Chapter 14
GOLDENWYCH, PRESENT DAY
Caitlin parked in her usual place. Stan was in the middle of a conversation on his mobile phone and shrugged apologetically as she switched off the engine.
Caitlin did not mind; she was still on edge after her strange and vivid dream of the previous night.
Stan’s preoccupation with church business meant she could continue to try to make sense of it.
She could not understand why she and the woman with the antler headdress, the genius loci of the stream in her garden, had been watching a third woman brushing her hair in a mirror.
Another woman who looked exactly like them.
When she had awoken with a start, Caitlin had rummaged through her bookcase for her books on King Arthur and Arthurian legend because this was what the castle and the clothes resembled, but she could not find a story about three women on a quest. It was the men who traversed the highways and byways searching for the Holy Grail and doing good deeds as they swept from town to village to hamlet.
Even more disturbing, when she was in the shower, she noticed a series of silver lines around the delicate Celtic tattoos on her arms. These had appeared overnight and reminded her of a long-healed scar.
It had taken several sessions, but by the time they were finished Caitlin had a small but intricate Celtic triskele decorated with flowers on the inside of both forearms in the crook of her elbow.
The third triskele was at the base of her spine; this was larger, more elaborate and encircled by flames.
As the last tattoo healed, she had felt a strange sense of completion, as though these images had made her whole.
She had never regretted her ink, but the change in their appearance concerned her.
Leaving Stan to his call, she climbed out of the car and walked around to the boot.
As she flipped it open, she thought, Dreams and tattoos are things I must resolve later, there are family issues to be dealt with first. She picked up the large cool box and sent a silent thank you to Sindy, who had excelled herself in creating a vast picnic lunch for the King family.
Caitlin carried the box to the door and as she slotted her key in, Stan finished his call and struggled out, his foot catching in the seat belt.
‘Sorry,’ he said, righting himself and hurrying over to join her as she locked the car with a click of her key fob.
‘The diocese is being difficult, they’re pushing me to balance the financial deficit.
As I keep explaining, my parishioners give as much money as they’re able, I can’t make funds appear out of thin air. I’ll have to pray about it.’
His narrow eyes strayed towards the impressive King family home, but Caitlin shook her head.
‘Dad has enough to worry about without you asking for another donation from the foundation set up in Mum’s name,’ she said, shoving the cool box into his hands.
‘Which you help him administer,’ said Stan.
‘He was very generous when you asked him to help with the Sunday School fund, but the foundation isn’t your private bank to prop up the church,’ she reminded him.
‘It’s to help the whole village. Anyway, Dad needs to focus on recovering.
If you begin discussing money, it might cause him undue stress. ’
‘Credit me with a certain amount of sensitivity,’ Stan said. ‘I visit sick people most days in the course of my work. I’m aware of the correct time to choose my moment.’
Yes, thought Cordelia as she shut the front door behind them, you’re very clever at pouncing when someone is in a vulnerable position and turning it to your advantage.
As soon as the words flashed across her mind, she felt ashamed of herself.
It was unlike her to be judgemental and it was unfair on Stan.
Yes, there were times when he could be pompous, but his true nature was kind and considerate.
No doubt her tetchy feelings were due to stress over her father and tiredness from her troubled night.
Pull yourself together, she thought as she dropped her keys into the wide uneven dark brown bowl where the family always placed their keys. It had been made by Rachel during her pottery obsession in her teens and despite its wonky shape, her parents had always given it pride of place.
The familiar scent of home enveloped Caitlin as she walked through the vast Arts and Crafts property, with its steep gables, intricate art nouveau woodwork and large bay windows.
On one of the quieter roads in the village, the house was set in the middle of its plot and had a long driveway with a parking area to the front.
To the rear of the house was a vast open-plan kitchen and living space and Caitlin felt her shoulders relax as she entered, soothed by being back in the room where the family had spent the majority of their time.
When it was first built in the 1990s, Larry and Miranda’s friends had been surprised by the design.
‘It’ll be hard to heat,’ their aunt, Larry’s elder sister, Primrose had stated.
‘Never mind,’ Miranda had replied. ‘We love it.’
As the years passed, an open-plan family room had become a commonplace feature, but Caitlin had always been proud of her parents for leading the way.
Her memories of growing up involved her father covering the dining-room table with scripts as he wrote, edited and annotated plays for the Goldenwych Players.
The scent of her mother’s cooking was the perfume of their world as she experimented with ingredients, each recipe carefully catalogued in her array of notebooks, while the three girls had lounged on sofas watching television, puzzled over their homework, played in the garden or rehearsed with their father.
The garden wrapped around the house and there were tables and chairs dotted in positions chosen with care to capture the sun’s rays at different times of the day.
Mature trees marked the perimeter, while a small orchard of apple, pear and plum trees stood in a sunny corner.
It was on one of the meandering pathways to the orchard where Miranda’s bees had lived.
When she had died, Caitlin and the local beekeeping club had moved the hives to her garden.
A criss-cross of paths wandered through the garden leading to various planting areas which created hidden, private nooks behind neat, clipped yew hedges.
Caitlin had always thought of the house as magical and her favourite part of the garden was in a small dell near the front where three large stones lay as though toppled by a giant.
As a child, she believed the fairies had flown the stones there from the circle on the edge of the village – a smaller version of the Three Sisters for her and her sisters.
She would take her dolls there and whisper spells to them in the hope they might speak to her in return.
One day, the shoe of her favourite doll had disappeared down the gap between the stones. Despite her best efforts from poking sticks into the void to try to feel for it, and even after she had enlisted the help of the entire family, the shoe, they realised, was lost forever.
‘There must be a hole under the stones,’ her father had said as they had dinner later. ‘Perhaps a passageway?’
Caitlin, Gillian and Rachel had been wide-eyed with excitement.
‘Shall we look for it tomorrow?’ Rachel had asked.
‘No,’ their mother had said, but there was amusement in her voice, ‘the stones weigh a huge amount, and even if we did have the necessary equipment to move them, we wouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’ Gillian had asked.
‘Because the stones have been there for thousands of years.’
‘How do you know, Mum?’ Caitlin had asked.
‘Many, many years ago, when Auntie Helena, Auntie Bea and I were little, Granddad Jeeves told us about an archaeological dig that had taken place when his father was a boy, which was in Victorian times. They excavated the stone circle and part of the land that is now our garden.’
The girls had stared at their mother in wonder.
‘Did they find anything?’ Caitlin had asked.
‘Yes, they found several skeletons’ – the girls had squealed – ‘and with one there was an amethyst set in gold which they think had been a woman’s pendant,’ Miranda had said.
‘It’s in a museum in London now because it was so valuable.
There were other finds too and the archaeologists have said there was a hill fort where the village now stands that can be traced back to the Iron Age. ’
‘Is that before the Romans?’ Rachel, who had been studying the Romans at school, had asked.
‘Yes,’ Larry had responded. ‘The Romans invaded in August 55 BCE and the Iron Age ran from 1300 to 900 BCE.’
The rest of the evening had been spent in sillier and sillier speculation about the people who had lived in the hill fort, ending with Larry and Gillian making up a song and dance routine called The Iron Age was full of Sage which had caused Caitlin, Rachel and Miranda to cry with laughter.
The house triggered an abundance of happy memories for Caitlin, it was her safe place, the family hub where they all belonged, while for Stan, it held a different appeal.
When he had first seen the property, his eyes had lit up and Caitlin knew he was impressed.
Her father had given lavishly to the church over the years, the donations increasing when Caitlin and Stan had become engaged, but she was irritated Stan would mention the ongoing financial woes of his parish when they were awaiting Larry’s return from hospital.
‘Would you put the cool box on the counter, please,’ she said, turning to open the bifold doors and let in the summer sunshine. ‘Dad’s going to be tense enough having been away from the factory for a few weeks, so the family has agreed not to mention work today.’
‘It might have been pleasant to be included in this instruction,’ said Stan, depositing the box with undue force.
‘It’s on the family WhatsApp,’ she said. ‘You were the only one who didn’t reply.’