The Tredegar Grounds sat in the bowl of the valley, the park gates open, the path leading in through a corridor of trees whose bare branches had been strung with fairy lights — white ones, not coloured, the kind that looked like constellations had come down to live in the oaks for the season. They glowed softly in the grey morning, not competing with the daylight but supplementing it, adding a layer of warmth that the sky, flat and pale above the valley, couldn't quite provide on its own.

Tima saw the lights. She went still in the pushchair — that full-body attention, the sudden cessation of all movement that meant something had arrived in her field of vision that required everything. She pointed. Her hand trembled slightly with the effort of indicating something so important.

"Da," she said. Then, quieter: "Da."

"Lights," Steph said. "Christmas lights."

Tima kept her hand up, pointed at the canopy of white dots, and didn't lower it for the full length of the path.

The market opened ahead of them — small wooden booths arranged around the central green, each one painted dark green or left as natural wood, with handwritten signs and awnings of canvas. Candles in jars. Dried flowers in bundles. Welsh cakes on a griddle, the sweet butter smell of them cutting through the cold air. A booth selling honey from a farm in the Sirhowy valley, the jars lined up like amber lanterns. A woman with a knitting stall, sitting in a folding chair behind towers of coloured wool, reading a paperback and not at all concerned about selling anything. A man carving wooden spoons, the curls of pale wood gathering at his feet.

And in the middle of it all, on his stone plinth, the Samson statue — the bearded figure in his loincloth, one arm raised — wearing, as he did every December, a Santa hat that someone from the town council (or possibly just someone with a ladder and a sense of humour) had placed on his bronze head. He looked, Steph thought, quite dignified about it. Like a man who has survived since 1897 and can survive a hat.

Eira pulled at Steph's hand. "Puppet show. Where."

"I don't know yet. We just got here."

"But it's AT TEN."

"It's half nine."

"That's ALMOST ten."

Steph parked the pushchair near the bandstand, where a small brass ensemble was setting up — four men and a woman with instruments that gleamed in the grey light, their breath rising in clouds as they unpacked music stands and stamped their feet. She lifted Tima out and settled her on her hip. Tima immediately pointed at the tuba.

"Da!"

"That's a tuba."

"Da!" More emphatic this time.

"Big, isn't it?"

Tima reached toward it with one hand, as if the distance between herself and the tuba was a problem she intended to solve.

"Not today, bach. Let's find those Welsh cakes."