Treasure of the Celtic Triangle

by Michael Phillips

  “No, he didn’t last long at the mine from what I understand. He’s been gone for months. The place is vacant now.”

  “Would you mind if I went down there?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I would like to see the place again. I spent some happy times there. Will I need a key?”

  Katherine laughed. “I doubt if there are a half dozen cottages in all Llanfryniog that even have locks on the doors! No, you won’t need a key.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Cottage

  It was with a strange feeling almost of reverence an hour later that Percy opened the door and crept into the cottage that had once been filled with such life. It was so still and quiet. Even in Gwyneth’s absence, the sense of her presence remained. Slowly Percy walked about through the two rooms of the cottage. He recognized a few pieces of furniture that were left. What clue he hoped to find here about his uncle, he could not imagine. Nor to answer the mystery of why Codnor Barrie, his daughter Gwyneth, and his great-aunt had disappeared from Llanfryniog without a trace, or where they might have gone.

  As he walked about, Percy reflected further on the small family’s strange disappearance. He gazed at the stone walls, the fireplace, the great beams overhead, the floor of thick wood planks. He stood in front of the hearth, now cold and lifeless. The mantle was embedded in the stonework, a massive beam of oak of obvious ancient date, gnarled and pitted.

  At length Percy turned away and walked outside, closing the door behind him. He wandered behind the house where Gwyneth had kept her animals. The lifelessness here was even more profound than in the cottage. Most of the large enclosing fence where her menagerie of animals had made their home was still visible, though in poor repair. But the pens and animals were gone. Only one small enclosure was left, mostly in ruins, its thin roof partially collapsed upon the decaying boards of a wall. Percy walked toward it.

  On the other side of the fence, a movement caught his eye. He turned and saw a small gray rabbit hopping slowly toward him across the grass. It slowed as it came closer. It did not seem afraid.

  Percy knelt down and gently extended his hand through the fence.

  Tentatively the small creature took a few more steps toward him and sniffed at his fingers.

  “Is that you, Bunny White Tail?” said Percy, gently stroking the furry gray back.

  Still the bunny did not shy away.

  “I believe it is you. You miss your mistress, too, don’t you? Have you been here all this time waiting for her?”

  For some moments, the young man and the bunny held a magical communion, bound together by the one who was the reason they were both there but who was now gone. At length Bunny White Tail bounced away, and again Percy stood.

  Turning from the fence, he ducked low and walked under the partially collapsed roof of the dilapidated pen where once hungry animals knew to come along with those who were injured. With a fond smile, he looked about.

  What was that hanging from an end of rusted wire? It looked like a clump of dried flowers!

  He took two quick steps toward it and gently took hold of it. It was one of Gwyneth’s friendship bouquets!

  Images and memories flooded him from that first day when he had been the recipient of a fresh bouquet of wildflowers not so very different from this.

  “Grannie says always greet a stranger with flowers,” he recalled her saying at their first meeting.

  Full of the cockiness of youth, he had replied with the air of one more pleased with himself than he had a right to be. “So you consider me a stranger, do you?” he had said.

  “I’ve never seen your face before.”

  “Then what do you intend to do about it?”

  “Give you the flowers I picked for you, of course.”

  Even now, so much later, Percy recalled how his sixteen-year-old rebel’s heart had been suddenly touched by the kindness of the child-stranger.

  “Surely you meant these for someone else?” he said.

  “I picked them for you,” Gwyneth had answered simply, gazing into his face with wide, innocent eyes. “Now that I have given you flowers, I must know who you are. What is your name, so I shall know whom to ask for when I go to Glasgow?”

  Percy had laughed with delight. She was charming beyond words!

  “My name is Percival … Percival Drummond, at your service,” he had answered. “My friends call me Percy.”

  “What would you like me to call you, Mr. Drummond?”

  “You must call me Percy. What is your name?”

  “Gwyneth Barrie.”

  “Then, Gwyneth Barrie, I am happy to make your acquaintance. But why did you pick these for me?” Percy had asked about Gwyneth’s simple gift of flowers on that day.

  “I saw you coming,” she replied.

  “You didn’t know me when you picked them. Surely you don’t give flowers to every stranger you pass.”

  “Only those who are going to become my friends.”

  “You knew that about me?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I saw on your face the look of a friend.”

  Percy’s thoughts returned to the present. The quietness around him deepened. It was too quiet—the stillness of desolation.

  He glanced down at the flowers in his hand, held together by a small piece of yellowed paper and tied around with a bit of blue ribbon.

  The blue ribbon! Of course—he remembered now … the very ribbon he had given her!

  Slowly he untied the ribbon, so as not to damage the fragile flowers, then unfolded the crinkled paper that had held them together. There was writing inside!

  Dear Percy, he read.

  These flowers are for you. I hope you come here one day and find them. I will never forget you.

  A stab stung Percy’s heart. He remembered the day he had waited for her so long on the edge of the bluff at Mochras Head. He had never seen her again.

  “Oh, Gwyneth,” he whispered, “where have you gone?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Inn

  As he left the cottage and rode toward Llanfryniog, his mind and heart quiet and full of many things, Percy recalled his return to Wales a year ago when he had stopped in at Mistress Chattan’s pub before continuing on to the manor. She had dropped several cryptic comments he had hardly understood, things about his uncle along with hints that she knew more than she was saying. Maybe it was time he paid the good Mistress Chattan another visit.

  Percy walked into the thin light of Mistress Chattan’s establishment. It was midafternoon. He was glad to find the place empty of patrons. Mistress Chattan was nowhere to be seen. Percy sat down at one of the tables and waited.

  Presently the proprietress appeared from her quarters, walking out from behind the long wooden bar. Still large, still clad in the familiar white apron spread about with stains and splotches evidencing the day’s work, she appeared to have shed a few pounds since he had last seen her. She still glided across the floor with the soft, stealthy step of a cat. Her hair was nearly entirely gray now, the wrinkles in her face and neck more pronounced.

  For the first time since he had made her acquaintance, a fleeting tinge of sadness swept through Percy at the sight. She was aging and alone. What did her future hold?

  “Well, young Drummond,” she said as she saw her lone customer, “you’re back, are you?”

  “Hello, Mistress Chattan,” said Percy, greeting her with a smile. “You probably already knew I was here.”

  “I did indeed.”

  “You know everything that goes on in this village.”

  “It pays for one like me to keep abreast of happenings.”

  “Is your ale still the best?”

  “I’ve no cause to think otherwise. But you shall be the judge of that yourself.”

  “Then pour me a pint and we shall see!” laughed Percy. “Come join me, Mistress Chattan,” he added.

  She returned a moment later, set a tall glass in f
ront of Percy, then eased into a chair opposite him. “So you’re not going to marry the lass after all?” she said.

  “You do know everything!” laughed Percy. “Are we so much the subject of the town’s talk?”

  “There’s nothing quite like a broken engagement to set tongues wagging.”

  “It’s not so much a broken engagement but a postponed one. We are simply waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “To see if it is right.”

  Whether Percy’s answer conveyed in any sense of the word an accurate view of the situation was doubtful. But she did not press her inquiry further. A student of the human condition in her own way, which she exploited through her position, aided by the liquid inventory of her stock-in-trade, Mistress Chattan was not by any stretch of the imagination a spiritual woman. What insight she possessed into human nature had been gleaned for one purpose alone—that she might gain power over those who came her way. She had come into more than her share of secrets. By subtle art, attentive ear, and skillfully placed sympathetic comment, she had through the years obtained much information that might be useful to possess. But to understand the spiritual movements within the heart of one like Percy Drummond lay completely outside her ken.

  “So what do you know of Lord Snowdon’s past, then?” asked Percy abruptly.

  Mistress Chattan’s eyes narrowed. If the question took her by surprise, she did not reveal it. “What makes you think I know anything?” she said.

  “You dropped many hints when I was here a year ago. You told me there had been another woman before my Aunt Katherine.”

  “I only told you what I have heard. But no one around here knows of it, for it all took place across the sea.”

  “You said there was a child?”

  “There’s children and there’s children. That’s why I asked you if you knew about your uncle’s past.”

  “I may know more than I once did,” said Percy with an enigmatic tone of his own.

  It was not lost on Mistress Chattan. One of her dark eyebrows curled up in question.

  “But it’s my opinion that you know more than you’ve said as well,” Percy added. “Now it is time for me to know what you know.”

  It was silent for twenty or thirty seconds. Mistress Chattan was thinking. “So the young man’s about to become the new viscount, is he?” she said at length.

  “You seem well up on the affairs of the manor.”

  “I know things, young Drummond. I know when his twenty-fifth birthday is and what might make him rue the fact that it didn’t come earlier.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Percy.

  “Just that there may be others to consider.”

  Percy took in the whispered words without revealing anything. Now he was thinking hard, wondering how much to reveal. He knew one like Mistress Chattan might be dangerous. He had to walk with care. “Others?” he repeated. “Who are you talking about?”

  “I will say no more than that. There were rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “About what drew your uncle to Ireland in the first place.”

  “What was it then?”

  “The lure, what else? What seduces all young men—and the lure of riches … the lust for gold.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Library

  Percy left Mistress Chattan’s with much to think about. From the inn he went to the Lorimer home, visited with Rhawn for an hour, then began the ride back up the plateau to Westbrooke Manor. When he arrived it was nearly time for dinner.

  He took his mount to the stables, unsaddled it, and then made his way around to the side entrance of the manor. He hurried up to his room with the bouquet tied with the blue ribbon in his hand, clutching it as if it were a tiny baby bird, careful over every stem and petal, but strangely shy lest Florilyn see it. Depositing it in his room, he descended by the main stairway to the dining room where his aunt and Florilyn were about to begin the evening meal without him.

  Later that evening, Percy went upstairs. Instead of returning to his room, he went to the library. He had not wanted to tell Florilyn that he had not even brought the MacDonald book she had been reading with him.

  He sought the shelf where he knew his aunt kept her growing supply of MacDonald books. The collection had indeed grown since he was last here. He stepped closer and examined the spines where the titles stood side by side. Some were familiar. Some he had heard his parents mention. Some were altogether new to him: Adela Cathcart, Alec Forbes of Howglen, Guild Court, Unspoken Sermons, Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, Robert Falconer, A Seaboard Parish, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Vicar’s Daughter …

  There was the one he was looking for—David Elginbrod. Percy removed it from the shelf, found his favorite chair in one of the window alcoves, flipped through the pages toward the end until he found his place, and began reading.

  An hour later, as Percy began to get drowsy, the words on the page suddenly arrested his attention. “He gathered together the few memorials of the old ship gone down in the quiet ocean of time; paid one visit of sorrowful gladness to Margaret’s home …”

  It was just like his visit earlier in the day to the cottage on the moor—memorials of the passage of time from his visit to Gwyneth’s former home. Even with the thought, he remembered what Florilyn had said when he was here for Christmas.

  “Gwyneth is Margaret in the book, Percy!” she had said. “Hugh thought he was in love with Euphra … but all along he was meant to discover his love for Margaret. Don’t you see? In the same way, what if part of your heart still belongs to Gwyneth?”

  Wide awake now, Percy continued to read, remembering again how Gwyneth, when he was a “pilgrim” in Wales, had awakened him to nature, to God, to himself. And yet, through it all, it was the face of Gwyneth herself that rose, dawning within him like a crescent moon.

  “Perhaps the greatest benefit that resulted to Hugh from being made a pilgrim on the earth,” Percy read, “was, that Nature herself saw him, and took him in. She spoke to him from the depths of air, from the winds that harp upon the boughs, and from the streams that sing as they go. It is no wonder that the form of Margaret, the gathering of the thousand forms of nature into one harmony of loveliness, should rise again upon the world of his imagination.

  She had dawned on him like a sweet crescent moon, hanging far-off in a cold and low horizon. Now, lifting his eyes, he saw that same moon nearly at the full, and high overhead. He knew that he loved her now. He knew that every place he went through caught a glimmer of romance the moment he thought of her. But the growth of these feelings had been gradual—so slow and gradual, that when he recognized them, it seemed to him as if he had felt them from the first. The fact was, that as soon as he began to be capable of loving Margaret, he had begun to love her. Now that Nature revealed herself to him full of Life, it was natural that he should recognize Margaret as greater than himself. She had been one with Nature from childhood, and when he began to be one with Nature too, he must become one with her.”

  Percy’s hands were nearly trembling by now as he held the book. Florilyn’s words were probing his brain, his heart, his whole being: “Gwyneth is Margaret in the book, Percy! What if part of your heart still belongs to Gwyneth? You have to find out. You have to discover what is in your heart.”

  He continued to read MacDonald’s words about the fictional Hugh and Margaret. But he was no longer reading about Hugh Sutherland. He was reading about himself!

  “But dared he think of loving her, a creature inspired with a presence of the Spirit of God, clothed with a garment of beauty which her spirit wove out of its own loveliness? She was a being to glorify any man. What, then, if she gave her love! She would bring with her the presence of God himself, for she walked ever in his light, and that light clung to her and radiated from her. True, many young maidens must be walking in the sunshine of God, else whence the light and loveliness and bl
oom, the smile and the laugh of their youth? But Margaret not only walked in this light: she knew it and whence it came. She looked up to its source, and it illuminated her face.

  The silent girl of old days, whose countenance wore the stillness of an unsunned pool, had blossomed into the calm, stately woman, upon whose face lay slumbering thought, ever ready to wake into life and motion. Dared he love her?”

  Percy drew in a deep breath, closed the book, then rose and stared out toward the sea in the distance. From the alcove he could also view the sea that Gwyneth loved so much … and to the east the hills where he had first met the nymph of Gwynedd when she was a mere thirteen and he was a sophisticated youth of sixteen.

  How little he had known back then! All the wisdom had dwelt in her, not him. But he had had no eyes to see it at their first meeting.

  He still stood at the window ten minutes later, absorbed in his thoughts. At length he turned. Taking the book with him, he left the library and returned to his room.

  Night slowly closed in upon Westbrooke Manor. Two hours later Percy lay in his bed, awake and full of many thoughts.

  Somehow he drifted to sleep. As occupied as his brain had been, he slept surprisingly sound—the gift given to youth—and awoke rested and refreshed with the sun streaming into his room.

  Then rushed back upon him the torrent of thoughts from the previous night. Rather than overwhelming him, however, they poured over him as though he were standing beneath the waterfall of a bracing mountain stream, with its icy waters pounding over his head. He would meet the challenge of whatever the new day brought him with vigor.

  Yes, he had loved Gwyneth. Oh, how difficult it must have been for Florilyn when she realized it—and how hard for her to tell him!

  After breakfast he saddled Red Rhud and set off for the village. But again, his way led him to the Barrie cottage. Something was here, he mused as he rode up, something he was meant to find.

  But where … but what?