Sleeper’s Castle: An epic historical romance from the Sunday Times bestseller. Barbara Erskine

but it was really the buttery. That and the pantry led off one side of the hall, the main living space of the house, while her parlour and her father’s study led off the other. The kitchen had originally been built separately, behind the house, but now it was joined into the main fabric of the building as a solid extension with behind it the bakehouse with its stone oven. Beyond it lay the high castellated wall of the yard.

      Drawing her cloak around her against the cold, Catrin went into the buttery to find the ink. Besides overseeing the storage of their ale and beer and cider casks, she made her simples and receipts and remedies in this room. They were a small household; she and her father with their cook housekeeper Joan, Betsi the maid of all work and Peter the outside boy and scullion. Joan did her best but she was worked off her feet in the old house, which had grown increasingly shabby and neglected over the years.

      When Catrin’s father and mother had first come here there had been a steward and other servants and farmworkers but one by one they had been sent away. Catrin’s father did not tolerate people around him; they distracted him from his poetry and from his dreams. And they cost money. Now all that was left of the livestock were a few sheep, a pig and a cow and they still had two horses and a mule. They were all looked after by Peter, who added to his long list of duties that of fisherman, keeping Joan’s kitchen stocked with trout and grayling and crayfish, which he pulled from secret pools in the brook. He also had made himself responsible for training the two corgis – the short-legged cattle dogs that followed him everywhere – and, from time to time, cosseting the barn cats; her father did not tolerate cats or dogs indoors either.

      The buttery was Catrin’s special domain, full of the rich smell of herbs and the precious spices she brought back sometimes from the market. The stoppered jug which contained the ink she made several times a year was stored on a high shelf. Carefully she set the candlestick down and reached for one of the spare inkhorns, filling it from the heavy jug. The black liquid glistened in the candlelight. She glanced at the basket of oak apples on the shelf and next to it the jar of precious gum arabic and the dish of blue-green copperas crystals bought from a pedlar who called in from time to time as he travelled between the fairs and monasteries. If he didn’t call again soon she would have to make the long arduous journey to Hereford to visit the only mercer there who stocked the items she needed. Her father was particular. He wanted his ink to be the best quality and he wanted it to last on the page. Early autumn was the best time to make the ink, the galls strong and full of acid after the worms had crawled out and left them empty. She had thought she had collected plenty; now there was but half a small basket left.

      When she returned to her father’s workroom he wasn’t there. The candle flames guttered as she made her way across to his desk. The page he had been working on was still lying where he had left it, the lettering cramped and heavily crossed out. She set down the inkpot and leaned closer, squinting in the flickering light, reading what he had written. It was the draft of a poem. She loved her father’s poetry. It was clever, intricate, perfectly written with the complex rules on metre and rhythm and rhyme as laid down by the bards of old, exactly as he had taught her but, as she looked at the page, her eyes widened in dismay. This was no poem.

      The words were scratched angrily across the page. The point of the quill had split and splayed with the force of his hand and had spattered ink everywhere. She could see where his knife had tried to excise the words, angrily scraping the surface of the parchment scrap on which he was writing until it thinned so much it tore. At that point he had obviously thrown down his pen and walked out of the room.

      ‘Tad?’ she called. ‘Where are you?’ With another horrified glance at the page she turned to run back into the great hall. The front door of the house was standing open and, despite the heavy screens set up to keep it at bay, the large room was full of the wind. Sparks and ash flew in all directions from the fire. There was no sign of her father.

      The garden was dark and reverberated with the noise from the trees beyond the high walls thrashing in the gale. As she stood on the step looking round she could see nothing. The sound of the brook hurtling down over the rocks vied with the wind and the trees to drown out any sound her father might make. She peered round desperately and then as her eyes grew used to the fitful starlight she thought she could see him, a darker shape against the shadows. She made her way cautiously down the path. He was indeed there, staring out across the cwm towards the mountains.

      ‘Tad?’ She came to a standstill beside him and timidly she reached out and touched the sleeve of his robe. He didn’t react. ‘Please, talk to me. I saw what you had written.’

      He turned abruptly and stared blindly down at her. Her father was a tall man. She barely came up to his shoulder and he seemed to be looking out over the top of her head into the distance. ‘You saw nothing.’ His voice was dull and heavy. ‘Do you understand me, Catrin? You saw nothing at all.’

      ‘But, Tad—’

      ‘No!’ He seemed to awaken as though the dream of which he had written had slipped like a heavy burden from his shoulders. He straightened and stepped away from her. ‘It was nothing. It’s gone. I will burn the page. It was the result of an ague. Tell Joan her food is too rich. It lies on my stomach like a stone; make me something in your stillroom to settle it.’

      She watched his dark shape as he strode back towards the house and disappeared through the door. It closed with a bang and she was left outside alone.

      She drew her cloak round her. Her beloved father had been trembling. She had felt it in those few seconds as she touched his arm before he shrank away from her. He had been trembling not because he was cold but because he had been afraid.

      Sleeper’s Castle had been her mother’s inheritance. She had been the only daughter of a wealthy well-connected local Welsh family – uchelwyr was the Welsh word for their class – and her grandfather had settled the old fortified manor house on her when she had married, with its farm and its supplement of servants. What he thought of her choice of an itinerant bard, albeit of impeccable descent, as a husband, Catrin never knew. Perhaps his decision to give them an isolated, ancient house hidden in the mountains and already the custodian of years of legend about its magical past and far from his own fertile acres in the Wye Valley, was a witness to his hidden thoughts. When Marged died in childbirth the house remained with Catrin’s father, who bit by bit had sold off what land it had until very little remained. What moneys they owed each year he paid from the earnings he brought home from his summer tours around the houses of his rich patrons.

      Bards were popular. The people loved them and their visits were eagerly awaited. They were poets but they were so much more. As well as the genealogies of the principalities and the history of the land of Wales, the myths, the legends, the ancient stories, they also knew all the latest gossip. That had made them dangerous once, in the reign of King Edward I, passionate supporters of their princes as they were in their desperate battle for independence from England; and that could make them dangerous again. The bards sang and played the harp. But their business was words. Words are powerful; words can soothe or inflame. Words can inspire loyalty or treason. Words can incite revolt. Edward may have recognised their power and ordered their execution, but they had never been exterminated.

      They toured the houses and castles of the land, staying a week here, a month there, eating at the table of anyone who would pay them with food and shelter. Some had no homes of their own, no roof save the roof under which they were staying. They owed their allegiance to the man who fed them. Thanks to his marriage, Catrin’s father was one of those who had a home and he had both a family and a bloodline of which he was intensely proud. But Dafydd was the most dangerous kind of bard of all. He was also a seer, a soothsayer; he saw the future in his dreams.

      A succession of nurses and housekeepers had reared Catrin. They had mostly proved loyal and kind to their small charge, but when she was old enough her father dismissed them, taught her himself and left the running of the house to the few servants who were trusted with the remaining farm animals, their ponies, the vegetable gardens and the kitchen. Catrin did not seem to notice. She loved this place.