A Swiftly Tilting Planet (24 page)

“Many women are married and mothers at seventeen. I want to go to Vespugia with Bran, as his wife.”

“Zillah,” Dr. Llawcae said, “you will wait. When Bran is settled, in a year or two, he can send for you.”

Bran pressed Zillah’s hand. “It needn’t all be decided tonight.”

In the end, Bran went with Gwen, not with Zillah. Mr. Maddox caught Gwen and Jack O’Keefe kissing behind the stable door, and announced flatly that she was to accompany her brother to Vespugia. No amount of tears, of hysterics from Gwen, of pleading from Mrs. Maddox, could change his stand.

Gwen and Zillah wept together. “It’s not fair,” Gwen sobbed. “A woman has no say in her own life. I hate men!”

Matthew tried to intercede with Dr. Llawcae for Zillah, but the doctor was adamant that she should wait at least until she was eighteen, and until Bran had suitable living arrangements.

Store and house were empty after they left. Matthew spent the morning working on accounts, and in the afternoon and evenings he stayed in his corner of the empty parlor, writing. His first novel was published and well received and he was hard at work on his second. It was this, and conversations with Zillah, who came frequently to Merioneth from Madrun, which kept him going.

“Bran’s all right,” he assured Zillah. “He sends love.”

“They can’t even have reached Vespugia yet,” Zillah protested. “And there’s certainly been no chance for him to send a letter.”

“You know Bran and I don’t need letters.”

She sighed. “I know. Will Bran and I ever be like that?”

“Yours will be a different kind of unity. Better, maybe, but different.”

“Will he send for me?”

“You must give him time, Zillah—time once again. Time to settle into a new world and a new way of life. And time for your father to get used to the idea of having his only child go half the way across the world from him.”

“How’s Gwen?”

“Part sulking and feeling sorry for herself, and part enjoying all the sailors on the ship making cow’s eyes at her and running to do her bidding. But she’s not going to be happy in Vespugia. She’s always hated hot weather, and she’s never liked roughing it.”

“No, she wasn’t a tomboy, like me. She thought Father was terrible to let me run wild and play rough games with you and Bran. Will your father relent and let her come home?”

“Not while Jack’s around. There’s no second-guessing Papa, though, when he latches on to an unreasonable notion.” He paused. “Remember the old Indian verses, Zillah?”

“About black hair and blue eyes?”

“Yes. They’ve been singing around in my head, and I can’t get them out, especially one verse:

“It’s beautiful,” Zillah said, “but I don’t really know what it means.”

“It’s not to be taken literally. The Indians believed that as long as there was one blue-eyed child in each generation, all would be well.”

“But it wasn’t, was it? They’ve been long gone from around here.”

“I think it was a bigger all-rightness than just for their tribe. Anyhow, both you and Gwen have at least a drop of Indian blood, and you both have the blue eyes of the song.”

“So, in a way,” Zillah said dreamily, “we’re the last of the People of the Wind. Unless—”

Matthew smiled at her. “I think you’re meant to have a black-haired, blue-eyed baby.”

“When?” Zillah demanded. “Bran’s a world away from me. And I’ll be old and white-haired and wrinkled before Papa realizes I’m grown up and lets me go.” She looked at him anxiously.

* * *

Matthew’s work began to receive more and more critical acclaim, and Mr. Maddox began thinking of it as something “real,” rather than fanciful scribbling not to be taken seriously. One of the unused downstairs rooms was fixed up as a study, and Dr. Llawcae designed a larger and more efficient lap desk.

The study was at the back of the house and looked across the lawn to the woods, and in the autumn Matthew feasted on the glory of the foilage. The room was sparsely furnished, at his request, with a black leather couch on which he could rest when sitting became too painful. As the cold weather set in, he began more and more often to spend the nights there. In front of the fireplace was a butler’s table and a comfortable lady chair upholstered in blue, the color of Zillah’s eyes: Zillah’s chair, he thought of it.

It was midsummer before letters began to arrive on a regular basis. True to his promise, Bran sent Matthew vivid descriptions:

How amazingly interconnected everything is, at least to us who have Welsh blood in our veins. My closest friends here are Richard Llawcae, his wife, and his son Rich. They must be at least distant kin to all of us, for Llawcae is not a common name, even in Wales. Richard says they have forebears who emigrated
to the New World in the very early days, and then went back to Wales, for nothing there was as bad as the witch-hunting in the Pilgrim villages and towns. One of their ancestors was burned, they think, or nearly so. They don’t know exactly where they came from, but probably around Salem.

Rich has eyes for no one but Gwen, and I wish she would see and return his love, for I can think of no one I’d rather have as a brother-in-law. But Gwen sees Gedder before Rich. Gedder is taller and bigger and stronger—perhaps—and certainly more flamboyant. He worries me. Zillie has told me of his fierce ambitions, and his manner toward all of us becomes a little more lordly every day. God knows he is helpful—if it weren’t for the Indians, I’m not sure the colony would have survived, for everything is different from at home—times for planting, what to plant, how to irrigate, etc. We are grateful indeed that the Indians not only have been friendly but have given us all the help they could. Yet I could wish Gedder had been more like his brethren and not so pushy and bossy. None of us likes the way Gedder treats his sister, as though she were his slave and inferior.

It is astounding how Zillie has the same features as Gwen and Zillah, the wide-apart eyes with the
faintest suggestion of a tilt—though hers are a warm brown, and not blue—and the high cheekbones and delicate nose. And, of course, the straight, shining black hair. People have remarked on the likeness between Gwen and Zillie. I haven’t talked with anyone except the Llawcaes about the Madoc legend following us to Vespugia, and they don’t laugh it away. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction. Put it into a story for me, Matt.

—I will, Matthew promised silently.—I will. But you must tell me more.

My house is nearly finished, large and airy, with verandas. Everyone knows that it is being built for my bride, and for our children. Zillie often comes and stands, just out of the way, and looks, and that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t think she comes of her own volition. I think Gedder sends her. I talk much about my Zillah, and how I long for the day when she will arrive. Matthew, twin, use your influence on Dr. Llawcae to let her come soon. Why is he keeping her with him? I need her, now.

As winter closed in and Matthew could not go out of doors, Zillah began to come from Madrun to Merioneth nearly every day at teatime, and Matthew missed her
more than he liked to admit when she did not appear. He was hurrying to finish his second novel, considerably more ambitious than the first, but he tired quickly, and lay on the black couch, reaching out to Bran and Vespugia, all through the winter, the summer, and into a second winter. He felt closer to his twin than ever, and when he neared the shallows of sleep he felt that he actually was in arid Vespugia, part of all that was happening in the tight-knit colony.

In the mornings, when he worked with his soft, dark pencil and large note pad, it was as though he were setting down what he had seen and heard the night before.

“You’re pale, Matt,” Zillah said one afternoon as she sat in the lady chair and poured his tea.

“It’s this bitter cold. Even with the fire going constantly, the damp seeps into my bones.”

He turned away from her concern and looked out the window at the night drawing in. “I have to get my book finished, and there’s not much time. I have a large canvas, going all the way back to the Welsh brothers who fought over Owain of Gwynedd’s throne. Madoc and his brother, Gwydyr, left Wales, and came to a place which I figure to have been somewhere near here, when the valley was still a lake left from the melting of the ice. And once again brothers fought. Gwydyr wanted power, wanted adulation. Over and over again we get caught in fratricide, as Bran was in that ghastly war. We’re still
bleeding from the wounds. It’s a primordial pattern, left us from Cain and Abel, a net we can’t seem to break out of. And unless it is checked it will destroy us entirely.”

She clasped her hands. “Will it be checked?”

He turned back toward her. “I don’t know, Zillah. When I sleep I have dreams, and I see dark and evil things, children being killed by hundreds and thousands in terrible wars which sweep over them.” He reached for her hand. “I do not croak doom casually, f’annwyl. I do not know what is going to happen. And irrationally, perhaps, I am positive that what happens in Vespugia is going to make a difference. Read me the letter from Bran that came today once more, please.”

She took the letter from the tea table and held it to the lamp.

Dear my twin, and dear my Zillah, when are you coming? Matthew, if you cannot bring Zillah to me, then Zillah must bring you. She writes that the winter is hard on you, and she is worried. There would be much to hold your attention here. Llewellyn Pugh languishes for love of Zillie, and I think she would turn to him did Gedder not keep forcing her on me, no matter how loudly I say that I am betrothed, and that my Zillah is coming to join us any day now. Do not make me a liar!

We have had our first death, and a sad one it was, too. The children are forbidden to climb up onto the cliff which protects the colony from the winds, but somehow or other, one of them managed the steep climb, and fell. We all grieve. It may be a good thing that there is so much work for everybody that there is little idle time, and this helps us all, particularly the parents of the little one. Rich has been a tower of strength. He was the one of us who was able to bring tears from the mother, partly because he was not ashamed to weep himself.

“He is a good man, that Rich,” Matthew said. “He’d do anything in the world for Gwen.”

“You talk as though you know him.”

Matthew smiled at her. “I do. I know him through Bran. And through my novel. What happens with Rich, with Bran, with Gwen, with Zillie—it matters to my story. It could even change it.” She looked at him questioningly. “This book is pushing me, Zillah, making me write it. It excites me, and it drives me. In its pages, myth and matter merge. What happens in one time can make a difference in what happens in another time, far more than we realize. What Gedder does is going to make a difference, to the book, perhaps to the world. Nothing,
no one, is too small to matter. What
you
do is going to make a difference.”

In the early winter Matthew caught a heavy chest cold, which weakened him, and Dr. Llawcae came daily. Matthew spent the days on the black leather couch, wrapped in blankets. He continued to work on his novel and sold several more stories. He kept his earnings, which were considerable, in a small safe in his study. And now he left the study not at all.

When he was too exhausted to write, he slid into a shallow sleep, filled with vivid dreams in which Bran and the Vespugian colony were more real than chilly Merioneth.

He was at the flat rock in his dream, the rock where he used to meet Zillah when he sought privacy. But instead of Zillah there was a boy, perhaps twelve years old, dressed in strange, shabby clothes. The boy was lying on the rock, and he, too, was dreaming, and his dream and Matthew’s merged.

Gedder is after Gwen. Stop him. The baby must come from Madoc. Gwydyr’s line is tainted. There is nothing left but pride and greed for power and revenge. Stop him, Matthew.

He saw his twin, but this was not Bran in Vespugia … Was it Bran? It was a young man, about their age, standing by a lake. Behind him stood another, a little older,
who looked like Bran and yet not like Bran, for there was resentment behind the eyes. Like Gedder. The two began to wrestle, to engage in mortal combat.

At the edge of the lake a huge pile of flowers smoldered, with little red tongues of flame licking the petals of the roses—

“Matthew!”

He opened his eyes and his mother was hovering over him with a cup of camomile tea.

Beside the growing pages of the manuscript lay a genealogy which he had carefully worked out, a genealogy which could go in two different directions, like a double helix. In one direction there was hope; in the other, disaster. And the book and Bran and the Vespugian colony were intertwined in his mind and heart.

The winter was bitter cold.

“As the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen,” Matthew said to Dr. Llawcae, who listened gravely to Matthew’s heart and his chest.

He leaned back and looked at the young man. “Matthew, you are encouraging Zillah.”

Matthew smiled. “I’ve always encouraged Zillah, from the days when we were all children and she wanted to climb trees as high as Bran and I did.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re encouraging her in this wild-goose chase to go to Vespugia and join Bran.”

“When Bran asked you for Zillah’s hand, you gave him your blessing,” Matthew reminded the doctor.

“That was with the understanding that Bran would stay here and become his father’s partner.”

“Once a blessing is given, Dr. Llawcae, it cannot be withdrawn.” Matthew urged, “Zillah’s heart is in Vespugia with Bran. I understand how she has taken her mother’s place in your house and at your table. But she is your daughter, Dr. Llawcae, and not your wife, and you must not keep her tied to you.”

The doctor’s face flushed darkly with anger. “How dare you!”