Candlenight

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.