Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine (reading an ebook TXT) 📕

her, her eyes on the huge arch of pale stone that spanned the roof before the altar. In her hand was a copy of the little tenpenny guide. This was William's chapel—and before him the chapel of his father, and his grandfather. It had been dedicated, the guidebook said, in the year 1073.

Slowly she walked toward the altar. If it were anywhere, his ghost would be there, in the very walls where he had knelt and prayed. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle as she stood staring up at the simple wooden cross with the pale ochre curtain behind it. No lighted candles, no incense. The bell was silent. But there was a sense of prayer. A presence.

I should be praying for their souls, she thought. Their souls—our souls—which are not at rest. With a shiver of something like defiance she made the sign of the cross and knelt before the altar, but the prayers would not come. The faith and burning trust that Matilda had felt before the twelfth-century statue of the Virgin were not for the twentieth-century Jo Clifford, kneeling in her shirt and jeans on the cold soap-scented flagstones. She felt nothing.

She was suddenly conscious of how quiet the church was, and how empty. Raising her eyes to the three small arched windows above the altar, she felt very cold. The air around her had become oppressive; the silence so intense she could hear it beating inside her head. Overwhelmed with panic, she scrambled to her feet and fled down the aisle, letting herself out of the door to stand in the vestibule, breathing deeply. Two women walked in past her and she felt them staring at her. They too brought a copy of the little guide, then they disappeared inside the church.

She stood in the graveyard shivering, feeling the warmth of the evening sun sinking through her shirt and into her bones. The air was glorious. It smelled of honeysuckle and woodsmoke from a bonfire below the churchyard, and of wild thyme from the Downs that ringed Bramber, bare and dusty beneath the hot evening sky. Immediately below her around the foot of the hill clustered the uneven, ancient roofs of the village of Bramber. Above, like a reproving finger, stood a huge pillar of masonry—part of the now-ruined castle.

Taking a deep breath, Jo left the churchyard and began to walk up the shallow steps cut in the side of the castle hill, across the overgrown depths of the defensive ditch and on toward the ruins.

The top of the hill was a broad flat area of mown grass in the center of which rose another steep-sided hillock, the motte on which the first William de Braose's wooden keep had been raised in the days of the Conqueror. It was shrouded now by trees, guarded by ancient yews. Very little of the castle remained. A few areas of crumbling wall around the perimeter of the hill where the only invaders were ash and sycamore, hung with the greenish, scented flowers of wild clematis. Only the one tall finger of wall remained rearing into the sky to remind the visitor of the castle's former glory.

Jo stood staring round her, lost. She could recognize nothing. Slowly she began to walk, seeing her shadow running before her across the grass, looking south toward the sea. Somewhere out there in the forest she had gone hawking with Richard and fallen at his feet to lie with her head on his lap. The forest had gone. Trees climbed the castle hill now, which then had been bare. Only the gap in the Downs was the same. The river was quite different too. So small. Surely then it had been vastly wider and there had been a jetty right there beneath the hill with ships and bustle and noise. The only noise now was the roar of traffic from the broad sweep of the fast road south, carried on the still evening air.

"Are you all right, Jo?" Nick had been following her silently.

She smiled at him. "The only thing I can recognize is the gap where the Downs aren't. " She laughed wryly. "And the church. I think the tower was the same, though there used to be something on top then. And there was water all around here. " She waved her arm. "I thought I said an hour?" She looked at him closely.

"I didn't like to leave you, so I parked in the lane at the bottom of the hill. I was afraid... " He hesitated. "Well, that something might happen. "

"So was I. " She put her hands on a fragment of wall, lightly touching the flints and mortar. "I should be able to feel something. I know I've been here before—how often have you heard people say that, joking? I do know it, yet I feel nothing. Why?"

"Perhaps you don't need to. " He touched the wall himself.

"Besides, it's quite possible that you had no particular affinity with Bramber. You probably have no reason to remember it. Matilda spent most of her time in Wales, didn't she?"

Jo nodded. "You're right. I expect all her memories are there. " She sighed. "There was something, though—just for a minute, in the church. " She shivered again. "William was so obsessive about religious observance. Do you know, his clerks had to be paid extra because of all the flowery bits of religious pomposity he insisted on adding to all his correspondence—" She stopped abruptly. "I must have read that somewhere—"

Nick took her arm. "Come on, Jo. Let's get on to Shore-ham. "

She shook off his hand. "You were right. I took my clothes off for Sam. " She was staring into the distance. "I thought he was William. He ordered me to do it, Nick. "

"Are you sure?" Nick stared at her grimly.

"I was in the solar of the castle at Brecknock and he stood in front of me and ordered me to undress while the blind