Barbara Erskine 3-Book Collection: Lady of Hay, Time’s Legacy, Sands of Time. Barbara Erskine
Читать онлайн книгу.
the crowded car park and resting her head for a moment on the rim of the wheel. She had thrown in her bags, typewriter and camera barely fifteen minutes after ringing Janet Pugh.
Pulling the rear-view mirror towards her she studied her face. Her lips were still swollen and her eyes were puffy from crying so much in the night. She had dabbed make-up over her white skin and used lipstick and eye-shadow. It made her feel better. The long sleeves and high neck of her Victorian blouse covered the worst of her bruises.
She pulled herself painfully out of the car and swung her bag over her shoulder. It was only another twenty miles, if that, to the Severn Bridge. Then she would be in Wales.
Tim stood for a long time outside the house in Church Road, staring up at the grey slate roof with its dentilation of wrought-iron decoration. The house was identical to its neighbours, save for the front door, which was cream with a brightly polished knocker. The windows were hung with fresh, plain net curtains, like old-fashioned muslin, he thought, as at last he raised his hand to the knocker.
Sylvia Walton opened the door at his second knock. She had plaited her hair and wound it round her head in a silvery braid. It made her look like an Austrian peasant. His fingers itched for his camera, but he had not brought it with him. He grinned at her. ‘It was very good of you and Bill to let me come back and talk to you.’
Sylvia smiled as she led him up the long flight of stairs. ‘He was pleased to hear from you again. Miss Clifford isn’t with you this time?’
Tim shook his head. He followed her into the room they had been in before, but this time the lines of chairs were missing. Instead a small wheeled table which had been laid for three was standing near the fireplace. Bill Walton was writing at his desk. He rose as his wife ushered Tim into the room and held out his hand. The prominent green eyes surveyed Tim shrewdly. ‘So, Mr Heacham, you want to try a little regression yourself,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m glad you found your previous visit so interesting.’
Jo drew the car up in a narrow lane and stared ahead of her through a stone arch. Her stomach muscles knotted. Abergavenny Castle. Climbing out of the MG, she walked slowly through the arch and stared around her.
The sleepless night and the long drive from London were catching up with her fast now and she ached all over with exhaustion; her mind mercifully blank whenever she thought about Nick. All she knew was that she did not want to be in London and that if anyone could comfort her it would not be Nick but Richard – a Richard she might never see again, but for whom she longed with an almost physical ache. She drew a deep painful breath of air into her lungs, and walked on.
This castle too was a ruin but there was far more of it left than at Bramber. She stepped onto a grass lawn strewn with daisies and stared up at a mock-Gothic stone keep, somehow garishly out of place on the motte at the centre of the bailey where the Norman tower had stood. Around her rose high pinkish grey ruined walls, while below the hillside the river elbowed in a lazy curve through the valley. Beyond it lay the soft Welsh hills, shrouded in heat haze. One of the massive walls was covered in scaffolding and she could hear the soft lilt of conversation from high on the ladders near the top of the masonry, where a tree cast its shade over the stone.
Shivering, she began to walk around the perimeter path. Somewhere here, in the bailey below the motte, the Welsh dead had lain in terrible disarray, and in their midst Seisyll and his son. She stood still again, staring round. Surely something of the horror must remain? The stench of blood? The screams? She felt the warm wind from the south lift her hair slightly on her neck. A patch of red valerian in the wall near her stirred, but nothing more. The echoes were still. William de Braose was dead and Seisyll long ago avenged.
She parked her car outside Janet and David Pugh’s neat white-painted house and rang the doorbell, staring back up the empty street as she listened to the sound of footsteps running down the stairs and towards the door. For a moment she and Janet stood staring at each other incredulously when the door opened. Janet saw a tall, elegant young woman with long, dark hair wearing a high-necked long-sleeved blouse and well cut slacks, most of her face obscured by dark glasses. Jo saw a very pregnant, fair-haired woman in a sleeveless summer dress and Scholl sandals. She grinned. ‘My God, you’ve changed since school!’
‘So have you.’ Janet reached forward tentatively and kissed her cheek. ‘Come in. You must have had a hell of a drive from London.’
From her bedroom at the top of the house Jo could see the castle ruins. She stood staring out across the low huddle of rooftops, her hand on the curtain, before turning to her hostess who was hovering in the doorway. ‘It was good of you to let me come like this, with no warning,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten you lived in Abergavenny, then when I knew I had to come here something clicked in my mind and I remembered your Christmas card.’
‘I’m glad you did. You’re working on an article, you said?’ Janet’s eyes went to the typewriter standing in its case at the foot of the bed. ‘David was very impressed when I rang the school and told him you were coming here. You’re famous!’
Jo laughed. ‘Infamous is a better word these days, I fear.’ She took a brush out of her bag and ran it down her hair which crackled with static. ‘You really don’t mind my coming?’
Janet shook her head. Her eyes sparkled with sudden irrepressible giggles. ‘I’m thrilled. Really. You’re the most exciting thing that’s happened to us for months!’ She sat down on the end of the bed with a groan, her hand to her back. ‘Well, what do you think of Wales, then?’
Jo sat down beside her. ‘I haven’t seen much so far, but what I’ve seen is beautiful. I think I’m going to love it here.’ How could she explain that already it felt like coming home? Impatiently she pushed the sentimental phrase aside and pulled off her dark glasses at last, throwing them on the bed. Beneath them her face was very pale.
David Pugh came home at about six. He was a squat, florid, sandy-haired man with twinkling eyes. ‘So, you’ve come to see where it all happened,’ he said cheerfully as he handed Jo a glass of sherry. ‘We were intrigued when we read the article about you in the paper.’ He stood staring at her for a moment, the bottle still in his hand. ‘You’re not like her, are you? Not how I imagined her, anyway.’
‘Who?’ Jo was looking around the small living room curiously. Books and records overflowed from every shelf and flat surface onto the floor.
‘Our Moll Walbee.’ He was watching her closely. ‘You know who that is, surely?’
Jo frowned. She took a sip of sherry. Out of the back window across the small garden there was a hedge and more roofs and behind them she could still see the pink-grey stone of the strange Gothic keep in the castle grounds. ‘Moll Walbee,’ she repeated. ‘It’s strange. I seem to know the name, but I can’t place it.’
‘It is what the Marcher people called Maude de Braose. You seem to prefer the name Matilda, which is, I grant, more euphonious, but nevertheless she was, I think, more often known as Maude.’
He poured a glass of sherry for his wife and pushing open the hatch into the kitchen passed it through to her. Janet, a plastic apron over her dress, was chopping parsley. She looked slightly flustered as she dropped the knife and took the glass from him. ‘Shut up about that now, David,’ she said in an undertone, glancing at Jo.
‘No.’ Jo had seen the challenge in David’s eyes. ‘No, don’t shut up. I’m interested. If you know about her I want to hear it. I can see you’re sceptical, and I don’t blame you. You’re a historian, I believe?’
He snorted. ‘I teach history at a local school. That doesn’t make me a historian, but I have read a bit about the history of the Welsh Marches. The Braose family made a name for themselves around here. And Maude is something of a legend. Moll is a corruption of Malt, the Welsh for Maude, of course. Walbee, I surmise, comes from St Valerie, which was her father’s name.’
Jo grinned. ‘That at least I know. Reginald.’
He nodded. ‘Or it could, I suppose, be a corruption of de la Haie – from her association with Hay-on-Wye,