Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven (5 page)

But on the other hand, she was worried, because she hadn’t the least idea what to do with them. And they would need something to
do
, they were not the sort to want to go to parties and hunt for husbands, marry, and settle into a complacent and narrow life. Of course it was possible that they would turn out to be good teachers, in which case they could easily join the school in that capacity. But
she was very much afraid that, no matter how well-intentioned they were, teaching was not something they were suited for.

So as she saw them settled back in their old suite of two rooms, a bedroom and a parlor, which still had feeding perches for Neville and Grey beside the fireplace and sleeping perches for them over the heads of the beds, she was very conscious of those mixed feelings.

“Oh,” Sarah sighed, as she set down her portmanteau at the foot of her bed. “It’s good to be back. Africa might be home to Mum and Papa, but… I’ve been away too long. I don’t like the insects or the snakes. Grey didn’t either, really. She liked the heat, and the lovely damp air, but she didn’t much care for the rest of it. The spiders! Ugh! They are as big as cricket balls! And the snakes!”

Grey and Neville flew to their perches and examined the water cups with critical, beady eyes to make sure that the water in them wasn’t stale. Grey bobbed her head, agreeing with Sarah; Neville made a comforting mutter.

“Lord A is coming to dinner, if that is all right with you,” Memsa’b said, “If you are not horribly exhausted after—”

“Great Harry’s ghost, Memsa’b,” Nan interrupted. “After traipsing around excavation sites in the heat from dawn to dusk, the trip back was restful! I just hope we’ve got a gown somewhere in our kit that won’t totally revolt his lordship’s sense of aesthetics.”

“I was hoping we’d be able to see him soon,” Sarah added, happily. “I was looking forward to it.”

Memsa’b relaxed. Alderscroft had asked after the girls regularly while they were gone, and had specifically requested he be invited to dine as soon as they were back. She was hoping that perhaps
he
had some notion of something they could do.

“I’ll leave you two to settle back in and tidy up then,” she said with a smile. “It’s so
good
to have you back!”

“Not as good as it is to be back, Memsa’b,” Nan replied for all of them, as Sarah and the birds nodded. “Not by half!”

T
HE
constable lost no time in making his appearance. Three days after market day, Mari saw a strange cart coming up the road from Criccieth, loaded with household goods. When she reported as much to her father, Daffyd mulled the news over for a moment, then nodded as if he had made up his mind about something.

“I expect that’s the constable. Don’t go to the village till market day,” he decreed, and she agreed, even though she was somewhat disappointed. “If you go too soon, all you’ll hear is likely worthless. If you wait till market day, he’ll have shown his true colors, and you’ll get a better notion of what the man is. Never fear; anything I hear, I’ll sing back to you.”

So that was what she did, heading off no earlier than usual, with her father’s admonition to get a few pigeons for a pie rather than a hare or the salmon she’d fancied. “You won’t know if the salmon or hare you’re sold has been poached,” Daffyd pointed out as he headed out to fish. “I’ll go on the river myself today to get one, and better believe I’ll be minding the boundaries.”

She didn’t ask him how he could be sure of getting a salmon without straying into the landlord’s waters; he would, and that was
that. She was also quite certain he would fish only where there were witnesses to exactly where he was. Her da was the clever one.

The first thing that she noticed as she neared the village was that it was
quieter
than usual. There was still the murmur of talk from the market, but it sounded subdued. She tensed, without really thinking about it. The murmuring sounded like the talk of people who are afraid of being overheard.

Once she got there, it was obvious why. There was the constable, in the glory of his dark blue uniform with its brass buttons and buckles, truncheon at his belt, helmet on his head, surveying all of them from a slightly elevated spot on the church steps. He stood out like a red apple in white snow. He didn’t belong, he looked it, and he looked as if he knew that.

He might have been a pleasant man; there was no way of telling, for his expression was stony. And the glances being cast at him were heated and full of resentment. People weren’t talking around him, and their conversations over goods in the stalls were in low murmurs meant to be kept from his ears.

What in heaven’s name did he think he was accomplishing, standing up there like some sort of sentry? Did he think that he was preventing theft or trouble? Or was he trying to cow everyone?

She went first to the post office, ostensibly to get some flannel to patch her petticoat, for the cloth-merchant from Criccieth wasn’t in evidence today. As she had expected, it was packed full, and away from the ears of the constable, the talk was as heated as the glances had been.

“… and he orders me,
orders
me, mind you, that I’m to clean his cottage!” sputtered Mrs. Fychan, who lived next door to Violet Cottage. “I asked him what right he had to order me about, and he says, all high and mighty, ‘By order of the Crown.’ I gave him a right piece of my mind, let me tell you.” She was actually red-faced with indignation, as the others gave her every bit of their attention. Her heavy eyebrows were going up and down, up and down with agitation. “I told him, ‘The Crown got no right to order a good woman to let her childern starve and be left alone just so you can be waited on. You
got some sort of paper saying you can order me about?’ Well, of course he hadn’t. So I said to him, I said, ‘You go find yourself a charwoman and you hire her at a decent wage, and we’ll be having no more of this nonsense. I won’t be your char and I won’t be treated like your sarvant.’” She snorted, and heads bobbed in agreement. “Then I marched back into
my
house and let him see I had better things to do than tend to His High and Holy self.”

“Well, I expect you heard what Sawyl Cale was told he was to do: fix that chimbley for no pay,” said someone in the crush. It sounded like one of the little boys.

“Aye but I heard he fixed it good!” said the postmaster, with a titter. “Heard it from Sawyl himself, I did!”

“So, what happened?” asked Bythell’s wife, from behind him. “You never did tell me the tale.”

The postmaster was only too happy to be prompted. “He waited till the place had been cleaned up, then came up with his old shotgun and shot it up the chimney with no warning and no covers laid. Soot and clinkers and soot dust, and bits of swallow’s nest and a skellington of a rook, everywhere! A waterfall of soot! Sawyl was black as black, and grinning because he recked it was worth it!”

There was a gale of laughter. “I was there. He had t’hire my ald woman to char all over again. It looked like a coal mine in there!” exclaimed old Bran Codd, wheezing with laughter. “Oh, he was madder than a washed cat! He had to pay her handsome to get it cleaned up again!”

“And he had the nerve to ask Sawyl what he was doing, having a shotgun!” said Mrs. Fychan. “And Sawyl says, with a straight face, ‘’Tis for fishing. ’Tis how we get bream hereabouts.’”

The tightly packed crowd roared with laughter again, as Mari wiggled in to the counter to make her purchase. “Half a yard of red flannel, sir, please,” she said. Mr. Bythell measured it out and sold it to her, then said, “Now, imagine this, if you please. The snoop has even been making inquiries about the Protheros!”

Mari blanched, as the others growled or muttered in indignation.

“Oh he has!” Mrs. Awbrey confirmed. “All manner of questions. Who’s got the cottage? Why’ve they got a cottage where there ain’t a farm? Who’s their landlord? Why ain’t they got one? Have there been unusual comings and goings? On and on… and not just to me!”

“Asked the very same of me, he did,” Mr. Bythell confirmed. “Probably to half the village. Has a nasty mind, does that one.”

“Well, and I told him as much. ‘You’ve a nasty mind, Constable Ewynnog,’ I told him straight to his face,” said Mrs. Awbrey. “‘Daffyd Prothero is the hard-workingest, honestest fisherman on the water, like his father, and his father before him, and his fore-fathers back to Owen ap Tudor. Out on the water in every weather, supporting that little bit of a girl all on his own, and evil to him that evil thinks, I say.’ Sent
him
away with a bee in his ear.”

“Well done, Mrs. Awbrey,” Mr. Bythell said, and Mari sighed with relief, seeing that if the village was closing ranks, it was closing the Protheros inside those ranks. The postmaster patted her on the head as if she was a child. “Don’t you worry, Mari. We’ll abide no nastiness about your da.”

She thanked them, and wiggled her way out of the crowd and down to the pub to see about getting her da’s beer keg refilled. And there, in the other site where village news could be gleaned, she heard more stories.

If the man had wanted to put every man’s hand against him, he could not have gone about it more thoroughly. To begin with, he was clearly a city man, and expected things that simply didn’t exist out here. The cottage had clearly unsettled him. He’d asked about gas, about water lines, and with increasing desperation, about other cottages he might get, only to be looked at blankly.

Then he had done the most foolish thing he could have. Constable Ewynnog had begun his tenancy in Clogwyn by putting on airs of importance and ordering people about as soon as he entered the village and discovered the state of the cottage he was being given.

First, on being told there were no other vacant cottages, he had gone up to the “English landlords” at the Manor and tried to evict
others from
their
rightful homes. That had gotten him short shrift up at Gower Manor, where—so Mari heard—he was told in no uncertain terms that no one was being displaced, that he wasn’t wanted nor needed and hadn’t been asked for, and that he could act like a man, hire what needed to be done, and get his own affairs in order. And if he didn’t like it, he could appeal to his superiors for help, for he’d be getting none from the Manor.

Which was interesting, since it meant that the Manor hadn’t been the ones that sent him or sent for him. From the approval with which that tale was told, it looked as if the village had decided that if the Manor was “the English landlords,” the Manor was
their
English landlords and not such bad sorts after all.

He then came marching down to the village and began issuing his orders. But word of gossip had already come flying ahead of him down from the Manor, and he either got snubbed or ignored until he parted with money—and then he got as little help as people could reasonably get by with giving him. He’d wanted those with building experience to come and put a jail cell on the back of the cottage free of charge, since there was little enough room for one inside; those with building experience had told him bluntly that they had families to feed, and were not taking time off their work, and that he could hire it done in Criccieth if he wanted it. Same for the roof repairs. And it appeared that the man—in the midst of the bounty of the sea, the rivers, and the farms—was going to be eating out of tins, tinned food heated over the fire and tea boiled in a kettle, because not a single woman in the village would cook for him, and he seemed to lack all domestic skills. He’d bought all the tinned food that Mr. Bythell had, and had left orders for more.

Small wonder, Mari thought, he looked so sour.

It made her feel warm to know that the villagers included her and her father in their company. She really had not expected that. She and her da were off by themselves so much…

And unlike the tenants of the half dozen farms around the village that belonged to the Manor, she and her da didn’t have the protection of the Manor.

But for now, at least, it looked like they had the protection of the village.

Something told her not to let her guard down, however, and she made sure to keep at least two people between her and the eyes of the constable while she finished her shopping. And when she left the market, she did so by going the long way, so that when she took the path back home, she was out of his sight. Eventually, she knew, she was going to have to talk to the man. From the sound of it he was asking everything about everybody. But she was going to put off that day as long as possible.

To her relief, there were no uncanny things about today, no whispers in her ear, no odd creatures showing themselves. She couldn’t run, carrying the heavy basket as she was, but she certainly kept her steps as brisk as she could without running, and whisked inside the cottage with a heavy sigh of relief. She made the pie, tidied up, put the rest of the shopping away, and did the washing. Last of all, she washed her newly purchased flannel to get the stiffness out of it—red flannel always bled out its dye, so she took advantage of that by washing one of her faded petticoats with the new flannel to freshen the color up a bit.