Since his walk out of the hills with little Gwyneth, then with the haunting, tear-luring story he had read coming on the heels of it, everything began to look different—nature and the faces of humanity most of all. In some inexplicable way, Percy found himself seeing all about him through Gwyneth’s fearless, trusting, unassuming pale blue eyes. He found himself wondering what Gwyneth would say to this, what Gwyneth would think of that, whether she would laugh at something he said or make one of her otherworldly comments that jolted new regions of awareness awake in him.
Percy had walked down to Llanfryniog on this day with neither specific purpose nor destination in mind, thinking simply to explore the town, perhaps walk to the harbor and along the shore. He was not yet a great friend of the sea as are most who live on the borders where water meets land in the daily dance of its tides. But he was beginning to love it because he knew from how she gazed across it that Gwyneth loved the sea. Seeing it through her eyes, what could he do but love it? And thus, almost without his realizing it, the sea subtly began to woo him with its hypnotic allure.
He passed several shops as he made his way casually along, looking absently into their windows. As he came to the draper’s, he paused. A handsome buggy and single horse stood in the street tied to the rail next to it. In the window a display of brightly colored spools of ribbon caught Percy’s eye. He looked down at the clump of flowers in his hand. He was seized with an idea, broke into a smile at the thought, and went into the shop.
The bell above the door rang as he entered. The shopkeeper was engaged across the room with a woman whose back was to him. Beside her, a girl about his own age turned at the tinkling bell. The smile, not yet faded from Percy’s lips, met her glance. She thought it meant for her and returned it.
Percy came into the shop, saw a girl smiling at him—and a very pretty one at that—and walked toward her. “Hello,” he said pleasantly, mistaking her look. “Are you one of the shopkeepers?”
“Oh, no,” she said, laughing lightly. “I’m here with my mother.”
“Oh, sorry.”
He saw her eyes flit toward the bouquet in his hand. “For a friend,” he said. “I came in to get a piece of ribbon to tie it with.”
“A friend … a girl?”
“How did you guess?” Percy said, laughing.
Now Percy Drummond, when he was not being surly to his father or mother, and though the lines of his countenance were still in the process of developing, was an extraordinarily good-looking young man. His features yet remained a little delicate, even, it might be said, bordering on the feminine. His face did not yet require the razor. A thick clump of light brown hair fell over a low forehead, on this day mostly obscuring the remaining evidence of Courtenay Westbrooke’s whip and fist, though the bruise on his cheek was still prominent. His nose and lips and jaw were unremarkable but well-formed, not yet showing the pronounced angles that manhood would bring. In spite of the visible bruise, and in a way perhaps almost enhanced by it, the overall effect, accentuated by a winsome smile, was more than moderately attractive to a young woman of fifteen.
Rhawn Lorimer was exactly such a girl, herself prettier than she had a right to be. The fact that she knew every boy or girl for ten miles around but did not recognize Percy made him all the more interesting in her eyes. And that he was carrying a bouquet for some other girl immediately set the wheels of her inquisitive brain spinning about who the lucky recipient might be.
Before she had the chance to coax more information out of him, a tactic at which she was singularly skilled, her mother moved down the counter, occupied in the examination of something she had just been handed, and the shopkeeper behind it addressed an interrogative expression to Percy.
“Hello,” said Percy buoyantly. “I saw some ribbon in your window. I would like to get some. How do you sell it?”
“By the foot,” replied the woman. “It is over here,” she said, leading Percy across the shop. “There are a number of colors. It is a penny a foot.”
“Oh, I see. All right, then … I think I will take, let me see—” Percy dug in his pocket to see what coins he had. His father hadn’t left him much money, but he certainly had enough for a few lengths of ribbon. “I think I would like three feet each of the red, the yellow, and the blue. And would you please cut off six inches from the red. I’ll use it right away.”
The woman went to find her scissors.
The magistrate’s daughter approached Percy again. “That will be a lot of ribbon for such a little bouquet,” she said.
“Oh … that,” said Percy. “I decided to get some extra. The girl I am buying it for will love it.”
“She must be a lucky girl.”
“Actually, I think I am the lucky one!” Percy laughed.
Unknown to either Percy Drummond or Rhawn Lorimer, Courtenay Westbrooke was riding—calmly and on a different horse than the flighty thoroughbred—through Llanfryniog just about the moment the shopkeeper had spoken to Percy. He was on his way back from Burrenchobay Hall and had taken the long way through the village to check at the post office for his father. For several days the viscount had been impatiently expecting a telegraph from his factor, whom he had sent to London. Courtenay saw the carriage, recognized it, reigned in, tied his horse beside it, and went into the shop.
He came through the door just in time to hear the fading echo of Percy’s laugh and to see the answering smile, which he took for one of fascination, on Rhawn Lorimer’s face.
Courtenay strode forward but did not look toward the latter in greeting. A thundercloud gathered on his brow.
Percy saw him and turned away. But it was too late. Courtenay grabbed his shoulder from behind and spun him around.
“Hi, Courtenay,” said Percy, trying to sound friendly. He had no idea what had caused the angry expression on his cousin’s face.
“I thought I told you to stay away from what’s mine!” said Courtenay heatedly.
“Uh … yes,” said Percy in a confused tone. “You made that quite clear. I haven’t touched your horse. I haven’t so much as looked at it.”
“I don’t mean that. You stay away from my girl.”
“Your … girl?”
“That’s what I said. I don’t want you looking at her any more than I do my horse.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Percy saw the horrified look of mingled chagrin and indignation on the girl’s face where she stood staring at Courtenay. Immediately he divined the truth. Irritated afresh at Courtenay’s bluster and presumption, his calm demeanor left him. “You’re not actually telling me that you are comparing this beautiful young lady to your horse?” he said, feigning innocence but with obvious sarcasm in his words. “She deserves better than that, Courtenay. I think you owe her an apology.”
“What she deserves for talking to the likes of you,” Courtenay shot back, “is between her and me, and it is certainly not an apology. I am telling you to stay away from her!”
Incensed to hear herself spoken of as if she were chattel, Rhawn Lorimer at last found her voice. “How dare you, Courtenay Westbrooke!” she said. “You have no right to call me your girl.”
“What are you then?” rejoined Courtenay brusquely.
“Maybe I don’t want to be called your girl any more than I want to be compared to your horse. You have no right to talk to him that way either,” she added, glancing toward Percy. “We don’t even know each other. He just came into the shop a minute before you. You can’t go around yelling at everyone I meet. You owe him an apology!”
Momentarily ruffled by the stares of the two women and Miss Lorimer’s rebuke, Courtenay realized he might have overreacted. But he was not sufficiently chastened to have learned his lesson. “Look, Drummond,” he said, “if you know what’s good for you, you will remember what I said. And you,” he added, to the girl, “you stay away from him.” He turned and stormed out.
Whatever dignity Courtenay Westbrooke may have entered the store with was certainly in tatters as he
left. And he had accomplished the shredding entirely on his own. Jealousy is indeed one of the stupidest of demons. The louder it cries, the more it defeats its own ends. By threatening Percy in her presence, Courtenay only succeeded in elevating Rhawn Lorimer’s interest in the handsome young stranger a hundredfold. Without his childish rant, she might well have forgotten the incident.
She was not about to forget it now!
Added to Percy’s good looks was now the increased fascination of both underdog and forbidden fruit. Thus, as he left the shop a few minutes later with his bouquet and ribbon, her eyes followed him with keen attentiveness and feverish curiosity.
Who could he possibly be?
24
The Magic of the Sea
Percy had planned to ask the shopkeeper who Grannie was that he might deliver his bouquet while it was still fresh. In the flurry of events with Courtenay, however, it slipped his mind. When he remembered, he turned momentarily again toward the shop. But as Courtenay was still in town and just walking into the post up the street, he thought better of it.
He set out instead in the opposite direction and continued on his course from earlier. He passed the chapel and school at the end of the village, followed the bend of the street seaward, and soon found himself approaching the small but serviceable sixteenth-century harbor that was now home to several dozen small fishing vessels.
A week ago, Courtenay’s blustering threats would have filled him with anger. But now he could laugh them off. What did he care for his cousin’s petty jealousy when there was a world to enjoy!
A few fishermen were about with their boats and nets. Small groups were clustered here and there talking among themselves. It was a small harbor, not in any sense a center for commercial fishing like the more sizable ports of the Wales west coast. But the local fishermen kept families, friends, and nearby villages supplied with fresh mackerel, salmon, and haddock. It therefore served its purpose bravely and kept the worst of the sea’s storms from eroding the shoreline—as important a function as providing a home for the many-colored boats that rested in its protected waters when not being employed in the fish-laden waters.
Percy spoke to a few men as he passed. Their greetings were more reserved than those in the upper town, in keeping with the two women who had seen him laughing to himself. These fishermen were a rugged lot who remained wary of strangers considerably longer than did Codnor Barrie’s daughter. They eyed him skeptically as he wandered on, all the more so that he was carrying a handful of posies bundled with a short red ribbon. It was not the sort of thing, in their opinion, that men, or even boys on the way to becoming men, did. Whoever he was, with that fair face and with flowers in his hand, the lad had sissy written all over him.
Leaving the harbor, men, and boats, Percy made his way along the sandy shoreline, walking southwest at the water’s edge in the direction where Mochras Head protruded into Tremadog Bay. As he went, the shoreline rose inward gradually where he came again even with the village. As he continued, it rose to become a hilly bluff then gradually by degrees a sheer cliff that separated sea from the plateau above.
The sea was calm. Its wavelets splashed gently landward, foam-topped, and ran up the gentle incline of sand until, their momentum spent, they slowed and receded back toward their home to meet the next coming toward it in the endless ebb and flow that made the sea, wherever it met land, a living thing. The sensations of sound and movement and smell wove their subtly intoxicating spell over the minister’s son from Glasgow.
The tide was probably halfway in. Percy walked along perpendicular to it, his shoes imprinting themselves in the wet sand in an uneven line behind him that might have been made by a wobbly drunk as he wandered in and out at the edge of the shallow foamy flow. The rhythmic resonance of the water to his right, the cries of the gulls flying overhead, punctuated by an occasional louder crash of waves on the distant rocks, made a music in his soul different than anything he had heard from the pipe organ in his father’s church. It was the music of nature, the symphony of the universe, the sounds of whose instruments he had only lately begun to recognize. He was not merely seeing through Gwyneth’s eyes, he was hearing the call of creation through her ears. The sights and sounds of the world were coming alive and stirred his heart.
Gradually the sand underfoot gave way to pebbles, then larger rocks, until the beach was no more. Ahead he saw clusters of larger rocks and boulders and seaweed-filled pools and submerged muscle-encrusted stones, with eddies of the tide swirling in and among them with unceasing motion and undulation, where lived a whole oceany universe of tiny creatures. Assuming his way blocked to further exploration, Percy was about to turn back when a sight arrested his attention in the distance.
In the middle of the cliff face that had risen on his left, perhaps half a mile ahead, a speck of white was moving down from the plateau above against the gray of the rocky cliff. At first glance, he took it for a gull. But the back-and-forth movement could surely be no graceful bird in flight. It must be a sheep, he thought. As he stared further, however, he realized it was too small for a sheep.
Suddenly he knew that speck of white!
He continued on, stepping carefully across the uneven rocks and stones and climbing around the increasingly difficult obstacles in his path. He slipped a few times as he worked his way through the boulders that filled the space between the water and promontory, doused his boots more than once in slippery tide pools, but finally succeeded in arriving onto the surface of another expanse of flat sandy beach.
By now the promontory on his left had risen to considerable height. Four hundred yards ahead the white head of his mysterious but delightful friend reached the shore.
“Gwyneth!” he yelled and broke into a run toward her.
In truth, Gwyneth’s eyes, whether from the second sight or careful observation, had seen Percy on the beach almost the same moment she had begun her descent down the bluff. She was not certain it was Percy. From that distance the features of his face would have been more difficult to descry with certainty than the Irish coastline from the overlook where she and Percy had gazed toward it over the sea.
Her heart beat a little more rapidly at the sight, for she hoped it might be him. But she was not sure until he called her name.
Her young heart leaped again. But she did not run across the sand. Rather she continued walking slowly toward him. Her heart had begun to be stirred, too, but for different reasons than Percy’s.
Percy reached her a few minutes later. He ran toward her out of breath and stopped. “I can’t believe I found you!” he exclaimed. “I had hoped to. I was going to ask in town how to find Grannie, but I forgot. I brought you these.” He handed her the bouquet.
Gwyneth blinked back something that sought to rise in her eyes. Flowers always moved her. To her they were tiny windows into the soul of God’s creation and made her happy. But flowers exchanged between friends meant even more. She gave flowers all the time. But no one had ever given her flowers—no one except Grannie.
Her heart was touched to be on the receiving end of such kindness. “Thank you, Mr. D–D–Drummond,” she said softly as she took them. “You are more k–k–kind to me than anyone has ever b–b–been. It is a pretty ribbon.”
“Oh yes, I almost forgot!” Percy dug into his pocket. “Look, I bought you some more—three pieces in different colors. I thought you might like to use them when you make your bouquets.” He held them out to her.
Gwyneth stared at the lovely gift in disbelief. Was she being given a bouquet and a gift besides?
“Here, take them, Gwyneth,” said Percy. “I bought them for you.”
“Thank you, M–Mr. Drummond.”
“And about this Mister Drummond business,” laughed Percy. “I thought we settled all that the first time I saw you in the hills. I told you that my friends call me Percy. Surely you qualify as my friend by now! I’m only sixteen—I’m hardly a mister yet. Don’t you think you might call me Percy?”
&nbs
p; “I can try, Mr. Drummond,” said Gwyneth simply. “But it might be hard. You seem so much like a man.”
Percy laughed again. “I suppose I shall be one someday. But not yet. Just promise me you will try.”
“I promise,” said Gwyneth. “Would you like to see the cave where I found the pirate’s skull?”
The words slammed into Percy’s brain as if he had been hit by a train. She could stop a conversation so abruptly with the most unexpected statements!
He stared back with a look of incredulity. “A … pirate’s skull!” he exclaimed.
“That’s what Grannie said it was when I told her. Papa didn’t believe it. He thought I had seen a dead animal’s head. But I knew it was from a man. I could tell. Come, I’ll show you where I saw it.”
She led him along the beach back toward Llanfryniog. Percy had run right past the cave’s mouth only a few minutes before but had not seen it. Moments later they crept into the darkened opening.
“The water is almost too high,” said Gwyneth. “I never go inside unless it is low because I don’t want to get trapped inside.”
“You found a skull in here?” said Percy, his voice echoing into the darkened chamber.
“It was buried in the sand.”
“What became of it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it again. I think the water washed it away. But I have been a little afraid to come here since. I have only peeped inside, just in case the pirate is still there. Grannie says there is pirate gold somewhere, if only we could find it.”
Was there no end to this girl’s surprises?
“Pirates … and gold!” said Percy.
“That’s what Grannie says.”
“How does she know?”
“I don’t know. Grannie knows many things. But sometimes it is hard to understand what she means.”
“Let’s go inside and look!” said Percy excitedly.
“I am nervous about the water,” said Gwyneth. “It will rise into the cave soon.”
From Across the Ancient Waters- Wales Page 13