He nodded.
‘We all thought you were dead.’
‘I nearly was. I was rescued and brought back from death by a wonderful woman, a doctor!’ He smiled. ‘This young man is her son. She sent him with me, when she realised I could not be dissuaded from following you, to make sure I kept taking the medicine.’ She was still touching his face, as though trying to convince herself that he was real. ‘I know one look at me could stampede a herd of wild horses. If you hate me like this, I shall understand. Drusus and I will go back to Rome.’
‘No. No, I love you!’ Suddenly she was in his arms clinging to him. ‘I can’t believe you are here; I never thought I would see you again; you saved me; you saved us.’ It was a little while before she had remembered Gort. She escaped from Julius’s arms and turned to him, catching his hand. ‘This man has looked after me and taught me and fed me and followed me across the island of Britannia to keep an eye on me.’ She fell silent suddenly with a glance at the wall. ‘Commios and Drusilla –’
Gort pulled her back. ‘Don’t look. There’s no point.’
Julius followed his gaze. He stepped over to the wall and looked down. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Dear sweet Lord have mercy on their souls. This man was a monster. No –’ As Drusus stepped towards them he caught at the boy’s tunic and held him back. ‘Don’t look. Not now. We will bury them later together. They are in heaven now.’ He glanced at Gort. ‘You would seem to be a Druid, my friend? Has Eigon not managed to convert you yet to our faith?’
Gort raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe she has persuaded me about one or two things. I’ve prayed to the Lord Jesus.’
‘Like my young friend here,’ Julius chuckled, ‘you have reservations?’
‘I cover my options. He seems to have answered some of our prayers satisfactorily.’ He glanced at Eigon with a smile. He was unlacing the cord that held his cloak closed. Taking it off he went over to the wall. ‘Do you have a knife?’ He took it from Julius and bent to cut the ropes that bound Commios’s hands behind him. Then he did the same for Drusilla. He linked their hands gently together, then he covered them with the cloak. ‘We will lay them to rest together here.’
They cut the shape of the double grave in the sweet meadow grass behind the byre and the three men began to dig. It took them a long time, but eventually it was ready and they laid the two bodies in one another’s arms in the grave and prayed over them. Later Julius and Gort dug another grave for Titus down amongst the trees in a darkly shadowed ravine. The prayers they said for his soul were not sufficient to imprison his restless spirit. It had already gone.
‘And Togo and Glads?’ Jess murmured. ‘Did you look for them?’ She could see Eigon still standing there in the corner of the room as she told her story. The folds of her gown were pale shadows in the darkness.
‘I didn’t know where to start. We asked questions in the hamlets round about. No one knew anything about them. I prayed so hard.’ Jess could see her face more clearly now; her eyes were red with weeping. ‘I laid flowers for them and I begged the angels to take care of them wherever they were.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we went away. I couldn’t bear to stay.’
‘What happened?’
‘Julius and I were married. We settled down in a house near a stream on the northern slopes of the Black Mountains not so far from one of the hill forts I had lived in, in the happier times with my mother and father. We built a wall round it, and we taught and prayed there. The people round about came to call it Llan Eigon after me.’ She smiled.
‘And Gort and Drusus?’
‘Drusus went back to his mother in Rome eventually. He sent messages from time to time. Gort stayed for a while too, then he decided to return to the south. He came to see us two or three times over the next few years.’
‘And you never had any children?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘And in the end?’
‘Julius died one winter of a fever. He was a great age.’ She smiled sadly. ‘My dearest love. After that I stayed there. It was my home. Where else was I to go? I was known in the hills around as a healer and an anchorite. Others joined me. They built their little houses inside our walls and in the end we built an oratory so we could pray together. But it was many, many years before the worship of Christ began to spread around the country.’
Rhodri and Jess went to Llanigon a few days later and spent some time in the little churchyard which marked the site of Eigon’s home. They walked around the ancient church and the far more ancient walls of the churchyard and laid some flowers in her memory on a pile of moss-covered stones. In the distance they could hear the sound of water from the tumbling stream.
That night she came again to Jess and for the first time Jess saw her as an old lady, the old woman who had lived and loved and worked in the spot beneath the mountains where they had laid the flowers.
‘You never found out what happened to Togo and Glads?’ Jess asked at last.
‘No.’
‘Togo lies up there under the rocks. I’m sure it’s him. I put flowers on his bones.’ Jess felt her own tears soaking into the pillow.
Eigon closed her eyes.
‘Do you want us to move him? To bury him perhaps?’
Was that a nod? Jess sat up in bed. ‘Do you want them to have a Christian burial?’
They didn’t call the coroner to examine those tiny bones. Two weeks after Will was buried in his parents’ beloved Cornwall, Megan’s cousin from Brecon, an eighty-year-old vicar with clear green eyes and a thatch of white hair and a mind as sharp as a whistle held a funeral service for the little boy who they had brought down the hill with due ceremony, the bones neatly stacked in a small yew wood box. The grave was dug behind the orchard on the hillside at Ty Bran, overlooking the valley, somewhere near the place where in the year of Our Lord 65 Commios and Drusilla, two Christian citizens of Rome, had been buried in one another’s arms. He said prayers for them as well. If questions were ever asked about the burial, he said, he would claim senility for his lack of memory about the whole affair. The day was hot and still. There was no sign of the buzzards, or the ravens of Ty Bran. They heaped the grave with flowers.
That left Glads.
Meryn had returned for the ceremony. Afterwards he had wandered outside and he stood staring down the valley as the sun set in a blaze of crimson and gold. Rhodri came out to join him. ‘Jess heard Glads calling again this afternoon.’
Meryn nodded. ‘She is a troubled soul.’
‘Does she sense her brother has been laid to rest?’
‘I suspect so.’
‘Is there some way of tempering her anger?’
Meryn looked thoughtful. ‘It is something that must be done. If these good people are ever going to have any peace in this house and Steph is going to be able to stay here alone without fear, she has to be neutralised.’ He folded his arms, watching as the sun sank into the misty distance. ‘I have an idea. She of course is not a Christian.’ Nor was Meryn. He had watched the funeral that afternoon and added his own prayers in his own way, ever watchful at the perimeter that no stray evil should enter the sacred space of the burial place. None had done so.
He smiled. ‘I have a colleague to consult. The studio, I think.’
He went in alone.
They filled the room with flowers and Steph insisted on burning incense there. It smelled very exotic as Meryn let himself into the dusky shadows. Someone had left a candle burning. It was enough to see by.
‘Marcia?’ He spoke out loud as he had before. ‘I know I said I had only one last favour and I asked too much even with that, but I need advice.’
He paused, listening. He could sense no one there. Disappointed, he tried again. ‘The soul of Gwladys, daughter of Caradoc, walks the hills filled with misery and hatred. We want her to travel lightly to the land of the ever young, or if she doesn’t desire that, to rest in peace with the soul of her brother near her.’
The incense was burning more brightly suddenly; the glowing tip of the stick of lavender and cade brought from Aurelia’s home in France flaring as if in a draught. He watched the spiral of smoke curl round the room. The candle flame guttered. Then he heard the voice.
Play with me. Come and play with me. Please.
‘You are too old to play now, Glads.’ Meryn’s voice sounded strangely loud in the shadowy room. ‘You lived to be a grown woman and you know now that Eigon and your mother and father did not desert you. They did their best. Your parents mourned for you all their lives. And Eigon came to find you. In the end, after all she had been through, she still came back to try and find you.’ He paused, looking round. ‘Tell me how I can help you rest in peace, Glads.’
The candle flickered again.
‘Eigon brought back a message of peace and love to this valley. She looked for you. She wanted so much to find you. Can you accept that? Can you rest?’
There was a long silence. He could sense her thinking. Then at last she spoke.
Bury my dolly with Togo. I’ll go and play with Marcia! The voice was older now. Stronger. I don’t like this valley any more!
Meryn gave a grim smile. ‘Thank you, Marcia Maximilla. I hope she does you credit,’ he said quietly. ‘And I hope you and I meet one day in the other realms. I owe you one!’
Blowing out the candle he let himself out of the studio and walked slowly across the yard. Pushing open the door he found the others in the kitchen. Someone had opened a bottle of champagne.
‘Ash has passed his exams with flying colours!’ Jess planted a kiss onto his cheek. ‘One of my most challenging pupils. My ex-boss has just rung to tell me.’
Meryn smiled. He accepted a glass from Aurelia and raised it. ‘To absent friends.’ They all joined him in the toast. ‘And, I hope to the renewal of our old acquaintance,’ he glanced at Aurelia. ‘I should like to visit your French hideaway if you would permit me, one day? And one more thing,’ he glanced at Rhodri with a raised eyebrow, ‘to the happy couple.’
Rhodri grinned. ‘Hang on a minute! I haven’t asked her yet.’ He looked round the room in mock despair. ‘That’s the trouble with having a psychic in the house. They always know what is going to happen next!’
Author’s Note
The historical evidence for Eigon’s existence is shadowy. We are not even sure who she was or that she existed at all …
I first came across her when my father bought a cottage in the parish of Llanigon some forty years ago. Who, we wanted to know, or what, was Eigon. The church guidebook answered our question. But only sort of. There are two theories. Either HE was a bishop or, SHE was the daughter of the great Welsh hero, Caratacus. Obviously I preferred the second option.
But then came the $64,000 question. If Caratacus had a daughter called Eigon and if she was taken to Rome as a captive as history records, how would she have ended up as the patron saint of an ancient church in the Welsh borders, 300 years before the official conversion of Britain to Christianity? This was the question which inspired this book. My curiosity was further piqued by a splendidly framed engraving of Fuseli’s painting of Caractacus at the Tribunal of Claudius at Rome, which has hung for years in the hall outside my study. In the picture Caratacus is portrayed as the noble warrior, his fists clenched in iron manacles, his moustaches to the fore, his brow steely. His daughter and his wife and even the Empress Agrippina are depicted as respectively, wilting, fainting, theatrical and buxom. The picture is I have to admit not really to my taste, but for us it is doubly interesting, firstly for its depiction of Eigon and the obviously dramatic story it tells and secondly, because the engraver was my great, great, great grandfather, Andrew Birrell. I had to find out more.
Caratacus the warrior king and opposer of the invading Romans was the son of Cunobelinus (or Cymbeline) king of the Catuvellauni. We know a great deal about his opposition to Rome, his battles, his defeat. I wrote about his capture by Cartimandua in Daughters of Fire, but as a character he moved off stage in her story, just as his life was becoming truly fascinating. We know he was taken with his family to Rome, made the famous speech to the Emperor as they stood, facing an almost certainly horrific death and won the Emperor’s approbation by the brilliance of his address, whereupon he was pardoned and given a house. (Tacitus quotes his speech at length in his Annals of Imperial Rome, written some 50 years after the event, so he might have known the gist of what Caratacus said, but we must bear in mind that the words may, as recorded, owe more to Tacitus’s own political views than what was actually said.)
This much is described by the Roman historians. There is however another Caratacus, or Caractacus or Caradoc. Here he is a legendary and mythic hero, the father of many children, the descendant of gods and from the novelist’s point of view it is the many interesting gaps and inconsistencies in all the information and misinformation which has come down to us about this period, that pose some of the questions which I have explored. Here we are at the cusp between history and legend and it is from this mixture that I have teased out the single thread of my story.
(I explore more about Caratacus’s legend and his possible relations and descendants on my website – fascinating though the subject is, it is not part of this particular novel.)
The questions I asked myself were specific. How and why could Caratacus just disappear from history? Where did he live in Rome? Why did he not immediately plot and plan to return to Britannia and specifically to the mountains of what we now call Wales to continue his fight? Surely so great a hero cannot have been seduced by a Roman retirement plan. The only reasonable explanation that I could come up with was that he died. If so, what happened to the daughter who was taken with him to Rome?
To call Eigon herself shadowy is an understatement; what we know of her is full of mystery and inconsistency. ‘Caratacus’s daughter’ (not mentioned by name by Tacitus and not appearing on the sometimes wild and wonderful lists of Caratacus’s children) disappears from history after the great set piece speech in Rome. But then we have her mysterious reappearance as a saint in the foothills of the Black Mountains.
So, more questions: if Eigon existed at all, was she as she is depicted by Elgar in his cantata Caractacus, where she is old enough to have a lover, and in the painting by Fuseli, where she is a full-grown woman at the time of her capture? Or was she a child? The latter would, I thought, make more sense as she was still with her mother on campaign and I decided to make Eigon’s mother a ‘Welsh’ woman. Caratacus was probably married as a young man to someone from his own or a neighbouring tribe to seal a tribal alliance, and if he indeed had other children it was she who would have been their mother. His alliance with the Silures came later in his career as his opposition to Rome pushed him further and further west. So it seemed reasonable to assume that perhaps his leadership of the Silures and his adoption as a legend of Welsh history came through, or was reinforced by, a subsequent marriage alliance with the daughter of their king, whom he later succeeded by dint of his prowess as a military leader. If this supposition is true, then his children by the lady I call Cerys would have been young at the time of the battle and they would have called South Wales home.
Then I wondered where Christianity came in and that at least was obvious. The Rome to which Caratacus and his family were taken was the Rome of St Peter and St Paul; if they survived they would have been there at the time of the Great Fire of Rome and the Christian persecutions under Nero and they would almost certainly have met up with Pomponia Graecina while there; her arrest and the charge that she was following a foreign religion is recorded, again by Tacitus. Some say she had been influenced by Druidry during her time in Britannia; some by the new Christianity. I have covered my options by making her interested in both.
It seemed to me a good guess that Eigon eventually returned to the country of her birth and, if she is remembered here as a saint, then she must have returned as a Christian. In the early Celtic church the term saint meant someone who s
erved God and lived a holy life. The Llan in Llanigon (still spelt Llaneigon in Victorian times) did not imply that this ancient place was originally a parish or even a church. Llan came to mean both those things in later Welsh but in the original meaning the term referred to a small religious community or centre, focused around a particular spiritual person, which would fit in with it being the place where Eigon chose to settle down. She was actually there. In person.
Thus from very slender threads I have woven her story. I can’t claim it to be history but I feel I have given a good guess.
That leaves me with one last mystery which Caratacus has bequeathed us. Where did that last great battle take place? It seems strange, but no one knows for sure. There are many places which claim to be its site. In the end I did not feel qualified to make a choice so I have invented one of my own. My Valley of Ravens does not exist as such! If you are interested in finding out more about some of the possible locations for the battle please look at my website (barbara-erskine.com) where I have listed some of them and posted some of my own photographs.
Researching this book has as with all my books, been a joy. I want to thank Pat Taylor who when I was researching Daughters of Fire, introduced me to her beloved Yorkshire and who nobly volunteered to come with me to Rome and helped keep me focused on the places I needed to see on this visit. She also introduced me, while we were there, to her friend Anne Marie Doran Marchetti who gave me wonderful advice about the food, the drink, the way of life and many other aspects of living in the most wonderful city in the world.
Back home very many thanks to Christian Chilton who provided me with information about police procedure. In the end the police presence in the story is mostly off stage, but it is only knowing exactly what they would be doing which allows one accurately to fit them into the action. Thank you too to Raymond and Christine Nickford who saved me from my own ignorance by sending me CDs of Elgar’s Caractacus of which I had never heard. I have to confess that like Jess I feel it is not altogether my kind of music but it is growing on me!
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