Band of Angel (7 page)

Then Aunt Gwynneth, bustling and frowning, had come out and taken her arm and led her inside again.

Deio groaned out loud as she left his sight. He was up on the hill, standing between two ash trees. He’d been there for close to an hour, sure he would not be welcome inside. He’d seen the small party of men walk up the hill, the earth being flung, the church doors opening again. His eyes swept over the mourners, now crunching their way slowly down the hill, heads down against the wind. Then she’d raised her head and looked up without seeing him. He saw the whiteness of her skin and the look in her eyes and, for that moment, felt her wounds. He could have howled; this was not what he wanted; it was everything he wanted. He was so torn, so lost; he wanted to own her, to protect her, to be free. Watching her, he unthinkingly tore a clump of grass from the ground. He picked out a danesberry from the grass; the plant his ancestors said had the power to help souls from one life to another. He took some of the berries in his hand and, squeezing them open, stained the palm of his hand a deep bright red.

Riding home, passing a farmyard where sheep were being sheared, Deio felt the same: skinned and undone; calling out in an uncertain voice for something he was not sure of. He couldn’t let her do this to him again, he thought, slamming his legs into his horse’s side. Never again.

He’d been a boy then; now he was twenty-two and preferred it this way. The next day, he would start the ride across the mountains to London and that always made him feel good. He’d come back from Smithfield, from Kent, from Wrexham, saddlebags stuffed with money and strange food and London linens, new shotguns and bridles, quilts, bits of jewelry for the girls. He’d have stories to tell, stories that kept other men spellbound in the taverns, sagging over their ales and saying “Never! And Duw! Duw! Duw!” Not a sniveling boy exploding with pain in an upstairs bedroom, hoping his parents couldn’t hear him; not a dog creeping through the Carreg’s backdoor, unsure of his reception.

She’d raised her head, she’d looked at him again with those eyes. He would look away. He had no other choice and that was all it took, a clear decision: she looked, and you looked away, and in time it would probably get easier.

His horse, dapple gray and four years old, shied at her reflection in a puddle. He hardly ever lost his temper with a horse, but now he gave it a sharp one and she cantered for a few strides, stiff-legged and sideways, then he sat deeply and tuned himself to her, gathering her up and making her as calm and comfortable as a rocking chair. He knew about horses, it was bred in the bone. He
understood the roots of their terror, their need to escape, and the right degree of force and tenderness it took to get them both to trust and accept you as the man in charge.

It worked with women, too. They were mad for the drovers, waited for them in every town, lay down with them in the night bucking and biting and calling out. You could never tell a woman like Catherine a thing like that. Even now, when he thought of that redheaded girl in Bala—her long waist; her high, hard breasts—he knew he wanted to stay free. He closed his eyes briefly, he pushed his long legs deeper into the saddle and made the gray horse sweat and stretch out and go to the point where fear met freedom. He told himself he felt better already.

But when the horse was walking again, relaxed now and calmly swishing away flies with its tail, he saw Catherine’s face looking up at him from the church porch. He saw her eyes bewildered by sorrow and felt her power to wound. It had happened before:
Mother says I can’t come anymore.
That night he’d slammed his fist into the wall so hard he’d almost broken it, then his hateful sobs and his father’s scorn and, even worse, kindly chat about never letting a woman do that to him, and then the closed door, until now.

Now he was at the duck pond rimmed with feathers, slap in the middle of the boundary line between Pantyporthman, his Da’s thirty-acre farm, and Huw Carreg’s hundred acres. His home—from here a sprawling series of stone buildings surrounded by stack barns and small wooden corrals—seemed set apart and special, a self-contained island of noise and excitement amid the more peaceful farms of the Lleyn. He loved everything about it: its sweeping views to the east and the west, the fields where they kept their broodmares, their trout stream, the foothills of Snowdon beyond, tonight bathed in pink light after the storm. From where he sat, he could hear the dinning of two hundred head of cattle, pent up and anxious before their journey; the shouts of men, the yaps of the corgis, Nip and Ben, who’d come with them to London; the deeper bark of Fly, their collie.

In the yard in front of the stack house, four men were herding a group of thirty or so Welsh blacks into a small field to the left of the house. His older brother, Rob, stopped when he saw him.

“Where you been, boy?”

“I went to Matthew Butts.” Deio named a blacksmith who lived near Nevin.

“Any luck?” said Rob, tensely. If they couldn’t shoe their cattle, they couldn’t leave for London.

“None at all,” Deio teased, glad he’d got one thing done that day. “He can only do it tomorrow if we ride them over.”

“Thank God for that,” said his brother, smiling. “He’s been getting himself in such a lather you could shave with him.”

Deio looked swiftly across the yard toward his father, Lewis Jones. He was dosing a heifer and had his arm over its neck and a finger in each nostril. “Yer varmint,” he said softly, “ged in there. Give me the horn,” he said to Rob. A thick green mixture was poured down the hollow horn. The cow rolled its eyes and coughed.

“I couldn’t swear to him having the hoosh,” said Lewis in his deep, slow voice, “but I’m not taking no chances.”

He loosened the noose, clouted the beast on its rump, and with his eyes half-narrowed took a long measuring look at the other cattle in the yard. Lewis Jones knew just about as much as it was possible to know about a herd of cattle without actually growing horns himself. He saw them with a stockman’s eye, constantly on the alert for hoven and hush and garget and pleural pneumonia; for the streaming noses and listless eyes that could decimate a herd and spell their ruin. They were banknotes on four legs: each one of these cows bought at ten pounds apiece in Wales would double in value in London.

It took months of detective work to assemble the group of Welsh Blacks such as he looked at so impassively now. First, the long, carelessly inquiring chats about who was going broke and who was selling cheap, then going to summer fairs and leaning over gates as if you had all the time in the world, until it was the right time for a palm to be slapped and a deal struck and another ten or fifteen cattle entered into his books. His reputation rested on his shrewdness: the locals expected nothing less from a man who held their livelihood in his hands.

When the cow was drenched, he straightened himself up slowly and bellowed at Deio.

“What kept you? You’ve been hours gone.”

“I’ve been getting a blacksmith,” shouted Deio. “
Working.
”

Lewis Jones in his worst moods reckoned none of them worked as hard as he did. Once, because Deio was as hot-tempered as his father, this might have led to a fight. Now he knew that on the nights before they left rows sprang up sudden as electrical storms and it was better to keep your mouth shut. He’d learned, too, after three trips to London, the point to his father’s tyrannical behavior in the matters of punctuality and oiled leathers and tightly wound ropes and checked supplies of medicine. Out on the mountains, a sick beast, a thrown shoe, a lame horse, could mean ruin.

Ten minutes later, when he walked into the tack room, his father was rolling the tarpaulins up into the tight cigars each man would tie on the front of his saddle.

“There’s some ale and bara brith in the kitchen if you want it, lad,” he said. “Get it down you while you can.”

“Yes, Father,” Deio gave him his cocky smile, and his father put his head down, glowering. It didn’t do to let a boy like him get too familiar.

Deio walked back into the house, through a door scuffed with dog paws, into the warm heavy, stale atmosphere of the kitchen. His mother, Meg, was surrounded by saddles, canvas bags, men’s boots, leather gaiters, cow horns, hammers, nails, flitches of bacon, girths, sacks of flour, and bread. He walked in and smelled bara brith hot from the oven, cats, leather dubbin, cows, old pies and rabbit stews and sticky fruitcakes and new baked bread. The smell of home.

Meg sat by the fire sewing a saddlebag. He looked at her closely; like his father, he missed nothing.

“You are crying because he is going, or crying because he’s a mean old bastard?”

“Both,” she said. She picked up her pipe, sucked on it, and looked at him, smiling at her own stupidity. “And don’t you dare talk about your father like that, even though I may have to kill him one day.”

“Well, finish those before you do”—he gestured toward the saddlebags—“or he’ll be roaring again.”

“Oh will he,” she muttered fiercely, dragging away on her pipe. “Oh will he? We’ll see about that.” She had his wonderful eyes and brown skin like a gypsy; the kind of woman who belonged outside.

She got up to get Deio some food and then, to make him laugh, clenched her fists and waved them comically in the air. He never worried about her really: she was strong at the center, you could not crush her for long. Out from the oven came some bara brith, moist crumbs of fat gleaming and the currants still hot enough to hurt the mouth. Then she took down her bread from the cupboard, and the butter she had churned in the dairy. She poured him a glass of ale and some for herself and lit her pipe again, watching him from a distance through the smoke. She looked at her boy, wolfing down his bread and cheese as if he couldn’t wait to get outside again. Not bred for captivity. Just like his father.

“So where were you this afternoon?” she asked softly.

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?” she said. She picked up a skein of thread from her basket and knotted it. “Not at her funeral then?”

“Does it matter?”

“Does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Catherine,” she said, looking directly at her son, “was for a while like another daughter to me. Poor Catherine,” she said softly, her brown eyes very dark and still. “Poor love. Whatever will happen to her now?”

Much later that night, after the animals were fed and watered, and the packs checked and rechecked and the leggings oiled and the dry socks soaped and waterproofed and the fodder tied down, the last gate opened and the cattle swept like a dark avalanche down from the hills and into the herding yards.

Then Reverend Hughes, the Methodist minister from Sarn, came into the kitchen, stood at the head of the table and closed his eyes.

“Let us pray,” he said, “for these brave men who face danger and cold and hardship to relieve the hunger of the starving men of England.”

Meg Jones, almost feverish now from the high anxieties of the day, added two fervent prayers of her own: “Lord,” she prayed, looking through her fingers at her husband. “Keep him out of the kitchen but in my heart, and don’t let the railways come to the Lleyn.”

She looked at her son who was pale and distracted. Normally on the night before a drove left, once everything was done, he got rowdy and his eyes shone with excitement. She closed her eyes again and thought without thinking that it was funny that the clergyboys warned you about sin and temptation, suffering and evil and all the rest, but the flamers never warned you about love.

A week after Mother’s funeral, Aunt Gwynneth took them to Caernarfon to supervise the purchase of black crepe and bombazine. She had insisted on staying on at Carreg Plâs to help the Poor Dear Girls through this Dreadful Time and was very keen for them to do things properly.

Gwynneth’s presence in the house made Catherine almost mad with nervous irritation. Restless and wretched herself, her mind endlessly picking over the hours that had led up to her mother’s death and the part she had played in it, what she most wanted was silence—a state Gwynneth regarded as most unhealthy. For Gwynneth, with her red-rimmed, sympathetic eyes and her long damp hands, so ready always to stroke a brow or to mix beef tea, had taken up her position in the house as The One Who Understands. She specialized in flavorless sayings. “It’s all for the best whatever” was one, pronounced with a sweet wan smile. “There is nothing so certain as death” was another, guaranteed to set Catherine’s teeth on edge.