of the masonry, where a tree cast its shade over the stone.
Shivering, she began to walk around the perimeter path. Somewhere here, in the bailey below the motte, the Welsh dead had lain in terrible disarray, and in their midst Seisyll and his son. She stood still again, staring round. Surely something of the horror must remain? The stench of blood? The screams? She felt the warm wind from the south lift her hair slightly on her neck. A patch of red valerian in the wall near her stirred, but nothing more. The echoes were still. William de Braose was dead and Seisyll long ago avenged.
She parked her car outside Janet and David Pugh’s neat white-painted house and rang the doorbell, staring back up the empty street as she listened to the sound of footsteps running down the stairs and towards the door. For a moment she and Janet stood staring at each other incredulously when the door opened. Janet saw a tall, elegant young woman with long, dark hair wearing a high-necked long-sleeved blouse and well cut slacks, most of her face obscured by dark glasses. Jo saw a very pregnant, fair-haired woman in a sleeveless summer dress and Scholl sandals. She grinned. ‘My God, you’ve changed since school!’
‘So have you.’ Janet reached forward tentatively and kissed her cheek. ‘Come in. You must have had a hell of a drive from London.’
From her bedroom at the top of the house Jo could see the castle ruins. She stood staring out across the low huddle of rooftops, her hand on the curtain, before turning to her hostess who was hovering in the doorway. ‘It was good of you to let me come like this, with no warning,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten you lived in Abergavenny, then when I knew I had to come here something clicked in my mind and I remembered your Christmas card.’
‘I’m glad you did. You’re working on an article, you said?’ Janet’s eyes went to the typewriter standing in its case at the foot of the bed. ‘David was very impressed when I rang the school and told him you were coming here. You’re famous!’
Jo laughed. ‘Infamous is a better word these days, I fear.’ She took a brush out of her bag and ran it down her hair which crackled with static. ‘You really don’t mind my coming?’
Janet shook her head. Her eyes sparkled with sudden irrepressible giggles. ‘I’m thrilled. Really. You’re the most exciting thing that’s happened to us for months!’ She sat down on the end of the bed with a groan, her hand to her back. ‘Well, what do you think of Wales, then?’
Jo sat down beside her. ‘I haven’t seen much so far, but what I’ve seen is beautiful. I think I’m going to love it here.’ How could she explain that already it felt like coming home? Impatiently she pushed the sentimental phrase aside and pulled off her dark glasses at last, throwing them on the bed. Beneath them her face was very pale.
David Pugh came home at about six. He was a squat, florid, sandy-haired man with twinkling eyes. ‘So, you’ve come to see where it all happened,’ he said cheerfully as he handed Jo a glass of sherry. ‘We were intrigued when we read the article about you in the paper.’ He stood staring at her for a moment, the bottle still in his hand. ‘You’re not like her, are you? Not how I imagined her, anyway.’
‘Who?’ Jo was looking around the small living room curiously. Books and records overflowed from every shelf and flat surface onto the floor.
‘Our Moll Walbee.’ He was watching her closely. ‘You know who that is, surely?’
Jo frowned. She took a sip of sherry. Out of the back window across the small garden there was a hedge and more roofs and behind them she could still see the pink-grey stone of the strange Gothic keep in the castle grounds. ‘Moll Walbee,’ she repeated. ‘It’s strange. I seem to know the name, but I can’t place it.’
‘It is what the Marcher people called Maude de Braose. You seem to prefer the name Matilda, which is, I grant, more euphonious, but nevertheless she was, I think, more often known as Maude.’
He poured a glass of sherry for his wife and pushing open the hatch into the kitchen passed it through to her. Janet, a plastic apron over her dress, was chopping parsley. She looked slightly flustered as she dropped the knife and took the glass from him. ‘Shut up about that now, David,’ she said in an undertone, glancing at Jo.
‘No.’ Jo had seen the challenge in David’s eyes. ‘No, don’t shut up. I’m interested. If you know about her I want to hear it. I can see you’re sceptical, and I don’t blame you. You’re a historian, I believe?’
He snorted. ‘I teach history at a local school. That doesn’t make me a historian, but I have read a bit about the history of the Welsh Marches. The Braose family made a name for themselves around here. And Maude is something of a legend. Moll is a corruption of Malt, the Welsh for Maude, of course. Walbee, I surmise, comes from St Valerie, which was her father’s name.’
Jo grinned. ‘That at least I know. Reginald.’
He nodded. ‘Or it could, I suppose, be a corruption of de la Haie – from her association with Hay-on-Wye, but there must be dozens of parishes up and down the borders which claim stories about her. She was reputed to be a witch, you know.’
Jo raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know.’ She leaned forward and took the bottle out of his hand, refilling his glass and then her own. ‘I’m not an historian, David. I know nothing about her, save what I remember from my –’ she hesitated, seeing the disbelief in his face, ‘my dreams, if you like to call them that. I looked her up in the Dictionary of National Biography, but I didn’t look at any books on Welsh history. Perhaps I should.’
Janet appeared with a saucer of peanuts which she put on the arm of David’s chair. ‘My husband is a bit of an expert on local legend,’ she said almost apologetically. ‘We must shut him up about it, because if he starts, he’ll go on all night.’
‘No, I won’t.’ He frowned at her. ‘All I said was that Joanna does not look like her. She was reputed to have been a giantess. She is said to have stood in the churchyard at Hay and, finding a stone in her shoe, thrown it across the Wye, where it landed at Llowes.’ He grinned. ‘The stone is about ten feet long! And of course she built Hay Castle singlehanded in a night. And she was Mallt y Nos, who you can see riding across the mountains with the hounds of hell in the wild of a storm.’ He laughed out loud at the expression on Jo’s face. ‘She must have been a fearsome lady, Jo. Overpowering, Amazonian even, who kept old William in terror of his life. Or that is the way the story goes.’
Jo said nothing for a moment. Then slowly she began to pace up and down the carpet. ‘I don’t think she was especially tall,’ she said reflectively. ‘Taller than William, yes. And taller than a lot of the Welsh, but then they are a short people –’ She broke off in embarrassment, looking at her host.
He roared with laughter. ‘I’m five foot four, girl, and proud of it. It’s power not height that counts in the rugby scrum, and don’t you forget it!’
Smiling, Jo helped herself to peanuts. ‘It’s hard to explain what it’s like being someone else, even if only as a vivid dream. She doesn’t inhabit my skin. I find myself in hers. I think and speak and feel as her. But I don’t know her future any more than she would have known it. Now, talking to you, I know roughly what happened to her, but in the regressions I know no more than we know now what will happen to us tomorrow. If in later life she was called Moll Walbee, I don’t know it yet. If later she came to dominate William, I have no clue. As a young woman only a year or so married she was afraid of him. And her only defence against him was disdain.’
There was a moment’s silence. Janet had seated herself on the arm of a chair near
