Read Online A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond - Free Book Online

get some of my own research done.”
    “Ah, yes.” Dr. Rhys gave a thin, quick smile. “Welsh language, isn’t it? Yes, indeed, it’s blessedly quiet now without them cluttering up the libraries and interrupting with questions every time one settles down to work. I quite agree. It is so difficult to do research in term time.” He spoke quickly, but Jen could detect the cadences she was beginning to identify as Welsh. He seemed to notice the three younger Morgans for the first time. “And this must be your family, is it?”
    “Yes, of course. Forgive me. Peter, Jennifer, and Becky.”
    Dr. Rhys shook hands with each of them gravely. His grip was light and dry.
    “But you should not let me keep you from your lunch now, please.”
    “Won’t you join us?” David invited him, and the three children held their breath. But Dr. Rhys shook his head. “Oh, no, no, thank you very much. I, too, have much to do this vacation, you see. I shall read this report”—he indicated a massive sheaf of paper tucked under his left arm—“while I have my lunch. I really must. So nice to meet you.”
    He left them and settled at a narrow table at the back of the room. There he bent to his report like a thin crow roosting on it.
    “Should think he’d get indigestion,” muttered Peter rudely. Luckily David didn’t hear him, but Becky giggled.
    David looked at her severely. “Dr. Rhys is a well-respected member of the University faculty and he’s been very helpful to me these past months. If you ever know one-half as much as he does, I’ll be very proud of you,” he said, carefully pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry beyond their table.
    “What’s his subject?” asked Jen.
    “He’s the head of the Welsh Studies Department, and he’s written several very good books on language and folklore.”
    “He doesn’t look like the sort of person who’d know fairy tales,” observed Jen, looking at Dr. Rhys with more interest.
    “Fairy tales isn’t the right term, really. I think he’d quarrel with you on that. It’s more mythology.”
    “Greeks and Romans,” said Becky. “We have to read that stuff at school.”
    “Too bad they never teach you the Norse myths—the Celtic ones, which include the Welsh, are much closer to those. Very exciting, some of them.”
    “Have you read them?” Peter asked, interested in spite of himself.
    “Some,” David admitted. “Trouble is, there’s too much to read. Now, what do you want for dessert.”
    “Something very sweet,” said Becky at once.
    ***
    After lunch, David went back to his office, and Jen, Becky, and Peter walked out to the Prom, as Becky had promised. It was a long, curving walk that ran from one end of Aberystwyth to the other along the sea. Only a few mothers with prams and small children were out on it in the watery sun, and here and there a clump of older boys or girls—always one or the other, never both together—stood talking by the rail, eyeing each other. Some of the boys smoked cigarettes, their hands cupped expertly around the butts, ready to flourish them or hide them depending on who approached.
    Jen couldn’t help feeling foreign, but Peter was lost in his own thoughts and not talking, and Becky was humming to herself unselfconsciously. Somehow Jen had pictured winter by the sea as stretches of deserted white sands under a cold sun and dunes scattered with fishermen’s shacks, boats upturned beside them like giant turtles, men mending nets and smoking pipes. She smiled ruefully to herself. Whatever she’dimagined hadn’t been this. And yet in its own way, she supposed it wasn’t bad, just rather a shock.
    Beyond the University, a point jutted out from the town, green grass sloping down to a war memorial and back from it the ruins of Aberystwyth Castle.
    “Not much there,” said Peter, but Jen had to see it when she was told what it was. “I’ve never seen a real castle before.”
    It had been landscaped into a park, with sand paths and