Band of Angel (13 page)

For the next hour she concentrated on coming to a working understanding with her horse. She would treat her fairly, but she was in charge. The mare fought her for a while, tossing her head and snatching at the reins, but when Catherine talked to her and patted her neck and told her how clever she was, she settled to a steady trot—and part of Catherine settled, too.

The road widened as they left the peninsula moving from a narrow tributary into a much wider stream. Ahead of them, gauzy and indistinct, were the foothills of Snowdon. Mair had called it Eryi—The Place of Eagles—and when they were young, told them spine-chilling stories of the spirits who lived there: headless men and ravaged maidens left to die by the Romans. “If those peaks could speak,” she’d said more than once, widening her currant eyes and holding up an admonishing finger, “they’d be struck dumb.” Catherine pictured Mair’s comforting bulk waddling through the kitchen in her red flannel petticoats. She was sad that there had been no time—and no words with which—to say good-bye. Poor Eliza, waking up and finding her really gone. Father would be on the rampage and probably with his gun.

She told herself she was part of the adventure now, not one of
the ninnies waving good-bye from behind the kitchen curtains, so why did it feel so bad? They rode on for a couple of miles, and then she realized that all this excitement and Cariad’s bouncing had left her with an overpowering need to go to what Gwynneth would call “the small room”—not exactly easy when you were surrounded by fields and open country. She told herself to wait. No lady, her aunt had once told her, ever needs to go to the Necessary more than three times a day.

When she stopped at the next gate, a shambled arrangement of old bedposts and rope, two ponies galloped up, stiff-necked with excitement, so that was impossible. Cariad was prancing again, panicked at the disappearance of the herd. Catherine dismounted quickly and, squatting behind a large clump of ferns, felt, for the first time in her life, like a savage. She buttoned the front of her breeches, and then dealt with another worry by flinging her head forward suddenly to see if her hat could fall off. It stayed firmly in place, her hair pinned and netted inside. She leaped back on her horse and, suddenly exhilarated, flung her arms around the animal’s neck.

When she caught up with the drove again, they were beside a stream bordered with young willow trees. Deio was riding halfway up the herd, weaving loose-limbed and relaxed in and out of the cattle. Tegan, his collie, shadowed him. He turned and looked at her. No one ever looked better on a horse, thought Catherine. A troop of small boys appeared behind him like small woodland creatures creeping from the undergrowth. They had dirty bare feet and matted hair. One of them carried a tiny, pathetically cheeping, starling in a net in his hand.

“Where are you going, your honor?” the boy with the bird asked Deio. He was very thin.

“To London and back,” replied Deio.

“To London!” The boy screwed up his face at this marvel beyond all comprehension. “Can we come, too, mister?”

Deio smiled down at the boy, the old sudden, wonderful smile, and Catherine felt herself light up. He made a move to gather him up on his horse, but the child shrank against the hedge, his hand tightening on the bird.

“What kept you?” said Deio, when the boys were waving dots on the track behind them and they were alone again. “Did you miss the turnoff?”

“No.” She felt infuriatingly shy. “I was—” The bellow of a cow drowned her out.

“You were what?” he persisted. “I thought you’d turned tail and gone home.”

Why must he scowl at her so, she thought, feeling tearful for the first time.

“Good Lord, no,” she said, with as much volume as she could muster. “Cariad and I are getting on very well, thank you.”

He smiled at her as suddenly as he had scowled, and lit a small pipe in a single elegant gesture. The smell of tobacco on the air reminded her of Father again, and to stop herself thinking, she asked what route they’d be taking. He leaned slightly out of his saddle and brought his face toward her so they did not have to shout. The gesture was intimate but his voice was cool and brisk.

“We’ll get to Llangollen in nine or ten days’ time. Two other droves will meet us there: one from Ffestinniog way, the other from Anglesea.” He told her there was a bridge now from Anglesea but that they used to have to swim cows and horses over at high tide.

“Do you know what to do if you find yourself in deep water on a horse?” he asked.

“I am sure I do, but tell me again.” She rather resented his schoolmasterish tone and suddenly wanted to tweak his nose and remind him they’d been playmates.

“Get off your horse immediately,” he said, “and hang on for grim death by its tail. If you stay on you’ll drown him.”

“Well, thank you for the advice.” She couldn’t stop smiling. “And let’s hope nothing like that happens.”

He looked at her suspiciously, saying, “I’ll move ahead of you now. I’ve told you all you need to know.”

“Is everything all right?” she asked him suddenly.

“I expect so.” He peered at her strangely. “Do you know you have dust all over your face?”

“I know.”

“Don’t you want a cloth?”

“Not really.”

He scowled at her. “Perhaps I
will
borrow the cloth,” she said meekly.

He told her to do what she liked, it made no difference to him. Then he broke off a long stick from a hazel tree above his head and swept it suddenly down on the rump of a cow ahead of him.

“A gadfly,” he said shortly. “If he gets one of those under his tail he’ll—”

“Gadabout?”

“Exactly.” But he wouldn’t smile. The path ahead of them seemed to go on for miles and miles. She suddenly felt very tired.

“Have we much farther to go before lunch?” she asked in as neutral a tone as possible.

A couple of hours, he told her, not long.

After a lunch of bread and some cheese washed down with some strong ale, Lewis, who ate with his eyes raking backwards and forwards across the cattle, split the drove into three lots.

“You boy,” said Lewis, after an elaborate burp, “stay with Rob in the second drove. I need you fresh for tonight.” What could he possibly mean? Another swarm of worries flew into her mind.

It got hot after lunch and she and Rob rode together in silence through a lovely valley to the north of Sarn. The sun blazed in the sky, and it was too hot for the birds to sing. A group of laborers eating lunch beside a hayrick had taken their smocks off. She could see their white, men’s chests and their slackly buttoned trousers and was embarrassed. They leaped to their feet when they heard the rumble of cattle, waved hats and pitchforks at them as they passed, and looked at the cows and horses with keen competitive eyes.

“Those poor blighters aren’t going nowhere.” Rob lit his pipe and grinned.

They came to a short track and then a wood, where the noise of running water sounded like children laughing. Catherine, face scarlet from the heat and with her tight hat making her head ache, was glad of the shade. When Rob splashed his horse into the water, two dragonflies flew away, skimming across the surface of the stream. Cariad snorted and pawed at the water, wetting Rob’s breeches and
getting a slap on the nose for her troubles. Rob produced a silver flask from his pocket, took a short nip, and passed it to her without a word. It went down her throat like scorching flames, and it took all her strength not to violently expel it.

“See that clump of pines ahead?” said Rob ten minutes later, as they came out of the woods. He pointed toward three dots on the horizon. “Eight miles past them is Two Crosses. We’ll get there in about three hours’ time.”

“Oh good,” she said, hiding her dismay. Every bone in her body was beginning to ache with tiredness and she felt as crabby as a child. “Not far at all.”

When they finally got to Three Crosses—a row of poor-looking houses beside a stinking open drain—it was dark enough for one or two stars to be out. The usual crowd of gawpers had gathered in the village and a halfwit shouted “Horse! Horse! Horse!”

Deio and Lewis, who’d arrived ahead of them, had driven their lot of cattle into a field. They were leaning against a barn, smoking short pipes and looking pleased with themselves.

“Journey’s end,” said Rob shortly, when she all but fell from her horse. “But still plenty to do.” They tied up their horses and spent a maddening half hour trying to persuade the two lead cattle that there weren’t ghosts in the field.

“Come on yer fuckin’ shitbags,” shouted Rob. “Bloody bastards.”

Catherine saw Deio give her a sly, not altogether apologetic smile. She was too tired to care, swooningly, horribly tired, and felt a little sick. Then she had to stumble around in the half dark, watering and feeding horses, washing their bits and soaping their saddles. Then Rob, the perfectionist, slowly started to unpack from his saddlebags a series of little tins, each one marked—“nails,” “soap,” “accounts for trip,” “orders in London,” and so on—and each one, it seemed, containing a separate job to be completed.

“Don’t want no girth galls, do we, lad?” said Rob as her bone-weary arm went up and down the straps.

They led the horses to a smaller paddock with a stream running through it, a gleam of silver now in the twilight. They set the horses
free one by one, each one lying down and groaning with pleasure as it rolled, before galloping off to the stream and taking a long noisy drink. When she turned back, she saw Deio leaning on the gate looking at her, a shovel in one hand and a length of tarpaulin in the other.

She was unable to stop herself yawning hugely with tiredness—the kind of gesture that Aunt Gwynneth abhorred.

“Is there a farm nearby where we put up?” she asked him,

“No. There is a tavern nearby where the men sleep. You stay here.” Stupid with tiredness, she watched him dig a hole, line it with straw and then stretch tarpaulin over the top. His muscles worked vigorously; he didn’t seem at all tired.

“Is this a joke?” she asked, as he laid a bedroll on top of the straw. “I would prefer to stay in the tavern.”

He gave her a funny look, a hard sad look, and she was immediately flustered. “Don’t you all stay there?” she faltered.

“Lewis wants you here,” he said, “that’s the job you’ve been taken on for. They will take another boy on at Llangollen. You wanted this, Catherine,” he said angrily, “don’t look like that.”

“Deio,” she said, “you are not responsible for me.” Her voice was more quavering than she would have chosen. “And thank you. I have had a most interesting day.”

He touched his hand lightly on her back. Every vertebra of it now ached and twanged. She longed for something like a brotherly hug from him, a few words of encouragement, some acknowledgment of how much she had been through that day.

“Unless the cattle get out, which they won’t,” he said, with the same strange look, “don’t come up to the tavern tonight. First night out . . . drinking and other things.”

He lit a fire for her, and left her with the two collies, a safety lamp, and a box of matches. She heard him walk off into the darkness, and then he came back again.

“Catherine, this isn’t right. It’s too much for you. Please go home.”

She wished she could give him clear reasons in a clear voice for this hunger inside, but out here in the dark all she felt was tired and all she longed for was a bath.

“Please, Deio, don’t say anything.” She put her head in her hands and maybe he touched her on the shoulder before he left, she couldn’t be sure of anything.

When he was gone, she sat huddled in her blanket, her eyes traveling between the yellow moon and the fire, until a boy with dirty hands and excited eyes brought her down a plate of bread and cheese and some ale. He wanted to talk to her about the drovers. She stared at him, too tired to form words, and then cut him off. When she’d eaten, she lay down inside the shelter, her head poking out of the tarpaulin. The air was filled with the greatly magnified sound of animal teeth tearing and chewing. She meant to cry but, instead, slept as though she had been felled.

They kept on riding, down wet green tracks, up gorse-covered hills, and to windy places where the silhouettes of primitive burial stones stood out against stupendous expanses of sky. Up there in the hills, the sense of slipping in and out of time was so strong, she could almost hear the clink of other horse’s shoes and see the generations of drovers, of Romans, of Celts and Druids whose tracks they followed. And when the men bellowed “Heiptro Ho” she heard the same message: life, for all its brutality, was a journey, an adventure.

When she wasn’t keeping watch, every third night, she fell asleep beside the drovers’ dogs, their tired bodies jammed against hers beside the dying embers of a fire, and then she’d wake to the sensations of animal life around her: a dog licking her face, a dawn chorus, the sound of a stream of cattle, horses munching. Although the fear of sleeping on her own never quite left her, in time she became used to the constant changes of bed: to sagging pallets in farmers’ houses, to heaps of straw in old barns with moonlight filtering through the rafters, to dry ditches covered by tarpaulin. After ten days on the road, she felt happy, really happy, for the first time in a long time.