Candlenight (28 page)

   
Giles folded in two as a big
shoe went into his stomach and his hair was torn back and something that could
only have been a fist but felt like a steel spike was driven into his
left eye.

Chapter XXXII

In Y Groes, around midnight, the air was still.

   
All that night there would be
violent rain in Pontmeurig. Over the Nearly Mountains there was sleet. The
River Meurig was savagely swollen.

   
Y Groes, around midnight, was
another world.

   
True, it had been stormy and
the barometers still registered minimal pressure. But now the rain had stopped
and the wind had died. The clouds slid back theatrically and there was a full
moon over the church. Wherever you stood in Y Groes, the moon always seemed to
be over the church, like a white candle flame.

   
Just before midnight, Claire
came down the ribbon of lane from the church among a group of people. They included
the rector, the Reverend Elias Ap Siencyn, Glyn Harri,
the amateur historian, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis, mother of Dilwyn and grandmother of
Sali. And the Morgans— Buddug Morgan and big Morgan Morgan.

   
They walked down towards the
river and Claire, seeing the moon on the thrashing water, became excited.

   
The river had been rising all
day and something in Claire had been rising with it. She felt drawn to the
water, but a gentle hand held her back.

   
"
Dim nawr
."

   
Not now.

   
Mrs. Bronwen Dafis explained
that if she went down now she might not get back. It was too dangerous. Too
dark.
   
But the moon . . .

   
Indeed, Mrs. Dafis said
cryptically. The moon.
   
"
Wel, pryd
?" Claire said. When?

   
"
Bore fori
," the rector said quietly. Tomorrow morning.

   
He turned and walked away up
the hill.

   
Tacitly dismissed, the group
split up in silence. Glyn Harri followed at a respectful distance behind the
spindly figure of the rector. Then went Buddug and Morgan. Mrs. Bronwen Dafis
was the last, a tiny upright figure, alone. None of them looked back at Claire,
who stood staring into the dark water.

   
The river was still gathering
rage, although there was no wind or rain here. As if driven by the moon, it
hurled itself at the stone buttresses of the bridge.

   
No lights now in the village,
except for a lone streetlamp with a small yellow bulb under a pan-lid shade.
The rector's long shape vanished beyond the light.

   
She was alone on the bridge,
but unafraid. Inside her dwelt a great calm which stilled her thoughts and her
emotions. She was content. She was
here.
Home.

   
At last.

   
Time passed. True darkness came,
as a dense cloud formed around the moon and then a final fold of cloud came
down over it like an eyelid. The air was still, but the water rushed and
roared, filling the atmosphere with rhythmic sounds. Claire could hear the
night now and feel its essence inside her.

   
Eventually, she began to walk
away from the bridge and up the hill towards the church.
  
Although she was moving further from the
bridge, further from the water, the sounds were going with her, swirling around
her and then separating, dying off, then wafting in. And mingled with the water
noise was the sound of singing, uneven and hesitant. A frail
 
organ wail, like cat cries, and the sonorous
rhythm of measured footsteps.

   
An arm brushed against Claire
and a hand touched her shoulder.

   
Misty people were drifting
around her. She was carried among them up the hill.

   
And they sang. With uncertainty
in their fractured, mournful voices, they sang, in Welsh and then in English,

                  
Love is kind and suffers long

                  
Love
is meek and thinks no wrong

The amorphous crowd split in two and something long and narrow slid
between the two lines and a darker mist closed
around it.

   
As the singing fell away and
the people dissolved into vapour, Claire felt a momentary heart-stab of pain.
But a cushion of warm air settled around her and the pain became a soft and
bearable memory. With no light to guide her, she turned into the track leading to
her cottage.

   
Soon after, the rain returned.
But there was no wind until daylight came.

Chapter XXXIII

It was probably the cold water that deadened the pain. He was lying in a
puddle. Or perhaps it had been raining so hard that the entire car park was a
great lake.

   
A blow. He heard rather than
felt it.

   
Bastards. He cringed. How long
would they go on hitting him and kicking him before he lost consciousness? He
lay very still; perhaps he should pretend he was already unconscious. Perhaps
that would stop them.

   
no need for you to speak Welsh, man . . .

   
How friendly they were in Y
Groes. How hospitable.

   
makes you a novelty, like, isn't it . . .

   
A Rhys. He was a Rhys. Sort of.
In spirit.
   
He was
with
them.

   
His head imploding as they
kicked it. Far away though, now. He closed his eyes, wished he could keep them
closed for ever, feeling nothing but the icy balm.

   
But they wrenched him to his
feet again, flung him back against the wall. His stomach clenched, waiting for
the pain. He felt the vomit rising again.

   
White figure swimming towards
him.

   
From the picture. Pale figure
from the photograph in its frame in the judge's study.
Eisteddfod Genedlaethol
White-robed, bardic, druidic.

   
It shimmered.

   
"No," he said weakly.
"No . . "

   
"Giles."

   
"No."

Bethan pushed back the hood of her white raincoat. "Giles, can you
see
me?"

   
"No," he said.
"No. Get away from me."

   
"Got him, have you?
Where's the other?"

   
"Don't . . . know. Keep still,
you bugger. You bite me again, I'm going to break your nose. What should I do
with this one?"

   
"What you should do is to
get rid of him very discreetly before he sees your face. You have enough
problems as it is."

   
"Big bloody help that is.
Where am I going to put him?"

   
"Well, hell. I don't know—drag
him over to the castle and throw him in the moat. Take him a good while to extricate
himself, by which time we'll all be away."

   
Guto looked puzzled. There is
no moat anymore."

   
Dai Death looked up into the
plummeting night sky. "There will be by now," he said.

   
Giles stared at Bethan as if he
didn't know whether to push her away or to hit her. As if he couldn't decide if
it was really her. Or, if it was her, whose side she was on.

   
In the shelter of the eaves, he
was propped into a corner like a broken scarecrow, fair hair spiked and bloody,
his suit vomit-soaked, beer-soaked, puddle-soaked and torn in several places.
But it was his eye Bethan was most worried about.

   
"Giles, can you see me
now?"

   
"Yes. Yes, of course I
can."

   
"Can you see me through both
eyes?"

   
"I think so. I don't know.
Christ, what happened to me?"

   
"You—you were
mugged," Bethan said.

   
"Mugged?' Giles started to
laugh and went into a coughing fit, vomit around his mouth, blood in his left
eye.
   
"Is that what you call it?"

   
"We knew something must be
wrong when we saw you racing past the door, knocking everything over."

   
"Where are the bastards
now?"

   
"One got away. Guto has
the other."

   
"Who?"

   
"A friend. Giles, you're
going to get pneumonia. We have to get you to hospital."

   
Giles said. "Am I
hurt?"

   
Bethan said. "Your eye.
How does it feel?"

   
"Cold. A bit cold. My
whole head, really. Cold, you know—"

   
"Idwal, stay with him. My car's
over there. We'll get him to the hospital."

   
"No!" Giles
straightened up and stumbled. "I've got to get back to Y Groes. My
car—"

   
"Oh, Giles, how could you
drive? Where is Claire?"

   
"At home. I suppose. I
mean, she's not expecting me tonight. It was . . . When we heard the weather was
going to be bad we decided I'd travel back on Friday—tomorrow. I—I couldn't
wait. Left early. Thing is—I always phone her, you know, every night."

   
Bethan thought Giles looked as
pathetic as seven-year-old Huw Morus had looked that morning after wetting himself
in class.

   
"I'll ring her for you later."
Bethan said. "We've got to get you to the hospital."
   
"Bethan. I'm OK. Really, I
am."

   
"I'll bring the car. Idwal
will stay with you. You remember Idwal Roberts whom you interviewed?"

   
"Hullo again, boy."
said Idwal. 'Talk about politics, is it?"

Pontmeurig Cottage Hospital accepted patients from within a fifteen-mile
radius. As with most local hospitals in Wales it did not have a permanent medical
staff of its own but was run by the local family doctors. Anybody in need of complicated
treatment or surgery was referred at once to the general hospitals in
Aberystwyth or Carmarthen.

   
They took Giles into a small
treatment room with whitewashed walls. A local doctor was summoned to look into
his left eye, which was cleaned up by a nurse and then re-examined. Serious
bruising. Permanent damage unlikely.

   
The doctor, a youngish man of
perhaps Middle-Eastern origins, said to Bethan. "How did this happen?"

   
"Slipped in the car
park," Giles replied quickly. "Running to the car through the rain.
Fell into a puddle and hit my head on somebody's bumper."
   
"What about the vomit?"

   
"Turned me sick."
Giles said. "Hell of a blow."
   
"I see. Were
you
there, Mrs. McQueen?"
   
"I came along afterwards."

   
"Did you. Look, Mr.
Freeman. I think I'd like to keep you in overnight, OK?"

   
"Oh, come on—is that
really necessary?"
   
"I don't know," said the
doctor, who had an educated English accent. "But let's not take any
chances."
   
"Well, can I get cleaned up?"

   
"I sincerely hope so.
We're not going to admit you in that state, we have our standards, you know.
Excuse me a minute."

   
"Just look at my
clothes." Giles said in disgust when the doctor had gone out. "What
am I going to do? I can't put these back on."

   
Bethan thought about this.
"What we'll do, Giles—how does this sound? I'll ring Claire and tell her
what happened. She can get a change of clothes ready for you and I'll drive
over early tomorrow and bring them back."

   
Giles shook his head. "I
can't ask you to do that. You'd have to leave at the crack of dawn to go over
there and bring the stuff back and then get back in time for school. You can't
go to that trouble. No way."

   
"How else are you going to
get anything. Claire hasn't a car there yet, has she?"