Home From the Sea: An Elemental Masters Novel Page 25

  But it was that very anger that turned on itself. Because, when you thought about it, a bunch of rich foreign men in London were always sitting in judgment on the Welsh. That was why the constable was here in the first place, and he was making a lot of people angry and unhappy with his meddling and prying. At least this particular lot of men had had the good sense to leave things up to Nan and Sarah, who were not at all meddling, who had treated her like she was a sister, almost, and who, if they had lied to her, had done so to protect her.

  So by the time that Sarah got to the part about them wanting to stay over-winter and help, the anger had burned out. Because, really, there were only two things that mattered. She loved Idwal, and her da, and she needed a way to have both without causing more trouble. You couldn’t rightly say that Nan and Sarah had used her in any way. Nor had they manipulated her. Nor had they entrapped her. And as soon as they possibly could be, they were honest with her. If that didn’t mean they really were friends… well, then Mari didn’t know what she could call a friend.

  She also knew that if Nan and Sarah had the friendship of the Land-Ward, they were very special indeed. And they had pled her case with a very powerful lord, more powerful than just his title indicated, if he was the Master of the Masters. Why, who knew what he would have done if these two had not come here on his errand?

  “I have heard of this Master in Londinium,” Idwal mused. “Oh, not his name, but that he had organized many of the Masters of Logres, and drew them to work together. The Selkies have to do with some of his people. They say he is a good, if somewhat…” he tilted his head to the side. “Somewhat limited man.”

  Nan blinked. “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “That he… he limits his thinking. That to his mind, the important and powerful must always be men of his sort.” Idwal pointed a finger at Nan, who was staring at him. “And you, little maiden, know precisely what I mean by that.”

  Nan was surprised into a laugh. “Yes. Yes I do,” she said, without an explanation.

  Well, this Master in London didn’t really concern Mari at the moment. What did concern her was the situation sitting here at her hearth. So she took a good, long, deep breath. She reminded herself to look at all sides of the thing, and it was no more than a moment’s worth of thought to tell her that her friends were truly her friends, and they were not happy with having had to deceive her for so long.

  “All right then,” she said. “I believe you. So now what does this Lord of yours mean to do about me and Idwal?”

  The relief Nan and Sarah felt was obvious in the sighs they heaved and the way the tension just ran out of their bodies. Even their birds reflected it, going from slicked-down and wary, to fluffed, with wings relaxed.

  “I suspect he’s not entirely happy about this, but since it’s not something that anyone is going to change, he wants to make sure nothing interferes with you two,” Sarah said earnestly. “He understands about the Bargain. I think he’s wary about an Elemental creature being the teacher of an Elemental Master, and I think if he dared, he’d offer you another teacher—”

  “Wait,” Mari commanded, holding up a hand. She turned to Idwal. “Is that a good idea?”

  He pondered the question. “Eventually, yes,” he said, finally. “I know only the oldest of the teachings. There could very well be much that a teacher who is not from an isolated Selch clan living beyond the sea you know could teach you. But I should like to wait until I know you are firm in your understanding.”

  Nan nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “And,” Idwal added, “Since there will be a wedding and a bedding, there will soon be wee ones to consider and work around about.”

  Mari felt herself blushing a little, and hoped it didn’t show. “Well, and there’s another problem,” she said instead. “Here we have that constable looking for trouble. And here we have a strange man coming to live with the Protheros, and no one knows him, nor where he’s from. I thought, before there was a constable and when I just wanted to get it all over with, we could make the man a sailor, but… well we still could, but where would I have met a sailor? And the constable will be wanting to make questions.” She almost felt like crying now. “What should we do? Should we be running away? But where would we go?” She couldn’t imagine, given his attitude, that Gethin would welcome her among the Selch even though now she had a skin of her own.

  Ah but… maybe this great lord would give us a little place of our own, away from constables and all, where we wouldn’t have to explain ourselves to anyone… For a moment, she lost herself in the dream. But then she brought herself down to earth again. Why should this man do anything of the sort for her? No—and besides, she’d be away from her da, never to see him again. No, that was not a good plan.

  “About that… we think we have a plan,” Sarah said, and opened up the sketchbook she had brought with her. “How would you care to be as reluctant a bride as you were when your father told you of the bargain?”

  Mari’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, cautiously.

  “We think that old snoop is never going to believe in you being happy to marry someone who has just popped up out of nowhere, so far as he knows,” Nan explained. “But what if you aren’t happy and it was an arranged marriage? Say… a distant cousin? Someone your father promised you to, and you’re just now finding out?”

  “We can pick somewhere remote enough for him to be from that the snoop won’t be able to discover you don’t have a cousin,” Sarah elaborated. “You can be angry you’re being forced into this.” She looked at Nan. “We can steal a page from Jane Austen, and the cousin gets the cottage when her father dies,” she pointed out.

  Nan laughed. Mari frowned. “I don’t know what you mean,” she pointed out again.

  “It’s just that there is a book we both like, a book that has the situation of a young lady being urged to marry a rather odious cousin because he will inherit the house they are living in when their father dies,” Nan said.

  A distant cousin, and an arranged marriage. It wasn’t unheard of. And since the Protheros had always kept themselves a bit apart from the rest of the village, no one would really know how out of character that would be for Daffyd to force his daughter into anything against her will. Everyone knew inheritance was a tricksy thing, and no one would be surprised to discover that some far-off fellow was claiming the Prothero cottage. Slowly, Mari nodded, then turned to Idwal. “Can you be odious?” she asked.

  “I can imitate Gethin,” he suggested, with a smile.

  She grinned back at him. “That will certainly do!” she agreed. “I believe that is a very good idea!”

  “You say that you know Selch clans in Scotland? Could you come from that part of the world?” Sarah prompted, as Mari got up to fill the kettle and make everyone some tea, since this discussion looked to go on for some time.

  Idwal considered this. “Are the Orkney Islands remote enough that there would be no easy way to say I was not from there?” he asked, finally. “In the days of our bargain, there was much coming and going between the Orkneys and here. Enough so there was even some intermarrying, mostly among the clan-leaders and war-chiefs and Druids and the like. You may have heard of some of this—the war-chief called Lot of Orkney—”

  Nan glanced at Sarah, who mouthed the words King Arthur at her. So Nan nodded, as Sarah did, though Mari looked a little puzzled. “I think the Orkneys are remote enough,” Sarah agreed. “And isolated enough! Even if Constable Ewynnog gets suspicious, first he’d have to get his superiors to enquire up in Scotland—”

  “Which is not very likely, as they seem inclined to make him do everything on his own—” put in Nan.

  “Then they’d have to find someone in the police service stationed in the Orkneys to ask about Idwal—”

  “And if my experience of the Scots is anything to go on,” Nan said with a twinkle, “They’re not terribly likely to be willing to cooperate with some busy-body Englishman. A
nd to them, a Welshman is the same as an Englishman.”

  “And then the information has to get back down here, and even if he can’t find anyone who knows you, it doesn’t prove anything.” Sarah accepted the cup of tea from Mari with murmured thanks.

  “Why the Orkneys?” Nan asked, accepting her cup in turn. “And thank you, that’s lovely.”

  Idwal laughed, and smiled broadly. “Because my clan knows a Selkie clan there, I have actually lived there long enough to describe where I was accurately, I’ve studied with their Master, and I can fair well imitate the accent. ’Tis not unlike the Cymric.” He cleared his throat, and what followed was in English, and a little slower, and a little more sing-song than the Welsh he had been speaking. “We doon speak Gaelic at hoom. Gaelic, ye ken, is mo-ore the west coast; people think because we be in the noorth we speak it as weel, boot up until James, ye ken, what we spook was Norn.”

  “Brilliant!” said Grey, and Neville flapped his wings in agreement. Idwal bowed to the birds.

  “I can keep to that from sunup to sundown,” he said, chuckling.

  “You’ll only have to do it when others are about,” said Mari happily. “And, I suppose, pretend you don’t speak Cymric at all. I do understand English; I learned it in dame school, though not all that well. I didn’t see any need for it, since it was just me and da most of the time.”

  “And knowing you, what you didn’t see a need for, you stubbornly refused to learn,” Idwal replied, gently chiding. Nan got the feeling this related to something that had occurred between them—probably having to do with Mari’s magic studies—that she wasn’t privy to. From the way Mari blushed, she was pretty sure she was right.

  “But that’s all to the good now,” Sarah pointed out. “First, she has this unwelcome husband thrust on her, second, he doesn’t even speak her language, and third, he’s not a very nice person. Constable Ewynnog isn’t going to question anything at that point, not the way he would if this beloved betrothed suddenly pops up out of nowhere.” Then she snorted. “He probably will feel very superior, however, and hold forth about the barbarity of arranged marriages to anyone who will listen.”

  “Let him,” Mari said dismissively, then beamed at all of them and all but clapped her hands with glee. “This gives you another reason to keep visiting me all winter, at least so far as the constable is concerned—if you are my friends, wouldn’t you want to be sure that I am not left too much alone with this man I do not like?”

  Nan blinked. “Great Harry’s ghost, you’re right! Good idea, Mari!”

  Mari’s eyes sparkled. “This is so much of a better solution than saying he is a sailor who Da knows!”

  Sarah nodded. “I’m glad you think so. Nan and I really worked very hard to think of a solution that would make Constable Ewynnog leave you alone.”

  Idwal chuckled again. “Well,” he said, “The weather will do that soon enough. I do not think even one so deluded as he is likely to wish to spend his time in cold rain, sleet, and snow, just to watch the cottage.” He turned to Mari. “I will be going out with Daffyd come winter, do not fear. Nothing will happen to him while I am with him, and as long as I—and possibly even some of the others—are about, he will make his catch, and be home and safe quickly. In fact, he may be out after breakfast and back at luncheon.”

  Mari bit her lip. “Well, and while I love my da… I am not altogether sure I wish to see that much of him…”

  That got a laugh even from the birds.

  Daffyd Prothero was enthusiastic about this new plan, as was Rhodri. Daffyd, probably because it was going to allow him to use his acting skills, which he always enjoyed, and because he would be tweaking the nose of the constable, who he had come to despise. And Rhodri approved not so much because of the plan itself as the fact it meant Nan would still be coming to the cottage on the shore. Nan still had mixed feelings about that part, although she was getting fonder of Rhodri all the time. Nevertheless, the main thing was to make sure that they created their little plot as tightly as they could, the better to foil the constable.

  “So…” Daffyd rubbed his hands together. “The first thing I must do is arrange the reading of the banns.” He counted on his fingers. “We’ve missed the first and second Sunday of September, so two readings of the banns in September, and one in October, and we can be having the wedding the second Sunday of October.” It didn’t seem to concern him that Idwal hadn’t actually asked if he could be wed to Mari, but perhaps the main thing on his mind, understandably enough, was the Bargain, and the fact that Mari was willing to take any of the Selch before winter came. Then his brow creased with a sudden concern. “Idwal, you can cross over a church threshold… ?”

  Idwal laughed. “Aye, no fear of that.”

  Daffyd relaxed. “Well then! And with these two kind misses, we have our two witnesses, though doubtless that pesky constable will be in attendance.”

  “Da, you don’t think he’d object when the banns are read, do you?” Mari asked in sudden alarm.

  “He has no grounds,” Sarah reminded her. “And he won’t have time to dig up any. And anyway… well, if we must, we’ll appeal to Lord Alderscroft.”

  “That would be chancy,” Daffyd brooded. “Then the blackguard would be all over questioning why his lordship got himself mired in such a little doing. No, if he decides to snoop even further, I think we’ll have to depend on authorities seeing no reason to accommodate one little interfering constable in a tiny town in Wales.”

  “Daffyd, you are getting a bit ahead of yourself,” Nan corrected him. “The very first thing that must happen is that Idwal must come openly into Clogwyn and come looking for you.”

  Daffyd snapped his fingers in annoyance. “True enough. And just how is that to happen? He can’t walk up from the beach, nor swim in on the tide!”

  “Ah now, you just leave that to us,” Sarah said. “You’ll see. We want you to be genuinely surprised. Just make sure you’re in Clogwyn tomorrow afternoon.”

  The next afternoon, one of the bigger fishing boats, one with a full crew of four, came sailing into Clogwyn harbor. It put in at the shore, where a rough and surly fellow asked in oddly accented English where he could find Daffyd Prothero. Since Daffyd was selling part of his catch not thirty feet away, there were plenty of people who could point him in the right direction.

  Daffyd appeared surprised to see this man, but oddly, also appeared to know him. Daffyd took the stranger into his little coracle—which could hold two, though only just—and they sailed down the coast toward the cottage.

  This caused enough of a to-do that several of the locals felt the need to question the sailors before they put out again.

  “We’re from Criccieth,” the sailors said, and when offered a drink before they left “to stave off the chill on the water,” they proved to be willing to answer more questions. No, they didn’t know who the fellow was; he’d turned up at the docks, looking for a passage to Clogwyn, and paid well for it. Who had he said he was? Oh, well that was different, he said he was kin to Daffyd Prothero, and had business with him. No, he hadn’t said anything else, a close-mouthed fellow he was, but he couldn’t speak a word of Welsh, nothing but that sing-song English, which was nothing like anything they had ever heard before.

  And there was Constable Ewynnog, hard-eyed, frowning, taking notes in a little book.

  There wasn’t much more that the fishermen could add, and so they sailed out of the harbor leaving behind them mostly questions and a severely vexed constable.

  Some of those got answered the next day, when the both of them, Daffyd and the stranger together, turned up at the minister’s house. And when they left, it wasn’t a minute before Fflur Morris, the minister’s wife, came flying out of the house and down to the post office and store to spread the gossip.

  “Oh, such a to-do!” she said, quite out of breath, as every woman that was at the store and every woman that had seen her run there gathered about her. “Can you believe it! The banns are to b
e posted for Mari Prothero and that stranger!”

  The babble of “What?” and “Why!” filled the store until Fflur got them all to hush so she could speak.

  “Now, this is all that I know, but Daffyd was going on about how Mari would be there and she would be wed or she’d be the worse for it! The stranger—his name is Idwal Drever, have you ever heard the like!—is from Stromness in the Orkney Isles. He’s Daffyd’s cousin, and he’s to have the cottage when Daffyd dies. Mari won’t get it, and that’s a shame and a disgrace, to turn the poor girl out of her own home!”

  There was a great deal of agreeing with that very thing, that it was a hard thing for a girl to be sent out and some stranger no one knew to get what she should inherit. When all that died away, Fflur went on.

  “Now Daffyd wrote to this fellow, it seems, and offered to wed Mari to him, so that he’d have a civilized wife and not some wild thing, and Mari would still be able to stay in her own home. And the fellow agreed. And so he’s here to wed Mari!”

  “And what’s Mari to think of this, then?” someone asked.

  “From the bit that Daffyd said, and his grumbling about serpent’s teeth, I do think she’s none too pleased,” Fflur declared.

  So excited were all the women that they never even noticed that once again the constable was at the back of the crowd, his frown deepening, still taking notes.

  And so roused was the village by this unexpected excitement that no one paid any mind when he pedaled off on his new bicycle, heading towards Criccieth.

  14

  IT was the first Sunday in October, and a sullen Mari Prothero stood beside her father and the stranger as the banns were read in church for the last time. It was a small, plain, stone building, with a small, plain altar covered only with a white cloth, a pair of candles, and the Bible. This was only proper for a Methodist chapel. Sunlight streamed in the small windows, but Mari’s face looked like a storm about to break.