Band of Angel (11 page)

The fawn smock was too long in the arms by miles, but as her head came through it she felt funny. She wound her hair tightly around her head, put on the black hat, and gazed long and hard at herself in the mirror. Her face was pink with excitement. She
could
pass as a boy. She wanted to keep the clothes on, but it was nearly seven-thirty, almost suppertime. From the kitchen downstairs she could hear Gwynneth—an angry clanker of pots and pans at the best of times—talking in her sharp whiney voice to Mair, whom she was in the process of retraining.

In the dining room, Gwynneth was sitting in Father’s place at the head of the table. He was out harvesting and would not be back until late. Eliza sat beside her aunt, looking hunched and depressed. She straightened up when she saw Catherine, and smiled so hopefully that Catherine wanted to take her in her arms there and then. A new look of wary disappointment had crept into Eliza’s eyes of late, and what she was about to do, thought Catherine, would only add to her sorrow.

Now Gwynneth leaned over the ham and the vegetables, thanking God for all his gifts. Her blue-veined eyes were closed. Her head was faintly wobbling.

“We started earlier than usual,” she said to Catherine when grace was over. “I’ve sheets to be hemmed for Reverend Hughes. We are all very worried about Mrs. Williams you see,” continued Gwynneth, chewing, to extinction a small slice of meat that had been transferred to her mouth.

“Her husband is taken very bad and somebody has to lend a hand.” Gwynneth’s proud hard stare seemed to indicate, that wonderful someone would have to be her.

Eliza, who was chewing, too, made a kind of little humming sound. Catherine said, “Oh poor you, Auntie, when must you deliver the sheets?”

“Tomorrow of course—one’s promise is a debt,” said Gwynneth coldly.

Catherine could feel something funny happening to her lip. Her aunt out of the house all day.

“Oh yes,” said Gwynneth. “He’s taken very bad: sick headaches, agues, and a colicky kind of pain.” She ticked the ailments off on her fingers. “Boils, shooting pains in his legs, and am I surprised?
No
.” Her little mouth shut tight as a trapdoor. “Mind you, most of his problems can be laid at the door of the Tavern Goch.”

It was on the tip of Catherine’s tongue to say “but you don’t even know the man properly, and that old misery, Reverend Hughes, thinks that the soul of every man who isn’t a regular worshipper is in imminent danger of hell.” Instead, she asked, “So we won’t be seeing you in the morning or in the afternoon? I plan to have a walk in the afternoon.”

Nowadays, she told her aunt what she was going to do, before Gwynneth could get in first with a stream of requests.

“I shall do my sewing and some household tasks with Mair and Eliza in the morning.”

“You must do what you like, Catherine,” Gwynneth looked at her coldly. “Within sense and reason, of course.”

At two-thirty the next day, on the beach at Whistling Sands, a young woman walked into the hut with the green door. Several minutes later, a young man walked out. The young woman, with
her picnic basket, her parasol and pretty dress, her bright hair, her sketch pad, her pencils and rug, was designed for decoration and for idleness. The young man, with his coarse smock, his leather gaiters, and long socks coated with soap to avoid blisters, was dressed for hard work.

Once again, the clothes, with their faint smell of leather and animals, gave her a peculiar thrill as though, dressed like this, she could take on something of the power and the ruthlessness of a man. The mood did not last. By the time she reached the track leading down to Pantyporthman, she was feeling so sick with apprehension that she had to hide behind a hedge, her stomach heaving and her heart pounding. What right had she to change her world?

Feeling stiff and unreal, she walked down the path toward Deio’s house. A brisk wind had got up from the west and was flattening the feathers of a group of Aylesbury ducks waddling across the yard. In a far yard, behind a fence made of slate and old bedsteads, some dust was rising, and she could see Rob Jones bobbing up and down on a horse. When Catherine peeped over the corral, a Corgi flew at her yapping furiously, and the bay horse—young, Catherine guessed, and newly broken—reared and spun.

“Geeedonwithityervarmint,” growled Rob. When he stuck his heels into the horse’s sides it leaped into the air like a pogo stick.

“Better, better . . . that’s it bachey boy.”

Although they were neighbors, Catherine hardly knew Rob—he was ten years older than Deio, part of the adult world. She saw him look at her and then ignore her as the horse, frightened by a sudden whoosh of wind rattling the fence, gave another leap. He gave the animal a sharp one with his stick, made it canter, and, when the bay saw it wouldn’t move him, it grew quiet and started to concentrate again. Rob jumped down and led the horse toward her.

“Good-day boy,” he said, with the hint of menace farming men reserved for strangers on their land. “What’s up?”

“Boy from Abersoch,” she said, in the gruffest voice she could manage. “For the job.”

“Ah, boy from Abersoch,” said Rob, his teeth bared in concentration. “You’d slipped my mind.”

He unbuttoned one of his gaiters and when he straightened up, was alarmingly male with his black hair tossing against the sky, “Why so?”

She thought for a brief moment that he must have recognized her and said nervously, “Why what, sir?”

“Why do you want the job?”

“For money, your honor.” She smiled with relief.

He laughed.

“Good. A lot of boys think droving is a great adventure. The last one of those we had ended up down the side of a cliff. Poor bastard. Can you ride, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any good?”

“Good enough.”

“Want to try this one?”

“If you like, your honor.”

The young horse was still weaving and stamping its feet. She stepped forward and put her hand on its stirrups. “Stay where you are,” said Rob. “You’re no help to me with your back broken.” He was thinking aloud. “If you did ride him to London, mind, we could sell him on and you could walk home.” He appraised her as if she was no more than a lump of meat.

“I could do that,” she said.

The wind was getting up so high, he told her to follow him into the tack room. They sat on either side of a table sagging with saddles and bits of tack and horse physics. “We’re taking about two hundred Welsh Blacks to England,” he said. “We’ll start with about a hundred and pick up others at fairs and farms on the way. We’ll need more men when we get to the mountains.”

A collie dog walked in, sat, and moved his silver eye restlessly from Rob to Catherine. He looked like his master: hardworking, shrewd.

“Know anything about cattle?” Rob put his hand on the dog’s head.

She shook her head.

“We buy ’em for between four and five pound each, sell ’em for about ten pound when we get to Smithfield. What with ferrying
and shoeing and tollgates and boys like you, we earn every penny of what’s over. You savvy, boy? If one of those stampedes or falls over a cliff or gets lost because you’ve been sleeping on the job, you will get a wanding you will never forget, and the price of the cow will come from your wages.”

He told her the wage was one and six a day all found, rising to one and nine by Llangollen if she was worth it, and pulled a notebook and quill and ink from a drawer stuffed with mole traps.

“Your name, boy, before you leave? For my accounts.”

“Joseph,” she said, on the spur of the moment, “Joseph Morgan. Jo for short.”

She had been taught never to tell a lie and her face flooded with color.

“From?”

“Abersoch.” Damn, she’d chosen a town near enough for him to have relatives there. “Abersoch, Caernarfonshire.”

“Great Britain, the World,” he said, smiling properly for the first time.

He put out his hand to strike the bargain. Raised it and slapped it down against hers with a force that left it tingling for hours.

Gwynneth and Eliza were in the kitchen when Catherine got home, sitting on either side of the kitchen table spooning the late gooseberries into preserving jars. Father sat by the fire, drinking tea, and wolfing down some bread and cheese before going out into the fields again. The harvest was not done yet.

He barely looked up as she walked in. His natural reserve had deepened over the past few months into something more aggravating: a sulky, more-or-less permanent silence. The silence of a disappointed child who will not ask for what he wants. The silence that takes a great deal of energy to ignore and casts a long shadow. “Well, don’t look at me then,” she thought, disliking her own snappiness at a time like this, “and don’t worry. I shall be gone soon.”

She drew her eyes away from her father, who was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked toward the table where Gwynneth was bemoaning the slummocky ways of “Poor Mrs. Williams” whose house—there was no other word for it and they’d have to forgive her—“smelled.” Writing, “Gooseberry 1853” in her very small writing on her own spotless labels, Gwynneth commented on what a sadness it was that so few people bothered to take proper pride in such matters nowadays. When she had finished her labels, Gwynneth lined them up carefully beside the jars and the liquid wax and said, without looking up, “And you, My Lady Catherine, have one of your headaches. I can tell by looking.”

“How clever of you, Aunt,” Catherine lied quickly, seeing an easy escape to her room.

“It’s not very clever,” said Gwynneth, bunching up her mouth
and looking toward Father. “Sketching, riding, rushing about all over the place. An excess of anything is not good. Now where is my remedy?”

Quite worn out with her own importance, she rooted around the dresser drawer until the packet was found. “Do you need magic hand?”

“No thank you, Aunt,” said Catherine quickly. Magic hand meant aunt’s damp hand dragging seaweedlike across the temples while she murmured “poor child” and “dreadful business” or “it’s all for the best whatever.” It usually appeared when Father or some other worthy male was around.

“Well, tomorrow,” her aunt decreed, “a nice lie-down in the afternoon and no sketching”—she made it sound like a disease—“and no rushing about all over the place mind. Don’t you agree, Huw?”

He shrugged, and in that moment Catherine knew that he would not lift a finger to get her back. She looked at him miserably, wondering when they had lost each other. More than anything she wanted a sign from him. There was a clock on the wall above Father’s head, with Davies of Caernarfon written on its face. It was five-thirty now. In a matter of hours she would be gone.

“Sit down by me,” said Eliza. “Mair will bring you some tea.”

Her sister’s anxious face made tears rush to Catherine’s eyes. Her dear, sweet sister deserved none of this.

“You mustn’t worry about me, darling,” she said. “I’m all right . . . a little tired maybe.”

“Tired?” Auntie Gwynneth’s face expressed the disbelief of one who had risen early, bottled ten pounds of black currants and four of gooseberries, and still found time to dispense advice and medicine to Blodwen Williams of Aberdaron. “Are you tired, Huw, with all that harvesting?” Father gave another sulky little shrug and walked stiffly toward the door.

“Go upstairs and lie down for a while,” said Eliza. “I’ll bring you up some of Aunt’s splendid physic and some mint tea.” Poor Eliza, always the peacemaker.

After supper, Catherine went upstairs to pack but, instead, threw herself on her bed. Then, remembering Rob’s instruction
that she should make a will before she left, she got up again and paced about. She looked at her three dresses, her cameo brooch, the bracelet of silver and coral her grandmother had given her. In the end, how laughably little she possessed. Her most precious possession? The lapwing that Deio had carved for her out of driftwood, which she wore around her neck.

Underneath her bed was a dark wooden box where she’d kept the five sovereigns her father had given her—it seemed like years ago—to buy the dress at Sarn. She was putting her money into a leather pouch when Eliza walked in with her tea and saw her on her hands and knees.

“What on earth—?”

“Eliza,” Catherine straightened up, “put the tray down; sit beside me on the bed.” Eliza sat down, hands folded like a child’s on her soft cotton dress. Catherine could have wept.

“Eliza,” she said in a low voice, “do you love me?”

“Of corth I do.” Eliza, at seventeen, still had a slight but endearing lisp.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes, oh yes. Catherine!” She grabbed her arm. “What is it?”

“Eliza, please don’t be too upset, but I’m leaving home soon, very soon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving because if I don’t I’ll go mad. I can’t stand that woman and I can’t stand my life. I have to find more to do than this.”

She could see Eliza wanting to leap in with words of comfort, new ways of looking at Gwynneth, but knew she must finish in one rush.

“So I am going to London.”

“To London!” Eliza’s face was almost comically aghast. “Across Snowdon? To England?”