‘My mother, for instance. I don’t think she once mentioned the Templars to me as a child, but she knew about the Nine Witches. I can name them, she used to say. Every one.’
‘So who were the other eight?’
‘I never asked, she never told me. Of course, when I was a child, a witch meant an old woman in a pointed hat, stirring a cauldron. They were probably all around me and not all of them women.’
‘Are there nine now?’
‘Probably. It’s not a coven or anything, Jane. It simply suggests that there are always going to be nine people who, whether they know it or not, have been entrusted with the guardianship of the hill and its ways. Whenever an issue arises which might damage us, certain people will project … a certain point of view. I can’t explain it any better than that.’
‘People with Garway in their blood?’
‘Nothing so prosaic as blood, Jane. It’s in their very being. I really do believe that. It conditions how one does what one does.’
‘Like your herbalism? Healing?’
‘Or dowsing. Water-divining. Or painting, sculpture, gardening, furniture-making. Everything somehow relating to the place and its relationship with the heavens and infused with … a special energy. Sometimes.’
‘As above, so below. Paracelsus?’
‘I’m not aware that Paracelsus was ever in Garway, or even if someone so loud and demonstrative would have been welcome here. We’re very low-key. Which is why I’ve always felt that Owain Glyndwr, as depicted by Shakespeare, would have been unlikely to have fitted in either.’
‘Archetypal Welsh windbag?’ Jane figured she had a good working knowledge of Shakespeare, the big ones, anyway. ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’
‘Anyone who goes around telling people he can call spirits is usually bugger-all use at it,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Do you mind if I smoke, or are you like most kids, indoctrinated by the fascists in Westminster?’
‘Are you kidding? In our house?’
‘Thank you. I’ll open the window. You see, that’s why I suspect Glyndwr was not such a windbag. Although the wind does appear to have been important to him in other ways.’
‘Huh?’
‘Vast amount of mystery and superstition attached to the man – the wizard, who could manipulate the elements, alter the weather, leaving opposing armies drowning in Welsh mist. A very Templar thing to do. I can’t believe that, coming here a mere century or so after the dissolution, he wasn’t exposed to the full blast of residual Templarism. Some of them would still have been here, undercover now, sitting on their secrets.’
‘But he only came here towards the end of his life, didn’t he?’
‘Who says that was the first time? I think not. Besides, the Templars may have favoured Welsh independence, just as they supported the Scots at Bannockburn. I’ve even heard it said that they included among their number Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, the last official Prince of Wales, in the thirteenth century. His dates certainly fit.’
‘Really?’
‘The Templars seemed to like governments being fragmented, Jane. Made it easier to sustain their own international power-base.’
‘Right.’
Jane slowed at the single-lane Brobury Bridge over the Wye, waiting for every possible oncoming car to come across before chancing her arm. Dorstone Hill, narrow, winding and wooded, wasn’t going to be easy. When she and Eirion had come last summer he’d had to keep reversing to find somewhere to pull in to let other cars get past. And she was … well, crap at reversing.
She’d stopped talking, to concentrate, but Mrs Morningwood seemed to want to talk, as if she was afraid of where her own thoughts might lead her.
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘So, like, is Garway the way it is because of the Templars? Or did the Templars only come here because Garway was already, you know, this really charged-up landscape? Maybe back into Celtic times?’
‘Mixture of the two. Whatever was here, they certainly enhanced it. It’s an unstable area, too. Has a major geological fault line. Climatic anomalies are often noted. We used to talk about gusts of wind from The White Rocks, which are supposed to be a Celtic burial ground. And then, of course, there’s M. R. James.’
‘We must …’ Jane’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘… have offended someone or something at Garway … ’
‘My God, Jane, for a child you’re remarkably well informed.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Anyone under forty’s a child to me now. It’s the wind again, you see. Why did James have this chap discover a whistle that could arouse the wind on the site of a Templar preceptory? It’s never explained in the story.’
‘But you think the Templars … and Owain Glyndwr …?’
‘And farmers in this area, at one time. John Aubrey refers to the winnowers of Herefordshire who believed they could arouse a wind to blow the chaff from the wheat, by whistling. Whistling up the wind. That’s undoubtedly where Monty James got the idea from.’
‘You reckon?’
‘It’s the only possible connection.’
‘But M. R. James didn’t even come here until years after he’d written that story. He didn’t come until this Gwen McBryde came to live here with her daughter. Erm … Jane.’
‘Well we don’t know for certain that he hadn’t been here before that. But, as an antiquarian, it’s most unlikely that he hadn’t heard of Garway.’
‘I keep thinking of Jane MacBryde,’ Jane said. ‘How old would she have been?’
‘When they came to Garway? About thirteen. You know her father was the artist who illustrated some of the early stories?’
‘And Jane also … drew things.’
‘Jane had a macabre imagination. Clawlike hands emerging from tombs.’
‘Do you know what she looked like?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. Nobody ever described her to me.’
At the turning to Dorstone Hill, Jane snatched a quick look sideways. Mrs Morningwood had her old Barbour on and the sunglasses, her cigarette arm on the open window, a small smile on her still-swollen lips. Roscoe’s head next to hers, his grey fur flattened in the slipstream.
‘Do you want to know the story?’
Jane McBryde had known in advance about the visit to Garway Church. Although it wasn’t more than a few miles from their home and she’d probably been before, visiting somewhere with Uncle Monty was always a joy. He was kind and he was funny and full of good stories – well, everybody knew that now, and Jane McBryde had read them all.
Uncle Monty, of course, could spend all day poking around old churches and Garway Church, with all its Templar relics, was a special treat. One of his most famous stories – Jane found it deliciously terrifying – had been about a Templar preceptory and what a solitary sort of professor had found there … and came to wish he hadn’t, or at least had left it well alone.
Monty didn’t really notice – he was probably safely in the tower or the vestry or somewhere, bent over something, his glasses on his nose – when Jane slipped out of the church and started looking round the outside walls, feeling along them with her hands.
‘What you after?’
The girl was a few years younger than Jane, maybe eight or nine. She had blonde hair and a wild look. The year was 1917.
Jane McBryde said, quite open about it, ‘I’m looking for a hole in the wall. I want to play a trick on my uncle.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, you’re not making it up or anything?’
‘I am telling it,’ Mrs Morningwood said, ‘just as my mother told it to me.’
‘So the blonde girl …’
‘Norah. My mother was quite a forward child. Not many of the local kids would dare approach a stranger. My mother, knowing every stone in the tower below her own height, was able to show her one quite close to the ground – perhaps in the area where the circular nave would be excavated just a few years later – which could, with the aid of a stick or a small knife, be eased out of the wall.’