Free Testimonies: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian

forward, I saw Bronwen come out of the farmyard and along to the big ash trees where the washing blew: I could tell her at once by the way she walked. She was wearing a blue dress and there on the brilliant grass under the ash trees she arranged and folded the bellying white sails of the sheets. As soon as I saw her I knew it was no good resisting, and I watched her with what I can only describe as concentrated love. I mean the high-flown term literally: I sent my love across through the clean air down.
    At the far end of the road by the cow house, I saw Emyr coming toward the farm. He was coming with his usual steady rapid lurching stride and his road would bring him past the ash trees. She had nearly finished the sheets and I prayed that she would be done and in before he came by. Impatiently I saw her dawdling with the smaller clothes. It would all be spoiled if she did not hurry; she dropped her pegs. He came steadily on, lumbering under my black hate (I managed it then, with no effort) and she was still picking up clothes-pegs from the grass. I willed her, tensing myself inside as I used to do when I was a child, but she would be no quicker: they were both in the same field of vision now—I did not have to shift my gaze to see him level with the first tree. He stopped to do something to the gate, where it was cobbled with string and wire, and she took her basket up and went into the house. It was a strange relaxation inside me; but then he stopped kicking the gate-post and went on. He opened the door with the push of the master, and I followed him in there alone with Bronwen. Even now I am ashamed to set down what a hot, uncontrolled imagination will do.
    When the crisis was over I felt the pain. They are right to say it breaks your heart: it is there, just there, you feel the empty, tearing pain, an actual present pain , nothing that is going on inside your head, but a great breaking pain, so that you bow over it and cry, with your throat stiff and the sobs coming up from your belly.
    I never let it go like that again, not just like that again, so cruel; but once the pain had found its place it did not leave me and it would come there, even when my mind was cold and it had no right to hurt me.

Pugh

    E myr Vaughan occupied my thoughts nearly as much as Bronwen. I could not in honesty dislike him. I looked for his faults and they were there, grossness and some ugly ways; and he was, if not downright avaricious, at least very near to it. Once I did see a fox that he had poisoned: it was strychnine they used, and the beast’s twisted agony was shocking, even to him. I suggested that he should use something less savage, like cyanide of potassium. He quite agreed that the torture was excessive, even for a fox (he really meant it, for in his way he was humane) but as an unanswerable objection he said, “But, Mr. Pugh, it is costing.” They were given the strychnine for nothing. I could see, from the look on his face, that he would do nothing about it—an ugly, shrewd look—so in the end I gave him some cyanide and he threw his old fox-bottle into the fire. But the meanness, if it was true meanness, and the other flaws I saw in him, all came from his way of life and his different values, and they were so far outbalanced by his goodness that they were not ground enough for dislike, still less for hatred.
    He was very kind to me: there were continual unprompted neighborly actions, loads of manure when I started gardening, a sack of potatoes, the boy sent up to tell me when anything interesting was going to be done at the farm. He never wanted to be thanked: it was the same when he answered my questions about the working of a farm, questions that must have been childish to a man brought up on the land; he answered them clearly, as plainly as he could, with no mystification or affectation of superiority (there are not so many, in any position, who can do that). He took great trouble in making things clear to me, and when it