The Dream Weavers. Barbara Erskine

3

      

      There was something here.

      It was a presentiment, nothing more, that whisper of cold air at the back of her neck. She recognised the feeling and paused by the gate. Should she stop now? Go home? Forget it? No. Of course not. This was for Chris, and for Simon and his peace of mind. There was nothing here but an unexplained voice. She began her routine of safeguarding herself against whatever might be lurking in the fabric of this pretty place, visualising herself and the cottage and its garden surrounded with light and love, murmuring the prayer of protection. Then, with an almost imperceptible shiver of apprehension, she began to climb the steps towards the front door.

      There was only the one main room downstairs at the cottage; Simon had pulled the table over towards the large stone fireplace and there were several books on it, neatly arranged, with a mug holding pencils and half a dozen ballpoints, a stack of A4 paper, presumably a printout of his manuscript, more books – quite a lot of them, she realised, as she looked around – piled on the floor in the corner. She could see his printer sitting on a side table. The hearth was swept clean, the log basket full. There was no sign of a laptop. Presumably he had taken that with him when he went out.

      She paused in the doorway, feeling for an unseen intruder, but there was nothing there. Reassured, she walked slowly across the room and went through into the pretty modern kitchen, built as a lean-to on the back of the building. Breakfast dishes had been rinsed and left to dry on the draining board. There was fruit and a cereal box on the worktop, presumably more food in the fridge. Nothing untoward there, either. When she made her way back into the main room and up the narrow, dark, corner staircase, she found the two bedrooms, one double and one with two narrow single beds, with their matching bedspreads and elegant lamps, were equally tidy. It was barely possible to see which one he had selected as his own. She resisted the temptation to look in the cupboard or chest of drawers. The ghost – if there was a ghost – was hardly likely to be lurking there. What interested her was the atmosphere. Or lack of it. The cottage felt empty. Not only because there was no one there; it was empty of echoes, almost sterile in its silence.

      Frowning, she went back downstairs to the front door.

      On the terrace outside there was a small wrought-iron table and chairs; beyond the low stone wall the view opened out across a broad valley towards the distant hills. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

      The fear hit her suddenly and completely. One moment she was relaxed, lost in the beauty of the hazy distances, the next her stomach had turned over, her heart rate had tripled and she found herself staggering across the terrace to lean against the house wall, barely able to stand.

      Hide. She had to hide.

      Her instinct was to bolt back into the house, slam the door, and then, what? The car. She had to get back to her car, but she couldn’t move.

      Closing her eyes, she took several deep breaths. She had been stupid, caught unawares by the stillness of the cottage, the glorious countryside. The world had spun for a second out of time into that weird unnatural silence. But the world was back now. She could hear the song of a skylark, high above the ridge, see the sheep grazing peacefully on the far side of the lane, hear them calling to their lambs.

       Elise!

      The voice came from the garden behind the cottage.

       Elise!

      Bea felt the hairs standing up on her arms. It was a woman’s voice, but muffled, strange, exactly as Simon had described, coming from far away. Steadying herself, reinforcing her shield of protection, she tiptoed to the corner of the terrace and peered round.

      The back garden was small, beyond its wall the open pastureland of the hillside. She could see no one there, although someone could hide with ease amongst the bushes and trees. Bea took a couple of steps onto the grass. Around her the scent of daphne and viburnum and daffodils filled the air.

      ‘Please, don’t be afraid. I only want to talk to you.’ Recovering her composure, she spoke out loud, her voice low and steady, unthreatening. ‘Where are you? Can you show yourself?’ The voice most certainly did not belong to someone from a farm or a campsite, this was someone from another world.

      At first the figure didn’t register. There was a woman standing there, near the wall, no more than a hazy shape, but already she had gone, if indeed she had ever been more than a shadow amongst the many wind-tossed shadows of the garden.

      From the depths of the shrubbery a blackbird let out a cascade of alarm notes as it dived out of the greenery and flew up into the trees. Bea swallowed hard, steadying herself sternly. This was the first time she had confronted something from the other worlds since her experiences in the old house, and she was shocked to find herself trembling.

      She took a few steps forward. ‘I want to help you,’ she called. But the voice and the shadow had gone.

      She made herself walk back inside the cottage. There was nothing in there either. No sound. Still no echoes. It was empty. Safe. Wandering over to the table by the window she glanced again at the typescript sitting there. Kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Volume 3: Mercia. This was Simon’s book. He had wondered, if only jokingly, if he had written his ghost. In the absence of any other signs, did this perhaps contain a clue to what had just happened?

      With a final glance round the room to ensure she was alone, she dropped into the chair by the empty fireplace and pulled the manuscript onto her knee. Amongst all the different-coloured sticky markers that bristled from every page she saw one larger than the rest. It was labelled ‘Chapter 12: The Offa’s Dyke Years’, and belatedly she wondered if he had left it there for her to see. She reached over to the lamp, switched it on, and, still wearing her coat, began to read.

       We will probably never know whose idea it was to construct a dyke between Mercia and the neighbouring kingdoms of the wild, mountainous country that later came to be called Wales. Modern thinking is that it was the result of discussion and agreement rather than the imposition of a constructed border and that, if only because it has been so definitively named after him, it was the inspiration of King Offa of Mercia (AD 757–796) a man with the ambition, manpower and administrative organisation to achieve such a large and consistent enterprise.

      The dyke as it survives today does not stretch the full length of the border between the two countries and only in a few places does it coincide exactly with the modern national boundary. Much of the dyke has been destroyed or lost, but from what remains within the landscape it appears to have been roughly 70 miles in length, though Bishop Asser, in his Life of King Alfred, written some 100 years after Offa’s death, describes it as stretching north–south, ‘from sea to sea’, that is, it is assumed, from somewhere on the north-facing coast near Prestatyn, overlooking the Irish Sea, down to the cliffs at Sedbury on the Severn Estuary, incorporating ditches and banks from earlier periods, some possibly Roman, implying the idea of an imposed border may not have been quite such an original concept as assumed. The kings of Powys in particular had over the centuries shown considerable interest in invading their eastern neighbour with its rich and fertile landscape – they attacked Hereford no less than four times during Offa’s reign alone, the last major attack in his reign, as far as we know, in the year 760.

      In pencil, Simon had noted here, also 778?? 784?? 796? Bloody hell!

      Bea smiled and read on:

      Offa had far more ambitious things to do than protect this leaky western edge of his kingdom. His main interests faced north, south and east. He had the kingdoms of East Anglia, and Wessex, Kent and even Northumbria in his sights; he would be pleased to ensure peace on his western borders with the peoples the Anglo-Saxons called the waelisc, meaning foreigner, a word that eventually segued into the word ‘Welsh’. The protection was to be achieved by the simple process of digging a ditch, which would, as part of the