The Echo of Crows, page 2
Jane would know there was probably nobody left in Ledwardine with an ancestor who’d died here, but she wasn’t letting go.
‘I can’t do much, Irene… but you can. Ledwardine is one of the last traditional villages in the UK to hold onto its Gallows Lane, right? I’ll see to social media, but if you can get it in the papers about the council getting rid of the old names…’
‘But—’ Now he got it; he could see her turning and beginning to walk away. ‘Jane, I’m just a very junior reporter working on one of the local papers that don’t do as well as they used to pre-Internet.’
‘You’re a professional journalist’ – her eyes gleamed – ‘in a position to publicize this scandal and be believed in a way the Net fact-shredders rarely are, I hope.’
‘In a Welsh evening paper that really isn’t interested in what’s happening in a village over the English border? And this kind of thing is hardly what you’d call a scandal any more. It’s the norm.’
The Welsh evening paper was his first job, and he’d been lucky to get it… but for how long, when local papers everywhere in Britain were rapidly closing down? But this one was surviving, just, and it was also convenient, because although Eirion was actually working in Wales, his office was not much more than an hour’s drive from the village of Ledwardine.
He stepped under a vast, very English, horse chestnut tree loaded with conkers in their spiky green shells. He needed the job but he probably needed to hold onto Jane Watkins more. He looked sideways at her in the late autumn sunshine. She was in patched, dark-blue jeans and an innocent white T-shirt. Did he want her to know how deep it went, how he’d never get tired of gazing at her? How he wanted to look at her at the start of every new day, until the day he died still staring at her, even if she was only inside his head?
Hell, he couldn’t tell her that, like they were in some Victorian romantic novel he’d never want to read.
He watched her moving away between the trees lining what was destined to pass into oblivion as Gallows Lane… and then found himself going after her to concede defeat, back down, let her win.
Because Jane Watkins always won.
3
The voice of God
‘YERE WE GOES, then, boy,’ Gomer Parry shouted and Huw Owen realized, as he was letting the Defender slip out of gear, that, compared with Gomer, he was a boy; must be at least ten years younger than the old feller on the other end of the tightening tow rope.
He wound his window the whole way down, and prepared to get good and wet, as a series of clunks told him he and his vehicle were being dragged out of the deep depression in the field and back onto the lane, where they rocked and then settled.
‘Go on, then, give him a try,’ Gomer called from behind.
‘No chance,’ Huw muttered grimly, as the Land Rover did a couple of coughs… then fired. ‘Bloody hell! Can’t believe it. An hour back I had a dead car, a dead phone and I thought me own end might be nigh. Then you come along and it’s like it never happened. Even the water levels are going down fast.’
Huw switched off the engine and clambered out to check around the wheels.
Even the tyres seemed to have survived. As God didn’t owe Huw any favours, he figured he must have Gomer to thank, so he pulled out his wallet hastily and grabbed several notes. Immediately, Gomer declined the offer, waving it away emphatically.
‘No, no, can’t ’ave that. Didn’t ’ave to come far. I was sussing out a job not far from here when the vicar rang and the rest was just a bit of old rope. I will have a cider at the local pub, though, if you push me.’
Huw grinned, wondered if they did lunches and if he had time to check out the church. An hour later, after refreshments and a call to Merrily to let her know they were safe, that’s where they headed.
*
Huw hadn’t expected that what could be the River Monnow would be thrashing down the nave when they entered.
All right, it didn’t. The nave was dry. So why did it sound like this? The river was some way from the church and not very big normally but, after hours of rain, it had swollen and strengthened and its unlikely roar was there, blasting under the pulpit – an unusual three-tier pulpit – like it was the voice of God.
Or some god, because, as Huw had learned recently from a tourist guide to the area, this may once have been the site of pre-Christian worship. A pagan place, its location linked to legends, its position in the landscape to strange phenomena and its very name to an ancient murder. He’d read the guide and a magazine he’d received from an old friend just days ago. How very weird his attention had suddenly been drawn to this unlikely ancient church and its curious ‘royal’ history by something unexpected in his mail. And then by unexpected weather.
Coincidence or divine intent? A crow flying past a window and cawing loudly cast a fleeting shadow on the wall in the nave. It felt so strange. He thought of Noah visited by a dove to show he was saved. A crow was linked through folk history as the sometimes carrier of a darker message.
Too much darkness. Already Clodock had its claws into Huw, whose hands were suddenly tightly gripping one another under a prayerbook shelf. How could somewhere this small have produced a saintly king?
Gomer seemed to read his thoughts. ‘King Clydawg – got hisself murdered here,’ he said. He seemed to know a lot of local history, gleaned from a lifetime’s work on the border landscape. And, according to Gomer, it was the only medieval church in the area not to have been updated by the Victorians.
Why had it been left in the Middle Ages then? Huw wondered. Then he found out, surprisingly, that Gomer Parry himself knew… an old digger driver with, additionally, an extensive knowledge of Iron Age history. It was turning out to be one of those days when things threw themselves into your mind – the same things from different places.
‘Clydawg getting hisself done in was the biggest thing ever happened yere,’ Gomer said. ‘They made him a saint and put up this church near where it happened and this is where they had him buried. He’s still under yere somewhere, all these centuries later.’
Huw stared at the wall and pictured, on the other side of it, the swollen river he’d seen coming in, which still made a roaring noise in his head. Could this be the Monnow, likely a far thinner stream in the sixth century, when there wasn’t an England or Wales as Huw knew them now? Clodock had been in both at various times, finishing up in the English county of Herefordshire. In the sixth century, when King Clydawg had been here, it would have been wholly Welsh. And the site of perhaps the oldest recorded murder in the Black Mountains. Certainly the oldest murder of a monarch, whatever qualified as one in them days.
Huw was increasingly asking himself how he’d been suddenly drawn to this place. He’d barely heard of it before yet it was the scene of a centuries-old evil and, somehow, that evil was still here. He could feel it. He could somehow sense its reverberation. Perhaps this needed some attention. Maybe his or maybe Merrily’s, considering this was her patch – just. She’d never talked about it. Perhaps it had never figured on her radar either. A place on the fringes, left to moulder in the Black Mountains umbra.
‘So what exactly happened to the king?’ he asked Gomer, who then told him about a woman who’d refused to marry anyone but Clydawg. Gomer didn’t know her name but she, apparently, was also of noble birth, nice-looking and nice-tempered enough for people to go along with her marriage plans.
‘Only it din’t work out,’ Gomer said. ‘Another fella fancied her for hisself. Saxon chap, if I recalls correc’ly. Anyway, him and a few mates ambushed the king and brung him down yere, by the little river, and this was where they kilt him. Some say he was shot with an arrow but, whatever, he never got to wed his intended.’
‘And now there’s nowt much else left here,’ Huw said, ‘apart from your feller’s church, one pub and a few cottages. It’s like the whole village took the king’s death… murder… to heart.’
‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said. ‘Longtown, right next to it, is a lot bigger, while Clodock’s kinder lonely, no bigger now than what it was then. But it was remembered, mind, with him being made a saint and pilgrims coming. They come in droves for quite a while after.’
It was what had struck Huw, too. Before the murder and the church being built, probably nothing had been here but grass, trees and a forded stream. Now he was here, on All Hallows’ Eve, of all days, along with his copy of Apparitionism, journal of the mainly ecclesiastical parapsychologists of England and Wales.
Periodically edited by an old friend from theological college, Apparitionism occasionally contained something he felt he should be aware of and this edition, looking at curious churches of the southern Welsh border, had grabbed his attention and held it strongly.
He was starting to feel a bit reflective now. He hadn’t died in the flood, he was just looking at retirement, which was like death, only worse in a way.
‘You never feel under pressure to retire, Gomer?’ he said to lighten the mood. ‘Or would that just be a waste of all them years of experience?’
Gomer looked like this had never, ever occurred to him.
‘Get to my age, boy, you needs to keep goin’, else you en’t gonner get much further.’ With both arms, he dragged himself half into his Land Rover. ‘Still got our uses, I reckon. Folk always need jobs done. Matter of fact, like I said, I dint have far t’come when the vicar rang me on the mobile. In this field at Bacton, sizing up for a double gateway, I was, but this sounded more urgent. Vicar, her said you thought you was lookin’ down at a watery grave.’
‘Aye,’ Huw said thoughtfully, ‘happen I was.’ He gazed up at the dark, stone-towered church, far too big for this cluster of cottages. ‘This is the first place to mess wi’ me mind since I decided to turn away from t’Church bosses. Likely there’s nowt in it but I’ll have to have a look. Happen not today, but I’ll come back, and if there’s an open grave of any kind, it’s my job to look down it…’
‘I fills ’em in fast as I can afterwards, Reverend,’ Gomer said.
Huw gave him a look of incomprehension before remembering that Gomer was the long-time parish gravedigger.
He suddenly felt his calling. His vocation was being tested, not ending. He saw his reflection ridiculously lengthened in a puddle. If he wasn’t in the established Church of England any more, who was there to get in his way? What got in Gomer’s way that he couldn’t remove with a bulldozer? He felt an excitement, an urgent need to talk to Merrily Watkins about this place and his future.
4
Fake history
EIRION HEARD HIMSELF saying, ‘I suppose I could try and drum up some interest.’
Jane stopped walking up the lane but didn’t turn.
‘Obviously I couldn’t tell them what to put,’ he said. ‘And if they come across people who think that losing an old name from a sign isn’t such a bad idea…’
At last, she turned.
‘You could do that?’
‘Well…’ he took a breath, ‘… there’s a girl – woman – I was on the pre-entry journalism course with. She went to BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester and…’
‘And covers this area?’
‘I guess I could give her a call. But before I do… are you sure there actually was a real gallows here where people were once executed? I don’t want to start spreading fake history.’
Jane stepped up from the narrow roadway to the new pavement, where Eirion spotted, with delight, that a corner of her mouth had twitched meaningfully as he caught her arm. He liked what that elfin near-smile said about her, the way it conveyed a mixture of amusement and triumph. He realized he’d seen it in her mother’s face, too. When it reached their eyes it kind of took them over.
Meanwhile…
‘Jane, were people really executed here?’
She nodded. ‘Twice, I think.’
‘That’s two separate hangings?’
‘Well, maybe in different centuries, since the Middle Ages.’
‘Murderers?’
‘One, possibly, but they didn’t have to be murderers in those days,’ Jane said. ‘Probably people convicted of stealing, I don’t know… sheep? Or apples? Even in medieval times, Ledwardine was well known for its apples.’
‘People were hanged for nicking apples?’
Jane nodded. ‘Way back, I imagine. I shouldn’t think stealing apples was actually a capital offence. But people were hanged here. Until all hangings were transferred to Hereford, several smaller places had their own gallows where people could come and watch the local miscreants dangle.’
Eirion eyed her. ‘Would you have watched?’
She didn’t reply. Wouldn’t have thought about all the jeers and cackling as a rough noose slid through tight coils and wrenched on a neck until it broke. Eirion thought that if it was still happening, she might make herself go and watch, even if she didn’t approve, if only so people couldn’t accuse her of being too squeamish to see a life being taken as easily and openly as council tax, and by similar people.
‘Ledwardine was actually a small town in the old days,’ Jane was saying. ‘With its own castle, even though only earthworks are left now.’
‘And persistent impressions,’ Eirion said.
He didn’t used to think there were still villages like this which, when the traffic noise died, would sometimes seem to be playing back faint echoes of their sometimes-harrowing histories.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask my radio friend – well, not a friend actually, but we’ve had a couple of chats. I’ll ask her if she can get the story out. I suppose it’s the sort of thing they’d do, as a bit of a conversation topic.’
It actually could become quite a talking point, but he wasn’t going to tell Jane that. Her face dimpled again, and he followed that familiar facial twitch from her mobile mouth to those flashing, dark eyes.
She’d got what she wanted. This was the first complete day they’d spent together since the big separation, brought about initially by the covid pandemic and then by the start of Eirion’s first job – both situations that had radically changed his life very quickly, at a time when everything seemed to be in flux, and broadcast and printed news was too often being replaced by online drivel.
It was early afternoon, and the sun seemed to be getting stronger after the fluke torrent of rain earlier on. The sky to the east seemed heavy enough to be threatening more. Climate change affected everything. He didn’t want to believe that, but he was a journalist now; you had to acknowledge evidence.
He wondered how Jane felt about that these days. Was she saving up for an electric car or did she think everybody was wildly overreacting to extinction-rebellion protests by squeaky, upper-middle-class young people? For now, she seemed more concerned about the trend for wilfully abandoning history than a supposed impending climate crisis.
‘Keep me informed, then,’ Jane said.
‘About what?’
‘About the Gallows Lane sign. If it’s going to be on the radio I want to try and listen to it. See where we can go next… where else can we take it? We can’t let these bureaucratic petty crimes keep getting swept under the carpet.’
So what are we supposed to do about it? Superglue our fingers to the endangered sign?
‘Jane…’ Eirion fixed his hands on his hips, ‘are you yourself prepared to talk about Gallows Lane? Be quoted in the papers?’
‘Well, I…’ Jane looked uncertain. ‘I’d rather not be identified again as the “vicar’s daughter”, which these media people always like to do. And the bastard Bishop would be sure to support the council.’ She squeezed her hands together. ‘Oh God, Irene, nothing’s ever bloody simple, is it?’
Not for Jane it wasn’t. Or for her mother, for whom being a vicar was only the start.
Eirion shrugged non-committally. Where was all this going to end? Was something even starting? Everybody was suddenly talking about the nearness of the end of the world, whether it would be through climate change or nuclear warfare. Was he really prepared for Jane’s to be the last voice he would ever hear? Waking up one morning for the last time next to her and her latest obsession?
Complications all the way. He took hold of her left hand. It was warm and slightly moist. Suddenly, he wanted her in the soft grass beyond the fence.
And then he didn’t.
Not where the bodies of the executed had lain after being cut down, flattening the grass, squashing dandelions and daisies – ancestors of today’s wild flowers, their tiny petals gently floating away.
That was an end-of-the-world thing.
‘Who was hanged here, Jane?’
‘Not sure. It was a long time ago. Hangings were centralized. The more recent ones were better chronicled. Like this guy who poisoned his wife up at Longtown. He and his girlfriend were strung up side by side in the centre of Hereford – and that was as recently as the turn of the nineteenth century.’
So recent that he couldn’t get it out of his head.
Eirion shook himself. It had been mainly a nice day, maybe the last nice day of a golden autumn for them both. He didn’t want it to go out this way. He noticed he was walking faster down Gallows Lane, half-dragging Jane Watkins away from a pastoral place that even now sometimes carried this dark, medieval magnetism. Jane walked faster as they reached the main village street, passing Gomer Parry’s bungalow, and the terrace enfolding the little cottage Lol Robinson occupied, once the home of Lucy Devenish.
‘How about we just go into the Black Swan?’ Eirion said, with a hoarse hint of desperation. ‘Get a drink and forget all this capital punishment. It doesn’t exist any more in this country.’
But somehow the past did exist here. He stepped from the pavement to the pub’s cobbled forecourt as a dog-collared guy got out of a Land Rover and Jane stopped suddenly.
*
‘Bugger,’ Jane said. ‘He’ll come in for a very slow drink and start giving me the third degree.’
‘Your mum’s colleague?’
