‘Is this your idea of a romantic day in the country?’ Ellie teased.
‘It depends what you mean by romance.’
She waited for him to go on.
‘Leon — your man in the castle. You said — he said — the poem was a bluff. That the real clues to the lance’s resting place were in Chrétien’s Conte du Graal.’
Ellie nodded.
‘In the story, when Chrétien’s describing the Grail castle, he mentions two real places as metaphors. He says of the castle’s tower, “From there to Beirut you couldn’t find a better one.” Talking about the galleries, he says, “They were more splendid than any you could see from there to Limoges.”’
‘OK.’
‘Both Limoges and Beirut were once Roman towns. Limoges was called Augustoritum, Beirut was Colonia Julia Augusta.’
‘Both named after the emperor Augustus.’
‘Exactly. I looked up a gazetteer of Roman place names in Britain. There was one place here that was also called Augusta. It’s now called Aust — I suppose it’s a corruption of the old name.’
Ellie remembered the sign. ‘The village we just went through.’
Doug gazed out over the Severn. The tide was low — brown sandbanks sloped down to the river, etched with crooked channels where the water ran off. A large boulder poked out of the stream.
‘Just before Perceval came to the Grail castle, he reached a river. He looked at the deep and rushing waters, but didn’t dare try to cross. The fisherman told him there was no bridge, ford or ferry for twenty leagues in either direction.’
He looked to his left, where the white cables of the suspension bridge swooped across the river.
‘Luckily, we’ve got the motorway.’
They got back in the car and crossed the river. On the far bank, a painted sign welcomed them to Wales.
‘The Severn’s always been a border,’ Doug said quietly. ‘Between English and Welsh, Saxon and Celt. Rational civilisation and wild, ungovernable magic.’
Ellie laughed. ‘I must have grown up on the wrong side of it.’
Doug took the next exit and drove a few miles through farmland. He pulled up on the edge of the road by a golf course and took two backpacks out of the boot. He handed her one.
‘I brought a picnic.’
She didn’t have to ask what was in the other bag. Since they came back from France it had been a constant presence, like a shadow or an odour. Neither good nor bad, but always there.
They found a stile in the fence. A fingerpost pointed to a footpath leading down into a valley.
‘“Perceval turned back from the river and climbed to the top of the hill,” Doug quoted. “Almost invisible in the trees, he saw the top of a castle.”’
‘I can’t see any castle.’
‘It’s a mysterious place. It appears and disappears.’
They followed the path down into a shallow combe, walking single file. Birds sang; flies buzzed around and the sun was hot on her face. She paused to take off her cardigan and walked with bare arms, enjoying the touch of the sun on her skin, the long grass under her fingers. There was a spring at the bottom of the hill; she crouched beside it and scooped water in her mouth. The chill gave her a headache.
The valley narrowed; the path turned between two hills. Doug took a map out of his bag and consulted it.
‘This should be it.’
He veered off the path and led her up a steep slope through the trees. The scar in her side pulsed, but she didn’t complain. They crossed a field and came to a barbed-wire fence. There was no gate or stile: Doug held the strands apart for Ellie to squeeze between.
‘Are we trespassing?’
‘It’s not the worst thing we’ve done.’
They re-entered the trees. After the glare in the field, Ellie’s eyes took a moment to get used to the dappled light. Walls began to emerge from out of the undergrowth. An ivy-clad column she’d thought was a tree turned out to be the corner of a ruined tower, twenty feet high. Rough-coursed brown stones stuck out of the broken masonry like branches. Gnarled trees sprouted everywhere: further along, a chunk of wall lay tilted on its end, twined in the roots of a large old yew.
She turned to Doug. ‘You knew this was here.’
‘It’s in the register of historic Welsh buildings. I found it online.’
‘If only Sir Perceval had had the Internet.’
They walked across the site, picking their way among the trees, tracing the outlines of the old buildings that now barely poked above the forest floor.
‘It dates back to the twelfth century, but it’s been ruined for ages,’ Doug was saying. Ellie wasn’t really paying attention. ‘If you look at the remains, you can see it was oriented east-west. A lot of people thought it might have been a chapel.’
‘Do you think —?’
Ellie heard a rustling in the leaves behind her. She turned, drawing a sharp protest from the bullet wound, and stared.
A bearded old man had come up behind them. He wore green rubber boots and a quilted jerkin, with a flat tweed cap over his woolly white hair and an ash walking stick in his hand. He could have been any farmer or fisherman out in the country — or the landowner whose fence they’d crossed — but there was a gravity in his eyes that was neither curious nor angry.
‘I thought you might come here.’
‘Who are you?’ Ellie asked. She’d almost stopped breathing, though she wasn’t afraid.
He leaned on his stick. ‘You can call me George. That’s how Harry knew me — your father, too. He would have been very proud of what you’ve done, Ellie.’
He walked around a cluster of crudely mortared stones, tapping at them with his stick. ‘If you’re looking for the lance, I’m afraid you’re a few hundred years too late.’
‘Did Chrétien hide it here?’
‘He did. He tried to hide it from us, thinking that would hide it from Saint-Lazare as well. He forged a replica and gave it to us, which had us fooled for a number of years. When we realised he’d written Le Conte du Graal, we followed the same clues you did.’
‘Where’s the lance now? The real lance.’
‘Somewhere safe.’ He picked up an acorn and rubbed it in his hand. ‘Every few hundred years, we have one of these aberrations and someone outside the Brotherhood rescues one of the treasures in our charge. They always think it’ll be safest hidden from us, but in the end, we get it back. It is best that way.’
He looked pointedly at Doug’s bag. Doug backed away, a fierce look on his face.
‘You could join us, you know. Both of you. You’ve certainly earned your spurs.’
‘Join what?’ Doug demanded. ‘An organisation that can’t protect its own members? That uses innocent people and then cuts them loose? You’d happily have seen Ellie buried under a French hillside to get to Saint-Lazare.’
Pain clouded the old man’s face. ‘We’d been stalemated with Monsalvat for eight hundred years. Unwilling to wield the weapon we had, unable to heal the wounds they made. You can’t imagine how debilitating it became. Perhaps, in the end, we lost sight of who we are.’
‘Then perhaps losing this is the price you pay.’
‘Give it to him,’ Ellie said quietly. Doug rounded on her.
‘You’re the one who got it out of the bank — you carried it across Europe and kept it safe. It should be yours.’
‘If it has any power at all, if it can do anything good, it’s better with him.’
Doug resisted for a moment longer, standing his ground and staring defiantly into her eyes. Then, with a sullen glare, he handed over the bag. Though she hadn’t touched it, Ellie felt a great weight pass from her body and knew she’d made the right decision.
The old man nodded gravely. ‘Thank you.’