Band of Angel (16 page)

“Join the Twenty-third of foot, the Welch Fusiliers. A terrific regiment!” His jowls blew up like a puff adder. “The most glorrioouss, the grrrandest fighters. . . . Come on boyos, there’s a queen’s shilling for any man who steps up now and a field-marshal’s baton in every knapsack.”

Some jocular pushing and shoving broke out among the young men, one or two of whom had unconsciously stiffened their shoulders and thrown out their smocked chests, even those who pretended to mock the man’s words. She saw a stoop-shouldered boy step forward, and then another after a whispered consultation with his mother.

“Grand lads, that’s it. Step right up.” The sergeant clamped his arm around the boys as though they were already gallant comrades. He steered their hands toward a large, leather register where they put a name or a mark.

How easy it is, she thought, for a man to change his life. A young woman had moved up beside her. She looked tired and had a baby on her hip and a frayed basket upon her head. She turned to Catherine suddenly and said as though she’d read her mind. “Men is lucky. They can go where they want to.”

Catherine stared at her. They were about the same age, but the girl looked exhausted. “I am going myself to London,” she heard herself say, “on the morrow.”

“Well, a drover is always going somewhere,” said the girl, who had already lost her front teeth, “and that’s their good luck, too.” With a practiced movement she took the basket down from her head, wiped the baby’s mouth, sat it on the other hip, and placed her basket back on her head.

“Where would you go if you could?” Catherine asked impulsively.

“Any place but here,” muttered the woman. She shot Catherine a suspicious look and prepared to move off.

“Tell me before you go,” said Catherine, “where the Wynnstay Hotel is, and where I might pick up the coach?” But the woman’s
reply was drowned out in another volley of drums and more shouts from the prize stallion.

“They say the train to London is better now,” said the woman wistfully. “It’s twice as fast and ’alf the price, but I know you drovers aren’t fussy on it.”

“Of course, the
train,
” said Catherine, as though she were in the habit of taking it several times a week. Her heart beat like a drum. A train tomorrow and to London. The girl placed her baby gently down in a spot between the cabbage stalks and a pile of swedes. She pointed out the post office and the general direction of the train and disappeared with a wincing smile into the crowd again.

Catherine watched her go, almost envious of the worn young mother, who had a certain home to go to, duties to perform. Decisions were horrible and she was so tired now and grandmother’s house so close. Everything in life was turning out to be so unclear, so contradictory. In the distance she heard the shrill neighs of foals separated from their mothers, the calls of “Buy a penny potato yaaaah”—a blur of sound behind the ominous beating of the drums. She went to a stall, where the shopkeeper teased her about a sweetheart, and bought soap, a bristle hairbrush, a wash cloth, and a small bottle of lavender water. She took a short walk up a road that followed the line of the river. She had never in her life longed so completely and so suddenly for a bath. That at least would be like going home.

The hotel looked large and imposing; she ran up the front steps and through the door, then made her way swiftly toward the subdued roar of male voices coming from a taproom stinking of dogs and ale. The landlady, Mrs. Davies, appeared: a stout, highly colored woman with challenging eyes and quivery jowls.

“Have I had the pleasure of meeting you before, young sir?” said Mrs. Davies with a grand and distant expression.

“No, ma’am, you have not, but I am with the drovers, with Lewis Jones.” Mrs. Davies’s expression softened. Her jowls shook gently like a blancmange.

“Well, you should have said so straightaway. Mr. Lewis Jones
is an old, old friend.” She implied a depth of intimacy which few round that bar could ever have imagined. “My girl will see you up.”

A short bark of “Bethan,” and a maid appeared and led her upstairs and showed her into a dark, low-ceilinged room with a slanting floor and a low truckle bed. The bed had a rope mattress and a red eiderdown. The top two panes of the window were engraved in a yellow and red fleur-de-lys design that threw little jewels of light over the bedspread. Beside the bed was a deal table whose edges had been burned by a careless smoker, but the sheets looked clean, and the dish of potpourri near the window gave the room a clean scent of oranges and cinnamon. After ten days on the road it looked like heaven.

“Is it to your liking, sir?” asked the girl, turning down the coverlet.

“It will do very nicely,” she said. “Thank you.”

Catherine asked the maid to send up some bread and cheese, some ale, and some water for a bath. When she was gone, she put her saddlebag on the floor and flung herself on the bed, her body still swaying with Cariad’s rocking rhythm. She could hear the murmur of the street and the river beyond.

“I’ll have a bath, I’ll sleep for no more than one hour, then I’ll go to the races, and then I’ll be gone,” she told herself drowsily. And sleep she did, with the greedy hunger of a young animal, and would have kept on sleeping until the same time the next day had not the girl knocked on the door and cried, “Ready for your bath now, sir?”

A large copper bath, needing much pushing and pulling, appeared at the door, followed by the maid and a red-faced young lad. They filled the bath in relays with hot water from large jugs. The young man said resentfully that it was unusual for customers to require washing facilities during a fair day.

After they had gone, Catherine, now fully awake and almost swooning with impatience, dashed to the curtains, half closed them, peeled off gaiters stiff with horse sweat, breeches, grass-stained smock. She took off the hat she’d worn almost continuously for the last ten days and unwound the greasy rope of hair that was flat to her scalp. From a twist of brown paper in her pocket, she poured bath salts into the water and, groaning with pleasure,
stepped naked into the bath, exclaiming out loud, “Ooh, wonderful!” She lay for a while, eyes closed, and surrendered her body to a state of infant bliss. She felt both more tired than she’d ever felt in her life and stronger. As she splashed and washed, the dying sun set through the red square of glass at the top of her window, flinging more jewels down across the water before snatching them away.

She washed her hair, awed and appalled at the dirt that flowed from it, and when the water grew cold, stood up, wrapped herself in a towel, and got out the blue-and-white dress she had brought from home and hidden at the bottom of her saddlebag. The dress was dusty and stank of the citronella the drovers used to keep flies from the horses. She dunked it in the bath and scrubbed it as well as she could, but the sight of it dripping, shrunken and pathetic on a hanger, brought a great wave of insecurity.

It was infuriating to care about clothes again so quickly, but now there was the terrifying thought of meeting Eleri’s father, the famous surgeon at St. Thomas’s Hospital. She imagined him immaculate, imperious, and herself in a creased dress, no petticoats, funny shoes, and no hat, in front of his desk.

“Oh Mama,” she thought suddenly and with a horrible sense of loss, “I miss you so.”

She tried to stop the voices now in her head, which never really went away and which reminded her how hopeless she’d been on that day, how she might have saved her mother. Why she had to go to London.

“My daughter Catherine,” she would have said to him, her voice crackling with vivacity, “isn’t she lovely?” And one could have floated through on her energy and her approval. She could have talked to her about Deio.

She looked at her watch; there was an hour to go before the race meeting. She felt sick. Everything in my life is going to change, she thought, and now the simple fact of leaving him, held back so carefully all day, overwhelmed her. She found a clean flannel shirt, slipped into it, and lay between the sheets, curled up like a baby.

The rumble of the voices from the bar downstairs grew less dense for a while and then swelled up again as the night began. She slept through the tinkling music of the barrel organ under her
window, through the shouts of “get your faggots and peas yar,” through a fistfight in which one of the protagonists kept yelling “a pox on your lyin’ mouth Davies,” and through another tub-thumping attempt by the Welch Fusiliers to pull in more recruits. And would have slept on until dawn, except that at two-thirty that morning there was a knock on her door, and Deio’s voice sounding drunk and desperate saying, “Catherine, where are you? Let me in.”

She sat up suddenly, “Deio. I’m sorry!”

“Can I come in?” He hadn’t heard her. “Chop. Chop. Open the door.”

She lit a candle, put on a nightdress, and hurried to the door.

“You can’t come in,” she said in an urgent whisper.

“Why not?” His voice sounded very near.

The chain pulled away easily from its weak catch and he stumbled into the room bringing a breath of horses and ale with him.

“Where were you, Catrin? Or should I say Cath-er-rine,” he said in his English voice.

“I wanted to come,” she said, “but I fell fast asleep.” He was swaying on his feet, glaring at her.

“I won, Catrin. I won!” His fist flared up like a giant’s hand against the wall, and she saw how drunk he was—sober he would never have made such a naked gesture, not to her. “Thirty of us in the field,” he said, “and a great field, too, big hunters, Rhys Harris’s polo ponies, racehorses. He was nappy at the start, but then he went like a dream. I was flying, Catrin, flying.” He smiled his beautiful smile.

“Oh Deio.” She could not resist him in this mood. “I wish I’d seen you. Your father must be happy.”

“Father happy,” he repeated doggedly. “But
you
missed it. You miss things. There’s time when you need people to be there an . . .” He sat down on the end of the bed and breathed out sharply as though once again she had let him down.

“I wish I’d seen you,” she said again. “I have had a great deal to do here.”

“What?” he said sharply.

She felt nervous of him suddenly, and evasive. His temper had been so uncertain lately.

“All manner of things. I’m going to London, Deio, I told you before. It’s all arranged. Nothing’s changed.” She was twisting her hair up, trying to find a pin to make it more modest. He took the hair from her hands and his shadow shot against the wall and flattened.

“Leave it,” he said in a low voice. “It’s beautiful down, like silk.” She was shaking, it was wrong to be here with him like this in her nightdress.

“Deio, please, I am tired. I must go back to sleep.” She sat down on her bed.

“Catherine.” He knelt down at her feet and held her face in his hands, and for that moment it almost felt like they were praying together. “Don’t leave. Please don’t leave. It’s been difficult for me having you here, and maybe could, should, I don’t know . . .”

“Deio please.”
Dear God, please help me.

“So much ahead, farm, and buy you things in London.”

“You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“I know what I’m say—” He put his head on the bed. She touched his hair, and he looked at her intensely. “I know what I’m saying. I want to be everything in the world to you.”

“Dear God,” she thought, “help me, help me.” Then his left hand was pressed firmly against her ear, making a rushing sound like water in a cave. She thought of things she could say to him: we’re too young; I’m frightened; I killed my mother.

“Deio . . . I must go. It’s all arranged.” He seemed to be breathing strangely.

“Why? Why? Why?”

“To study medicine or to nurse. I want to go. You saw my mother, what her life did to her.” It hurt so much to say this.

“That won’t happen to you,” he said fiercely. “You have friends.”

A bluish light from the window fell in slats across the bed. He got off his knees and sat down heavily on the bed with his head in his hands. His red rosette fell out of his breeches pocket. She picked it up and smoothed it carefully. “And you,” she looked for words to salvage his pride, “I’ll never forget you. You’re in my heart forever.”

“Oh bugger to that, don’t want to be just in your heart.” He looked at her so strangely she wondered if he’d heard a word. “I would rather be—”

“Deio! What? Don’t! You are looking at me as though you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.” There were tears in his eyes. “Don’t say that.”

“Aren’t you pleased at all that I know what I want to do?”

“I think you’ve gone mad woman,” he said. “You know I . . . I . . . oh for God’s sake.”

He took her hair with one hand and her waist with another and put her down on the bed. He put his mouth on hers, and the full weight of his body on top of her. For a moment, her body seemed to take off in all directions as she kissed him and stroked his hair. And then she felt his hand over her body: under her nightdress, between her legs. The other, smelling of saddle soap went over her mouth. And then she was moving toward him, pushing herself toward him, toward his hand, which was moving deeper and harder. It was utterly strange and wicked. She froze for a moment closing her eyes.