Crybbe aka Curfew

Hereward knew there was blood also on his torn cheek. He didn't touch it.

Outside, the school kids began to drift away. Jocasta had her back against the window, unaware of them.

Still she made no attempt to get up, only said calmly, voice nasally blocked, as if she had a cold, ' I accepted some drawings from that girl a few days ago. Sale or return. Do you remember them?'

'I didn't make the connection,' Hereward said quietly.

'They were drawings of an old man.'

'I didn't see them.'

'He was cutting his own throat.'

'Yes,' Hereward said dully. '… What?'

'The reason I don't want this painting here is that the other night, while you were away, the figure, the likeness of this old man, the old man in the drawings, was seen in our bathroom.'

Hereward said nothing.

'Not by me, of course,' his wife assured him. 'But the man I was sleeping with swears it was there.'

Everything was completely still in The Gallery. Hereward Newsome stunned, aware of a droplet of blood about to fall from his chin. Jocasta Newsome lying quietly in the window, red splashes like rose petals on her cream silk blouse.

CHAPTER V

Fay had a whole pile of books and just two short names.

She was alone in the reading room of the County Library in Llandrindod Wells, nearly thirty rural miles from Crybbe and another world: bright, spacy streets, a spa town.

Two names: Wort and Dee.

Fortunately there was an index to the dozens of volumes of transactions of the Radnorshire Society, a huge collection of many decades of articles by mainly amateur scholars, exploring aspects of the social, political and natural history of the most sparsely populated county in southern Britain.

There were also books on Tudor history and three biographies of John Dee (1527-1608) whose family came from Radnorshire.

She read of a farmhouse, Nant-y-groes, once the Dee family home, at Pilleth, six miles from Crybbe. But it had, apparently, been demolished and rebuilt and was now unrecognisable as Elizabethan.

Dee himself had been born in the south-east of England but had always been fascinated by his Welsh border ancestry. The name Dee, it seemed, had probably developed from the Welsh Du meaning black.

History, Fay discovered, had not been over-generous to this mathematician, astronomer and expert on navigation – perhaps because of his principle role as astrologer to the court of Elizabeth I and his lifelong obsession with magic and spiritualism. Most schoolchildren learned about Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, but John Dee hardly figured on the syllabus, despite having carried out major intelligence operations in Europe, on behalf of the Queen, during periods of Spanish hostility.

Two hours' superficial reading convinced Fay that John Dee was basically sound. He studied 'natural magic' – a search for an intelligence behind nature. But there was no serious evidence, despite many contemporary and subsequent attempts to smear him, of any involvement in black magic.

Dee wanted to know eternal secrets, the ones he believed no human intelligence could pass on. He sought communion with spirits and 'angels', for which a medium was required.

Fay read of several professed psychics, who sometimes turned out to be less well-intentioned than he was. People like the very dubious Sir Edward Kelley, who once claimed the spirits had suggested that, in order to realise their full human potential, he and Dee should swap wives.

Now that, Fay thought, was the kind of scam Guy might try to pull.

But there was no mention of Dee working with Sir Michael Wort in Radnorshire.

She skipped over all the weird, impenetrable stuff about Dee's so-called Angelic Conversations and went back to the Radnorshire transactions.

It emerged that while Dee himself might not have been a medium he clearly was, like Henry Kettle, an expert dowser.

In 1574, he wrote to Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, requesting permission to seek 'hidden treasure' using a method that was scientific rather than magical (nothing psychic), Fay smiled, involving a particular type of rod.

He was also most interested in folklore and local customs, druidic lore and landscape patterns.

OK. Speculation time.

If there were such things as ley-lines, the mounds and stones which defined them must have been far more in evidence in Dee's time.

If ley-lines had psychic properties, Dee's interest in the remains would have been of a more than antiquarian nature.

If he'd been in the area in the 1570s he could hardly have failed to run into Wort.

If Dee felt that Wort had knowledge or psychic abilities he lacked, he might have been inclined to overlook the sheriff's less savoury practices.

Fay looked up Wort and found only passing references. No mention of hangings. His name was in a chronological list of high sheriffs, and that was all.

She looked up Trow and found nothing. She looked in the local telephone directories, found several Worts and several Trows, noted down numbers.

Then she simply looked up Crybbe and found surprisingly little, apart from references to the curfew, with the usual stuff about the legacy of Percy Weale, a mention of the town hall as one of the finest in the area.

Had Crybbe received so little attention because, for much of its history, it had been in England? Or was it, as she'd intimated to Powys, because local historians weren't too thick on the ground.

It was almost as though nobody wanted the place to have a history.

And so Fay emerged from the library with only one significant piece of information.

It came from a brief mention of Crybbe Court in an article dated 1962 about the few surviving manor houses of Radnorshire. Crybbe Court, which the writer said was in dire need of extensive restoration, had been built in the 1570s by a local landowner, Sir Michael Wort, who later served as High Sheriff of the county and who lived there until his death in the summer of 1593.

It was precisely four centuries since the hanging of Black Michael.

'Oh, what the hell,' Colonel Col Croston said. 'Don't see why not.'

'I'm really very grateful,' Guy told him.

It was the first piece of genuine co-operation to come his way. Well, from the locals, anyway. Whether you could call this chap a local was highly debatable, but he was the deputy mayor.

As soon as Guy had found out that the public meeting wasn't, after all, going to be chaired by old Preece, he'd driven off by himself to the deputy's home, a partly renovated Welsh long-house across the river, about a mile out of town on the Ludlow road.

Col Croston had turned out to be an affable, pale-eyed, sparse-haired, athletic-looking chap in his fifties. He lived quite untidily with a couple of Labradors, who rather resembled him, and a tough-looking little wife who didn't. There was a mechanical digger working on a trench fifty yards or so from the house. Try and ignore the smell,' the Colonel had greeted him breezily. 'Spot of bother with the old septic tank.'

What the deputy mayor had just agreed was to let Guy shoot a few minutes of videotape in the meeting before it actually started, so there would at least be some pictures of an assembly of townsfolk and councillors. Guy would milk this opportunity for character close-ups of the taciturn, grizzled faces of Old Crybbe.

His heart lurched. He wished he hadn't thought of grizzled old faces. With bulbous noses and bulging eyes and blood fountains from severed arteries.

'And… er… Colonel,' he said hurriedly. 'What I'd also like, if you have no objections, is a little interview with