‘No!’ his wife said again. ‘No! It’s my Bethan’s room.’
‘But she isn’t here, Mam,’ Gwyn said gently.
‘It’s waiting for her, isn’t it?’ his mother reproached him.
‘But Eirlys could sleep there,’ Gwyn persisted. ‘The room is ready – I looked in. The bed is made, and the patchwork quilt on it: the cupboards are shiny and all the dolls are there, it’s such a waste!’
‘Yes, all the dolls are there!’ cried Mrs Griffiths. She sank into a chair and bent her head, covering her face with her hands. ‘You don’t seem to care, any more, either of you. It’s my daughter’s room, my Bethan’s: her bed, her dolls, her place.’
Her husband and her son stood watching her, sad and helpless. How could they tell her that it did not matter if Bethan was not with them, because now there was Eirlys.
‘We won’t discuss it now,’ said Mr Griffiths. ‘But I’ve already agreed to fetch the girl tomorrow. Be kind while she’s here. She’s an orphan remember?’
‘I won’t upset her,’ Mrs Griffiths said. ‘I’m sorry for her, she’s just not my Bethan.’
When Gwyn took Eirlys to visit his grandmother the following afternoon, Nain was waiting by the gate. She had dressed carefully for the occasion, in an emerald green dress and scarlet stockings; round her neck she wore a rope of grass green beads, long enough to touch the silver buckle on her belt, and from each ear a tiny golden cage swung, with a silver bird tinkling inside it.
Eirlys was most impressed. ‘How beautiful you look,’ she said, and won Nain’s heart.
Gwyn noticed that his grandmother could not take her eyes off the girl. She watched her every move, hungrily, like a bright-eyed cat might watch a bird. ‘Eirlys!’ she murmured, ‘that’s Welsh for snowdrop. So we have a snowflower among us!’
After they had sipped their flowery tea, and eaten cake that tasted of cinnamon and rosemary, Gwyn told his grandmother about the ship, and Dewi Davis’s nose, while Eirlys wandered round the room, touching the china, the beads and the plants; studying pictures in the dusty books and tying coloured scarves around her head.
Nain was not surprised to hear about the silver ship. She merely nodded and said, ‘Ah, yes!’ But now that her prophesies for Gwyn were coming true, she found it almost too gratifying to bear. ‘You have nearly reached what you wanted, Gwydion Gwyn,’ she said. ‘But be careful! Don’t do anything foolish!’
‘Shall I tell Eirlys about the spider?’ Gwyn asked his grandmother. ‘Should she know about the cobwebs and that other world?’
‘Of course,’ said Nain. ‘Though I believe she knows already.’
They left the cottage before dark. Nain followed them to the gate and as they set off up the track she called again, ‘Be careful!’
Gwyn was not listening to his grandmother; he had begun to tell Eirlys about the spider. He realised that he had not seen Arianwen for several days and wondered where she was.
When they got back to the farmhouse, Mrs Griffiths was upstairs, sewing the hem on her new bedroom curtains. Her husband was cleaning the Land Rover. He had used it to transport a new batch of pullets from the Lloyds that morning, and they had made more of a mess than he had bargained for.
Gwyn told Eirlys to wait in the kitchen while he fetched the pipe and the spider from his attic room. When he returned she was sitting in the armchair by the stove. The light was fading but a tiny slither of winter sun had crept through the swaying branches of the apple tree, and into the kitchen window. The light glimmered on the girl in the armchair and Gwyn had to stop and take a breath before he said, ‘You are the girl in the web, Eirlys!’
‘Am I?’ she said.
‘Yes, it was you! I knew it all the time, but I couldn’t see how . . . You’re like my sister, too. Where have you come from Eirlys?’
The girl just smiled her inscrutable smile and asked, ‘Where is the spider?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I looked in the drawer, on top of the cupboard and under the bed. I couldn’t find her.’
Eirlys looked concerned. ‘Where can she be?’ she asked.
Gwyn shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s been gone before, but only for a day. I haven’t seen her for nearly a week.’
His father called through the front door, ‘Time to go, Eirlys. Are you ready?’
Eirlys stood up. ‘You must find the spider, Gwyn,’ she said. ‘She’s precious! She will make it possible for you to see whatever you want, and when I . . .’
‘When you what?’ Gwyn demanded.
‘I can’t say, just yet,’ Eirlys replied. And then she had disappeared into the passage and run out of the house before Gwyn had time to think of another question.
He watched the lights of the Land Rover flickering on the lane before he climbed up to his room again. This time he shook the curtains, felt under the carpet and, beginning to panic, emptied the contents of every drawer upon the floor. Arianwen was not there.
He went down to the kitchen to see his mother. ‘Have you seen that spider?’ he inquired.
‘I’ve seen too many spiders,’ Mrs Griffiths replied. She was rolling pastry on the kitchen table and did not look up when she spoke.
‘But have you seen my own, particular, spider?’
‘I saw one, yes. It could have been the one.’ Mrs Griffiths inexorably rolled and rolled the pastry and did not look up. ‘It was different,’ she went on, ‘a sort of grey.’
‘Silver!’ Gwyn corrected her. ‘Where was it?’
‘Here. On the curtain.’
‘Did you catch it?’
‘Yes! You know I can’t abide cobwebs.’ Mrs Griffiths had finished the pastry, but still she did not look up.
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I put it down the drain,’ his mother said flatly. ‘Drowned it!’
Gwyn was speechless. He could not believe what he had heard. His mother had to be joking. He stared at her, hoping for a smile and a teasing word, but she kept tearing little pieces away from the pastry and would not look at him.
And then Gwyn found himself screaming, ‘Drowned? Drowned? You can’t have!’
‘Well, I did!’ At last his mother faced him. ‘You know I don’t like spiders. Why did you keep it so long?’ She could not explain to Gwyn that she was afraid, not only of the spider, but of the strange girl who could not be her daughter, yet seemed so like her, and who was beginning to take her daughter’s place.
‘You don’t understand,’ Gwyn cried. ‘You foolish woman. You don’t know what you’ve done.’ He ran to the kitchen sink. ‘Did you put it down here? Where does the drain go to?’
‘The septic tank,’ Mrs Griffiths said defiantly. Guilt was making her angry. ‘And you can’t look there. Nothing can live in that stuff. The spider’s dead.’
‘No! No! No!’ Gwyn rushed out of the kitchen and up to his room. He regarded the dark places where cobwebs had sparkled with snow from that other world. The room seemed unbearably empty without them. He flung himself on to the bed and tried to tell himself that Arianwen had not gone forever. Surely he