Band of Angel (61 page)

She’d missed his smile, even one as wan as this.

It felt like home.

The next day they packed up the saddlebags with sleeping gear and the shotguns, some fishing lines, water, hard cheese, and bread. They rolled up the tarpaulins and lashed them to the front of their saddles. An hour later they were away, riding through a dazzling spring day up the winding road toward the hills.

It was heaven being out on a horse again and she would have been very happy if Deio hadn’t looked so drawn and deadly pale. After an hour, she asked him to stop for a while; his wound was so recently healed and he had taken little exercise recently.

“I can’t stop, Catrin,” he said. “I’m always worried they’ll be gone when I get there.” Now they were following a small stream uphill. There was a tang of sage and pine in the air and the horses were side-deep in long grasses. In a clearing halfway up the hill, they passed a heap of human bones scattered carelessly over some sandbags. She saw a hand poking out from the earth as though beseeching.

Around noon they came to a bridge and, below it, some cypress trees and a dell where the grass was as soft and as green as a lawn.

“This is it.” Deio shot her a warning look. “We’re here now.”

He led her into a makeshift corral near the water’s edge, camouflaged by branches of sawn-off trees. Inside the railings she suddenly saw four sorry-looking horses; they were restricted by hobbles around their front legs and were grazing.

She let him go ahead of her, watching him walk between them caressing them, calling them by their names, checking their ropes. He was in his natural habitat again and so was she. Her
eyes fell on one horse that was nothing but a pitiful collection of sores and hollows and bones; it stood separate from the others as though ashamed of itself. Its front legs were bandaged and its coat was mostly black skin with the occasional clump of mousy fluff. A deep gouge in its side had been painted with thick orange-colored powder.

She went to its side. “What happened to you?” She gentled its ears while it stood with its head low to the ground. She ran her hand softly down the back of the animal’s legs and then stopped breathing as she saw the distinctive white markings shaped like piano keys.

“Cariad!” she said. She bent down and looked into large tragic eyes. “Oh my God!”

Cariad made no sign of recognition. She could just about stand up. Catherine touched her horse all over, speechless with shock. When she looked up, Deio, who was watching her, looked quickly away. Her Cariad, her horse. They’d both been so proud of her once: the silly, knock-kneed filly who’d found herself on the drove.

“What happened to her legs?” she asked him when she could speak.

“She got lost and was stolen,” he told her in a monotone. “Then she went lame and the bastard who took her bandaged her in wet bandages and when they dried they rubbed her raw.”

There was an open wound in Cariad’s rump.

“Vultures?” She touched the edges of it gently.

“Yes.”

While they were talking, Cariad seemed to perk up a little and to listen to them intelligently. And then to remember. She shifted her shoulders so she could be closer to Catherine, sighed, and put the whole weight of her head in her hands as if to say, “You work this out.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Deio. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.” Tears poured down her face. “None of you would be here if it wasn’t for me.”

She asked Deio to hold Cariad, and got out her lint and her scissors and a bottle of the Griffith’s ointment Betsy Davis had given her and swore by for skin problems. She sent Deio down to the
stream for some water and then they cleaned the wounds together. When they were finished, both of them put their arms around Cariad’s neck. So many days they’d spent like this before: washing ponies, schooling them in the ring, filling their water buckets, settling their beds—playing house with live animals in the most satisfactory way. For him, a tenderness that had no other expression, for her—everything.

“We went out on the plain every day after they went.” He was already saying more to her than he had in the last six weeks. “I thought I’d go mad. I behaved like an arse and was being punished for it.”

“Punished for what? For looking?”

“No. Not for looking. For being myself. I hated myself.”

When they were finished with Cariad, they gave her a handful of fresh grass mixed in with some of the gruel they had brought, and then they fed the other horses who were watching them covetously.

Now he was reeling with fatigue, so she was firm with him and made him sleep, on a bed made of saddle blankets in the shade of a juniper tree. When he woke, she was washing her hair in the stream and he came over and helped her rinse it, his hands as firm and as perfect as you’d expect from a man who understood animals so well.

He rubbed her hair in a towel and combed it for her strand by strand, spreading it out to dry.

“Did you get nits like everybody else, Catrin?” He was teasing her again. “Oops, there’s one, and another—David and Llewellyn and Flora.”

She cuffed him around the head, and pulled his hair. They laughed, for the first time in a long time.

It got cooler later. He put a rug on Cariad and built up the fire and put the camouflaging leaves back over the corral. Then he sat by the stream, and Catherine stared at his back marveling at him. He had picked out a branch from the kindling, attached a line to it, and caught a couple of beautiful trout, their sides silvery and speckled with gold dust. He put the bedroll beside the fire, and when the flames had burned down to pale and powdery ashes, he cooked the
trout and they ate them together while the light faded from the day and the stars came out.

After their meal they sat with their backs against a rock and he looked straight ahead and told her everything. He knew how hard he’d been with her on that drove, but he couldn’t do much about it: he’d loved her for so long; had this dream of her, and it wasn’t of her dressed as a man and living like a man.

He’d come out here to find her, and felt very high on it all for a while, with his equipment and his horses.

“The horses flew away like bits of paper.” He looked at her intently to see she’d heard and understood.

She put her hand out to him, but he wasn’t ready for it yet.

“There’s more, Catherine. I’m not who you think I am now.”

“What do you mean?” She listened to the fire crackle and waited in the silence that followed.

“I don’t know who I am now,” he repeated.

Then he told her about Chalkie, his friend, and the night he’d persuaded him to go up to the front and fight with him, and how, half an hour later, Chalkie was blown to bits and he’d walked around caked in him for hours.

“Deio!” She saw his expression. “Deio, don’t!” she said, frightened.

“I must finish this,” he said. “I liked it at first, the fighting. You’re not supposed to say that are you? But I
really liked it
. I was trained for it, I was good at it; it was like going hunting but better. The first time I shot someone, I felt great, almost as great as—”

“Lying with a woman?”

“Catrin! I didn’t say that.”

“No, but a young soldier in hospital did. You wouldn’t be the first man to find war wonderfully stimulating at first.”

“At first, but then you feel like scum . . . like the lowest worm. I killed a young Russian, and there was a picture in his wallet of a sweetheart. And before I killed him, I thought of you, and then I thought, ‘Once I lived for her, now I kill for her.’ And then I grew to hate what I saw and what I became and I do now and I don’t know how to stop it.”

“Deio.” She held him tight. “Please listen to me.
Please!
I’m not
who I thought I was either . . . all the bad things you worried about happening to me have happened.”

“What bad things?” He sat up, ready to fight her corner.

“Not now. Deio”—she put her arms around him, she could hear her heart thumping with fear—“Please let me in. I’ve missed you so much.”

He looked at her then squeezed his eyes shut.

“Catrin,” he put his head next to hers. “Catrin.”

They went down the track toward the stream.

The night was full of noises: the silky sounds of the water; the horses munching grass; and every now and then, the swish and whirr of shells being fired in the distance.

When he kissed her, she knew she’d never properly been kissed before, not like this. First the tender probing of his tongue, then a firm and urgent inquiry, a question needing an answer from her, which she gave in a blaze of pure joy. He smoothed her hair; he stroked her face, the points of her ears, her neck. A promise and a claiming all at once. And then they lay down on a quilt on the bank near the river and laughed because Cariad, looking like a peevish old ghost in her bandages, was jealously calling out to them.

She forbade him to do more than kiss her in case he burst his stitches or damaged his ribs, but as she lay behind him in the dark, holding herself against him, she was aware of relief breaking over her body in wave after wave. There he was, her miracle, and here was she. One day she might tell him everything, but maybe not. You didn’t have to say. Not everything. Some secrets might stay like dark sediment at the bottom of a bottle, and would not improve with shaking. Either way, they had to meet as adults now: complicated, flawed, full of untamable longings. They had no other choice. But if she let him go now, she knew that a darkness would fall on her and she would miss him for the rest of her life.

In the middle of the night he woke with a start and sat bolt upright.

“Are you all right?” she said. “Are you in pain?”

“No,” he smiled. “I’m not in pain.”

She stroked his back, waiting.

“If I haven’t asked you much about yourself, Catrin, it’s not because I don’t care,” he said suddenly. “I know you had friends, like I had Chalkie, didn’t you?”

“One day, Deio,” she said, “not now.”

It was good, lying there and hearing the water, seeing the stars break intermittently through the canopy of leaves.

Sometime during the night, he woke again and warned her that he couldn’t ever imagine himself living in one place and that there was no one on earth who he could imagine wanting to spend twenty-four hours a day with him.

It was strange to hear herself laughing again.

“Heavens, Deio, you sound as if I’ve just insisted on . . . on . . .”

He took her hair in his hands, and held it at the nape of her neck.

“Well, I am asking you now,” he said. “Because if I don’t, I’ll spend the rest of my life missing you.”

It was still and quiet down at the water’s edge. The horses, hearing their voices, pricked up their ears and carried on eating. He put another log on the fire, and wrapped her up in a rug.

Cariad was looking back at her from the fringes of the pool.

Her face was serene. She was back with her herd.

And now dawn was breaking over them, a flush of light falling on the broken earth and the remains of the fire, the new trees and the hills beyond. She looked at Deio, and then at the glowing light; once it might have seemed as fleeting as their youth, now it felt like a future.

FOR DISCUSSION

1. While on the drove Catherine thinks to herself, “life, for all its brutality, was a journey, an adventure” (page 92). Discuss how this reflects the overall theme of the novel.

2. Catherine has a multitude of men in her life. In what ways do her interactions with men help to shape her journey?

3. Throughout the novel heartache, loss, and disappointment often propel Catherine into action. Talk about those pivotal moments in the book. How do they help Catherine learn about the world?

4. Deio’s mother Meg describes him as “not bred for captivity,” (page 45) and his feelings for Catherine vacillate between his desire for her and his desire for freedom. How does this reflect some of the conflict between Catherine and Deio?

5. Deio seems both attracted to Catherine and repulsed by her while on the drove. What does this reveal about his attraction to her? About his personality?

6. During her interview with Lady Bracebridge, Catherine is irritated by the line of questioning and says to herself: “she wants a band of angels, not nurses” (page 191). How does this particular scene illustrate the class roles of the time period? What were some of the markers of class? How are people treated differently because of their class status?

7. Discuss the variety of women in Catherine’s life. What kinds
of reactions does she have to them? How do these women impact the woman Catherine wants to become? How do they help her learn about herself?

8. Describe the experience of “droving.” What are the sights and smells the author provides? How does it begin to prepare Catherine for what’s ahead?

9. In leaving her home, Catherine leaves the comforts she’s accustomed to. While at Scutari her living quarters are often filthy and the food and water rations limited. What other physical discomforts has Catherine had to face? How do her experiences reflect the brutality of war?