Court of Foxes by Christianna Brand Page B

no stolen, town-accustomed horse would have been sure-footed enough) and for the night work on the high toby. Now in daylight, she could catch glimpses of the sentries, one at each end of the valley on the mountain tops above them; from the forests at their lower slopes came the voices of men and the barking of dogs, out hunting; in the far away valley, old men stood patiently fishing. Above in the clear September sky kite and kestrel wheeled and hovered, lazily, effortless: from some improvised farm came the gentle lowing of dairy cows, the cluck of chickens, the grunting of pigs. Dio y Diawl sat out in the sunshine, perched upon a boulder surrounded by a small group of men, holding a large sheet of paper and all earnestly talking. Everyone seems occupied and busy, thought Gilda, as though in some perfectly normal community; but the cows had been driven off by night, no doubt, from a neighbouring farmyard by men with a nice fat hen tucked under each arm for good measure, or a squealing piglet, hurriedly hushed; and the clothes the women washed had come from plundered coaches and the sportsmen, not a doubt of it, were poaching woods and rivers, an offence punishable by long imprisonment. And the paper would be a rough, home-drawn map of some cutting or crossroads where in the near future rich cargo was due to pass by…
    A red-headed young woman approached, bobbed her a curtsey and offered: ‘Would you wish for a drink of milk, Madam? Fresh drawn it is from the cow.’
    She had to strain her ears to catch the words in their heavily inflected south Welsh accent, very different from the more familiar sing-song of the north as she had heard it mimicked upon the London stage. She accepted the milk, sat down on the moss beneath a little tree, growing up, crooked and spindly, between two rocks. The girl sat at her feet, her rough brown legs curled up under her. ‘You speak English then?’
    ‘I was in service at Lampeter, Madam, with a lady who taught me the English. But Y Cadno set about her carriage one day and she was killed by a stray ball; if the women wish to be safe, they should stay in the coaches. And so I came back with them here.’ She nodded to where a group sat with Dio the Devil. ‘My man’s over there; Tom the Scar they call him.’
    ‘Your mistress killed?’ said Gilda, horrified, ‘—and you came away with her murderers?’
    The girl shrugged. ‘What was I to do? I ran and was caught — by this same Twm, as we say the name here. And from struggling he turned to kissing and from kissing to something more; and so since he had made me his woman, I could but go with him.’ She laughed. ‘I told you — the women should stay in the coaches if they wish to be safe.’ She dismissed the subject. ‘My name is Jenny, my lady: Jenny Coch, they call me, which is to say Jenny the Red, because of my hair.’
    To learn a little Welsh would occupy her time and might yet come in useful. ‘What colour would you call my hair?’
    ‘Your hair — ah, Madam, no hair is like yours that I ever have seen. It is the true Melyn Mair, the marigold.’
    ‘And so they call me: Marigelda or Marigold. Well, and so tell me another Welsh word, Jenny—’
    ‘I will tell you the loveliest word in Welsh or in any other language, my lady. It is Cariad.’
    ‘Which means Dearest. You forget,’ said Gilda, not without some bitterness, ‘that I have a Welsh husband.’ And she wondered if he would ever call her Cariad again; and doubted it. Well, what do I care? I know him now and he knows me. Let him accept, she thought, that she was in love with his brother, let him put her aside and be done with it. He wanted my body, that was all; well, that he has had and shall have no more. For the rest, rich or poor, I don’t care; I’ve had little enough amusement out of being a titled lady of wealth…
    He came to her that afternoon as she sat down at the common table with its long centre-piece of high-piled treasures of the gang;