Lady of Hay (33 page)

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 center of the bailey where the Norman tower had stood. Around her rose high pinkish-gray 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 around. 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 toward the door. For a moment after the door opened she and Janet stood staring at each other incredulously. 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 called 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-gray 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 skeptical, 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 Mallt, 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, but there must be dozens of parishes up and down the borders that claim stories about her. She was reputed to be a witch, you know.”

Jo raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know.” She leaned forward and took the bottle out of his hand, refilling his glass and then her own. “I’m not a historian, David. I know nothing about her save what I remember from my”—she hesitated, seeing the disbelief in his face—“my dreams, if you like to call them that. I looked her up in the
Dictionary of National Biography
,
but I didn’t look at any books on Welsh history. Perhaps I should.”

Janet appeared with a saucer of peanuts, which she put on the arm of David’s chair. “My husband is a bit of an expert on local legend,” she said almost apologetically. “We must shut him up about it, because if he starts, he’ll go on all night.”

“No, I won’t.” He frowned at her. “All I said was that Joanna does not look like her. She was reputed to have been a giant. She is said to have stood in the churchyard at Hay and, finding a stone in her shoe, thrown it across the Wye, where it landed at Llowes.” He grinned. “The stone is about ten feet long! And of course she built Hay Castle singlehanded in a night. And she was Mallt y Nos, who you can see riding across the mountains with the hounds of hell in the wild of a storm.” He laughed out loud at the expression on Jo’s face. “She must have been a fearsome lady, Jo. Overpowering, Amazonian even, who kept old William in terror of his life. Or that is the way the story goes.”

Jo said nothing for a moment. Then slowly she began to pace up and down the carpet. “I don’t think she was especially tall,” she said reflectively. “Taller than William, yes. And taller than a lot of the Welsh, but then they are a short people—” She broke off in embarrassment, looking at her host.

He roared with laughter. “I’m five foot four, girl, and proud of it. It’s power not height that counts in the rugby scrum, and don’t you forget it!”

Smiling, Jo helped herself to peanuts. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like being someone else, even if only as a vivid dream. She doesn’t inhabit my skin. I find myself in hers. I think and speak and feel as her. But I don’t know her future any more than she would have known it. Now, talking to you, I know roughly what happened to her, but in the regressions I know no more than we know now what will happen to us tomorrow. If in later life she was called Moll Walbee, I don’t know it yet. If later she came to dominate William, I have no clue. As a young woman only a year or so married she was afraid of him. And her only defense against him was disdain.”

There was a moment’s silence. Janet had seated herself on the arm of a chair near the kitchen door. “Do you really believe you are her reincarnation?” she asked at last, awed. “Really, in your heart of hearts?”

Jo nodded slowly. “I think I am beginning to wonder, yes.”

“And are you going to go on being hypnotized to see what happened?”

This time Jo shrugged. “I’m not too happy about being hypnotized, to be honest. Sometimes I think I must, other times I’m too scared and I swear I’ll never go back. I tried to get the hypnotherapist to make me forget her, but it didn’t work, so now I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Well, that’s honest at least.” David had wandered across to his bookshelves. He picked out a heavy tome. “People who are capable of regression usually, if not invariably, regress into several previous lives,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever read of a case where just one life was picked out like this.” He smiled at her quizzically. “It is most intriguing. Do you think that anyone else from Maude’s lifetime has returned with her?”

Jo hesitated. “It is as much as I can do to believe in myself,” she said slowly, “but sometimes I wonder…” Nick’s face suddenly rose before her eyes. A Nick she had never known. A Nick, his face contorted with jealousy and anger, who had pinned her to the bed and raped her, and behind his face another, a face with red-gold hair and beard—the man who had tried to strangle her.

“Jo, what is it?” Janet’s whisper brought her back abruptly to the room where she was sitting.

She smiled and gave another shrug. “Just something I thought of, someone who’s been behaving rather strangely.” She bit her knuckles for a moment. “But if he is the reincarnation of someone from my—from Matilda’s past—who is he?”

David let out a little chuckle. “Don’t worry about it too much, girl. I’m sure it will come to you. Either that, or you’ll regain your wits. Now, why don’t I find a bottle of wine so we can celebrate your visit, then while we eat I’ll help you plan an itinerary so you can follow Matilda’s footsteps, starting at Hay, where most of her legend is centered. That is why you’ve come to Wales, isn’t it? To follow her footsteps?”

“I suppose it must be,” Jo said after a moment.

“You know,” he said, his hand to his cheek. “You could be like her, at that. I suspect you’re a very determined lady when you want to be!”

Jo laughed. “I have that reputation, I believe.”

“And you’re not superstitious or anything?” he went on, almost as an afterthought.

“Not in the slightest.”

“Good.” He handed her the book. “Some bedtime reading for you, Jo. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

***

Nick let himself into his apartment with a sigh. He dropped his case to the floor and picked up the mail from inside the door, then he stopped and looked around, listening. “Is someone there?” he called.

An inner door opened and Sam appeared, lifting his hand in a laconic greeting.

“Sam!” Nick threw down the letter.

Sam raised a cynical eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve had so ecstatic a welcome for years!”

“Shut up and listen!” Nick pushed past him and went through into the living room. “I hurt Jo.”

Sam had followed him and was about to help himself to a drink. He swung around and stared at Nick. “You did what?” he said.

“I hurt her, Sam. Last night. We were talking about the regressions and she began to tell me about things that had happened to her in that life—things she hadn’t mentioned under hypnosis. She began talking about de Clare—describing how they had made love…” He went to the tray of drinks. “I grabbed her, Sam. I saw red and grabbed her. I wanted to punish her. I wanted to hurt her. I might have killed her.”

Sam was very still. “Where is she?”

Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. I called a dozen times this morning and went back at lunchtime. Her car had gone. I went up to the apartment and looked around. She’d taken her typewriter and a suitcase. There wasn’t a note or anything.”

Sam pushed him aside and poured out two glasses of Scotch. He handed his brother one, then stood watching him thoughtfully. “How badly did you hurt her?”

Nick shrugged. “She knocked the tray off the coffee table and cut her arm. That was an accident, but I was pretty rough with her—”

“Did you rape her?”

Nick could feel Sam’s eyes on him. He straightened defiantly. “Technically, I suppose I did.”

“Technically?”

There was something in the coldness of Sam’s voice that made Nick step back. “She and I have been living together on and off for years, for God’s sake!”

“That is hardly the point.” Sam sat down slowly. “So you forced her. Did you beat her up?”

“I hit her. She was covered in bruises. I don’t know what came over me, Sam. It was as if I wasn’t me anymore. I couldn’t control myself. I knew I was hurting her, and I didn’t want to stop!” He fumbled in the pocket of his jacket for a pack of cigarettes, extracted one, then threw it down with a curse.
“Christ!
This is all such a mess. I was jealous, Sam, of a man who died God knows how many hundreds of years ago. I thought for a while it was Jo going out of her mind. Now I think it’s me!” He threw himself down opposite his brother. “You’ve got to help me. What the hell do I do?”