Band of Angel by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online Page B

took some of the berries in his hand and, squeezing them open, stained the palm of his hand a deep bright red.

Chapter 7

    Riding home, passing a farmyard where sheep were being sheared, Deio felt the same: skinned and undone; calling out in an uncertain voice for something he was not sure of. He couldn’t let her do this to him again, he thought, slamming his legs into his horse’s side. Never again.
    He’d been a boy then; now he was twenty-two and preferred it this way. The next day, he would start the ride across the mountains to London and that always made him feel good. He’d come back from Smithfield, from Kent, from Wrexham, saddlebags stuffed with money and strange food and London linens, new shotguns and bridles, quilts, bits of jewelry for the girls. He’d have stories to tell, stories that kept other men spellbound in the taverns, sagging over their ales and saying “Never! And Duw! Duw! Duw!” Not a sniveling boy exploding with pain in an upstairs bedroom, hoping his parents couldn’t hear him; not a dog creeping through the Carreg’s backdoor, unsure of his reception.
    She’d raised her head, she’d looked at him again with those eyes. He would look away. He had no other choice and that was all it took, a clear decision: she looked, and you looked away, and in time it would probably get easier.
    His horse, dapple gray and four years old, shied at her reflection in a puddle. He hardly ever lost his temper with a horse, but now he gave it a sharp one and she cantered for a few strides, stiff-legged and sideways, then he sat deeply and tuned himself to her, gathering her up and making her as calm and comfortable as a rocking chair. He knew about horses, it was bred in the bone. Heunderstood the roots of their terror, their need to escape, and the right degree of force and tenderness it took to get them both to trust and accept you as the man in charge.
    It worked with women, too. They were mad for the drovers, waited for them in every town, lay down with them in the night bucking and biting and calling out. You could never tell a woman like Catherine a thing like that. Even now, when he thought of that redheaded girl in Bala—her long waist; her high, hard breasts—he knew he wanted to stay free. He closed his eyes briefly, he pushed his long legs deeper into the saddle and made the gray horse sweat and stretch out and go to the point where fear met freedom. He told himself he felt better already.
    But when the horse was walking again, relaxed now and calmly swishing away flies with its tail, he saw Catherine’s face looking up at him from the church porch. He saw her eyes bewildered by sorrow and felt her power to wound. It had happened before:
Mother says I can’t come anymore.
That night he’d slammed his fist into the wall so hard he’d almost broken it, then his hateful sobs and his father’s scorn and, even worse, kindly chat about never letting a woman do that to him, and then the closed door, until now.
    Now he was at the duck pond rimmed with feathers, slap in the middle of the boundary line between Pantyporthman, his Da’s thirty-acre farm, and Huw Carreg’s hundred acres. His home—from here a sprawling series of stone buildings surrounded by stack barns and small wooden corrals—seemed set apart and special, a self-contained island of noise and excitement amid the more peaceful farms of the Lleyn. He loved everything about it: its sweeping views to the east and the west, the fields where they kept their broodmares, their trout stream, the foothills of Snowdon beyond, tonight bathed in pink light after the storm. From where he sat, he could hear the dinning of two hundred head of cattle, pent up and anxious before their journey; the shouts of men, the yaps of the corgis, Nip and Ben, who’d come with them to London; the deeper bark of Fly, their collie.
    In the yard in front of the stack house, four men were herding a group of thirty or so Welsh blacks into a small field to the