An Audience with an Elephant Read Online Free Page A

River Towy,’ the report began.
    In March 1972 Allen died suddenly at the home in Penarth he had shared with a spinster sister, and there was a passage in his will which surprised his friends almost as much as the catching of the sturgeon. Though he had talked little about the incident, he left instructions that his body be cremated and the ashes put into the river at the spot out of which he had pulled Leviathan.
    ‘I called on David Price one day,’ said Ronald Jones, the former Chief Constable of Dyfed, and another of Allen’s friends, ‘and said what a pity it was about Alec. “Aye,” said Dai, “I’ve got him there on the mantelpiece.” It was the casket, you see. We were all surprised. Nobody had ever heard of anyone wanting that done before.’
    ‘I suppose it was a romantic touch,’ said Brian Rudge, ‘but he wasn’t the sort of man who’d like people to gather round a grave.’
    It was a grey wet day when they put the ashes into the water. A dozen of his old friends, contacted by phone or letter, gathered on the bank, but no clergyman or minister had agreed to take part, their religion not recognising a river as consecrated ground. And, despite the hymns in the rain, it would seem to have had pagan overtones. Among the first things a people names are rivers. River gods are the oldest of all, so a man who had pulled out of a river its largest living thing would seem to be assuaging prehistory, having himself put back in its place.
    ‘We said the Lord’s Prayer,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘as we committed the ashes to the waters he’d fished for 50 years. But then as the wind carried them I saw a trout leap into the air just where they were drifting.
    ‘And I said to Dai, “Look, Alec’s there.’”

The Lost Children
    OU WILL SEARCH in vain in any road atlas. I could not understand this when I started looking. I thought there had to be some small country town: the name breathed all the certainties of such a place. Sempringham. I could see the cobbled market square, the single Indian restaurant, the gleaming brass plaques on Georgian houses which bulged with solicitors. I knew it was in Lincolnshire but there was no sign of it on the map in that geometry of straight lanes and fens. What made it even more mysterious, and will puzzle those of you who read medieval history, is that this is such a familiar name; it is there in all the indices. Sempringham, where the lost children were. . .
    It is 11 November 1283, and a king is writing to the Prior and Prioress of Sempringham. Edward I, the conqueror of Wales, has a request to make, ‘having the Lord before our eyes, pitying also her sex and age, that the innocent may not seem to atone for the iniquity and ill-doing of the wicked and contemplating, especially, the life of your Order’. But you can forget the phrases, typical of that legalistic and self righteous man; the King was making the Prior and Prioress an offer they could not refuse. He wanted a child to disappear.
    With a dangled pension of £20 a year there came an orphaned baby, the only child of the first and last Prince of Wales, Llywelyn, but to the King a biological time-bomb. She must never be allowed to marry or have children, and so Edward was ordering them to make her into a nun. When his troopers brought her father’s few treasures out of his shattered principality, the coronet called the Crown of Arthur and the fragment of the True Cross, they brought her as well to Edward, in her cradle out of Snowdonia. She would never return.
    Her name was Gwenllian, but the King’s clerks got that wrong, spelling it Wencilian. She had 54 years of life left among strangers who would never learn to spell it, for it is Wencialian to the end in the Priory records. More poignantly she may never have learnt to spell it herself, or even to pronounce it, for in her one letter, an appeal for money (the letters of the Middle Ages were either about money or the law), it is Wentliane.
    Her father