‘Come here.’ He beckoned. ‘You knew, didn’t you. You saw truly what would happen to my ill-fated cause. Your father told me of your dreams and nightmares when he told me of his own. He would speak of glory but then he would warn of defeat and ruin to follow and I silenced him. I was angry. It demoralised my troops. It demoralised me! So, he would change his mind and speak what I wanted to hear.’ He sighed. ‘I chose to ignore his warnings and to believe the men who foretold nothing but triumph. Forgive me.’
She was speechless.
He held out his hand and, still bewildered, she stepped towards him and put her hand in his. This man had been, was, the prince of all Wales, her idol, her father’s lord.
He looked down at her fingers and ran his thumb over the silver ring she still wore. ‘I gave you this?’
She nodded. ‘I have never taken it off,’ she whispered.
‘You are a good woman, Cat. My daughter tells me that you are going to stay with us; that your father died. I am truly sorry for that, but pleased that we shall have the pleasure of your company.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Go now, my dear. Alys shall take you downstairs. I am tired. But we will speak again soon.’
As she followed Alys back down to the lower chamber Cat found her voice again. ‘I thought he was a fugitive in the mountains! Or even—’ She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. ‘People think he’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘Thank the Blessed Virgin he is safe with you.’
Alys gave her a mischievous grin. ‘My father is always safe. He will recover his health and return to fight again. You’ll see.’ She caught Catrin’s hand. ‘But please, Cat, remember he is in hiding here. No one knows about him. And no one can ever know. Our English neighbours don’t even know that the daughter of Glyndŵr is John’s wife. It is too dangerous. Only a very few servants wait on him.’
Catrin bit her lip. ‘Does he know what has happened to Catherine, to your mother? Is it true they took them to London?’
Alys’s eyes flooded with tears and she dashed them away angrily. ‘They are in the Tower. All we can do for now is to pray for their safety.’ She sniffed bravely. ‘Come, let’s go back down to the others. They will be wondering where we are.’
Catrin caught her hand. ‘Does Edmund know?’
Alys smiled again. ‘Of course Edmund knows. That is why he brought you here. He has been a true and faithful servant to my father.’
Two days later Catrin and Edmund were again summoned to the tower chamber. This time Owain Glyndŵr was in the lower room, sitting at a table, a pen in his hand. He put it down when they were shown in to him.
‘It is good to see you again, my Cat.’ He smiled. He glanced at Edmund standing behind her. ‘And you, my most loyal friend.’
Edmund blushed.
The Lord Owain leant forward. ‘I know you have come into the king’s peace and your father paid your fine. I would want it no other way, Edmund,’ he said. He paused for a long time and they waited in silence. A gust of wind shook the windows and the candles on the table guttered. ‘I had such dreams for Wales,’ he went on. ‘We could have been a great nation. We will be a great nation one day, but my people have suffered too much. I could not ask them to do more. I want them to eat; I want them to prosper. I want them to have a fair and peaceful life. I couldn’t do that for them.’ He leaned back and blinked away tears. There was a long pause before he sat forward again in his chair. ‘So,’ he went on, his voice regaining its strength. ‘You are looking after Catrin?’
‘I would like to marry her,’ Edmund said. He didn’t look at her. ‘Lord Owain, if you would act in her father’s stead, we would dearly like to have your blessing.’
Catrin gave a little whimper of joy. She reached out to grab Edmund’s hand.
Owain’s face was weary and sad but when he smiled his eyes lit with their old sparkle. ‘And are you agreeable to this plan, Cat?’
She nodded. ‘Oh, yes. Please.’
And so, three days later, Catrin ferch Dafydd and Edmund, son of Raymond of Hardwicke, were married in the porch of St Mary’s Church. She was given away by a man huddled in a heavy homespun cloak which effectively disguised the fact that he was Owain, Prince of Wales and Lord of Glyndŵr.
As a wedding present Sir John Scudamore, Alys’s husband, was prevailed upon to give them a cottage on the estate. Later he was to make Edmund one of his bailiffs.
In the spring Catrin was delivered of a baby son. They called him Owain.
Bryn rifled through the box of papers which he had pulled out from the cupboard under the stairs in his cottage. His father had left them to him with strict instructions to keep them and hand them on to his son. Bryn gave a grim smile. If he ever had a son. His father had not seemed to consider the fact that it might never happen. He found old letters and copies of the deeds of the family farm, the farm which he, Bryn, had sold. His dreams of the fifteenth century had awakened strange memories of stories he had been told as a little boy by his grandfather, sitting by the range in the old farmhouse on the hill. Stories of Owain Glyndŵr.
The legend of what happened to Glyndŵr had lasted since the days of his last defeat. He had disappeared into the hills, as he had done so often before, hidden by the mists and clouds of Wales that had come to his aid so many times in the past. Where he went to ground no one ever knew.
Stories abounded, one of which was that he went to the home of his daughter Alys at Kentchurch Court and that she and her husband shielded him for the rest of his days. To this day no one knows where he died; no one knows where he was buried. The story goes that, like King Arthur, he is not dead but merely asleep, hidden deep in the caves beneath the mountains of Wales, waiting to come again in her hour of need.
Bryn picked up one of the letters his grandfather had written to him when he was at Jesus College, Oxford – the Welsh college. ‘Do not forget your roots, boy,’ he had said. Bryn smiled. He could hear the old man’s voice, the light lilt of the Welsh hills always there in the background. ‘Do not forget that Glyndŵr gave us this house.’
Bryn sat down on the sofa and leant back, exhausted, the letter in his hand. He had always thought of his grandfather’s stories as so much romantic nonsense, but now he was wondering.
For the first time he had heard Edmund’s full name. He was Edmund of Hardwicke. Andy kept saying how like Edmund he, Bryn, looked. Edmund had been his grandfather’s name. And his great grandfather’s name. An English name, going back a long time, that in itself strange, in so passionately Welsh a family.
He leant down to the box at his feet and pulled out the large folded sheet, which contained his family tree. Standing up, he spread it out on the table. To his shame he had barely looked at it in all the years he had kept it.
He traced his finger up the generations of names until he reached the top.
Edmund Hardwicke married Catherine Davidson in 1410. They had three children: Owen, John and Alice. It all looked very English.
He, Bryn, was the direct descendant of that Owen who in his turn married a girl called Margaret. They called their eldest son Edmund.
He paused, his finger still pointing at the top of the page. Catherine Davidson. Catrin ferch Dafydd. Ferch Dafydd meant daughter of Dafydd. David. People in England didn’t call their children ‘daughter of’. He smiled quietly. Was it possible he was a descendant of Catrin and Edmund? Had he inherited one or two look-alike genes from Edmund after so many centuries? It was probably all nonsense, but it was a thought.
More to the point, had he inherited the farmhouse that Owain Glyndŵr’s daughter and son-in-law had given them as a wedding present? And then he, Bryn Hardwick, had sold it.
Was it possible that some indignant fate had, in response, guided him back to Sleeper’s Castle to dream of the past and realise his folly? He bent over the box again. At the bottom, under a pile of old typed letters was a large, much-folded Manila envelope. As he pulled it out he realised it contained books. He opened it and extricated them. There were three, very small,
chunky and heavy, bound in leather. He opened one, hardly daring to touch it in case the leather fell to pieces in his hands. It was handwritten, the vellum pages thick and crackling slightly as he touched them. It was an illuminated book of hours. Dear God! He found himself a mass of goose pimples. He recognised them. These were Catrin’s books, the books Edmund had saved for her and packed and carried down the Golden Valley on the back of a mule.
He sat staring at them for a long time, then he put them down with meticulous care on the table in front of him, stood up and went to help himself to a bottle of lager from the fridge.
If only he could he afford to buy back the family farm to appease the shade of Owain Glyndŵr.
Three days later Bryn and Meryn dug up the bones of Dafydd ap Hywell. They were almost exactly where they had guessed they would be, only a foot or so down under the grass of the lawn. They told no one. Sian had declined to be there. This was ghostbusting stuff, and not for her; instead she went to visit Roy.
Bryn put the bones reverently one by one into a wooden chest he had discovered in one of the outbuildings. He had carried it up to the bedroom which Andy now used as a studio and she had painted it with medieval scrollwork and wreaths of flowers. When they brought it down again they laid it on two makeshift trestles in front of the hearth in the room which in Dafydd’s day had been the great hall of the house, the room in which he had died. With his bones they put in a reproduction of a medieval book of hours which Andy had found in the Pascoes’ bookshop in Hay and a copy of The Mabinogion which contained, she was sure, some of the stories he had loved.
Meryn told their story in confidence to a local clergyman, a friend of many years, who, as he’d hoped, agreed to help with a quiet interment in a private, shadowy spot beneath an ancient yew in the corner of an isolated churchyard in the mountains above Sleeper’s Castle. There were only the three of them there as mourners to lower the box into the ground as the priest spoke the age-old words.
Requiem eternam dona ei, Domine,
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Requiescat in pace.
Lord grant him eternal rest,
And let perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace.
Behind them the shade of Dafydd ap Hywell stood for a few moments staring down at the box that contained his earthly remains, then with a gentle sigh he was gone.
When they left there was no sign that a new grave was there. There had been no witnesses save the yew tree, which scattered her needles and berries gently on the grass.
In the end they came up with a plan. It was tentative and optimistic and probably mad, but as they drank to Dafydd’s memory that evening it seemed as good as any. As soon as she got legal possession of the house in Kew, Andy would sell it; its memories, happy as they had been, had been tainted by Rhona’s malevolence and without Graham there the house was no more than a pile of bricks.
With part of the proceeds she would then proceed to buy Sleeper’s Castle; she would illustrate Meryn’s book on herbs, a book that had nothing at all to do with botany and everything to do with magic, and Bryn would continue to be the gardener, though no longer paid by direct debit. They exchanged a comfortable, humorous glance when this point was mentioned and agreed to negotiate further at an unspecified future date. One thing would not change. Pepper would still be in charge.
Meryn raised his glass first to Andy and then to Bryn. ‘One thing needs to be said,’ he announced fondly. ‘You may not be ready to hear this, but I feel I am in loco parentis, so I give you both my blessing. I too can sometimes see the future, probably better than you, possibly better than poor old Dafydd.’ He took a sip from his glass. ‘I see quarrels ahead, and regrets and sorrow for Dafydd and for Rhona, but I also see laughter and banter and much happiness … and after all that, I see a descendant of Catrin ferch Dafydd living in this house, and I see you two as his parents.’
He chuckled at the sight of their faces, both shocked and indignant, in Bryn’s case incredulous, in Andy’s embarrassed. He put down his glass and stood up. ‘With that thought for you to ponder, my children, I shall bid you both goodnight.’
Author’s Note
Catrin and her father did not exist but I am certain people like them did. Wales was and is a land of isolated houses and remote valleys where writers and poets and their ilk quietly practise their trade. Glyndŵr was famous for his patronage of poets and seers and bards. If Catrin and Dafydd had existed, I am sure he would have sought them out.
There were women poets; the names of at least two famous ladies have come down to us, Gwerful Fychan, who was writing during the fifteenth century and her namesake, Gwerful Mechain, who was writing towards its end. (She is the lady famous for her ‘Ode to Pubic Hair’!)
This novel was first inspired by Hay Castle itself. Having written about its building by Matilda de Braose in Lady of Hay I thought it would be interesting to write about the castle’s destruction. Possibly bad timing in view of the fact that, at the time of writing, a programme of restoration is beginning, preceded by an archaeological and ‘geophys’ investigation of the site. At long last, but not alas in time for this book, perhaps we will know the answer to all those questions about a moat, drawbridge, curtain walls, etc. and what is under the ‘mansion’ which today takes up so much of the original site.
When I started to look up accounts of the castle’s destruction, I found so many different dates given for the dastardly deed, I was utterly confused. I was aiming to set my novel in the years when the country was torn apart by the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr, that is between 1400 and about 1410. He was an incredibly charismatic and interesting character, but he is also credited with destroying almost every old building in Wales. Hay Castle was one of them – or was it?
I consulted a few websites. One, which had better remain nameless, claimed that Glyndŵr destroyed the castle in 1353 (for shame – he was a small child then, if even born). Others gave variously 1400, 1401, 1402, 1403, all possible as it turned out. I turned to books – far more reliable. Yet one gives three different dates within the same book. Other sources differ again. Some official records give the date when it was ‘ruinous’, others when it was once again defenceable. The conclusion to be drawn is that, either Glyndwr came back several times – which, given its strategic position on the border and between other places he is known to have visited, is perfectly possible – or that he never destroyed it at all, just gave it a bit of a fright. I gather the latter view is beginning to prevail. This is a novel, I’m allowed to be vague!
I hadn’t intended Owain Glyndŵr to be a character in the novel at all. He was going to lurk off stage, but he muscled in almost at once. He was a forceful personality. And a wonderfully mysterious one. His magical reputation is almost as legendary as his final disappearance. I couldn’t not include him.
I was given so much unstinting help with the writing of this novel. Thank you once again to my son Jonathan who on this occasion introduced me to the wonderful tool of the dashboard camera; fantastic aide memoire for research purposes. And I must acknowledge the many people who we met as we visited the various sites mentioned in Catrin and Dafydd’s tour of the border March. I don’t know who they were but at the first glimpse of my camera and notebook they materialised with their dogs and their gardening gloves and their shopping to give me their views on Glyndŵr, his battles, his successes and his failures, historians every one.
I want to mention Annie McBrearty as well, who I first met all those years ago when I was looking for an expert on medieval Welsh when writing Lady of Hay and who has been a friend and inspiration and translator-in-chief of all matters Welsh ever since. And thank you Sheila Childs for your encouragement and help as honorary researcher. It was Sheila who introduced me to Jan Lucas-Scudamore. Thank you, Jan, for showing us Glyndŵr’s rooms in beautiful Kentchurch Court and for introducing us in turn to Professor Gruffydd Aled Williams and his colleagues. I shall long remember that wonderful evening we all spent
at the Garway Moon. I am not sure if Aled realised the kind of books I write, but I thank him for his enthusiasm and knowledge and for a sprinkling of academic stardust over the project. Thank you too to Séza Magdalena Eccles for her masterclass in weather magic. I’m not sure if we got it right, but it was fascinating and inspirational.
In fact, I’m not sure if I got anything right. All the mistakes and inaccuracies in this book are mine alone with the excuse once again that I write novels, not history books.
Thank you above all to the people of Hay who have been so consistently supportive over the thirty years since Lady of Hay was published and who helped and encouraged me in the ten or so years even before that, when I was researching the book and publication was only a dream.
Which brings me full circle to my agent and friend Carole Blake. Thank you Carole for so many years of brilliant agenting and friendship and thank you to the team behind this book. Susan Opie, Anne O’Brien, Kim Young and all the wonderful people at HarperCollins.
Historical Note
When preparing to write a historical novel one does masses of research, consulting dozens if not hundreds of books, documents and websites, visiting museums and buildings, castles, abbeys and battlefields, all the time making notes and taking photographs. Much if not most of this research is not used as such in the book, but it is there in one’s head, forming a background, a scenario, a flavour of the times. Below I have included a selection of these notes, which I hope will interest you and which cover topics which fascinated me.
Edmund is fictional. He is a typical example of a younger son, forced to find a living beyond the family farm which, like the whole country and indeed the whole of Europe after the Black Death half a century before, was still depleted and unable to support the family. Many young men, trained since childhood in the use of often primitive, home-made weapons, sought their fortune and the excitement of war in the service of their local lord and in the case of talented archers, in mercenary bands. Glyndŵr attracted many such to his service. His own experience of war in France and Scotland in the service of the Earl of Arundel as a young man had taught him to be a talented soldier and it is believed he learned some of his skills in guerrilla warfare from fighting the Scots who were experts at it.