Theirs Was The Kingdom (65 page)

“ To be sure I will, and gladly,” Giles said, and they shook hands again, this time less formally.

2

Over the battlemented, tip-scarred hills enclosing the valley and north into the green, unravished country of Brecknock, Radnor, and Montgomery, where hardly anyone he met spoke English, and the smell of the sea reached him when the wind was in the west.

Mile after mile across sheep pasture and woodland valley, where rivers dashed over boulder-strewn beds and the landscape, he would say, had remained unchanged since Edward Longshanks’ French-speaking cavalry had ridden this far to kill Llewelyn and build their ring of fortresses in the north. Into the higher, wilder country about Dolgelley and through the frowning Llanberis Pass, where he spent one day looking over the quarries and another climbing Snowdon, but saw little for his pains on account of the dense trailers of mist. Fifteen and twenty miles a day on average, sometimes sleeping in remote little inns, where old stone bridges spanned rushing mountain torrents, more often, as a dry spell followed a week of clouded skies, camping under the edge of a wood, and sleeping in his sack until dawn put a razor edge on his appetite and he was glad to restore circulation by a tramp to the nearest village, where he would wolf down bacon and eggs and a pint of the local ale that would sustain him over the next stretch of rough walking. In this way he progressed within a day’s walk of Caernarvon, having half-decided to visit the castle and then head for Chester through the lovely Conway Valley, and afterwards perhaps, take a look at the engine sheds at Crewe before moving into the Polygon to renew his acquaintance with Catesby.

The rushing, frothing, chattering rivers fascinated him up here, especially in the early mornings when the sky above the jagged mountains was coral streaked with heliotrope, and the soft rush of the water over the stones was like the chorus of an old Welsh battle-song. He would sometimes pause, resting his elbows on the stone parapet of such a stream, looking about him with satisfaction, but telling himself that he was unlikely to learn much about the state of the nation up here, for the purple hills and the wooded slopes clothing the lower parts of the valleys did not look as if they had altered since the earth cooled. Yet curious and unpredictable things did happen, as he discovered for himself one sunny morning in mid-May, whilst taking a breather at Pont Aberglaslyn, a river-crossing a mile below Beddgelert, where the road to the Vale of Conway led through a ten-mile pass of incomparable splendour.

He saw her when she began her hop-skip across the river, two hundred yards upstream, but paid her no special attention. At that distance she looked no more than a leggy, overbold schoolgirl, trying her luck on stepping stones formed by random boulders. Then he heard her squeal and saw a splash, and after that the glimpse of a red bundle spinning slowly in the current, rapidly gathering momentum and moving towards him as fast as a man could run.

The river was no more than shoulder deep, save where it ran in pools under the bank, but a child could easily drown there and, suddenly alarmed, he darted across the bridge and jumped ten feet to the gravel, wading in up to his knees and trying to judge where she would pass as the current swirled her towards the arches.

There was a long forked branch wedged between two rocks and he tore it free, calling to her and holding it out as she swept level with him. He saw then that the red bundle was not a child but a girl about his own age, and also that she had not completely lost her nerve, for she was making strenuous efforts to save herself, striking out for a smoother reach between the boulders but not, so far as he could judge, making enough progress to gain the bank.

He went in deeper, right up to his chest, waving the stick and shouting to her to grab it as she bobbed past, but she did not seem to understand him and ignored the branch. She kicked clear of a smooth rounded boulder and somehow got into an eddy that carried her not only underwater but clean between his legs, so that he was able to grab a handful of her skirt as the impact caused him to lose his footing and they rolled together in the shallows.

He dragged himself ashore and the girl with him, but he was weighed down by the heavy knapsack on his back, so that it was she rather than he who played the more active part in reaching the triangle of shingle below the bridge. Then, dashing the water from his eyes, he saw that she was laughing; instead of feeling a hero he felt a complete idiot, for it occurred to him then that the girl had been in no danger after all and probably knew the course of the river much better than he did.

She said, shaking her head like a spaniel, “There, now! Who rescued who?” and laughed again, so saucily that he was obliged to join in, saying, “I made sure you were a child… What possessed you to cross there? It isn’t a ford, is it?”

No, she told him, it wasn’t, but the river was fordable anywhere at this time of year, unless spring had been late and very wet.

He looked at her more closely then and saw why he had underestimated her age. She had the face of a child, a pretty and rather spoiled child he would say, with blue, slightly upslanting eyes, long, fair lashes, a retrousse nose, and a red, petulant mouth that looked as if it could sulk as well as chuckle. Yet her figure, revealed by her wet clothes, was that of a woman, and even here, dripping wet on a river bank, she flaunted it like a favour at a fair, heaving herself up and resting her weight on the buttress of the bridge, so that she could wring the water from her skirt. Her boyishness, and complete lack of concern over the wetting, reminded him of his younger sisters at home, who would make nothing of a thing like this but would never, he thought, have lifted their skirts above their thighs in front of a strange woman, much less a young man.

He said, to cover his confusion, “Do you live about here?” and she said offhandedly that she did, a mile or so along the Caernarvon road. But she did not explain what she was doing here by the river at six o’clock in the morning, or indeed, offer any explanation as to how she came to fall in the stream and half drown in front of his eyes.

Then, having dropped her sodden skirt, she peeled off the little hussar jacket she wore over a white silk blouse and began to wring that out, bending forward so that he had to avert his eyes, for the front of her blouse was open and as she was wearing neither corset nor petticoat he could look the length of the cleft between her breasts. She noticed his glance, swift as it was, and laughed again, throwing the jacket over her shoulder and fastening the blouse buttons, but so casually that he thought “She might be well grown but she’s obviously weak in the head. Maybe she’s an idiot, but the bonniest I ever saw!” and he said, “Let me have the jacket,” and took it, turning his back on her and wringing it almost free of water. When he turned she was still regarding him humorously, one finger pulling at her lip and one bare foot (she had lost her shoes) braced against the cornerstone of the bridge in a way that revealed a dimpled knee.

“
I
can go home and change,” she said, “but
you
can’t, can you? And your knapsack is just as wet as my bolero, and probably has all your things in it.”

He had forgotten his own plight and now had to make a new assessment of her. She obviously wasn’t the village idiot but an extraordinarily self-possessed young lady, as he realised the moment she went on, “We’ll go on home, and you can breakfast with us while Maggie is drying you out. It’s not far if we cut across there!” and she pointed to a zig-zag track climbing the furze-covered hill on the far bank. Then, without waiting for his assent, she took hold of some stones protruding from the buttress and hauled herself up the ten-foot wall and back on to the road level, moving with the precision of a gymnast. He followed more slowly, having thrown his dripping knapsack up to her, and together they took the hill-track that wound over the shoulder of the hill, leaving the little town of Beddgelert on their right.

“What’s your name and what were you doing here this early?” she demanded and he told her, adding that he had slept in the woods and had been making for the town to buy breakfast before tackling the pass to Capel Curig and Conway. For some reason this seemed to impress her and she stopped to take a long, unabashed look at him, saying, “Just how
far
have you walked, Mr. Swann?”

“About a hundred and fifty miles,” he said. “From North Devon. I left a month ago,” and she gasped, again looking like a child.

“Why, that’s
marvellous
! Papa will be
most
interested to learn that! He doesn’t walk much, of course, but he knows all the places you must have passed. All those dreadful coal-mining towns, in the south.”

“Who is your father? Is he a farmer?”

“Good heavens, no!” she said, laughing again. “He’s nothing really, but his hobby is geology when he’s here. Usually he’s in London, or at one or other of his factories. He’s got lots of factories in the south.”

“What kind of factories?” Giles asked, for it was very difficult to visualise a factory-owner who lived up here in the very heart of the mountains, had a daughter like this pretty, unchaperoned creature, and studied geology into the bargain.

“Oh, all kinds of factories,” she said, carelessly. “A dye works, a processing plant for coal-tar, a tannery, I believe… oh yes, and a foundry for making chains. Anchor chains, you know, the kind they use on ironclads and liners.”

“You mean his home up here is his country-seat where he comes for holidays?”

“Yes, you’d call it that, I suppose, but I live here most of the time. I can do what I like up here whereas in London I always have to keep finding ways of outwitting Prickle. Prickle is strict and has the stupidest notions about how young ladies should behave once they put their hair up. That’s why I had mine cut short,” she added, as though that was what she had been leading up to.

“What’s your name?”

“Guess. It begins with ‘R’.”’

“I might guess all morning. Is it Rachel?”

“No, that’s Biblical, and Papa is an atheist, like Mr. Bradlaugh. Try again.”

He would have liked to have asked her if she had met Bradlaugh, who had recently been ejected from the House of Commons by ten policemen, but decided to humour her.

“Rhoda? Rosalind?”

“You’re getting warm. Rhoda is nice and not at all common, is it? But you’ll never guess, no one ever does.” She sounded as if this was deplorable. “It’s Romayne. Do you like it, Mr. Swann?”

He liked it very much, not only because it had a pleasant sound on her lips but because it suited her exactly. It had a gypsy flavour.

“Romayne what?”

“Rycroft-Mostyn. The Mostyn bit I never use unless I have to. There’s a whole lot of Mostyns about here and over on the coast. Papa married one and took the name, but she’s dead now. Years and years ago.”

It was difficult to adjust to her lack of sentimentality, so that he had to assume the late Mrs. Rycroft-Mostyn was a stepmother. “That wasn’t your mother?”

“Of course it was, but I can’t remember her. She died having an operation when I was three. What’s your Christian name, Mr. Swann?”

“Giles,” he said, and to his embarrassment she repeated it twice as though tasting it and then added, “I like it.
Giles.
He was the patron saint of cripples, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” he said, adapting to her somewhat, “and that’s how I come to be called after him. I was born soon after my father lost his leg in a train crash. He didn’t even know I existed when he came home with an artificial leg and as I hadn’t been properly named, Giles seemed appropriate.”

The information seemed to impress her even more than his mileage. She said, “But that’s a
wonderful
story! The kind you might read in a book. Come to think of it, you jumping into the river after me was like a book.
Giles. Giles Swann
! ” She rolled the name round her tongue in a way that made him smile. “It’s the right name too, I mean, for someone who
would
jump into a river to save a young maiden in distress.”

“That’s about the last role I would give you to play, Romayne,” he said, using her Christian name without shyness, for although he had no experience with girls other than his sisters, she was obviously a person who discouraged reticence of any kind and he was beginning to find communication with her very easy.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re clearly a person very well able to look out for herself. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, thoughtfully, “I suppose it is. But it was nice
being
rescued, and I haven’t thanked you for it, have I? There, now I have!” And she spun round, grasped him by the shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth.

The embrace was so swift and so ingenuous that he had no time to feel anything but charmed by her gaiety. Suddenly the sun shone even brighter, and the sky over the mountain ridge behind Beddgelert seemed cleaner and fresher, so that it was a privilege to be alive and exciting to be walking along beside this dashing, wayward girl, whose father owned dye works, iron foundries, and processing plants, as well as the house that came in view just then as they topped a rise and began to descend towards the road.

It was a beautifully sited building, about a century old he would say, with a way of conforming to the landscape as though it had grown there and was as much a part of the scene as the gorse-covered crags above and the flashing river below. It looked a very large house, with any number of tall windows and a well-tended lawn at the front enclosed on each side by great clumps of hydrangea and flowering cherry.