A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (30 page)

Edwyn is looking at him. For a few minutes he does just that. His face is the palest thing that Silas can see: an oval with the bottom part eclipsed by the crescent of his beard. The crescent moves: ‘I'm sorry.'

Silas waits for more but nothing comes.

‘For what?'

Silas needs him to say.

‘My exaggeration.'

‘But why, man, why do it?'

Silence. Edwyn tips his head and his face disappears beneath the brim of his hat.

‘Aren't you going to tell me?'

He shakes his head. ‘It's too difficult.'

‘Please tell me,' Silas says more gently, ‘I would like to know. How did it start?'

‘It was after my mother died.'

Silas waits again. When Edwyn speaks his voice is small, strained and so unlike his usual voice that it's as though someone else is speaking. ‘After her English landlord killed her.'

‘We don't know what happened.' His voice has returned to its normal timbre. ‘Perhaps she had a note, but if she did it would have been in English, not that she could read much, anyway. My mother missed out on school, no one much saw the point in educating a girl like her, I suppose. They still don't – do they?' Edwyn looks up briefly, smiles sadly to himself, and then looks back towards the fire. He pokes it and sparks fly up. Silas wonders if there are any Indians around to see it.

‘Anyway, if she had a note she didn't mention it to me. The first we knew was a knock on the door and one of the landlord's henchmen was standing there, pushing her through the doorway as soon as my sister opened it.'

He pauses, swallows, then looks up at Silas. His eyes are reflecting the fire and seem to be burning too. ‘They'd beaten her, my friend. She was an old woman and they'd beaten her. She could hardly see, and we'd begged her to come and live with one of us, but she had been so fond of her house and her memories. She'd been determined to die in it, but she didn't in the end, of course.

‘He was greedy, he had plenty of land already but he wanted more and the government let him take it. He campaigned for an enclosure act and there was no one to stop him, no one to stand against him. So he had his way. He extended his empire and unfortunately my mother's house was in the middle of it. It was on the common land, one of those houses built in the night. She was so proud of it. Built overnight with smoke rising through the chimney before the morning. She thought no one could ever claim it from her but she was wrong.

‘I hated him, Silas.' For a full five seconds Edwyn glares at Silas without blinking. ‘I had hated him before but afterwards, after I'd seen what he could do, I hated him more.'

Edwyn looks down again. ‘Of course hate is an evil, wicked thing, but I didn't know that then. At the time I thought of it as revenge – something pure, something righteous. An eye for an eye, it says in the Good Book, in three different places, did you know that? Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But that is the Old Testament. Our Lord has given us new commands, since then.' He glances at Silas again. ‘How well do you know His words, or the words of the disciples? “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matthew,
ffrind
: the tax collector, a wealthy, educated man. He knew the sacrifices a man needs to make. It took me some time to realise the meaning of his words, some more to take them into my heart. It is always necessary to forgive,
fy ffrind
. It brings comfort.'

Silas stabs at the ground with a stick. He had been expecting another tale – one in which Edwyn's great worth is shown through his heroic and selfless actions – not this self-effacing tale of mistakes and wrong thinking.

‘Ah, my mother was so fond of that house. I was born there; all my brothers and sisters were born there. It was a simple place; just two rooms. It makes what we have here seem like palaces. But it was a fine place to her, all she ever needed, she said.'

Edwyn is carrying on, almost as if he is talking to himself.

‘A house in pieces.' He smiles and shakes his head. ‘Surely you have heard of such a thing. For months it was waiting in parts around the village, she said – behind her parents' cottage there would be a door, in the cowshed a window frame, their settle was waiting for them in the pub. There were pieces everywhere – beneath barns, on top of the pigsty, even in the chapel hall...'

A fragment of wood tumbles from the flames and Silas stares at where it has been.

‘I often imagine how it must have been. Everything had to be done in secret, she said – single words passed along the pew in chapel before services, spread around during market: all that whispering... then a wink perhaps, or a nudge, and a couple of words exchanged over a pint of ale. Then the night...'

How the man loves the sound of his own voice. Silas leans to one side and allows his body to collapse against the ground. He feels as if he is a child again, being told a fairy story.

‘It was autumn and there had been no rain for days, she told me. The moon was full...'

Edwyn's voice drifts away to somewhere distant and Silas shuts his eyes. He sees the men meeting in front of the tafarn. The dusk is gathering and their voices are too loud and quick. Anyone passing would wonder at them. They laugh pointedly at any slight joke and there is something strange in the way they each reassure the rest as they go – that they will see them tomorrow, the same time as usual. Silas smiles and turns and Edwyn's voice drifts over to him again.

‘When my mother arrived she was cross with herself – the house was already half-finished, you see, she'd missed some of it. She'd had no idea they would get on with the business so quickly. There were a dozen men tapping with their hammerheads covered in rags to muffle them, and some more constructing frames and building walls. Then, very soon, there were walls with two windows and a door and the chimney.

‘Then my father carried her over the threshold – laughing so hard he almost dropped her. And then, still laughing, she'd struggled to make the fire light, but then the tinder caught, just as the sun rose, and everything was all right, something she'd never forget, she said, something she told me again and again – how a small thread of grey smoke rose into a sky full of reds and purples and everyone clapped, cheered, and banged the new corrugated iron of the roof. It was done then, you see, too late for anyone to do anything about it. Smoke coming up the chimney before eight o'clock, Silas. “
T
Å·
 Unnos
.” The house built overnight.' His voice fades.

‘But they were wrong, though, weren't they?' Silas says drowsily

‘Yes,
brawd
, they were.'

For a few minutes there is silence. The fire is dying down. Edwyn reaches out to gather some more twigs and drops them on top. Silas opens an eye – new fiery houses are lying on top of the old. He remembers seeing houses before, remembers feeling Megan beside him looking too. She'd been happy then, he thinks – or if not exactly happy, content.

Edwyn sighs and then his voice starts again. ‘After they evicted her they burnt it down. Didn't even allow us in to clear the place. It was all over before anyone could do anything. A easy target, see. Just an old woman, almost blind, no danger to anyone. All she had left were her memories and they destroyed even those – every little knick-knack, every little treasure, went with that house – up in smoke.' His voice has grown hard. He sighs – a long breath out – and when he speaks again it is softer. ‘It is so hard not to hate.'

Silas is awake, now, remembering tales of his own: the dogs in their sacks; Melrose on his horse, that little fat lawyer Dewi Roberts not listening: lazy, stupid. He stabs at the ground again. He is nothing of the kind, he reminds himself. There was nothing he could do then and nothing he could do later either. Then he thinks of Megan. He let her down. She expected him to do miracles and was disappointed when he did not. Sometimes he thinks she withdrew into her silent world just to spite him.

‘She didn't talk again.' Edwyn is still talking. It is as if someone has broken into the bottom of a full barrel of his words. ‘Something seemed to snap inside her. I went to the Englishman's house and demanded to see him but they wouldn't let me. When she died I swore I would pay him back, but of course there was nothing I could do. I hurt,
brawd
, it was as if someone had pierced me with a knife and then run away. I wanted so much to wound them back, but that sort of revenge never heals your own cut, it just makes it burn worse.'

‘I started writing a magazine making fun of everything I could find – the chapel, the church, all the people I thought could have helped her but didn't – and, of course, the English. But it didn't make things better. What ever I did I just hurt more.'

Silas is sitting up now, staring at the man and listening. No one in the colony knows very much about Edwyn Lloyd, he realises now. As far as everyone is concerned he is just the
Meistr
, the one who brought them here, the one who went to Patagonia before them and came back again babbling lies. The man obsessed and possessed by the idea of this promised land. He says little else about himself. Yet once he must have been a child, once he must have fallen in love.

‘It is as the Good Lord says, but I was too young and hot-headed to listen. I had a good brain, you see, and I'd been lucky, I'd been to school and I thought I knew everything. I trained as a printer then became a publisher. Oh, I had fun,
ffrind
. If the English could do that to my mother then I would hurt them back with my pen. I was cruel, I realise that, now. Eventually I didn't care if what I was writing was true or false, all that mattered is it should hurt those that hurt me. It obsessed me. It was all I could think about.'

Silas says nothing. He needs to hear more. He shifts slightly on his haunches.

‘But it didn't work. I never felt satisfied. After all, the people I wanted to hurt didn't even read my paper. And then, after that report, that travesty of a report,
ffrind
, by those inspectors of the schools, the Blue Book…'

Silas nods.

‘I realised I could not continue. Welsh was becoming a language of ridicule, “unsuitable for modern life” they said, incapable of explaining complex ideas of law or science…' he laughs derisively.

‘It was going to die out, I realised. People were beginning not to teach it in schools. There is something called the Welsh Not, have you heard of it? They pass it round in the classroom, one child betraying the next if they hear another using the language, until the last one at the end of the day is whipped.
Jiw, jiw
…' he shakes his head.

‘As if it's dirty! As if it is something to be ashamed of, as if we really are uncivilised, just peasants, backwards – both morally and intellectually.'

He pauses. ‘I'm sorry, I've always felt rather strongly.' He looks into the fire again. ‘I despaired. I gave up my business. It was then that I met Cecilia. Ah, she is such a gentle, considerate woman…' he pauses for a few seconds and rubs his eyes. ‘I don't think I should have lived without her… and it was through her and her father that I met Gabriel Thomas.' He looks at Silas. ‘Have you met him?'

He waits for Silas to shake his head. ‘What a man, so intent on how things should be done and what needs to be done. He made me see what I could do. If things went on as they were, he told me, if we let the English come in, if we let them close the chapels and open churches instead, make fun of our language, call us dirty and obscene, then we would lose everything, just like my mother had. Our culture and our tongue would be gone within a generation. The only answer was to escape.

‘He'd already been to North America – but that was no good, he had seen that. He had gone there as a young minister. Within a generation everyone had forgotten who they were. Ask Selwyn. So we had to find somewhere else. Somewhere clean, uncorrupted, empty of people who could contaminate us. When he heard of Patagonia he knew it was the place. He called me to him and we prayed together. It was then that I saw.'

He shudders, shuts his eyes. ‘Patagonia. The promised land. Kept for the Welsh. All I had to do was go there and see for myself. He warned me it would not be easy to make others see. He said there would be those with blinkers but with time these blinkers would drop away.'

Silas looks up. Edwyn's face is close, glowing in the fire. ‘Is that why you lied?'

‘I saw what I knew would be,' he says quietly.

‘But they were not there.'

‘It doesn't matter. I knew what would be; how it is now; what you have changed it into,
brawd
!'

‘And what about the Indians? It seems to me you saw exactly what you wanted to see.'

‘I believe I saw what the Lord wanted me to see.'

Silas watches him. He really seems to believe in what he says. It doesn't matter any more what is true, what is real, all that matters is this place, what it is, and what it will become.

‘What about Cecilia?' Silas says coldly. ‘Did she see it too?'

At last his face changes. It sags, and then drops from sight. ‘No. I was hoping so much that she would. All she ever saw when she came is what the rest of you seemed to see. At first she tried to support me, but then we argued. She said I was mad, ill, obsessed. Even in Buenos Aires she refused to listen. In the end she said she couldn't stand it any more.'

‘So she went.'

‘Yes. Home. I'm still hoping...'

‘Do you miss her?'

‘Of course.' His voice snaps like one of the twigs in the fire. ‘I had such dreams, but without her...'

‘They won't all come true.'

A twig snaps again.

‘No.'

Silas wakes with the wind still blowing past his ears. He is cold and stiff, the blankets around him sodden. He doesn't know how he has slept but he has. Then it comes: the despair that overwhelms him each time he wakes. Another day without Megan, another day Richard won't see. Her face. His voice. He allows himself to think of them for a few minutes before resolving, as usual, to set them aside. Then he looks at Edwyn. He watches his eyelids twitch as the eyes beneath follow a dream. Then, without warning, they open. For a few seconds they meet Silas' eyes. Neither of them speaks. Then, abruptly, Edwyn smiles and rises swiftly to his feet.