The Wrong Rite (8 page)

“But you’re still going to rub the two pieces of oak together, aren’t you?” Gwen really was a minx. “How long will it take you to get a spark?”

“Till hell freezes over,” muttered Dai. “He’ll use a match, he always does. Plenty of matches, and maybe a dash of petrol.”

“Not petrol, Dai,” Madoc protested, “unless your uncle’s planning to commit a particularly unpleasant form of suicide. I’ll make him a fuzz stick, Canadian style.”

“How jolly, the fuzz will make a fuzz stick. You are fuzz, aren’t you, Madoc?”

Dai, who’d barely opened his mouth all last evening, must suddenly have decided to be the life of the party. Janet wished he’d go back to being sullen. Madoc was taking the callow youth in stride.

“Oh yes, I’m fuzz, if you don’t like the sound of policeman. We get called worse, often enough. A fuzz stick isn’t a truncheon, if that’s what you’re thinking; just a piece of kindling wood that’s been frayed around the edges to make it ignite more quickly.”

Gwen skipped over to the box where Betty kept bits of kindling she might need to restart the coal fire in the Aga should it go out, which it seldom did, winter or summer. “Here’s a likely faggot. Let’s see you fuzz it.”

“Very well, Gwen, on to the fray.”

Madoc took out his jackknife and began making short, slantwise cuts into the wood, keeping them close together and not detaching them so that they curled back and would indeed present a tempting snack for any spark ambitious to become a blaze. He worked neatly and quickly; by the time he was through, the stick was a mass of whitish curls.

“Ooh, that’s lovely!” cried his sister. “Much too pretty to burn; it’s like a miniature tree. Does he make them for you, Jenny?”

“Sometimes. He whittled a whole grove of baby ones this past Christmas to hang on our tree as a present for Dorothy. Fuzz sticks are mostly for when you’re out camping and can’t find any dry tinder. This isn’t one of Madoc’s better efforts; you may have it for the Beltane fire if you want, Dai.”

Neither Dai nor Bob appeared to be overwhelmed with gratitude, but Mary was ecstatic. “Thank you,
cefnder.
This will be my first time to jump over a fuzz stick.”

“I have tried to explain, Mary”—Bob spoke with the weary impatience of one who has had to say the same thing far too many times—“that it is inappropriate for you to anticipate. The correct procedure is for cakes to be baked, some of oatmeal and some of brown meal, then broken into fourths and placed in a bag. Each person in the gathering should draw a piece without looking, and only those who get the brown pieces should leap three times through the fire. However, as it appears we are not to have our oatmeal cakes nor our brown cakes and the fire will not have been laid with proper ceremony, this may as well become just another case of who wants to leap and who does not.”

“Count me among the nots.” Iseult had finally graced the gathering, in cream-colored gabardine pants and a matching tunic that had its neckline cut in a capital V. She also wore a good many golden chains, presumably to keep her pectoral area warm. “Where’s Reuel?”

“He asked for sandwiches and went off to the downs.” Betty was putting great platters of sliced meats and salad on the table. “It is yourselves you must be helping, I have more to do. And no time to be baking white and brown cakes for heathen rites,” she added rather snappishly. “What is it that Dorothy will be wanting to eat, Mrs. Madoc?”

“Nothing, thank you, Betty. She had porridge at Aunt Elen’s. I’ll just take her upstairs, she usually has her nap about now.”

Sir Caradoc and Sir Emlyn volunteered in chorus, bass and baritone, to sit with her if Janet and Madoc wanted to go off somewhere. Janet was charmed.

“Why don’t you do it together? She’d love having two handsome men all to herself. Wouldn’t you, Dorothy?”

Sir Caradoc would drop off, too, Janet suspected. So would Sir Emlyn, like as not. And what if they did? Surely one or the other would wake up if the baby cried. Lady Rhys was indicating that she’d be downstairs in the drawing room fixing the flowers, or else in the dining hall scraping up candle wax. She’d come to the rescue should her services be required, as they very likely would.

While they were settling the baby-sitting question, Madoc had been making Janet a lovely sandwich to take upstairs with her. She thanked him and excused herself.

“Come up in half an hour or so, whenever you’re ready. I doubt whether Dorothy will take long to drop off, after the busy morning she’s had.”

She’d had to raise her own voice to make herself heard over Bob’s, he was still on about the Beltane fires.

“It is sympathetic magic, you know. Symbolically, the fire is meant to burn up the witches.”

“That doesn’t sound madly sympathetic to me,” drawled Iseult. “Would somebody pass the mustard?”

Presumably someone did. Janet couldn’t wait to find out, Dorothy was beginning to fuss.

It was thoughtful of Betty to have put them in the red room, pleasant to be alone with her baby for a while, to sit in a low slipper chair by the window with the soft breeze coming in, to watch the sun turning the hills to golden green, to eat her good sandwich while Dorothy kneaded and sucked and made gentle grunting noises like a happy piglet. A neat illustration of supply and demand.

She’d got the baby tucked into the cradle and herself decent by the time the proud grandfather and the delighted great-great-uncle tiptoed in like two policemen strayed from
The Pirates of Penzance,
and she was free to go. She gave them each a kiss, reminded them to yell for Lady Rhys if their charge should wake up, and left them to cope as they might.

Her husband was, as she’d expected, still in the kitchen. Megan had appeared from somewhere and was washing pots for Betty, Madoc was trying to help and getting the shy girl all flustered. Janet chased him off to make another fuzz stick and offered to take over the pot-washing. However, that only flustered Megan further, they might as well go fluster Lisa instead.

Madoc was quite willing, this was not a day to be sitting around the kitchen stove. He presented his fuzz stick to Betty, who tucked it up carefully in a corner of the dresser next to the Staffordshire cow, and they went.

“How far is it to Lisa’s?” Janet asked. “I didn’t even get to meet her before, did I? I didn’t remember her at all.”

“It’s not much more than half a mile. You won’t mind walking that far, will you? And no, we didn’t see Lisa last time. She was off somewhere. Looking at tortoises, probably. I told you about Tessie, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. We’ll have to get some of her books for Dorothy when she’s old enough to read.”

“I’m not so sure about that, love. Tessie’s a fairly uninhibited type, as tortoises go, we don’t want to give the kid notions. Jenny, do you think it’s going to be tough on her, having a cop for a father?”

“I expect likely she’ll manage. Look at that sheep, smack in the middle of the road. It’s got blue paint on its neck. That’s not Uncle Caradoc’s mark, is it?”

“No, his is a red splotch on the left hip.” Madoc remembered that all too well. “I don’t know whose this one would be. Somebody will cope with it, sooner or later.”

On her previous visit, Janet had marveled over the way sheep were allowed to graze wherever they took the notion. She’d seen them in dooryards, churchyards, along roadsides, on the lawn of the town hall. She’d been startled one morning in Bangor, where they were staying at a rather classy hotel, to see a sheep with its nose pressed against the bathroom window, watching her brush her teeth. She didn’t see much point in trying to shoo this one over into the meadow, it would only wander back again if it took the notion. Drivers in rural areas were used to keeping a lookout for sheep; if they weren’t, they soon learned.

“Good thing they’re such docile creatures,” she remarked.

“Not always.” Madoc wished the subject hadn’t come up. “A ram can be as mean as a billy goat. Worse, because they look so sheepish you don’t think anything’s going to happen. One of Uncle Caradoc’s rams got me in the seat of the pants when I was a kid. I flew about six feet and landed in a mudhole. Mother was not pleased. She’d have thought I knew better than to go around teasing a poor, innocent sheep.”

“You must have been a sore trial.” Janet slipped her arm through his and rubbed her cheek on his sleeve.

“Oh, I was. You’re not planning to leap the balefire, are you?”

“Perish the thought. I’ve got nothing against witches. I wouldn’t mind watching Mary, though. It’ll be tomorrow, won’t it? How late will they start?”

“Not late. Shortly after the sun goes down, I expect. Perhaps the idea is to bring back the light. I’m not much up on folklore myself, I hear enough of it from crooks. Anyway, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go and watch, if you want to. We could take Dorothy, for that matter. At least in later years she can say she’s been.”

“You’re thinking this might be the last time, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so, Jenny. How could I help it?”

“Uncle Caradoc looks fairly spry to me, dear. Of course we never know what’s going to happen.” Janet could hardly help thinking of her own parents and that logging truck her father hadn’t happened to notice quite soon enough. “Uncle Huw wouldn’t want to keep up the Beltane fires?”

“I shouldn’t think so, he’s not too big on pagan rites. I suspect the main reason he and Aunt Elen stayed away from dinner last night is that Uncle Huw finds Bob’s gassing about folklore something of a pain, and particularly can’t stand Mary when she gets on about her leaping.”

“Which shows his good taste, in my opinion. I expect I could work up a fairly healthy scunner to that pair myself, if I had to be around them long. How long are they planning to stay, do you know?”

“Just through tomorrow night, I hope. Mother said something at dinner about their having an urgent appointment to haunt a house. I think she was being facetious, but I’m not quite sure. Well, well, look who’s coming. What’s the matter, Dafydd, did Aunt Elen throw you out for singing bawdy ballads? Where’s Tom?”

“Peering interestedly down the front of Iseult’s blouse, the last I saw of him,” the elder brother replied. “Where did you park the kid?”

“She’s taking a nap. Tad and Uncle Caradoc are baby-sitting.”

“Chacun à son goût.
Where are you off to?”

“We thought we might pop in and say hello to Lisa, if she’s not too busy baking brown and white cakes.”

“Why brown and white?”

“That’s Bob’s latest crotchet. He was nagging Betty to bake a batch for some extra bit of hocus-pocus he wanted to tack on tomorrow night at the bonfire. She wasn’t interested.”

“I’m sure Lisa wouldn’t be, either. Bob does tend to make one feel there’s something to be said for human sacrifice, don’t you think? Jenny, if you were delegated to hurl somebody into the fire tomorrow night, which would you pick: Bob or Mary?”

“Well, I shouldn’t pick Bob because he has a nice singing voice even if he is a bore. And there’d be no point in my picking Mary because, from the way she’s been talking, she’d already be in it. Besides, it’s not polite to shove people into bonfires.”

“Really? I hadn’t thought to consider that aspect of the question. But then I’m a rude fellow, as you must have noticed. Not a bit like my brother.”

“That’s all right, Dafydd. I’m not much like my brother, either. How long are you here for?”

“Is that Canadian for ‘How long do you intend to stay’?”

“Yes, we don’t like to waste words. We save our breath to call the polar bears.”

“And what do you do with the polar bears once you’ve got them?”

“Nothing, they never come. We just like to exercise those old Celtic yearnings for the unattainable that I’ll bet somebody around here’s just finished writing a poem about.”

“Ah, you’ve been reading romantic novels about Welsh poets.”

Actually Janet’s tastes in reading tended to be on the scholarly side, but she wasn’t about to belabor the issue. “Well, I can’t read the poems themselves because they’re all in Welsh, and Madoc won’t translate for me because it makes him feel silly. Is anybody writing a poem for Uncle Caradoc’s birthday, I wonder?”

Dafydd laughed. “Is anybody
not
would be the more pertinent question, and you’re going to be sorry you asked. Prepare yourself for at least two solid hours of bardry tomorrow afternoon, Jenny darling. What do Canadians yearn for, by the way?”

“Blubber and tallow candles. You ought to know that, you’ve been to Canada often enough. What does Reuel Williams write?”

“Scripts for the sort of movie Iseult plays in. Which is a dreadful thing to say about anybody, but there it is. I can’t think why she dragged him along, unless he’s planning to use us all as characters in his next horror story. Hello, Tib. Looking for me?”

“M
OTHER SENT ME TO
find you. She’s steaming because you left that great monster of Uncle Tom’s parked behind her bug. She can’t get out to go to the shops and they’re desperate for flour in the kitchen.”

“Oh God! I gave the keys back to Tom, and he’s gone wondering off somewhere with Iseult.”

“Then you’d better find him, unless you want to find snakes in your bed tonight.”

The pretty teenager was enjoying herself, this must be Tib’s revenge for Dafydd’s refusal to ride with her this morning. Poor Dafydd, Janet thought, he was getting it both barrels this trip. An idol was not without worshipers save among his own relatives. Too bad for him.

“Madoc,” she said out of pity, “can’t you jump-start the Daimler and move it out of the way?”

“Not I, love. I’m not messing around with anything that pricey. Come on, Tib, let’s saddle up the horses and gallop into town western-style. I’ll be the hitching post while you buy the flour.”

“Super! Come on, then.”

Tib raced off without a backward glance. Dafydd’s scowl would have looked just right on Baron Scarpia, hardly a role for a tenor.

“I suppose I’ll have to go fetch those blasted keys or I’ll never hear the end of it. Want to come with me, Jenny?”

“Thanks, but I’m beginning to feel I’ve done enough walking for today. Good hunting, Dafydd. They probably haven’t gone far, Iseult’s wearing high-heeled sandals. I’ll see you in a while, then.”