Band of Angel by Julia Gregson Page B

animals mating, dying, and being born, and a human form becomes a blundering shadow.
    She dashed along in a stumbling run for fifty yards or so and then stopped. From across the fields, bursts of music and laughter were coming from the drovers’ house. She went down the track, past the pond and barns and fields of waiting cattle, toward the brightly lit house. Now she could hear the sounds of two men playing the fiddle together, trying to outdo each other in speed and dexterity. A flute joined in and there were shouts of “Come on there, Lewis!” and shrieks of laughter. She’d planned to test her disguise by wandering through the merrymakers, but her nerve failed her at the last minute and she stood, crouched, outside the kitchen window.
    Raising her eyes above the cracked window frame, she saw several barrels of ale in the fireplace and a table crammed with food: raised pies, a joint of beef, fruit jellies, a big Cut-and-Come-Again cake. It was a little while before she could see Deio. The broad back of Ben Challoner, the local wheelwright, who was wolfing down ahuge plate of meat as if it were the last he would see that year, was wedged in most of the window. In a tall chair beside the fire, bald head gleaming in the lamplight, was Mr. Roger Jones who ran the general store at Aberdaron.
    It saddened Catherine to see how much jollier these people looked among their own. When Mr. Jones delivered to Carreg Plâs on Tuesdays, he backed from their door, almost incoherent with good manners and excuse-me-misses. Now, red and roaring, he was hollering for Lewis Jones, who was sitting on the settle, to get on and do his party piece. Lewis had a cat on his knee and its tail in his mouth. Lewis’s eyes rolled soulfully. He squeezed the cat like a bagpipe, making it spit and yowl. Shrieks of “Stop it, you brute!” from the women, and fresh roars of laughter. The fiddlers, capering and making foolish faces, keeping pace. Meg Jones bent over and pretended to clout her husband upon the forehead and he pinched her on the bosom and said in a squeaky voice, “Oh Meg, my darling, my life,” then pulled her on his knee and kissed her.
    At the end of the kitchen, the dancers had rolled back a rush mat. Then Deio stood up, his shadow flying against the wall. He was dancing, a boy again, a beautiful heathen boy, lean and brown in the lamplight. He turned and looked straight toward her. She shrank back into the bushes, but he hadn’t seen her. He looked again and, with no expression in his eyes that she could read, pulled a girl from the crowd—quite a pretty girl with dark hair and a round, good-natured face—who Catherine vaguely recognized as Mary Jones from Sunday school. Catherine watched her face light up, saw his hand around her waist tighten as he led her toward the dancers. When the music stopped, he swooped down upon the girl. He lightly kissed her and lightly let her go. Then she saw him lift Mary onto the windowsill, as if she were a feather, and kiss her again. Harder this time.
    Catherine wanted to smack his smiling face, and the girl’s. Then she began to shiver and wrapped her own arms around herself for comfort. This was nonsense, she told herself he was a childhood friend, her companion for the journey. He could play the young stag with whomever he liked. She had not lied to Eliza. That moment—the business in the fishing hut when she had let herself go(for so she thought of it, and even in the dark it made her face burn with shame)—had been nothing more than a regrettable, even wicked, weakness on her part.
    He was walking across the kitchen now, another girl smiling like an idiot beside him. Her friend was gone. In his place, a handsome, shrewd young man, with a wary look in his eyes and his arms around any girl he liked. There was a kind of hardness now in those green eyes, a deliberate, even studied, coolness in his manner that both frightened her and set her free.
    The rowdy blare of voices faded suddenly to