Band of Angel (17 page)

“Deio.” She could hardly breathe. “This is wrong, please stop.”

Her head was jammed now between the bed and the wall.

“Feel it first, Catherine.” His fingers were touching her; she felt a spiraling sweetness.

“No!” She was surprised at the strength she found to fling him off the bed. “Not like this, and don’t you dare blame me.”

With a crash, he fell from the bed. “What did you expect? We’ve been ten days together.”

He was stumbling around now looking for a light for the candle.

She watched him in a stupor of misery, body still blazing and uncoiling, mind all tangled. “Try for once to understand me.”

“I can’t. I won’t.” He was on the bed beside her again and, suddenly, in one quick movement, lifted her skirts and entered her. They both cried out, and then her tears flowed through his hands.

Afterward, she lay rigid with shock and he staunched her bleeding.

“It’s strange at first,” he said. He was on his elbow looking at her. “But I’ll make it wonderful.”

Her voice seemed to come from miles away.

“I’m going to London.” She sounded like a mechanical toy.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. Yes. No. I’m all right.” She was determined not to cry.

“Don’t go to Lon— I’m sorry if I—” Now his voice was choked.

“I’m going, Deio. It’s all arranged.”

He got off the bed; put his shirttails back in his breeches. His eyes were dark in the candlelight. His red rosette on the floor.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Please go.”

She got up on her pillow and looked at the dark room. There were footsteps echoing in the streets outside as some revelers went home. Watching him walk toward the door, she felt an indescribable pain, a sense of loss never felt before. He turned around and looked at her before he left.

“I shall not give up on you,” he said.

London, 1854

Boom! Boom! Catherine, stepping off the train and into the dark cave of Euston Station, heard the drums immediately, and felt them in her skull. She had never seen so many people together in all her life, or been so scared.

For the last hour, she’d been watching blue sky become yellow smoke, green fields turn to smoke, and then row upon row of sooty houses, their washing lines hung with camisoles and shirts and combinations. “Kindly leave the train if this is your destination!” the guard was shouting. “All others change, please-uh! That’s it, all change. Off you go.”

She was pushed onto the platform, crowded with soldiers in new blue-and-green uniforms, and stood there with her saddlebag in one hand, her hat in the other. A boy, still young enough to have gosling fluff on his cheeks, was being kissed by a weeping mother. A man in civilian clothes with a huge leather suitcase shouted at her and bumped her painfully on the shins, half spinning her around.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Where is Hyde Park?” but he’d gone, and left her shouting on her own.

Outside the station she clung to some railings and tried to make sense of the noise and the stream of people jostling one another and hurrying forward. “I’m in London,” she thought in a blaze of surprise. “I am here at last.” A man at the corner of the pavement shouted, “
Chronicle, Chronicle! . . .
” A horse swept by pulling a cart and airily depositing its dung, half on the harness and half on the street.

Driving in a cab toward the city, her face pressed against the
window, she saw amazing shops crammed with costly goods; an old woman, filthy and in rags, holding a terrier in her arms; a man in a purple coach drawn by four grays, dressed in a gorgeous fur coat and smoking a cigar.

“How Mother would have loved this,” she thought, “how she would have laughed.”

Driving down Oxford Street in spite of everything, she thought of Deio. He’d talked about the mad rush at the end of every London drove to get the cattle down here and into the markets before the city woke up. He’d sung songs from the London theaters and told jokes that had the tears running down her face. And there he was again: on his knees in the moonlight, his face hungry and thwarted.
Look at me, Catrin,
he’d begged her before the end,
Look at me
. But no! Never!
I hate you, Deio, I can never love you again.

“Tyburn,” the coach driver shouted at the end of Oxford Street. “Where the criminals was once hexecuted. They used to watch them from the apartments up yonder.” He pointed with his whip to some windows above a hat shop.

Green Street. A long narrow street with handsome sober houses and gay window boxes. Ferdinand Holdsworth’s house was at number thirty. She stood at the corner with her head swimming from the strangeness of it all, realizing that thinking about a thing and actually doing it was so different. Soon she would have to bang on a perfect stranger’s door and announce herself. She darted in the opposite direction, across a busy road, in the direction of an iron gate. “I’ll count up to twenty and then I’ll go,” she said to herself.

On the other side of the road, at the park’s entrance, a wizened old man was singing
I will gather this rose
to a monkey in a shawl. Oh, why must everything remind her of Deio; that was another of the songs he’d once sung in his Miss Pitkeathly voice to make her laugh. The old man doffed his cap, and she was so embarrassed that she went to the sign attached to the gate and read studiously, “The park keepers have orders to refuse admittance to the park to all beggars and any persons in rags, or those whose clothes are very dirty or who are not of decent appearance or bearing.”

There was a spot of blood on the hem of her blue dress. Seeing it, she felt dirty again and touched with darkness. Plam! Plam!
Plam! Plam! The drumbeats again, coming from the park. She’d behaved like a creature gone mad. She stood on her own for a moment, shaking her head.

Two women walked by in silk dresses, both carrying small dogs. “Oh look,” said one. “Them hosses again.” Ten black horses from the Household Cavalry clattered by, their riders magnificent and impassive.

London! The thought kept breaking in on her. It was too sudden, too strange; she needed more time to think about it.
I will count up to thirty and then I’ll go.
But instead, she spent a rootless, miserable hour wandering up and down Park Lane, looking into carriage shop windows and pretending from time to time to greet imaginary friends. London, she knew, was full of kidnappers and pickpockets.

And then she closed her eyes, breathed deeply, walked up the street, found the house, and banged on a brass door-knocker shaped like a fish.

A woman carrying a pile of clean sheets opened the door.

“My name,” she said, “is Catherine Carreg.”

“Is Mr. Holdsworth expecting you?” The woman looked put out.

“I hope so.” Catherine tried not to sound too desperate. “I think his daughter, Miss Eleri Holdsworth, sent a note ahead of me.”

“Ah, Miss Eleri.” The woman rolled her eyes. “You had better come in.”

My dear Miss Carreg.” The tall, slightly stooped, gray-haired man stepped forward and took her hand. “What a delightful surprise. Eleri did tell me about you.”

She shook his hand, warmed by his smile and the softened look of the housekeeper who had her dusty cloak in one hand and her saddlebag in the other.

“Margaret,” he said, “would you be so kind as to make us tea? Cress sandwiches, I think, some walnut cake, and one or two of those scones if they are hanging about. Thank you.”

Following Ferdinand Holdsworth up the mirrored hall, she caught a glimpse of her frightened face and crumpled clothes. She was in London but dressed for a hayride.

He led her into a large, light room, with windows opening onto a walled garden and what looked like stables behind. Its book-strewn tables, tapestry chairs, and general air of artistic untidiness struck her as a grander version of Eleri’s home.

“What a lovely room,” she said.

He thanked her and said his wife, Penelope, had set it up. This was her room—all the tapestries, the footstools, everything. He looked so resolutely cheerful when he said this that she knew his wife was dead.

“She was a wonderful needlewoman,” he said. “She taught me to sew and knit. That one is mine.” He pointed proudly at a green-and-purple footstool depicting deer and vine leaves.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Oh yes,” he said. “She was stern with me at the beginning. ‘
Shoddy work! Ferdinand,’ she would say. ‘Think of those Italian builders who used to teach their sons the rule of Cento Anni. One hundred years, not three, or five, so unpick it. Now!’”

They both laughed. He was a good mimic.

“I was telling Miss Carreg about that tartar Penelope Holds-worth,” he said as Margaret appeared in the room with a laden tea tray.

“Oh sir!” The housekeeper set down a silver teapot and a walnut cake and some cress sandwiches. “The dearest lady who ever lived, as well you know. Now Miss Carreg, how do you like your tea?”

While Margaret bustled and poured, and replenished the pot, Ferdinand watched the girl. The surgeon in him noted the extreme pallor of her skin and the faint blue circles around her eyes. The poor child looked all done in.

His impulse was to offer her a bath and a bed for the night. He was ready to care in the way the lonely are, as an escape from loneliness, but he worried that this might compromise the girl and sound like an improper suggestion. On the other hand, Eleri had written to him, had asked him, perhaps as an envoy of her family. “Oh Penelope,” he pleaded silently. “Tell me what to do.”

“Another sandwich, my dear?” He was puzzled by this mysterious creature his daughter had sent. Her poise suggested a girl who had been well brought up, but her accent, now English and now with the singsong inflections of the Welsh, suggested a farmer’s daughter; she ate like a refined young lady, but she was clearly starving.

“Do have some more cake, it’s very good.” No point in pressing her with questions until she had eaten and drunk. He talked for a while in his urbane and kindly way about the Lleyn Peninsula, and how he and his wife had discovered it on a walking holiday in Wales when they had been retracing the footsteps of the pilgrims, and how he had taken his children back there year after year, for there was something in the scenery that stirred the soul.

“Did you mind Eleri staying there?” Her eyes, very direct and intelligent, brought the general part of their conversation to an end.

“Penelope minded,” he said. “She felt her desire to live alone in a more or less foreign country would attract a great deal of disapproval.”

“Did you, do you . . . ?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve seen quite a few clever women go mad for want of something to do. When Eleri was three years old she drew and painted as if time was running out. To have gifts like that and not to use them is a form of slow death. She was an absolute monster as a child.”

They both laughed at that, and he held out the teapot toward her. “Now finish off that pot my dear, it’s thirsty weather, and then you may refresh my memory about your London plans.”

She put down her cup, her heart skipping with fear. She’d imagined having this conversation hours or days after meeting Mr. Holdsworth, but here he was, twinkling at her over the tea tray as if they’d been friends for years.