Free Return to Hendre Ddu by Sian James Page A

what we’ll do with it. I suppose she hasn’t left any instructions or any sort of will?’
    ‘No, I’ve been through all her papers. Though I’m afraid I’ve been unable to throw much away. It’s all so interesting, accounts of how much Mrs Ifans spent on her wedding outfit when she married your father, stuff like that. How much was spent on the Harvest Festival supper and at Christmas and the New Year festivities. We should keep it all together in a big cardboard box. It would make a history of the house since she first came here at fourteen, over sixty years ago. About 1854 I think it was, not long after Mrs Ifans’ mother died. And as well as that, as the minister said, she had gleaned information about the Morgan family over generations and had taken the trouble to write it all down in her lovely copperplate handwriting.’
    But Tom seemed unable to think of anything but the money. ‘Let’s put them in piles of ten and add them up. I’m beginning to realise what joy misers have in counting up their gold, doesn’t it give you some sort of a deeply sensuous pleasure? I’m afraid it does me.’
    ‘Well, it’s in your family, they say, that miser strain. Your great-grandfather now, he was a hard, grasping man according to what I’ve heard.’ It was the first time Lowri had dared tease Tom, as Josi and Catrin always did.
    ‘And don’t I know it! It was that man who took my father’s inheritance, Cefn Hebog, to pay off some paltry debt. He’s never let me forget that. Hasn’t he ever told you about it?’
    ‘No. He must have forgiven him now that you’ve righted old wrongs and given it back to him. He loves Cefn Hebog and so do I.’
    ‘When May and I are married and we’ve got a farm manager here, you might be able to go back there. Though I shall dread the day. I think families should stick together. I even love having Catrin and the baby back here.’
    ‘Have you noticed anything about the dates of these sovereigns?’ Lowri asked him after a few moments.
    ‘No, should I have?’
    ‘They’re all quite old. I mean, all of them have Victoria’s head on them. When did her son, Edward, come to the throne?’
    ‘In 1902 or 1903. I know Catrin and I are both Victorian babies and so are you probably.’
    ‘Yes, I’m six months older than Miss Catrin, Catrin I mean.’
    ‘When did my grandfather die? I was about four years old then. Catrin doesn’t even remember him. But you’re quite right, none of these is from the new century. Perhaps she got all of them from my grandfather, they all seem from the time he was alive. Great Heavens, I wonder whether Miss Rees was his mistress. It would explain why she never got married. She used to tell us about all the rich widowers who’d courted her. She used to say that it was Mother she couldn’t leave, but there might have been another reason.’
    ‘Oh Tom, Miss Rees has only been dead a week and you’re already blackening her character.’
    ‘Not at all. Why shouldn’t they both have had some pleasure in life, they both worked hard enough. Anyway, it was you who noticed that they were all old, what were you thinking about when you mentioned that? It’s certainly intriguing. I think we’ve got about five hundred sovereigns here all told. Whatever shall we do with it all?’
    ‘You could take May to London for your honeymoon and stay in a grand hotel with great gold bathrooms and carpets everywhere and live a life of luxury for six months or more.’
    ‘I’ll tell you one thing. That first cousin from Tregaron is not going to have a penny of it. She never visited Miss Rees in all the years I remember, though Miss Rees was always so proud of her. She was a schoolmistress and later married a sea captain from New Quay and had “visited the heathen lands across the sea”.’
    ‘She’ll have plenty of money then. Sea captains have always been rich.’
    ‘Is that my father coming in? Tell him I want to see him please, Lowri. What’s he going to