Candlenight

Remembering being introduced to the woods as a boy, as they all had been. Taught honour and respect for the trees, fathers of the village itself. And once, aged eighteen or thereabouts, bringing a girl into the woods one night in May and feeling afraid at the inferno of their passion.

Gwenllian. His wife now.

He told himself he was doing this for her. Ill she was now, most of the time. Did not want to cook, would go into no bedroom but their own, wept quietly in the afternoons.

Looking only at the ground, he almost bumped into the oaken gate.

Rheithordy.

Looked up then, and into the face of the rector.

Cried out, stifled it, embarrassed.

Ap Siencyn, in his cassock, standing at the gate, motionless, like one of the winter trees.

'Rector,' Aled said weakly.

Only the rector's hair moved. Even whiter than Aled's and longer, much longer, it streamed out on either side, unravelled by a little whingeing wind which the oaks had let through as a favour.

The rector spoke, his voice riding the wind like a bird.

'You are a coward, are you then, Aled?'

'Yes,' Aled confessed in shame. 'I am a coward.'

There was a long silence then, the wind cowed too.

'We shall have to leave, I know.' Aled said.

'Indeed?'

'We… I… There used to be this exhilaration. A delight in every day. Contentment, see. That was how it was.

'And you do not think we have to justify it? Nothing to pay, Aled?'

'But why upon me? Me and Gwenllian, all the time?'

'Perhaps it is a test. A test which you appear to be on the point of failing.'

'But when there's no contentment left, only a dread—'

'It's winter, Aled. In winter, the bones are revealed. In winter we know where we are and what we are.'

Aled said, 'Death himself walked from these woods last night, and across the bridge and to the door of the inn.' The pitch of his voice rose. 'We heard him knocking, with his claw, a thin knocking…'

The rector said mildly, 'You've known such things before.'

'It's changed,' Aled said. 'There is… something sick here now.'

The rector did not move yet seemed to rise a full two feet, and his white hair streamed out, although there was no wind now.

'How dare you!'

Aled shook his head and backed off, looking at the ground.

'You puny little man.' He was pointing at Aled now, with a thin black twig, like a wand.

'I'm sorry.'

'If you go from here you must go soon,' the rector said.

'Yes. There are relatives we can stay with. Over at Aber.'

'You must get out of our country.'

'Leave Wales?'

'And never return.'

'But what will we do?'

'No harm will come to you, I don't suppose,' the rector said. 'Unless you try to come back here.'

Meaningfully, he snapped the twig in half and tossed the pieces over the gate so that they landed at Aled's feet.

'It's building again, you see,' ap Siencyn said, deceptively gently. 'You must be aware of that. You must surely feel it growing beneath us and all around us.'

Oh yes, he could feel it. Almost see it sometimes, like forked lightning from the tip of the church tower.

'It's like the rising sun on a cloudless day,' the rector said. 'Always brighter in the winter. Rising clear. And those who do not rise with it, those not protected, will be blinded by the radiance.'

Aled thought, this man talks all the time in a kind of poetry. Perhaps it is a symptom of his madness.

But the parish owned the inn and many of the cottages and so he, in effect, was ap Siencyn's tenant. And in other ways, Aled knew, ap Siencyn had the power to do good and to do harm. He looked down at the two pieces of the twig at his feet and saw where his choice lay.

'Don't leave it too long, will you. Aled? Make your decision.'

'Yes,' Aled said. He walked back through the woods towards the road, and the oak trees watched him go.

Chapter LVIII

I felt it was right, see,' Guto said. 'Meant to happen. All my life, the disappointments, the frustrations — all foundations for it I mean, Christ. I needed this.'

Dai Death said, 'Oh, come on, man. Not over yet, is it?'

'It is for me. I'll tell you when it ended… that meeting in Y Groes. I just can't convey to you, Dai, what it was like. Thinking, you know, have I come to the wrong bloody hall, or what? Another pint, is it?'

'Not for me. And not for you either. Finish that one and get a sandwich down you.'

'Bloody mother hen.' Guto grumbled.

Well, all right, he was drinking too much, he knew it. And in public. The party's General Secretary, Alun, had warned him about this—'half the votes are women, never forget that' — as they drove across to Aber for a lunchtime conference with two other Plaid MPs. The other MPs had been encouraging. You could not really get an idea until the final week, they said. But Guto had followed campaigns where a candidate who'd been strongly tipped initially had dropped clean off the chart in the first few days.

By the weekend the results of the first opinion polls would be out. If they were half as bad as he expected, he'd be placed at least third…

'Bethan it is, though, really,' Dai said. 'Admit it.'

Guto glared resentfully at the undertaker through his pint glass. Then he put the glass down, fished out a cigarette, the anger blown over now, leaving him subdued.

'Aye, well, that too.'

And that also would have been so right, both of them gasping for fresh air — her with the trouble at school, him badly needing a legitimate outlet for frustrations which were threatening to turn destructive. Westminster, the bright lights — and what was so wrong with bright lights'? He'd convinced himself — well, Christ, politics weren't everything — that when he won the election she would go with him.

When he won…

He could have bloody wept.

'Who is this Morelli?' Dai asked. 'Who is he really?'

'More to the point.' Guto said, 'where is he?'

This was also what the girl in the Porsche wanted to know.

'Seen you on the telly, isn't it?' Mrs. Evans said at once, having watched the car pulling up outside the house and this exotic creature unwinding.

'Well, it's possible,' Miranda admitted modestly.

'It's the red hair. Wasn't you in… Oh. what's it called now, that detective thing on a Sunday night…?'

'Oh well, you know. I pop up here and there.' Miranda was hardly going to remind this little woman that her best-known television persona was the girl accosted in a back street by a leather-clad thug impressed by her shampoo. 'Anyway, I'm awfully sorry to bother you. but a journalist told me Berry Morelli was staying here.'