The Pendragon Legend (12 page)

“Were you ever in France, Doctor?”

“Of course, many times.”

“Do you speak French as well as you speak English?”

“About the same.”

It was already getting dark, but I could see that Cynthia was looking at me with growing interest.

“Doctor, you’re like the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. You know
everything
.”

“I do know rather a lot,” I replied nervously.

“I believe you even speak Sanskrit.”

“Fluently,” I replied. But she believed that too.

“And you must surely know the Russian novelists. Tell me
something
about Dostoevsky or Béla Bartók. I’ve a friend who never stops talking about them.”

“I never met Bartók,” I said, untruthfully, shocked at her
ignorance
. “But I knew old Dostoevsky really well. He and my father were at primary school together, and he often came for supper. He had a beard like Pierce Gwyn Mawr’s.”

“How lucky you are, to have known such famous people as a child. I’m sure you could even tell me why Aix-la-Chapelle is called Aachen in German.”

I didn’t tell her, partly because I didn’t know, and also because I had suddenly seen through her and become thoroughly annoyed with myself. Women take me in all the time. There are moments when they behave as if they were perfectly human. On such
occasions
a simple philologist like me will hold forth, launching into
serious expositions, in the belief that the woman is actually
interested
in what he has to say. But no woman has ever yet taken an interest in an intellectual matter for its own sake. Either she wants to woo the man by a display of attention, or she is seeking to improve her mind, which is even worse. The first of these is after money; the second is in pursuit of edification, but has other motives which are no less self-interested: she wants to adopt the pose of a woman of culture, as if it were some sort of cloak to be worn at the opera.

I got up and paced angrily back and forth. Cynthia sat
staring
out from her armchair, lost in reverie. Her gaze was distant, dreamy, noble. She was like the inhabitant of some Welsh
fairytale
land that would inspire anyone who had been there with the profoundest yearning.

But the instant I gauged her true intellectual merit something was released inside me, and I became aware again of how young she was, and how lovely. I can never feel much attraction to a woman whom I consider clever—it feels too much like courting a man. But once I had realised she was just another sweet little gosling, I began to woo her in earnest.

“Cynthia,” I began, “I really deplore the amount of time I’ve been spending with these books. Life passes so quickly. You see, I grew up so quickly I never even noticed, and just as suddenly I’ll be an old man. And it will all have gone. My memory will fail, and I’ll forget everything I’ve ever read. When I look back over my life I shall have to face the fact that I’ve always been alone.”

By now it was quite dark in the room. I stood at the window. Outside an unusually atmospheric sunset was being projected onto the screen of the heavens. At such moments sentimental declarations are twice as effective, according to books and in my private experience. I proceeded to deploy arguments of a more personal nature.

“I’ve never met anyone who understood me so completely. You are the first woman, Cynthia, with whom I can be truly myself. It’s as if you had once been my sister, or my wife.”

Old Goethe was writhing in his grave.

Cynthia got to her feet, dreamily, and came up to me in the bay of the window. It was the sign I had been waiting for. This time I
knew she would not slap my face. But as I stood there summoning up my courage to manage the business in hand, she asked me, in a voice choking with emotion:

“Oh, Doctor … do you even know algorithms?”

“By heart,” I replied, and drew her to me.

I kissed her. She clung to me for quite some time, with no sign of resistance. Visions of sunlit springtime days, of dazzling lakes and azure skies flashed by inside me: as if I were sitting in a train. Life was wonderful, after all.

At last she broke free. She stared at me for a moment, deeply embarrassed, then declared:

“You still haven’t told me why Aix-la-Chapelle is called Aachen in German.”

It was ten-thirty in the evening. I was seated in my room, in the much-celebrated comfort of an English armchair. In fact I wasn’t so much sitting as sprawled out almost supine. I felt too idle to go to bed, and in too much of a daydream to read.

The events of the last few days had fused into a sort of golden haze, from which every so often random flashes leapt out,
filling
me with alarm. Blended into this haze were the
centuries-old
atmosphere of Llanvygan Castle, the Earl’s aquatic monsters, the Rosicrucians, and Cynthia … Cynthia, I mused—goddess of the moon, Queen of the Night, my latest dalliance, perhaps my future love. Poets had bestowed her celestial name on the great Elizabeth. Cynthia, in whose veins flowed the blood of the line of Gwynedd and with it the secrets of centuries, the accumulated nobility of an ancient race of lords of the mountains, the aurora borealis itself. I congratulated myself on having actually kissed the aurora borealis, Queen Elizabeth and the whole tradition of the English sonnet.

There was a knock at the door. Osborne stepped in. I felt the same fondness for him too.

“Forgive me, but I noticed your light was still on.”

“Have a seat,” I replied. “Is something the matter? You look so serious.” 

“Well, my uncle hasn’t shown himself for several days … but there’s something else. If it goes on like this I’ll become
superstitious
myself. Are you aware, Doctor, that old Habakkuk the Prophet disappeared the day after his attack of Revelations?”

“Yes, I heard about that. The Reverend’s account of the
episode
verged on the miraculous.”

“Well, I’ve found the old boy … But why all this talk? What would you say to a little outing? I just can’t make head or tail of the whole business.”

“I’ll get my coat.”

“I’ll have a word with Maloney, if he’s still up. This is just the thing for him.”

The light seemed to be on in his room. We knocked and,
hearing
his positive reply, pushed the door open.

The light was indeed on, but Maloney was nowhere to be seen. I instantly thought of the Rosicrucians’ power to make themselves invisible.

“Where is the fellow?” asked Osborne. “He’s just told us to come in.”

“Coming,” said Maloney’s voice, from some indefinable place that was clearly not in the room.

Seconds later a pair of legs appeared in the window frame, dangling from above. Then their owner, dressed entirely in black, leapt lightly down onto the floor.

“Training,” he explained, nonchalantly.

“But why at night?” I asked.

“We Connemarans always climb at night. When it’s too dark to see you have to trust your instincts, and they never let you down. If there aren’t any rocks, a good wall will do, or the trees down in the park.”

“Right. Well, come and see what old Habakkuk is up to. Bring your rope.”

We got in the Delage and drove for about twenty minutes down the main road, under a brilliant moon.

“From here we proceed on foot—don’t want to disturb him. He needn’t be aware of us. He didn’t notice me here yesterday.”

For some time we continued along the road. No one spoke. The profound silence, the dark, distant mountains in all their immensity
and the silver moonlight held us in their grip. Above us, at a
terrifying
height, towered the rock on whose peak stood the ruins of Pendragon Castle.

Osborne turned off the road and we made our way through the dense thicket. For some fifteen minutes we struggled on through the trees, slithered down precipitous slopes, and at last found
ourselves
before a high stone wall.

“These are the remains of the old wall that used to surround the whole of Pendragon,” said Osborne. “Now, where’s the gap? To the left, or right?”

After some time we found it.

“Look,” said Osborne. “You can see this gap has been made quite recently. You used to have to go round the entire wall to get to Llyn-y Castle—the Castle Lake. Who on earth would have made this way through? And why? On we go now: quiet as you can.”

Maloney crept ahead soundlessly, and at great speed. Under my feet, however, the brushwood crackled and snapped, and I kept getting murderous glances from the others.

We arrived at an almost sheer rockface.

“We have to climb it,” said Osborne. “From up there we’ll have a brilliant view of the entire lake, and no one will see us.”

Before I had even begun to consider how we might make the ascent, Maloney had reached the top. He undid the rope he had around his waist and promptly pulled us up. Osborne went first, with no problem. I followed, with great difficulty.

“You’d make a pretty feeble monkey,” Maloney observed,
contemptuously
.

From the other side of the rock we looked down on to a small lake, glittering in the moonlight. I had never before seen anything quite so unearthly. Across the water, huge trees ringed the shore, watching over the stillness under the soaring peak of Pendragon. It was a lake from a fairytale, with the fairy’s coral castle sunk in its depths.

And there, in a strange little boat shaped like a tub, sat old Pierce Gwyn Mawr, quite motionless. With his flowing white beard draped over his folded arms, he stared straight ahead, through half-closed eyes. He might have been sleeping.

“What’s the old chap doing?” said Maloney, restless as always.

“I’ve no idea,” replied Osborne. “Perhaps he’s waiting for Tylwyth Teget—that’s the fairy who lives in the lake. He’s
obviously
waiting for something, or someone. Perhaps we should too.”

We waited a very long time, lying at full stretch up on the rock. Maloney became increasingly impatient. Finally he suggested we should either throw something into the water to wake the old boy up, or else go home. The eeriness of the place clearly had the same sort of effect on his highly instinctive nature as a ghost would on a dog.

But Osborne and I continued gazing, enraptured, at the
fantastical
scene. It was a Hans Christian Andersen illustration come to life, and my dormant child’s consciousness was stirring in me, like the soft strains of a distant violin.

Suddenly the prophet raised his arms and began to sing. His strange, senile, whistling voice entirely failed to string the notes together into a tune: each protracted utterance seemed to be
individually
torn out of him, to be followed by another quite
disconnected
from it. The overall effect was distinctly weird, not so much song as incantation. The words, being Welsh, were
incomprehensible
to me.

And then, no less suddenly, the bushes facing us on the far side of the lake parted, and someone came down to the water’s edge. The old man ended his incantation, turned towards him and, without getting up, made a profound bow.

By this time the newcomer was standing on a small rock, every contour of his face clearly visible in the moonlight.

He was a powerfully-built man, very old, of almost
preternatural
size and dressed in black, a close-fitting Spanish outfit of long ago, like those worn by the night guards at Llanvygan. Only the collar was different, an enormous white ruff the size of a
millstone
. And the face … was that of a statue, ancient, timeless, quite beautiful in its august dignity, without a trace of humanity: the bleak, unfeeling face of a Northern god.

He began to speak, in a low but penetrating voice. The
language
was again Welsh. Pierce seized his oars and rowed his
coracle
swiftly to the shore. He climbed out, secured it to a tree, kissed
the stranger’s hand, then vanished into the thicket. The stranger remained standing where he was for a while longer.

Slowly but unmistakably he was turning in the direction of our rock. Then he stopped and glared pointedly in our direction, as if he could actually see us. With a face of terror, Maloney gripped my arm. The unwavering stare of those wolf-like eyes produced an unbearable tension in all of us. I was afraid I might leap up at any moment. Maloney was uttering strange, soft cries.

The stranger turned on his heel and vanished into the gloom of the huge trees.

“Time to go,” said Osborne.

He let himself speedily down the rock, and we followed him. We took a short cut through the thicket, then went out through the wall and back to the main road.

Maloney wasn’t too pleased with this.

“I say … let’s at least try and see where they went.”

But Osborne warned him against it.

We almost ran towards the Delage. Though we had so carelessly abandoned it, it was waiting for us amiably enough on the road. After the Castle Lake, the wall, and the ghostly old men, there was something very reassuring about the car—the triumph of
technology
and the comforting familiarity of the twentieth century.

We were driving home at considerable speed, when Osborne suddenly stopped the car on a bend.

“Take a look at that,” he said, and pointed to Pendragon, now clearly visible from where we were.

The old tower, without question or possibility of optical
illusion
, was filled with light.

“Who’s living there?” I asked.

“According to my information, no one has for two hundred years,” said Osborne. And he set the car moving again. He was clearly agitated, and unwilling to talk for fear of betraying the fact. We returned to Llanvygan in silence.

“Come to my room and have a drink,” he suggested.

After three large tumblers of strong whisky—which we
reckoned
we had thoroughly earned—Osborne’s tension began at last to ease.

“Do sit down,” he began. “So, what did you make of all that?”

“What do you make of it?—that’s the question,” said Maloney. “I can’t believe you don’t know the old gent. He even looks a bit like you. He must be your uncle, or the ghost of your late
grandfather
.”

“Call me Jack Robinson if I’ve ever seen him before.”

“But, somehow, he knew we were there. He was looking towards us as if he really could see us. I don’t know why, but it was a pretty nasty feeling.”

“Where could they possibly have gone?” Osborne wondered. “You can’t go anywhere from the far side of the lake. Twenty yards from the water the rock face starts, with Pendragon up on the peak. All I can think is that there must be some secret entrance to the castle. By the time we got to the bend in the road they had made it all the way to the top and put the light on in the tower.”

“It is possible,” I remarked. “I never yet read of an old castle that didn’t have a secret entrance. And that’s not just in books, but in actual reality. It’s one of those rare situations where literature shows some sort of connection with real life.”

“Then what we have to do is quite straightforward,” said Maloney. “Tomorrow, in daylight, we’ll take a look at the far end of the lake. Ten to one I’ll find you your secret entrance. We Connemarans are pretty good at that sort of thing.”

“In any case, we have to go back to Pendragon,” I added, “to see who’s living up there.”

“Well, well,” mused Osborne. “Something in me doesn’t like the idea at all. Because, you see: just suppose the man we saw is in fact living up there. Whether he’s human or a spirit, he’s
obviously
a gentleman. Have we the right to trouble him without an invitation?”

“I take your point,” I replied. “An Englishman’s home is his castle. All the more, if your home is a castle. On the other hand, to some extent Pendragon belongs to you, as heir apparent to the Earldom of Gwynedd. You’ve more right than anyone to be there—not counting the Earl himself, of course.”

“There’s something in that,” he said. “I’ll sleep on it.”

“One further question,” I went on. “What made you decide to visit the Castle Lake yesterday? You never mentioned that
midnight
jaunts were a favourite pastime.”

“I don’t go in for them at all. I like to sleep at night, however petty bourgeois that may sound. But why I went is a story in itself. Have a look at this.”

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a slip of paper.

“Someone stuck this on the windscreen of the little Rover
yesterday
morning.”

I studied the paper. It was covered in a strange, archaic writing, of the sort you find in seventeenth-century manuscripts in the British Museum. No one nowadays writes with such a flourish. Our hands have altered their shape since then.

It read:
‘Pendragon, forte si vellis videre Petrum senem vade ad lacum castelli media nocte ubi et alium rerum mirabilium testis eris.’

“It’s Spanish,” declared Maloney, “and, I’m sorry to say, it’s not a language I ever learnt.”

“Not at all. It’s Latin,” said Osborne, and translated it: “‘Pendragon, if you wish to see old Peter (i.e. Pierce), go to the Castle Lake at midnight, where you will be witness to other
miraculous
things as well.’”

“If this was actually written by the old boy himself,” said Maloney, nodding thoughtfully, “I’d say he’d be a teacher by profession, or why on earth would he write in Latin? Anyway, he’s a real show-off.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t know English?” Osborne observed.

“Or else … ” I blurted out, then stopped short. The stupidity of my idea surpassed even Maloney’s.

It had occurred to me that the man who had written it—the stranger by the lake—was in fact so old, so truly ancient, that had he written in English his archaic turn of phrase would have been incomprehensible. That was why he had chosen the
timeless
, unchanging language of Latin. But of course I couldn’t utter this daft notion, which could have occurred only to a philologist.

“And did you see the old gent yesterday too?” asked Maloney.

“No,” replied Osborne, “only Habakkuk, sitting in his coracle, as he was tonight. The other chap didn’t appear. Or he might have, only I didn’t wait long enough to find out.”

At this point we went off to bed, each nursing his own
private
theory about what had occurred. Maloney was no doubt
wracking his brain for the most spectacular and Connemaran method of catching the old man.

The next morning a boy from the village called on me. He had been sent by the Rev Dafyd Jones. He handed me a letter, the gist of which was that the vicar desired to speak with me urgently and in the strictest confidence. He asked me to meet him in the little graveyard behind the church at ten, adding, with a profusion of apologies, that it was a matter of extreme importance.

I had absolutely no idea what it might be. Against what species of non-existent horror could this excitable visionary be seeking my help? Then I recalled the previous night’s events at the lake, and I hastened off, in some agitation, down to the village.

I had no problem finding the little graveyard behind the church, with its lovely trees beckoning to eternal rest. The parson was already there, pacing back and forth, and gesticulating to himself in the restrained manner imposed by his ecclesiastical dignity and by British reserve. I thought he might be rehearsing his Sunday sermon.

When I called out to him he gave such a start that I became alarmed myself.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he gabbled. “You, sir, are a well-known physician.”

“Sir, I am not a well-known physician,” I replied in
astonishment
. These people had obviously conspired to make me a medical doctor.