Candlenight, page 33
"You might as well tell me," he said. "How the hell did you manage to persuade them to let you have a room? And not just any room, for heaven's sake . . ."
He was looking up suspiciously at an ornate Victorian ceiling across which misshapen plaster cherubs frolicked amid gross moulded foliage.
"Isn't it so utterly tasteless?" said Miranda and giggled, a sound which reminded Guto of the tinkling door chimes in Pontmeurig's new health food shop which he'd entered for the first time during this afternoon's canvassing.
"It might be tasteless," he said. "But it's probably the best room they've got."
An awful thought had crept up on him. They wouldn't, would they?
"Hah!" Miranda sprang up in the bed, wobbling deliciously. "I know what you're worried about!"
"What am I worried about?"
"You think I've been planted, don't you? You think I'm an expensive bimbo hired by the opposition to discredit you. You think any second now the door's going to fly open and chaps will crowd in with popping flashbulbs. You do, don't you? Admit it!"
"Was a thought," Guto mumbled gruffly.
"Hah!" Miranda shrieked and rolled about laughing. "Oh, how utterly wonderful that would be!"
"Shut up, woman," Guto hissed. "Everybody'll know you've got somebody in here."
"Oh, I love it when you call me 'woman'."
"Well, come on, enlighten me. How did you get into a hotel that's been claiming to've been hooked up solid for weeks?"
"I'm not going to tell. I have my methods."
"Now look. I'll . . ."
"Will you, Guto? Will you really? Do you think you still have the strength? Well, in that case I'll tell you just a little, it all comes down to judicious use of that famous phrase. Do you know who I am?" which never works with the police these days but still tends to put hoteliers in the most awful tizz, especially in small-town snobby dumps like this. So don't worry any more, OK?"
"Who said I was worried?"
Miranda dug into the bedclothes. "Oh dear, he's utterly flaked out, isn't he, poor little Welsh thing. All right, I'll give him half an hour to recover. And you can use the time to tell me all about this dreadful village where people go to die."
"Y Groes?" Guto fell back into the pillows. "I suppose I died there myself, in a metaphorical way. In the theatrical sense of presenting your famous one-man show and no bugger applauds."
"Did you know a chap called Martin Coulson?"
"Met him the once. Briefly, like."
"I was talking to this old vicar who believes Coulson committed suicide because he was brilliant at speaking Welsh but he couldn't get a word of it out in the pulpit. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Aye, I remember now—he spoke Welsh to me. I switched over to English pretty smartly, mind, when I realised how good he was."
"Typical."
"Well, I was brought up in the Valleys. Welsh is only my second language, see. You don't like to be put to shame in your own country by an Englishman."
"Good heavens, no."
"And you say this vicar thought he topped himself because he couldn't turn it on in the church?"
That was what he said."
"Sounds highly unlikely to me," Guto said. "Red hot, he was. And it's not an easy language to learn. This is what you wanted to tell Morelli?"
"More or less." She told him how Berry Morelli had gone to Y Groes with Giles Freeman and returned feeling very funny, disturbed over some son of dubious psychic experience. "And when Freeman snuffed it suddenly, he got very upset. And now these other two people. Giles's in-laws . . .Well, gosh, it's even made me think. It's a lot of deaths, isn't it?"
"Probably more than you know," Guto said. "But it's all explained and, after all, they were—"
He'd been about to say they were all English, but stopped himself on the grounds that she could do a man a lot of damage, this one.
"Well, I'm going there tomorrow night," he said.
"I heard."
"So if you want to tag along, it'll be one more in the audience."
"Super," Miranda said. "I look forward to it. Where do you think Morelli's gone? Will he be there tomorrow?"
"How should I know?"
"It's snowing again." Miranda said, switching out the bedside light so they could see the white blobs buffeting the long window. "Quite hard, too."
"Berry, wake up. Please."
He turned his head into the steam from a white cup of black tea.
"What's the time, Beth?"
"Nearly four-thirty. I'm sorry to wake you, but my thoughts are killing me."
He sat up, took the cup. Waking wasn't so hard.
"Please can we talk. About everything."
"We can try, kid," Berry said. He'd called her Beth and he'd called her kid, and she hadn't reacted. She must be serious about this.
"OK," he said. "So what are we into here? One sentence. One word. Say it."
Bethan said, "Magic."
"That's the word," Berry said. 'That's the word we've been walking all around and poking at with the end of a stick on account of we don't like to touch it."
"Perhaps there are two words," Bethan said.
"And the other one," Berry said, taking her hand, "is black. Right?"
They sat on the edge of the bed in the overheated hotel room, holding hands and drinking tea and watching the snow fall, feeling more afraid now the word had escaped.
Chapter LXI
Hotel staff had cleared most of the snow from the carpark, but Berry had to dig out the Sprite, which coughed like hell and turned the air blue with acrid smoke.
"Could be pneumonia," he said anxiously, driving into the centre of Hereford, where the early morning streets had a first-fall purity that would last maybe until the shops opened.
The snow had stopped soon after dawn, but the bloated sky suggested this was only an interim gesture of goodwill.
The city library was almost opposite the cathedral and at this hour they had no problem parking right outside. Waiting for the library to open, they wandered the cathedral grounds, an ancient island cut off from the city by a soft white sea.
Bethan said, "If it snows again we may not make it back for days. We'll have problems anyway; it could be a lot worse in Wales."
Berry thought it would be no bad thing if they didn't get back for weeks, but he said nothing.
On the way here, they'd talked about the baby.
He said it was the most insidious case of rape he'd ever heard of. "Some bastard has to pay."
Bethan thought this was unlikely. "I'm sure, you see," she told him. "that when I was offered the head teacher's post—at the express request of the school governors, I've since discovered—it was expected that I would return very pregnant. And of course the baby would be looked after while I was at the school—very caring people in Y Groes. And the child would grow up like all the rest."
"What would that mean?"
"I can't explain it very easily. They are children of Y Groes. Steeped in the Welsh traditions—traditions which no longer apply anywhere else, not to this extent anyway.
Although the community is . . . clings, if you like, to its church, this church is different. There's an element in the religion of the village which is almost pre-Christian. It accepts all the eerie, psychic things—the toili and the cannwyll gorff and the bird of death—as part of life's fabric. All right, that's not unusual in itself, rural west Wales is riddled with superstition, but here it's a way of life."
"But the church is Anglican." Berry said now, under the massive spireless tower of Hereford Cathedral. "Like this place."
"Not so simple." Bethan was wearing her pink woolly hat and a red scarf wound twice around her neck. 'The old Celtic church was the earliest form of Christianity in Britain and it probably absorbed many elements of paganism. Nobody knows for sure what its rituals were, or its dogma. I suppose we can say the two earliest known religious
influences in Wales were the Celtic church and . . . what remained of Druidism, I imagine. Intermingled."
"It says in Guto's book that it used to be suggested Owain Glyndwr had been trained in Druidic magic. Like, he was some kind of sorcerer who could alter the weather and—"
"—Call spirits from the Vasty Deep," said Bethan. "Yes. Obviously. Guto is deeply dismissive of all this. He wants Glyndwr to have been some sort of pragmatic early socialist with a deep commitment to democracy and the classless society."
"What do you think?"
"I think Glyndwr was probably fumbling in the dark like the rest of us." Bethan said, taking his arm. "You need a thicker coat, Berry, you must be freezing."
In the library they paused to glance through the morning papers. Over Ray Wheeler's story in the Mirror was the headline:
W—KERS!
GUTO BLASTS THE BOMBERS.
Bethan shook her head wryly. "The things an election campaign can do to a person. Not three weeks ago he was saying that while he deplored the methods, he could fully understand the motives of anti-English terrorism."
They went up some stairs, and Berry said to the guy in the reference section. "We're interested in aspects of Welsh folklore. The, ah—"
"Gorsedd Ddu" Bethan said.
"I don't think I've heard of that," the guy said, and Bethan assured him this was not so surprising.
They spent more than an hour bent over a table, exploring maybe twenty books. At one stage Berry went down and moved the Sprite to avoid collecting a parking ticket. When he returned, Bethan announced that she was satisfied there was nothing to be learned here.
"This mean there's nothing actually documented on the, ah ... "
"Gorsedd Ddu. Probably not."
Before they left the hotel Bethan had given him a very brief history of the Welsh bardic tradition. Of the Dark Age poets, of whom the best known was Taliesyn. And how, in the nineteenth century Edward Williams, who called himself Iolo Morgannwg—Iolo of Glamorgan—had identified himself as the Last Druid in Wales and set about singlehandedly restoring the tradition. It was Iolo, an inventive antiquarian scholar not averse to forging ancient verse to prove his point, who established what was to become the National Eisteddfod of Wales—the annual gathering of poets and singers and cultural leaders honoured as "bards".
The inner circle of which was the Gorsedd—whose members appeared in white ceremonial costumes such as the Druids were believed to have worn.
"You mean it's all crap?" Berry had said, astonished. "The great Welsh bardic tradition was dreamed up by this guy, bridging a cultural gap between the nineteenth century and the Dark Ages? It's all bullshit?"
"Well, let us say, ninety per cent bullshit. But it did fulfil a need in the Welsh people to . . . exalt their heritage, I suppose. It gave them this annual showcase for the language and the poetry. The Welsh love to show off."
"And they conveniently forgot about the antisocial side of the Druids—like human sacrifices in the oak groves under the full moon, all that heavy ritual stuff?"
"Ah, now, some Celtic scholars say the Druids did not sacrifice people or even animals—that was just stories put about by the Romans. We only have people like Julius
Caesar to rely on for concrete information about Druidism. But, yes, the organisers of the eisteddfodau have even forgotten that the Druids were pagan. It has always been a
very God-fearing festival."
They collected all the books together and took them back to the man in charge of the department.
"Nothing"?" he said. "Are you sure you've got it right about this Gorsedd, er—"
"Ddu," Bethan said. "It means black. The Black Gorsedd. Yes, but don't worry, there is nothing wrong with your books."
"Oh, we do know that." he said.
They sat a while in the car with the engine running, for heat. "Where's that leave us?" Berry said.
No more snow had fallen and last night's was already being trampled into slush.
Bethan said. "They talk about the Gorsedd Ddu in some places like you talk of bogeymen, to frighten the children. Eat your greens or the black bards will get you. Or the Gwrach y rhibyn"
"What's that?"
"The Gwrach? A sort of Welsh death-hag. A monstrous woman with black teeth and leathery wings who's supposed to scare people to death and then steal away their immortal souls. She's a vengeful demon who preys on those who have sinned."
"Jeez, what a country. What do the black bards do?"
"Well, the inference is that while the white bards—"
"—as invented by this Iolo guy—"
"I wish I hadn't told you that. now. Yes, the white bards, while they are amiable pacifists, the Gorsedd Ddu are supposed to have very real magical powers. They are stern and cold and . . . perhaps vindictive."
"Question is." Berry said, "do they exist? This is the bottom line. And if they do, do they have any more of a solid foundation than the old guys at the eisteddfod or are
we just looking at a bunch of fruitcakes?"
"And if they have—" Bethan leaned back in the ruptured bucket seat, the side windows and the screen all misted, blurred ghosts of people walking past. "If they have
foundation . . . powers . . . what can we do about it anyway?"
"Magic's not illegal any more. Not even black magic."
"Killing people is."
"How can we say that? Natural causes, accidents, suicide and, OK, a murder now. But it's solved."
"Yes, it sounds silly. Utterly."
"We're saying there's a—an atmosphere, whatever, generated here. Which causes outsiders—say, people not protected by the village or by this aura of Welshness, whatever that means—either to lose the will to live, to fail in what they most want to do—"
"Like Giles failing to learn Welsh—to be a part of something he so much admired—"
"Right. Or have their negative emotions take over. Lose their normal resistance to unacceptable or downright brutal behaviour. Like ole George Hardy. Suburban solicitor beats wife to death. In short, go nuts."
"Or," Bethan said, "if we try to explain the deaths from natural causes, to get into such a state that even their bodies stop fighting."
"OK, Like the immune system breaks down or something of that order. My knowledge of these things is no more than the average hypochondriac. So they're exposed to diseases, tumours form that never would've, heart diseases worsen and, well, yeah—"
"I've always found it bitterly ironic." Bethan said, bleakly, "that Robin, who was so opposed to nuclear power, should die of a condition so often said to be induced by radiation escaping from nuclear installations." She shook her head sadly. "Radiation."
"Was he happy in Y Groes? Was it like he'd imagined?"
"He—Oh, what does it matter now . . ." Bethan was twisting her scarf. "The truth is we never really had much of marriage in Y Groes. Almost as soon as we moved in, he
began to be tired and irritable. The stress of the move and the travelling and having to search for nuclear dump-sites—that was what he put it down to. We used to go for walks together, along the river bank, up to the woods, and he would go so far and he just became . . . bone-tired, you know?' She turned away, stared hard at the people-shapes
passing the misted car window. "l'm going to cry."
"Let's get outta here." Berry flung the Sprite into gear, rubbing the windscreen clear, moving into a line of traffic in the one-way system out of town.
"We really are insane, aren't we?" Bethan was shouting at him. 'Tell me we're insane! Tell me we're imagining it all, fabricating something out of thin air to account for a lot of people's bad luck. Look, for God's sake, take me home, Morelli! Don't you have a job to go to?"
"No," he said. "And you don't want to go home. You know where we have to go."
"No . . ." Bethan was shaking. That is, she was sitting here very still, but he knew she really was shaking inside. We can't."
"How else?" He also was shouting now, against the ear-threshing of a big delivery van alongside them. "How else we gonna find out one way or the other? How else, without we go in there and start kicking asses till we get some answers?"
"You don't know what it's like!" Bethan screamed.
A lorry's brakes hissed . . . ssssssssssssssssssiiiice!
He turned into a stream of traffic crossing a wide bridge over the Wye.
"You came back, Beth. Nobody said you had to take that job. You'd killed its baby and you came back."
Bethan wept, biting hard into her lower lip until blood came.
Chapter LXII
Tin- radio had described the road over the Nearly Mountains as "passable with care."
On the way to Pont, with his wife Gwenllian in the passenger seat, Aled had driven with considerable concentration, knowing of old what this road could do with a coat of snow on its back. On the return journey, alone now, his driving had been sloppy, his mind on other things, and he'd taken a corner too fast and ploughed the van into a
snowdrift.
Digging himself out with the shovel he always kept in the back from November until May, Aled could see the tip of Y Groes's church tower, a light haze around it, wispy blue.
While the sky above him, as he shovelled snow from around the van wheels, was thick as pastry.
He was going back. He had put Gwenllian, who did not understand these things, on the bus to Aber where her sister lived. But he was going back.
What alternative was there? He was the keeper, like his dad before him, of the most beautiful inn in the most beautiful place you would find anywhere. This was what he told himself.
He threw the spade in the back of the van. All around him the Nearly Mountains were tundra, no visible blade of grass. The slender creature about two hundred feet away was a fox, ears pricked, loping off when it saw him, black against the snow. Everything in black and white from up here, except the sky over Y Groes.
By the time he arrived back in the village — not yet ten o'clock—the sky had deepened to a lurid mauve, the colour pouring in from a circle in the clouds like a hole sawn in a sea of ice for Eskimos to fish. It was as if the church tower had stabbed out the hole.
