by Rhys Bowen
“Half my students are playing in those bands,” Austin Mostyn commented. “I keep trying to educate them to like real music and what do they want—heavy metal, whatever that is.”
Betsy laughed. “Heavy metal? That went out years ago, Mr. Phillips. Get with it! You should go to the Musicfest and see what the young people like today. I thought I might go. My cousin Eddie’s in one of the bands. The Groovin’ Druids, they call themselves. They’re ever so good.” Her gaze moved toward Evan. “How about you come with me, Evan? Remember I promised to teach you the latest dance steps? You haven’t even learned the macarena yet.”
“You’re wasting your time, Betsy love,” Charlie Hopkins said while Evan was still forming an answer in his head. “He’s off with Bronwen-the-Book again tomorrow.”
“Her again? Bloody bird watching, no doubt,” Betsy muttered as she set down a glass, none too gently, in front of another customer. “Sounds like a barrel of laughs to me.” She ignored Evan and leaned closer to Charlie. “Now if he came on a date with me, Mr. Hopkins, I’d show him that there was more fun in life than watching birds. He wouldn’t have the time or energy to notice bloody birds if he was with me.”
This was greeted with noisy laughter. Evan was glad that the public bar was dark. He was always embarrassed at blushing so easily—one of the problems of fair Celtic skin, he supposed. He took a long drink and emptied his glass.
“I’m not giving up, you know,” Betsy said, taking the glass from him and refilling it without being asked. “I’m going to get you dancing with me one of these days, Evan Evans, and when you’re out there with me, you’ll wonder what hit you.”
“The floor, probably, when I trip over my own feet,” Evan said, grinning at Charlie.
A blast of cold air made everyone turn to the door.
“It’s y Parch, the minister,” Charlie muttered, digging Evan in the ribs. “Better watch our language from now on. Evening, Reverend,” he called as the crowd parted to let the Reverend Parry Davies, the more worldly of the two ministers, approach the bar.
“Good evening, one and all.” The Reverend Parry Davies nodded genially to those around him. “A pint of your best Brains, please, my dear. I’ve a thirst that could drain Llŷn Llydaw tonight.”
“Been practicing your sermon for Sunday, have you, Reverend?” Evans-the-Meat asked. It was well known in Llanfair that he was a regular at the other chapel and thought that its preacher, Mr. Powell-Jones, was far superior. “When are you going to try sermonizing in Welsh, then? Isn’t our mother tongue good enough for you?”
“I have to cater to everybody, Gareth,” Reverend Parry Davies said, still smiling genially. “And not everybody speaks our mother tongue as well as you and I do.” He looked around with pride. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just been reciting some of the finest Welsh words ever written. It’s for the bardic competition at the eisteddfod, you know. This year I’m doing a poem based on the story of the Lady Rhiannon in the Mabinogion.”
“The what?” young Barry-the-Bucket, the local bulldozer driver, asked in a stage whisper.
“The Mabinogion,” Evans-the-Meat hissed back. “One of the oldest books in the world, and full of stories of Welsh heroes, too. What do they teach you in the schools these days?”
The minister nodded. “Magnificent it is! The drama of it—the pathos when her little son is taken from her and she searches in vain. There won’t be a dry eye in the pavilion, I can tell you.”
“Why? Are you going to bring onions with you, Reverend?” Barry-the-Bucket, quipped to his friends.
“You be quiet, Barry-the-Bucket,” Betsy said fiercely. “You wouldn’t know culture if it jumped up and bit you. I think the reverend is going to do just fine. He’ll be a credit to us all.”
“Your faith in me is very touching, my dear,” Reverend Parry Davies said. “I have to confess that I have high hopes of being chaired bard this year.”
“Good for you, Reverend,” Charlie Hopkins said. “But what about Mr. Powell-Jones? Isn’t he entering the eisteddfod, too?”
“My fellow minister doesn’t believe in getting involved in secular declamations.”
“What?” Barry-the-Bucket asked.
“He thinks it’s sinful to enter competitions,” Evans-the-Meat clarified.
“Only because he’s not good enough,” Evans-the-Milk muttered, loud enough for Evans-the-Meat to hear.
“What’s that you’re saying?” Evans-the-Meat demanded. “You’re talking bloody rubbish as usual. The Reverend Powell-Jones has the finest voice this side of the mountain. That’s my opinion and I don’t care who knows it.”
“I don’t dispute it,” the Reverend Parry Davies said easily. “He does have a fine voice. Almost as good as mine.”
This got general laughter.
“But I don’t even know if he’ll be here for the eisteddfod,” he went on.
A hush fell on the room.
“Not be here? Where’s he going then?” Evans-the-Meat asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” The Reverend Parry Davies looked from face to face. “He’s letting his house for the summer. His wife’s going down to Barmouth to look after her mother.”
There was a muffled cheer and someone at the back of the room muttered, “Good riddance.”
“He’s letting his house?” Harry-the-Pub appeared at Betsy’s side, wiping his hands on his apron. “The Powell-Joneses are moving out for the summer? Where did you hear that?”
“Our daily woman, Elen, is friendly with their daily woman, Gladys. Elen heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. She said he was on the phone this afternoon arranging things and then he asked Gladys if she could come in over the weekend to help get their things packed away and give the place a good cleaning. Gladys said he offered an extra fifty pounds.”
“Fifty pounds? That’s not like him,” Betsy exclaimed. “He’s usually an old skinflint.” She saw Harry-the-Pub’s frown. “Well, he is,” she repeated. “It’s common knowledge in the village. He only had one go when I was in charge of the coconut shy at the last fete.”
“You should have been in charge of the kissing booth, Betsy,” Barry-the-Bucket said. “Then you’d have made a fortune.”
“And I wouldn’t have let you, even for a hundred pounds,” Betsy responded quickly.
“Hold on a minute,” Evans-the-Meat interrupted. “Did Gladys say who was renting the house for the summer? I can’t imagine Mrs. Powell-Jones letting strangers into her house. That’s not like her at all.”
“I’ve no idea,” Reverend Parry Davies said, “but I got the feeling it was someone important.”
“I know who it is,” a voice spoke from the back of the crowd. Heads turned to see young Trefor Dawson, a newcomer who did maintenance at the Everest Inn. “At least I think I do,” he added, conscious of being the center of attention.
“Well, spill the beans then, man,” Charlie Hopkins said.
“My cousin works for Jenkins and Jenkins—you know, the posh estate agents in Caernarfon?” Several people nodded. “Well, you’ll never guess who asked them to find a house in LLanfair?” He looked around with satisfaction. “Ifor Llewellyn.”
“Ifor Llewellyn?” Mostyn Phillips demanded.
“THE Ifor Llewellyn?” Betsy shrieked. “The famous opera singer?”
For once the residents of Llanfair were momentarily speechless. Then Evans-the-Milk voiced what everyone was thinking. “Why on earth would he want to spend the summer in Llanfair, of all places?”
“And what’s wrong with Llanfair?” Evans-the-Meat demanded. “Isn’t it beautiful enough for you then? And peaceful and quiet and free of all those bloody tourists?”
“Yes, but…” Evans-the-Milk began. “It’s nothing special, is it? I mean, if I were famous, I’d be spending my summers in Nice or Monte Carlo or California, not Llanfair.”
“Especially someone like Ifor Llewellyn,” Barry-the-Bucket added. “If what we read in the papers is true, you’d expect him t
o be on some woman film star’s yacht.”
“Perhaps he’s bringing a lady friend to a little love nest in Llanfair,” Charlie Hopkins chuckled. “Maybe that Italian Carla whats-her-name.”
“I don’t know how he does it,” Barry-the-Bucket said.
“Does what?” Betsy demanded.
“How he gets all those beautiful women. I mean, it’s not like he’s young and he’s heavy enough, isn’t he?”
“I think he’s ever so sexy,” Betsy commented. “But then there’s something about big men that I find very sexy.” Her gaze moved unabashedly to Evan again. Evan hoped he wasn’t beginning to look as heavy as Ifor Llewellyn.
“Love nest in Llanfair!” Barry-the-Bucket shook his head. “I don’t think so, somehow.”
“No, he’s bringing his family, that’s what Gladys said,” the reverend interrupted. “Bringing his family here for the summer.”
“He’s probably had enough of Nice and Monte Carlo,” Evans-the-Meat said. “After all, he is a local Gwynedd man, isn’t he? He’s coming home to his roots.”
“Is that so?” Evan asked. “Ifor Llewellyn comes from around here?”
Several heads nodded. “He lived for a while in Llanfair, didn’t he? When he was a little boy?”
“That would be when his mother was a maid at the big house,” Charlie Hopkins informed them.
“The big house?” Evan asked. “You mean the Powell-Jones’s?”
“It used to belong to Mrs. Powell-Joneses’ family in those days. The Lloyds, they were. Owned the slate mine. She used to be Patsy Lloyd—” he laughed. “I remember her right enough. She was a toffy-nosed little thing, even in those days, wasn’t she? They sent her away to boarding school in England and she came back even more toffy nosed. Then the slate mine closed and eventually she inherited the house.”
“Very handy for Mr. Powell-Jones, right next door to his chapel,” Evans-the-Milk exclaimed.
“Why do you think he got that chapel, you dummy?” Evans-the-Meat exclaimed. “He got it because it was on land owned by her family.”
“And Ifor Llewellyn’s mother was the maid there?” Betsy asked, leaning forward across the bar until her neckline was stretched into a dangerous view of cleavage, causing every man in the room to stop drinking momentarily. “No wonder he wants to come back and rent it. What’s the betting Mrs. Powell-Jones put him in his place when they were young. He probably had to bow to her.”
Evans-the-Meat laughed. “Nothing like coming back in victory, is there. I wonder how he got them to leave?”
“He offered a huge sum of money, that’s what I heard,” the Reverend Parry Davies said.
“It must have been a huge sum to make her hand over the place to her former maid’s child,” Charlie Hopkins commented. “Well, isn’t this a turn up for the books.”
“I think it’s a great honor for Llanfair,” Evans-the-Meat said grandly, “as long as no bloody tourists come wanting to catch a glimpse of him.”
“Now if we could only get him to join our choir for the eisteddfod,” Charlie quipped.
“Oh ’deed to goodness, yes. He’d want to do that, wouldn’t he? Make a change from La Scala. Do you think he’d be good enough for us?” The low-ceilinged barroom echoed with jeers and noisy laughter.
“Why don’t you go ask him, Charlie,” Harry-the-Pub suggested with a grin. “After all, you persuaded the constable here to join us.”
Mostyn Phillips cleared his throat. “I happen to know Ifor Llewellyn,” he said. “He and I got scholarships to the Royal School of Music in London at the same time.”
“Is that a fact?” Suddenly Mostyn was the center of attention.
“You really know Ifor Llewellyn?” Betsy asked, wide-eyed and impressed.
“He and I shared digs together, our first year in London,” Mostyn said. “I—uh—also knew the lady who is now his wife. I introduced them, in fact.”
“Almost like one of the family, isn’t he, boys?” Barry-the-Bucket clapped Mostyn on the back, sending him off balance and into the bar. “Good for you, Austin Mostyn.”
“Well then,” Evans-the-Meat said grandly. “You’ll be the one to ask him to join us, won’t you?”
Mostyn cringed with embarrassment. “Be reasonable, man. I can hardly ask one of the greatest tenors in the world to sing with the Llanfair Côr Meibion.”
“I don’t see why not,” Evans-the-Meat insisted. “If it was a favor for a very old friend, like.”
“Maybe you could ask him to sing a few solos—sort of drown out the rest of us,” Evans-the-Milk suggested. “It would certainly make the judges sit up and take notice, wouldn’t it?”
“If you really do know him as well as you say,” Barry-the-Bucket commented.
Evan put his hand on Mostyn’s shoulder. “You were asking for a miracle a few minutes ago, Mr. Phillips. I’d say you just got it.”
Chapter 4
“I don’t know if we were wise to choose this route on a day like this,” Evan said to Bronwen as he helped her over a stile. “It looks like we’ll be walking in the clouds most of the time.”
Bronwen took his hand and stepped nimbly up onto the stile. She was wearing khaki hiking pants today instead of her usual long skirts, and a blue-green jacket that gave her normally blue eyes a greenish glow. Her fair hair was back in a long braid but a few stray wisps swirled in the wind around her face as she smiled down at Evan.
“I like walking in the clouds,” Bronwen said. “I like that feeling of unreality—being somewhere magical, quite apart from the real world down below.”
They had been climbing steadily into the mist until they reached a high moorland of springy turf and heather. A pair of red grouse rose flapping from the grasses in front of them and from high in the mist came a plaintive wailing cry, like the call of a frightened child waking from a nightmare. It was so eerie, echoing from unseen cliffs, that they paused, alarmed for a second, then both said, “Raven,” at the same moment.
They laughed and walked on but the unearthly quality of the cry haunted them. Evan felt his skin prickling.
“How about eating our lunch down by Llŷn Crafnant?” he asked. “The sun might be out there.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Bronwen said.
They reached a high pass where the wind swirled up from unseen waters below them, then picked their way down cautiously over rocks slippery with moisture and moss. Suddenly there was the lake, its surface steaming as the sun melted away the mist.
“Perfect,” Evan said. “We should have blue skies by the time we’ve dropped down to the water. And we’ll get a grand view of Snowdon on the way back.”
He reached out and took Bronwen’s hand as they made their way down over lichen-covered rocks. Suddenly Bronwen stopped. “Oh,” she said in disappointment. “We’re not going to be alone. Look, there’s a car parked on the other side.”
“A car?” Evan looked toward where she was pointing. Far below them, on the steep far shore of the lake, a maroon sedan was parked. A figure was standing behind the car, blending into the dappled shade of the trees. It seemed to be a young man in jeans and a leather jacket. “How on earth did someone get a car up here?” Evan asked.
“There’s the forestry track up from Trefriw, isn’t there?”
“But I wouldn’t have thought it was suitable for cars, especially after the wet spring we’ve had. It must have been awfully bumpy. I didn’t think cars were allowed.”
“What some people will do to get out of walking,” Bronwen said scornfully. “They want the views and the solitude, but they want the convenience of driving there.”
“That’s funny,” Evan said, staring hard at the car. “That looks like the car I saw yesterday. Unusual color, isn’t it?” He frowned, then shrugged. “No matter. Let them enjoy their day and we’ll enjoy ours, eh Bronwen? Room enough for both of us.”
The path passed through a stand of woodland, ancient hawthorns and oaks, still draped in mist. It was completely silent. Their fe
et made no noise on the rich carpet of decaying leaves. Overhead the raven cawed again, its plaintive cry echoing unnaturally loud. Then the path emerged from the woods and began a zigzag descent to the lakeshore.
“We don’t need to worry about the car anymore,” Bronwen said, her eyes scanning the lake below. “It’s gone.”
“That was quick,” Evan said.
“Probably one of those tourists who come, take a snapshot of the kiddies in front of the lake, then go again.”
Evan was about to move on when he saw bubbles rising from the surface of the lake. Once he spotted them, the outline of the car was clearly visible.
“It’s in the water, Bron,” Evan shouted. “The car’s gone into the lake! Oh my God. We’ll never get there in time.”
He took off like a madman down the narrow path, leaping from rock to rock, his arms flailing to keep his balance around the precarious bends. He heard Bronwen shrieking, “Evan be careful. You’ll fall!” but he couldn’t slow down. The image of the submerged car blotted out everything else. He started peeling off his jacket as he ran. Where was the closest cottage? They had passed nothing since a farm above Capel Curig. Which would be the best direction to go for help—back the way they had come or down the forestry track to Trefriw? But that had to be a good two miles or more.
I’m going to be too late! The words echoed through his mind as the blood pounded in his temples. He was not conscious of the ground beneath his feet or of the drop to the lakeshore below. The descent seemed to take forever. He was running in slow motion, like the running he sometimes did in dreams, away from pursuers or wild beasts.
At last he reached the lakeshore. The level was down and he slithered over loose shale to skirt the end of the lake. Bubbles were still rising, marking the spot where the car had gone in, but nobody had managed to get out. How many people would he have to deal with? Why hadn’t they jumped out when the car started to move?
He struggled out of his boots before he dove in. The icy water took his breath away. He took a big gulp of air and dived into green darkness. The water was clear and he could see the outline of the car below him, moving steadily downward. The lakeshore fell away quickly into the depths. If he couldn’t get to the door soon, it would be too deep for him to reach. He came to the surface again, took in more air, then went straight down. The door handle was in his hands. Please don’t let it be locked, he prayed. He pressed on it and tried to pull it open. The force of the water held it shut. Inside he could make out a figure slumped in the driver’s seat. He braced his feet against the doorpost and pulled again with all his might. Water rushed in through the crack he had opened. His lungs were bursting and the water was singing in his ears, but he struggled to let the water equalize the pressure.