There are old tragedies sealed in the stones of Llysygarn and their shadows don’t let go.
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Shadows
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Llysygarn Book 1
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by Thorne Moore
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Genre: Paranormal Historical Crime
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Kate Lawrence can sense the shadow of violent death and it’s a curse
she longs to escape. But, joining her cousin Sylvia and partner
Michael in their mission to restore and revitalise the old mansion of
Llys y Garn, she finds herself in a place thick with the shadows of
past deaths.
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She seeks to
face them down but new shadows are rising. Sylvia’s manipulative son,
Christian, can destroy everything. Once more, Kate senses that a
violent death has occurred…
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A haunting
exploration of the dark side of people and landscape, set in the
majestic and magical Welsh countryside.
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No!
I didn’t hear the word, but I felt it, pushing me out of the cramped attic room, with its leaking dormer window among the chimney pots.
All through our tour of the house, I’d been waiting for some shadow to spring out on me. Sylvia had led me up staircases, down corridors, through one derelict room after another, but this, high up under the eaves, was the first sense of death and dark emotion I’d felt. There was fear in this garret, and a lingering panic, but mostly there was a strident, fierce defiance, determined to push me out.
No!
So I pushed back, and followed Sylvia in.
I’d done it. I’d conquered. Not so difficult after all. I just had to be strong. It was still there, that melting pot of fear and resistance, but I could put it firmly to one side.
‘…and perhaps the guttering.’ While I was vanquishing my shadows, Sylvia was considering the large blooms of damp on the sloping ceiling. She looked at me anxiously. ‘Could we?’
‘Sure!’ I felt absurdly all-conquering. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ I followed her, gleeful in my triumph, back down servants’ stairs to the ground floor.
She flung open double doors. ‘Ta-Ra! The drawing room. It’s the only one we’ve seriously tackled so far. What do you think?’
‘Hey.’ I could see why the room had inspired her into action. It was all mock-medieval plasterwork, with a Gothic fireplace and touches of stained glass in the tall arched windows that opened onto the terrace. Sylvia had decked it out with William Morris wallpaper, a chaise longue upholstered in faded red velvet, an Oriental rug and a brass oil-lamp with Tiffany shade. It was hard not to be impressed.
‘Wonderful. Creative. Just right.’ I reeled off compliments. It certainly demonstrated the potential of the place. Every other room merely screamed ‘Rewiring! Dry rot! Woodworm!’
‘I love it,’ said Sylvia. ‘Well, I think that’s it here. Now come outside.’
In the entrance hall, with its patterned tiles and mock-Tudor staircase, we struggled with the bolts of the towering front door, and emerged into the rinsing chill of a spring morning. Tissues of mist were clearing from the tree tops and the distant fields were already free from frost, though the sloping pasture below us was still crystalline grey.
From a mossy balustrade with crumbling urns, I surveyed the house. Solid Victorian, with heavy-handed touches of Gothic Revival; a pointed window here and there, a gargoyle or two, writhing vines on the woodwork.
‘We were so lucky to find it,’ said Sylvia happily. ‘When it went up for auction, I expect most people were put off by the amount of work it needs. Listed building and all that.’
‘But you and Mike didn’t mind?’
‘Of course not! I know there’s masses to do, but it’s such a dream and we’ve got money between us. Not endless money but you know, if we manage it carefully.’
I laughed. Sylvia had never managed anything carefully in her life, least of all money.
‘And if we can get the easy bits up and running, like the lodge, well, it will just pay for itself, won’t it?’
I doubted it, but practicalities could come later.
‘Of course it’s a gamble,’ she went on. ‘But we fell helplessly head over heels in love with it as soon as we saw it. And it does have incredible possibilities, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh God, yes.’ If the initial financial nightmares could be sorted out. That was where I came in. Nothing like a challenge.
‘Obviously guests,’ Sylvia took my arm and led me along, scrunching on gravel. ‘Music festivals perhaps. And a restaurant. You know, local organic produce, and our own herbs and vegetables. Themed weekends.’
We reached the end of the terrace. ‘And of course this is the real pièce de résistance.’
I jumped. There had been something so comfortably bourgeois about the Victorian façade that I was unprepared for what lay round the corner. The remnant of an old house. Much older, crouching behind the new. Nothing fake about this Gothic. Crumbling stonework, sagging beams, a small bush sprouting from a chimney.
‘What do you think?’ asked Sylvia, gleefully. ‘I could have taken you in through the house, but it’s so much more dramatic from this angle. Isn’t it incredible?’
I stared into the darkness behind crooked mullioned windows. My victory over an odd twinge in a servant’s attic was forgotten. This was altogether more forbidding. There were centuries upon centuries fossilised here.
‘A pity there’s so little of it,’ Sylvia continued. ‘Not much more than a hall, really, with a minstrel’s gallery. Oh, and there’s a dungeon. With a spiral stair! Lord knows how old it is. Mike’s researched it all, says it was already here in 1540. The rest of the house was demolished and rebuilt in Queen Anne’s time, and then again in Eighteen something.’ She patted the neat Victorian stonework as we passed.
I shivered. Hardly surprising with the frost still intact on the shaded gravel. Shiver with cold if I must, but it was absurd to shiver because of what might lie within.
There might be nothing.
Then again… Dungeons, Sylvia said. I’d dealt with an attic. Did I really have to deal with a dungeon too, on my first day?
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Long Shadows
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Llysygarn Book 2
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Llys y Garn is an ancient mansion riddled with mysteries. What
tragedies haunt the abandoned servants’ attics, the derelict great
hall, the deep mire in the woods?
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1884. The Good
Servant. Nelly Skeel is the unloved housekeeper whose only focus of
affection is her master’s despised nephew.
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1662. The
Witch. Elizabeth Powell, in an age of bigotry and superstition, who
would give her soul for the house she loves.
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1308. The
Dragon Slayer. Angharad ferch Owain, expendable asset in her father’s
eyes, dreams of wider horizons, and an escape from the seemingly
inevitable fate of all women.
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Llys y Garn, a rambling Victorian-Gothic mansion, with vestiges of older glories, lies on the steep slopes of the Arian stream, under the Preseli heights, in the isolated parish of Rhyd y Groes in North Pembrokeshire. It is the house of the parish, even in its decline, deeply conscious of its own importance, its pedigree and its permanence.
Others see it differently.
Rooks wheel over the deep valley of the Arian and see it in its entirety. Below them, tangled oak forests cloak the slopes, from the high crags to the glinting flash of the river as it swells, gathering the gullies that pour down from the hills, heading for the thundering ocean.
The rooks are the real owners of these forests. Their nests cluster in the trees and have done so from time beyond time. To them, the great house, Llys y Garn, is a transitory thing, intrusive, shape-shifting, of value for the occasional perch it offers, the food it discards. But it isn’t permanent, like them.
They see it from above, a mess of slate and cobbles, gable ends and chimney pots and mossy urns on terraces, clinging to the hillside.
But they saw it too when there was nothing here but round houses, women squatting over querns and wolves howling in the deep woods.
They saw it when, below the Devil’s stones of Bedd y Blaidd, a nobleman held court for poets, in a timber hall under sooty thatch, and men quarrelled over family feuds.
They saw it when gatehouse, stables, kitchen and stores clustered around a great stone hall and tower, and kings fought for sovereignty.
They saw it when Tudor wings embraced the hall and people battled and butchered over the sanctity of bread and wine.
They saw the dismantling and remodelling as Queen Anne breathed her last.
They saw the slow decay, the arrival of Victorian affluence and the building of a house that dreamed of King Arthur and croquet on the lawn. The rooks were not, and never will be, greatly concerned with documents, but it might be of interest to note that in the 1881 census, Llys y Garn, with its associated dwellings, was listed as the home of Edward Merrick-Jones, gentleman, aged thirty-six, his wife Agnes, son James, aged five, aunt Eleanor Pendrick (visitor), and twenty-seven servants, indoors and out. The Arthurian croquet lifestyle required a great deal of maintenance.
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Romancing the past.
I write historical fiction, or fiction in which history plays a vital part, but my books don’t necessarily fit the usual sub-genres. I don’t write about famous people – not even Tudor Queens. Plenty of other authors do that very well. There is a whole sub-genre, I know, of Historical Romance, but I don’t think anyone reading my books would mistake them for romances.
What a lot of romance there was in the past. Romantic fiction too, from tales of King Arthur, Tristram and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere. Everywhere, troubadours were singing about knights wooing fair ladies, begging for their favours, swooning with desire, passion swirling in the air. One thing that was lacking was the final line “and they married and lived happily ever after,” but it does seem to be an essential part of historical romances. Man and woman fall in love and therefore, after various adventures, with plots to divide them, they finally get married.
In the 20th century, except in royal families, it was taken for granted that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Go back to the start of the 19th century and the idea is germinating, but it is still an ideal rather than a norm. There are repeated conflicts in Jane Austen’s novels between characters who see marriage as a matter of affection, like Elizabeth Bennet, and those who see it as a financial settlement, like Charlotte Lucas. Sometimes there are characters, like Eleanor Dashwood, who realise that a certain level of financial security is essential to ensure the survival of affection. There are also characters, especially among the older generation, who see marriage as a matter in which parents arrange and children obey. Jane Austen was writing at a critical moment in romance. Prior to the nineteenth century, marriages were arranged, by parents or by the couple, as a deal, a contract providing benefits and demanding duties, and romance had nothing to do with it.
Among the propertied classes, marriage was very much a matter of exchanging assets. It was the families of bride and groom and their potential alliances that mattered, with a view to enrichment, security or improved status. Sons and daughters were at the disposal of their parents or, if they were noble orphans, at the disposal of the King, who had an interest in the land, titles and, especially, military forces they represented. If they found their future spouse agreeable, that was a lucky bonus. Their duty, impressed by society, church and outright force, was to produce children who would ensure a line of succession to keep that all-important land and title in the family. They didn’t have to like each other. They didn’t have to fancy each other. They didn’t have to be heterosexual. They just had to procreate.
For the ordinary labourer, there might have been less pressure to obey parents, but the same imperative existed to produce children, because without them, how would men and women survive in their old age when they were too crippled or blind to be able to work and feed themselves? Love wasn’t really a consideration, although lust played a useful part. Come May Day, or Harvest Home, or those long summer nights when the rye was high, there was plenty of frolicking opportunity to get down and dirty. Any resulting pregnancy would likely lead to marriage, not because of disgrace or the need to amend sin, but because if the couple were capable of producing children, that was good enough to make their future relatively secure.
My books feature marriages, but that really isn’t the same as romance. In SHADOWS, which is set in the present day, there are marriages created in the 20th century way, via a belief in the all-conquering power of love, attraction and romance, and they don’t work out very well at all. In LONG SHADOWS, set across six centuries, there are marriages or attempted marriages created in the old way, via arrangement, command, calculation and convenience, and I am afraid they don’t work very well either. But then, if I don’t write romance, I do write drama.
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Thorne was born in Luton and graduated from Aberystwyth University (history)
and from the Open University (Law). She set up a restaurant with her
sister and made miniature furniture for collectors. She lives in
Pembrokeshire, which forms a background for much of her writing, as
does Luton.
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She writes psychological
mysteries, or “domestic noir,” exploring the reason for
crimes and their consequences, rather than the details of the crimes
themselves. and her first novel, “A Time For Silence,” was
published by Honno in 2012, with its prequel, “The Covenant,”
published in 2020. “Motherlove” and “The Unravelling”
were also published by Honno. “Shadows” is set in an old
mansion in Pembrokeshire and is paired with “Long Shadows,”
which explains the history and mysteries of the same old house. Her
latest crime novels, “Fatal Collision” and “Bethulia”
are published by Diamond Crime. She’s a member of Crime Cymru.
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She has also written the
Science Fiction trilogy “Salvage,” including “Inside
Out,” “Making Waves” and “By The Book” as
well as a collection of short stories, “Moments of Consequence.”
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