Chapter 15 Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice
Where the road ended just past the pottery, we went through a gate and on to a path that zigzagged upwards. It was obviously well trodden, for it was easy to climb, even by torchlight.
The procession was soon strung out, so that many glimmering fireflies seemed to be moving above us. I was somewhere in the middle, with the other Triskelion guests.
The leading, white-robed figure of Rhys vanished suddenly into darkness, and I guessed the head of the procession was now entering the oak wood.
‘The mummers will wait in the middle of the wood till everyone else has arrived,’ confirmed Nerys, who was walking just behind us with Timon.
There was quite a large clearing among the trees, with a burbling stream that appeared out of a tumble of small rocks, before forming a pool and then vanishing mysteriously back into the ground again.
Rhys stood at the upper end of the clearing, near the trunk of a large oak, with the other mummers arranged on either side, while the audience slowly formed a semi-circle around them.
Then, when Rhys raised his white staff, we all fell silent.
Rhys handed his staff to the Green Man, who was on his left, and the boy with the drum came forward and gave him a pottery flagon, from which he poured a liquid on to the roots of the nearest oak tree.
‘The wassail libation, for fertility and fruitfulness generally,’ Timon whispered to us, almost drowned out by the enthusiastic shouts of ‘Wassail!’ from the small band of visiting Druids.
Rhys handed back the flagon to the boy, then took a small silver sickle from his belt.
The blade flashed in the torchlight as he reached up and cut a small bunch of mistletoe from the oak, which he tied to the top of his staff, before waving it in the air and calling out, in his deep voice: ‘Onwards!’
‘Oaks were sacred to the Druids, and fruiting mistletoe was seen as life in the dark winter months,’ Timon told us as we joined the long procession again.
It was a cold, clear night and once we were out of the wood the sky looked like a vast, diamond-studded dome above us.
We were close now to Mab’s Grave, outlined on the top of the hillside, but the bonfire was now hidden by a rocky outcrop, except for a warm glow and some leaping sparks.
When we reached the Neolithic tomb I discovered it was huge. We formed a circle around it and Rhys repeated the ceremony with the flagon of wassail, pouring it over the flat top stone.
‘Now it’s just the bonfire,’ Nerys said. ‘That will warm us up a bit!’
‘It is all so strange and fascinating, I haven’t noticed how cold I am till now,’ I said.
‘Nor me,’ said Toby, and, from what I could see of the pinched pale features of the twins, they were frozen too.
‘You need a bit of meat on your bones for this kind of weather,’ Evie’s voice said suddenly at my elbow as the crowd re-formed itself around the bonfire, which was built on a flat area just below the summit.
‘Where did you spring from?’
‘These days I don’t spring from anywhere, especially going up steep paths,’ she said with dignity.
‘I took my time, and then one of the New Age Druids was a bit past rushing too, and kindly gave me his arm up the last bit. See, there he is with the others in a huddle. He’s the one with the longest beard. ’
She waved and an elderly Druid waved back enthusiastically.
‘He told me they get to do their own little ritual round the fire when the mummers have done theirs: and that’s about to start.’
Indeed, Rhys was now leading his mummers, the boy still beating his drum at the rear, around the fire.
They circled it three times, the Druid declaiming something in what I took to be Welsh as they went.
‘The verse said by the Druid is believed to be part of a much earlier oral tradition when stories and verse were exchanged around the bonfire,’ Timon explained.
Rhys beckoned forward the New Age Druids and the mummers stood back while they, in turn, circled the fire, arms raised to the heavens and chanting.
‘Well, that concludes the whole ceremony,’ said Nerys. ‘We just all wander back down in our own time and gather on the green, where Bronwen and her helpers will be serving the hot punch and the slices of wassail cake.’
Everyone moved nearer to the warmth of the fire and the mummers mingled with the crowd, strangely bizarre in the firelight.
I, however, moved away into the shadow of the steep slope below Mab’s Grave, to look up at the dark star-studded sky.
‘That really bright one is the Winter Star,’ said a deep, mellow and familiar voice in my ear. Rhys was standing right next to me. ‘The tilt of Mab’s Grave echoes the slope of the mountain range over the estuary and they all seem to line up to point to the Winter Star.’
I caught the white gleam of his teeth as he grinned. ‘Actually, if you were here on any clear night, at some moment they would point to any star you wanted them to, I should think, like a stopped watch showing the right time twice a day.’
‘Don’t take the magic away,’ I said involuntarily. ‘I know Noel said the whole rite was a hotchpotch of various traditions, ancient and fairly recent, pagan and Christian, but somehow, the entire thing is imbued with magic and mystery.’
‘I feel that way too, and so do most of the other performers – and that’s why we go on doing it year after year.’
The crowd around the fire had begun to thin and I spotted Evie, linking arms with Old Winter, turn away from the dying embers to start the descent.
Opal and Pearl still stood on the edge of the firelight, like twin wraiths, pale as the undead.
Opal appeared to be talking urgently to her sister, so perhaps the Solstice ceremony had inspired her with some ideas for their performance art.
Pearl, however, was wistfully gazing beyond her sister to where Toby stood, talking to Megan.
‘Bronwen’s daughter makes a very beautiful St Melangell,’ I said, entirely forgetting for a moment who I was talking to.
‘I suppose she does, but Megan’s never been notably saintly,’ he said, sounding amused.
‘Verity said you’d always been very close,’ I told him. I hadn’t meant to, it just slipped out.
The laughter seemed to go out of his voice.
‘Did she? Well, Megan and I grew up together here at Triskelion and we’re as close as a brother and sister.
In fact, her husband is one of my best friends and I’m godfather to their baby, so if Verity implied anything closer between Megan and myself, it was all in her imagination. ’
‘Oh, no … I mean, I expect I took what she said the wrong way,’ I said quickly. ‘Not that it matters, in any case.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked softly. ‘Verity has a lot of imagination, so I’d take anything she says with a pinch of salt. I’m sure she imagines I’m some kind of shameless philanderer, but I’m really not that kind of man at all. She should have been a novelist, not a painter!’
I was thrown off balance, wondering who to believe.
My silence must have revealed what I was thinking as he said ruefully, ‘I suppose, given I never contacted you after our first meeting, it’s my own fault if you believe her anyway. Come on, everyone else has gone. As we walk down, I’ll explain the reason why I never called you.’
‘There’s no need to explain anything,’ I said stiffly as I followed the light cast on to the path by his torch, very conscious of his tall, cloaked figure by my side, the hood of his robe now pushed back.
‘I think there is, Ginny.’ He took my elbow to steady me as I slipped on a loose stone, then released me again quickly. ‘What I told you before was true: I never forgot meeting you at that party, or the instant feeling of connection between us. We just clicked, didn’t we?’
‘At the time I thought we did,’ I said coldly.
‘I hardly remember what I did at the party after I’d met you, except that I just wanted to get home and call you right away.’
‘Oh? And any reason why you didn’t? I mean, other than the fact you were married at the time?’
He stopped and I did too, then turned to look up at him. I could just make out his craggy face and the way he was running his hand through his dark hair, which seemed to be a habit with him when disturbed about something. His bronze crown of oak leaves was askew.
‘I wanted to tell you about that right away. I would have done at the party, before I asked you for your phone number, if we’d had time,’ he said. ‘The marriage wasn’t a great success and we’d become estranged after a final attempt at a reconciliation earlier that year, and filed for divorce.’
He sighed deeply. ‘But then, when I got back to my flat after the party that night, there she was, waiting for me …’
‘And you thought you’d give it another go,’ I said helpfully. ‘You really don’t have to explain anything. Once I’d realized you weren’t going to call me and I googled you, I found you were married to Annie Ashwin, who was not only a talented artist but stunningly lovely.’
‘She didn’t look lovely that night. She was upset and very angry … and very drunk,’ he said. ‘She’d just found out she was pregnant – and so far along they wouldn’t let her have an abortion. She told me she’d done everything she could to try and get rid of the baby and nothing had worked.’
This was the last thing I expected him to say, so it was a few moments before I said, ‘It was … your baby?’
‘So she said, from our reconciliation earlier that year, although what led to our final – as I thought – estrangement was finding out she’d never totally dropped the man she was living with before we first met.
And come to think of it, I have Verity to thank for that bit of information, too.
She “accidentally” let it drop that Annie hadn’t been sharing a flat with her in London, but living with this old boyfriend. ’
‘So she wanted to get back with you?’ I suggested.