When, breathless and cold, she let herself back into the kitchen she found herself laughing. There was still no sign of Pepper. Well, he could look after himself. She put on the kettle and made herself some tea, leaning against the Aga rail as she sipped from the mug, cupping her hands around it for warmth.
She did not sense the silent figure in the corner of the room, watching her from the shadows, the figure which between one breath and the next had faded into nothing.
2
March 1400
The door banged shut in the wind, the latch rattling with the force of it, the draught sending up showers of sparks in the hearth. ‘I made sure Betsi had locked up the hens.’ Catrin kicked off her pattens, pulled off her shawl and hung it on the back of the door. She was a delicately built young woman with fine attractive features and grey-green eyes. Her hair, swathed in its linen coif, was rich chestnut. ‘Is my tad still working?’
‘He’s not come out of that room all day.’ Joan was bending over the pot hanging from the trivet over the fire, her face red from the heat. Sturdily built with muscular arms, she padded her hands against the hot metal of the handle with a cloth and unhooked the pot, thumping it down on the table. ‘Did she find any eggs?’
‘Two.’ Catrin produced them from her basket and set them carefully in the wooden bowl on the table. ‘I’ll go and see if he’ll come and eat. He’ll get ill if he goes on like this.’ Another gust of wind shook the house and both women looked towards the window. Sleeper’s Castle stood full square and solid on its rocky perch beside the brook but when the wind roared up the cwm like this from the north there was nowhere to hide. The shutters were rattling ominously. Only weeks before one had torn free and gone hurtling off into the brook. It had been days before they could find one of the men from the farmstead down the valley willing to come up and fasten it back into place. She hated this time of year. Even the patches of snowdrops growing in the lee of the stone walls could not make up for the wild gales screaming over the mountains and the patches of snow still lying on the high scree. There were no real signs yet of spring; the deep impenetrable cold of winter was still implacable within the stone of the house.
Crossing the large empty hall and pushing the door open, Catrin peered into the shadows of her father’s study. The candles on his desk guttered and spat throwing shadowed caricatures of his hunched figure over the walls. ‘Go away!’ He did not look up. His hand was racing across the page, the pen nib spluttering as he wrote and crossed out and wrote again. ‘I need more ink,’ he added.
Catrin sighed. ‘I’ll fetch it from the stillroom. Please, could you not stop to take some pottage? Joan has made your favourite.’
He did not bother to answer. She turned away. At the door she hesitated and looked back. He was seated on a high stool in front of his writing slope, bent low over his work, his weary figure illuminated into flickering highlights by the candles. He had a thin ascetic face with dark lively eyes, narrowed now with exhaustion and eyestrain. His hair was white, long and tangled. ‘What is it, Tad?’ Again he was furiously scratching out with his knife the words he had just written, almost tearing the thin parchment in his agitation. He ignored her. With a sigh she left him.
Joan glanced at her. ‘Is he still working?’
‘And still irritable. I need to fetch him more ink.’
They called it the stillroom, but it was really the buttery. That and the pantry led off one side of the hall, the main living space of the house, while her parlour and her father’s study led off the other. The kitchen had originally been built separately, behind the house, but now it was joined into the main fabric of the building as a solid extension with behind it the bakehouse with its stone oven. Beyond it lay the high castellated wall of the yard.
Drawing her cloak around her against the cold, Catrin went into the buttery to find the ink. Besides overseeing the storage of their ale and beer and cider casks, she made her simples and receipts and remedies in this room. They were a small household; she and her father with their cook housekeeper Joan, Betsi the maid of all work and Peter the outside boy and scullion. Joan did her best but she was worked off her feet in the old house, which had grown increasingly shabby and neglected over the years.
When Catrin’s father and mother had first come here there had been a steward and other servants and farmworkers but one by one they had been sent away. Catrin’s father did not tolerate people around him; they distracted him from his poetry and from his dreams. And they cost money. Now all that was left of the livestock were a few sheep, a pig and a cow and they still had two horses and a mule. They were all looked after by Peter, who added to his long list of duties that of fisherman, keeping Joan’s kitchen stocked with trout and grayling and crayfish, which he pulled from secret pools in the brook. He also had made himself responsible for training the two corgis – the short-legged cattle dogs that followed him everywhere – and, from time to time, cosseting the barn cats; her father did not tolerate cats or dogs indoors either.
The buttery was Catrin’s special domain, full of the rich smell of herbs and the precious spices she brought back sometimes from the market. The stoppered jug which contained the ink she made several times a year was stored on a high shelf. Carefully she set the candlestick down and reached for one of the spare inkhorns, filling it from the heavy jug. The black liquid glistened in the candlelight. She glanced at the basket of oak apples on the shelf and next to it the jar of precious gum arabic and the dish of blue-green copperas crystals bought from a pedlar who called in from time to time as he travelled between the fairs and monasteries. If he didn’t call again soon she would have to make the long arduous journey to Hereford to visit the only mercer there who stocked the items she needed. Her father was particular. He wanted his ink to be the best quality and he wanted it to last on the page. Early autumn was the best time to make the ink, the galls strong and full of acid after the worms had crawled out and left them empty. She had thought she had collected plenty; now there was but half a small basket left.
When she returned to her father’s workroom he wasn’t there. The candle flames guttered as she made her way across to his desk. The page he had been working on was still lying where he had left it, the lettering cramped and heavily crossed out. She set down the inkpot and leaned closer, squinting in the flickering light, reading what he had written. It was the draft of a poem. She loved her father’s poetry. It was clever, intricate, perfectly written with the complex rules on metre and rhythm and rhyme as laid down by the bards of old, exactly as he had taught her but, as she looked at the page, her eyes widened in dismay. This was no poem.
The words were scratched angrily across the page. The point of the quill had split and splayed with the force of his hand and had spattered ink everywhere. She could see where his knife had tried to excise the words, angrily scraping the surface of the parchment scrap on which he was writing until it thinned so much it tore. At that point he had obviously thrown down his pen and walked out of the room.
‘Tad?’ she called. ‘Where are you?’ With another horrified glance at the page she turned to run back into the great hall. The front door of the house was standing open and, despite the heavy screens set up to keep it at bay, the large room was full of the wind. Sparks and ash flew in all directions from the fire. There was no sign of her father.
The garden was dark and reverberated with the noise from the trees beyond the high walls thrashing in the gale. As she stood on the step looking round she could see nothing. The sound of the brook hurtling down over the rocks vied with the wind and the trees to drown out any sound her father might make. She peered round desperately and then as her eyes grew used to the fitful starlight she thought she could see him, a darker shape against the shadows. She made her way cautiously down the path. He was indeed there, staring out across the cwm towards the mountains.
‘Tad?’ She came to a standstill beside him and timidly she reached out and touched the sleeve of his robe. He didn’t react. ‘Plea
se, talk to me. I saw what you had written.’
He turned abruptly and stared blindly down at her. Her father was a tall man. She barely came up to his shoulder and he seemed to be looking out over the top of her head into the distance. ‘You saw nothing.’ His voice was dull and heavy. ‘Do you understand me, Catrin? You saw nothing at all.’
‘But, Tad—’
‘No!’ He seemed to awaken as though the dream of which he had written had slipped like a heavy burden from his shoulders. He straightened and stepped away from her. ‘It was nothing. It’s gone. I will burn the page. It was the result of an ague. Tell Joan her food is too rich. It lies on my stomach like a stone; make me something in your stillroom to settle it.’
She watched his dark shape as he strode back towards the house and disappeared through the door. It closed with a bang and she was left outside alone.
She drew her cloak round her. Her beloved father had been trembling. She had felt it in those few seconds as she touched his arm before he shrank away from her. He had been trembling not because he was cold but because he had been afraid.
Sleeper’s Castle had been her mother’s inheritance. She had been the only daughter of a wealthy well-connected local Welsh family – uchelwyr was the Welsh word for their class – and her grandfather had settled the old fortified manor house on her when she had married, with its farm and its supplement of servants. What he thought of her choice of an itinerant bard, albeit of impeccable descent, as a husband, Catrin never knew. Perhaps his decision to give them an isolated, ancient house hidden in the mountains and already the custodian of years of legend about its magical past and far from his own fertile acres in the Wye Valley, was a witness to his hidden thoughts. When Marged died in childbirth the house remained with Catrin’s father, who bit by bit had sold off what land it had until very little remained. What moneys they owed each year he paid from the earnings he brought home from his summer tours around the houses of his rich patrons.
Bards were popular. The people loved them and their visits were eagerly awaited. They were poets but they were so much more. As well as the genealogies of the principalities and the history of the land of Wales, the myths, the legends, the ancient stories, they also knew all the latest gossip. That had made them dangerous once, in the reign of King Edward I, passionate supporters of their princes as they were in their desperate battle for independence from England; and that could make them dangerous again. The bards sang and played the harp. But their business was words. Words are powerful; words can soothe or inflame. Words can inspire loyalty or treason. Words can incite revolt. Edward may have recognised their power and ordered their execution, but they had never been exterminated.
They toured the houses and castles of the land, staying a week here, a month there, eating at the table of anyone who would pay them with food and shelter. Some had no homes of their own, no roof save the roof under which they were staying. They owed their allegiance to the man who fed them. Thanks to his marriage, Catrin’s father was one of those who had a home and he had both a family and a bloodline of which he was intensely proud. But Dafydd was the most dangerous kind of bard of all. He was also a seer, a soothsayer; he saw the future in his dreams.
A succession of nurses and housekeepers had reared Catrin. They had mostly proved loyal and kind to their small charge, but when she was old enough her father dismissed them, taught her himself and left the running of the house to the few servants who were trusted with the remaining farm animals, their ponies, the vegetable gardens and the kitchen. Catrin did not seem to notice. She loved this place. It was in her blood. She did not know or care that her mother’s family had turned their back on her father and forgotten her.
This land in the border Marches of Wales was a place of beauty and magic and danger. Successive Marcher Lords, supported in their greed for land by their king, had built their great castles and made dangerous or at best uncomfortable neighbours to the local Welsh families over the centuries, but hidden away in this fold of the hills, cradled in the crooked elbow of a torrential brook and lulled by the cry of the birds, Sleeper’s Castle, Castell Cysgwr, had seemed safe to Catrin. Until now. For her father’s dreams of late had been frightening and full of ominous clouds.
She knew her father’s fathers had been bards and soothsayers from the days of the ancient Druids. Poetry was in his blood, the inheritance of his family, the gift of his ancestors. His name was Dafydd ap Hywell ap Gruffydd ap Rhodri – his line stretched back through time like a bright ribbon of silk. And there she was, Catrin ferch Dafydd, Catrin, the daughter of Dafydd, the latest born and perhaps the last of that line.
She didn’t remember her mother, Marged, but in her dreams, those dangerous sparkling dreams she never mentioned to her father, she could see her clearly, her eyes the colour of smoke, her face gentle and loving as she smiled at her little daughter, the daughter she had never met, the daughter who had inherited all her father’s talents and more.
Dafydd taught his daughter all he knew. She could read at the age of four; she could play the harp at the age of six; she could recite the long histories of her father’s family and their patrons and princes by the age of eight. She could write poems and stories of her own and at her father’s dictation, and from the age of twelve she had been sufficiently confident to sing to the harp in front of her father’s patrons. Once or twice, in the solar of an indulgent group of women, she had sung her own poems, cautiously diffident, embarrassed by their applause. The poems were a secret and even now she was a woman she had not confessed to her father that she wrote and dreamed just as he did. She sensed he would not approve. He was proud of his daughter’s talents but subtly and firmly he had made it clear he would not tolerate competition, especially not from a woman. Things might have been different had he had a son.
There were other secrets in her life. After her mother died, in his first frenzy of grief and anger, Dafydd had hidden or destroyed everything that would remind him of his beloved wife. When the nurse who was taking care of this new scrap of life had seen what was happening she had rescued the one thing Marged had treasured above all else and which the loyal woman was sure would end up in his vengeful pyre: a small coffer in which was stored Marged’s tiny, beautiful book of hours, another book of poetry and a collection of notes and recipes for herbs and cures and remedies, copied for her from the family of healers who lived in the village of Myddfai, on the banks of Llyn y Fan Fach on the far side of the mountains. Each successive nurse had been sworn to secrecy and promised to keep the coffer safe until Catrin was given charge of her mother’s legacy by the last of the women employed to look after her. Her father now felt she had no need of female company beyond the servants and cooks who remained. By then Catrin already knew this small coffer and its contents was something else she had to keep hidden.
Her second secret she had found for herself. Half a mile up the valley, through a wood and across a brook she had stumbled upon a small cottage, lost in a tangle of wild herbs. The widow who lived there, Efa, was motherly and kind, full of stories of her own. Catrin told no one of her friend. It seemed important that she should be as secret from her father as the coffer full of her mother’s treasures.
Woven into the stories Efa told were ancient legends and magic spells. Sometimes when Catrin climbed the bank towards the cottage she saw gifts which had been left outside, a skinned rabbit, a jar of cider, a pot of honey, and when she asked, Efa told her about the service she rendered to the community. She magicked the weather. It seemed natural for her to teach the wide-eyed child some of the simple spells. She knew where Catrin lived, she knew the stories about Sleeper’s Castle. She guessed the girl would have a natural aptitude, and so it proved.
The farmers who came to see Efa needed fair weather for ploughing and harvest, they needed rain and then sun for ripening the crops; their wives came to seek good weather for markets and fairs and festivals. And then for fun Efa showed her some of the more powerful magic, the magic that would command the e
lements, conjure thunder and lightning over the high tops of the mountains, rites which commanded the mist and fog to wrap itself around the trees and drift into the cwm. It was all secret. When men or women came and asked for lightning to strike a neighbour dead or for weather to cause their cattle to sicken and die, Efa refused. Such magic was black and a mortal sin, but she taught Catrin that it could be done and how. That was the greatest secret of all.
‘He has called for new candles.’ Joan looked up as Catrin walked into the kitchen from the garden next day. She was chopping onions and leeks and tossing them into the pot.
‘I’ll take them in to him.’
Joan straightened her back, tucking a wisp of her blonde hair under her hood. The house was full of the smell of her rich fish stew. ‘He’s not well. You must make him eat.’
Catrin nodded.
‘I heard him shouting again in the night.’ Joan held her gaze challengingly before looking away. She reached for a dishclout and wiped her hands.
‘I know. I know he’s worried.’ Catrin pulled a stool from under the table and sat down with a heavy sigh.
Her relationship with Joan was a difficult one. The two young women were of a similar age with but two years between them, and in the lonely valley with few neighbours they had become friends. But Joan was her servant; she was paid to cook and clean.
Joan’s father, Raymond of Hardwicke, was a wealthy yeoman farmer and such work should have been beneath her, but his farm had struggled to survive over the last decades like so many others after the last great wave of pestilence had swept across nations far and wide, destroying towns and villages, leaving land depopulated and barren. Raymond had two sons, the eldest had married and was slowly taking over the running of the farm; his second son had also married and had left home with the idea that he would one day take over part of his wife’s father’s land. Raymond’s only daughter, Joan, was expected to marry and marry equally well. But she had stubbornly refused every suitor her father picked for her. In the end, in a fit of vindictive spite, he told her to go and live off someone else’s charity. She did.