Silver on the Tree

  Simon blinked, taken by surprise. “Well—yes, I suppose.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Just … well, just things.” Simon’s face was flushed; he floundered, caught between honesty and bewilderment.

  Jane saw Barney’s face crease in a resentful frown. She said, surprised at the cool self-possession in her voice, “What do you mean exactly, Mr. Rowlands?”

  “How much do you three know about Will?” John Rowlands said. His face was unreadable, his voice curt.

  “Quite a lot,” said Jane, and her mouth shut sharply like a closing door. She stood looking at him. On either side of her she could feel Simon and Barney rigid and challenging as herself; the three of them arrayed against questions that, they instinctively knew, nobody outside the pattern of their dealings with Merriman and Will should be bothering to ask.

  Rowlands was looking at her now: a strange searching uncertain look. “You are not like him,” he said. “You three, you are no more than I am, you are not … of that kind.”

  “No,” Jane said.

  Something seemed to collapse behind John Rowlands’ eyes; his face twisted into a kind of taut despair, and Jane was all at once rocked by distress as she saw him gazing at her in open appeal. “Diawl,” he said, tight and unhappy, “will you stop mistrusting me, for the love of God? You cannot have seen more of the nature of those two than I have seen, this past year. Those two—for Bran is someone you may know nothing about at all. And there is fear shouting all through me now, about what may be happening to them, about who may have taken hold of them, at a time when they may be in worse danger than they have ever been before.”

  Behind Jane’s shoulder Barney said suddenly, “He means it, Jane. And Will did trust him.”

  “That’s true,” Simon said.

  “What did you mean, Mr. Rowlands,” Jane said slowly, “about what you had seen, this past year?”

  “Not a year all spread out,” John Rowlands said. “Last summer it was, when Will came visiting his uncle. As soon as he came to the valley, things … things began to happen.

  Forces woke that had been sleeping, and people grew and changed, and the Grey King of Cader Idris rose in his power, and fell again … it was all a confronting between the Light and the Dark, and I did not understand what it was all about and I did not want to.” He looked at them, grave and intent, his pipe forgotten in his hand. “I have told Will that, all along,” he said. “I know he is part of the power called the Light, and Bran Davies perhaps even deeper into the pattern. But that is enough for me. I will help Will Stanton when he needs me, and Bran, too, because I feel for him as if he were my own—only, I do not want to know what it is that they are doing.”

  Barney said curiously, “Why not?”

  “Because I am not of their kind,” John Rowlands said sharply. “And nor are you either, and it is not proper.” For a moment he sounded stern, censorious—and very sure of himself.

  Simon said unexpectedly, “I know just what you mean. I’ve always felt the same. And anyway we don’t really know either.” He looked at Jane. “Do we?”

  She had opened her mouth to protest, but now she paused instead. “Well … no. Great-Uncle Merry never said anything much. Only that the Dark is rising, or trying to, and must be stopped. Everything we did seemed to be a step on the way to somewhere else. Something else. And we never really have known what.”

  “Safer for you that it should be so,” John Rowlands said.

  “And for them too, right?” said Simon.

  John Rowlands gave his head a small wry shake that was like a shrug; smiled, and began re-lighting his pipe.

  Jane said, “I don’t think we shall be seeing Will and Bran here, Mr. Rowlands. They went away, somewhere. Safe. But … a long way away.” She looked out at the estuary, where a few white sails tacked to and fro over the blue water. “I don’t know for how long. An hour, a day…. They … they just went.”

  “Well,” John Rowlands said, “we shall just have to wait and see. And I must dream up something to tell to Blodwen, because to this day I do not know whether she has any idea at all of what is in those two boys. I think not, really. She has a warm heart and a wise head, bless her, and she is content to be fond of them for what they seem to be.”

  A motor-boat whizzed past on the river behind them, almost drowning his voice. Somewhere the beat of rock music thumped insistently through the warm air; it rose and then retreated, as a group of people carrying a portable radio passed on the wharf. Looking over at the road, Jane saw Blodwen Rowlands emerge from the draper’s shop and pause on the crowded pavement; then she was cut out of view, as a large motor-coach crept with difficulty down the village street.

  John Rowlands sighed. “Look at it all,” he said. “How it has changed, Aberdyfi fach. Of course that had to come, but I remember … I remember … in the old days, all the old fishermen used to be in a line over there, leaning on that rail in front of the Dovey Hotel, over the water. And when I was a lad about Barney’ age one of my favorite things was to hang around and listen to them, when I was allowed. Lovely it was. They remembered so far back—a hundred years and more, it would be now. Back to the days when nearly all Aberdyfi men were sailors, my taid’s time, when the masts bristled thick as a forest along the wharf by here, loading up slate from the quarries. And there were seven yards building ships in the river, seven, building dozens of ships—schooners and brigs, and small boats too….”

  His deep Welsh voice made a threnody, recalling and mourning the lost days that even he had not seen, except through others’ eyes. They listened in silence, fascinated, until the present sounds and sights of the crowded summer resort seemed to retreat, and they could almost imagine that they saw the tall ships coming into the river round the bar, and stacks of cut slate piled around them on a different wharf, built of black wood instead of concrete.

  A seagull rose slowly into the air from the end of the jetty, crying out, slow and harsh and sorrowful, and Jane turned her head to follow the flap and sweep of its black-tipped wings. The breeze seemed to feel stronger than before against her cheek. The gull swung sideways past them, close, still crying….

  … and when Jane brought her gaze down again from watching it, she saw the wooden beams of the jetty black beneath her feet, stacked with rows of grey-blue slate, and beyond, on the river, a tall ship coming in close towards land, flapping and creaking as men hauled down her sails.

  Jane stood motionless, staring. She heard laughter, and shrill voices, and milling round her on the jetty came a gaggle of small boys, pushing and hopping and thrusting one another aside in perilous clamour along the edge. “Firsties … firsties … get off my foot, Freddie Evans! … look out! … don’t shove! …” They were a mixture, clean and grubby, barefoot and booted, and one of them, yellow-haired, bumping and laughing among the rest, was her brother Barney.

  Jane could only think, ridiculously, “But in those days they’d have been speaking Welsh….”

  Further along the jetty she could see Simon talking earnestly in a group of two or three boys his own age. They turned to watch the ship draw gradually closer. With a snapping rush of canvas her mainsail came down in a heap, to be seized and furled; she was a brigantine, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the main, and only two foresails now hung billowing to draw her inshore. Her figurehead glinted beneath the jutting bowsprit: a lifesize girl, with streaming golden hair. On the bow Jane could read the name now: Frances Amelia.

  “Carrying timber,” John Rowlands’ deep voice said beside her. “See some of it stowed there on the deck? Mostly for John Jones the builder, that will be—he has been expecting it. A cargo of yellow pine, from Labrador.”

  Jane glanced at him; his face was tranquil, the pipe still clenched between his teeth. But on the hand that reached up to the pipe now there was tattooed between the knuckles a small blue star that she had not seen before, and at his throat he wore the wing collar and high-necked jacket of the nine
teenth century. He had become someone else, belonging to this other time, and yet somehow was still himself as well. Jane shivered and closed her eyes for a moment, and did not look down to see how she herself was dressed.

  Then there was a flurry and a sudden shriek from the edge of the jetty, where more and more people had gathered. Peering vainly past the heads, Jane could see only that the brigantine had begun to dock, lines flying down from bow and stern to be caught and made fast by darting figures ashore. From the end of the jetty where the small boys had gone running, there came out of a group of women a noisy scolding eruption, and all at once Barney and another boy, both very white in the face, were being dragged back towards Jane by a bustling distressed woman in bonnet and shawl. It was recognizably Blodwen Rowlands, yet a Blodwen Rowlands who did not seem to know Jane as Jane. She spoke to the world at large, scolding, yet in warm concern, “Always the same it is, this silly game to be the first to touch the ship that comes in, and all of them in the way there hindering the men…. One day one of them is going to get killed, and it was as near as a whistle for these two today, did you see them? Right on the edge, losing their balance, the side of the boat like to crush them against the jetty if there had been no one there to grab them out of it … aah!” She gave each boy a little exasperated shake. “Have you forgotten last week, when Ellis Williams fell in?”

  “And Freddie Evans the week before,” said the boy with Barney, in a pert, lilting voice. “And much worse, that, because Evans the Barber was waiting for him with a strap when he got out, and beat him all the way home.”

  “Mr. Evans to you, young monkey,” said Mrs. Rowlands, trying to suppress a smile. She gave Jane a little humorous shrug, released the boys with one finger wagging at them as she turned, and went back to the group of women greeting sailors on the ship.

  “I like her,” Barney said cheerfully. “She probably saved my life, you know that?” And he grinned at Jane and ran off with the other boy, disappearing along the road, behind the great stacks of slate.

  Jane turned to call, but no sound came. Beside her, John Rowlands was shouting to one of the men aboard the Frances Amelia. “Iestyn! Iestyn Davies!”

  “Evan boy!” the man called back, white teeth flashing. And even while the name puzzled her, Jane thought again of the strangeness that there was no Welsh to be heard, and then suddenly knew that of course all the speaking that she could hear was indeed in Welsh, her own included, with no word of English used anywhere at all.

  “After all,” she said shakily, knowing with no reason that Simon was now at her side, and turning to him, “it’s no more odd to understand a language that you don’t know, than to be switched into a time before you were born.”

  “No,” Simon said, in a voice so reassuringly his own that Jane felt dissolved in relief. “No, not really odd at all.”

  John Rowlands called, beside them, “What news of the Sara Ellen?”

  The man stared. “You haven’t heard?”

  “A letter sent from Dublin was the last. It came yesterday.”

  The man on the Frances Amelia paused, put down the line he was coiling, called a few words to someone else on board, and leapt over the gunwale and down to the jetty. He came up to John Rowlands, his face lined with concern. “Bad news, Evan Rowlands, very bad. I am sorry. The Sarah Ellen foundered off Skye two days ago, with all hands. We heard yesterday.”

  “Oh my God,” John Rowlands said. He put out a hand, gropingly, and clutched the man’s arm for an instant; then turned and moved away, stumbling, as if he were suddenly old. His face was grey and hurt. Jane longed to go after him, but she could not move. How was it possible to comfort grief that was naked on a living face, and yet had been gone and forgotten for a hundred years? Which was more real: her own bewilderment, or Evan Rowlands’ pain looking out of his grandson’s eyes?

  The man called Iestyn said, looking after John Rowlands, “And his brother aboard.” He looked round, at the two or three other men who had been standing near, and his face was grave. “Something is not good. That was the fourth boat built by John Jones Aberdyfi to go down in three months, and all of them new boats too. And it was not a great storm that took the Sarah Ellen, they say, but only a heavy following sea.”

  “They are all the same,” one of the men said. “They dip the stern under. Every one of his vessels does it now, and then there is strain and the leaks come, and down she goes.”

  “Not every one,” another man said.

  “No, not every one, that is true. John Jones has built some very good boats indeed. But the bad ones….”

  “I have heard it suggested,” said the man called Iestyn, “that it is not in the design but in the building. That it is not John Jones’ fault at all, but one of his sawyers. And any work that he handles—”

  He broke off, conscious suddenly of Jane’s anxious stare, and switched on to his face a broad deliberate smile. “Waiting as usual, is it, like all the young ones, but too polite to ask?” He reached into one capacious jacket pocket and brought out a square package. “Here—put some in my pocket for the first of you who would come smiling and begging I did. And for not asking at all you shall inherit it, little one.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane, and for the second time that day startled herself by dropping a little bobbing curtesy. Folded in paper in her hands he had put four enormous wood-hard ship’s biscuits.

  “Off with you,” said the man amiably. “Into the oven in a dish, covered with milk, isn’t it, and a knob of butter on top, lovely. Lord knows it is good someone enjoys the hard biscuit the way you all do. Not so good halfway across the Atlantic, I can tell you. By then you would swap the lot for a good warm slice of bara brith.”

  The others laughed, and suddenly it was as if the last two words had turned a key back again to relock a door. For now they were speaking unintelligibly in Welsh together, and Jane knew that the difference was not in the language they used but in her own hearing of it. She had been able to understand it for a short enchanted while; now she could not. She clutched at Simon’s unfamiliar stiff sleeve, and drew him away.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I only wish I knew. There’s no logic to it. Everything all mixed up.”

  “Where are we? And when? And why?”

  “The why is the biggest.”

  “Lets go and find Barney.”

  “I know. All right.” As they walked over the broad-spaced timbers to the street, Jane glanced sideways at her tall brother; somehow in the rough old-fashioned suit he seemed taller than ever, and more controlled. Had he changed too? No, she thought: it’s just that I wouldn’t normally bother to think what he’s like at all….

  They were walking up the road, past little cottages gay with roses and snapdragon and sweet-smelling stock; past terraced houses far grander and newer looking than they had seemed in the days that were yet to come; past a resplendent coaching inn with its board hanging newly painted: The Penhelig Arms. Two men walking ahead of them greeted a stumpy sun-tanned figure standing in the doorway of the inn. “Good day. Captain Edwards.”

  Jane thought: We are back in Welsh again….

  “Good day.”

  “Did you hear about the Sarah Ellen, then?”

  “I did,” said Captain Edwards. “And I remembered what we spoke of, and I was thinking of paying a call upon John Jones.” He paused. “And on one of his men, maybe.”

  “Perhaps we might go with you,” one of the two men said, and as he turned Jane saw with a shock that it was John Rowlands again. She had not recognized him; not only the clothes were different, but the walk as well.

  A sound of hammering came from somewhere below the road, down by the sea, and a high rhythmic screeching that Jane could not identify. At a cautious distance she and Simon followed the three men, to the edge of the road where it overlooked a flat yard just above the high-tide mark.

  The shipyard was surprisingly simple: a couple of sheds, with next to them a curious box-like structure, lea
king threads of steam. It was perhaps two feet high and wide but very very long, dozens of feet long, and attached to it by a pipe was a big metal boiler. Nearby, the rough skeleton of a boat lay in a wooden cradle: a long keel branched by the bare oaken ribs to which only a few planks had as yet been set. Huge baulks of timber, the yellowish-white colour of pine, lay piled on the ground and beside them gaped a long deep pit, deeper than the height of a man, where sawyers cut the wood into planks. Jane stared, fascinated. A piece of timber lay lengthwise over each pit, supported on small logs set across; one man stood below it and another above, and between them they worked up and down a long saw, set in a frame, which produced the rhythmic shrieking she had heard from a distance. Two other sawyers worked in a similar pit close by. Others were shifting the timber, stacking planks, tending the steaming boiler, beneath which a fire burned so hot as to be almost invisible in the warm summer air.

  A boy looked up and saw the three sailors, and gave a kind of salute; he ran to the sawyer working on top of one of the pits, shouting to be heard over the rasp of the saw.

  “Captain Humphrey Edwards and Captain Ieuan Morgan, it is, and Captain Evan Rowlands, up aloft there.”

  The sawyer signalled to his partner, stilling the long blade before it came down again for the next cut. He stared up. Jane, peeping over the side of the rough rock-edged road, saw a pudgy face topped by astonishingly bright red hair; the man was scowling, with no sign of friendship or welcome.

  “John Jones has gone to the wharf,” the red-haired man called. “To see to a shipment of pine just come in.” He bent down again, dismissivlely.

  “Caradog Lewis,” said the stumpy captain from the inn. He did not raise his voice, but even at normal pitch it was the kind of voice accustomed to being heard above a gale at sea.

  The red-haired man jerked up petulantly, hands on hips. “There is work to do here, Humphrey Edwards, if you please.”

  “Aye,” John Rowlands said. “It is your work we should like to talk to you about.” He stepped over the low rocky wall and went down a flight of rough steps to the sawpits; the others followed him. So, a little later when no one was paying attention, did Simon and Jane.