Silver on the Tree (15 page)

“Yes, of course,” John Rowlands said.

“Thank you very much.” They climbed in. Jane peered closely at hedgerow and field as the car turned out into the lane, and saw Barney gazing too, but there was no sign of anything except white fool's parsley, and rose-bay willow-herb tall in the grass, and the sweep of the tall green hedges above.

Simon, sitting beside her, saw the strain in her face and brushed a fist gently against her arm. He said, very low, “But they
were
there.”

The Land-Rover crept down the last elbow turn of the steep little road and into Chapel Square, there to wait in line while a miniature traffic jam of cars fidgeted in the single tiny one-way street leading to the main road.

“Goodness gracious,” Blodwen Rowlands said. “Look at them all. I want to call in at Royal House, John, but how you will find a parking place I cannot think.”

“We shall just have to be visitors, and go in the car park,”

John Rowlands said, swinging to the right and edging through sweaters and parkas, push-chairs and buckets and spades, their owners all vaguely wandering or gazing out at the sea.

The Land-Rover was left in the park, its square roof looming over its smaller neighbors like a landmark. They threaded their way back along the crowded steets; Mrs. Rowlands paused beside a shop-window filled with jerseys and swimsuits and shorts.

“Wyt ti'n dwad i mewn hefyd, cariad?”

“No, I won't come,” John Rowlands said, pulling his pipe from his pocket and peering into its bowl. “We will be over on the wharf, I dare say. The best place to look out for Bran and Will. No hurry, Blod, take your time.”

He led the children across the road, between a huge black shed labelled Outward Bound Sea School and a cluster of masts, their rigging gently singing in the breeze, where the boats of the Aberdyfi Yacht Club lay in lines on the beach. Sand spilled out over the pavement.

They walked across the wharf and out on to the short dogleg jetty. John Rowlands paused, filling his pipe from an old black leather pouch. “A different jetty we had here when I was a boy,” he said absently. “All of wood, great beams of black creosoted timber…. We used to climb all over them at low tide, and fall off where the green weed was slippery, and fish for crabs.”

“Did you live here?” Barney said.

“See over there?” Following John Rowlands' pointing finger, they looked back at the long terrace of stately, narrow, three-storey Victorian houses that stood facing out over the road, over the beach, to the mouth of the Dyfi River and the sea.

“That one in the middle, with the green paint,” John Rowlands said, “that's where I was born. And my father before me. He was a sailor, and so was
his
father. My grandfather Captain Evan Rowlands of the schooner
Ellen Davies—
he built that house. All built by the old captains,
they were, the houses along that road, in the days when Aberdyfi was still a real shipping port.”

Jane said curiously, “Didn't you want to be a sailor too?”

John Rowlands smiled at her through puffs of blue smoke as he lighted his pipe, dark eyes narrowed by the lines of his brown face. “Once I did, I dare say. But my da was drowned when I was six, you see, and my mother took my brothers and me away from Aberdyfi then, back to her parents' farm near Abergynolwyn. Back in the hills near Cader Idris—behind the valley where you were today. So what with one thing and another, it was sheep for me, not the sea.”

“What a shame,” Simon said.

“Oh, not really. The shipping days have been gone a long time now, and even the fishing too. They were dying already in my father's time.”

Barney said, “Fancy him drowning. A sailor.”

“A lot of sailors can't swim,” Simon said. “Even Nelson couldn't. He used to get seasick, too.”

John Rowlands puffed reflectively. “For a lot of them there was never time to learn, I fancy. The men in those sailing ships—no playing in the sea for them. The sea was their mistress, their mother, their living, their life. But everything serious. Nothing for fun.” He turned slowly back towards the street, his eyes carefully searching—just as, Jane suddenly realized, they had been already searching the wharf and the beach. “I don't see any sign at all of Bran and Will. How long before you left, was it, that they came down?”

Jane hesitated, and saw Simon open his mouth and shut it again, confused. Barney simply shrugged.

She said, “About—about half an hour, I suppose.”

“Perhaps they caught a bus?” Barney said helpfully.

John Rowlands stood for a moment, pipe between teeth, his face without expression. He said, “Have you known Will Stanton for long?”

“We were all on holiday together once,” Jane said. “About two years ago. In Cornwall.”

“Did anything … unusual … happen on that holiday?” The Welshman's voice was casual still, but suddenly he was looking very closely and specifically at Simon, the dark eyes bright and intent.

Simon blinked, taken by surprise. “Well—yes, I suppose.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Just … well, just things.” Simon's face was flushed; he floundered, caught between honesty and bewilderment.

Jane saw Barney's face crease in a resentful frown. She said, surprised at the cool self-possession in her voice, “What do you mean exactly, Mr. Rowlands?”

“How much do you three know about Will?” John Rowlands said. His face was unreadable, his voice curt.

“Quite a lot,” said Jane, and her mouth shut sharply like a closing door. She stood looking at him. On either side of her she could feel Simon and Barney rigid and challenging as herself; the three of them arrayed against questions that, they instinctively knew, nobody outside the pattern of their dealings with Merriman and Will should be bothering to ask.

Rowlands was looking at her now: a strange searching uncertain look. “You are not like him,” he said. “You three, you are no more than I am, you are not … of that kind.”

“No,” Jane said.

Something seemed to collapse behind John Rowlands' eyes; his face twisted into a kind of taut despair, and Jane was all at once rocked by distress as she saw him gazing at her in open appeal.
“Diawl,”
he said, tight and unhappy, “will you stop mistrusting me, for the love of God? You cannot have seen more of the nature of those two than I have seen, this past year. Those two—for Bran is someone you may know nothing about at all. And there is fear shouting all through me now, about what may be happening to them, about who may have taken hold of them, at a time when they may be in worse danger than they have ever been before.”

Behind Jane's shoulder Barney said suddenly, “He means it, Jane. And Will did trust him.”

“That's true,” Simon said.

“What did you mean, Mr. Rowlands,” Jane said slowly, “about what you had seen, this past year?”

“Not a year all spread out,” John Rowlands said. “Last summer it was, when Will came visiting his uncle. As soon as he came to the valley, things … things began to happen.

Forces woke that had been sleeping, and people grew and changed, and the Grey King of Cader Idris rose in his power, and fell again … it was all a confronting between the Light and the Dark, and I did not understand what it was all about and I did not want to.” He looked at them, grave and intent, his pipe forgotten in his hand. “I have told Will that, all along,” he said. “I know he is part of the power called the Light, and Bran Davies perhaps even deeper into the pattern. But that is enough for me. I will help Will Stanton when he needs me, and Bran, too, because I feel for him as if he were my own—only, I do not want to know what it is that they are doing.”

Barney said curiously, “Why not?”

“Because I am not of their kind,” John Rowlands said sharply. “And nor are you either, and it is not proper.” For a moment he sounded stern, censorious—and very sure of himself.

Simon said unexpectedly, “I know just what you mean. I've always felt the same. And anyway we don't really know either.” He looked at Jane. “Do we?”

She had opened her mouth to protest, but now she paused instead. “Well … no. Great-Uncle Merry never said anything much. Only that the Dark is rising, or trying to, and must be stopped. Everything we did seemed to be a step on the way to somewhere else. Something else. And we never really have known what.”

“Safer for you that it should be so,” John Rowlands said.

“And for them too, right?” said Simon.

John Rowlands gave his head a small wry shake that was like a shrug; smiled, and began re-lighting his pipe.

Jane said, “I don't think we shall be seeing Will and Bran
here, Mr. Rowlands. They went away, somewhere. Safe. But … a long way away.” She looked out at the estuary, where a few white sails tacked to and fro over the blue water. “I don't know for how long. An hour, a day…. They … they just went.”

“Well,” John Rowlands said, “we shall just have to wait and see. And I must dream up something to tell to Blodwen, because to this day I do not know whether she has any idea at all of what is in those two boys. I think not, really. She has a warm heart and a wise head, bless her, and she is content to be fond of them for what they seem to be.”

A motor-boat whizzed past on the river behind them, almost drowning his voice. Somewhere the beat of rock music thumped insistently through the warm air; it rose and then retreated, as a group of people carrying a portable radio passed on the wharf. Looking over at the road, Jane saw Blodwen Rowlands emerge from the draper's shop and pause on the crowded pavement; then she was cut out of view, as a large motor-coach crept with difficulty down the village street.

John Rowlands sighed. “Look at it all,” he said. “How it has changed,
Aberdyfi fach
. Of course that had to come, but I remember … I remember … in the old days, all the old fishermen used to be in a line over there, leaning on that rail in front of the Dovey Hotel, over the water. And when I was a lad about Barney' age one of my favorite things was to hang around and listen to them, when I was allowed. Lovely it was. They remembered so far back—a hundred years and more, it would be now. Back to the days when nearly all Aberdyfi men were sailors, my
taid's
time, when the masts bristled thick as a forest along the wharf by here, loading up slate from the quarries. And there were seven yards building ships in the river, seven, building dozens of ships—schooners and brigs, and small boats too….”

His deep Welsh voice made a threnody, recalling and mourning the lost days that even he had not seen, except through others' eyes. They listened in silence, fascinated,
until the present sounds and sights of the crowded summer resort seemed to retreat, and they could almost imagine that they saw the tall ships coming into the river round the bar, and stacks of cut slate piled around them on a different wharf, built of black wood instead of concrete.

A seagull rose slowly into the air from the end of the jetty, crying out, slow and harsh and sorrowful, and Jane turned her head to follow the flap and sweep of its black-tipped wings. The breeze seemed to feel stronger than before against her cheek. The gull swung sideways past them, close, still crying….

… and when Jane brought her gaze down again from watching it, she saw the wooden beams of the jetty black beneath her feet, stacked with rows of grey-blue slate, and beyond, on the river, a tall ship coming in close towards land, flapping and creaking as men hauled down her sails.

Jane stood motionless, staring. She heard laughter, and shrill voices, and milling round her on the jetty came a gaggle of small boys, pushing and hopping and thrusting one another aside in perilous clamour along the edge. “Firsties … firsties … get off my foot, Freddie Evans! … look out! … don't shove! …” They were a mixture, clean and grubby, barefoot and booted, and one of them, yellow-haired, bumping and laughing among the rest, was her brother Barney.

Jane could only think, ridiculously,
“But in those days they'd have been speaking Welsh….”

Further along the jetty she could see Simon talking earnestly in a group of two or three boys his own age. They turned to watch the ship draw gradually closer. With a snapping rush of canvas her mainsail came down in a heap, to be seized and furled; she was a brigantine, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the main, and only two foresails now hung billowing to draw her inshore. Her figurehead glinted beneath the jutting bowsprit: a lifesize girl,
with streaming golden hair. On the bow Jane could read the name now:
Frances Amelia.

“Carrying timber,” John Rowlands' deep voice said beside her. “See some of it stowed there on the deck? Mostly for John Jones the builder, that will be—he has been expecting it. A cargo of yellow pine, from Labrador.”

Jane glanced at him; his face was tranquil, the pipe still clenched between his teeth. But on the hand that reached up to the pipe now there was tattooed between the knuckles a small blue star that she had not seen before, and at his throat he wore the wing collar and high-necked jacket of the nineteenth century. He had become someone else, belonging to this other time, and yet somehow was still himself as well. Jane shivered and closed her eyes for a moment, and did not look down to see how she herself was dressed.

Then there was a flurry and a sudden shriek from the edge of the jetty, where more and more people had gathered. Peering vainly past the heads, Jane could see only that the brigantine had begun to dock, lines flying down from bow and stern to be caught and made fast by darting figures ashore. From the end of the jetty where the small boys had gone running, there came out of a group of women a noisy scolding eruption, and all at once Barney and another boy, both very white in the face, were being dragged back towards Jane by a bustling distressed woman in bonnet and shawl. It was recognizably Blodwen Rowlands, yet a Blodwen Rowlands who did not seem to know Jane as Jane. She spoke to the world at large, scolding, yet in warm concern, “Always the same it is, this silly game to be the first to touch the ship that comes in, and all of them in the way there hindering the men…. One day one of them is going to get killed, and it was as near as a whistle for these two today, did you see them? Right on the edge, losing their balance, the side of the boat like to crush them against the jetty if there had been no one there to grab them out of it … aah!” She gave each boy a little exasperated shake. “Have you forgotten last week, when Ellis Williams fell in?”