King Arthur's Bones (17 page)

The focal point of this family gathering was Ralph Merrick, a tall, erect man with a permanently truculent expression. He was forty-five, born seven years before Owain. Heavy features and a ruddy complexion made him unlike his brother, apart from the deep-set eyes that were a family trait.

‘I told you to bring our sister,’ he snapped as a greeting. ‘Where is she?’ He spoke in English, though he also had a fair grasp of Norman-French, the language of his masters.

‘She cannot leave our dying father, and her husband has to be in the mill all day,’ replied Owain, deliberately speaking in Welsh.

‘For God’s sake, speak in English,’ snapped his brother irritably. ‘You know Alice can’t understand the peasants’ talk.’

‘It was good enough for you when you were young!’ retorted Owain. ‘You never heard a word of English until you were ten years old.’

He suspected that Alice understood far more than she admitted, but this pretence was all part of their craven attachment to the Marcher lords and their tenants, who were ruthlessly annexing what for untold centuries had been Welsh lands.

‘Why have you asked me here today?’ he demanded, never one to be overawed by his domineering brother. ‘Our father cannot live much longer, so I trust you are going to come to visit him while he still breathes?’

‘I was there last week,’ growled Ralph. ‘And if my duties here permit, I will ride over in the morning.’

‘You may well be too late,’ retorted Owain. ‘Since Idwal died, you are the eldest son and must lead the family.’

Ralph dismissed this with a wave of his hand. ‘I summoned you here because I have heard very disturbing news about your activities,’ he began ominously. ‘It has come to my ears that you are encouraging men to go with you to join the rebel Dafydd. Are you mad, brother!’ His voice had risen to a shout.

Owain was shocked, for this meant that someone had betrayed him. ‘Who has told you this? I am a Welshman, as you are, and I am free to fight this oppression against my homeland!’

‘The king has declared all such rebels as traitors and the penalty is death,’ thundered Ralph. ‘You say I will soon be the head of this family, so I intend to prevent it from falling into disrepute by having a traitor as a brother!’

Owain, now in a rage himself, pointed a quivering finger at Ralph. ‘You’ll not tell me what I can or can’t do, Rhodri ap Hywel!’ he shouted, deliberately using his brother’s real name. ‘If you were not so besotted with crawling around the English who have settled on our land, you would join me on this journey to Gwynedd!’

Alice squealed her protests at the quarrel that had flared up, and the two sons had risen to their feet, looking aggressively at their uncle. Ralph, bright red in the face, advanced on Owain, shaking a fist at him.

‘This part of the March is now at peace. Would you see all our efforts wasted by your mad schemes? We are prosperous, both Welsh and English. Why would you wish to stir up conflict once again?’

‘And what’s this nonsense about taking King Arthur’s bones to the north?’ cut in the son John. ‘Everyone knows that they lie in Glastonbury, so are we going to suffer you as a charlatan as well as a rebel?’

His uncle was too aghast at this further disclosure to censure his nephew for his insolence in speaking in such a way to a family elder. How in God’s name did they learn about the relics?

‘Who told you this?’ he demanded. ‘Was it Eifion at the Skirrid?’

To his further surprise, Rosamund suddenly burst into tears, bending over where she sat and sobbing into her folded arms.

Ralph threw out a hand dramatically towards her as he continued to rant at his brother. ‘See how you and your treacherous friends cause such anguish to my family?’ he rasped. ‘Some common fellow of your acquaintance has had the impudence to try to pay court to my daughter. It was from him she has heard these tales of rebellion, before I forbade her today ever to lay eyes again on the ruffian.’

This provoked a fresh outburst of sobbing from Rosamund, which caused her mother to give her a good shaking rather than to comfort her. Owain, though incensed at the way in which his secrets had been bandied about, felt obliged to come to the defence of the culprit.

‘The lad is no ruffian! Caradoc is the son of the fuller at Pandy, a respectable and prosperous freeman,’ he protested.

Privately, if Owain had had Caradoc here now, he would have boxed his ears soundly for his loose mouth, even if it was to his girlfriend.

‘I care not if he has a chest of gold, he will not approach my daughter ever again!’ snarled Ralph. ‘I have given orders that if he sets foot on this estate again, he will be flogged!’

Rosamund wailed again and got another shaking from her mother.

‘I suppose he is another of your rebellious knaves – so let him go off to Gwynedd and be killed, and good riddance to him! All who are foolish enough to rally to Dafydd ap Gruffydd will be slain,’ ranted the bailiff. ‘But I forbid any member of this family to sully our name by turning to treachery!’

Owain glared at his elder brother, containing his anger with difficulty. ‘Is that why you called me here today?’ he demanded. ‘Dragging me from the side of our dying father to lecture me on your craven obedience to the people who have stolen our land and our heritage?’

‘Don’t speak to our father like that!’ bawled William. ‘The Scudamores have been good masters. We live better now than we ever did before.’

John, emboldened by his brother’s defiance, weighed in with his denunciation: ‘A damned sight better than you who live across the Monnow and up into the hills – squalid shacks to live in, scratching an existence from stony ground and few sheep!’

Owain ignored them and continued to glare furiously at his brother. ‘So what are you going to do about it? Denounce me to your English overlords and have me hanged? Edmund Crouchback’s castle is just down the road, and he has the highest gallows in these parts!’

‘Of course not, you foolish man!’ glowered Ralph. ‘You are my brother and for all your wrongdoing you are still my kin.’

He swept his hand around the room to indicate his wife and offspring. ‘But look what danger you have brought on me and my family, damn you! By concealing my knowledge of your folly, I risk being branded as a traitor myself.’

Owain shrugged. ‘None will hear it from me – so if you tell your daughter to keep her chattering mouth closed, no one will be any the wiser. I’ll deal with Caradoc. He’ll say no more to anyone.’

He turned to go, convinced that staying would only worsen the antipathy between them. As he reached the door, he turned to face them again. ‘Whatever has passed between us, remember that your father is dying, Ralph. If he could walk or even crawl, he would be with me on this venture, but, as it is, he at least deserves to hear his son say farewell!’

With that, he stalked back to his horse and rode away.

Ralph and his two sons did come to Pandy the next day, but they were too late. Hywel had died peacefully in his sleep in the small hours and now lay in the Church of St Michael, near the Skirrid alehouse, until he was buried in the churchyard the next day. Owain walked out of the cottage near the mill when Ralph appeared, too incensed at his brother’s dilatoriness, leaving Rhiannon to exchange a few stilted words with him.

He took his empty cart, which he had used to carry his father’s body to the church, down to Llanfihangel and sought out the priest to make arrangements for the burial.

‘The ground is rock hard with frost, Owain,’ said the parson sadly. ‘How will we dig the grave? Our sexton is sick with a fever, though in any case he’s too old to hack his way through such ice-bound earth.’

Owain promised that he would come himself with friends and with picks and iron bars, to lever away the topsoil to get at the softer earth beneath. The priest, Father Samson, was Welsh-speaking, unusual in this area. When Owain had gone with his nephews to Christ’s Mass in Garway, the priest there conducted the whole service in Latin, of which no one apart from a couple of Templars understood a word. Owain knew that this was the usual practice everywhere, except that often the short sermon was delivered in English. Here in Llanfihangel, still within the diocese of Llandâf, the incumbent was a native, and Owain suspected that his sympathies were similar to his own. It would have been difficult for Father Samson not to have been aware of the politics of some of the men in the parish, such as those who met covertly in the Skirrid.

Later that day he returned with Dewi, Caradoc and Islwyn, another of their coven, and began the arduous task of digging a grave pit near an old yew in the corner of the graveyard. They had to avoid the roots, but the shelter of the tree had slightly lessened the depth of the frost, and within two hours they had gone down a sufficient depth to accommodate the rough coffin that one of the mill workers had fashioned. As they finished digging the hole, Owain took Dewi and Caradoc aside and gave the younger man a stern warning about his loose mouth.

‘But it was only to Rosamund!’ he protested. ‘How was I to know she would carry tales to her father?’

‘Well, she’ll carry no more, by the looks of it,’ snapped Owain. ‘Ralph Merrick says he’ll have you whipped if you set foot in Kentchurch again – and probably he’ll have you hanged if you try a second time!’

Dewi responded by giving his son a smart clout across the ear, which made the young man stagger. ‘You silly fool, you put all of us in danger with your idle chatter! Let’s pray that none of this comes to the ears of those in Grosmont!’

Their altercation was cut short by the return of the parish priest, who came to see if they had finished the grave. After he had inspected it, and declared it better than their sexton could have done, Owain took him aside and spoke in a low voice. ‘Father, talking of sextons, do you happen to know who is the sexton at Abbey Dore now? Is it still a Welshman called Meredydd?’

The parson looked at him covertly, suspecting this was no casual enquiry. ‘I think he is still there, but why do you ask?’

Owain became evasive, still not sure of where the priest’s sympathies lay. ‘Digging this hole made me think of sextons – and I had heard that that post at the abbey was almost a family benefice, handed down from father to son.’

‘I would not know about that, Owain, but certainly the fellow there now is called Meredydd. It is not often I go there, as local priests are not always welcome at Cistercian houses.’

Abbey Dore was a large and very rich abbey at the bottom of the Golden Valley, which ran down the eastern edge of the Black Mountains.

Owain was on the point of letting Father Samson into the secret, but after having castigated Caradoc for the same indiscretion he decided to keep quiet.

The diggers adjourned to the Skirrid for well-earned refreshment, during which Owain was beset with people offering their sympathy for the loss of his father. Eventually he was able to retire to a corner of the taproom with Dewi, his son and two others, Alun and Cynan, who had offered to go with him to Gwynedd.

‘We have to see my father safely into the ground tomorrow,’ he began soberly. ‘Then we need to carry out his last wishes, by recovering these relics and taking them to our prince up north.’

Dewi nodded in agreement. ‘The will of a dying man, especially one with the courage of Hywel ap Gruffydd, must be respected. So what are we going to do?’

‘It’s time to tell you where the bones of Arthur rest,’ said Owain. ‘And this time, no one – and I mean no one,’ he added, glaring at the abashed Caradoc. ‘No one breathes a single word until our task is accomplished . . . is that understood?’

There were nods and grunts from the four heads that were inclined close to his. Then he stood up and swallowed the rest of his ale. ‘Come outside. I’ll not reveal the hiding place in an alehouse, as I said before.’

They trooped out into the cold afternoon, but there was no wind and even a weak winter sun made it just bearable to sit on the tailboard of his heavy two-wheeled cart while he related the story he had heard from his father.

‘Hywel told me what he had learned from his father years ago,’ he began. ‘After the relics were retrieved from Glastonbury by a group of patriots, they were taken to Carmarthen, where they were hidden for a few years. The leader of the group was Meurig, one of the sons of the Lord Rhys, but ironically, when Rhys attacked the Normans in that town, they were in such danger that they were moved on to a safer place.’

‘What happened to this Meurig?’ asked Alun.

‘He died of wounds in the fighting at Carmarthen but managed to pass the secret to his sister, who called the remaining Guardians – I don’t know how. His half-brother, also called Meurig, led these men, and he was my great-grandfather!’

Dewi nodded wisely; for a miller he was well versed in Welsh history. ‘It was common for brothers to have the same name, as so many died in infancy. That same Lord Rhys, who is your ancestor, had no fewer than three sons called Meredydd.’

‘But where did they take these relics?’ demanded Caradoc impatiently.

Owain looked around cautiously at the empty countryside. ‘Abbey Dore!’ he murmured.

‘The abbey! What the hell did they take them there for?’ exclaimed Cynan, sounding indignant. ‘Those Cistercians were all Frenchmen then! They would have no truck with anything to do with Arthur, unless perhaps they were from Brittany.’

Dewi shook his head. ‘They came from Burgundy, that lot.’

‘And they must have known that the real bones were still in Glastonbury,’ objected Cynan. ‘The abbot there made great play with the news of their discovery, so that he could attract even more pilgrims and their pennies.’

Owain held up his hand to placate them. ‘Don’t fret over that! This ancestor of mine, this Meurig, was a drover and he knew many people between Carmarthen and Hereford. One was a Welshman, who became sexton at Abbey Dore.’

‘What good was that?’ muttered Alun.

‘It seems that this man was sympathetic to all things Welsh. Meurig took the box of bones on a packhorse when he was driving the next herd of cattle to Hereford and prevailed on this sexton to hide them at Abbey Dore.’

‘But why there, of all places?’ persisted Cynan.