Band of Angel (14 page)

Lewis’s plan when they reached Bala was to take it easy over the Berwyn Mountains so the cattle would be fit and rested by the time they reached Llangollen, where some would be sold and others taken to Kent for summer pasturing. For the most part, they stuck to the wide-verged drovers’ roads, through endless hills where, apart from the creak of a saddle or the cry of a bird, it was
holy and silent. On other days, it was a clatter through small towns where she frankly gawped into upstairs windows at other people’s lives—families eating, a man shaving, a woman brushing her hair—frozen into stage sets. Her body grew stronger; her senses became keen again, and her emotions were easily aroused. When a group of mourners passed them on a highway, pushing a coffin on a farm cart pathetically decorated with rowan leaves and scraps of cloth to keep bad luck away, she shed tears with the widow.

Her mother would have loved all this movement, this richness of life. She thought of her so often and of Eliza, even of Father, but she was not lonely. As long as she did her work well, and she made sure she did, the men treated her kindly. Lewis turned out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. After they’d called in at some hillside farm or other, conducting a long wrangle over the price of this cow or that, he’d show her the workings of his mind. “I knew he’d take three pounds apiece.” He’d give her his shrewd look. “Because his rent’s due”; or, “I walked out on that one because even a blind man could see them runts is wormy.”

Once or twice he slipped a toffee in her pocket or invited her to have a swig on his flask, and he liked to tease her, telling her she was a rum-looking creature for a boy and had she ever thought of becoming a jockey. One evening they were wading through a stream on their horses when he tried to flip her hat off and chuck her in the water, before she scrambled away.

“You and your firkin’ hat,” he shouted.

Deio was her only problem. He spoke to her and ate with her, rode within feet of her for mile after mile, but the old ease was gone. Sometimes a companionable silence turned dark and dangerous for no reason, and she wondered anxiously what she’d done to upset him so. At other times, he was quite different, seemed all lit up with a strange light. One evening, as they rode side by side through the Maid’s Pass in the Berwyn Mountains, the setting sun brought a glow to their faces. Cariad was fit and strong by now and beautifully soft to her hand. They clattered together over an old stone bridge, and then rode to the top of the hill where they sat silently astride their horses like two savages on the rim of the world.

“Not a bad life,” he said, watching a skylark fly away.

“It’s heaven,” she said.

“What is heaven?” She could feel him watching her.

“It’s feeling free to be who you are.”

“Is anybody?” The old note of impatience had come back in his voice.

“For a while maybe.”

“For how long?”

She would have answered, but Cariad shied at a rock and banged into Deio’s horse. The muscles of his leg lay against hers.

“We’ll go down now,” said Deio, as if nothing had happened, “there’s cattle on the other side.”

The path was too narrow to ride abreast so she rode behind him, feeling for a while very simple and secure, a pagan woman behind her mate. As they passed through a small copse of oak and sycamore trees, he turned in his saddle to tell her, “I saw six green woodpeckers here last trip.”

“Oh Deio,” she said when they were out of the trees and riding side by side again. “You are so lucky. You can spend your whole life like this.”

“No, I can’t, the trains will come. This will all be over soon.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Home I suppose. Breed horses. Take them to London.”

“On the train?” She tried to get him to smile.

He ignored this, asking, “So what are you going to do?” His eyes, when he looked at her, were startlingly green.

“I’ve told you . . . to London . . . London!” She closed her eyes, not wanting to think.

“To buy a fat pig.”

When she opened her eyes, he was scowling. “No peasant, to live.”

“Don’t call me that.” His eyes looked very black.

“I’m sorry. It was a joke once.”

“Well it’s not now.” He pointed at a patch of bog cotton ringed with rushes. “Watch out.”

“Thank you,” she said meekly, but she was learning to use her eyes and had already noted the danger. “The bright green stuff will sink you, the rest is but a bog.” She was quoting Lewis.

He smiled at her sourly. “You know everything now, don’t you, clever girl? I expect you could get your certificate next week.” His color was up and she recognized the set of his jaw.

“Deio, please!”

“A clever girl, riding away from home as if nothing mattered in the world except her own happiness. What about your father then? And Eliza? You haven’t given them a thought.”

“I have. I have!” Oh God blast and damn it, she was going to cry now. “I’ve been dreaming of my mother, for the first time since she died.”

“Oh there’s wonderful.” He was quietly sarcastic. “That will be a great comfort to your father.”

They bivouacked that night in a hollow of ground within earshot of the waterfalls near Pen Plaenau. When the horses were fed and the cattle settled, Rob, a massive shadow in the firelight, kneaded flour and water, set the damper in the fire, and took two rabbits from his saddlebag. He disemboweled the rabbits, slicing their bellies and leaving a steaming pile of entrails on the grass, then he cut off the feet and pushed the leg bones through the skin. He wrapped them in clay dampened in water, put them in the ashes of the fire, and pulled out a flask of brandy from his inside pocket. The fire and the small toenail of a moon hanging above a rim of dark hills were the only two points of light in the darkness.

“Hey ho, the diddle oh.” He uncorked the brandy, threw it down his throat, then pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and blew a series of notes into the dark. The sound made her melancholy.

But not sad enough to spoil supper. When the men had put away several more brandies and smoked a few more pipes, smells of roasting meat filled the air.

“Well come on boyos, fork it into you,” said Rob. He hauled the rabbits, black and smoking, from the fire, and when the skin was stripped off the meat fell from the bone.

“Eat or be eaten,” Rob’s teeth roared at her from the end of a fork. “Law of the jungle.”

She ate with her hands off a tin plate, the fat dripping from
her chin, and enjoyed every sweet and succulent and fire-tasting mouthful. When she looked up, Deio was watching her.

After supper, the local farmer, a redheaded man with damp red skin and an aggrieved expression, joined the men around the fire to collect the money for their grazing and to explain the sleeping accommodations. The three men, he said, could sleep at his house; the boy in the shearer’s hut down by the river. There were a few bits of roof missing, but the hut was safe and gave good shelter. The man brought his boy, a pasty child of about nine, whose eyes glittered with excitement and who breathed noisily through his mouth. Lewis, mellow from the brandy, his face glowing in the firelight, said, “Ah, sit down y’ere and join us, man.”

As the night wore on and the stars slowly multiplied above their heads, the men got a little drunker and the boy fell asleep in his father’s arms. Then the men began one of those sleepy, interminable nonthinking yarns of the “do you remember so-and-so had that bay filly with the walleye” variety, which are not so much coherent thought as human animals taking comfort in the sounds and closeness of others.

She felt Deio watching her again. Through the dark like an animal. When a coolish wind got up she stood up, ready for sleep.

“Chuck a log on the fire, boy, before you leave us,” said Lewis.

“I’ll do it.” Deio got to his feet in one powerful movement. “I’m leaving, too.”

When they were out of the circle of light thrown by the fire, he took the saddlebag she carried. “Give me that.”

“It’s all right, I can carry it, really,” she said stiffly.

“Give it to me.” She handed it over without a word, and said, “I’m going down to check on the horses.” She had been planning to go to bed but felt wary suddenly.

“I’ll come with you.”

It was dark down by the stream where the horses were tethered. As she walked among them with a lamp in her hand, they blinked at her out of dark long-lashed eyes and then plunged their heads again into the sweet grass at the water’s edge. Only Cariad kept her
head up and when she patted her, the mare licked her hand, liking the salt of human sweat.

Clambering up from the riverbank, she could see Deio’s slightly bandy legs above her and his vague shape against the stars. He put out a hand to steady her and smiled. Then his mouth was on hers, so she could taste his brandy and smell wood smoke in his hair. It was a good smell, a man’s smell, her body leaped toward him, then, panicked, she pushed him off. “Don’t . . . oh please, don’t Deio.”

“Don’t worry,” he teased, as if it had all been a great joke, “you’re miles from home.” Then he held her head between his two hands and looked straight into her eyes.

“I don’t understand, Catrin. What’s all this about?”

“I don’t know.” She was trembling, half hoping to be in his arms again.

He let go of her and lit his pipe, and tried for a light tone. “You’re quite a puzzle.”

Her heart bled for him. And for herself.

“I don’t know Deio,” she said, “I wish I did.”

The next morning she heard a splashing outside her hut. She poked her head around the door and saw Rob, less than ten yards away from her, pissing on the remains of last night’s fire. Deio was behind him.

“Morning, lad.” Rob’s manhood swung like a turkey’s neck from brown corduroy breeches. “Good sleep?”

“Yes, thank you,” she muttered to the ground.

He buttoned up in a leisurely fashion and yawned several times, scratching himself under his privy parts. She had seen her father once, by mistake, undressed, and so was not completely taken by surprise. But when she looked up again and saw the expression on Deio’s face, she stepped back and hugged herself.

When Rob had wandered off, Deio came into the hut and shut the door.

“Catrin,” he said, “this is wrong. You must go home now.”

“Surely that is for me to decide.” She was shaking with nerves, and he looked fit to be tied.

“You know nothing about men,” he said. “They are animals.”

“
All
men? Animals? Oh Deio, please. You sound like the Reverend Hughes.”

“Shut your mouth,” he suddenly roared at her. “I don’t need you to tell me what to think or how I feel.” Then he clouted her on the shoulder—not a painful blow but a shocking one. The two dogs shot from the hut with their tails between their legs. She lost her temper.

“Don’t you dare try to tell me what to do, you ignorant fool,” she shouted. That was all, but the damage was done.

* * *

For a few days afterward, Deio kept a moody distance and would not speak. When he had to ride beside her, he sometimes muttered and swore at himself, and all her new feelings of independence seemed to disappear; she couldn’t hang on to them. Although she had forbidden herself to speak to him, she found she missed him.

She was glad now that they had come to the end of the Berwyn Mountains and were within sight of the small town of Llangollen, on the banks of the River Dee. A town would give her the chance to review her options and, she hoped, cheer Deio up. The men had been talking about the place for days: its pretty women and good ale, and about the bareback race along the banks of the Dee that Deio had won.

“The local lads hold it every year on Fair Day,” said Lewis, with that proud little curve of the lip he got when he spoke of his son. “One mile along the riverbank field with jumps, and bareback; last year he won it by a mile.”

He gave some stew to Rob and Deio sprawled on the other side of the fire. “Eat up, lads.”

“And that lad likes to win,” Lewis continued, dunking his bread in the stew.

“Yes,” she said.

“And I will.” Deio’s eyes gazed at her so steadily through the dark that she wondered why the others did not notice.

“Where do we put up in Llangollen?” She looked deliberately at Lewis.

“Well, that’s a bit of a sore point, boy. Normally we stay at Slawsons, which is a common lodging house, but what with the fair tomorrow and the army in town drumming up men for the war, it was so full I had to dig into me pocket and get you into the Wynnstay, a proper hotel. So you behave yourself mind, no drinking, and keep your breeches on.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” drawled Deio softly. He lay on his back and exhaled a plume of smoke into the stars. “It might do ’er good to get ’em off.”

She flounced off to bed furious, slammed the door of the hut, and lay down with the dogs around her, too disturbed to sleep.
How dare he speak so rudely to her in public, how cruel to say “it might do her good,” and deliberately put her disguise in jeopardy. All the men had sniggered as if it had been a great joke.

She thumped her pillow, pulled the blanket up tight, commanded herself to sleep. She hated him so much. But images of him kissing her, then striking her, went round and round in her head until she thought she was going mad. At three o’clock she woke with a start, determined on a course of action. The situation was impossible: she must strike out on her own for London, let her old life be severed from her as quickly and cleanly as a limb being amputated. The other alternative was to go home, and as soon as possible, and pretend none of this had ever happened. The dogs sighed and rewound themselves in tight balls. At length, she lay on her back, one arm flung across her face, thinking of all the stinging replies she should have made to him, how boldly she might have questioned his authority and with what clarity set down her future plans.