and across a brook she had stumbled upon a small cottage, lost in a tangle of wild herbs. The widow who lived there, Efa, was motherly and kind, full of stories of her own. Catrin told no one of her friend. It seemed important that she should be as secret from her father as the coffer full of her mother’s treasures.
Woven into the stories Efa told were ancient legends and magic spells. Sometimes when Catrin climbed the bank towards the cottage she saw gifts which had been left outside, a skinned rabbit, a jar of cider, a pot of honey, and when she asked, Efa told her about the service she rendered to the community. She magicked the weather. It seemed natural for her to teach the wide-eyed child some of the simple spells. She knew where Catrin lived, she knew the stories about Sleeper’s Castle. She guessed the girl would have a natural aptitude, and so it proved.
The farmers who came to see Efa needed fair weather for ploughing and harvest, they needed rain and then sun for ripening the crops; their wives came to seek good weather for markets and fairs and festivals. And then for fun Efa showed her some of the more powerful magic, the magic that would command the elements, conjure thunder and lightning over the high tops of the mountains, rites which commanded the mist and fog to wrap itself around the trees and drift into the cwm. It was all secret. When men or women came and asked for lightning to strike a neighbour dead or for weather to cause their cattle to sicken and die, Efa refused. Such magic was black and a mortal sin, but she taught Catrin that it could be done and how. That was the greatest secret of all.
‘He has called for new candles.’ Joan looked up as Catrin walked into the kitchen from the garden next day. She was chopping onions and leeks and tossing them into the pot.
‘I’ll take them in to him.’
Joan straightened her back, tucking a wisp of her blonde hair under her hood. The house was full of the smell of her rich fish stew. ‘He’s not well. You must make him eat.’
Catrin nodded.
‘I heard him shouting again in the night.’ Joan held her gaze challengingly before looking away. She reached for a dishclout and wiped her hands.
‘I know. I know he’s worried.’ Catrin pulled a stool from under the table and sat down with a heavy sigh.
Her relationship with Joan was a difficult one. The two young women were of a similar age with but two years between them, and in the lonely valley with few neighbours they had become friends. But Joan was her servant; she was paid to cook and clean.
Joan’s father, Raymond of Hardwicke, was a wealthy yeoman farmer and such work should have been beneath her, but his farm had struggled to survive over the last decades like so many others after the last great wave of pestilence had swept across nations far and wide, destroying towns and villages, leaving land depopulated and barren. Raymond had two sons, the eldest had married and was slowly taking over the running of the farm; his second son had also married and had left home with the idea that he would one day take over part of his wife’s father’s land. Raymond’s only daughter, Joan, was expected to marry and marry equally well. But she had stubbornly refused every suitor her father picked for her. In the end, in a fit of vindictive spite, he told her to go and live off someone else’s charity. She did.
Working for Dafydd ap Hywell had a cachet all of its own – besides, he paid well. His patrons were generous and he had realised almost too late that if he dismissed every servant on the place he and Catrin would be left to cope alone. Joan liked it at Sleeper’s Castle. It had once been far grander, a fortified manor house in a scattered parish in the hills above Hay. Some of the walls had crumbled and it had little land left, but it still had a fine slate roof, Catrin was educated and her gowns had been made by a skilled seamstress. They were serviceable and these days Catrin patched them herself with neat clever stitches, but nevertheless they were of good expensive cloth, and her cloaks were warm and lined with miniver. Joan liked her and was sorry for her. She must be lonely. She needed a friend.
Joan glanced at Catrin, who was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. ‘He’s had these moods before,’ she said. Her voice was gentler now. ‘He’ll come out of it. You’ll see.’
Catrin looked up. ‘I know.’ Wearily she stood up. ‘I’ll go and see if he wants to eat. Perhaps if you throw more logs on the fire in the parlour and serve us there it will cheer him up.’ She didn’t notice Joan’s tightened lips or her exaggerated sigh. Usually they all ate together in the great hall, or she ate here in the kitchen with Joan and Betsi and Peter after placing her father’s food on a tray and taking it to him in his study. That was the way he liked it.
It was as she left the kitchen and walked back into the shadowy hall she thought she caught sight of a woman’s figure standing near the window. Behind her the kitchen door banged and the draught sent a wave of cold air across the room, scattering ash, blowing out the candles. She blinked and stared and rubbed her eyes and the figure had gone.
Andy woke with a start. The morning sun was shining into the room and she lay quietly staring at its path across the black-painted floorboards. She had been dreaming, a gentle homely dream about cooking and putting logs on the fire downstairs, and then in the dream a door had banged and all the candles had blown out, leaving her in darkness. She had woken, aware that somewhere a conversation had been left unfinished, the words still echoing in the quiet of the room.
Sitting up, she groped for her slippers with her feet and pulled on her dressing gown. Pushing her hair back off her face she made her way downstairs to the living room. The bang of the door slamming shut in her dream had seemed so loud and so real it was as if it had been in here.
The room looked huge and shadowy at this time of the morning, living up to its title of great hall. She smiled, remembering that was the way Sue referred to it, her only concession to the house’s medieval antecedents.
The sun hadn’t come round yet to any of the windows. The papers on Sue’s desk by the front-facing window with its ancient mullions had been blown onto the floor. Had that happened last night when she came in? She couldn’t remember. She gathered up the papers and as she did so she noticed two tightly stoppered bottles of dark brown liquid standing there. Tucked under them was a torn sheet of paper which said simply: For Sian.
Neither she nor Sian had thought to look on Sue’s cluttered desk the night before. Andy surveyed the chaos with a smile. If she had been going away for a year she felt sure she would have tidied her desk at the very least. She groped in her pocket for her phone and turned back to the kitchen to look for the note on which Sian had written her number.
‘You don’t look as though you slept much.’
They had arranged to meet in The Granary in Hay. Sian’s dogs lay quietly under the table as Andy brought the two cups of coffee from the counter and set them down.
Andy gave a rueful grin. ‘I suppose I didn’t. I was exhausted, but my head was whirling all night. The silence is so different from London.’
She must have slept though. After all, she had dreamed.
‘Silence? Didn’t you hear the brook?’
‘It is a bit noisy, I admit, but it’s not cars and planes. My house – where I used to live,’ Andy amended hastily, ‘was under the flight path to Heathrow.’
‘Ah.’ Sian took a sip from her cappuccino and licked the froth from her top lip. ‘Not in the same league, noise wise.’
‘There are people who use the sound of water to send them to sleep,’ Andy smiled again, ‘but this is a constant roar.
