Candlenight (23 page)

   
God, Giles thought, the village
is still growing out of this woodland just as it always has. An organic process.
Morelli had been right when he said it was like the place had just grown up out
of the ground.

   
Giles raised up his arms as if to
absorb the soaring energy of the wood but felt only insignificant among the
arboreal giants and decided to turn back. It was too much to take in all at
once. Especially when he wasn't feeling awfully well, nerves in his head still
jerking, like wires pulled this way and that by a powerful magnet.

   
He almost got lost on the way
back, taking a path he was convinced was the right one until it led him to a
pair of blackened gateposts where the oaks formed a sort of tunnel.
   
At the end was something big, like a
huge crouching animal. A house. Somebody lived in the middle of the wood.

   
Well, what was so odd about
that? Lots of people lived in woods.

   
Yes, but this wood was special.
The village was down below; this was where the trees lived.

   
There was no gate but on the
left-hand post it said, carved out of the wood.

   
Rheithordy.

   
Above the word, which Giles had
never seen before, a rough cross had been hewn.
   
"
Helo
."

   
Giles stopped, startled, as a
small dark figure darted out from behind the gatepost.

   
"Hello." Giles said.
"Who's that?"

   
It was a little girl—maybe
eight or nine—and she was dressed mainly in black—black skirt, black jumper,
black shoes. Even so, she seemed to fit into the backcloth, like some woodland
sprite. "
Pwy y chi
?" she
demanded.

   
"Sorry," said Giles.
"'Fraid I don't speak Welsh. Yet."

   
The child had mousy hair and a
pale, solemn face. "Are you English?"

   
Giles nodded, smiling ruefully.
"'Fraid so."

   
The child looked up at Giles
out of large brown eyes. She said seriously, "Have you come to hang
yourself?"

   
"What?" Giles's eyes
widened in amusement. "Have I come to—?"

   
But she only turned away and
ran back behind the gatepost.

   
Giles shook his head—which
hurt—and strolled on. Soon the path widened and sloped down to the village. It was
easy when you knew your way.

   
There was only one paracetamol
left in the packet, but he took it anyway and sat down at the fat-legged dining
table. They were going this morning to Pontmeurig, where Giles was to meet the
chairman of The local Conservative Party to get a bit of background for a
feature he was planning in the run-up to The Glanmeurig by-election. It
wouldn't be long
now before a date was set.

   
"And while we're in Pont."
he shouted to Claire, who was in the bedroom, changing out of her old, stained
jeans into something more respectable, "there're a few things we could be
on the lookout for, if you're agreeable. I had a walk around the place last
night, making a few notes on tape."

   
"Super." Claire said,
appearing at the living room door, still wriggling into clean, white denims.
"
Da iawn
. How's your head?"

   
"Could be worse. Don't you
want to hear the list?"

   
"Oh, I hate it when you put
ideas on tape and we have to unscramble all this distorted cackle. Why can't
you write it out?"

 
"All right. I mean
o'r
. .
. o'r
. . ."

 
"
O'r gorau
." Claire said, zipping up her trousers as she went
through lo the kitchen.

 
While still in London they'd
taken to peppering their conversations with a few Welsh phrases. Giles now
tried to think of a suitable comment to make in
Cymraeg
but nothing came to him and his head still hurt. How long
had they had these bloody paracetamol? Maybe they were losing their potency.

   
He found his pocket cassette
recorder and ran the tape back to transcribe the aural memoranda into a
notebook.
   
Concealed lighting for the hall,
electrician, plumber . . .

   
". . . and the pantry knocked
out." his voice crackled back at him from the tiny speaker. "Discuss
with Claire . . .if she can spare the time . . ."

   
Giles hurriedly lowered the
volume, hoping she hadn't heard the last bit from the kitchen. He put his ear
to the speaker in case he'd said anything else vaguely inflammatory, but there
was nothing.
   
Nothing at all.

   
Hang on, where was the stuff
he'd recorded in the study, something about wall-lights, right?
   
It had gone.

   
He must have wiped it by
mistake.
   
Bugger.

   
And yet—turning up the volume
as high as it would go—he could still hear the ambient sounds of the room, the hollow
gasp of empty space, as if it was only his own voice which had been wiped off.
Which was stupid; he must simply have left the thing running.

   
"Recorder batteries,"
he wrote in his notebook, at the head of the list. Better make sure of that
before he started doing any actual interviews. Over the past few years Giles had
relied increasingly on pocket tape-recorders; his shorthand was all to cock
these days.

   
Not that the batteries seemed
low, but there was an awful lot of tape hiss.

   
ssssssssss
, it went
,
sssssssssssssssssssss

Chapter XXVIII

Bethan had never been to Judge Rhys's house before. She'd been past it enough
times—shepherding the children on nature rambles up in the hills, trying to
spot the Red
Kite, Britain's rarest bird of prey, which nested there.

   
Occasionally, over the hedge,
she'd seen the judge in his garden. Not actually gardening, of course. Other
people did his gardening. Simply standing there, not moving but not really
looking as if he was admiring the scenery either.

   
He used to be like that in
church too, always in the same pew, two rows from the front, very still in the
black suit, not visibly singing and not visibly praying.

   
Strange man.

   
Now there was only the house to
stand there gazing towards the hills, its windows darkened. As she lifted up
the metal gate and pushed it open, Bethan was trying to imagine what it would
look like here when Claire had her children and there were toys all over the
lawn and perhaps a swing.

   
She really could not see it.

   
A fine dusk was purpling into
night as Bethan walked up the path. A light came on in a front window, and by
the time she reached the front door, arms full of books and things as
usual, it was open. A tall, fair-haired man was there in a sleeveless V-necked
pullover over a checked shirt, looking, she thought, distinctly relieved when
he saw her.

   
"Great. Hi. Giles Freeman.
Bethan, right?" Standing back to usher her into the warm living room with
the Welsh dresser and the inglenook and a muted glow from a reading lamp with a
brown ceramic base. ''Super of you to do this for us, it really is."

   
"Super of you to
want
to do it." Bethan said.
"Not many of you—your—people who move in from England—"

   
"Bastards," Giles
said vehemently, closing doors. "No sense of where they are. We—Ah, here's
Claire."

   
She wore a grey skirt and a
white blouse, looking like a schoolgirl, no make-up. She did not smile.
"Bethan, hello. Coffee now? Or later?"

   
"Whichever suits you."
Had there been a row, she wondered.

   
"How about during."
Giles said. "I'll make it."

   
"I'd like to start, I
think," Claire said. "We don't want to delay you. You'll want to get
home to your husband."

   
"My husband is dead,"
Bethan said casually, standing in the middle of the floor looking for somewhere
to put down the pile of books, pretending not to notice the familiar silence
which always followed this disclosure.

   
"Oh," said Claire
mildly, as Giles was saying, "I'm awfully sorry. We didn't know." The
unspoken question was hanging around, so Bethan answered it.

   
"He died about a year ago.
Leukaemia."

   
"That's really terrible."
said Giles. "That really is a bastard of a thing."

   
"It was very quick. By the
time it was diagnosed he was dying. Three weeks later, he—" Bethan made a
mouth-smile. "Right. That is over with. I am at the stage where sympathy
only depresses me. Look, I've brought you these little books. They're grown-up
cartoons with all the bubbles in Welsh and a lot of the everyday kind of words
you don't find in the more formal textbooks."

   
Giles moved to take the other
stuff from her (why did people always rush to help as soon as they learned she
was a widow?) so she could open a little paperback called "Welsh Is
Fun." She showed him a drawing of a woman in her underwear. Little arrows
pointed to things, giving the Welsh, with the English in brackets. Like
bronglwm
(bra)
and
bol
(belly).

   
"I've also brought you
some leaflets for
Pont
—have you heard
of that?"

   
Giles shook his head.

   
"It's an organisation set up
lo form links between native Welsh people and the, um, incomers.
Pont
means—"

   
"Bridge, right?" said
Giles. "As in Pontmeurig. Rehabilitation, eh?"

   
"There we are," said
Bethan, glancing towards the fat-legged dining table at which only two chairs
were set. "That's a start. Now, where shall we sit?"

   
"Not in here." Claire
said quickly.

   
Giles looked at her. She said.
'I've set up a table in the study."

   
"What's the use of going
in there? There's no bloody electricity!"

   
"I filled the oil lamp.
And lit the fire. Will you light the lamp, Giles? Please?" It was a
command. Bethan thought.

   
"Oh. for Christ's sake . .
. What's wrong with staying here?"

   
"It's more fitting,"
Claire said quietly.

   
"Goodness." Bethan
said, looking at the rows of black books.

   
"Can you tell us what they
are?" Giles was turning up the wick on the big oil lamp dangling from the
middle beam. "Claire, is this really going to be bright enough?"

   
"If we put the table not
quite underneath, it'll be fine."

   
She'd erected a green-topped
card table and placed three stiff-backed chairs around it.
  
A small coal fire burned rather meanly in the
Victorian grate. Bethan also would rather have stayed in the living room. She
would never have tolerated a classroom as stiff and cold as this. She crossed
to the shelves.

   
"I don't recognise most of
these." Taking books down at random. 'They're obviously very old and must
be very valuable indeed. See . . ." She held out a page of text.
   
"This is in medieval Welsh. These
must be some of the oldest books ever printed in Welsh—although copies, I expect,
in most cases. There seems to be a lot of old poetry—Taliesyn, is this? And
these three are quite early versions of The Mabinogion. I've never seen them
before, although I'm no expert. Oh—"

   
"What've you found?"
Giles wandered over, craning his neck.

   
"Nothing really, just a
modern one amongst all the old stuff. It hasn't got its dustjacket so it looked
like all the rest. It's ap Siencyn, one of his early books of poetry."

   
"What, you mean ap
Siencyn, the vicar here?"

   
"The rector, yes. He used
to be a poet." Bethan smiled.
   
"What I mean is, he used to
publish his poetry. Many years ago."

   
"That's amazing,"
Giles said.

   
"Not really, there are
poets everywhere in Wales and quite a few are ministers."