There was a mattress and a duvet. Andy (or someone) had slept here. Like a monk might sleep in a little whitewashed cell with no worldly possessions. Or a rich philanthropist might feed the need to live like a squatter for a while to restructure his consciousness.
Or a modern man might have a need, somehow, to shed centuries…
'…
These were Andy's own notes, hand-written; Powys had discovered them in the only modern luxury item to be found in Keeper's Cottage – absurdly, a black leather Filofax.
The Filofax had been kept in what once might have been a bread-oven inside the stone open fireplace, which suggested this hovel was rather older than it appeared from the outside.
Upstairs, Powys had found a single room with a skylight, which appeared to be used as an artist's studio. There was a table with brushes and palettes on it and coloured inks and a large assortment of paints, oil and acrylic.
There was turpentine and linseed oil and other dilutants in tightly corked medicine bottles. He uncorked one and sniffed incautiously.
It was urine.
Another one looked like blood.
Eye of newt, he thought, toe of frog.
Christ.
This room, with its skylight, was the only well-lit area of the house; all the windows in the sides of the building were screened by dense conifers.
There was a work in progress on an easel – a canvas under-painted in black and yellow-ochre. Shapes of buildings and a figure.
He decided not to sniff the painting.
There were two chairs up here, just as there were two downstairs. Andy and a lover.
Or a pupil.
He didn't know quite why he thought that. Maybe it was because someone else had been doing what he himself was doing – copying out pages of material from the Filofax. In the bread-oven had been a small pile of loose-leaf pages with writing on them in a different hand – bold, big letters. A schoolboy hand. Or a schoolgirl. There was also a paperback book on Elizabethan magic, with pages marked. He'd read one – and immediately put the book into his pocket, to study later.
The Filofax had contained about thirty loose-leaf pages of closely written notes, together with hand-drawn plans and maps. Powys had sat down at the table with the artist's materials on it, a rough-hewn item of rustic garden furniture. He'd copied everything out as carefully as he could, including the maps and plans, some of which made sense, some of which didn't.
He could have stolen the Filofax; that would have been simpler.
But he suspected that what he held here was something like what the old magicians called a
So what you did, you copied it out.
He stopped copying at one stage, his wrist aching, a distant siren sounding in his head like the beginning of a migraine.
What the hell am I doing?
I mean, am I out of my mind?
He'd crossed again into the Old Golden Land, where everything answered to its own peculiar and archaic logic.
So, by candlelight, he'd gone on copying material from the Filofax into the blank pages of a slim blue book of his own with photographs of stones and mounds in it and maps of Britain networked with irregular thin black lines. Indented gold letters on the cover spelled out.
It took him a long time.
And if Andy had come back, caught him at it?
So what? The bastard had more explaining to do than he did.
He was scared, though. You couldn't not be, in this environment. Not if you were inclined to believe it worked.
As he wrote, he started to understand. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to convince him that the original source of some of these notes was probably Dr John Dee, astrologer to Elizabeth I. That Dee, who lived along the valley, who was not psychic but studied people who were, had been the recipient of the visit from the man who came 'at nyte in hys spyryte'.
And that the visitor was Michael Wort. High Sheriff of Radnorshire.
And you can prove that?
Of course not. What does that matter?
But you're not rational, Powys. You're a certifiable crank.
He'd put the Filofax back into the bread-oven, wishing there was somewhere to wash his hands, and climbed out through the window again, walking away into the dusk, the wood gloomy, treacherous place now, spiked with fallen branches bramble tentacles.
The night coming on, and he didn't feel so certain of ability to deal with this, this…
This phrase appeared several times in the text.
Standing, now, by the stone, feeling the tension like an impending thunderstorm, only denser. And the feeling that when the storm broke and the rain crashed down, the rain would be black and afterwards the earth would not be cleansed and purified but in some way poisoned.
Acid rain of the soul.
He moved a few feet away from the stone, stood behind a thick old oak tree bound with vines and creepers. The logic of the Old Golden Land told him that right next to the stone was not the place to be when the storm broke.
It also told him that the ringing of the curfew every night was some kind of climax and if he wanted to get a feel of what was going on, he ought to stay near that stone for… what?
He stretched his arm towards the sky to see his watch.
For less than half an hour.
He was frightened, though, and really wanted to creep back through the wood to the nearest lights.
So he thought about Henry Kettle and he thought about Rachel. And found himself thinking about Fay too.
She sped through the shadowed streets, Arnold on the passenger seat.
Not the other son – what was his name?… Warren – not him, surely.
She could hear her own voice-piece.
The usual reporter's moral conflict taking place in her head. Better for the Preece family if it was someone else. Better for the media if it was another Preece – Double Disaster for Tragic Farm Family.
Better for her, in truth, if she was away from Offa's Dyke Radio, which was clearly in the process of ditching her anyway. And away from Crybbe also, which went without saying.
Headlights on, she dropped into the lane beside the church. Nothing like other people's troubles to take your mind off your own.
Other, brighter headlights met hers just before the turning to Court Farm, and she swung into the verge as the ambulance rocketed out and its siren warbled into life.
