A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees

by Clare Dudman

  The cows are now bellowing in triumph. One of them has managed to demolish a piece of the earth wall and is forcing her way through to the outside. Behind her the cows are milling about, pushing and mounting each other in their anxiety to escape. Silas and Edwyn wade as quickly as they can but progress is difficult. They keep slipping over, struggling to get up and then falling over again. At last Silas manages to find a piece of ground more solid than the rest and staggers forward. A few of them have escaped and are making for the northwest where the ground is higher and firmer, but the rest are slower and more timorous. He shouts at them and they back away, then with his spade he begins to dig, one small plunge and then another. The mud is wet and heavy; it is as much as he can do to lift each small spadeful. Soon Edwyn joins him and they work together silently, repairing one section of the wall and then the next.

  At last they rest, straighten their backs and groan.

  ‘Good. We’ve done well, Silas. That should keep them safe for now.’

  ‘But we’d better keep a watch.’

  Edwyn looks back at their work. ‘No, it’ll hold – better to give chase to the rest.’

  Silas shakes his head. ‘I’m telling you, we’d better keep a watch. Better to keep an eye on what we’ve still got.’

  Edwyn regards him steadily.

  ‘It’s easy to lose track of them if you can’t see them.’ Damn the man, why does he just keep staring, making him talk, making him give excuses. ‘You think it’s all right, but it’s not.’

  ‘The sheep?’ Edwyn smiles.

  Silas nods.

  ‘Those damned sheep, eh? Nothing but trouble. In the end they didn’t matter, did they?’

  But they did. He didn’t look after them. He let them go. He let everyone down. A sob rises so suddenly to his throat he can’t hold it in.

  ‘Do you think anyone cares about a few sheep now, Silas?’

  He can’t answer.

  ‘No. It’s not the sheep that matters, ffrind, but this.’ He spreads his arms. ‘This country, this place, our new Wales.’

  ‘But without the sheep we almost lost everything. Everything!’

  ‘No, without you all would have been lost. You, Silas. Don’t you see?’

  Silas shakes his head. And Edwyn smiles. ‘Come, brawd.’

  Their horses are sinking into the mud. Silas and Edwyn pull at their reins but their struggling just sends them deeper. Eventually they find some stones and slowly make a path for the horses to clamber out, neighing and snorting, onto firmer ground to the north. The cows are long gone. There are distant bellows but nothing close. After he has allowed his horse to drink, Edwyn eases himself onto its back.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Going after them, of course. If we’re quick we might get to them before the Indians do.’ He looks down at Silas. ‘Are you coming? It won’t take long, I promise.’ He holds out his arm, smiles and then trots away. It is too cold and wet to think. Silas mounts his horse and allows it to follow.

  The horses’ backs are laced with rain. It dribbles down their necks and onto the blanket underneath the saddle. Silas sniffs. He has always liked the smell of a wet animal. He pats the horse and whispers into the animal’s ear, ‘Good boy’. They follow the mess of footprints up onto the higher ground and then out of the valley into the barren plain above. It is raining here too but more gently. The horses’ hooves make a ringing sound on the ground as if they are treading on the skin of a taut drum. Silas has the impression that they are treading on something hollow and he leans forward, urging the horse to be careful. The cows’ tracks peter out and soon they have to get down from their horses to examine the ground. Edwyn puts his ear to the ground as they have seen the Indians do but reports that he can hear nothing.

  ‘Maybe we should be getting back,’ Silas says, looking around them. The rain has stopped and it is getting dark, the sun close to setting, and it is still very cold with the wind whipping their faces.

  ‘Just a little longer. Look, I think I see something moving over there.’ Edwyn points to where there is a clump of pale-coloured rock and shadows moving around them. They carefully move a little closer but the shadows turn out to be just the branches of an old dead bush moving in the wind.

  It is dusk now and they have had little to eat since breakfast, just a couple of old crusts Edwyn found in his saddlebag. Silas climbs to the top of the rocks and looks around. It is the highest thing for miles. Towards the west he can see some dark dots moving together across the plains – and around them some other dots, browner and more widely spaced, stealthily circling around them. He motions to Edwyn who scrambles up beside him.

  ‘Indians.’

  Edwyn nods.

  ‘Is it worth going after them?’

  Edwyn shakes his head slowly. ‘Up here they’ll be seen as fair game, belonging to no one.’

  ‘But they know they’re ours.’

  ‘I don’t think that will matter, ffrind, not if they are Gallatt’s men.’

  Closer to them something is moving through the undergrowth, tail twitching.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Shh.’

  It is a cat, too big to be one of the small wild cats. This one is a sandy yellow and moving quickly. A puma. Silas has heard stories from the Indians of course, and even seen distant small fast movements, but this is the first one he has ever seen close and it terrifies him. Edwyn motions for them to sink onto the rock and they do so quietly. Only a couple of small pebbles grind against each other as they crouch but it is enough for the animal to stop and for his ears to swivel. His head turns and his eyes glare at them – oddly uninterested and antagonistic at the same time. Arrogant, Silas thinks, and coldly vicious. For a few seconds the animal doesn’t move, but then he comes slightly closer. He is silent, his soft paws seem to know exactly where to go not to make a sound – each movement slow and powerful. Silas thinks he can hear the animal’s breath. Just the wind, he tells himself, just the wind. Beside him Edwyn is rigidly still. The puma’s head disappears. Silas moves slightly, craning to see if he has moved closer towards them or further away. A branch of gorse immediately in front of him shifts. He breathes out. It is a small armadillo carelessly dislodging gravel as it makes its way though the undergrowth.

  ‘It’s going.’ Edwyn’s voice is barely discernible above the wind. But still they do not dare move. It is becoming rapidly darker now the sun has set, and the wind is howling. Shadows are turning into faces and the ends of twigs into twitching tails. Silas has lost feeling in his legs. He shifts a little then falls to one side.

  ‘Hush!’ Edwyn hisses and Silas stays where he is, awkwardly supporting himself with a forearm on the ground.

  At last Edwyn indicates with his hand that they can move. It is almost night now and they can see only as far as the nearest bush. Silas thinks of the puma creeping around them, biding his time.

  Edwyn stands and briskly starts to gather twigs.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘There’s no point in trying to return now. We’d only get lost. The best thing we can do is try to light a fire and wait until daylight.’

  He’s right, of course he’s right. Silas thinks about Miriam waiting for him and worrying.

  ‘We shouldn’t have gone after them,’ he says, not moving, ‘we had no chance of catching them.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come.’

  Silas feels a strong compulsion to hit him. ‘Why do you never apologise? Never admit you’re wrong?’

  ‘I wasn’t wrong, it was the right thing to do – there was a chance we might catch them.’

  But Silas isn’t listening. ‘Why do you lie? Do you enjoy deceiving and tricking people?’

  ‘I do not lie.’

  ‘The meadows, the tall trees – why did you say they were here? Why did you pretend we were coming to a paradise, when this was all there this?’

  ‘I do not believe I mentioned trees. Those were the words of Captain Fitzroy, and I saw no rea
son to doubt them.’

  ‘But you’d been here, man. You’d seen this place for yourself.’

  Edwyn stands and looks at their collection of twigs and then stoops to rearrange it. ‘Yes, our land, a new Wales.’

  ‘But it’s a desert!’ His voice is too loud. His words will travel even in this wet wind.

  ‘No, Silas, not a desert. You, ffrind, have shown that it is not a desert.’

  Edwyn kneels by the heap of twigs and dry kindling they have managed to find and strikes at flints, but it takes him several minutes to produce smoke and then a small flame. They pull blankets from the horses over their shoulders and sit beside it. Silas takes a twig and begins to trace pictures on the ground. He thinks of Myfanwy’s pictures and the way Miriam has hung them so carefully on the walls of their house, and a small thrill of pleasure makes him want to hug himself. When he gets back he will try to make some paint. Next time the Indians visit he will ask them what they use to daub on their cloaks. Megan used to admire those cloaks. She said that one day she would like to own one for their walls. The thought of her is not so raw now. Sometimes he feels guilty that he can prod at the wound where she was and not feel pain but just a poignant gladness that at least he knew her once, at least they shared time together and were happy. Then he remembers Edwyn’s woman: her pale small face, and her indignant anger on behalf of her husband. She had seemed so much more vulnerable than Megan, as brittle and as fragile as a doll, and yet Cecilia Lloyd still lives. He looks up at Edwyn wondering how he can bear to continue to live here without her. It must be a strange existence – as if he is married and widowed at the same time. Or maybe he welcomes her absence.

  Edwyn is looking at him. For a few minutes he does just that. His face is the palest thing that Silas can see: an oval with the bottom part eclipsed by the crescent of his beard. The crescent moves: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Silas waits for more but nothing comes.

  ‘For what?’

  Silas needs him to say.

  ‘My exaggeration.’

  ‘But why, man, why do it?’

  Silence. Edwyn tips his head and his face disappears beneath the brim of his hat.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’

  He shakes his head. ‘It’s too difficult.’

  ‘Please tell me,’ Silas says more gently, ‘I would like to know. How did it start?’

  ‘It was after my mother died.’

  Silas waits again. When Edwyn speaks his voice is small, strained and so unlike his usual voice that it’s as though someone else is speaking. ‘After her English landlord killed her.’

  Fifty-six

  ‘We don’t know what happened.’ His voice has returned to its normal timbre. ‘Perhaps she had a note, but if she did it would have been in English, not that she could read much, anyway. My mother missed out on school, no one much saw the point in educating a girl like her, I suppose. They still don’t – do they?’ Edwyn looks up briefly, smiles sadly to himself, and then looks back towards the fire. He pokes it and sparks fly up. Silas wonders if there are any Indians around to see it.

  ‘Anyway, if she had a note she didn’t mention it to me. The first we knew was a knock on the door and one of the landlord’s henchmen was standing there, pushing her through the doorway as soon as my sister opened it.’

  He pauses, swallows, then looks up at Silas. His eyes are reflecting the fire and seem to be burning too. ‘They’d beaten her, my friend. She was an old woman and they’d beaten her. She could hardly see, and we’d begged her to come and live with one of us, but she had been so fond of her house and her memories. She’d been determined to die in it, but she didn’t in the end, of course.

  ‘He was greedy, he had plenty of land already but he wanted more and the government let him take it. He campaigned for an enclosure act and there was no one to stop him, no one to stand against him. So he had his way. He extended his empire and unfortunately my mother’s house was in the middle of it. It was on the common land, one of those houses built in the night. She was so proud of it. Built overnight with smoke rising through the chimney before the morning. She thought no one could ever claim it from her but she was wrong.

  ‘I hated him, Silas.’ For a full five seconds Edwyn glares at Silas without blinking. ‘I had hated him before but afterwards, after I’d seen what he could do, I hated him more.’

  Edwyn looks down again. ‘Of course hate is an evil, wicked thing, but I didn’t know that then. At the time I thought of it as revenge – something pure, something righteous. An eye for an eye, it says in the Good Book, in three different places, did you know that? Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But that is the Old Testament. Our Lord has given us new commands, since then.’ He glances at Silas again. ‘How well do you know His words, or the words of the disciples? “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matthew, ffrind: the tax collector, a wealthy, educated man. He knew the sacrifices a man needs to make. It took me some time to realise the meaning of his words, some more to take them into my heart. It is always necessary to forgive, fy ffrind. It brings comfort.’

  Silas stabs at the ground with a stick. He had been expecting another tale – one in which Edwyn’s great worth is shown through his heroic and selfless actions – not this self-effacing tale of mistakes and wrong thinking.

  ‘Ah, my mother was so fond of that house. I was born there; all my brothers and sisters were born there. It was a simple place; just two rooms. It makes what we have here seem like palaces. But it was a fine place to her, all she ever needed, she said.’

  Edwyn is carrying on, almost as if he is talking to himself.

  ‘A house in pieces.’ He smiles and shakes his head. ‘Surely you have heard of such a thing. For months it was waiting in parts around the village, she said – behind her parents’ cottage there would be a door, in the cowshed a window frame, their settle was waiting for them in the pub. There were pieces everywhere – beneath barns, on top of the pigsty, even in the chapel hall...’

  A fragment of wood tumbles from the flames and Silas stares at where it has been.

  ‘I often imagine how it must have been. Everything had to be done in secret, she said – single words passed along the pew in chapel before services, spread around during market: all that whispering... then a wink perhaps, or a nudge, and a couple of words exchanged over a pint of ale. Then the night...’

  How the man loves the sound of his own voice. Silas leans to one side and allows his body to collapse against the ground. He feels as if he is a child again, being told a fairy story.

  ‘It was autumn and there had been no rain for days, she told me. The moon was full...’

  Edwyn’s voice drifts away to somewhere distant and Silas shuts his eyes. He sees the men meeting in front of the tafarn. The dusk is gathering and their voices are too loud and quick. Anyone passing would wonder at them. They laugh pointedly at any slight joke and there is something strange in the way they each reassure the rest as they go – that they will see them tomorrow, the same time as usual. Silas smiles and turns and Edwyn’s voice drifts over to him again.

  ‘When my mother arrived she was cross with herself – the house was already half-finished, you see, she’d missed some of it. She’d had no idea they would get on with the business so quickly. There were a dozen men tapping with their hammerheads covered in rags to muffle them, and some more constructing frames and building walls. Then, very soon, there were walls with two windows and a door and the chimney.

  ‘Then my father carried her over the threshold – laughing so hard he almost dropped her. And then, still laughing, she’d struggled to make the fire light, but then the tinder caught, just as the sun rose, and everything was all right, something she’d never forget, she said, something she told me again and again – how a small thread of grey smoke rose into a sky full of reds and purples and everyone clapped, cheered, and banged the new corrugated iron of the roof. It w
as done then, you see, too late for anyone to do anything about it. Smoke coming up the chimney before eight o’clock, Silas. “Tŷ Unnos.” The house built overnight.’ His voice fades.

  ‘But they were wrong, though, weren’t they?’ Silas says drowsily

  ‘Yes, brawd, they were.’

  For a few minutes there is silence. The fire is dying down. Edwyn reaches out to gather some more twigs and drops them on top. Silas opens an eye – new fiery houses are lying on top of the old. He remembers seeing houses before, remembers feeling Megan beside him looking too. She’d been happy then, he thinks – or if not exactly happy, content.

  Edwyn sighs and then his voice starts again. ‘After they evicted her they burnt it down. Didn’t even allow us in to clear the place. It was all over before anyone could do anything. A easy target, see. Just an old woman, almost blind, no danger to anyone. All she had left were her memories and they destroyed even those – every little knick-knack, every little treasure, went with that house – up in smoke.’ His voice has grown hard. He sighs – a long breath out – and when he speaks again it is softer. ‘It is so hard not to hate.’

  Silas is awake, now, remembering tales of his own: the dogs in their sacks; Melrose on his horse, that little fat lawyer Dewi Roberts not listening: lazy, stupid. He stabs at the ground again. He is nothing of the kind, he reminds himself. There was nothing he could do then and nothing he could do later either. Then he thinks of Megan. He let her down. She expected him to do miracles and was disappointed when he did not. Sometimes he thinks she withdrew into her silent world just to spite him.

  ‘She didn’t talk again.’ Edwyn is still talking. It is as if someone has broken into the bottom of a full barrel of his words. ‘Something seemed to snap inside her. I went to the Englishman’s house and demanded to see him but they wouldn’t let me. When she died I swore I would pay him back, but of course there was nothing I could do. I hurt, brawd, it was as if someone had pierced me with a knife and then run away. I wanted so much to wound them back, but that sort of revenge never heals your own cut, it just makes it burn worse.’