The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

began to look after the goats and the sheep and the dogs and cats; then other people started bringing me their animals. Soon I had a small herbal animal hospital on my hands.
    But I didn’t find my true vocation until that night when I went to my first hunt saboteurs’ meeting.
    In each hunter I saw my suitor, and I screamed No! at more of them than I could count. It was a word I had to learn like a foreign language, like a musical instrument, and I enjoyed using it in all its nuances. I whispered it and shouted it, sang it and screeched it; I said it cajolingly and threateningly, with irony and amusement and joy and in hot fury.
    I loved every minute of it.
    I was free.

    D
    But I had no idea what to do next.
    I tried to imagine explaining to my mother (to Maelor’s mother, for that matter) what had happened. I wasn’t sure which bit they would find harder to believe: the fact that the most eligible bachelor of Cwmcapel had tried to force me, or the fact that I had deep-frozen him for his pains.
    Of course he’d never do that, my dear. You must have imagined it. Are you sure you haven’t had a drop too much of that French wine?
    Come on now, dear, unfreeze him. You’ve had your joke, and I’m sure I don’t know how you did it. Very clever, of course. But think how cold the poor boy must be by now.
    God, but he looked stupid, even through inches of ice.
    In the end, I left him there in the rose garden and just walked away.
    It was a lovely summer’s night, warm and balmy and smelling of hay and dust and, faintly, salt and seaweed.
    I walked and walked, and when morning came I had arrived at the seashore. There was a small island just off the coast, and I took off my satin shoes that were falling to bits, hitched up what was left of my dress and waded across.
    Finally alone.

    There was a well with sweet water on the island, and wild brambles and even an apple tree.
    Finally alone.
    Over the years, I don’t quite know how, I acquired a reputa tion as a wise woman who could make and unmake spells, see into the future and cure afflictions in humans and beasts.
    I suppose the story of what had happened to Maelor helped a bit.
    It was mostly women who came to see me and ask me for advice. I gave them my apples and a drink from the well, and they left, strengthened and comforted, and spread the word.
    For twenty years and more, I was happier that I’d ever been. After that, I sometimes dreamed of the world again. Never of Cwmcapel, and not often of other places, but just sometimes I wondered what it might be like somewhere else, across the water in other countries. What it might be like meeting other people.
    I had companions, of course. There were the seals who’d lie for hours on the rocks in the sun, and at night threw off their skins and came ashore to dance.
    There were birds, crows and gulls mostly, who would sit in the tree and entertain me with stories of what they’d seen and heard.
    There were quite a few cats, and a couple of donkeys and an old, wise, moth-eaten sheep.

    After another twenty years, I decided I needed a change from my island life. I packed some ripe apples, filled a flask with water and waded ashore for the first time in four decades. I turned round and round with my eyes closed and finally chose a direction that seemed promising.

    M
    They didn’t like it, of course. And not just the hunters. In some places it was half the village that would slam its doors in our faces when we came to shop for something that we couldn’t grow, or to visit a friend or the library. Some men spat when they saw us; and even some of the children jeered.
    If we thought a fox or a hare or a bird was that important, they said, we could go and ask them for ink or butter or clothes.
    But they still brought their animals to us when the vet had given them up.
    Then we heard rumours of what they called a counter attack.
    They came one morning, quite early; a group of