The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

of car she drives but there was a Micra parked up at the end of the lane so it wouldn’t be spotted.’

Mark threw himself down into a kitchen chair. ‘Do you want me to get her dismissed? Although, I’m not sure one can dismiss a volunteer. Perhaps on the grounds of age. But that doesn’t really apply. Perhaps we could get her promoted to somewhere else.’

‘Where is the furthest outpost of the Church?’ Bea smiled. ‘I don’t think that would do it, in any case. She’s obsessed.’

‘She’s jealous of you, Bea.’

‘Jealous?’

‘My spies tell me so. You are clever, talented, you have an interesting job, albeit no one quite knows what it is,’ he grinned, ‘and you are married to the most gifted and charismatic churchman ever. Oh, and it has been pointed out that you are also very beautiful.’

Bea let out a snort of laughter. ‘Who says? But seriously, Mark, no one is supposed to know what my job is!’

‘Don’t forget, she showed the newspaper cuttings to the dean. That took some explaining, I can tell you. Luckily for you, he was deeply sympathetic. I have told him you used to teach full-time, which is perfectly true, and that since we moved to Hereford you’ve been doing some supply work, which is also true, and that now you’re doing some mentoring, ditto. If the woman goes near the dean again, he will tell her in confidence that you’re working with a disturbed child, which I think we can honestly say Emma is, and that if she is intrusive that will be seriously detrimental to the girl’s stability. Also true.’

‘Thank you, Mark.’ It made her feel very guilty to think that he was lying for her. But then as he said it wasn’t a lie. A sin of omission, perhaps, but not a lie.

‘Hopefully, she will back off now.’ Mark stood up and set about making hot chocolate for them both. He pushed a mug towards her. ‘You saw Simon this evening?’

‘He left Emma with Felix. He told me she is calm and very tired. I will see her again only if she wants to.’

‘Do you think the ghosts are laid?’

‘I think poor old St Ethelbert is a place memory. Emma is sensitive but she is also very imaginative. It’s a pretty gory story when you think about it.’

‘So she is not actually being haunted or possessed.’

Bea hesitated. ‘Not by him anyway.’

‘By Offa’s daughter?’

She felt his thoughtful gaze on her and looked away. ‘I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. Let’s wait and see if anything else happens. I’ve given her some tools to work with which should keep her safe. A few days after Easter she and Felix will be going home anyway. Term will start with all the terror of exams to keep her distracted.’

‘Let’s hope so.’ Mark headed for the door, carrying his mug. ‘Are you coming up?’

‘Too much to think about; I’ll never sleep. I’ll follow you in a bit.’ She knew he would be waiting, listening to see if she went up to her study, worrying. Making her way back into the snug, she flicked on the electric fire and curled up on the sofa. She was not going to allow herself to think about Eadburh, even though Simon’s cryptic remark had intrigued her. Simon knew all about Eadburh, knew enough to make an off-the-cuff remark about her being a demon and knew enough to be quite shocked at the idea of her being married to a Welshman, an idea he had dismissed out of hand. Well, she had seen what Eadburh was capable of, if her interpretation of the killing of St Ethelbert’s murderer was true. She was cold-blooded and calculating, a true daughter of her parents.

She took a sip from her chocolate. Perhaps it was time to think about the mysterious, attractive Elisedd instead. The man who so obesssed her; the man who had captured her heart and then turned it to stone. If he was real, and she truly believed he was, somewhere there must be a record of his life. And his death.

She cudgelled her memory, trying to think of the names in Simon’s manuscript, names so complicated she had skipped over them as she read, the King of Powys, Cadell ap Brochfael, son of Brochfael ap Elisedd. Elisedd, pronounced Eleezeth, a family name.

Where was her iPad?

His name, if not common, appeared several times with different spellings given to various different princes and kings of a Wales that in the post-Roman era seemed to have been a confused, indistinct tangle of small kingdoms, some, according to one article, as small as fifteen miles across, remnants of the original tribal states. But Powys was one of the big ones. Powys had an ancient and well-established royal family with the advantage and disadvantage of a long border with Mercia and thus of being the near neighbour of Offa.

Cadell the king was there; the only son of his mentioned by name was Cyngen, but then she knew Elise was a younger son. Maybe he had not merited a record in history. Maybe he had died too soon. She stared down at the screen in her hands. There seemed to be precious little known about the family. A sister. A famous grandson. But the name fitted, the name that someone, Eadburh herself, perhaps, was calling so frantically into the dark of a lonely mountain ridge on the borders of Wales and England.

The two kings were thought to have negotiated over the dyke. Even that wasn’t certain. If Eadburh’s Elisedd had gone to oversee the building of the part of the dyke that ran near what was still called Offa’s Ridge, as a negotiator and ambassador, there was no known record of that either. And if, as a younger son who had suddenly become a threat to Offa’s plans of domination, he was regarded as expendable, his murder, made to look like an accident, never made it into the historical record.

When Mark tiptoed downstairs an hour later,