It depends on what sort of family you want to study.”

“Hm. Well, actually, none. I’ve had nothing but trouble from mine since I was little.”

“So what does interest you?” I asked, sympathetically.

“Me? Rock climbing, most of all.”

“Fine. Then I’ll order you a book that really should appeal to you. If you would just write your name on this slip.”

He wrote, in a large, childish hand: George Maloney. I requested Kipling’s Kim for him, and my new acquaintance buried himself in it, with great apparent interest. For some while I was left in peace.

Everything I read about the Pendragons was lent a mysterious perspective by the tales Fred Walker had told me, by the telephone call, and by the Earl’s character and imposing presence. By now James I was on the throne, and studying the natural history of demons. Previously scholars had pursued the noble and the beautiful, but now they were starting to turn to the world of the occult, in search of the Ultimate Wisdom.

Asaph Christian, the sixth Earl, was not a courtier like the fifth. He wrote no sonnets, did not fall in love or leave fifteen illegitimate children, or even a legitimate one, and after him the title passed to his younger brother’s son.

Asaph spent his youth in Germany, in the cities of the old South, where the houses stooped menacingly over the narrow streets, and the scholars worked all night in their long, narrow bedrooms whose cobwebbed corners were never pierced by candlelight. Amongst alembics, phials and weirdly-shaped furnaces, the Earl pursued the Magnum Arcanum, the Great Mystery, the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a member of the secret brotherhood of Rosicrucians, about whom their contemporaries knew so little and therefore gossiped all the more. They were alchemists and doctors of magic, the last great practitioners of the occult. It was through Asaph that the cross with the symbolic rose in each of its corners was added to the family coat of arms.

On his return to Wales, Pendragon Castle became an active laboratory of witchcraft. Processions of visitors, in coaches with darkened windows, came from far and wide. Heretics arrived, fleeing from the bonfire. Ancient shepherds brought the accumulated lore of their people down from the mountains. They were joined by bent-backed Jewish doctors, driven from royal courts for seeming to know more than is permitted to man. And they say that here too, in disguise, came the King of Scotland and England, the demon-haunted James, to probe his host’s secrets in nightly conference. Here the first English Rosicrucians initiated their believers, and Pendragon Castle became the second home of Robert Fludd, the greatest student of Paracelsus the Mage.

This was the Fludd through whom I had befriended the Earl. Truly speaking, I owed the invitation to him. At this stage I had no idea that all this ancient material, and all these names that had meant so little to me—Pendragon Castle, Asaph Pendragon—would come to play such an extraordinary part in my life.

From a collection of North Wales folklore I learnt that the legend of Asaph Pendragon began soon after his death. It speaks of him as a midnight horseman, never leaving the castle by day, setting out only at night, with a carefully chosen band of followers, to gather plants with magical properties by the light of the moon. But such prosaic purposes were not enough to satisfy popular imagination, and the story grew that the terrifying night horseman had been out dispensing justice, an attribute he retained even after his death.

By night he would catch robbers sharing out their booty in secret dens, and next morning, to their utter amazement, the victims would find their treasures returned. The felons had been so astonished by the apparition that they kept every one of the undertakings extracted by him, and died soon after.

The most gruesome of these histories concerns three murderers. The volume I held in my hands tells it rather well.

Once, in a Welsh mountain inn, three young noblemen killed and robbed a Jewish doctor on his way to join the Earl in his castle. The court, which in those times might well be suspected of anti-Semitism, acquitted the men, and they set sail for France. That night some peasants watched with awe as the night rider and his retinue turned to the south, galloped up the rocky slopes of nearby Moel-Sych and soared into the sky in a southerly direction. The next day the three noblemen were found in the castle moat, their limbs crushed and their necks broken. The Earl had meted out the justice due to his intending visitor.

 

At eleven I went for a coffee.