The tiny chapel is crowded this Sunday morning; every seat taken, every pew crammed, best-dressed shoulders rubbing against best-dressed. Any spaces along the side and back walls are rapidly filling up; feet are stepped on and hats are bumped awry. Someone drops a glove, and it stays dropped. The room is hot with the press of bodies.
Yet when Myfanwy enters, space is found around her, and she walks to her accustomed place with increasing dignity and discomfort, feeling everything is wrong but having no clue as to why. She has come alone; odd but not unusually so. Myfanwy would never dare miss a Sunday, for what would people think of her then?
Lizzie—whose chapel attendance had once sprung from a sense of high position in the valley— has announced she’d rather not see the vicar this side of Hell, and now waits to be helped into the squad car by PC Jones, before setting off to Ponty. And Sarah Maud, once too bright for the sombre chapel, then too clouded, is still in her room, pacing the littered floor and talking to herself, with the door locked hard.
Myfanwy sits in a small island of open space, a few inches of smooth oak pew either side of her. Since the mood at the shop two days ago, she has felt contaminated, but doesn’t know by what. She can guess, but today she is wrong. She has never been so out of place in the only place she knows.
The men have all given over their seats to their straight-mouthed, Sunday-frocked women and line themselves thickly along the walls; the short nave holds the congregation as dark flowers nested in a black dish. The noise is steady, a low droning of distant warplanes, or the static when a radio dial has slipped off the station; a white noise of speculation so dreadful it goes beyond gossip. Myfanwy hears nothing clearly. When the congregation in front of her shifts, Myfanwy glimpses that Mrs Barry—the vicar’s most loyal supporter— also has a cordon sanitaire around her, a few rows away. In the congregation, tongues move faster than a nest of grass snakes.
Myfanwy grows beyond discomforted, but she can’t find the courage to retreat. She had thought she should be here, in defiance of the situation with Jenner, in defiance of the shame and rumour; show herself to say ‘I’m here and it’s right I am, a god-fearing valley woman.’ Now, oh god, she thinks she was wrong to come. They’re talking about... And I can’t answer to it. I can’t.
Red-eyed and crumpled, Reverend Morgan enters from the vestry to a crescendo of murmurs that collapses into inward-breathing anticipation as he begins an approximation of the usual rites, avoids all eye contact. He looks ill, thinks Myfanwy, before she’s startled by the movement around her. All the women lean back and cross their arms, narrow their eyes; while all the men lean forward, and cross their arms, and narrow their eyes. The silence is total; there are no children here today. This isn’t about me!
The reverend goes through the first stages of the service, and no-one moves, neither sits nor stands when they should; when the antiphon is reached, the silence remains unbroken. Reverend Morgan repeats his lines; the congregation does not answer. The very air is muffled, as if damp velvet was draped over every ear and mouth. No prayer books need to be opened, no throats need to be cleared, for no hymns will be sung here today.
The vicar tries again: ‘Dearly beloved brethren…’
They do not identify.
‘Dear brothers and sisters…’
They are not his siblings in Christ.
‘Let us…’
‘Tell us the truth now, Twdr.’ Mrs Barry, ever the natural leader, and considering the moral fence a comfy place to sit for the best view. ‘Truth, mind!’
‘I’m sorry, Zipporah? We are all here for the Truth of God …’
The chapel shivers with a righteous anger not a little tempered by the relish of pinning a hypocrite down…
‘She means about Dewi,’ chorus several voices along the back.
‘…You old charlatan.’ finishes one of them, solo.
‘I … My name isn’t Dewi…’
‘No. Maybe not. But you know who’s was.’ Mr Barry has stepped forward into the aisle, from his place in the back line. Dai Spuds, a teetotaller and lately come to the news, stands beside him, frowning so intensely that his eyes and neck have virtually disappeared with indignation.
‘No.’ Reverend Morgan. Shifting his stance off the red altar carpet in a twinge of guilt at bearing false witness while actually standing by the altar, he perforce gets close to the foremost chapel elders in the front pews. Torn between the theoretical wrath of his god and the living coldness he feels radiating from the front pews, he slips back onto the carpet again.
‘What was it David was doing here anyway, back in ’58, ‘59? He had no business here.’ challenges Dai Spuds. ‘Ach, I remember him then, a bad boyo.’ Several heads nod in unison.
‘No.’ repeats the vicar. He shuffles his feet forward, off the carpet; ‘He wasn’t. He didn’t…’ A diminutive elder in the front row stands up, his gold fob chain across his fusty waistcoat winking with authority, and the vicar slides back onto the red carpet for the second time. It’s painful to watch. His face is contorting as the muscles of his mouth and jaw are battling each other for control: to open his mouth and speak against these accusations, or clench tight against the rant rising up inside him. The final battle for the vicar’s sanity has started; and frankly, it’s a bit one-sided.
‘He was! And he did!’ Mr Barry’s affirmation is met with grunts of agreement from the other men. Some of them had known David. Yea verily, some of them were as well, and some of them had done, right alongside the errant David, once. But now…
‘And he certainly had no business with that Ty Merched lass, or any woman of these valleys!’ Barry finishes, glaring at the vicar, ‘For we know he was married already. Wasn’t he?’ The small chapel building seems to pulse; its walls, built from the very stones of the timeless valley, expand and contract: breath, heartbeat.
A roaring comes to Myfanwy’s ears. The vicar might be talking; the vicar might indeed be lying, or defending himself, or singing backwards in Russian, for all Myfanwy can tell now. Sound waves beat on her eardrums and do not register. Light reflects off the vicar’s sweating forehead but doesn’t reach into her eyes. Inside her clothes, the temperature has become arctic. She remembers a man called Dewi. She remembers a sharp man called Dewi who called at Ty Merched only once, but who she often saw leaning by the lamp at the crossroad to the Ty Merched lane. Until suddenly she never saw him again. And the months and years of Sarah Maud’s rising strangeness fall into a rough pattern. Just as, Myfanwy now sees with crystal clarity, the pale skin, the black hair and green eyes of Dewi fall into place beside the face of Jenner with her ivory skin and raven hair and emerald eyes. Myfanwy wants to move but nothing physical is working. She wants to shout but has no breath. She wants to cut and stab and hammer at something, anything. She holds her prayerbook until the spine cracks. It isn’t about her, until suddenly it most horribly is.
The noise is growing around her, there is no escape.
But it’s the vicar who’s shouting.
‘… how dare you question my authority in this place!’ He’s on the top step of the dais, clinging to the altar, shielding himself with the sanctuary of the building, the sanctity of his office, the status of his family. But he has overdrawn his assumptions, for all his fine clothes and his resonant voice. He knows this now. ‘That dreadful child, that… bastard witch!... is no part of my family. Daughter of a whore! Child of Satan!... she must be staked … burnt...’
The congregation, that has for the past few minutes been shouting accusation at the vicar with all the affront of a proper, God-fearing community that sees it has been conned, falls into disbelieving silence.
‘Whitened sepulchres! The lot of you. Just dead man’s bones... I, He, would bring a flaming sword down amongst you. How dare you?’ The vicar wipes his chin on a sleeve. He sways out from the dais towards the elders, one hand clinging to the old altar and the other waving over the congregation, as if he held a scimitar to sever their heads clean off their necks, slice, slice, slice …
‘I’ll get her, I’ll get her and her… and her fucking ignorance of my authority…’ Twdr Morgan takes one final swipe across the room, swings back and scrambles up onto the altar, kicking over the vases of flowers, the accoutrements of worship ‘… she, they, daughter and mother, sorceress and bewitcher! Witches, all witches. They shall be cast down! For these things they did are detestable… stealing the seed… the Lord will cast them out and all you are accursed that stand with them! He will divide you, and destroy you, and you will burn!’ He scrambles up onto the altar, backs up against the wall and holds his arms straight out, his forefingers stabbing at the astonished faces before him. ‘For I have snared her, and she will be punished. I will be avenged for the traps of filth and witchery. And I will be held on high. And you! you... you…Stinking sinners. All burn! I will bring the holy fires down on you all! I will…’
… the altar, decades ago given over to woodworm and dry rot, collapses. He falls, cracks his skull against the floor. The old velvet curtains slide stiffly to the ground and drape the insensible figure of Gwrhyd Chapel’s vicar, prostrate among the splinters, his throat rattling as he gasps at the musty air. His spine twitches, his eyes roll in independent directions, before shuddering shut.
There’s a long moment of silence as the dust settles. Someone coughs. The dour chapel elders stand as one and file out, heads together in twos and threes as they plan an immediate succession. ‘Not another of the Morgans, I think’ one of them can be heard to suggest.
‘Du, Du; look at the old bugger. I always thought he …’ Younger Miss P falters into silence under Elder Miss P’s cautionary glance.
‘Stealing seed, my arse. It’s clear the brother raped Sarah Maud.’ says Mr Barry. ‘Get the women out, would you.’ He looks to the fellow members of the Quorum, but the women are already flowing out the door in as much of a rush as narrow space and Sunday clothes will allow. As soon as they reach the open air, the women’s voices rise into a flood that can be heard receding across the road.
Dai Spuds cautiously approaches the detritus-sprinkled vicar, who is mumbling unconsciously in the litter of the altar. ‘What’ll we do with him? He’s as mad as a two-bob watch, for my money.’
The men hold a brief conference, but when they come to lift him, thinking to tie him in a curtain and call the mental hospital, Twdr Morgan thrashes in their grasp, flings himself at the wall with a crash, kicks out and breaks free. Stumbling over a hanging shred of his cassock, the vicar runs headlong out the chapel door with blood streaming down his forehead; the men hurrying down the aisle to grab him feel him slip through their fingers. The leading few of the Quorum spill out the door in time to see him take the same path as Jenner that other day, flighting over the crest of the ridge to disappear down into the woods. It’s clear that beneath the cassock he is bollock naked.
Dai Spuds shakes his head. The men look at their boots a while. There’s a small snort of breath, quickly stifled. They nudge each other out the door and leave without speaking… for they each hold a hand to their face, and their shoulders shake and quake. They step into the sunlight and down the gravel path left vacant by the women; by the time the group reaches the gate they are gasping for breath and crying with muffled laughter.
By the time they reach the pub for the most essential lunchtime pint they’ve ever known, they will be ashamed of laughing at such madness, and drink themselves sober.
But to be fair, and all crimes aside, it was bloody funny.
Behind in the chapel, Myfanwy is still in her seat. A few flakes of altar wood have drifted along and settled on her left shoe. Slowly she bends to brush them off, but her hand is shaking beyond control.
-oOo-
Jenner in the Ponty police cell is writing in an exercise book that the duty officer found for her, with a small pencil stub that’s all the regulations will allow. She leans into the corner, and the book wobbles on her knees, for there’s no chair or table. The air moves through her lungs like mud. She wheezes, she mutters to herself, she dozes and wakes with a shiver. She grunts as the pencil breaks. The duty officer brings a new one into her cell as he removes the uneaten breakfast.
‘You need to drink something. At least that.’ He nudges the water glass closer to her, worried by her pallor, her damp hair stuck to her forehead, her laboured breathing.
Jenner doesn’t hear his voice.
Off- and on-duty officers, passers-by, a couple of drunks from the other cells, all come and peer in the door, and linger.
‘Oh dwt, look at the size of you in this place…’ Lizzie has bought the quilt from Jenner's bed, and a change of clothes. She now wonders why she hasn’t brought some flowers, or a bit of Myfanwy’s bara brith.
‘Hen Nain.’ Jenner smiles in greeting, beaming right into Lizzie’s eyes. Her eyes are huge, hot and dry in her shrinking face. She looks at the quilt as if it came from a fairy story, pats a loosening thread into place, and shuffles the quilt round her shoulders. ‘Diolch, Hen Nain…’ she turns back to the exercise book and resumes writing.
Lizzie recognises the words on the page. And the drawings, as Jenner works on. Recipes, instructions, details of plants and their seasons of usefulness, seasons of danger; pencilled on the scruffy pages. Jenner is rebuilding the Ty Merched Materia Medica from memory.
‘I lost my book, Hen Nain…’ says Jenner, after a minute.
‘Ah, never mind, cariad; we’ll find it again.’ Lizzie for no sane reason feels this to be true.
‘Yes, but there should be two anyway.’ Without explanation, Jenner continues to write, mutter, wheeze. Lizzie can feel the heat of the child’s fever coming through her clothes as they sit side by side. She looks at the group of watchers at the door.
‘Maybe a bit of fresh air, do you think?’ she gestures with a wave. And the officers move back. One opens a window to the chill sunny day.
‘I can give you half an hour,’ Jones says as he hands Lizzie a cup of police station tea.
‘She needs a doctor!’
This was also suggested when Jenner had arrived at the station. But Watcyns—seeing, for the first time, the strange waif he’s arrested for the murder of an adult—had dug his heels in: no special treatment. The case was making him uncomfortable. DS Watcyns didn’t like feeling uncomfortable.
So no doctor is to be provided. Lizzie sits in the cell and watches Jenner write until the time is up, then kisses the girl’s feverish forehead and gets driven home by Jones.
Into a disturbed landscape.
Fanning out from the chapel in both directions, the road is dotted with little clusters of women, speaking and stunned by turns; they move off the road to let the car through. The faces that peer in at her suggest a story so muddled Lizzie has no way to read it. And fair enough: this is gossip beyond ordinary imagining, and simple valley folk haven’t had time to decide whether it’s pity or curiosity or a sense of twisted justice that’s running through their minds and showing on their faces, or maybe all three at once. Some cannot hide their awkward uncertainty, managing to appear both honest and alarming.
Jones winds a window down as he draws near the Misses Perry and slows to a stop. ‘Is something happened? What’s to do?’
‘Oh, Officer,’ Elder Miss P leaps into the vacuum with the first thing in her head, thinking to take control of the conversation before Younger Miss P can say something awkward to the passenger she's spotted in the back seat. ‘Do you know now, we’re moving the memorial into the week. You can still come?’ But she remembers that the Ty Merched women were not in on the discussion about a memorial. ‘Anyway, there it is. Say hello to Jenner for us, Mrs Coombe?’ she starts on a cheerful note, before collapsing to silence at the end of this road-crash of a conversation. Younger Miss P is having just the best morning; this is all going in her private journal, word for word. Elder Miss P hurries them both off the road into the heather.
The few women still on the road are now alert to the presence of the squad car and have also begun to cut across the rhos, awkward in their Sunday frocks and best shoes. Jones is frowning as he drops Lizzie at the house gate, with a comment that he’ll see what can be done about a lift tomorrow, although he’s conscious that Watcyns’s presence at the station will make such consideration very difficult to deliver. Before he returns to Ponty, however, he turns left at the crossroad, parks up at the Rhiwfawr Arms, orders a raspberry soda at the bar. And there he will learn something about the vicar, and something about the memorial, and a lot about David Morgan and Sarah Maud, and Jenner.
So it is that the four daughters of Ty Merched inhabit separate worlds; in different orbits under different stars they each spiral alone. In the interstellar dark, they cannot see each other.
-oOo-
The Ty Merched kitchen is not the ‘beating heart’ of the house. Nothing so inadequate. The kitchen of Ty Merched is the house. The walls so thick you could conceal a woman lengthwise and neither her head nor feet would stick out. The hearthstone so old that swords as well as ploughshares had been whetted on it betimes. Niches for storage that, with a couple of hammer blows, became arrow slits and embrasures. The rest of the building—rooms, storage, passages and lofts—has sprouted from the frame of the kitchen in outgrowths that came and went with the generations. The kitchen, with its solid flagstone floor and near-perpetual fire, is the only certainty that Lizzie has, or expects will endure. Even that has changed since she first looked upon the candlelit world of her childhood; she sees each layer of change as a faded gauze behind the electric light, radio, refrigerator. She sees the shadows of her ancestors move across the room: liquid under the light of other nighttime fires, dust motes in the beams of other sunlit mornings.
As she heard the squad car struggle through a cramped U-turn then recede up the lane, Lizzie had raddled the fire into life. Now she fills the kettle, which stays in her hand a while before landing on the stove. She hangs her coat, leans against it on the hook a moment as the ache of her flexing arms recedes, then stands in the inner doorway; she looks up the hall and sees the worn-smooth floor, the sideboards and pictures and umbrella-stand, the baskets stacked on boxes, the cupboards and closets undisturbed for most of her long lifetime. Minor details have changed; old Elizabeth’s cane has been relegated to the barn and hangs with William’s sheep crook, while the wolf’s head walking stick now dominates the hallstand hodgepodge. The indents of different pram handles overlapping in the plaster, the hieroglyphs of boot marks big and small over generations…
The door to Sarah Maud’s room is closed, and stillness covers everything like dust. An anonymous portrait holds a curling unframed photograph tucked into its frame; in the photo her sons’ young faces are clear, but their uniforms are out of focus, and fine detail has disappeared from half the print where the summers have washed over it these fifty-two years past. The kettle boils as Lizzie continues to stand in the doorway; she too is unfocused, losing detail, fading. She can hear the hot stove clicking, the clock ticking, a tree branch tapping…
Myfanwy comes home from chapel, and without acknowledging Lizzie, knocks on Sarah Maud’s door and disappears into Sarah Maud’s room.
-oOo-
When PC Jones returns to Pontardawe police station, Jenner is the small centre of a growing crowd. A curious dislocation from their daily routine has drawn the families of the officers on shift, to ‘just call in’ and then to linger. The open window has attracted a few coal tits and nuthatches to the sill. Soon the cell is alive with larger birds: jays and ravens; one small chicken has taken perch on the end of the bed. A neighbourhood dog stands almost on guard by Jenner, two more hold watch over the cell door. Cats, well… cats are everywhere. But they don’t bother the birds and are in their turn tolerated by the dogs. A bullfinch flutters in, lands on the quilt by Jenner's side, offers a twig of feverfew in flower, then other bits of the greenwood are brought in by birds, cats, a mouse. Jenner nods a thank you, nibbles the herbs, sips from the cup of water the jailor has given her, continues to write and draw and mutter under her breath. Her words are almost solely old Welsh now, no-one can understand what she’s saying… but they stay, they watch. The oldest amongst the crowd begin to recognise the work she’s recreating, understand what she’s doing; they remember hearing such words and seeing such a book as they lay feverish in childhood sickbeds, the doctor consulting the wise woman…
When Jones looks in the cell, over the shoulders of the others, Jenner glances once in his direction and nods, before returning to her task; she fills one notebook, asks for a new one.
An old woman, having done with watching, makes her way out of the station, and up to the western hills, walking an ancient path to the ring of standing stones at Carn Llechart, where she sits for a time. Later, others follow her up the hill, clear the litter and leave flowers on the stones. They agree that it seems a nice day for a walk.
DS Watcyns is taking the air on his front porch, high on the eastern hill. The last of the Sunday roast is drying to leather in the oven. His wife lies a-shambles on the kitchen floor, but he doesn’t call an ambulance.
Much flaunted as a delicate child in her youth, Mrs Watcyns’s only fragility in middle-age is a tendency to fart in such prodigious volume that the sudden drop of abdominal pressure causes her to faint, which she has just done. So DS Watcyns is taking in the fresh air on his front porch. He sees the steady rambling and ambling of locals around the police station but thinks nothing of it. He feels the ground soften beneath him but puts it down to indigestion.
So hard is he concentrating on not feeling the ground shift, that he doesn’t really hear any rustling in the shrubbery. It’s almost dusk before he’s aware that he has a visitor, in a torn cassock, hiding in his tool shed.
It’s Morgan’s muttering of curses that gives the vicar away.
‘The hell you doing here?’ Watcyns peers harder into the gloom of the shed. ‘Jeezus H Christ, man; the hell happened to you?’
‘A temporary set-back.’ Morgan isn’t interested in explaining himself. ‘The child is evil.’
‘Well, yes, man; all kids are evil; nasty piglets every one o’ them. But what…?’
‘She’s a witch.’
‘Right. Is that… is that still against the law, though? I’m not sure. You say you witnessed the actual crime, right?’
‘I did. I saw exactly who did it. She’s behind it all. All the…’
‘Can you come in and make a statement, I need that.’
‘Certainly. Word of God I can. I was there and I saw it all. She’s to be stopped and locked and barred.’ The vicar shivers; something in his manner is unsettling. And Watcyns hates to be unsettled.
‘What… Out of interest, man, what were you doing at Ty Merched around midnight, then?’
‘I? I was on God’s business, it’s none of yours… Throw the book, Watcyns! Lock her and stop her and chain her up. Lesson to them all.’ He gulps, his throat is congested. ‘The child is a witch.’
‘Riiiight. As I said, I don’t think that’s a … ’
It’s Watcyns’s locking of the shed door that keeps the vicar in. He returns to slide the last of the Sunday roast through the gap under the shed door, ‘The missus, you understand…’ he apologises. ‘Sleep well, Vicar.’
A question that Watcyns is yet to ask himself: can we still call that rabid creature ‘vicar’? Watcyns has made his reputation as a detective by not asking questions he doesn’t know the answer to already, and now is not the time to start. But he’s getting really annoyed by all the uncomfortable feelings lately. Ever since Gwyn phoned him to repeat Morgan’s words, things have been getting messy, and messy is always uncomfortable. He wonders about calling at the Rhiwfawr Arms, fails to come to a decision. DS Watcyns casts round in his mind for someone to blame.