The Magus of Hay(89)

‘And the earth-power he found here,’ Huw said to Merrily. ‘The strange energy. The mysticism in the hills. As experienced before him by Father Iggy and Eric Gill.’



‘Ah… Mr Gill.’ Emrys smiled cautiously. ‘Father Ignatius builds the monastery, and he’s mostly forgotten now. Gill just lives in it for a while and he’s the most famous feller ever lived in Capel. Fair bit a gossip about him, even then, mind.’

‘No surprise there, Emrys.’

‘Thing was, ’cordin’ to my father, he was a real nice feller to deal with. Very English, very polite, real enthusiastic. Made you realize what you’d got, living yere. The ole farmers used to go down to Hay market and feel like they was nothing, from nothing – thin ole ground, still covered in thick snow a month after all the rest was green. But Mr Gill, he’d tell you he felt privileged to be yere.’

‘Gill was a traditional Catholic, I think,’ Merrily said.

Knowing from Huw’s expression that this wasn’t quite right, but it was too late.

‘Oh aye, lass. As traditional as anybody who went to mass in his own chapel and then kept on having sex with his daughters.’

Merrily said nothing, recalling the sinister little-girl voice of Miss Athena White.

… the necessity of breaking human taboos, pushing the mind and body beyond accepted limits of behaviour. Performing acts regarded by society as hideous…

Wondering how Eric Gill had married passionate Catholicism with serial incest. Had he really confessed his sin… and then done it again and again? Or had he not quite seen it as a sin? Had he managed to find something profanely sacred in it, something spiritually empowering?

She turned to Huw, raised an eyebrow.

‘Aye, I know, lass. If Rector were chaos magic and Father Iggy were chaos religion, Eric Gill… I don’t know what you’d call his combination of devoutness, art and incest. But even he couldn’t keep it up for long, as it were. Four years, Emrys?’

‘Mabbe the winters was too hard, too long. Take some heating, the old monastery. Mabbe the demands was more’n he’d reckoned on. Moved on to what you might call softer climes, I believe.’

‘And then Peter Rector arrives,’ Huw said.

‘Could be Mr Rector’s parents was here within a year or so of Mr Gill leavin’. Their farmhouse, that’s a couple of miles away, up towards the Bluff, but they used to come down yere to church, and the son he’d go up through the woods to the monastery, to play with the local farm boys.’

‘So,’ Huw said to Merrily, ‘Rector were steeped in the atmosphere here from about the age of ten, all through his formative years before the war. He’d learned about Father Iggy, and the farm lads’d be telling him all the stories about what Eric Gill got up to.’

Emrys said Rector’s parents had been interested in Eric Gill’s stone-carving and drawings. Emrys’s own dad had also learned quite a lot from Gill about carving memorials, and he passed the knowledge on to Emrys, telling him about the man with a posh accent who came out of England and taught you how you make real art out of your biggest natural commodity.

Rector had no talent for stone-carving, Huw said, but he knew about the curious atmosphere of the place, and when he came back, in what you might call vigorous middle age, to claim his inheritance, he’d learned a whole lot more.

‘Keen to try out a few things – and what better place than this? Tiny population and all these absorbent hills.’

‘I bet you fancied this parish,’ Merrily said.

‘I’d’ve loved it, lass. But the opportunity never arose, and I ended up further west, where I were born. And this is part of Hay now. Or Hay…’ Huw leaned forward, bizarrely excited ‘… Hay is part of this. Feeding off the energy Ignatius found. St Mary’s at Hay is probably the only Anglo–Catholic church in South Wales. Incense, bells and whistles, the lot. And pulling in record congregations when all the others are dwindling.’

‘But that could be just an inspiring vicar.’



‘Could be,’ Huw said lightly. ‘Could be. Or, if you wanted to be fanciful, you might think summat were drifting down the holy Gospel Pass.’

‘Nice idea,’ Merrily said. ‘Now, is anybody going to tell me what Rector was actually doing up here and how it relates to two missing girls?’

It still took a while to come out.

Emrys said, ‘Mr Gill’s was an artistic community, see: his own family, Mr Davy Jones the painter and various staff… including priests. Always a strong religious element. Mr Rector’s, forty years later, was… well, we all thought that was religious, too, and likely so did he.’