‘He’s in the church,’ she said quickly. ‘On the bier.’
‘Does Daunce…?’
‘Daunce has been summoned to Presteigne,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Where the bishop lodges. I know not where Siôn will lie.’
‘I’ll talk to the bishop,’ I said. ‘If it’s necessary.’
Knowing I must needs talk to him anyway. About many things.
‘They say he’s killed,’ Anna said. ‘The Welshman.’
‘They say he killed himself. Were you not there?’
‘When he let me go, I ran away. I saw no more of him.’
‘It’s as well,’ I said. ‘He… killed without a thought. He was driven by a demonic madness. The man who you and the shepherd found, all cut about… the man Stephen Price buried to prevent panic… he can only have been killed by Gethin.’
Anna Ceddol looked down at the stain on her dress, then up at the statue of the Virgin.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Mercy?’
‘No more lies. You’ve been good to me. I won’t—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I may have brought a terrible sorrow to you and everyone here. Stephen Price saw me as a saviour but I think, in truth, that I’m just part of the curse.’
‘I won’t lie to you,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know how that man died, and I know how he was cut about.’
I stared at her.
‘Because I cut him.’ Her voice was soft as moss. ‘I took his apparel and then I set about his face with a spade.’
My body jerked back against the statue’s stone robe.
‘What are you saying?’
‘So that no one would ever know who he was,’ she said rapidly. ‘That he was my father. And Siôn’s father.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’ll go no further, but you still don’t have to tell me. No one will ever know any of it from me.’
She looked up at the statue.
‘The Holy Mother will know.’
Tomos Ceddol. The man who, Anna had told me, had courted her mother but was deemed by her mother’s parents as not of their level. Who, when Anna’s mother died, had begun to drink to excess. Who had been driven to violence by the ravings of their youngest child, barely weaned when his mother had died.
‘Not true,’ Anna said. ‘She was not his mother. When she died, I was already with child. I was twelve years old.’
Oh, dear God.
‘She was unwell for nearly a year, my mother. After a while, he began to touch me. He’d get drunk on strong ale. He was a big man. Resisting him would only lead – did lead – to injury.’
She was hardly the first this had happened to. Hardly the first who’d gone on to give birth to her own father’s child. I believed that most women stayed, made the best of it, at least until the child was old enough to leave home.
But this child would never be old enough to leave. And Anna would blame her father for the boy’s idiocy. Her father… and herself.
‘When I found out I was with child, I tried to… make away with him. Went to a wise woman in the next village, who charged me all I had for a potion that made me sick for days. But the babe continued to grow. It wasn’t until he was nearly two years that I knew he must be damaged in the head. And knew why.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I said, but she seemed not to hear.
She’d never let her father touch her again. She’d been sleeping with a kitchen knife since first learning there was a child on the way.
The night she’d found him kicking Siôn, to quieten him – that was true enough and happened just as she’d told me. What she hadn’t told me was that, when they left home, taking all his money, Tomos Ceddol had gone in search of them. This was why they’d moved from village to village down the border.
‘He found you?’ I said. ‘He found you here?’
‘I’d become careless. It was over twelve years since we’d left. I’d thought he’d surely given up, found a woman somewhere. I thought we were safe in the Bryn. The first real home we’d had.’
His approach had been slow and careful at first. He’d watched for whole nights from the oak wood – one of the Thomas boys had seen him twice, thought him a thief, though nobody was ever robbed… not then. I imagined Tomos Ceddol catching sight of his daughter – even more beautiful than he’d remembered. All the money he’d spent trying to find her. She was his daughter and the father of his child, who should have been disposed of long ago.
God’s tears.
The night he broke in, he was drunk, having found a barrel of cider left over from the harvest festival. They heard later he’d been driven out of his own village after two rapes, although the women would not name him.
Anna Ceddol stopped, as though that were the end of the story.
‘How did he die?’ I said at last, in dread of the answer. ‘Not that you have to—’
‘Nor will I. I awoke and he was in my bed. Naked. And some men… some have thinner skulls than others.’
Siôn had done this? Struck his father…
… with the thigh bone?
It took me about three hours get him out to the hill,’ Anna said. ‘I had to do it myself.’
He didn’t find that man, she’d said, of Siôn. He wouldn’t even come out that day. He was afraid and clung to the fire.
‘I smashed his face with the spade. And then took the spade to him… down there. Bore it on the spade into the wood. I suppose the pigs ate it. Pedr Morgan found him next day and his wife came to me to ask what we should do.’
I thought of Stephen Price who’d buried Tomos Ceddol, not knowing who he was. Buried him twice. In the tump.
Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him.
But no one lay easy in the tump.
She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.
I would talk to Scory. This was a matter for a priest of the old kind. Someone practised in the cure of souls.
‘Come home with me,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘Please come home with me. For tonight.’
PART FIVE
Here the vulgar eye will see
nothing but obscurity
and will despair considerably
LVI
From an Angel
HE REFUSED WINE, accepting small beer. There was a ring of blood around the pupil of his left eye.
No longer wearing mourning, though his apparel was of earth colours, he’d ridden alone to Mortlake, and I wondered if this meant he no longer feared for his life… or if he no longer cared. I wondered if he’d been shown the letter from Thomas Blount. I wondered if he’d tell me if he had. I wondered too much.
There was an unseasonably close air for that time of year when late afternoon and evening are become one and the traffic of wherries on the river is thinned. Dudley leaned back on the bench in my workroom, the long board betwixt us, his shoulders against the wall.
‘So you gave it back.’
Oft-times you don’t choose the stone, Jack Simm had said, reporting the words of Elias the scryer. The stone chooses you.
I didn’t remind Dudley of this: my feeling was that if that stone had chosen me it was not for anything good.
But it hadn’t, anyway. It had been given either as a bribe for my silence or…