The police declared the case of the missing teenagers closed. Merry and James had returned to their parents, scratched, cold, starving, clearly lying about something or other but none the worse for wear. No crime seemed to have been committed.

Neither Merry nor James spoke of Parks. He’d probably have died back in the sixteenth century, they thought. Without antibiotics, it would have been very unlikely that his arrow wound would have healed. Mair would not have tended him. Enough damage had been done. Some secrets needed to be kept.

The burial mound was covered over by a large tarpaulin while Merry and her parents debated what to do. Merry thought that the chieftain should be left at peace, but there was pressure from Dr Philipps and the museum to continue the excavation.

Merry hid her talismans: the gold coins given to her by King Henry VIII and, her favourite, a four-leaf clover. She pressed it to preserve it. Sometimes she would take it out and hold it on the palm of her hand and that day would come flooding back: the young girl with the blonde hair and the blue eyes handing it to her with a shy smile and wishing her luck.

James signed with Manchester United. His parents, in a radical change of approach, born of their terror that they had lost their son for ever, did a deal with him. He had to sit his GCSEs in a few weeks’ time; then he could leave school and play football full time. For as long as he wanted to. For as long as he was able. The Black Castle and his inheritance would wait for him.

In the wilds of the Owens’s five hundred acres, the herd of Welsh Mountain ponies and the Arab stallion ran free. His stud fees brought in a healthy income. And Merry Owen and James de Courcy . . . they too knew the meaning of freedom and what it meant to be alive.

The book stayed in the Museum of Wales. It didn’t take Dr Philipps long to raise the sixty thousand pounds that secured the future of Nanteos Farm for the Owens.

Merry went to look at the book from time to time. She thought there was nothing more for her in it, that after all that had happened, it had relinquished her.

But deep inside the Brecon Beacons, the River of Time rolled on.