‘Thing was, I was affeared she’d die.’
‘Your wife?’
I looked blearily at Price, my hair and face stiff with dried blood.
‘Couldn’t sleep, would not eat. Would not go out, not even in daylight. Gone thin as a rib. Sent her down to Monaughty farm to be cared for by my brother’s wife. Mabbe she won’t be back. It’s all different down there, see. Not much more’n a mile, but it lies easy.’
‘A monastery farm.’
‘A safer air. She never liked this house, or this valley, that’s what it come down to. Couldn’t wait to move to Monaughty where there’d be more company. More company… and less company.’
He looked down at the fire, shaking his head.
‘Wanted me to spend more money on the building work, finish the extension at Monaughty, so we could go. It led to much quarrelling at first. I was glad to get away to London, truth be told. You know what women are like, think you’re tight with money, don’t understand what you gotter spend keeping your ground in good heart, and…’
He looked up, stricken, his face all creased.
‘Truth of it is, I never want to go to Monaughty. Two brothers, one farm, divers sons, it don’t work. Stephen Price of Pilleth, that’s me. Was gonner make Meredith an offer for this house.’
‘It’s all your land down here?’
‘Most of it. But no house. Joan was all, “Oh thank God it’s only rented. We can be out of yere.” We’d signed for the place for two years. I thought to… mend things, somehow. Thought mabbe ole Walter, the priest, could change it for us. When we first come, if my wife or anybody seen anything, we’d send for Walter. And sometimes Marged, the wise woman. Mother Marged and Walter the priest… they had an understanding.’
‘What did they think was the problem here?’
‘Never listened much to ole Marged, it was all mumbles and spells. Father Walter, he’d say that, if you had the Sight, living yere you’d ever need the Saviour’s protection.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘Shrine to the Holy Mother, place of pilgrimage – you come, you pay your respects and then you leave with faith renewed. No one should live too close to such places, Walter said, ’cept mabbe monks and hermits trained to thrive on spiritual agony. The ole priest, you never knowed when he was serious, but he knowed what he was about. And then he died. And then ole Marged. Both gone, one after the other.’
‘And then all you had,’ I said quietly, ‘was a boy who brought death out of the earth but could not talk. And a new priest, all for the Bible.’
‘Had hopes for Daunce at first. That he’d bring some sense, with the new religion. Plain talking. But, in the end…’ Price stabbed the poker into the heart of the fire. ‘…putting it all down to the devil, that was the last thing we needed.’
‘So you came to me.’
‘You were sent to us. That’s how I seen it.’ He leaned away from the fire. ‘The boy with you out there. Was that young Vaughan of Hergest?’
‘And the man with him is my… my cousin, Thomas Jones, from the west of Wales.’
He and Vaughan had said they’d stay outside, watch the night, watch the hill for movement. Anything.
‘My wife’s been like this all her life,’ Price said. ‘Some has it, most of us en’t. I thought it didn’t bother her much any more.’
‘But it was different here?’
‘She liked to walk. In the evening, when the air was soft.’
‘Not any more.’
‘No. Never any more.’
His accent was thicker this night, but his voice was higher, querulous.
‘What did she see?’
‘The dead?’ He prodded at the fire. ‘But not in a goodly way.’
‘You mean from the battlefield…’
‘Confused. Looking for a home. Fragments of them. She’d be walking through them, like they were part of the wind, blowing down the hill, scattered like leaves – that was how she described it. After a while, she wouldn’t go up the hill at all, except to church, in a group of us.’
‘Where did she walk then?’
‘By the river.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Quieter down there, see, until—’
I leaned forward, driven by sudden and powerful insight.
‘Until you buried a man’s body in the old grave mound?’
I sat back, into shadow. Felt I was close to the very heart of it. If it was just the fears of villagers, he’d pass it off as the superstitions of the uneducated. But his own wife… domestic troubles, matrimonial strife. His desire to remain here, in his own place, tempered by that fear that his wife, if they stayed, might even die of it.
I said, ‘Did she know what you’d buried in the mound?’
‘Christ, no.’
Of course not. It was even possible that his wife’s fear of Brynglas had been another good reason to dispose of the remains… before she could find out about it. The thought of what that might do to her.
‘Why did you bury him there?’
‘Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him. Or, if he did, nobody would dig there because they all knowed it was an ole grave. Nobody disturbs a known grave.’
‘No.’ I nodded. ‘Can you tell me what happened down by the river… with your wife?’
Price sat staring at the window and the smeared moon.
‘Gone to walk. Around dusk. Pleasant, warm evening. Come back not an hour later… worst I’ve ever seen her. Close to swooning in distress. Face white as clouds. Took until next day ’fore she could even tell me.’
‘What was it she saw?’
‘Saw… smelled… felt.’
I nodded. I’d thought the smell would cling to my apparel, but when I left there it was gone. The smell had been part of the place. Part of what was there. And for the first time I’d been thankful that I did not see, like Mistress Price.
‘No more’n a white mist, at first,’ her husband said. ‘Drifting across the marsh. Taking shape when it got close. Too close to run from.’
‘What shape did it take?’
‘A man.’ He swallowed, shifting on his stool. ‘Clothed only… only in his rage.’
‘You mean naked?’
‘Violence.’ Price poked angrily at the log. ‘She felt the violence in him. A dirty violence. She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.’ He threw down the poker, turned away from the fire. ‘Inside. You know what I’m saying, Dr Dee? You know what it felt like? You heard of anything like that before.’
‘No.’
Though maybe read of it. I wasn’t sure. Horrified, I sought to reassure Price, telling him that no one was mad, that the old priest had been right about the peculiar air of a place of pilgrimage which might have its origins long before the shrine of the Virgin. That it seemed to me the tump had itself been placed in geometric accordance with the hill, the river, the shrine’s heathen precursor and perhaps other monuments now vanished – even the sun and moon and the stars – to give this place a certain mystic resonance. Maybe empowering the spirit of whoever lay within the tump. And anyone who disturbed it… might themselves be disturbed.
All of this unloaded unrefined from my hurting head. Years of study might make it no clearer. And I knew that, but for my own experience at the tump this night, I’d be inclined to say that Mistress Price had created the whole story in her head to persuade her husband to turn his back on Brynglas Hill.
‘We buried a naked man in the tump,’ Price said. ‘A man whose spirit did not rest. Who walked, and… more.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘She hadn’t been out of her bed for three days. After I’d spent the day with you on the hill, came back home and Clarys said Joan hadn’t been able to keep food down. Death was coming for her. Got the ole cart out, and we carried her on it, me and Clarys, took her down to Monaughty. And later, when all were abed, I went to the tump.’