Home From the Sea: An Elemental Masters Novel Read online

  “You really think that’s it, Da?” she asked, tilting hot water into the stone sink, and starting in on the plates.

  “What else would it be, I’m asking?” he replied with a derisive sniff. “Worst thing we’ve ever had happen in Clogwyn was when Mrs. Bevan’s dog stole them sausages—well, there’s the usual dust-up at the pub every now and again, but I wouldn’t call that enough for to station a constable here.”

  “Well then, where will they be putting him? Violet Cottage?” Violet Cottage had been the home to Mrs. Ithell the elder before she’d got pneumonia and died in the winter. Now it was empty. It was one of the smallest cottages in the village and one of the meanest. Mrs. Ithell had been a penny-pincher, and had not put a shilling into the repair of her place that she didn’t absolutely have to, and never mind improvements. Like many of the cottages in the village, it wasn’t freehold, it was rented, and belonged to the Manor. Nevertheless, with the rent being so cheap, the cottage had been hotly contested over. Now perhaps the mystery of why there had been no tenant found was solved.

  “Likely,” Daffyd replied, and sniggered. “Short of finding someone willing to rent him a room, or having him stay up at Criccieth or thereabouts, it’s the only choice he’ll have. And bad luck to him already. Roof’s leaking, I hear tell, and chimney needs cleaning so bad the fireplace sends most of the smoke into the room, and if there’s one mouse in there, there’s likely to be a hundred. If he’s some city man, used to laid-on gas and piped-in water, he’ll be wishing he was back at home before he’s there an hour.”

  Probably less than that, Mari thought. She considered the villagers. Would there be anyone there willing to help him? Fix his leaks, clean his chimney, tell him who had the best rat-catching ferrets?

  Well… yes. Some would. For the money, if naught else. And some to prove that they were in no way in sympathy with the striking miners. But this was likely to divide the village soon enough, unless the fellow somehow managed to alienate everyone.

  Which was possible, if he came in demanding things and acting as if he suspected everyone. Then everyone would be up in arms, giving him no welcome at all. He’d have to hire everything done from Criccieth.

  Or if he’s helpful and pleasant, they might all decide he’s a good sort and warm up to him… “Da, there’s no telling. He might be a good enough fellow,” she ventured. “This might be a good thing.”

  Once again her father sniffed. “And I might be able to fly if I jump off the roof. One’s as likely as the other.”

  She just didn’t have a response for that. “Well… tomorrow’s market day. I’ll be finding all about it then. And twice as much that’s made up of whole cloth.” She put the dishes in their places, covered the pie and the bread, and made all straight, then returned to the fire. “Was there anything you’d be wanting?”

  He shook his head. The windows were rapidly darkening, the only way that you could tell the sun was going down in this storm. “Nothing worth spending money on.”

  He picked up the net she’d been mending, and took up where she’d left off. She took up her knitting; he always needed socks. They busied themselves, talking of commonplaces, until the fire grew too low to see by. Then they took themselves to bed; she climbing up the ladder to the loft and he to the bedroom. She stripped to her shift, and climbed under the blankets and nestled into the featherbed. The bed soon warmed to her body, and she relaxed. She listened drowsily to the wind slowly die away, and tried not to listen to the other voices she heard… and finally slept.

  Morning dawned clear and bright, and they both breakfasted heartily on the rest of the pie and toasted bread and tea. He hurried down to his boat, while she put things to rights, then took the path to Clogwyn.

  Their little cottage stood far off by itself, within sight of the village (or at least of the church steeple), but it was a good brisk half hour walk to the village itself. The cottage was an oddity; the only other dwellings that stood this far away from a village or town were those that belonged to great landowners, for the use of their tenants, or farmhouses. But the Prothero cottage, which had been in the family for many years, had no land to speak of, just enough of a garden to supply most of what she and her da needed and a henhouse that was empty now. No use trying to keep chickens without a dog; foxes and stoats would have them in no time, and until they found a dog that fancied fish instead of meat, a dog would just be another mouth to feed. It was easier just to trade for eggs. They had a cat, so to speak. It was an aloof beast, kept to itself, slunk in and hunted the cottage and slunk back out again. The only time it stayed inside was in the worst of weather, hiding under a chair or in the corner of the hearth, and running off as soon as the door was opened. It would come if she offered it fish, but ate with one suspicious eye on her, bolting the food as fast as it could. She wondered what had made it so wary, because neither she nor her father had ever so much as shied a stone at it. It was as if they were some terrible predators, and the cat was waiting for them to pounce on it and eat it.

  The morning was as bright and beautiful and mild as if the sea had never dreamed of throwing a tantrum yesterday. Her way was clear enough, with the village visible along the curve of the coast, on their hill up ahead. The church tower rose up above the other gray-slate roofs like a hen above her brood, beneath a cloudless sky. The air was lovely, almost intoxicating.

  And as for the sea, it was so calm that the little wavelets washing the shore barely made a sound. Only the debris of the storm told the whole truth; she’d be harvesting all those mounds of seaweed this afternoon and for several to come. She would pick out the laver to make God’s own gift to the poor Welshman, laver-bread, and samphire for eating like salad. “Sea lettuce,” her da called it. Kelp would be dried and burned and turned into the garden soil. There was driftwood too, and there might be sea-coal, the coal that washed out of the cliff rocks and got tumbled in to shore after such storms. Sometimes there were wrecks close to this part of the shore; the Lifeboat Service down the coast at Criccieth was there for a good reason. But tragic though a wreck might be, sometimes salvage came out of it. There’d been a wreck when her da was a lad that the village still talked about, when so many yards of red flannel came in to shore that every woman in the village had a half dozen red petticoats made of it and the men had as many shirts and nightshirts.

  The path to the village was just off the shingle, beaten into the grass. There was a road proper to the village, further inland, but she saw no sense in traipsing across fields and over hedges and stiles just to get to it when there was a perfectly good path right here. The sheep to her right looked none the worse for the storm, with their lambs bumbling about and occasionally breaking into the incomprehensible skips and frisking that lambs were prone to do. On a winter morning, the trek was misery, and she was generally frozen clear through by the time she reached the village, but on a morning like today, she almost wished it took longer.

  She swung her basket and sang as she walked, feeling a little like frisking herself. Was there anything better than a spring morning, with the air washed clean, and the sea just lapping at the shore?

  She had most of the string of herring with her, and the household money under the napkin in her basket, which would go for things she could not get with barter. Clogwyn hadn’t anything more than three places you could get things regular—a little bit of a store that also held the post office, the pub, and the village baker. So the weekly market was important to everyone hereabouts. A few enterprising souls even sent a clerk with a cart of goods over from Criccieth once a month to add to the stalls in the market—and now that it was spring, there were traveling peddlers known to turn up unexpectedly, and tinkers and even gypsies. The thought made her move a little faster. Not that she’d buy anything, but oh, how she loved to look!

  But once she reached the marketplace, she sensed the change in peoples’ moods in the tone of the talk; from a distance, the village sounded like a disturbed hive. The closer she got, the more apparent
it became that there was one topic of conversation uppermost, and no one was happy about it.

  In fact, as soon as she put herself close enough to talk to, she was drawn into it. The entire village was abuzz with gossip over the coming of this constable. That wasn’t entirely surprising, considering it was the biggest bit of news to affect the whole village in a long while, but she was a little taken aback by the amount of resentment most people were showing. It was as if they and her da were all of the same mind about it.

  “And what need have we of a constable, I’m asking you?” complained stout Mrs. Awbrey in her milk-and-egg stall, as she examined herring to trade for a dozen eggs. “Treating us like we was criminals! Shame to them as thinks we can’t take care of our own!”

  “I don’t understand it either,” Mari agreed. “I mean, except when it was tramping people, nobody’s ever stole a thing. Well, leave aside apples and maybe a pie…”

  “Yes, and I caught that young limb of Satan Aled Hulme red-handed, and believe me, he’d have wished I was a constable before I was done with him,” Mrs. Awbrey said heatedly, and took as long over the tale of how she had chased the lad and given him a right tanning as she had in choosing her fish. Mari had heard it all before, of course, since Mrs. Awbrey was likely to bring it up at least once a month or so—but this time the round-faced farming wife ended it differently. “But what if there’d been a constable here?” she demanded. “The boy could have been locked up—or worse! I’ve heard of boys transported to Australia for taking a handkerchief, let alone for stealing an apple pie!”

  “That was a long time ago, Mrs. Awbrey,” Mari reminded her. “They don’t do that now.” But as she moved on to her next purchase, she wondered what the penalty would have been.

  “Pa says he’ll be here to spy on us,” whispered Braith Wyn, the village beauty, as the two girls both looked over every bit of frippery on a ribbon-dealer’s little cart, and Braith, predictably, selected red ribbons and a bunch of artificial cherries for a new hat. Braith was always making new hats. “Pa says the landlords don’t trust any of us, and think we’re all anarchists.” Braith might have been so pretty that every boy in the village and more married men than admitted it cast longing looks after her when she passed, but she had not let that go to her head except in the matter of a little vanity. She loved hats. She had even learned how to braid straw so she could make more. And she was so pretty that no one was likely to tell her how silly and overdone they were because she always looked so happy when she wore one.

  Since that echoed what Mari’s da had said, she nodded. “Well…” she replied. “They never have. But that’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it is!” Braith agreed, with a sniff. “Who’d want to be an anarchist? Anarchists have no money.” Braith was a practical girl; penniless anarchists might be romantic, but romance bought no ribbons.

  “I don’t think the landlords care…” Mari replied, doubtfully. “I don’t believe they even think about it, they just say ‘The Welsh are all together,’ and have done. Honestly, I don’t know where they think we’d have time to be anarchists. Who’d do the milking and the fishing if everyone was running about being anarchists?” She really wasn’t at all sure what an anarchist was. The few times she had seen a newspaper and they had printed anything about anarchists, they all seemed to be bearded and throwing bombs. There were plenty of fellows with beards about here, but she hadn’t the faintest idea where any of them would find a bomb.

  Braith agreed, and they returned to the choosing of ribbons. Well, Mari advised; Braith was the one that did the buying.

  Acquiring a quart of lamp-oil at the tiny store brought yet another complaint about the new constable. “Getting Violet Cottage, and rent free!” sniffed the postmaster, Andres Bythell, holding forth not just to Mari, but to a willing audience here to buy his goods or pick up mail. “Well, they’ll not be getting free labor for the fixing of it, I can tell you that. And he’ll not be putting a jail cell in my post office! I’ve barely enough room here to move as it is!”

  Which last was true enough; Bythell’s little store was crammed full of the sorts of things that people might need in a little village, when they couldn’t make the journey downcoast to the town, and it was only one small room. The rest of the building was the house where he and his family lived.

  “And I wouldn’t be having someone who had to be locked up anywhere next or nigh the girls, either!” the postmaster continued, indignantly, his chest puffing out at the mere thought. “I won’t have a drunk keeping us up at night, I won’t have a gypsy getting a look at what he can steal, and I won’t have some wandering laborer putting his eyes all over my wife and daughters. He can put a cell in Violet Cottage, that’s what he can do, and that damned squire of a landlord up the hill can complain about the alterations to whoever had the daft notion of sending him here.”

  One thing was certain. This man was not going to find a warm welcome in Clogwyn.

  By the time she finished her purchases and bartering, it looked to Mari as if there wasn’t a single person in the entire village that wanted the man there. A great deal of this was the enormous resentment people had that he was going to get the vacant cottage rent-free. This was no small thing; there were no empty cottages in the village proper, which meant if a young couple got married, they’d have to move in with one or the other set of parents, see if there was a cottage farther away for rent, or somehow come up with the enormous amount of money it would take to build a new home themselves. There were at least three such courting couples that she knew of, who had been looking forward—with guilt, perhaps, but looking forward anyway—to the day when Violet Cottage would be empty. To have it snatched out from under them—for free!—was enough to engender plenty of anger. And not just in the couples themselves, but in their parents and in their friends.

  She wondered, as she picked her way along the trace of a path in the grass just above the shore, how badly the Protheros were going to stand out from the rest of the village. Unlike most people hereabouts—or at least the ones who were not actually landholding farmers—she and her da owned their cottage rather than renting it from the owners of Gower Manor.

  She had never actually seen the family nor the Manor; having no reason to pay rent, there was never any reason to go there. They were always referred to as the “English landlords,” although as far as Mari knew, the family had been there for at least five or six generations. Still, the divide between cottagers and landlord was enormous, and not getting any narrower. I wonder if that’s who is behind bringing the constable, she thought. It was logical. The monied folk at the Manor were also the targets of village resentment, for raising the rents, for not doing repairs. Were they taking an alarm from the mine-owners and reading resentment as the prelude to rebellion?

  The Prothero cottage had been in the family since time out of mind. Yet it wasn’t a farm. And it was set far apart from the village. They were different. The village was used to the Protheros being different, but they’d been different for generations. Would the constable see that as suspicious? Would he think, because their house was set apart, that they were holding anarchist meetings there? Would he start enquiring about how they got their money, why they were so prosperous, and think they were thieves or worse?

  “And what are you all a-pother about, Mari Prothero?” a voice called to her from just behind her on the path.

  Mari didn’t freeze, quite—but she didn’t turn to look at the speaker, either. The female voice was melodious, too melodious, really. Just like the little she-thing yesterday.

  She hadn’t seen anyone until the voice spoke to her. And it was coming from the verge of a little pond beside the path.

  This wasn’t one of the villagers, nor one of the farmer’s daughters, nor anyone human at all. It was one of those creatures. And she didn’t want to turn to see what kind, though she had a guess it was one of the Gwragedd Annwn. Two uncanny things in two days! It had been months since the last vision, but now two
in two days! If I ignore it, it will go away, she told herself fiercely. I am not going mad. I am not going mad!

  Behind her, she heard a peal of laughter.

  “Pretending I’m not here won’t make me go away,” the voice called after her. “Just wait. You’ll be learning the truth soon. Soon enough.”

  She shivered and hurried her steps, fixing her gaze on the cottage and its promise of safety; the beautiful, bright, sunny day no longer seemed so welcoming. Had that been a promise?

  Or a threat?

  It was a beautiful spring afternoon in London, with enough of a breeze to carry away the stink of the city and the warring smells of the harbor. The ship from France had docked, and it had been a crowded passage. The dock was full of people coming to welcome those just off it, complicated by porters and passengers disembarking.

  Two young ladies coming down the gangplank were just enough different from the crush of similar young ladies before them that more than one eye fastened on them. It was not that they were pretty—although they were, or rather, the smaller of the two was definitely pretty in the conventional sense, though the taller was what might be described as “handsome.” It might have been their outfits; both wore gowns of brown and gray that were rugged, travel-worthy Rational Dress rather than the constricting, colorful, and rather impractical gowns of the girls who had clearly traveled across the Channel in the luxurious salons. Both had sensible little hats rather than Ascot-worthy confections. But it was probably their laughter that attracted the eye once the ear had been caught; it rang out above the babble of the crowd, honest, clear, and happy. Not stifled little titters, gasping giggles, or wheezy little sounds that had a hint of sadness about them. People turned at the sound, looked, and smiled involuntarily. Both of them beamed answering smiles as if they considered anyone and everyone a potential friend.