‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.
‘Beg mercy,’ she said. ‘I called you master. It’s doctor, isn’t it? You treat the sick also?’
‘I… treat nobody and nothing,’ I said. ‘And cure even less. The doctorate’s something I picked up in the course of a long education. Which will never finish.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’
Tomos Ceddol, her father, had laboured on her grandparents’ farm. Good looking, and her mother had fallen for him and determined to marry him against her own father’s wishes. Anna’s mother had been the youngest of six.
Had Tomos Ceddol expected some kind of dowry? Had he expected to be rich, wed to a big farmer’s daughter? Whatever, he was soon embittered.
‘Not a good marriage,’ Anna Ceddol said, ‘and my mother, as soon as I could understand, was telling me I must never make the same mistake, to marry below me. My father had to go farther away to find work. My grandfather wanted nothing to do with him. While he was away, my mother taught me to read. Secretly. If he’d known, he’d have beaten her. And then my mother died of the summer plague, and we were left alone with him.’
‘How old was your brother?’
‘Very young. We didn’t know then that he wasn’t… as he should be.’
Some time had passed before it became clear that Siôn was not as other children. Crying in the night… that didn’t stop. Nor pissing his bed. His sister washed his sheets daily and made more in secret, or her father would have had him sleeping on straw. Soon Tomos Ceddol was become ashamed of his son. Could not bear to look at him.
‘Spent as much time away from the house as he could. He’d come home drunk – so as to get to sleep, he said. But oft-times, the noise was too much. He’d awake in a tearing rage and… hurt Siôn. One night he took him out to the barn. I found him kicking my brother where he lay, and I pulled him away, and he hit me until I knew not where I was. The next day, I loaded a handcart and took my brother away.’
‘Where could you go?’
She shrugged.
‘Kept on walking until we were too far away for my father to find us. I’d robbed him, see.’ She looked at me, eyes wide open and unmoving. ‘Took all the money he had in the house. Well… he’d no cause for complaint. It would have cost him more if we’d stayed.’
‘Where was this? Where did you live?’
‘A good distance away. You’ll excuse me, Dr Dee, for not saying where. If he hasn’t drunk himself to death in a ditch by now, I don’t want him finding us.’
‘Did you know by then of Siôn’s… qualities?’
She shook her head.
‘We came down the border, village to village, for some years. For some time I had work caring for the small daughters of a widowed gentleman who paid a village woman to look after Siôn by day. It seemed a good situation until I learned that I was expected to marry him. He was older than my father, and I… Anyway, it was back on the road until the money was all gone.’
I waited.
‘Then another rich man took us in.’
Looking at her, was it any surprise? All the rich men would be waiting in line.
‘He gave me money and offered me a house to live in. In Presteigne.’
‘Generous,’ I said.
‘It was a good dwelling, behind one of the clothing workshops. Too good to be given without demands on my… time.’
They were walking out of town when a man and his family stopped and gave them a ride on their stock cart. Pedr Morgan, shepherd of Pilleth, returning from taking fat lambs to market. They’d spent the night in his stable. She’d asked if there was anywhere she might find work and somewhere to live for a while.
‘The rest… is of small import. Save that it took time. The people here are slow to befriend a stranger. But at least there are no rich men, save Master Price. Rich men have not been good for me.’
‘Nor poor men, it sounds like.’
‘Except for Pedr Morgan.’
Who had lost his finest fleecing shears – must have fallen off the cart in one of the fields, he had no idea which. Been searching for a fortnight and more. Taking Anna’s advice, he’d shown his old pair to Siôn Ceddol, who had found the missing shears within an hour. Within a week, he’d found two new springs in the hillside. Wells were sunk, the Ceddols given food and offered dry barns to sleep in. And then Anna Ceddol had happened upon the Bryn, where nobody wanted to live and could be hers, for nothing.
And then Siôn Ceddol had found the thigh bone. The first of hundreds of body parts.
‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.
All the time she’d been talking, the red hat had been bobbing above the yellowing grass. No sign of it now.
‘He won’t be far away,’ she said. ‘Where did you put the bone? You might as well tell me.’
I told her I’d gone up to the little church, finding it empty. And then, walking around the side, had come upon…
‘Oh Jesu,’ Anna Ceddol said.
Already she was running up the hill, lifting her skirts, her breath coming hard.
I caught her up.
‘Mistress, it was the best test of him I could think of. A place he’s not used to going – a place he might avoid – though quite close. I needed to know how—’
‘I thought you understood!’
It was almost a scream. The most emotion I’d seen her show, and made me sick to my heart.
‘Listen,’ I said, running alongside of her, panting. ‘Please… I think I do understand. I think your brother possesses rare natural skills of a kind which are yet… fully explicable by emerging science. I’d like to… to help him develop them.’
‘That’s not possible.’
She stumbled on, the mist gathering more densely around us. Her head was lifted to the obscured sky, and her lips were moving in what looked to be rapid prayer, as we came up to the church’s grey walls. The tower was darkly garlanded in mist which seemed to hide no sun, trees bending away into the sloping churchyard. A cawking of crows and ravens, intimate in the fog, and, mingled with them, a kind of liquid wailing which sent Anna Ceddol, sobbing in relief, forward in a rush, to follow the church wall to the holy shrine of Our Lady of Pilleth.
I’d been in a hurry when I’d brought the bone and now saw the shrine and holy well as if for the first time: the green-slimed rocks, the steps down to the spring-fed pool, the stone wall built around it making it look like an open tomb.
On her ledge against the church walls, the mother of our saviour was smirched by the grime of neglect. Abandoned. Behind the body of the church, almost certainly older in its origins, the shrine of the holy virgin had been given back to nature.
And the bone given back to Siôn Ceddol.
He sat with his legs overhanging the pool, rocking from side to side, the dripping thigh bone in his arms, a gurgling in his throat.
He could, I suppose, have found it by accident, but why would he even come this way? And I’d hidden it close to the edge of the well, where bushes concealed the shallow water, and covered it over with silt and sodden leaves.
It was conclusive enough for me. I turned to his sister.
‘I do understand him. I know what he does.’
As if this were all that mattered.
Oh, the blindness of science.
I went down to the holy well, where rough steps sank towards the water, the mist gathered above it like a soiled veil. Siôn Ceddol clutched his bone to his chest and looked up at me as though he’d never seen me before and snarled, his face twisting like to a gargoyle’s.
And then…
‘He makes mockery of God!’
Christ, no.