Band of Angel (12 page)

“Oh Eli,” said Catherine, smiling through her tears, “you sound like Mair.”

“And what if Black Fedu be there?”

They cried together for a while, Eliza’s tears trickling down the neck of Catherine’s bodice and her dear, pink and white face
becoming hot and swollen against her sister’s. After a while Eliza said, “Is it Mother still? I still think you blame yourself.”

“Partly. I was hopeless.”

“Catherine, it was not your fault. Please try to forgive yourself. I miss her so much, too,” said Eliza, still sobbing, “but is there nothing I can say that would make you change your mind?”

“No, it’s done now,” replied Catherine quietly. “Try not to think of it as such a big thing. Men do it all the time, they travel, they study, and the world does not fall apart around them.”

“But how will you get to Pwllheli?” asked Eliza, naming the town where the mail coach stopped.

“I’m not going that way,” said Catherine. “I’m going with the drovers.”

“The drovers! No Catherine, you can’t! What will you tell Father? That you’re running away with Deio? He’ll murder you both when you get back.”

“I’m not running away with Deio,” said Catherine furiously. “I’ve wanted to do that journey all my life, and I’m tired of being ignorant. I’m tired of being bored. You must make Father see that.”

“
I
must make Father see!” Eliza was as close to rage as she ever came. “Why me?”

“Because I can’t reach him. He’ll be harvesting until late tonight.”

“What?” Horror dawned on Eliza’s face. “What are you talking about?”

Catherine, with shaking hands, looked at the watch around her neck. The watch her mother had given her, which had marked off years of filling in the quiet periods of time between eating and dressing and going to bed. “Tonight. There’s a party at Pantyporthman. We’ll leave after that.”

Her sister shook her head and wept.

Hours later, as she embraced her shivering sister on the stairs and saw again the fright on her face, she felt for the second time in her life like a murderess.

The moon was high that night. The drovers were careful to time
their leaving to coincide with it, and it was almost as light as day. In its light the distant mountains shone pale blue and ghostly, and the sea broke like liquid silver. She stood in the shadows outside the kitchen door. Her father and the men were out there somewhere in the Nant Field, near the river. She could see the glow of their lanterns in the distance, bobbing up as the rows of corn lay down at their approach. They would finish soon, sit and have an ale together, and talk and laugh in a way she never heard Father laugh inside this house. She thought of him again, and how they had failed each other; how, in place of that warm love both had once felt, there was now a huge baffled blankness. Once she was gone he would not send for her; she would almost bet on it. He would let her slip through his fingers as he had allowed Mother to do, and a part of them both would die off, and he, too proud to acknowledge the hurt, would go on plowing and planting, and speaking in his secret silly voices to the animals that never let him down.

She stopped at the end of the drive where the two roads forked. She made herself feel the agony of turning around and looking at Carreg Plâs for what felt like the last time. The shadows of two large pine trees fell against the L-shaped house. The moonlight left reflections in the upstairs windows. “Good-bye, Mama,” she whispered, imagining her still asleep behind the third window on the right. “Wish me luck.”

As Catherine passed the two massive stones at the end of the drive and took the lane leading toward Pantyporthman, she could hardly breathe. She tried to think only of Deio and of the journey ahead—the two fixed points in her world.

From the high hedge beside the road came a sudden scream, followed after an interval by another, then another, as some nighttime creature murdered one of its fellows by slow degrees. The sound made her pant with fear. She had never walked alone at night before, and did not know that time when the dark is alive with the sounds of animals mating, dying, and being born, and a human form becomes a blundering shadow.

She dashed along in a stumbling run for fifty yards or so and then stopped. From across the fields, bursts of music and laughter were coming from the drovers’ house. She went down the track, past the pond and barns and fields of waiting cattle, toward the brightly lit house. Now she could hear the sounds of two men playing the fiddle together, trying to outdo each other in speed and dexterity. A flute joined in and there were shouts of “Come on there, Lewis!” and shrieks of laughter. She’d planned to test her disguise by wandering through the merrymakers, but her nerve failed her at the last minute and she stood, crouched, outside the kitchen window.

Raising her eyes above the cracked window frame, she saw several barrels of ale in the fireplace and a table crammed with food: raised pies, a joint of beef, fruit jellies, a big Cut-and-Come-Again cake. It was a little while before she could see Deio. The broad back of Ben Challoner, the local wheelwright, who was wolfing down a
huge plate of meat as if it were the last he would see that year, was wedged in most of the window. In a tall chair beside the fire, bald head gleaming in the lamplight, was Mr. Roger Jones who ran the general store at Aberdaron.

It saddened Catherine to see how much jollier these people looked among their own. When Mr. Jones delivered to Carreg Plâs on Tuesdays, he backed from their door, almost incoherent with good manners and excuse-me-misses. Now, red and roaring, he was hollering for Lewis Jones, who was sitting on the settle, to get on and do his party piece. Lewis had a cat on his knee and its tail in his mouth. Lewis’s eyes rolled soulfully. He squeezed the cat like a bagpipe, making it spit and yowl. Shrieks of “Stop it, you brute!” from the women, and fresh roars of laughter. The fiddlers, capering and making foolish faces, keeping pace. Meg Jones bent over and pretended to clout her husband upon the forehead and he pinched her on the bosom and said in a squeaky voice, “Oh Meg, my darling, my life,” then pulled her on his knee and kissed her.

At the end of the kitchen, the dancers had rolled back a rush mat. Then Deio stood up, his shadow flying against the wall. He was dancing, a boy again, a beautiful heathen boy, lean and brown in the lamplight. He turned and looked straight toward her. She shrank back into the bushes, but he hadn’t seen her. He looked again and, with no expression in his eyes that she could read, pulled a girl from the crowd—quite a pretty girl with dark hair and a round, good-natured face—who Catherine vaguely recognized as Mary Jones from Sunday school. Catherine watched her face light up, saw his hand around her waist tighten as he led her toward the dancers. When the music stopped, he swooped down upon the girl. He lightly kissed her and lightly let her go. Then she saw him lift Mary onto the windowsill, as if she were a feather, and kiss her again. Harder this time.

Catherine wanted to smack his smiling face, and the girl’s. Then she began to shiver and wrapped her own arms around herself for comfort. This was nonsense, she told herself he was a childhood friend, her companion for the journey. He could play the young stag with whomever he liked. She had not lied to Eliza. That moment—the business in the fishing hut when she had let herself go
(for so she thought of it, and even in the dark it made her face burn with shame)—had been nothing more than a regrettable, even wicked, weakness on her part.

He was walking across the kitchen now, another girl smiling like an idiot beside him. Her friend was gone. In his place, a handsome, shrewd young man, with a wary look in his eyes and his arms around any girl he liked. There was a kind of hardness now in those green eyes, a deliberate, even studied, coolness in his manner that both frightened her and set her free.

The rowdy blare of voices faded suddenly to a respectful hush. The Reverend Thomas Hughes stood up, threw a significant look at the clock above the dresser, which stood at a quarter past eleven, then fixed his gaze on the revelers, waiting for their smiles to fade.

“The time has come”—he steepled his fingers and lowered his voice—“for us to attend to the matter in hand. The drovers will soon be gone. Pray silence for these men, our neighbors, our friends, who face danger and hardship to relieve the hunger of the men of London.” Admiring looks were shot through fingers at Lewis Jones, now stroking the cat; at Rob, draped around with the body of a sleeping child; and at Deio edging toward the door, determined to be first out.

“And pray God will keep them safe from the robbers, the evil men, the impostors, all that men are prey to on their journey.”

Catherine, listening and trembling under the window, said a heartfelt “Amen.”

“God speed,” said the partygoers, patting the drovers’ arms as they left the lighted room. “Come home in one piece.” One woman asked Rob to bring her some of those new red currants from London so she could plant them next year, “and don’t forget my marbled paper, mind.” Rob’s four-year-old son, a sturdy fellow with cheeks like ripe apples, held his arms out stiffly and started to bellow, “Don’t go, Dadda,” and was swooped up and kissed. Then the partygoers all moved to the window, jostling for a good position from which to watch the drovers leave.

Crouched in the shadows, waiting, Catherine heard the scrape of Deio’s boots as he left the back door of the kitchen and strode on his slightly bandy legs across the yard toward her. She could see
his form clearly in the moonlight, but was unable to read his expression. He was carrying a saddle and saddlebag and two bridles.

“Deio,” she said softly.

“Good God, woman.” He gazed at the small figure in front of him. The smock, the hat. “Jo from Abersoch.” She stepped from the shadows.

“My God,” he said with some distaste, “it’s you.”

The cattle were streaming down the moon-washed hills into the marshaling yard and the noise was deafening. He led her to a dark shed smelling sharply of urine. A bright bay horse stood saddled and tethered to the stable wall. She was wet with sweat and the whites of her eyes showed in the slatted light.

“Her name is Cariad,” said Deio shortly. “Yours for the trip—then they will sell her in London. Rob is too heavy on her. You’ll be all right.” Her legs felt weak. She hoped he was right.

There was another roar outside and the crash of gates as more cattle came down the hill, then Rob’s beard suddenly appeared over the stable door; his teeth gleamed in the moonlight.

“We’ll leave at four-thirty sharp and you’ll get your orders at Pistyll,” he shouted. “Yes sir.” She was thumped sharply on the shoulder by Cariad who was frightened by the noise.

“She’s very green,” Rob shouted, “watch her.”

It took an hour to check supplies—the leathers, nails, hammers, food, guns, playing cards, sacks of flour, and smocks—then pack them neatly into rough saddlebags with tarpaulin covers. Toward morning, when streaks of yellow were showing in the dark hills above, Rob bellowed “Mount up,” and Deio helped Catherine lead the mare into the yard. The mare was covered in a creamy foam of sweat and was dancing on the spot. She tightened the girths with a shaky, “Whoa there, Cariad.” Then she leaped into the saddle as quickly as possible.

From behind, Rob gave a roar loud enough to splinter wood: “Heiptro Ho!” There was the clank of gates opening, and then a great rumbling sound as the last group of cattle came down the hill and all the dogs began barking at once as the three lots of cattle were merged into one group.

“Get back, get back,” Rob shouted. Cariad had bounded into
the empty space, banging Catherine’s knee on the gatepost as they passed.

“Now come out,” yelled Lewis. The cattle surged up the moonlit track and Cariad, ears tensely pricked, leaped toward them. Turning to look back at the drovers’ house, she could see the vague outlines of the few hardy souls who had stayed up all night to wave good-bye.

They were calling out, but no one could hear them, their voices drowned in the dark wave of thundering hooves heading toward the mountain.

At the fork in the road, she hung back behind the cows and the shouting men, hoping to be on her own. It was the last view of Carreg Plâs. She thought this moment would pierce her heart but, turning, saw only a blur of trees, for Cariad, unused to saddlebags, was bucking and all she could think about was staying on.