Band of Angel (15 page)

As the night wore on, her mind grew tired, and she accepted that her feelings toward Deio were so confused that she might have earned his anger. Led him on; bewildered him by craving the very protection that now unsettled her. Even now, there were moments when she saw him from a distance looking so fine that her heart swelled with such a warm regard, such a tenderness of shared associations, that she might under other circumstances have called it love. Deio was brave. He had helped to set her free, risking the anger of his family and his own reputation in the community to do so. For that alone, she would be forever grateful to him. Sometimes he felt so close to her she didn’t know where he ended and she began. Then she saw that look in his eyes that scared her. It made her think of those horses who cry out in the darkness for their mate and wait with a desperate intensity for one reply. Then she wanted to push him off—she wasn’t ready. It was too much.

And here was another bad thought: the next day they’d ride within a mile or so of her grandmother’s house at Dyffryn Ceiriog on the borders of England and Wales. The idea of that house, with its pillows and pomanders, its excellent teas, its strict timetables, filled her with a most terrible homesickness. How wonderful to
sink into that copper bath by the fire. To hear the housekeeper clink up the stairs laden with ginger cake and tea. All she had to do was ride there now and explain to her grandmother, an amiable and forgiving woman, what a goose she had been and how glad she was to be home, and all would be forgiven and forgotten. But then what?

Then home, and the blankness of knowing she hadn’t done what she had set out to do. At last she slept, and when she woke, a gray light was filtering through the beams of the hut. She sat up with a quick panicky movement. A robin made the first note of the dawn chorus, then a chaffinch, then the tsk-task of the golden cret. Within seconds the riverbank was full of birdsong. White-faced, she took paper and pencil from her bag and, sitting cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by the sleeping dogs, did some sums.

One week later, they went to Llangollen to the fair. Deio, to her great relief, went on ahead with Rob and the twenty head of cattle they planned to sell. Deio, Lewis told her, had definitely decided to do the horse race. Lewis beamed at her. With his sons gone for the day and most of the cattle secure in a ha’penny field nearby, he seemed like a man released. He was wearing a suit she hadn’t seen before of moss green cord, with the breeches tucked into a pair of beautiful old, cracked but highly polished, riding boots. His freshly shaved cheeks glowed like ripe apples and his mood, for reasons she did not fully understand, seemed positively frolicsome.

They rode for over an hour together, up to the top of Y Geriant, a foothill of the Berwyn Mountains that overlooked Llangollen. Lewis, who took a gloomy relish in such tales, told her that a local barber had been hanged near here for killing his wife. “You could ’ear terrrrrible terrrible cries, like a baby he crrried and his bones creakin’ in the wind.” They gazed down at the perfection of the town below: the scattered houses, the purple and brown hills, and the river that dashed through the valley in full flood, twirling ducks and trees in its wake.

“There’s your view, boy,” said Lewis with considerable satisfaction, as though the scene was one of his more successful negotiations. “All right is it?”

They came down from the hills to a road that curved beside the river into town. There was real heat in the sun now, which pierced the vapor of mist over the river and squeezed out drops of perspiration from under Lewis’s hat. But Lewis, smart and garrulous on his jogging horse, seemed determined not to spoil the perfection of his dress by removing one detail. He received greetings now from the stream of carts and pedestrians that flowed along the picturesque road. He touched his hat to an old woman on a horse with two geese peeping from her saddlebags, promised a younger, prettier woman riding in a farm cart and squinting up from her knitting, that he would buy her some saucepans, some “prrroper saucepans mind from London,” and agreed with her that you couldn’t rely on the tinkers for nothing.

The road was curving in now toward the Dee, over a humpbacked bridge, around a sharp corner. On the corner stood a very fat man eating a meat pie, half of it dropping out of his mouth.

“I would not choose that spot if I was him,” said Lewis, who liked disaster as much as scandal. “Twin brothers killed there last year. A horse doing the London to Holyhead Mail caught them, slap bang wallop. Took ’em both home to their mam in a bag. Worse than raspberry jam a friend of mine told me.”

After registering appropriate shock, she asked Lewis, in a casual voice, how often the London to Holyhead Mail ran and whether it took passengers.

Twice a day he told her.
Twice a day!
No time at all for prevarication. “And if you ever go on it,” he rattled on, “choose your driver well. The young drivers are always trying to beat their elders. There’s one, Titus Johnson, who can do the journey in eighteen hours.”
Eighteen hours.
The sky seemed to spin suddenly in front of her, and for a moment she felt quite sick. By this time tomorrow she could be gone, and everything in her life would be changed. . . .

Llangollen was crammed with marketgoers by the time they got there. After two weeks on horseback, living on plain fare in the depths of the countryside, the smells of fresh gingerbread, and faggots and peas affected her like a drug. Catherine couldn’t wait to tether
Cariad in a safe place and join this noisy surge of people, now jostling for a free sample from the strong-looking man selling Dr. Guber’s Patent Medicine, now haggling for onions, or taking a gander at the poster of Hilda the Snake, showing the whites of her eyes and her rolls of flesh and the big grass snake around her neck.

But Lewis, to her disappointment, took her to the pens where the cattle and horses were kept. In a fenced-off corridor between the horses and the cattle was a gray line of men and women, some with placards around their necks: “Handy Boy,” read one; “Strong Willing Girl,” read another, worn by a wisp of a girl with a swelling beneath her apron. Every now and then, a farmer or his wife would step forward to inspect the teeth of one of these specimens, and the worm broke up into its human parts.

The desperate neighing of separated mares and foals, the mooings and trumpetings of cattle, the sound of humans baying for money, were deafening enough to shut Lewis up temporarily. But when they were out of the crush, he pointed toward two piebald horses with big heads tied to the railings in the forecourt of the market and told her he would teach her a thing or two about horse sales.

“Look at them, not worth their price and dear as a gift. You can bishop ’is teeth to make him look younger, dye the white bits on ’is face with Indian ink, puff out the hollows of his eyes. Those two boyos,” he stared into the milky eyes of the guilty parties, “are ready for the pot.”

Lewis’s friendliness was starting to make her feel sad. “Save your breath,” she felt like telling him, “you will have to find a new boy tomorrow.” When Lewis suggested they go straightaway to the Hands Inn Hotel and leave the horses, she gratefully agreed.

At the Hands Inn, she understood the significance of Lewis’s smart clothes when, standing with his hand on the neck of a horse discussing business, he suddenly stopped dead. A good-looking, well-rouged blonde on the wrong side of thirty had stepped from the shadows. A vision in lavender silk with parasol to match.

“Lewis Jones!” the woman, walking with difficulty across the
cobblestones, was grimacing and dimpling so enthusiastically that Catherine, under other circumstances, might have thought she was taking a fit.

“Well, Duw Duw Duw . . .” said Lewis. If she hadn’t known him better, she would have thought he was blushing. “Now there is a sight for sore eyes.”

The blonde pursed her lips and disdained to answer immediately. “And who is this handsome gee-gee fellow?” She fluttered her lace gloves on Cariad’s neck.

“A new horse.” Lewis couldn’t take his eyes off the woman, or stop smiling. “He was as green as grass at the beginning of the trip, but the boy has bottomed him.”

Catherine blushed with pleasure. It was the first compliment Lewis had ever paid her.

“That reminds me, I’d better pay the boy.” Lewis seemed anxious suddenly to be rid of her. He pulled out an account book and pencil and made a quick calculation on the end page.

“Ten days work at two shillings a day,” he said, “and here as a special favor is five pence to get into the races. Deio left a message with me that you were to go. Then you’ll be sleeping at the Wynnstay, which is not a common lodging house—I couldn’t get them into Slawson’s,” he explained to the blonde, “it is crammed, and that man with the bear is staying there. Behave yourself mind, keep your breeches on.”

The woman shrieked and hit him with the handle of her parasol. Catherine tried a manly wink back, but only managed a terrified blink. The idea that she had earned this money—more than she had imagined—fairly and squarely by her own labor, excited her more than she could have imagined. But now there was alarm. She was longing to see Deio at the horserace, but there was so much to organize: clean clothes, and a ticket on the stagecoach to London. And another nerve-racking thought: if the drovers were staying the night at the tavern, tonight she and Deio would be together for the first time under one roof.

When he got to the Wynnstay, Deio handed his horse over to the ostler with careful instructions as to when he should be fed. No horse ran well on too full, or too empty a stomach. Inside the hotel, he confirmed the bookings for the night with a maid. The maid, who was plump and comely, stood with one arm draped over the banisters. She raised her pretty mouth toward him, “Will there be a party tonight after the flappin?”

“Maybe,” he said.

He carried on walking upstairs, with the maid following behind. Admiring his muscular thighs and the quality of his boots under the dust, she felt disappointed. He was so handsome but very out of sorts. She took him into a room that had a view of the street and the river beyond. He sat on the bed, his dark hair falling over his eyes. He gave the maid his boots to polish, and as the door closed, he put his head in his hands. It annoyed him to find that underneath his careful cool manner, he was almost shaking with excitement. Damn. He desperately needed to be calm. First for the race, then for Catrin. He saw the cup gleaming in his hands as he rode through a cheering crowd. Then thought of himself alone with her again, away from the men, and then, maybe, they could have a talk and a glass of wine together and a chance to see what was what.

It was so unlike him to feel out of control like this, and it drove him mad with frustration. He drew the curtains against the sound of the market and the distant plan, plan, plan, of a drum; the army was in town again, drumming up business. He’d thought of joining the army once: he sold plenty of good remounts to the cavalry in
London, and one of their men, a stuck-up arse but an officer, had watched him ride, had said he was the kind of man they needed. Now he daydreamed about himself in a scarlet cavalry uniform, with maybe a faint scar down his cheek. She was part of this dream, standing in a pretty dress, watching him on his plumed horse, her eyes bright with emotion.

Deio took off his dusty clothes and lay down on the bed. What a fool he was trying to impress her. An ignorant fool—she was right. Too nice he’d been to her up until now; too much the gentleman, too willing to give credence to her half-baked plans, too conscious that she was different from the others. Women were like horses, they could smell nervousness. Better in the old days when he took charge and told her what was what. Then they’d laughed and sung.

He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. Feeling bristles as he stroked his face, he got up, poured water into a bowl, stripped to the waist and shaved with firm deliberate strokes. He wanted to look good at the flapping; he would smile at her as he passed the finishing line. When one half of the firm jaw was done, the maid came in with his now gleaming boots in her hand. She was completely unabashed to find him half undressed. He liked women like that. Straightforward. A pretty little thing, though not as pretty as the last one who worked here.

“Do you need anything, sir?” She went over to the window, a black silhouette, one hand stretched toward him. “I’d be happy to help you.”

She was pretty enough. He let his eyes linger on her, then he thought of Catherine’s eyes, opening like a seam of tortoiseshell, and again felt she was taking his power.

“Good luck with the race, sir.” The girl closed the door behind her with a little wink. “Ride like you did last year and you’ll learn them.”

Catherine was walking toward the hotel, but stopped next door to a stall selling rabbits and eggs to listen to a man exhorting the crowd. A pair of handsome soldiers passed her, surrounded by gawping young men and children hiding behind their mother’s skirts. They
were walking toward the middle of the square where a tall man, wearing as much brass and oiled leather as a prize stallion at a show, stood on a carpet of cabbage leaves and cattle dung, shouting.