Silver on the Tree (16 page)

“And Freddie Evans the week before,” said the boy with Barney, in a pert, lilting voice. “And much worse, that, because Evans the Barber was waiting for him with a strap when he got out, and beat him all the way home.”

“Mr.
Evans to you, young monkey,” said Mrs. Rowlands, trying to suppress a smile. She gave Jane a little humorous shrug, released the boys with one finger wagging at them as she turned, and went back to the group of women greeting sailors on the ship.

“I like her,” Barney said cheerfully. “She probably saved my life, you know that?” And he grinned at Jane and ran off with the other boy, disappearing along the road, behind the great stacks of slate.

Jane turned to call, but no sound came. Beside her, John Rowlands was shouting to one of the men aboard the Frances Amelia. “Iestyn! Iestyn Davies!”

“Evan boy!” the man called back, white teeth flashing. And even while the name puzzled her, Jane thought again of the strangeness that there was no Welsh to be heard, and then suddenly knew that of course all the speaking that she could hear was indeed in Welsh, her own included, with no word of English used anywhere at all.

“After all,” she said shakily, knowing with no reason that Simon was now at her side, and turning to him, “it's no more odd to understand a language that you don't know, than to be switched into a time before you were born.”

“No,” Simon said, in a voice so reassuringly his own that Jane felt dissolved in relief. “No, not really odd at all.”

John Rowlands called, beside them, “What news of the
Sara Ellen?”

The man stared. “You haven't heard?”

“A letter sent from Dublin was the last. It came yesterday.”

The man on the
Frances Amelia
paused, put down the line he was coiling, called a few words to someone else on board, and leapt over the gunwale and down to the jetty. He came up to John Rowlands, his face lined with concern. “Bad
news, Evan Rowlands, very bad. I am sorry. The
Sarah Ellen
foundered off Skye two days ago, with all hands. We heard yesterday.”

“Oh my God,” John Rowlands said. He put out a hand, gropingly, and clutched the man's arm for an instant; then turned and moved away, stumbling, as if he were suddenly old. His face was grey and hurt. Jane longed to go after him, but she could not move. How was it possible to comfort grief that was naked on a living face, and yet had been gone and forgotten for a hundred years? Which was more real: her own bewilderment, or Evan Rowlands' pain looking out of his grandson's eyes?

The man called Iestyn said, looking after John Rowlands, “And his brother aboard.” He looked round, at the two or three other men who had been standing near, and his face was grave. “Something is not good. That was the fourth boat built by John Jones Aberdyfi to go down in three months, and all of them new boats too. And it was not a great storm that took the
Sarah Ellen,
they say, but only a heavy following sea.”

“They are all the same,” one of the men said. “They dip the stern under. Every one of his vessels does it now, and then there is strain and the leaks come, and down she goes.”

“Not every one,” another man said.

“No, not every one, that is true. John Jones has built some very good boats indeed. But the bad ones….”

“I have heard it suggested,” said the man called Iestyn, “that it is not in the design but in the building. That it is not John Jones' fault at all, but one of his sawyers. And any work that he handles—”

He broke off, conscious suddenly of Jane's anxious stare, and switched on to his face a broad deliberate smile. “Waiting as usual, is it, like all the young ones, but too polite to ask?” He reached into one capacious jacket pocket and brought out a square package. “Here—put some in my pocket for the first of you who would come smiling and begging
I did. And for not asking at all you shall inherit it, little one.”

“Thank you,” said Jane, and for the second time that day startled herself by dropping a little bobbing curtesy. Folded in paper in her hands he had put four enormous wood-hard ship's biscuits.

“Off with you,” said the man amiably. “Into the oven in a dish, covered with milk, isn't it, and a knob of butter on top, lovely. Lord knows it is good someone enjoys the hard biscuit the way you all do. Not so good halfway across the Atlantic, I can tell you. By then you would swap the lot for a good warm slice of
bara brith
.”

The others laughed, and suddenly it was as if the last two words had turned a key back again to relock a door. For now they were speaking unintelligibly in Welsh together, and Jane knew that the difference was not in the language they used but in her own hearing of it. She had been able to understand it for a short enchanted while; now she could not. She clutched at Simon's unfamiliar stiff sleeve, and drew him away.

“What's happening?”

“I only wish I knew. There's no logic to it. Everything all mixed up.”

“Where are we? And when? And why?”

“The why is the biggest.”

“Lets go and find Barney.”

“I know. All right.” As they walked over the broad-spaced timbers to the street, Jane glanced sideways at her tall brother; somehow in the rough old-fashioned suit he seemed taller than ever, and more controlled. Had he changed too? No, she thought:
it's just that I wouldn't normally bother to think what he's like at all….

They were walking up the road, past little cottages gay with roses and snapdragon and sweet-smelling stock; past terraced houses far grander and newer looking than they had seemed in the days that were yet to come; past a resplendent coaching inn with its board hanging newly
painted:
The Penhelig Arms.
Two men walking ahead of them greeted a stumpy sun-tanned figure standing in the doorway of the inn. “Good day. Captain Edwards.”

Jane thought:
We are back in Welsh again….

“Good day.”

“Did you hear about the
Sarah Ellen,
then?”

“I did,” said Captain Edwards. “And I remembered what we spoke of, and I was thinking of paying a call upon John Jones.” He paused. “And on one of his men, maybe.”

“Perhaps we might go with you,” one of the two men said, and as he turned Jane saw with a shock that it was John Rowlands again. She had not recognized him; not only the clothes were different, but the walk as well.

A sound of hammering came from somewhere below the road, down by the sea, and a high rhythmic screeching that Jane could not identify. At a cautious distance she and Simon followed the three men, to the edge of the road where it overlooked a flat yard just above the high-tide mark.

The shipyard was surprisingly simple: a couple of sheds, with next to them a curious box-like structure, leaking threads of steam. It was perhaps two feet high and wide but very very long, dozens of feet long, and attached to it by a pipe was a big metal boiler. Nearby, the rough skeleton of a boat lay in a wooden cradle: a long keel branched by the bare oaken ribs to which only a few planks had as yet been set. Huge baulks of timber, the yellowish-white colour of pine, lay piled on the ground and beside them gaped a long deep pit, deeper than the height of a man, where sawyers cut the wood into planks. Jane stared, fascinated. A piece of timber lay lengthwise over each pit, supported on small logs set across; one man stood below it and another above, and between them they worked up and down a long saw, set in a frame, which produced the rhythmic shrieking she had heard from a distance. Two other sawyers worked in a similar pit close by. Others were shifting the timber, stacking planks, tending the steaming boiler, beneath which a fire burned so hot as to be almost invisible in the warm summer air.

A boy looked up and saw the three sailors, and gave a kind of salute; he ran to the sawyer working on top of one of the pits, shouting to be heard over the rasp of the saw.

“Captain Humphrey Edwards and Captain Ieuan Morgan, it is, and Captain Evan Rowlands, up aloft there.”

The sawyer signalled to his partner, stilling the long blade before it came down again for the next cut. He stared up. Jane, peeping over the side of the rough rock-edged road, saw a pudgy face topped by astonishingly bright red hair; the man was scowling, with no sign of friendship or welcome.

“John Jones has gone to the wharf,” the red-haired man called. “To see to a shipment of pine just come in.” He bent down again, dismissivlely.

“Caradog Lewis,” said the stumpy captain from the inn. He did not raise his voice, but even at normal pitch it was the kind of voice accustomed to being heard above a gale at sea.

The red-haired man jerked up petulantly, hands on hips. “There is work to do here, Humphrey Edwards, if you please.”

“Aye,” John Rowlands said. “It is your work we should like to talk to you about.” He stepped over the low rocky wall and went down a flight of rough steps to the sawpits; the others followed him. So, a little later when no one was paying attention, did Simon and Jane.

“What boat is this you are working on, Caradog Lewis?” said Captain Edwards, looking thoughtfully at the graceful curving frame, all ribs and keel, standing skeletal on the stocks.

Lewis looked at him sourly, as if about to snarl, but seemed to change his mind. “She is the schooner
Courage,
for Elias Lewis. I should have thought you would have known that. Seventy-five feet, and a month overdue already. And over there—” he nodded at a half-rigged hull already launched, floating in the dock, “that is the
Jane Kate
for Captain Farr. They will be floating her spars over from Ynyslas tomorrow, and high time too.”

“And you had a hand in both of them,” John Rowlands said.

“Well of course, man,” said Lewis irritably. “I am top sawyer for John Jones, isn't it.”

“And no doubt responsible for much,” said Captain Edwards, stroking his side-whiskers. “John Jones being a busy man, with a great many keels laid down on one another's tails these last few years.”

“Well?”

“The
Integrity
was your work too?” John Rowlands said. “And the
Mary Rees?
And the
Eliza Davies?”
Each time Lewis nodded his red head impatiently. Rowlands went on biting off his words like a child biting a biscuit. “And the
Charity?
And the
Sarah Ellen?”

Lewis scowled. “You choose the ships of unfortunate men.”

“Yes. I do indeed.”

The sawyer and the other shipyard workers had put down their tools and came drifting close to listen; they stood in a group, restless, eyeing the captains resentfully.

“I have just heard about the
Sarah Ellen.”
Lewis shrugged, with shallow regret. “It is a pity, about your brother. But no new thing in this village.”

“No new thing among the ships that you work on,” Humphrey Edwards said.

Caradog Lewis's pale face flushed with anger, and Jane saw his hands tighten into fists. “Now look here—” he began.

“You look here to us, Caradog Lewis,” said the third man, who had not spoken since they entered the yard. He was a small olive-skinned man with a fringe of grey beard. “Two of those boats I have watched at sea, keeping company on the Labrador run, and both had the same failing, and that none of John Jones' designing if I know him. Careless he is and a little greedy for work, so that he has not the time to supervise as those builders do who will not work on more than one keel at a time. But it is not his doing, for a
boat to dig in her stem and founder in a following sea. That is the work of a man every time giving more length at the stern than there should be, and more than a few times letting planks go by that were steamed too quick and had cracks beginning.”

A rumble of anger came from the listening workers.

The red-haired man was wet at the mouth with rage; he could scarcely speak. “Prove it, Ieuan Morgan!” he hissed. “Prove one small part of that! You think you can prove I have deliberately sent men to their deaths?”

“There must be some way to prove it,” John Rowlands said, his voice grim and deep, “for true it is without a doubt. There is more in you than you show. We have been wondering a long time, we three, and now this loss of the
Sarah Ellen
is too much. And we are sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That you are … different, Caradog Lewis. With loyalties that are not like those of other men. Serving in some dreadful way a cause that is not that of men at all.”

The words had such cold conviction in them that the men near Caradog Lewis shrank unconsciously away from him a little; and Lewis sensed it, and yelled at them in sudden fury so that they dived back at the nearest piece of work. But there was no fury in the way Caradog Lewis looked then at John Rowlands; there was instead an icy arrogant hatred that made Jane shiver, because she had seen it before, once, in a man dedicated to working the will of the Dark. Lewis, with his pasty face and his raw red hair, did not seem to be totally a creature of the Dark, but he was the more frightening as a result; such malice living without apparent reason in an ordinary man was something Jane could hardly bear to contemplate. She could sense anger rising in him like steam in a near-boiling kettle.

Lewis came slowly towards the three men, clear of his sawpit. He said tightly, “I am a man as you are, Evan Rowlands, and I will show you that I am.” And all at once he seemed to erupt, flinging himself on John Rowlands, his
face twisted horribly by snarling rage. Caught off-balance, Rowlands was thrown backwards in a rattling shower of grey slate, and Lewis was after him like a dog, arms flailing, smashing. The two other captains rushed to part them, but now the men from the shipyard had dropped their tools and come deliberately in the way, and there was suddenly a great melée on the ground. Stocky Captain Edwards knocked a man down, with a horrible click of teeth as his knuckles met the man's head; then he disappeared beneath a trio of others, and beside him, shouting and fighting, Ieuan Morgan hauled them away. Caradog Lewis, struggling with Rowlands, stumbled to his feet, gasping with malice, and reached for balance to kick with his hard-booted foot. Jane shrieked, and then Simon was past her in a flurry of arms and legs, clutching at Lewis, crying out as the toe of one heavy boot met his own shin.