Band of Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

with acorns. Nightgowns, woolen boots, jackets, tams. That for the wash, that to throw away, that for a stitch, that for when the sewing lady came. She tried to sing sometimes to show she was all right, but her voice sounded cracked and funny.
    Catherine got up quickly. This was supposed to be a happy day. Mother had persuaded Father to give them some money to go to Sarn and buy taffeta or silk for her first grown-up ball in Caernarfon. Father, grumbling but only a bit, had given in to his wife’s entreaties that the girls must begin a social life before it was too late. He thrust his big red hand into a leather pouch hidden behind the flour jar on the dresser, drew out five shillings, and said to Mother with a shy look, “You girls bleed me dry.” Or maybe he gave in because Mother had sighed and flapped the air as though she had limited breath for an argument.
    Walking barefoot toward her wardrobe, Catherine was half at the ball already and half walking across the square at Sarn with Deio’s eyes on her. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her: the little girl he’d reenacted Llewellyn’s last stand with—she’d been good at that, swiping with her sword and making gurgling cries as she galloped off—or the child who had loved playing hospitals with him, bandaging their obliging cat and putting it to bed, and telling him it may not last the night. She hoped he might forget that now and see her as she was: a woman, or very nearly one.
    She selected the smartest of the three dresses she owned (white cambric with a
broderie anglaise
trim and a bodice pintucked intothirty narrow pleats). She hung the dress on the front of the cupboard then poured water into a pretty china basin with a lily-of-the-valley motif and a faint crack down the center. As she washed under her nightgown what Mair, who could be coarse, referred to as “nooks and crannies,” a sudden burst of sun sent patterns of light over her skin and made her shiver with pleasure.
    She went down to the kitchen, a narrow room on the northern side of the house and always dark. She took a taper to the kitchen fire and lit an oil lamp over the table. It cast a warm glow on familiar objects: the dresser with its green-and-white china, the hearth with its hooks and pans, and beside it the still shocking thing: a baby-chair covered in green velvet, its carved footrest scuffed from generations of kicking babies.
    Since it was Mair’s day off and they had no other help now, Catherine went into the creamery behind the kitchen to draw off a pint of milk from one of four blue basins. Stepping into a patch of sunlight outside the creamery door, a yellowhammer sang its little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese song, and she stood for a moment, jug in hand, listening and smiling. A pretty young woman to whom nothing really bad had ever happened. Then, turning, she saw her father standing at the kitchen window looking agitated. He beckoned her inside, his mouth was moving. She thought she must have done something wrong: worn her best dress outside; left her candle lit; not got his breakfast quickly enough.
    “Catherine,” he said, when she stood before him dry-mouthed, “go upstairs straight away to your mother, something’s happening to her.”
    “What is it, Father?”
    His tone frightened her, reminding her of the blank spots in her childhood: the slammed doors, Mother’s long rests in the afternoon. But now, Father was waving his hands in jerky circles, and telling her to take a chamber pot with her and seemed incapable of naming the thing.
    She dashed down the path to the necessary, the shed where potties were stacked in a cupboard to the left of the privy. She ran back into the house and up the stairs, frightened to open the door that led into Mother’s room. When she did, she saw her mother,half undressed in her bed, her hair undone. Her skin gleamed with sweat. Her favorite gray dress was all undone like a burst doll’s. Her bosom and corsets were showing.