'I'm only going to Kington.'
'You're going back to the Old Golden Land,' Annie said, half-smiling. He'd shown her the letter from Henry's neighbour, Mrs Whitney. 'Admit it, you're going back.'
'What happens?' Andy says- 'Well, you go around the stone thirteen times and then you lie on the fairy hill and you get the vision. You see into the future, or maybe just into yourself. According to the legend, John Bottle went round the stone and when he lay on the mound he went down and down until he entered the great hall of the Fairy Queen with whom he naturally fell in love. It was so wonderful down there that he didn't want to leave. But they sent him back, and when he returned to the real world he became a great seer and prophet.
'Of course.. – Andy ate a black olive -',.. he could never settle in the mundane world, and he knew that one day he'd have to go back..
Powys drove his nine-year-old Mini out of the city, turning off before the Wye bridge.
In essence, Alfred Watkins had been right about the existence of leys. Powys felt this strongly. And Henry Kettle had been better than anybody at finding where the old tracks ran, by means of dowsing.
'After all these years,' he'd said once to Powys, 'I still don't know what they are. But I know they're there. And I know that sometimes, when you're standing on one, it can affect you. Affect your balance, like. Give you delusions sometimes, like as if you've had a few too many. Nothing psychic, mind, nothing like that. But they do interfere with you. Sometimes.'
They might interfere with you when you were walking along them, with or without your dowsing rods. Or when you were driving along a stretch of road which happened – as many did – to follow one of the old lines. Many accident blackspots had been found to be places where leys crossed.
Coincidence.
Of course. And you could go crazy avoiding stretches of road just because they happened to align with local churches and standing stones. Nobody really went that far.
Certainly not Henry. Who, you would have thought, was too experienced a dowser ever to be caught out that way.
But when an experienced dowser crashed into a wall around an ancient burial mound, it demanded the kind of investigation the police would never conduct.
He didn't expect to find anything. But Henry Kettle was his friend. He was touched and grateful that Henry had bequeathed to him his papers – perhaps the famous journal that nobody had ever seen. And the rods, of course, don't forget the rods. (Why should he leave his rods to a man who couldn't dowse?)
Powys left Hereford by King's Acre and headed towards the Welsh border, where the sun hung low in the sky. During his lunchbreak, he'd spent half an hour with the OS maps of Hereford and eastern Radnorshire. He'd drawn a circle around the blob on the edge of the town of Crybbe where it said:
The Tump
(mound)
He'd taken a twelve-inch Perspex ruler and put one end over the circle and then, holding the end down with one finger, moved the ruler in an arc, making little pencil marks as he went along, whenever he came upon an ancient site. When the ruler had covered three hundred and sixty degrees he took it away and examined all the marks- haphazard as circles and crosses in a football-pool coupon.
And stared into the map like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball or the bottom of a teacup. Waiting for a meaningful image or a pattern to form among the mesh of roads and paths and contour lines… mound, circle, stone, church, earthwork, moat, holy well…
But from a ley-hunter's point of view, it was all very disappointing.
There was a large number of old stones and mounds all along the Welsh border, but the Tump didn't seem to align with any of them. The nearest possible ancient site was Crybbe parish church, less than a mile away. He looked it up in Pevsner's Buildings and established that it was certainly pre-Reformation – always a strong indication that it had been built on a pre-Christian site. But when he drew a line from the Tump to the church and then continued it for several miles, he found it didn't cross any other mounds, churches or standing stones. Not even a crossroads or a hilltop cairn.
The ley system, which appeared to cover almost the whole of Britain and could be detected in many parts of the world, seemed to have avoided Crybbe.
'Bloody strange,' Powys had said aloud, giving up.
What the hell was there for Henry Kettle to dowse in Crybbe? Why had Max Goff chosen the place as a New Age centre?
Powys came into the straggling village of Pembridge, where the age-warped black-and-whites seemed to hang over the street instead of trees. Driving down towards Kington and the border, he felt a nervousness edging in, like a foreign station on the radio at night. He rarely came this way. Too many memories. Or maybe only one long memory, twisted with grief.
Fiona, Ben's girlfriend, laughing and burrowing in one of the bags for the bottle of champagne. 'Better open this now, warm shampoo's so yucky.'
Ben holding up a fresh-from-the-publisher copy of the book. On the cover, a symbolic golden pentagram is shining on a hillside. In the foreground, against a late-sunset sky, a few stars sprinkled in the corners, is the jagged silhouette of a single standing stone. Across the top, the title. The Old Golden Land. Below the stone, in clean white lettering, the author's name, J. M. Powys.
And below that it says. With photographs by Rose Hart.
Rose looks at you, and her eyes are bright enough to burn through the years, and now the pain almost dissolves the memory.
Ben saying, 'A toast, then…'
But Andy is raising a hand. 'There remains one small formality.'
Everybody looking at him.
'I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.'
Forget it, you think. No way.
'I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.'
Fiona clapping her hands. 'Oh, yes. Do go round the stone, Joe.'
CHAPTER VI
Henry's place was the end of a Welsh long-house, divided into three cottages. The other two had been knocked into one, and Mrs Gwen Whitney lived there with her husband.
Powys arrived around eight-thirty, driving through deep wells of shadow. Remembering Henry coming out to meet him one evening round about this time, his dog, Alf, dancing up to the car.
That night, twelve years ago, Powys pleading with Henry: 'Come on… it's as much your book as mine. The Old Golden Land by Henry Kettle and Joe Powys.'
'Don't be daft, boy. You writes, I dowses. That's the way of it. Besides, there's all that funny stuff in there – I might not agree with some of that. You know me, nothing psychic. When I stop thinking of this as science… well, I don't know where I'll be.'
And an hour or so later: 'But, Henry, at the very least…'
'And don't you start offering me money! What do I want any more money for, with the wife gone and the daughter doing more than well for herself in Canada? You go ahead, boy. Just don't connect me with any of it, or I'll have to disown you, see.'
Silence now. The late sun turning the cottage windows to tinfoil. No dog leaping out at the car.
Mrs Whitney opened her door as he walked across.
'Mr Powys.' A heavy woman in a big, flowery frock. Smiling that sad, sympathetic smile which came easily to the faces of country women, always on nodding terms with death.
'You remember me?'
'Not changed, have you? Anyway, it's not so long.'