Candlenight

Chapter LI

The Rhos Tafol Hotel was a white-painted former farmhouse about six miles west of Machynlleth. It overlooked the placid Dyfi estuary, beyond which mountains lay black, pink and gold in the last light of the last day in November.

The Rhos Tafol dated back to the seventeenth century and had a suite with a four-poster bed. OK, a reproduction four-poster. But four posts were four posts.

Tenderly, he kissed a small, pale left breast. 'How would you feel,' he said, 'about another nervous breakdown?'

The sky over the inn was like bronze tinfoil, the cottages around it coloured ochre and sepia and clustered together like chocolates.

Yes, it was beautiful. She had to agree. It cast its spell.

And inside the beauty it was only a village, only houses with front doors and gardens and electric cookers and televisions. It could not harm her.

This was because, before leaving Pontmeurig in the Land-Rover, Elinor had taken two valium.

Claire steered them casually, one-handed, over the bridge. 'You never know, having to come back here — it might be destiny.'

Destiny, Elinor thought. Dessss-tinnny. Fated to see it like this, in what passed for sunset. To understand why they were all so attracted to it.

'Or it might simply be incompetence and inefficiency,' George growled, trying to hold a match to his cigarette as they jolted to a halt in front of the inn. 'Can't for the life of me understand how they managed to send the wrong damn parts.'

Destiny and fate and beauty, Elinor thought, drifting. I shall leave tomorrow and still look back with a degree of hatred.

'Perhaps we should have taken it to Dilwyn's,' Claire was saying. 'Dilwyn is very good at improvising.'

'Don't want a Mickey Mouse job.' George said, opening his door, peering out. 'Don't know why you can't have a proper car, Claire. Hell of a way to the ground from these things.'

'You said that yesterday,' Elinor said, opening her own door, putting a foot into the air, giggling.

'Mother, wait…'

But she fell into the gravel. She was crying when Claire went to help her to her feet. 'Don't mind me, darling,' she said miserably, clutching her handbag to her chest.

Night came and they did not leave the reproduction four-poster bed, did not go down to dinner.

She clung to him for hours.

He woke intermittently, hearing voices from the bar below. Mainly voices speaking Welsh. Local people, farmers. He and Bethan must be the only guests.

It occurred to him that in only a few hours' time he was going to be out of a job. He could, of course, steal quietly out of bed and drive like hell through the night, reaching

London by dawn, just time to shower and shave and change and present himself at Addison's desk by nine- fifteen. Then again… He hugged Bethan lightly. She moaned softly. Her body was slick with her own sweat, nothing to do with the sex. He hoped she was sweating out all the pain.

He slept.

Woke again. No noise from the bar now. Bethan stirring in his arms, mumbling, 'Which of us is sweating?'

'Don't wish to be ungallant,' he said, 'but I think it's you. I also think' — licking moisture from her shoulder —'I also think I love you. Is this premature?'

'You don't know what you are saying.'

'Do too.'

'We've talked so much, you think you've known me for a long time, but it was only yesterday. What I think —'

'Don't care what you think. No, yes I do. I care.'

'I think having so much to talk over, things we'd never told anyone… that is a great stimulant.'

'Like Welsh lovespoons,' Berry said.

She kissed him. 'What are you talking about?'

'Those lovespoons. The long wooden ones. Aren't they some kind of Celtic dildo?'

For maybe a couple of seconds, because they'd pulled the curtains around the bed and it was too dark to see her face, he had the impression she thought he was serious.

Then a small hand closed around his balls.

'No, hey… I didn't mean it… Bethan, geddoff…I'll never… Bethan!'

After a third, rather more languorous nervous breakdown, she said, 'I have got to have a shower.'

'OK.'

'Alone! You stay and read Guto's book. It is the least you can do for him now.'

'Because I went off with his woman?'

'I am not his woman.'

'Well, he obviously—'

'Shut up and read the book.'

He looked at his watch on the floor by the bed. It was three-fifteen in the morning. They'd been in bed since about four-thirty yesterday afternoon.

Hell, he'd left all his stuff at Mrs. Evans's. What was she going to think? More of a problem, what was Guto going to think?

As they'd had no cases — and not wishing to make anything too obvious — they'd carried everything they could find out of the Sprite's trunk. Bags full of useless stuff lay under the window, on top of them the two books — Guto's Glyndwr and the red notebook George Hardy had given Bethan.

Berry switched on a bedside lamp with pictures of Tudor houses on the shade. He heard the rush of the shower. He began to read, the way journalists read official documents when they have only twenty minutes to extract the essence.

She was right about Glyndwr. He was an articulate, educated guy who'd probably had no ambitions to rule an independent Wales. This had been a lost cause since the last official Prince of Wales, Llywelyn, had bought it in the thirteenth century. All the same, people in Wales — where there seemed less of a social gap between the peasants and the landowning classes — felt they were getting a raw deal from the English king, Henry IV. And Owain Glyndwr had been pushed into confrontation when some of his own land was snatched by one of Henry's powerful supporters, one Reginald de Grey, who seemed to have had it in for Glyndwr in a big way.

Guto's style was straightforward, fluid and readable — and maybe as biased as Shakespeare in its way. But Berry was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as he read the enthusiastic account of Glyndwr's rebellion which, at one stage, had put almost the whole of Wales under his control. Guto implied that a Wales under Glyndwr and his parliament would have come closer than anywhere else in Europe to some kind of medieval democracy. It was an appealing theory.

The book was fairly dismissive about Glyndwr's reputation as a wielder of supernatural forces — a side of him which had certainly caught Shakespeare's imagination. The only lines Berry could remember from Henry IV were Glendower claiming, I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Oh, sure, somebody had replied, or words to that effect. But are they really gonna show up when you do call for them?

Dr. D. G. Evans quoted Shakespeare some more, Glendower boasting,

… at my birth

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes.