Band of Angel by Julia Gregson Page A

and white facebecoming hot and swollen against her sister’s. After a while Eliza said, “Is it Mother still? I still think you blame yourself.”
    “Partly. I was hopeless.”
    “Catherine, it was not your fault. Please try to forgive yourself. I miss her so much, too,” said Eliza, still sobbing, “but is there nothing I can say that would make you change your mind?”
    “No, it’s done now,” replied Catherine quietly. “Try not to think of it as such a big thing. Men do it all the time, they travel, they study, and the world does not fall apart around them.”
    “But how will you get to Pwllheli?” asked Eliza, naming the town where the mail coach stopped.
    “I’m not going that way,” said Catherine. “I’m going with the drovers.”
    “The drovers! No Catherine, you can’t! What will you tell Father? That you’re running away with Deio? He’ll murder you both when you get back.”
    “I’m not running away with Deio,” said Catherine furiously. “I’ve wanted to do that journey all my life, and I’m tired of being ignorant. I’m tired of being bored. You must make Father see that.”
    “
I
must make Father see!” Eliza was as close to rage as she ever came. “Why me?”
    “Because I can’t reach him. He’ll be harvesting until late tonight.”
    “What?” Horror dawned on Eliza’s face. “What are you talking about?”
    Catherine, with shaking hands, looked at the watch around her neck. The watch her mother had given her, which had marked off years of filling in the quiet periods of time between eating and dressing and going to bed. “Tonight. There’s a party at Pantyporthman. We’ll leave after that.”
    Her sister shook her head and wept.
    Hours later, as she embraced her shivering sister on the stairs and saw again the fright on her face, she felt for the second time in her life like a murderess.
    The moon was high that night. The drovers were careful to timetheir leaving to coincide with it, and it was almost as light as day. In its light the distant mountains shone pale blue and ghostly, and the sea broke like liquid silver. She stood in the shadows outside the kitchen door. Her father and the men were out there somewhere in the Nant Field, near the river. She could see the glow of their lanterns in the distance, bobbing up as the rows of corn lay down at their approach. They would finish soon, sit and have an ale together, and talk and laugh in a way she never heard Father laugh inside this house. She thought of him again, and how they had failed each other; how, in place of that warm love both had once felt, there was now a huge baffled blankness. Once she was gone he would not send for her; she would almost bet on it. He would let her slip through his fingers as he had allowed Mother to do, and a part of them both would die off, and he, too proud to acknowledge the hurt, would go on plowing and planting, and speaking in his secret silly voices to the animals that never let him down.
    She stopped at the end of the drive where the two roads forked. She made herself feel the agony of turning around and looking at Carreg Plâs for what felt like the last time. The shadows of two large pine trees fell against the L-shaped house. The moonlight left reflections in the upstairs windows. “Good-bye, Mama,” she whispered, imagining her still asleep behind the third window on the right. “Wish me luck.”

Chapter 13

    As Catherine passed the two massive stones at the end of the drive and took the lane leading toward Pantyporthman, she could hardly breathe. She tried to think only of Deio and of the journey ahead—the two fixed points in her world.
    From the high hedge beside the road came a sudden scream, followed after an interval by another, then another, as some nighttime creature murdered one of its fellows by slow degrees. The sound made her pant with fear. She had never walked alone at night before, and did not know that time when the dark is alive with the sounds of