Free Band of Angel by Julia Gregson Page A

drink.
    “Have you ever been to Bardsey Island?” she asked eventually. “You can see it from this window if you stand on a box.”
    Catherine felt a wave of anger and embarrassment wash over her. She had opened her heart, and now this good woman was going to try and distract her with scenic wonders.
    “I will take you there one day if you like,” said Eleri.
    “That would be very kind,” said Catherine numbly. She wished she could leave now.
    “It is supposed to be a magic island: twenty thousand saints buried there—or two thousand, depending on who you are talking to—people for centuries walking from all over Britain to get there. They say Merlin the Magician is buried there inside a glass house.”
    She talked on for a while about other magic islands, places with trees that were always in bloom, filled with birds that never stopped singing. Catherine saw her mouth moving but hardly heard a word. If she was late home Father would never let her out again.
    “The Welsh, all of us, love these stories,” she went on. “They take our minds away from how hard life really is—again, it’s the idea of life suddenly turning up ready-made for you like a present left at the door.”
    A sharp wind had got up and was rattling the windows and outside, even though the sun was shining, it had started raining.
    “Ah,” said Eleri, getting up to close the window, “sun and rain together. The Devil, or so another legend goes, is beating his wife.” Her eyes were shining now in the darkening room. “But if thunder is heard while the moon is shining, the devil is beating his mother. To a Celt, the Devil is almost as important an idea as the idea of God.”
    “I think I really must go home,” said Catherine.
    “And God help you if you find the Water Horse,” said Eleri, “he looks so lovely and he’s deadly.”
    “Do you believe in him?” Catherine was interested at last. “I think about him every time I see the sea.”
    “No.” She put down her pipe. “No, I don’t. But I do believe he shows us what we fear.”
    “What?”
    “Well, there he is: beautiful, extraordinary. He stands placidly by the water’s edge. We try to mount him, and sometimes you can ride him and you feel so powerful, so wonderful, and the next time he bolts back into the sea with you and you die a horrible and frightening death. What could be clearer?” Eleri’s eyes were shining in the dusk. “It’s our fear of being out of control. He’s the one who tells you to stick with the ordinary, don’t move, everything else isdangerous and nothing possible, but the problem is that if you fear everything you can’t control, you’ll never do anything that matters to you.”
    When Catherine looked up Eleri was frowning at her. “You are very self-absorbed,” she said. “Many people of your age are. Let us suppose for a moment that you did have a hand in your mother’s death. What have you done about it since? I mean, apart from walking on the cliffs and feeling misunderstood.”
    “I have a plan,” Catherine said angrily. “That’s why I’m here.”
    “All right, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” said Eleri. “I talk too much. It’s one disadvantage of being on your own.”
    “No, don’t.” Catherine leaned across and touched Eleri’s hand. “Please don’t stop.”
    “Well?”
    “Well—” Her mouth went dry. “I want to be a doctor. I do know your father is a surgeon and I want to go to London,” she blurted out. “I want to be a doctor. I want to save some woman somewhere from the misery my mother went through. She shouldn’t have died like that.”
    “Lots of women do.”
    “I know.”
    The room grew quiet for a while, only the boom of the sea.
    “I used to watch you sometimes,” Eleri said eventually, “with that drover’s boy on the cliff. I heard you once tell him your pony had a toothache, you’d tied its jaw in a bandage.”
    “Oh no.” Catherine covered her face in confusion.
    “No, no, no, don’t.