A Novel Read online

  FINDING

  CAMLANN

  A NOVEL

  SEAN PIDGEON

  Dedication

  For my father

  Epigraph

  While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd,

  Belonging to the time ere I was bought

  By Arthur’s great name and his little love;

  Must I give up for ever then, I thought,

  That which I deemed would ever round me move

  Glorifying all things; for a little word,

  Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove

  Stone-cold for ever?

  WILLIAM MORRIS, The Defence of Guenevere

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Enigmata

  On Badon Hill

  A Magical Thing

  The Song of Lailoken

  From Farthest West

  Whispers

  The Importance of Aerodynamics

  A Castle Built High Above the Sea

  Dyffryn Farm

  Borderlands

  Of Old Welsh Secrets

  The Sign of the Black Lion

  Three Devil Falls

  Ty Faenor

  Divitiae Grandes Homini

  ‘Be Thine Despair . . .’

  The Old Way Down from the Mountain

  Chronology

  Guide to Welsh Pronunciation

  Copyright

  Enigmata

  AS HE NURSES his pint in a quiet corner of the Smoking Dog pub on Malmesbury High Street, turning distractedly through the pages of his unfinished manuscript, Donald Gladstone feels the first stirrings of a familiar dissatisfaction. By now, he should be at the comfortable stage of fine-tuning his work, correcting minor errors and infelicities of style. But he cannot help noticing a troubling patchwork quality to the text, a sense of disparate concepts stitched hurriedly together. He can hear the ancient voice of his sixth-form history teacher whispering in his ear. Always strive for perfection, Gladstone. If in your own mind you have not achieved that exalted standard, you must start again at the beginning. If Mr. Pankhurst were here with him now, reading over his shoulder, he would doubtless be dispensing the same impractical advice.

  Donald puts down his pencil, retrieves his half-empty glass from the corner of the table and leans back in his chair. On this cool autumnal Sunday, the pub is filled with the comforting sounds of mild inebriation, a buzz and hum of mellow chatter. Fragments of conversation drift in his direction: yesterday’s second-half performance by Bristol Rovers, a new curate making enemies up at the abbey, rumours of a black panther on the loose in Devon, the relative merits of damson and quince. Bursts of raucous laughter accompany the telling of a rambling story up at the bar, an account of the previous Saturday night’s exploits in Shepton Mallet. At the next table, tucked in close to a fireplace burning logs the size of elephants’ feet, two elderly men are quietly absorbed in a game of Scrabble.

  The proprietor of the Smoking Dog, stoutly built and with a fresh sweat beading on his brow, comes by on his way to stoke the fire. In the years since Donald and his father first made this place their habitual weekend rendezvous, he has become almost a friend of the family. ‘Ready for a refill, Mr. Gladstone?’

  ‘No thanks, George, I’ll wait for my dad.’

  The publican glances down at the manuscript. ‘How’s the book coming along?’

  ‘It’s not as finished as I thought it was,’ Donald says. Something in George’s earnest expression prompts a different thought. ‘Can I ask you something, though?’

  ‘Course you can. Nothing too hard, mind you.’

  ‘If I say King Arthur, what are the first three things that come into your head?’

  ‘Sword in the stone . . . Merlin the magician.’ George hesitates, narrows his eyes in exaggerated contemplation. ‘The quest for the Holy Grail? Not that anyone would come here looking for it.’ He laughs good-naturedly at this, then goes on his way.

  With a small, wry smile, Donald returns to the opening page of his narrative.

  Popular historians have conjured an apocalyptic vision of the centuries that followed the Roman withdrawal from Britain. This, they inform us, was a twilit age, a period of encroaching darkness illuminated only by the candlelit scribbling of monks in exile on windswept headlands and rocky island sanctuaries. This was a fateful era, we are told, in which pagans sailing across the eastern sea threatened to bring about the ruin of Christian civilisation in the west. This was the heroic time of the Siege of Mount Badon, of the peerless Arthur as leader of battles.

  Donald’s intention has been to introduce a quietly provocative tone from the outset, to paint a vivid but ambiguous picture that will set the scene for his controversial retelling of Arthur’s story. But now, as he glances through this well-worn text, it occurs to him that he has looked at it so many times that he has lost all sense of its likely impact on the reader. These evasive, prevaricating sentences perfectly encapsulate his challenge in writing the book. For he has set out to show, by combining the evidence of modern scientific archaeology with the long-established traditions of documentary scholarship, that almost everything that has ever been written about the historical Arthur is wrong.

  There is a tense silence now at the Scrabble table. The player nearest to Donald, dressed in a fraying tweed jacket, is being let down by his technique. With his letters arranged in alphabetical order, aegimnt, he is staring at his tiles, chin in hand, glancing only occasionally at the board. Tweed-jacket’s opponent, with a flat cap pulled down low over his forehead, is flicking through the dog-eared pages of a small dictionary. Donald checks his watch: half an hour until his father is due to arrive. He reads on through his second paragraph.

  Perhaps no other period in the history of the world has attracted so much misguided scholarship. A sober assessment of the literary and archaeological evidence should cause us to question the traditional symbolism of the sun setting inexorably on the Roman world, of a dark age that was to be ended only by the wisdom and enlightenment of the later Saxon kings, of Alfred and Edward and Athelstan, four hundred years in the future. To arrive at a proper understanding of our British history, we must abandon this dramatic interpretation of what has come to be known as the Age of Arthur: even if, in so doing, we diminish what has seemed to many of us the most truly evocative period of our insular past.

  Passages such as this have become a source of tension in Donald’s conversations with his editor, Felicity Wickes. It’s not enough to be a debunker of popular misconceptions, Felicity would say, however elegantly and convincingly you may do it. You have to tell the reader what really happened. If Arthur was not a war leader in post-Roman Britain, then who was he?

  This is the very question that Donald has been striving to answer, but it is no small thing that she asks: this is a challenge that has defeated fifty generations of scholars who have come before. Of one thing, at least, he is perfectly sure. The Arthurian story as it has been interpreted by popular historians, invoking a valiant battle-leader who, for a while at least, stemmed the rising Saxon tide in fifth-century Britain, does not properly express the true nature of Arthur. He is a far deeper mystery than such stories of war and adventure would suggest.

  Letters are placed ponderously on the Scrabble board. ha is attached to cape, making ah and pa as well. Fourteen points. With fastidious movements that do little to disguise his evident self-satisfaction, flat-cap pencils a new total on his side of the score sheet. ‘A hundred and five plays seventy-two,’ he says, taking a deep pull on his pint as he replenishes his tile rack.

  Donald picks up the local newspaper from the basket near the fire. The headlines speak of rising damp in the local primary school, the thirty-year tenu
re of the town’s librarian. He begins doodling in the margin, embellishing it with cross-hatched loops and burgeoning spirals, his thoughts meanwhile running on the challenge of meeting Felicity’s latest deadline. His central argument is that Arthur was not so much a flesh-and-blood warrior as an archetypal hero, a god-like figure whose exploits were beyond mortal reach. Stated in these simple terms, it is not such a radical thesis; but it is not enough merely to accept this with a shrug of the shoulders and move on. What is important is to get back to the origins of this pervasive mythology of Arthur, to understand where, when, and how it arose. Such is the impractical challenge that Donald has set for himself.

  ‘That’s me finished,’ says tweed-jacket. ‘Can’t do a thing.’

  ‘Don’t give up on me now, Jack,’ says flat-cap, though this seems less than a heartfelt plea. ‘I’m just getting warmed up.’

  ‘Sorry, Harry, but I’ll have to be going. I promised Beryl I’d give her a hand up at the market.’

  ‘Chalk another one up to me, then.’ Raising his voice a notch, Harry gestures in Donald’s direction. ‘Unless our friend here wants to step in for you?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ Donald tucks his manuscript back into its folder, returns it to his battered leather briefcase. He has just settled himself in Jack’s chair when he hears the publican’s voice cutting across the room.

  ‘Mr. Gladstone? Telephone call for you.’

  With an apology to Harry, and conscious of curious eyes on him, Donald makes his way up between the tables to the bar. ‘It’s your father on the line,’ George murmurs to him. ‘He doesn’t sound too special today.’

  Donald picks up the receiver left dangling on its cord. ‘Is everything all right, Dad?’

  ‘Nothing terminal, I dare say.’ James Gladstone’s hoarse voice is barely audible. ‘Just a touch of cold—but I shan’t be joining you today, I’m afraid.’

  A small wave of disappointment washes over Donald. Their plan was to have lunch together, then decide on where to go for their usual Sunday walk. ‘I had a good idea for us today,’ he says. ‘Let’s try again next weekend, if you’re feeling better. I’ll give you a call during the week.’ He hangs up the phone, makes his way stoically back to the Scrabble table.

  JULIA LLEWELLYN DRAINS the last drops from her second glass of wine. She briefly considers a refill, thinks better of it. For now, she tries to distract herself with a volume of Welsh poetry that her father has sent her. She smiles as she thinks of him, Dai Llewellyn of Dyffryn Farm. He will often send her random books and literary fragments, articles and leaflets and pages torn from newspapers, usually with some dramatic arrowing or encirclement of the critical text. A thread of yellowed old string bookmarks a poem by Dylan Thomas, one that she knows well but has not read for many years.

  Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

  About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green . . .

  As she reads, she finds herself computing the rhythms in the lines, the poet’s use of stress, alliteration, and rhyme in perhaps unconscious imitation of the Welsh cynghanedd verse style. It is not purely a blessing, the way her mind works, always analysing, looking for patterns and codes and symbols. Just read it as the writer intended, her father would say, knowing the way she is. Imagine he’s there in the room, speaking the words out loud. She forces herself to start again from the beginning. On this second reading, the poet’s evocation of an untroubled pastoral youth, the lyrical intertwining of his verses, brings a dream-like nostalgia that merges into an inchoate sadness as the chill of mortality enters the wistful lines. In a sense, this is her own childhood, growing up at Dyffryn, though she wonders why her father should choose to remind her of it now.

  Pulling her shawl more tightly around her, she closes the poetry book, uses her napkin to dab away a small drop of wine. The cover bears an unusual design, a Welsh upland landscape with green foothills rising to stark mountain peaks, dark storm-clouds roiling overhead. A narrow track leads through a gentle wooded valley before climbing into higher, more rugged terrain. There is a portentous quality in this picture that her father would find appealing, though she does not. She can hear him lecturing her about choices, taking the right path, even if it is not always the easiest. Taking the wrong path is sometimes harder, she would say in return. Taking the wrong path is sometimes right.

  Julia glances at her watch: a quarter to two. Her husband is more than an hour late for their rendezvous. By now, her faint irritation has evolved into a more insistent anxiety. This was to have been a celebration of sorts, the fifteenth anniversary of their engagement, a return to one of their favourite pubs from the early days. Hugh is on his way back from the Mortimer family property at Ty Faenor, near Rhayader in central Wales, where he and his sister Ruth have been supervising recovery efforts following the heavy rains that have flooded the riverside lands. In a bulletin delivered by telephone the night before, he explained the situation to Julia in the careful, didactic manner that he reserves for such conversations. The drains around the old manor house had become badly clogged, he said, sending two feet of water into the cellars. With a couple of pumps going, everything would be under control by the morning. He would have to stay up there overnight, but an early start should see him to Malmesbury in plenty of time.

  In a habitual nervous gesture, Julia begins twisting her wedding ring back and forth, prying it loose, working it over the knuckle. She swaps it to her right hand, slips it on to the third finger, begins the process in reverse. When she tries to imagine what is going through Hugh’s mind, it feels like she is striking against a dark impenetrable wall. As usual, there will be a reasonable explanation for his lateness. He will have stayed at Ty Faenor to the last minute, determined to remain in charge at the moment of crisis. He will be on the road somewhere now, driving too fast, reinventing his poor awareness of time as a heroic dash to Julia’s rescue.

  In other circumstances, on another day, in another year, she would have found it charming. But this is not the first time in recent months that Hugh seems so casually to have lost his sense of the importance of things. She takes a piece of paper from her bag, begins mentally drafting a short, matter-of-fact note to leave for him at the bar; then folds the blank sheet and puts it in her pocket, continues playing nervously with her ring.

  Her meditation is interrupted by a brash announcement from the bar. ‘Mr. Gladstone? Telephone call for you.’ She sees a tall man get up from a table in the opposite corner and approach the far end of the bar. He has reddish-brown hair cut short, the weathered face of an outdoorsman, strong parallel frown-lines tempered by a gentleness in his expression as he reaches for the telephone. A memory replays itself: the steps of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a book falling from her bag, white with an orange spine, a heavy volume of Welsh history. It was picked up by a tall, awkward boy who happened to be following her up the steps. He made some dry comment, said he was reading it too, and he didn’t know it had become such a blockbuster. On the strength of this introduction, they spent an hour together in the new Egyptian exhibit at the Ashmolean, then afterwards went for tea across the road at the Randolph Hotel.

  Now she watches curiously as Donald Gladstone hangs up the phone, turns and walks back to his table with an air of quiet disappointment. She remembers liking him at the time, though her interest was purely theoretical; in those days, she was intensely preoccupied with a third-year student at Jesus College by the name of Hugh Mortimer. It is perhaps not so great a coincidence, seeing Donald here, but still she feels a faint unsettling tug of superstition.

  HARRY HAS GONE up to the bar to get them both a refill, leaving Donald under some pressure to deliver an impressive score. He is convinced there is a seven-letter word somewhere in Jack’s hand. mintage would work, but there is nowhere to put it. He reaches into his briefcase, pulls out the top sheet of his manuscript, writes the letters down, scattershot, at the foot of the page; then taps unsuccessfully through various permutations with the tip of his
pencil.

  ‘I think it’s enigmata.’ These words are spoken from behind his left shoulder, a quiet voice with an unmistakable Welsh lilt.

  Donald turns to meet the gaze of a woman in her thirties, dark-brown hair cut to shoulder length, a pale complexion, striking green eyes behind narrow-framed reading glasses. A long embroidered shawl is wrapped loosely around her shoulders. She is achingly familiar to him, somebody he once knew.

  ‘You just need to use the loose a down there,’ she says, pointing to the bottom right-hand corner of the board. She picks up his discarded pencil, goes through the letters in sequence; then pauses, gives him a searching look. ‘You don’t recognise me at all, do you?’

  Something in her expression brings the memory back, crystal clear. It must be sixteen years ago at least, perhaps seventeen, his second year at Oxford. He found himself behind her on the steps of the Ashmolean Museum just as a large book fell from her bag and tumbled down towards him. Picking it up for her—it was John Davies’ A History of Wales—he mentioned that he had been reading the same book, which indeed was true. She laughed at some poor joke he made, and he decided straight away that he was going to fall in love with her. ‘It’s good to see you, Julia,’ he says.

  There is the flicker of a smile. ‘Now that you’ve remembered me, are you going to ask me to join you?’

  ‘Of course. I insist on it, in fact.’ He stands up, a little too quickly, pulls a chair across from a nearby table. ‘Will you have something to drink?’

  ‘What about your game?’ she says. ‘Your friend’s on his way back.’

  Harry returns to the table, his hands shaking with the effort of carrying an overfilled pint precariously in each. He sets them down, glances from Donald to Julia, sizes up the situation with a knowing look. ‘Seems to me I might be superfluous to requirements.’