated way of life? Did he have a wife, a family? Did he live on his own? Perhaps he lived in the middle of Hay? Somehow she doubted it. It was more likely that he lived in a remote cottage somewhere. He had answered a few of her questions but then created more in their place. If anyone was an enigma it was her gardener, and he had not answered her first question about the history of Sleeper’s Castle.

  She didn’t dream that night. Lying tossing and turning in her bed she tried to go to sleep, then she read a bit, from another volume, this time on the general history of Wales, then she climbed out of bed and walked around the room. She went downstairs and boiled the kettle to make herself a cup of tea, then she slipped on her coat and went outside to stand on the steps at the front of the house to look across the dark valley while she drank it. The night was still and silent apart from the sound of the brook falling over the rocks at the side of the house. There was a slight movement in the dark behind her and she heard a small chirrup. Pepper materialised out of the shadows and wound himself round her ankles. She bent and scratched him behind the ears. ‘It’s a beautiful night, fella,’ she said softly, unconsciously adopting Bryn’s name for him. She could see a light in the distance now. It was obviously a car, moving slowly on the far side of the valley, appearing and disappearing as the road wound across the faraway hills. It was strange how lonely the sight made her feel. She shivered, cupping her hands around her mug of tea. Pepper had vanished as quietly as he had come and once more she was alone with her thoughts.

  Had Catrin stood here on this very doorstep all those years ago? The doorstep was made of local stone and it had been worn away into a smooth dip in the middle where countless men and women had walked over it through the centuries. Everywhere she went she could picture the place as it had been in Catrin’s day. The new bits hadn’t been there, of course, and the inside of the house had changed considerably, but the walls were the same, the window in her bedroom was more or le
ss the same, the door to the side parlour – the room which had been Dafydd’s study – was the same door. Their footsteps echoed through the building. Their voices were part of the house’s fabric, theirs and generations of others after them.

  The distant car had gone now. The lights had either been turned off or the road had disappeared down into the valley. The absence left her feeling bereft. Somewhere near at hand an owl hooted softly and a second owl further away answered with a quick double call which seemed to echo in the wood on the far side of the brook. She pulled her coat more tightly round her. A whisper of cold had crossed the garden. Soon winter would be here. As if in answer to the thought the patter of dead leaves blowing across the paving slabs made her shiver again.

  Joan heard the news first. The king had arrived in Shrewsbury with a huge army. He then moved west to sack Bangor and headed on towards Harlech. Catrin was writing in her chamber upstairs when she heard Joan calling. She had returned from a visit to Efa via a farm at the edge of the mountain, and heard that the countryside alive with gossip. ‘The English army won’t be coming here,’ Joan said as she sat down on Catrin’s bed. ‘They are all staying far in the north.’ She gave a huge sigh. ‘It’s dreadful! To think of all that fighting! A whole army here in Wales! But Glyndŵr is defeated again. Once more he has fled.’

  Catrin looked down at the page before her. Sitting at her little desk by the window she had been writing a poem about the autumn colours in the trees and the reflections of the sunlight on the brook as it flowed down over the rocks. It was her favourite subject. With a sigh she put down her pen. ‘How did they get the news?’

  ‘A pedlar who had been up north. He was in Welshpool when the king reached Shrewsbury. He had been planning to go there himself, but he changed his mind. He doesn’t like soldiers. They are too quick to sample his wares and then forget to pay.’ Joan bit her lip. ‘Oh my, it’s frightening.’ Her eyes were huge and she kept clutching at her bosom.

  Catrin managed a smile. ‘As you say, I don’t think they are likely to bother with us. We are far from the main roads. Even the drovers don’t come down our valley. And it sounds as though it is all over.’