Free Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce Page B

the Council, not the Chirpy Caravaners of Britain Association. It’s ice-cold. You can’t see it from the road, it’s hidden behind the Borth Lagoons Holiday Camp sign. Even the caretaker doesn’t know about it. If things get too hot for you, you could hang out there for a while. No one would find you.’
    I closed my hand around the key.
    ‘There’s food and water and a brand new ludo set. It’s not much but it might help.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    He waved my gratitude impatiently away. ‘Now you get out of here and find those guys. I’ve got a donkey to bury.’
    From the harbour I walked up through the Castle to the top of town and turned right just before the market to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot’s Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller’s loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.
    ‘It’s tea cosy all right,’ she laughed. ‘Funny, you don’t look the type!’
    ‘It’s … it’s not mine,’ I said lamely.
    She laughed again. ‘No, it never is! Don’t tell me, it belongs to a friend!’
    I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.
    I picked up the scrap of wool. ‘Can you be sure it’s cosy? I mean it’s just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.’
    The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: ‘What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you’ve come to, you know?’
    She handed me the eyepiece. ‘See for yourself.’
    As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.
    ‘See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That’s tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That’s pretty fancy crocheting. You don’t see that sort of thing very often. That’s what’s known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.’
    There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.
    ‘Very interesting,’ she repeated.
    ‘Yeah, why?’
    ‘Dates it, doesn’t it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It’s from 1958.’
    ‘How can you tell?’
    ‘Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there’s more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?’
    ‘Yes!’ I said, amazed at how much the woman had seen through her magnifying glass.
    ‘See how the fibres are shrivelled and discoloured?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That’s classic scorching. That’s where the spout would have gone. Now see around that rim those funny symbols?’
    ‘Yes! Like hieroglyphics.’
    ‘Ha!’ She laughed and smacked me on the back with a force you wouldn’t have expected from a lady of her age. ‘Not bad for someone who claims not to know anything about tea cosies. They’re not hieroglyphics, but you’re not far wrong. Early Mayan alphabet. Which means what you’ve got here is the Mhexuataacahuatcxl . It’s from a limited edition set of cosies knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol for Ma Prytherch’s Tea Cosy Emporium in 1958. Creation Legends of the World series. This is Mhexuataacahuatcxl , the Mayan fertility god.’
    I put the eyepiece down and stared at her in wonder.
    She was grinning with delight; it wasn’t often she got a chance to