Band of Angel (2 page)

After she caught up with him and they’d said good-bye, there was a pain in her chest as she watched him canter back down the road. His words—bugger bastard—but she needed them now and it was a bugger wanting to go back with him and wanting to go home, too. “I’ll hold you up to the branches,” she whispered.

Now she stood with her back to the sea and looked down on the green blur of hills dotted with whitewashed cottages. The Lleyn Peninsula. Deio, who had ridden to London on a drove and who knew, said this was the end of Wales.

Then Mair ran up the lane shrieking. Mair was their maid, fat and with wild, red, frizzy hair.

“Are you insane completely, Catherine Carreg?” she shouted. “Your poor mother’s frantic. Where have you been?”

“Down to Whistling Sands. I’m allowed.”

“Only a few times when your mam was ill—and don’t you ever dare tell her I said you could.”

“More like fifty, a hundred, two hundred times, when Mama was ill,” thought Catherine giving back a crafty look.

“And what sort of state is that to come home in with your auntie coming for lunch? Did ye fall in the cow muck?”

From her pony, she could see inside Mair’s mouth, the place on her lower jaw where she had lost two teeth and the spittle ballooned.

“Eliza is washed and dressed already and looking a perfect picture, and look at you!” She wondered how fast he was riding home and if he would jump the fallen log near the gate. Another test. If he’d get her a horseshoe from the blacksmiths so she could hang it in the tack room at home. If she could see him tomorrow and the day after that and was it a sin to hope Mama would carry on having rests in the afternoon?

“Oh Mair.” She put her maid’s hand on the pony’s sopping neck. “I went so fast.”

Their eyes locked for a moment in perfect complicity. They were both in their own way trapped.

“Don’t give me fast, madam,” said Mair with a spiteful look. “One day you’ll go down there and the Water Horse will get you, it happened to another little girl I knew.”

Catherine shivered. “Don’t Mair, please!”

“He’ll come out of the water, all beautiful and wet, and you’ll want to ride him, and you will, and then he’ll bite your neck with his big teeth and then he’ll drown you.”

“No he won’t,” shouted Catherine. “He knows where I am and he doesn’t come. He likes me.”

“Oh, well he will,” said Mair in a mysterious voice. “He’ll come.”

“Don’t Mair, please stop. You’re frightening me.” She put her hand into the maid’s rough red one and gave it a squeeze. “And keep my great big magic secret.”

“You silly little girl.” Mair’s eyes were unsmiling as she bounced down the hill toward Carreg Plâs. “It won’t last long.”

She so wanted her mother to be happy, but she never really was, and for the four years that her mother had suffered from the variety of illnesses, the headaches and bad backs and bouts of insomnia that were really all a kind of anguish, it had suited her parents to drop her next door, and Pantyporthman had become her second home.

There she met Deio. He was a few years older than she and, at first, tried hard to ignore her. Then, because the drovers were always busy, he’d let her tag along. She’d backed ponies, gone fishing, learned to stalk, to make a fire out of nothing, and, in between, they’d taken the tests: the breakneck gallops down the steepest paths, the sickening jumps, hair flying above her head, from the cliffs into the sea. He taught her to swear and told her matter-of-factly one day while they were out on the horses what men did with women. He brought her a piece of amber from London when his dad took him there on a drove. He’d carved her a lapwing out of driftwood that she wore around her neck. She shivered when she looked at him, at his careless grace on a horse, his dark hair against the sky. Nothing at home made her feel so alive, so free.

And then, a few months after her sixteenth birthday, it stopped.

The gossip began when Catherine—who had wild tawny hair and a spirited, mobile face—grew, it seemed overnight, from a curious-looking child into a beauty. Local opinion thought it “a bit whatsname” to see her still riding out with Deio Jones, who frequently traveled to London and who was known to be wild. Eventually it fell to the vicar, the Reverend Hughes, to saddle up
his skinny horse and ride the eight miles from Sarn to Aberdaron in order to have “a little, ahem, talk” with her father, “in a private place so to speak.”

It was glorious that early spring morning; the air smelled of salt and wildflowers and the Reverend, who lived on his own in a dark damp cottage, enjoyed the chance to get out and to observe the Carreg family at closer quarters. They were a curious tribe; Huw Carreg, Catherine’s father, came from a family who had lost a great deal of money in lavish improvements to a series of houses and at the gambling table. Either way, the money had gone. Huw, had he not then married Felicia, might have been allowed to reinvent himself in the community as a hardworking farmer, which was all he ever wanted to be. But Felicia, Catherine’s mother, had sealed his fate. She was beautiful and strange and, once he had got her home, confused him and them and made him, forever, not exactly foreign, but never really local.

The house he rode toward, Carreg Plâs—the name in Welsh meant place of stones—had been Catherine’s home for as long as she’d been alive. It was the last remnant of her grandparents’ once-flourishing estate, a no-nonsense L-shaped farmhouse, built of brick and stone, with slate walls on the Atlantic side to withstand the worst of the winter gales. In the twelfth century, it had been the home of the abbots of Bardsey Island, where thousands of saints were said to be buried. Thousands of pilgrims had come here, their last resting place before they took the boat to Bardsey. They’d washed their bruised feet under the pump in the herb garden—for them a place of joy or relief, for her mother a prison.

Hidden by trees, the house, dark and with higgledy-piggledy rooms, was designed to endure rather than impress, but upstairs, from its different windows, you saw wonderful things—the foothills of Snowdon, the Atlantic Ocean, Cardigan Bay—lit up with the hard sparkle of diamonds on this spring morning. The Reverend had been having trouble with his false teeth. A dentist from Rhyl had come in his horse and trap, given him a whiff of chloroform, and filed down the roots and affixed the new teeth, but they still seemed to wobble slightly as he sucked them in now, for duw, how the place had run down over the last ten years. He frowned
at the tangle of bramble near the gate, the messy circle of grass at the end of the drive, the two stone greyhounds on either side of the front door with their heads half-eaten away.

Later, over a drop of Bristol in the parlor, the Reverend—a stoop-shouldered man with a perpetual dewdrop at the end of his nose, and a manner both snobbish and servile—talked about the great harvest that year, and the high prices cattle were fetching in Caernarfon; the lower classes seemed to be getting a taste for meat. Then, seeing Mr. Carreg look wistfully toward the door, he grasped the nettle. There was talk in the village that Catherine, a fine girl, had been riding out with the Jones boy. Now, as far as he knew, he was a fine boy, too—although he’d have to take this on hearsay as the family were not regular attenders of the church. He had thought hard about coming up, he said. After all, if the tongue told all the bosom knew, none would be neighbors, but in a small community like this, and with the Carregs being such a fine old family, the best candle surely, was prudence?

Father, who had a gentleman’s disdain for gossip, could not bring himself to confide in this man any details of his wife’s illness or the chain of circumstances that had led his family into such an intimate relationship with his neighbors. He thanked him for his visit and showed him the door.

Shortly after the Reverend Hughes had gone, Father had a sharp and urgent discussion with his wife, then called Catherine and her sister, Eliza, into the parlor. One look at his face made Catherine’s heart thump.

“Catherine,” he said, “I expect you had a nice day today, did you?”

“Yes, Father,” she said. “I think so.”

He put his cheek closer to her, he’d shaved for this and his skin smelled of witch hazel. Then he said, in the same dull voice, he was glad she had had a nice day because he was working hard on the farm all day, and now that Mother was much better and she was growing up, it was time for her to spend more time at home, helping. At this, Eliza, always the peacemaker, had made gentle, encouraging noises.

“And of course”—Mother gave a pleading look to her husband—“we’ll
have some fun, too. It has been quiet for you girls and you have been so patient, so good.”

“Patience be damned!” Father’s shout made them all jump. “I should have put a stop to it years ago; we’ve let her run wild. Riding around with Deio like a hoodlum.” He opened his legs, a surprisingly coarse gesture meant to mimic a girl riding astride.

The sharp cuff he gave her behind the ear made Eliza cry out, and Catherine feel like a dog sent clattering across the floor when it had done its necessaries inside.

“Don’t do that, Father,” she’d said, determined not to cry, “I am too old for that.”

He gave her the look she feared most, as if all the words in the world would not be able to contain his rage and disappointment.

“Do not be too sure of that, missie,” he said. “I’ll do what I damn well please in my own house, and what I want is for you to stop seeing that boy and the rest of them.”

“Stop seeing them?” she whispered. “How can I? They are my friends, and he is hardly ever home now.”

This was true. That week, he was away in Ludlow at a horse fair, but they’d arranged a ride for when he got back.

“It’s not right,” her father repeated. “It sits all wrong, does it not, Felicia?” Mother’s face, so bad at lies, flickered with distress. She was afraid of the drovers, linking them with her times of greatest unhappiness, but on her own she would never have forbidden it.

“Well, Huw, they have indeed been kind, but we . . . I . . .”

“We what Father? Say it? Do not need them anymore?”

“Catherine”—he balled his big red hands—“that is quite unnecessary.”

“If it is, I am sorry, Father but . . .”

Eliza’s round blue eyes were pleading with her to stop now and say the gentle, womanly things that would end this horror.

“You are deliberately missing the point,” he hammered out. “Those men are capital men and I will continue to do everything we can to help them, but your time with them is over. Do you understand that?”

“I do, Father.”
And wish to God I had been born a man.
For one
moment she imagined herself looking down at him from a horse and knocking him down without a word.

She had to tell them the very next day. Pale with shock, she took the shortcut to Pantyporthman, across the two fields and down by the river. In her basket was a jar of Mair’s elderberry jam and some pickled onions. In Meg Jones’s kitchen she put the basket on the table.

Meg had Deio’s wide-set green eyes; she wore bangles on her strong brown arms. “Well, there’s kind.” Meg took a cake out of the oven and put it beside the jam on the table.

“Now give me your cloak, set down there tidy, and have a piece of this.”

“The preserves are from Mother,” Catherine lied. She didn’t want her mother to be blamed for this. “With her most cordial good wishes.”

If Meg was surprised by this formality she did not show it. She shooed a cat away from the bench and told her to sit down and eat and stop dithering like an old sheep.

“No thank you.” She felt tears rising. “I am expected at home.”

“You all right, love?” Meg looked at her sharply, and said, “Deio’s away this week with his father. There’s a sale on Ludlow way. He’s got a grand new horse, I expect he’ll show you.”

“How is he?”

Meg lit a pipe and looked at her. “He misses you. He never says so but he always does. You met each other too young.”

“Too young for what?” She put her head in her hands.