The Magus of Hay(39)

One way or another, next week was not going to be easy.

She stayed in the scullery and rang Huw Owen.

No answer. She leaned back in her curved captain’s chair. Even Ethel was out. The silence in the vicarage was like earwax. She switched on the computer and Googled Cusop Dingle.

Wikipedia said it was a single track road once known as Millionaire’s Row because of all the big houses. It ran alongside the Dulas Brook, with its many waterfalls, into the foothills of the Black Mountains, and had been home to the notorious Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only English solicitor ever hanged for murder.

Which was a long time ago. To go back even further, she looked up Cusop in Jane’s much-thumbed copy of Ella Mary Leather’s Folklore of Herefordshire, first published in 1912. As always, more illuminating, if you were the kind of person who specialized in peculiar tangents.

Fairies have been seen dancing under foxgloves in Cusop Dingle within the memory of some now living there.

Not far from Hay Station on the Herefordshire side there are some rocks overhanging a brook which flows into the Wye. Fairies or ‘little people’ formerly lived in these rocks and in the haymaking time used to provide dinner for the haymakers in the adjoining fields. But once a haymaker took away a knife; after this the fairies never came again, although the man took the knife back.

The last line almost adding a nice touch of credibility. A Welsh Border farmworker would be well miffed with himself at ruining a source of free meals. Less cosy was a mention, four pages later, of Cusop as a place where people believed in the will-o’-the-wisp, Mrs Leather quoting a certain Parry, of Kington, in 1845.

The ignis fatuus or exhalation termed Will-o’-the-wisp or Jack with a lanthorn, which is sometimes seen in churchyards or marshy places in summer and autumn, was considered by many old inhabitants in this neighbourhood, when the author was in his infancy, to be a kind of device of the evil spirit to draw human beings from the road they were pursuing into some frightful abyss of misery; and there leave them without any hope of regaining the enjoyment of happiness in the land of the living.

Will-o’-the-wisp had more recently been explained as marsh gas, a phenomenon not, presumably, confined to marshes.

You just never heard about it, though, did you? Though someone drawn to peculiar tangents might well, on reading about a frightful abyss of misery, picture a deep waterfall pool with a dead man in it.

‘David Hambling,’ Huw said when he called back. ‘No. New one on me.’

She could almost see him in his chair in the stone rectory, sinking lower as more stuffing leaked out. Welsh born, brought up in Sheffield, returning as ordained minister. There might even be a low fire, as summer didn’t much like the Brecon Beacons and this was hardly an effective summer.



Merrily said, ‘How about Peter Rector?’

There was a pause.

‘He’ll be dead now.’

‘Yes. He is. That’s what I said.’

‘We’re happen at cross-purposes here,’ Huw said. ‘The Peter Rector known to me must’ve been dead years.’

‘Well… the post-mortem results aren’t through yet, but this one, as I understand it… less than two days? Believed to be over ninety years old. Would that fit?’

‘Aye. It might, too.’

‘White hair and beard. Large collection of mainly esoteric books. Smoked cannabis.’

‘And living in… where did you say?’

‘Cusop Dingle. About a mile out of Hay-on-Wye, on the English side.’

‘And how long’s he been there?’

‘Don’t know exactly. Could be anything over twelve years. He lived very quietly, didn’t have a car. He had friends who did his shopping. His neighbours didn’t know much about him but seem to have respected his privacy. He was known as a healer, a bone-setter and possibly a dowser.’

Huw’s laugh carried a yelp of astonishment that was rare. You could hear his chair scraping on the flags as he stood up.

‘Small world then?’ Merrily said.

‘Smaller than I’d reckoned possible. You do know about his activities at Capel-y-ffin?’

‘In the Black Mountains?’

‘Aye.’

‘No, I don’t. Just that he was running educational courses.’

‘Long time ago. Over thirty years. You’d’ve been a kid. Everybody thought he’d gone abroad. And he were just a few miles away? Beggars belief. I’m looking at the map now. Cusop – got it. Nowhere else in the country, I reckon, where you’d get such a change of landscape, climate and culture in… six miles? As the crow flies. You know about his books?’