Dead Man's Embers (11 page)

This is an important day for him and time to stop thinking about her own troubles. ‘Sorry, Wil,' she says. ‘I was far away. What did you say?'

‘It was only, did Osian show you this little carving he gave me?' Wil holds out his cupped hand in which rests a carved head and shoulders. ‘I think he thought I was going away today and not coming back. I did try to tell him but he just gave me his blank look. You know.'

Non peers at the carving and with a jolt of recognition realises that she is seeing herself. She takes it from Wil's palm. Osian has made it from the block of lime that Davey gave him. As she studies the head her own fierce eyes stare back at her – with no sign of the timidity she sometimes catches in them when she sees herself in the looking glass – the slight frown of concentration between them etched here for ever.

‘How does he do it, Non?' Wil says. ‘Just look, it's absolutely perfect, he's got you just right – and, you know, it's not just how you look, is it?' He takes the head back from her and draws his forefinger down her carved face. ‘It's how you are, somehow.'

‘He's a bit of an enigma, little Osian, that's for sure,' Non says. ‘You know, you were only a year older than he is now when he came to us. He seems such a baby in many ways compared with the way you were. And yet he produces a thing like this. And
there was that soldier he carved that upset you father. That was perfect, too.'

‘I didn't get a look at that,' Wil says. ‘He's got dozens of crows he's done – all Herman, I suppose – under his bed. I've never seen him make anything like this before.' He turns the head around in his hands.

‘So you think this is the essence of Non Davies?' She makes a melancholy face at him. ‘It scares me.'

Wil laughs at her and stuffs the carving into his jacket pocket. ‘Maybe I can find him a good picture of a ship, and he could make a carving of that. It's funny to think he's never seen a ship, Non.'

‘It's a bit hard to take him anywhere when he won't let you hold on to him,' Non says. ‘Imagine me with him in Barmouth or Port harbour trying to stop him falling into the water and him screaming his head off because I'm touching him!'

Wil smiles at her, and she can see from his smile that he understands the difficulties she has with Osian. They are both silent as the train pulls into the station at Talsarnau with much screeching and juddering. Steam hisses from under the engine and coils along the platform past their open window, causing them to clamp their hands over their mouths and noses, and try not to breathe. Wil jumps from his seat and yanks at the leather window strap but the window stubbornly refuses to close. As the train sets off again he flops back into his seat, patting his hair where it has become ruffled by the battle with the window. She imagines him out on the ocean, the wind blowing his hair into tufts just like the ones he is trying to flatten.

She wants to smooth his hair for him, the way she used to when he was much younger. ‘Why the sea, Wil? Why not farming or just staying with your father, or any other thing? You can't even swim.'

‘I will come back and see you all, you know, Non. Especially
you. I'll miss you more than anyone.' Wil blushes at his own words.

‘Oh, Wil,' Non says, ‘you know I could never have managed to keep going all those years when your father was away if it wasn't for you. You and your grandfather.' It seems to her now that she must have placed a terrible burden on such a young boy.

‘You looked after me, Non,' Wil says, ‘and you didn't have to. You could have left me to live with Nain, same as Meg.' He grimaces at Non who laughs at his expression.

‘I still don't understand why you picked the sea,' she says.

‘To see the world,' Wil says. ‘No, well, I don't really know, either, Non, but there was a job going and it sounded exciting – hard work, you know, but different to anything else I know about. And I've often wondered how people go on in other places, other countries . . .'

‘I hope you won't be sea-sick,' she says. Or homesick, she thinks. ‘And I can't imagine you cooking,' she adds, though she is sure he will do that as competently as he turns his hand to anything else.

‘I haven't got the job yet, Non! I'll find out a bit more today,' he says. ‘I don't think it's cooking like you do, from what Eddie said. Anyway, I think I have to do lots of other things, too. I don't mind what I do, really, so long as they take me on.'

The trouble is, she thinks, I cannot bear to think about it, I cannot bear the thought of losing Wil, too. ‘Does Eddie know when the ship's actually leaving?' she asks.

‘When the repairs are done, he said, but he wasn't sure how long they'd take. A week or two he thought. Maybe they'll tell me today. If they give me the job.'

‘They are sure to give you the job, Wil.' She had not meant to sound so melancholy.

‘Don't worry, Non.' Wil leans forward in his seat and takes hold of her hand in an uncharacteristic gesture. ‘There's something else I want to talk to you about,' he says, not looking at her.

He is blushing, as if he is embarrassed. What can he have to say?

‘I don't know how to say it, really, Non,' he says. ‘But I've seen the way you look at Osian and Tada lately, one to the other, when you think no one can see, and all that stuff with the census, and I can guess what you're thinking.'

Non tries to pull her hand away, but Wil's grip is too tight. Has she been as obvious as that?

Wil leans closer and looks up at her face. ‘Eddie told me something about Uncle Billy he thought I should know,' he says.

‘Billy?' Non does not know what he is talking about.

‘Maybe boys talk about these things more than girls,' he says. ‘But Eddie said that Uncle Billy got himself into trouble more than once . . . well, I should say he got girls into trouble.'

‘Girls?' She sounds like an echo. She thinks of all the young women she helped during the War who had got into that kind of trouble when their husbands or sweethearts were away fighting. Loneliness was a terrible thing. She knew all about that. But they were women, not girls.

‘He liked them really young,' Wil says. ‘You know, Meg's age and even younger. I don't suppose they knew they were expecting till it was too late to do anything about it. Well, you know . . .' Wil's face is scarlet.

Non tries to take her hand from Wil's again; he is clinging to her so hard it hurts. This must be much more embarrassing to him than it is for her. Has Wil somehow got to know about the kind of help she gave women during the War? Does he think she helped one of these girls? She is not ashamed of the work she did:
she has kept it quiet for the women's sake. But Davey had been furious when he found out – and, now that she has had time to consider it, she is sure it was Williams the Pharmacist who was to blame, not Dr Jones – and made her promise to stop treating anyone for anything immediately. No more killing, Non, he had said. Killing! She never gave a woman anything harmful after the quickening. But Davey had not been in a state of mind to be argued with.

‘And,' Wil says, ‘Eddie said that Nain has been paying out money on the quiet for the keep of Uncle Billy's bastards – sorry, Non – for years.'

Non is speechless. She had never liked Billy; she should have realised why. How is it that Maggie Ellis has never brought it up? Or Lizzie? Is it because they feel sorry for Catherine Davies? Or because they don't know?

‘How does Eddie know all this, Wil?'

‘He knew one of the girls. She lived the other side of Port somewhere. He said all the girls were out that way, that Billy didn't dirty his own doorstep. But, Non,' Wil is still struggling to explain, ‘I expect that's why Tada has to keep helping Nain out with the money since Billy died.'

Non knew Davey was helping out but she had not asked why. It had seemed a generous thing to do after Billy died, that was all.

‘Anyway, sorry, Non, but I thought you ought to know that Osian is probably one of Billy's and that's why he looks like Tada, like the family really. You've seen how Tada looks just like that old picture of Taid, haven't you?'

She is stunned that she has not made the connection. She had been too quick to judge Davey. But she had doubted him because she could see no other answer to Osian's likeness to him. And
Davey had prepared her mind for the thought by telling her that . . . that story about Angela. She blinks back tears. To think of Davey shouldering these burdens on his own. If only she had known. But, she thinks, I did ask him and he would not tell me. And he was so forbidding about it and I was such a new wife. She had been following her sister's adamant instructions on how a wife should behave. She must, Branwen had said, take notice of what her husband said, and do as he told her even when she disagreed with him; that was how wives were expected to behave. She should have known better than to listen to Branwen, but she had so very much wanted to be a good wife.

‘Is that why Meg came home to us?' she asks.

‘I wouldn't be surprised,' Wil says. ‘I expect Nain didn't want trouble a lot more than she wanted to keep Meg. Anyway, they're all safe now, aren't they, all the girls? He's dead. No one was very upset about it, didn't you notice?'

‘Well, yes,' Non says. She thinks back to Lizzie saying much the same thing. ‘The funeral was rather small. I thought it was because it was just after the War, you know, and everyone was so sad and despondent.'

The train is slowing; here they are at Port station, the braking engine filling their compartment with steam and smoke and specks of soot. She coughs, and smiles at Wil as she loosens her hand from his grip. He blushes again when he realises he is still holding on to her.

‘Shall I walk to the harbour with you?' she asks.

‘Would you like to see the schooner? The David Morris?'

‘I think I would, you know, Wil. And then I'll be able to picture you on the deck sailing the oceans of the world, or in the galley cooking up delicious breakfasts and dinners and suppers for the crew.'

Wil leaps out of the carriage before the train has completely stopped. ‘Come on then,' he says, striding ahead of her along the platform and grinning at her over his shoulder.

The schooner lies in the distance from where Non and Wil enter the harbour; it shimmers in the warm air as if it is a reflection of itself in water, seeming too small and frail a vessel to go sailing across the vast oceans of the world. She wants to hold Wil back, to keep him safe, but watches as he runs off from her, with a quick backward wave, to weave in and out, round and about the wooden crates, the coils of rope, the small hills of shattered slate, damaged before they were loaded, no doubt, until he, too, looks small and frail in the distance.

Non has arranged to meet him under the town-hall clock in an hour, and promised him a pure white ice cream in a glass dish in Mr Paganuzzi's new ice cream parlour, as if he were a child still. A treat, a celebration, she thinks, because he is sure to be given the job. And a treat for her in celebration if she is able to do what she really must within the next hour.

She holds her parasol to shield her head and shoulders from the burning sun. She cannot remember a summer so torrid, she cannot remember being so vastly tired all day, every day, so that each single act or thought requires twice the effort it should take.
Her father used to comment from year to year about the changes in the seasons, one spring was never like another spring, and every summer brought more heat, unless it brought more rain. Good for some of my herbs, he used to say on each occasion, but not for others. He had been an old father to her, the last of his children, older than many of the grandfathers she knew; she remembers that he was often tired, and she thinks now that she must have been a worry, even a burden for him. She cannot use the excuse of age for her own tiredness. Is it the heat? Or is it the death her father told her was always at her shoulder creeping ever closer?

She half sits on a low wall in the shade of the tall house behind it. Such magnificent houses here in Port; there used to be money made from the slates shipped out from here and the many other goods brought in before the slate trade began to decline. The War had hastened the decline. The War had changed everything; she does not think that is an exaggeration. Everything. She tries to steady the rhythm of her breathing, to calm her heartbeat.

She furls her parasol – not the smartest parasol she had seen on her walk from the train to the harbour with Wil, but not the shabbiest, either. I am putting off what must be done, she thinks. She pulls her bag onto her lap, unclasps it and rummages inside, fingering her purse, the bottle of thyme oil for Osian's breath, an emergency bottle of Sal Volatile that she had decided to carry with her after the debacle at Number Thirty. The small box she seeks has sunk to the bottom, caught in the folds of her bag's lining. She frees it and draws it out, admiring the grain of the green leather with which it is made as she unhooks the brass clasp to open the lid. Inside, minute writing on the white lining says
John Dalby, Jeweller & Goldsmith, New Bond Street, London
; she knows it by heart. Although Non sits in deep shade, the light is strong enough to make the diamond on the ring scintillate at the
opening of the lid, as if the sun and the air in this street are all it has been awaiting to bring it to life. The ring waits in its silken nest. Her mother's betrothal ring.

Her father's story of how he had come to buy the ring never tired her. She believed his every word although she now recalls that the detail of the story changed slightly with every telling. Like all the best stories until they are written down; it is the writing down that stops them in their tracks, she thinks. Osian Rhys told her how he had courted her shy and beautiful mother, whose father had a different occupation in every version but was always rich, and had eventually persuaded her to marry him. Here he would sigh in rapture. Amor vincit omnia, Rhiannon, he would say, love conquers all. He told her that he had been in London, the greatest city in England, presenting a paper on his recent voyage of discovery to distant lands where he had come across all manner of new plants and herbs and been taught, and learnt quickly, the ways and means in which they were beneficial to a vast variety of diseases, especially, and here he would pat her on the hand or knee, especially diseases of the heart, and how impressed the Fellows at the Royal Society had been, and how they had made a collection to finance a further voyage, and how he had walked out of the spacious hall and through the grand doors and along the streets where he had been blinded, yes Rhiannon, he would say, blinded by this light that came from the window of a small shop on a street corner, a jeweller's shop as he saw when he shielded his eyes from the blinding light. Here he would pause, spellbound by the memory of what he had seen. Then, he would give himself a little shake, like a dog, and tell her that the light, the incandescence, came from the most beautiful stone, the most stupendously lovely diamond he had ever seen, held aloft like a beacon in the shop window by the most
delicate and exquisite silver setting on a fragile ring of pure gold. He had vowed that if it was the last thing he ever did, he would buy it for her mother, because it was obvious that it had been, and here he would give Non's hand or knee a squeeze, that it had been made for her, meant for her, she was fated to wear it. And so, he had entered the jeweller's shop which sparkled and shone like a cave full of treasure, and the jeweller had brought from the window the very ring that Non now holds. The rainbow of light from it eclipsed the other treasures, and – here Osian Rhys would grip Non's hand or knee so tightly that it was all she could do not to cry out, and say slowly – and its price was exactly the amount of money that had been collected for me at the Royal Society, Rhiannon. Down to the very last guinea.