The Dream Weavers Read online

  After two mugs of coffee and some toast she began to feel more human. She checked her phone but there was no message from Simon. Did that mean that Emma had gone back to London with her mother? No doubt she would hear eventually. Propping her own little Ava on the shelf between the pots of jam and marmalade that Mark loved with his toast, she sat back to think. Mark was obviously out and she had no idea when she would see him next, so there was nothing to stop her going back to bed. She resisted the thought sharply. No more of Eadburh and her misery. Not now. She reached for her phone instead and called Heather.

  They walked together down towards Castle Green. ‘I assumed Mark would have told you what happened when I went to see Sandra. I was so rattled after I left her, I came straight over to see you. You weren’t there so I told him. I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but you had said he knew.’

  ‘He never had the chance to tell me. He was very late back last night.’ They stopped beneath the lime trees to watch some children playing with a ball.

  A little boy, slightly bigger than the others, retrieved it from the edge of the grass and ran off with it, jeering, leaving the little ones in tears. Moments later, two women detached themselves from the group of adults gossiping nearby and set off in pursuit of the ball and a peace settlement. The interlude had given Bea the chance to think. ‘Can Sandra be convinced to stand back now and leave things to me? What did she say to you?’

  Heather sighed. ‘Let me tell you what happened.’

  They walked slowly across the grass as Heather talked, and stopped at last on the footbridge across the river, standing side by side looking down into the water. ‘Sandra is not going to give up on this,’ Heather said as she finished her story. ‘I never had a hope of convincing her.’

  ‘Couldn’t you persuade her to come back to the cathedral?’

  Heather looked at her incredulously. ‘You don’t really mean that?’

  ‘I would rather she was somewhere we can keep an eye on her. Emma has almost certainly gone home now, to concentrate on her exams, so there’s nothing here for Sandra to anguish about any more. I know she won’t forget this, and she will probably be watching me forever, but l can but hope she’ll grow bored and think of someone else to persecute.’

  She didn’t really believe it herself and, judging by Heather’s expression as they turned to walk back, neither did she.

  42

  For the first couple of days Val stayed at home, afraid to go out and leave Emma alone, then at last she had begun to resume her usual routine, shopping, coffee with friends, hours of what her daughter considered to be vacuous gossip on the phone. Two more days and Em and Felix would be back at school and then it wouldn’t be long before the exams began. As the door closed behind her mother, Emma ran up the stairs to her brother’s room. Felix was seated at his desk.

  ‘She’s gone to meet someone at Peter Jones.’

  Felix grinned. ‘Then you’ve got a few hours of peace. She’s been like the angel of doom hanging over you, hasn’t she!’

  Emma cast her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘She’s driving me nuts!’

  ‘Never mind. Once the exams are over, she’ll let up.’

  ‘And drag us down to Provence! Doesn’t it occur to her we might not want to go with her?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got an option. You could’ve played your hand better, Em. Then she might have let you go back to Dad for the summer. I’m afraid all that ghost stuff has freaked her out good and proper. Anyway, Provence will be cool.’

  Emma glared at him. ‘I thought you’d be on my side.’

  ‘I am. But I don’t see what I can do about it. Stop flopping about and acting all wounded and dramatic and do some revision like she wants, then she might be in a better mood.’

  ‘Dramatic!’ Emma echoed, but the sigh she gave as she flounced out of her brother’s bedroom would have done credit to the stage of the Old Vic. She headed for her own room, then at the top of the stairs, she paused, thought for a second and then crept down towards her father’s study.

  The room was at the back of the house, looking out onto their small walled garden. It was a room she loved, book-lined, peaceful and still. Very still. He did not encourage his family to come in here, so it managed to avoid the noise and bickering and somehow preserved its atmosphere of scholarly calm. It smelled slightly musty after being shut up for several weeks. She breathed in deeply. She loved the smell of old books. A curtain of pink clematis hung across the window, making the room shadowy, but she was reluctant to turn on the lights. She had always liked it like this. Sometimes when she was smaller, when her father was out she would come and sit in here on her own, feeling close to him. She had that feeling now, though this time the feeling was mixed with guilt. She looked round, then went to stand in front of the wall of bookshelves. There were huge gaps left by books he had taken with him to the cottage but somewhere amongst those that were left was the one he had quoted to Bea. Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the book that mentioned what had happened to Eadburh in the end. When she had asked him about it, she thought he was making excuses not to tell her when he said he had left it behind. It was with his books on Wessex, he said, and so it had been missed out when he had been piling the boxes of books into the back of his car.

  The silence of the room was soothing as she stood before the shelves running her eye along each one. The books were well organised now she came to study them. Northumberland took up a whole section. History, geography, maps, a box file labelled tourist leaflets; then she found the books on Wessex. Wiltshire, Sussex, Winchester, her eye scanned the shelves. History, geography, leaflets again. She went back to the history section, more carefully this time, and there it was, a slim black paperback, hard to see between its neighbours on the shelf in the shadowy room. Alfred the Great. No author on the spine. She pulled it out. A Penguin Classic. Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. She clutched it to her chest and turned for the door. Opening it, she listened. There was no sound. Felix had stayed in his room.

  Since coming back to London she had had no dreams, perhaps because she had meticulously followed Bea’s instructions for surrounding herself with light and protecting herself before she went to sleep. Somehow, here in Kensington she was more in control, far abler to resist the urge to find out what happened. Perhaps Eadburh’s own dreams were blocked by this place. Quietly shutting her bedroom door, she went to sit at her desk and, switching on the lamp, she checked her bubble of protection was in place and opened the book.

  It was easy to find the relevant passage. It was one of the many her father had marked with little yellow stickies.

  There was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa.

  She read on and turned the page.

  There were only two paragraphs covering Eadburh’s life, describing her exile to the court of King Charlemagne, his indignation at her choice of potential husband between him and his son, her banishment to a convent as its abbess, her reckless living, her welcoming of men to her bed, and the king’s discovery of her and her ejection from the convent. She was at the end before she knew it. Too late to backpedal and pretend she hadn’t read it.

  … begging every day, she died a miserable death in Pavia.

  ‘No!’ Emma let out a cry of denial. ‘No. He’s got it wrong. it wasn’t like that!’

  Asser made her out to be a horrible person; he implied that she deserved to die in poverty and misery. He had actually met people who saw her begging in Pavia, with only a single slave boy for company. Emma frowned. If she had a slave, surely she can’t have been that poor? And where the hell was Pavia?

  Mopping her tears, she switched on her laptop. Northern Italy. On the pilgrim route to Rome. It was a famous place. She ought to know where it was. That was something else she would have to study. Geography.

  So how had Eadburh reached Pavia? She went back to the book. A note in the back said no one knew which convent she had been abbess of. Was
it in France or Italy, she wondered miserably, or Germany somewhere? She wasn’t sure how big Charlemagne’s empire was. That was something else she ought to know if she was going to study history at uni one day.

  By the time Felix had put his head round the door to suggest it was time for lunch she had mugged up on the Carolingian Empire and Renaissance, the early Medieval Church, and had speed-read an overview of the Anglo-Saxons – not written by her father, but well-thumbed, from his library.

  Felix eyed her cautiously. When he had opened her door he had found her hard at work at her desk. Somehow that wasn’t what he had expected. He watched as she dug out a couple of ready meals from the freezer and stuck them in the microwave. ‘How’s the revision going?’

  ‘OK.’ She went over to the wine rack.

  ‘Mum will go ballistic if we open a bottle of wine,’ he said cautiously.

  She gave a grim smile. ‘She won’t notice. Do you want a glass?’ She took his silence for acquiescence and poured. ‘Do you know where Pavia is?’

  ‘In Italy.’

  She looked up astonished. ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  ‘General knowledge. Why d’you want to know?’

  ‘It came up in my history notes.’

  He hauled himself up to sit on the table with his feet on a chair. ‘Have you heard from Bea since you came home?’

  She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Why had the mention of Pavia made him think of Bea? ‘No. I haven’t. I expect she and Dad have forgotten I existed.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ Felix spoke with feeling. He reached for the bottle and topped up his glass. ‘Do you think Dad and Bea have something going?’

  She stared at him, astonished. ‘No! Of course not. What on earth makes you say that?’

  ‘He fancies her. I’ve seen him looking at her. She’s quite attractive for an older woman, you’ve got to give her that.’

  ‘You mean because she’s over twenty!’ Emma punched him on the shoulder. ‘I do think Dad and Bea have become friends, though. He hasn’t got many real friends, has he. He has lots of colleagues, but that’s not the same.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t quite a lonely person, deep down. But he wouldn’t. No, of course he wouldn’t. He loves Mum.’ Noting Felix’s sceptical expression, she added, ‘No, he does. I think they really do love each other deep down. Otherwise they’d have got divorced years ago. Mum’s got a temper, we all know that, but he knows how to wait until it’s over. Anyway, Bea’s happily married.’

  He conceded the point with a slight nod. ‘It’s all so weird. Dad was the one that conjured up the ghost by writing about her, then you and Bea ended up haunted by her. Three people!’

  Emma grimaced. ‘She wants her story told. Asser lied about her.’

  ‘Asser?’

  ‘A monk who wrote history.’

  ‘Like Kate and Phil’s chronicle.’

  ‘Which all ties in. Perhaps a moment comes when lots of right moments collide and the truth has to come out and it’s Dad’s job to reveal all.’ She gave a rueful smile.

  ‘“The truth is out there.”’ He quoted in a hollow voice. ‘But he can’t tell anyone how he knows. He’s a real historian. He can’t quote ghosts!’ He paused. ‘What a bummer!’

  ‘Eadburh doesn’t know she’s a ghost,’ Emma put in quietly.

  ‘No, but we do.’ The microwave pinged and, putting his glass down, he slid off the table. ‘It’s all fascinating, isn’t it. Maybe we should both demand to go back to Dad for the summer. Mum can bugger off to Provence on her own. She’d enjoy it much more without us, and seriously, even if they still love each other, she and Dad need time apart. We both know they do. I think they’ve got it worked out, the way they do things. He goes away for a few months then when they get back together they’re all lovey-dovey again!’ Reaching for an oven glove, he pulled their meals out of the microwave and put them on the table. ‘Don’t do any more ghosty stuff, Em, please,’ he added quietly as he spooned the food onto their plates. ‘Mum would freak out, and we want her on side. You’ve only got to forget it for a few weeks while we do these wretched exams, then she’ll be in a much better mood and we can start our campaign to persuade her to let us go back.’

  In Eadburh’s dream she was young again and pretty and at her father’s court and riding up into the hills for a secret meeting with her lover. In the dream they were not spied on or followed and the sun was shining. The prince’s black stallion and her white palfrey nuzzled one another in the shade of an old oak tree while their riders lay on a woven checked rug within the walls of the sheepfold on the edge of the woods, high on the Welsh side of the ever-deepening dyke being dug across the hills. Overhead the buzzards circled ever higher, calling to one another; some days they were joined by kites and once by a great golden eagle from the distant mountain crags.

  Emma woke up, stretched and smiled. Through her open window she could hear a robin singing in the garden as it grew light. The noise of morning traffic from their narrow road, a rat run to the West End, was building already. She could ignore that, because the rest of the dream was coming back.

  She sat up. Her protection hadn’t worked. Or was it that reading about Eadburh had somehow broken the circle and allowed the memories in. She had woken, not in her lover’s arms, but in a cave somewhere in a dark forest, huddled with a skinny girl and a dog as the rain poured down outside, the noise of the traffic somehow morphing into the sound of water on rock. She reached for her phone. It was just after 6 a.m. Too early to call Dad. Instead she began a text.

  Miss you. Would love to come back after the exams. Any news of Eadburh—

  She deleted the word and replaced it with Bea.

  I hate London. Mum is being a pain. I had a nightmare again last night.

  She paused, her thumbs poised over the screen. A nightmare? Part of her dream had been delicious, erotic, exciting. Not something she could tell her dad. Leave it as nightmare. She finished with three xs and pressed send before she could change her mind.

  She wanted to ask him about Asser’s version of events and the horrible old man’s obvious bias against Eadburh. About Pavia and why Eadburh would have chosen to go there. And what happened to the lover she was caught with in the convent.

  Emma’s thoughts skidded to a halt and between one moment and the next she knew what had happened. The lover was described by Asser as a man ‘of her own race’. He was from Britain. Would Asser, or his gossiping informants, have known whether he was Anglo-Saxon or Celt? Would they have cared or even guessed that he was a prince in disguise? Somehow she knew it for certain. Eadburh’s last wild wonderful moments in the convent had been with the man she loved above all others, and Charlemagne had had him murdered.

  Val came downstairs half an hour later to find her daughter sitting in the kitchen sipping a mug of coffee. Emma jumped guiltily. ‘I’ve been revising. I needed something to keep me awake.’

  Val put her arm round her and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. ‘Don’t get too tired darling. Shall I make you some breakfast?’

  Emma nodded. ‘That would be nice. Then I must get back to my notes. Would Dad mind if I borrowed a few books from his study? There’s stuff there that fits in with my history.’

  ‘Of course he wouldn’t mind.’ Val was relieved that Emma was working. It never occurred to her that the syllabus Emma was following at school was unlikely to include the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that formed the core of her husband’s research and that were now the focus of her daughter’s full attention.

  *

  ‘Simon!’

  Bea had answered the knock on the door with extreme caution. She did not really expect Sandra to return, but there was always that chance.

  ‘Can I come in? I’ve something to show you. Sorry. I should have rung first.’

  She showed him into the snug. ‘Mark is out at a Chapter meeting.’

  ‘You can tell him about this later. I’ve just been up Coedmawr. Your librar
ian lady, Jane, has some amazing photos of the ancient chronicle now. Fresh angles with far more information, and I was so excited I had to tell someone.’ He gave a sheepish grin.

  ‘It must be quiet without Emma and Felix.’

  ‘It is. Partly a relief, but partly not.’ He heaved a deep sigh.

  ‘Have you heard from Emma?’

  He nodded. ‘She asked after you.’ There was no point in mentioning the nightmare, so he changed the subject. ‘Sandra Bedford turned up while Val was there,’ he said. ‘Amongst the various poisons she dripped in my wife’s ear was the possibility that you and I might be having an affair.’

  Bea stared at him incredulously. To his relief he saw her smile. ‘She really is a piece of work, isn’t she. I suppose she assumes a man and a woman can’t be friends. Or perhaps it’s wishful thinking. I am fairly reliably informed that she fancies Mark. I trust your wife didn’t believe her.’

  ‘No. She didn’t.’ Probably because she thought him too boring to have the energy for an affair. Simon kept the thought to himself. He reached into his pocket for his phone. ‘Let’s forget about Sandra Bedford. Let me show you these new photos. Jane is making me a set of prints for my records, but in the meantime this will give you an idea. Take a look – it mentions Eadburh.’

  Bea glanced at him sharply. ‘What does it say?’