The Fabric of Sin

55 Monty and Jane

‘So where did it happen?’ Jane asked.

The Volvo roared and surged because she’d put it back into second gear instead of up into fourth. Shit.

‘Was it at your home?’ Jane said. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

Mrs Morningwood glanced at her.

‘It wasn’t far from home. It’s an established fact that most car accidents take place on roads that are well known to the victim. Familiarity breeding carelessness.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘Very good.’

She wasn’t totally stupid. She was driving slowly but trying not to make it suspiciously slowly. She’d left a message on the table for Mum telling her the truth, that she was driving Mrs Morningwood home to collect some stuff, but not the entire truth, that she’d be driving back, almost certainly in the dark, unaccompanied by a qualified driver.

She could do this. Country roads all the way, a wide arc around Hereford.

‘So what was it like growing up in Garway, under the shadow of the Templars?’

‘Good question,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

Obviously any question unrelated to her having been viciously assaulted was going to be a good one.

‘Like, the first time I went up there,’ Jane said, ‘I was noticing things. But maybe if you grow up in a place you take it all for granted.’

‘In this case, Jane, I think not. Even people who profess no interest at all in the Templars are, I think, affected in some way. It’s one of those areas that seems to … I don’t know … condition the way people think and behave. It somehow imposes its own rules and strictures. You noticed yourself the names of the pubs. I’ve never worked out how far they go back, but I don’t think it matters. They might simply be echoes from memory. The people are the memory cells of the hill.’

‘Cool.’

‘My mother, for instance. I don’t think she once mentioned the Templars to me as a child, but she knew about the Nine Witches. I can name them, she used to say. Every one.’

‘So who were the other eight?’

‘I never asked, she never told me. Of course, when I was a child, a witch meant an old woman in a pointed hat, stirring a cauldron. They were probably all around me and not all of them women.’

‘Are there nine now?’

‘Probably. It’s not a coven or anything, Jane. It simply suggests that there are always going to be nine people who, whether they know it or not, have been entrusted with the guardianship of the hill and its ways. Whenever an issue arises which might damage us, certain people will project … a certain point of view. I can’t explain it any better than that.’

‘People with Garway in their blood?’

‘Nothing so prosaic as blood, Jane. It’s in their very being. I really do believe that. It conditions how one does what one does.’

‘Like your herbalism? Healing?’

‘Or dowsing. Water-divining. Or painting, sculpture, gardening, furniture-making. Everything somehow relating to the place and its relationship with the heavens and infused with … a special energy. Sometimes.’

‘As above, so below. Paracelsus?’

‘I’m not aware that Paracelsus was ever in Garway, or even if someone so loud and demonstrative would have been welcome here. We’re very low-key. Which is why I’ve always felt that Owain Glyndwr, as depicted by Shakespeare, would have been unlikely to have fitted in either.’

‘Archetypal Welsh windbag?’ Jane figured she had a good working knowledge of Shakespeare, the big ones, anyway. ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’

‘Anyone who goes around telling people he can call spirits is usually bugger-all use at it,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Do you mind if I smoke, or are you like most kids, indoctrinated by the fascists in Westminster?’

‘Are you kidding? In our house?’

‘Thank you. I’ll open the window. You see, that’s why I suspect Glyndwr was not such a windbag. Although the wind does appear to have been important to him in other ways.’

‘Huh?’

‘Vast amount of mystery and superstition attached to the man — the wizard, who could manipulate the elements, alter the weather, leaving opposing armies drowning in Welsh mist. A very Templar thing to do. I can’t believe that, coming here a mere century or so after the dissolution, he wasn’t exposed to the full blast of residual Templarism. Some of them would still have been here, undercover now, sitting on their secrets.’

‘But he only came here towards the end of his life, didn’t he?’

‘Who says that was the first time? I think not. Besides, the Templars may have favoured Welsh independence, just as they supported the Scots at Bannockburn. I’ve even heard it said that they included among their number Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, the last official Prince of Wales, in the thirteenth century. His dates certainly fit.’

‘Really?’

‘The Templars seemed to like governments being fragmented, Jane. Made it easier to sustain their own international power-base.’

‘Right.’

Jane slowed at the single-lane Brobury Bridge over the Wye, waiting for every possible oncoming car to come across before chancing her arm. Dorstone Hill, narrow, winding and wooded, wasn’t going to be easy. When she and Eirion had come last summer he’d had to keep reversing to find somewhere to pull in to let other cars get past. And she was … well, crap at reversing.

She’d stopped talking, to concentrate, but Mrs Morningwood seemed to want to talk, as if she was afraid of where her own thoughts might lead her.

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘So, like, is Garway the way it is because of the Templars? Or did the Templars only come here because Garway was already, you know, this really charged-up landscape? Maybe back into Celtic times?’

‘Mixture of the two. Whatever was here, they certainly enhanced it. It’s an unstable area, too. Has a major geological fault line. Climatic anomalies are often noted. We used to talk about gusts of wind from The White Rocks, which are supposed to be a Celtic burial ground. And then, of course, there’s M. R. James.’

‘We must …’ Jane’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘… have offended someone or something at Garway … ’

‘My God, Jane, for a child you’re remarkably well informed.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Anyone under forty’s a child to me now. It’s the wind again, you see. Why did James have this chap discover a whistle that could arouse the wind on the site of a Templar preceptory? It’s never explained in the story.’

‘But you think the Templars … and Owain Glyndwr …?’

‘And farmers in this area, at one time. John Aubrey refers to the winnowers of Herefordshire who believed they could arouse a wind to blow the chaff from the wheat, by whistling. Whistling up the wind. That’s undoubtedly where Monty James got the idea from.’

‘You reckon?’

‘It’s the only possible connection.’

‘But M. R. James didn’t even come here until years after he’d written that story. He didn’t come until this Gwen McBryde came to live here with her daughter. Erm … Jane.’

‘Well we don’t know for certain that he hadn’t been here before that. But, as an antiquarian, it’s most unlikely that he hadn’t heard of Garway.’

‘I keep thinking of Jane MacBryde,’ Jane said. ‘How old would she have been?’

‘When they came to Garway? About thirteen. You know her father was the artist who illustrated some of the early stories?’