Like he owned the place… like he knowed the place. And it knowed him.
… what better place than this, where the very air was full of spiritual energy?
When she opened her eyes, it was to the rows of candles alight on the votive stand. How many of them had been lit today for Tamsin Winterson?
Big mysteries that hung like the incense on the air. Small mysteries ripping families, whole communities apart. Small flickerings of hope.
Before she left, she lit another, with a short, intense prayer, and left her last fiver in the offertory box.
Outside, the rain had stopped, a sputtering sun gilding a corner of the sky. She walked all around the low-lying, squat-towered church, counting the ancient yew trees, shapeless sentinels flagging up pre-Christian origins. The church itself must have medieval foundations, but seemed to have been substantially rebuilt over the centuries. Quite an ordinary church, really, from the outside.
But its site was not.
Coming down from the circular churchyard, she saw its immediate neighbour, a green mound, evidently a castle motte, smaller and perhaps older than the hill at the top of the town where Hay Castle reared, with no church beside it. She followed the sound of water, down a steepening path beside the mound, found a fast-flowing steam dividing it from the church, and a place where the water went tumbling vertically over a small cliff, like a quarry face. She followed the path to where it joined another, found a spring coming out of a rock.
Stone and water everywhere, all this rushing, swirling energy so close to the River Wye but separated from it, the river obscured by trees, a living screen, as if the sight of it might be too much.
She began to tingle in a way that Jane might tingle, at the perception of something powerfully primeval. Oh God, why were all the sudden thrills so pagan-tainted these days?
The sun was burning away the clouds as she crossed a wooden footbridge over the stream, moving away from the church, but there were some old buildings ahead, quite low, and the sound of traffic.
From a short alley between some almshouses, probably nineteenth century, once humble, now bijou, she emerged on to the main road, some way below the Swan Hotel and almost directly opposite the opening of Forest Road, the long and winding lane – the only lane – leading to the Gospel Pass.
For a blinding moment, the main road and its traffic disappeared, and she saw, like a bright ribbon, the ancient connection between the church at Hay and the little oilcan church of Capel-y-ffin, both encircled by yews denoting prehistoric ritual origins, both dedicated to St Mary the Virgin who opened her ruined fingers to the sky.
St Peter and St Paul carrying the word down from the mountains, to Hay.
While at the opposite end of the town, the Dulas Brook, bypassing another church of St Mary, at Cusop, offered itself to the River Wye… so sacred that the town was afraid to look at her. Merrily stood at the side of the road, water glistening on the sleeves of the freshly waxed Barbour.
How the mountains came to Hay. The mountains and the word.
And what else? What else?
Walking back into the town centre, she felt, at last, connected. Getting a feel for it. It didn’t feel Welsh, but then it didn’t feel like England either, and that odd sense of being abroad seemed central to the experience.
But then that was the same for the whole of the border area. It was as if Hay, despite all its incomers, was somehow the quintessence of the border. A kind of alchemy at work here, taking in outsiders and then changing them in its own eccentric image.
And that was good… wasn’t it, transformation?
There was a tiny pop inside her head, like a bubble bursting, followed by an acute sense of awareness… not self-awareness, something more objective: a vivid sense of being in a particular place, as if she were watching herself on a film. Probably a state of consciousness that Peter Rector and Athena White could bring on at will; it might happen to her once or twice a year and she was never quite sure if she liked it or not.
Hadn’t happened in the church, but it might have been as a result of being in there, the mind-altering qualities of a re-coloured faith. Looking up Castle Street, there was a sense of timelessness, as if the whole area had been chemically preserved. An orange cast on the scene, as the sun peeled back the clouds, like she was viewing it through one of those old cellophane Lucozade wrappers from her remotest childhood. Almost as soon as it happened, it began to fade, but not completely.
She shook herself.
There was a shop on Castle Street called The King of Hay, its windows a little museum of Independent Hay. Richard Booth might have lost the castle and his biggest bookshop, but he was still a presence, which was probably important.
He made that town the best little bloody town in the country, Gomer Parry had said. ‘Both bloody countries!