“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?
TWENTY–FOUR
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 wandere
d 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?”
“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.”
“The tide comes in so slow, it won’t bother us.”
“Sometimes a big wave comes in all at once. It is high enough now that that could happen. I am very small, and I have to be more careful about the water than bigger people. It is too dark to see inside anyway. And there is no gold in the cave. I have been all the way to the back of it.”
“How do you see well enough to be certain?” asked Percy.
“When the sun shines exactly right at the end of the summer, it shines all the way to the very back wall. Then you can see everything. That only happens for a few days, when the sun is coming straight into the cave’s mouth from the water. That’s why I know there is no gold in the cave.”
On this day the sun was too high in the sky for its rays to probe inside the cave more than a few feet. Having come out of bright sunlight, all Percy and Gwyneth could see was blackness.
“I think I want to go now,” said Gwyneth, walking back outside.
Percy followed, turning the remarkable series of revelations over in his mind. “Where were you coming from,” he asked, “when I saw you from back there? It looked like you were climbing down the cliff.”
“A trail comes from the top,” replied Gwyneth.
“Can you show me? I’ll go home that way instead of walking back through the village.”
Again they turned along the beach, continuing past the place where two lines of footprints coming from opposite directions still showed the place of their meeting in the sand. They walked past them toward the base of the trail.
“So, Gwyneth Barrie,” said Percy as they went, “when will you begin teaching me to ride like the wind?”
“Whenever you like, Mr. Drummond
.”
Percy looked at her with a stern smile.
“Whenever you like … Percy,” said Gwyneth shyly, her face reddening.
“That’s more like it! How about tomorrow, then?”
“All right.”
“Where shall I meet you?”
“On the beach there where you came from,” said Gwyneth, pointing back toward the harbor, now probably a mile distant. “Between the harbor and the rocks. Lady Florilyn never walks along the sea. She will not see us there. I don’t think she likes the ocean. I love the ocean.”
“I know you do. I think you love it because of your mother.”
Percy’s statement made Gwyneth thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I have always loved the water. Perhaps you are right and that is why.”
“Then the beach below the village it is,” said Percy. “I will be there as soon after breakfast as I can get away. I will ask Mr. Radnor to saddle a horse for me.”
They made their way up the steep trail from the beach to the plateau above, then struck out across the open moorland in a direction that led toward Westbrooke Manor and finally parted.
TWENTY–FIVE
Secrets of Nature
As soon as he had finished breakfast on the following morning, Percy slipped out of the house for the stables. He had never yet seen Florilyn in the breakfast room. She was not an early riser. To his relief this day was no exception.
Hollin Radnor was out with Stuart Wyckham pruning some of the hedges around one of the gardens after their vigorous spring growth.
Percy walked toward the two men. “Good morning, Mr. Radnor,” he said cheerfully. “I think I am ready for another ride. Would you mind helping me saddle a horse?”
“Certainly, Mr. Percy,” replied the groom. He set aside the shears. “I will be back in a few minutes, Stuart,” he said.
From Across the Ancient Waters Page 13