Andy was too tired to argue. She hobbled into Sian’s house with the help of a couple of thumb sticks from the umbrella stand in the hall, then fell into bed. She didn’t even wake up when Sian removed her shoes and tucked her under the duvet.
Andy woke abruptly, half sat up in the bed and fell back as the pain in her shoulder hit her. She lay still, disorientated, trying to work out why she was in Sian’s spare room. Her nails were torn and broken, her palms grazed and raw, her wrist lacerated. Someone had cleaned her wounds; she could see traces of something sticky round her fingernails. She sniffed at it. Herbal. Slowly it was coming back to her. Her feet were bare. She waggled them and nearly fainted with the rocket of pain that shot up her left leg. Not so lucky then.
The door opened and Sian’s head appeared. ‘Ah, you’re awake. How are you feeling?’
It was over an hour before she was able to sit down at Sian’s breakfast table, showered, hair washed free of grass and leaves, wearing borrowed clothes. By then she had remembered most of what had happened.
Sian put down a glass beside her plate. ‘Painkiller.’ She smiled. ‘One of Sue’s tinctures. Meryn has prescribed it four times a day. Willow and comfrey and St John’s Wort and lots of other mysterious ingredients which will have you cured and back to robust health in no time at all. He gave you a pretty hefty dose of it last night. You slept like a log.’
By midday Sian was driving her back to Sleeper’s Castle. It was only as they were parking that Andy remembered Pepper again.
Sian laughed. ‘Don’t you worry. He’s been attended to. I’m sure he will complain, but as I told you I fed him myself last night.’
It took a lot of effort for Andy to haul herself up the steep steps to the front door, and through to the kitchen. There she collapsed on a chair. Pepper, as predicted, had a lot to say about people who stayed out all night. Even when he was finally mollified by a few extra special treats in his bowl he sat on the corner of the dresser and glared at the two women.
‘He’s not going to let me forget my betrayal.’ Andy stretched her ankle out in front of her with a groan.
‘Spoiled brat of a cat.’ Sian ruffled his ears. ‘I rang Meryn before we left and told him you refused to rest and that you wanted to come home. He’ll be over soon.’ She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘He wants to check your ankle.’
‘I hope he doesn’t expect me to go to a doctor.’ Andy bent and rubbed it ruefully.
‘No, he won’t expect that. Unless he thinks you’ve broken something.’
‘I haven’t. It’s a bad sprain, that’s all.’
A diagnosis which Meryn confirmed half an hour later as he was re-wrapping the bandage round her ankle. Andy studied him carefully as he worked. He had sensitive, artistic hands, like Graham, with long strong fingers, and he conveyed an air of calm confidence. She found she was smiling. ‘I’ve heard your reputation. I think even if it was broken the bones would knit immediately if you told them to,’ she commented in amusement.
He laughed. ‘It has been known.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. The healing comes from within you. I just add a bit of ointment and a bit of confidence.’
‘And some pizzazz!’ Sian added.
‘If you like.’ He glanced up at her. ‘So, Andy. Have you worked out any more about what happened?’
Andy shook her head. ‘It’s all a bit blurry. I don’t really remember Rhona being there. If I said she was, I suppose she was, but I might have imagined it.’ She screwed up her eyes, trying to picture the woman out there on the hillside.
‘If she’s a tall rangy woman with bright red hair and a cream jacket, she was seen by others,’ he said. He was packing his pots of ointment and spare bandages back into the canvas bag that he had brought with him.
‘Really?’ Andy paled. ‘Did they see her push me? Where did she go?’
‘She was a figure on the horizon. I’m sorry. But she was there.’
‘She threw my phone into the spring,’ Andy said. ‘That would prove that there was someone else there. But I suppose it has gone for good now.’
‘I’m afraid it will have.’ Sian stood up. ‘Was it insured? We’ll have to get you fixed up with a new one. I’m sorry. I’m going to have to leave. There’s somewhere I have to be. Would you like me to come and collect you this evening, Andy? I don’t think you should be on your own until you’re feeling better. And until we know what that woman is up to. Whatever she did or didn’t do, she’s not someone I like to think of wandering around here. I know Megan said she was leaving but I don’t think I believe it.’
Andy sat back in the chair and stretched out her foot, waggling it experimentally. ‘Thank you, but don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I would rather be here. I’ll lock myself in, I promise.’
Sian didn’t stay to argue the point, but Andy saw the look of worried concern she threw Meryn on her way out.
Meryn didn’t move. They listened to Sian’s footsteps as she walked through the hall to the front door and they heard it bang behind her. Minutes later the sound of her car engine faded away as she drove off down the lane.
‘You and I need to discuss a few things, I think,’ Meryn said. He leaned back in his chair.
Andy nodded, feeling inexplicably nervous. ‘Sian told you she brought me up to your house to see if we could find you.’
‘And then you came again on your own.’
She felt her cheeks colour with embarrassment. ‘How did you know?’
‘I set wards when I leave the house for any length of time. You know what that means?’
She nodded again slowly. ‘Magic guardians? I’ve read about them.’
‘They alerted me to your presence. I think they chased you away, for which I apologise. You have no need to be embarrassed about coming. You needed my help. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to give it.’
‘I needed your help because of my dreams. I’ve been dreaming since I came to live here.’
‘And you want to stop?’
‘No!’ she almost shouted the word. ‘No, I don’t want to stop,’ she repeated more calmly. ‘I want to know what happens. I want to be a part of Catrin’s life – Catrin is the woman I keep dreaming about.’ She broke off, realising what she had said. ‘I’m not sure if it’s safe,’ she added. She felt instinctively that this was a man she could trust. ‘It isn’t only Catrin I dream about. There’s something else. It’s the reason Rhona wants to harm me. It’s my fault: I started it.’
He listened without interruption as she told him of her daydreams about Kew. Once she had started talking, she found she couldn’t stop.
‘You see, I think she was telling the truth when she accused me of stalking her. I didn’t intend to do it. I only wanted to go back to where I had been so happy with Graham.’
‘And have you been back to Kew in your dreams since Rhona came here?’
‘Once. The house was empty.’
He stood up and walked towards the window, gazing out for a while, deep in thought.
Andy watched him in silence.
‘Who taught you to do this?’ he asked at last.
‘My dad, I suppose.’
‘And he never taught you any safeguards?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure he did it deliberately. We just loved all the same things. History. Old buildings. Spooky stories. I found it easy to travel inside my head. I thought all children did it.’
‘A lot of children do,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the restraints that adults feel. They don’t need things to be logical. The sad part is that the ability is destroyed so easily, so to keep it into adulthood is rare. That’s why people who can see ghosts or travel as you have done in the present, or experience the past or the future, are so often feared or ridiculed. They can’t be taken seriously because to do so would mean admitting that such things exist, so they learn to keep quiet.’
He turned and leant with his back against the sink, arms folded. ‘Some of the most intelligent scientists in the
world are believers, you know, and they’re on the way to finding out how all this works. I sometimes think it’s only when they have succeeded in manufacturing computers and robots with extra-sensory powers that they will acknowledge that humans have had that facility as long as humans have existed. And not only humans, of course. It’s common in the animal world because animals aren’t tortured by existential philosophies. They can’t describe what they see and feel in words, but they can convey to us something of what is going on. We’re the ones who are slow to understand.’
As if on cue, the cat flap rattled and Pepper appeared. He walked across to Meryn without hesitation and rubbed against his legs. Meryn squatted down and picked him up. Pepper seemed delighted.
‘By the time I came to live here, I’d convinced myself that all this stuff was rubbish,’ Andy went on. ‘That I’d imagined it to please my dad.’
‘And now you know it isn’t rubbish at all. Well, now that we’ve established that you have a very powerful, if somewhat unpredictable, talent, what do we do about it?’ Meryn held the cat up against his shoulder and rubbed his back like a baby. Andy could hear Pepper purring from where she was sitting. ‘I will rephrase that. What do you want to do about it?’
‘I want to control it. Somehow I was burned on Rhona’s bonfire when she was destroying my letters from Graham.’ She held out her hand. ‘I tried to snatch one out of the flames. I don’t think I want things to get that real.’
Meryn scratched Pepper behind the ear. ‘It’s interesting that Rhona can apparently see you as clearly as you see her,’ he said.
Andy nodded. She said nothing.
‘So we must assume she has a certain facility herself.’
She thought about it. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’ She looked doubtful. ‘If she has, I don’t think she would have told Graham. He hated anything to do with the supernatural. That was why I never told him about the things I felt and saw. I tried to stop it happening. I pretended it was my imagination. I left all my books with my mother, so he never saw them.’
‘You put great value on your books, but you don’t need books to tell you anything about all this,’ Meryn said gently. ‘So, while you were with your partner you tried to stop it happening. Did that work?’
‘I found I could ignore things.’
‘But they went on happening.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Dreams?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘What you call daydreams?’
She nodded.
‘Visions. In trance.’
She stared at him, horrified. ‘No. No, nothing like that. That sounds creepy. They’re just daydreams.’
‘All right. Daydreams. And you induce these deliberately?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do.’ She thought for a minute, trying to find the right words. In the event they were simple. ‘I shut my eyes and picture myself there.’
‘And when you are asleep?’
‘Ah, that’s completely different. That’s the problem. I don’t seem to be able to go there because I want to. I know what I want to see; to hear. I know where we were in the story, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it skips huge bits of information – as if years have gone by. At first I thought events followed on logically, but they don’t. And the dream bleeds through into when I’m awake, but not in the same way as the daydreams. I sometimes think Catrin is here in the house. She’s left the dream and walked in through the door. Sometimes she’s there, over there,’ she waved her hand at the kitchen door. ‘Watching me. Our eyes meet. She’s as real as you or me. And Pepper can see her.’
He smiled, running his hand up and down the cat’s back. Pepper squirmed with pleasure. ‘Pepper is very psychic. More so even than the average cat, and the average cat is always psychic.’
‘So does that confirm whether Catrin is real or not?’
‘She is real to you both.’
Andy shook her head. ‘No. Those are weasel words. I need to know. Is she a ghost?’
‘You and Pepper can see Catrin. And Catrin can see you. That’s enough. That is all you need to know.’
‘How do I find out if she really existed?’
‘You want to read about her in books?’ He smiled tolerantly. ‘Andy, that may not happen. She may not be an important person in history. She may not even be a footnote. But for you, here, she really existed. Her story is her story.’
She exhaled crossly. ‘I want to know if she was a historical character. Did her father really live in this house? Was Edmund real?’
‘Edmund?’
‘One of the sons of a farmer in the next village. Catrin has fallen in love with him.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, not ah!’ She was becoming cross, but then she realised that he was laughing.
‘Period? Do you know when she lived?’
‘Glyndŵr.’
‘And have you read the history of the period? Do you know if the things that happened to her and her father really happened? That surely is easy to check.’
‘I bought some books about him,’ she admitted.
‘And have you read them?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there is no mention of Catrin?’
‘No.’
‘The history fits though?’
‘I think so.’
‘But you’re not happy?’
She shook her head. ‘I wanted some sort of proof that Catrin existed.’ She held his gaze defiantly. ‘I couldn’t bear it if she wasn’t real.’
18
It was still winter when the comet came, a streak of red fire, low in the north, trailing its tail across the sky. Dafydd spotted it first, standing in the garden, staring out across the Wye Valley towards the bare hills of the Radnor Forest. His eyes were wild with excitement. ‘Catrin, come here!’ he shouted.
Grabbing her cloak, Catrin ran out into the dark. Snowdrops were everywhere and in the dingle and the valleys snow still lay thick on the ground, but here in the garden the winds had scoured the herb beds bare. ‘What is it, Tad? What’s happened?’ Joan ran out after her, followed by Betsi and the new scullery maid and Peter.
‘Look!’ He pointed exultantly.
It was a dragon, the symbol of Glyndŵr.
They all stood staring up at the sky. It seemed to hang there above the hills then, as they watched, the snow clouds came and enveloped it and it was gone.
Dafydd turned to Catrin, triumphantly. ‘It is a sign!’
Behind them Joan snorted derisively and turned to go back to the house. She had been devastated when her mother sent a message with a scullery maid that Edmund had been to see them. He had told their parents of his allegiance to Glyndŵr, thinking to reassure them that he was alive. His father had told him he would rather he were dead!
The maid had delivered the note to Catrin. There was a postscript at the end, for Joan, telling her to keep the girl who brought the note to work in the kitchen at Sleeper’s Castle as they could no longer afford to pay her the penny a week that she had cost them. Catrin agreed to take her; anything to mollify Joan a little as she stamped around the house.
In her lonely bedroom that night, Catrin had scribbled a love poem for the first time in her life.
Then she’d thrown it on the fire.
‘There are signs and portents everywhere!’ Dafydd crowed triumphantly. ‘And now in the heavens themselves!’ He led the way back inside the house and the new girl, Megan, barred the door behind them. She stared at him apprehensively. She was terrified of her new master, though Catrin doubted if he had noticed the girl’s existence. He walked over to the fire and held out his hands to the flames. Catrin wondered briefly what he had been doing outside staring up at the sky. Had he known the great dragon would appear? She sighed. Of course he had. He was a seer. She pulled her cloak around her miserably. Could Edmund see it, wherever he was? The very thought of Edmund made her heart ache. She had received her first declaration of love and he had gone before she had had
a chance to tell him how she felt. She wasn’t sure how she felt, except that she had an aching void somewhere in her middle and at night now, instead of dreaming of the future of Glyndŵr, she sometimes dreamt of Edmund.
It was morning. Andy lay for a while, aware that in her total exhaustion she had slept right through the remainder of yesterday and then through the night without waking. Eventually she sat up and somehow dragged herself to her feet, staggering into the bathroom.
Meryn had left her something he described as a sleeping draught, she remembered that. ‘In case the pain is bad at night. It will help,’ he had said as he left, ‘but it may stop you dreaming.’
She had poured it down the sink.
She had been too tired to go on talking and he had suggested she rest. Much to Pepper’s chagrin, Meryn had pushed him off his lap and, promising that they would talk again soon, he had let himself out, reminding her to lock the door behind him.
Before she went upstairs Andy phoned about her mobile. It turned out to be easier than she’d expected to arrange a replacement. It could even be delivered by courier. She smiled. Somehow that felt like a small triumph. Something that would thwart Rhona’s plans.
It had taken a long time to haul herself up to her bedroom. She wasn’t going to wait until night-time to try and sleep. Besides, she was so tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open however much pain she was in. She collapsed into bed and lay for a moment, trying to get into a comfortable position. It was impossible. Her ankle was throbbing and her shoulder ached so much she began to wish she hadn’t been so hasty in disposing of Meryn’s potion. In the end she lay flat on her back, her foot propped on a pillow, and closed her eyes. Her last thought as she drifted into sleep was about the back door. Had she locked it after Meryn left? Almost certainly. She couldn’t remember.
Stripping off her bandages she ran a hot bath and climbed in to lie back staring up at the ceiling as the warmth soaked through her bones. It had been so cold out there in the garden watching the comet. And snowing. And then in her bedroom it had been cold as well, as cold as ice, the wind inserting icy fingers through the mullions and shutters as though neither were there. As though there was no glass there.