by Jenny Nimmo
‘I don’t think so, Nia. He’s not here!’
‘But the car, Mam. The car is there,’ Nia said, a little pang of misgiving beginning to gnaw at her.
‘The car maybe but Evan is out.’ Betty Lloyd looked hard at her daughter. ‘What did Evan say, Nia, to make you think he’d take you?’
‘He said that it was my turn,’ she said quietly. ‘He meant it, Mam, I know he did.’
‘Well . . .’ Betty’s mouth closed in a thin line. It was difficult to determine what she felt. ‘We’ll wait and see,’ she said.
So Nia left her incomplete bundle on the table and went to change. She refused to believe that she was not going to have her journey so she chose her clothes carefully; her thickest sweater, creamy Aran wool handed down from Catrin but still her favourite, black jeans and new pale trainers. Then she took up a position on the landing where she would be the first to claim Evan when he came through the front door.
The boys were already in the kitchen scrabbling for crisps and lemonade.
Nerys, coming in late from the library, saw Nia on her perch and asked, ‘How is Catrin?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nia replied. ‘Is she ill?’
‘Came home in the dinner hour,’ Nerys said. ‘She looked awful.’
Nia gave a strangled little ‘Oh!’ Her eyes pricked and she chewed her lip to distract her tears of suspicion. ‘She’s not at home now.’ Her sisters’ bedroom door was open and she could see that the room was empty.
Nerys looked up, then went briskly into the kitchen. There was a commotion. Raised voices. Mrs Lloyd ran through the hall followed by Nerys. They both went into the shop. Nia watched the door and listened. Loud conversation in the shop. Mr Lloyd emerged in bloody apron. ‘Are you sure, girl?’ he said over his shoulder, then seeing Nia, commanded. ‘Look in Catrin’s room, see if she’s there, Nia. Look in all the rooms!’
Nia obeyed. She looked swiftly and calmly into every upstairs room, certain that Catrin was not alone, wherever she was, and quite safe from kidnappers.
‘No,’ she called. ‘Catrin’s not here.’
Mr Lloyd was reaching for the telephone, his wife pulling off her apron when the front door opened and Catrin sailed in. She was breathless but hardly unwell. Her hair was tumbled, her eyes wide, her face all smiles.
Very clever, Nia thought, to make an entrance just in time, before a fuss is made and police sent searching in the hills.
Her sister was swept into the kitchen with questions and complaints. ‘Where’ve you been, girl?’ ‘Why didn’t you say?’ ‘Why leave school so early?’ ‘Are you sick?’
The boys scuttled out before they could be included in the trouble that was brewing. Treats might be withheld. The television banned. But Nia, plunging through their retreat, heard Catrin object in a shrill voice. ‘I’m sixteen now. I’m not a child who has to tell everything. I went for a walk. I went for a walk, a walk, a walk, right?’
To Nia this disdainful repetition was proof of her sister’s guilt. She wanted to know more. Trying to provoke her parents into further questioning she asked innocently, ‘Were you alone?’
Her mother cast her an agitated look. ‘It’s none of your business, Nia!’
Temporarily rebuffed Nia left the argument and went to take up her post on the stairs. She met Evan in the hall. She was angry now. Angry with everyone, especially Evan. ‘I’m ready,’ she said defiantly.
He looked exceptionally handsome: windswept and buoyant. ‘Very nice,’ he murmured abstractedly.
‘You said you would take me to the sea,’ she furiously reminded him. ‘Remember?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, yes.’ And then, shaking his head in a suddenly thought-out explanation, ‘The car’s not right, Nia. It needs fixing.’
‘You’ve had all day,’ she said, unable to stem the deliberate rudeness.
He hardly noticed her tone. ‘I’ve been . . . preoccupied,’ he told her. ‘Problems to solve.’
‘I suppose you’ve been walking off your ‘problems’ with a friend!’ She glowered at him, hating herself.
The wonderfully carefree expression vanished. ‘Ridiculous child,’ he said roughly.
She dropped down on to the top stair. Chastened. He strode past her into his room, not giving her the satisfaction of a slammed door, as a friend would have done, but closing it firmly behind him.
Nia brooded on the darkened stair. She was hungry for descriptions, information, anything that would give her a picture of Catrin’s mysterious afternoon. She would waylay her sister. Get at the truth. When Catrin came out of the kitchen and began to mount the stairs, Nia deliberately set herself in the centre.
‘Nia,’ Catrin sighed. ‘Let me pass.’
Nia stood aside but followed Catrin into the room she shared with Nerys. Her sister did not object, but Nia ventured no further than the door. She stood with her back against it, ready to attack. She envied her sisters. They had made their room so pretty; painting the walls creamy yellow to match all the old pine furniture they had gleaned from T Llr. They had stripped and polished chests and cupboards, burning themselves with acid sometimes, chafing their fingers on sandpaper, reeling from the smell of spirit but determined to recreate the bygone age that beckoned from the pages of glossy magazines. Nerys had even forbidden posters, instead she had begged samplers and flower paintings from ancient aunts, and hung them round the room.
‘You’re so lucky,’ Nia said, but her sister would not respond to this. She stood beside the window, looking out. Michael hadn’t been seen for a week but Catrin still seemed unable to break her habit of watching for him. Perhaps, after all, Nia thought, Catrin had been ill at school. She knew that her parents would have asked the usual questions about time and place. These did not interest her. She wanted to get at events. Ruthless and daring she challenged, ‘Has he kissed you?’
Catrin turned into the room. ‘Kissed?’ she repeated.
‘Evan? Has he? Has he?’
‘Ssh! What if he has?’
‘No,’ Nia cried. ‘Not that way!’
Catrin approached her. ‘He’s not a goblin,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m not bewitched, see!’ She stretched her long pale fingers towards Nia then flipped her hands over, palms upward, like a baby who has cleverly hidden a forbidden sweet.
‘Has he, then?’ Nia whispered.
‘I’ll never tell,’ Catrin taunted, launching herself into a series of sad and frantic giggles.
Nia fled.
October broadened into a month of extremes. Frosty nights and warm, bright days lit by the violent colours of dying leaves. But the mountain chestnut was more colourful that year than any other tree. So startlingly splendid were its leaves that, from a distance, it appeared to blaze like an enchanted fire above the wreaths of evening mist.
And Evan Llr’s luxuriant hair was growing longer. He seemed unable to comb it into any conventional shape. A mass of red and black framed his narrow face so that he took on an unreal, fairy-tale appearance. The superstitious were alarmed. Nia, forgiving everything, was entranced, for it seemed to confirm her belief that Even was, indeed, a hero from the Celtic past. She felt as though by recognising him she had breathed life into the troubled prince she had welcomed on that stormy day.
It was Nain Griffiths who gave Evan the name of Chestnut Soldier. On one of her rare visits to town she had met him striding down the High Street and boldly re-introduced herself, remarking on his hair and its resemblance to the flaming chestnut tree. And he had laughed his deep abandoned laugh and swept her into number six for tea. Nia was amazed to see how girlish Gwyn’s grandmother became in Evan’s company. She would not leave until she had extracted a promise from him, to visit her.
Others did not feel so comfortable about Evan Llr. He was seen too much with Catrin Lloyd, a girl young enough to be his daughter. His hair was too long for a soldier. When would he return to the army? What was his past?
At school girls pestered Nia for information about him. But Gwyn Grif
fiths and Emlyn Llewelyn were the worst. They wanted to know everything. Where the soldier went, and how he behaved when he returned. Why his hair was turning red? How Catrin felt and why she was so pale now and so very slender. And was the soldier ever angry or violent?
Because she needed these two to be her friends, she told them she would watch her cousin and report. She would have watched without being asked. And every time she saw Evan and her sister walking together or laughing secretly, she would try and ignore the painful twist inside her and forgive him, always trusting in his promise, that one day it would be her turn to be his companion by the sea.
By now the twins had given up trying to draw Evan into their games. They had hoped for a swaggering soldier, a violent man whose stories they could boastfully repeat. They felt cheated. Evan was a romantic who spent time only with their sister and who excited the female population of Pendewi for reasons they did not approve. Sometimes Nia would hear them arguing with Iolo who would always champion Evan. Alun felt himself to be above the quarrel but tended to side with the twins. No one seemed to notice Iolo’s increasing distress; the way he would hide his face behind his hands as though by obstructing his view of the family he could prevent them from recognising him. Sometimes they would discover his toys in strange places; in his mother’s drawers, behind the old dresser, inside the piano. Even when Mr Lloyd found a toy garage in the deep freeze he merely thought it another of Iolo’s little idiosyncrasies.
Rehearsals for the Christmas Concert began. This year it was to be excerpts from Fauré’s Requiem. The Male Voice Choir, the High School Orchestra and half their relatives were roped in for the most ambitious project yet attempted. Every evening music filled the valley from the Church, the School and the Community Centre. Siwan Davis had been chosen to sing solo soprano and in order to achieve perfection she spent all her spare time listening to a tape of Victoria de los Angeles. Long after dusk ‘Pie Jesu’ issued from the open windows of the Davis’s hill farm. It might have been this wistful accompaniment to the autumn that made it so unforgettable.
One afternoon Mr and Mrs Davis called into the butcher’s shop. Bryn was a friend of lestyn’s and a good customer. He liked his meat. Besides his daughter, Siwan, he had a son, Dewi, whom nobody liked. Dilys, Bryn’s wife, vied with Mrs Bowen, the wool, for the position of most informed busybody; she was never one to withhold advice or practical help. The Davises came into the shop just before closing time and were taken through the house to see Betty. There began a low and earnest conversation in the kitchen.
Nia, overcome with curiosity, burst in on them, saying through the sudden taut silence, ‘I forgot my homework.’ She sidled behind Mr Davis to a pile of newspapers on the dresser where she had planted her books, and then left the room.
‘Shut the door, Nia!’ her mother called after her and Nia meekly replied, ‘Yes Mam!’ However she had perfected a method of clicking the door shut and then immediately opening it a fraction. The adults, reassured by the first click, began to resume their conversation, never noticing the narrow crack through which Nia, hidden by the door, was listening.
‘You’re not worried then, Betty?’ Dilys Davis continued where she’d been interrupted.
‘Well, as I said . . .’ Mrs Lloyd began.
‘You should be, Betty!’ Mr Davis broke in. ‘If it was my daughter . . .!’
‘It’s innocent, I’m sure,’ said Dilys. ‘But people talk, and it’s not nice, Betty. Not right, I mean, for Catrin’s sake.’
‘Can’t you do anything, Iestyn?’ Mr Davis asked. ‘It’s a man’s duty.’
Mr Lloyd’s chair squeaked on the tiled floor. He stood up, paced toward the window. ‘It’s difficult, Bryn. He’s a relative, see, and recuperating – had a terrible time just lately. His family’s in Australia and he’s nowhere else to go. The other cousins are all gone from Wales; in England now, they are . . .’
‘And he had to come back to Wales,’ Betty added softly.
‘What happened out there, then, in Northern Ireland?’ Dilys Davis inquired, her quiet tone hardly disguising an unpleasant eagerness.
‘Well, from what we can gather,’ Betty Lloyd reluctantly began, ‘it was a routine search for arms, no danger expected. Evan sent his platoon into a warehouse, I think it was, then suddenly there’s this explosion and Evan rushes in. The radio operator tried to stop him, madness he said it was and not the right thing to do at all, but Major Llr must reach his men. He brought two out, horribly burned they were, and then went in again when the whole place went up like a . . . like a . . .’
‘Wired like a cage, they said,’ Iestyn explained dramatically. ‘Four bombs in all. They didn’t stand a chance. Then, after, when the fire was out, they found our major under a pile of girders, not a mark on him!’
‘A miracle!’ Dilys breathed.
‘A hero!’ Betty added.
‘Duw, I remember now,’ Mr Davis declared, banging the table. ‘It was in the papers, like a cauldron they said it was, and only one man left alive. He was in a coma for days. They never released his name. Duw, I never realised it was him!’
‘Nor did we,’ Betty said. ‘He wouldn’t speak of it. But Iestyn wrote to his regiment, just to make sure, you know, of what his accident had been. They’d kept his name out of the papers because it was all too extraordinary, a mystery!’
Outside the door, Nia was getting cramp, yet she dared not move. She wondered when her father had written that letter. When had he become suspicious?
‘The army don’t like mysteries,’ Bryn said gravely, and his wife excited by the talk added, ‘His hair, all streaked red like that, it’ll be the shock!’
‘It would be!’ her husband echoed.
‘The shock,’ Iestyn agreed. ‘So we must have sympathy. And Catrin, well, perhaps she helps. She’s a kind girl, and sensitive!’
Nia began to tiptoe away. Filled with this new knowledge of her cousin, her mind raced back to that first day, when her prince had come to them out of his long sleep. She did not watch her step and tripped on the stairs. Books tumbled out of her arms and slipped into the hall. She turned to retrieve them just as the front door opened and a gust of wind sent the pages into a frantic flutter, while Evan stepped in amongst them and stood looking down at her.
Without exchanging a word, they gathered the books together and put them in a pile on the stairs. Nia found herself sitting beside Evan on the second stair, and couldn’t stop herself from asking, ‘Will you take me, this time, Evan, to the sea?’
He stared at her for a moment, smiled and said, almost savagely, ‘Yes, I damn well will!’
‘Now?’
‘Right now. Get your coat.’
She hurried upstairs, hardly able to believe her luck. When she came down again they were all crowding into the hall. Dilys Davis, seeing Evan in a new light, was gazing almost shyly at him while he said, ‘I’m taking Nia for a ride, Betty. Is that all right, with you?’
‘Nia?’ Betty asked, surprised.
‘Yes, me this time,’ Nia said, childishly triumphant.
‘We’ll see you at rehearsal then, Iestyn,’ Mr Davis reminded his friend of his duty to the Male Voice Choir. Then he steered his wife towards the door, nodding respectfully at Evan, before stepping into the street.
Mrs Lloyd buttoned Nia’s jacket fussily. ‘You won’t be too long now!’ She addressed herself to Evan. ‘You’ll be back for supper?’
He answered indirectly, ‘I’ll take good care of her, Betty.’ He took Nia’s hand and, stepping into the street, they approached the bright car together, like conspirators.
‘D’you like to travel in the air?’ he asked her and when Nia nodded, he jumped into the driver’s seat and pressed a switch, conjuring his strange car into a gleaming roofless chariot.
Nia stood on the kerb, almost afraid. If she entered the prince’s chariot would she turn into something her family would not recognise?
‘Hurry! Before the sun sets,’ he commanded. And to reassure her, h
e climbed out and opened a door. ‘Into the back,’ he said. ‘Where children are safe!’
She grimaced and got in. Evan laughed and said, ‘Time will fly, Nia. You’ll soon be old enough to sit beside me!’
Like Catrin does, she thought, and said, ‘Let’s make time fly now!’
The engine growled into action and they sailed up the High Street, passing Gwyn Griffiths on the bridge. He was talking to Alun and Emlyn. Two boys returned her vigorous waving but Gwyn looked glum and seemed to shake his head.
‘We’ll go to Harlech,’ Evan declared. ‘Where it all began.’
She did not ask what he meant but pressed herself into the seat and half-closed her eyes, enraptured with the smell of leather, the freshness of the wind and the whirl of mountains, sheep and sky.
They travelled in silence for nearly an hour and then came within sight of the sea. A huge sun balanced on the edge of the horizon and, against the mountains, the great castle was defined by shadows.
The road that led to the castle on its giant rock was deliciously steep and narrow. There were no visitors in the car park, they had the place to themselves. But the castle was closed so they stood by the south-eastern tower where a statue of the dying King Bendigeidfran, turned away from the sea. Behind the King on his weary horse, lay a dead boy: Gwern, the King’s nephew, a victim of the mad Efnisien.
Nia had forgotten the statue and remembered only the view: Mount Eryri, the rugged towers that swept towards the sky and the delicate blue line of the Llyn peninsula curving into the sea. When she had been younger, she purposely put sad things out of her mind; she had been prone to nightmares.
‘It’s so old, this castle,’ she murmured.
‘No,’ Evan retorted. ‘Not so old!’
‘But . . .’ she began.
‘It wasn’t here,’ he said abruptly, ‘when they were. He half- turned his head toward the statue but wouldn’t look at it. Then he paced away from the dying King and added, ‘There was only the rock.’
‘Oh!’ Hugging herself against the wind, Nia twirled about trying to turn the landscape into a wild kaleidoscope. At last she came to rest beside him. He would not even glance at the scenery that so delighted her but remained very still, glaring across the sea. In spite of the wind beads of sweat glittered on his face and she wondered what mirage could be there, beyond the horizon, that had suddenly called up so much wrath. Her prince had slipped away again and left a demon in his place, his wild hair ruffled like some mythic beast, his windblown jacket surging darkly all about him.