A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees

by Clare Dudman

  Silas looks around him. The rest of the colonists and soldiers are looking more happy and relaxed. It is pointless to say anything now. It is better to wait. Everyone will find out soon enough.

  Megan comes over to him with Gwyneth held over her shoulder. ‘I’m worried about her, Silas; she’s not feeding properly. And I think she’s got a fever.’

  The baby is listless, her eyes half shut. He feels her face. She does feel hot but then his hands are cold. ‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ he says, but he examines the child’s face again. She seems tired. Her eyelids droop. For a few seconds she looks beyond him through half-shut eyes as if she is already dreaming and then she falls asleep.

  Myfanwy comes to hold his hand. ‘Why are you looking at Gwyneth?’ she asks.

  ‘Just to make sure she’s asleep, cariad fach.’

  In the yard the Argentines are making speeches.

  ‘What are they saying Dadda?’

  ‘I don’t know, cariad. Go and ask Mr Williams.’

  She sidles up to Selwyn but he shakes his head and waves her away.

  She runs back to her father and tugs at his sleeve. ‘Mr Williams won’t speak to me.’

  He pats her on the head. ‘Never mind. Perhaps he’s trying to listen.’

  She looks back at Selwyn for a few minutes still holding on to her father’s sleeve, and then tugs it again. ‘Dadda?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Williams is crying.’

  ‘No he’s not.’

  ‘Well, he looks like he is.’

  ‘Men don’t cry, Myfanwy. He must just have sand in his eyes.’

  ‘But he looks sad.’

  ‘No, he’s happy. We all are. Look, they’re putting up a flag.’

  The flag is fastened on a pole outside the warehouse. It is pale blue and white and a yellow sun with a face is shining from the middle. Not the red dragon standing on a green field clawing at the white air, spoiling for a fight. For a few seconds there is silence, then Edwyn Lloyd yells out a hurrah with Jacob following immediately, then a bedraggled applause from some of the younger women. Cecilia, Silas notices, is mute and pale, looking first at her husband then at the flag and then at her husband again. He glances again at Gwyneth on Megan’s shoulder and brushes his finger against her face. She seems less hot than before.

  Now there are more speeches, in Welsh this time and it is the Argentines’ turn to be bored. Jacob first, then finally Edwyn Lloyd.

  ‘And in honour of that man,’ Edwyn Lloyd says, ‘we have decided to call our first settlement Rawson, because without Dr Rawson, minister of the interior, none of this would have been possible.’

  Jacob leads the hurrahs this time, and this time the soldiers join in – at first just with their voices, and then, at Murga’s nod, with their guns, quickly lifted from their shoulders and fired into the air. Myfanwy buries her head into her mother’s skirts and begins to cry. The guns fire again and there is some more muted applause and cheering. Most of the children are crying now, and a couple of the very young ones are screaming. Silas’ eyes meet Selwyn’s and then look away again. The American is standing on his own looking out of the settlement to the river.

  The guns fire again and Silas catches his breath. Gwyneth has not cried, not moved, not even flinched. She hangs over Megan’s shoulder like a rag.

  Twenty-two

  Yeluc

  Elal’s land had been defiled. From the bay to the fort was a weal; the wet ground scarred by the marching hooves of a small army. When I approached the fort I could see them there: men wearing tight mantles in the bright colours of flowers, gold and silver sparkling from their shoulders, and beside them their strong large horses. The Cristianos. They stood in line and clapped and made the low loud sound of the elephant seals, and then numbed Elal’s world with thunder from their firesticks. Then, in the middle of it all, appeared a patch of blue and white – the colour of the sky on a summer day – and in the middle of these stripes, a picture of the sun: the father of Elal’s bride. And this small scrap of colour fluttered high over the roof of one of the huts and there were more shouts and one of the Cristianos started to talk in a loud voice to the rest. Then, when he finished talking one of Si-las’ brothers began, and then another of the Cristianos. They had so much to say. I grew weary of listening to them, I led Roberto away for him to find new food.

  By the time I returned the Cristianos had gone, marching northwards on the track they’d made. It had begun to rain and they marched quietly, the noise of their harnesses and hooves muffled by the low cloud.

  That was then. This is now.

  Si-las sits outside his grass toldo. On his lap there is a small child with hair like his own. The setting sun catches it and turns it into fire. Neither moves. Then, in front of him, a small mouse emerges from a hole in the bank and sniffs at the air. Si-las glances up and as he does so the child’s head on his lap drops against his chest. The mouse disappears and Si-las looks down. For a single heartbeat the baby’s head lolls outside his arms, then Si-las catches hold of the tiny object in his great wide hand. He brings it quickly towards his face as though he is going to kiss it then allows it to fall away again. Then he leans back against the doorway and roars – a scream turning into a single word, again and again: ‘No, no, no.’ A magic so strong even the river spirits listen. He clutches the head again and turns it towards him, looking at the face and screaming the same word and each time it is as the first time, ‘No, no, no,’ and even though his own kind come, even though they try to prise it from him he will not let it go. ‘No,’ he says, and it hurts my ears. And I turn because I cannot bear to watch, but when I shut my eyes I can still see it, a pale spirit drifting above us all, wondering where she is to go next.

  They buried the child at the edge of the village. I watched carefully so I could tell Seannu: how they stood and chanted. How they all sang. How they wept. And the skin around Seannu’s eyes softened, and I knew she was thinking of the small patches of ground beside the river where the soil never seems to heal.

  Twenty-three

  The doctor is young, Irish, and has picked up very little Welsh. He had joined the Mimosa fresh from medical college. He had few ties and was looking for adventure, but a life in Patagonia has not lived up to his expectations. He has an easy-going nature and has found life with these Welsh colonists a little too intense. ‘Intense,’ that is the English word he uses to Silas when they talk. Silas has to ask Selwyn for a translation.

  ‘Too holy,’ Selwyn explains, and grins.

  Silas has noticed that the doctor himself grins little these days and has less to say. When he first came aboard he had made some effort to learn the language, but just recently he seems to have given up. Instead he has taken to resorting to signs and odd words.

  ‘Why did you not go back with the Mimosa?’ Silas had asked him once through Selwyn. It is what I’d have done, he’d thought. After all the doctor had the means – no doubt the Mimosa needed a ship’s doctor on the way back just as much as she’d needed one on the way out. The doctor had shrugged in reply. ‘I had to stay,’ he’d said once, ‘the colony needed me.’ Another time he’d said Edwyn Lloyd had persuaded him. But eventually he’d admitted that he couldn’t face another voyage on the same ship as Captain Gidsby.

  ‘The man was… ill,’ he said, pointing to his temple, ‘up here.’

  Then, when Silas had asked him why he’d said that, he’d pulled at his hair and grimaced: ‘Nits. Remember?’

  Silas had returned the grimace – ‘nits’ is a word the doctor came to know well on board the Mimosa. It was the first time any of them had encountered the Jones family; the daughter, Miriam, had been engaged in a tug of war with the captain. It had been a struggle that neither was likely to win since they were well matched in height and weight. John Jones’ daughter was striking. Tall and thin with a black fuzz of hair topped with a small white cap, long pale face, sharp nose and small brown eyes like raisins.

  ‘Mam, Mam!’ Her voice had been
shrill as the two had crossed the deck together in a slow strange dance – his hands entangled in her hair and her feet aiming kicks at his legs and at any other place she could reach.

  ‘Mam!’ By this time the other Joneses had appeared: Mary, John, and two of their other four children. John was small and stringy and Mary was shaped like a cannon ball – her girth roughly matching her height – but their sons were both tall like Miriam, with arms like truncheons. They advanced on the pair together and then suddenly stopped. There was a glint of grey metal and polished wood: a gun. The Jones family paused for about three seconds and then Mary, six months pregnant and consequently more spherical than ever, reached forward and grabbed the gun. There was a single shot that caused everyone to drop down and when they all looked up again the captain and Mary were looking at each other with the gun between them on the floor.

  It didn’t take long for Jacob to find out the reason for the rumpus: the captain had been told by one of the sailors that some of the girls had nits so he had ordered the first mate to ‘fleece the lot of them’. Unfortunately he, and the first mate, had chosen the first ewe unwisely.

  The doctor, as an Irishman, and outsider, had been called in as judge.

  ‘The Welsh are a clean race,’ Jacob had said grandly and, thought Silas, somewhat sweepingly.

  In the end the doctor, with a wry smile, claimed to find nits only on one person – the completely bald head of Caradoc Llewellyn, the Baptist minister.

  There have been few smiles from the doctor since then. By the time they landed in Patagonia his face seemed already to set into a frown, with pair of perpendicular and parallel lines on his forehead that have deepened week by week. All he seems to be able to do is oversee the passage of children into the world – only to see them out of it again a few months later. Silas looks at his face with pity. How miserable it must be to feel so powerless one day after the next. Gwyneth is the third child to die in less than a month. He turns all these thoughts over in his head. It’s not hurting yet. It’s as if some large part of him has just been scalded and he is waiting for the pain to start.

  ‘But why did she die?’ he asks, but the doctor shrugs and shakes his head.

  ‘It must have been something.’

  ‘Fever,’ he says, which they both know is no answer at all.

  Megan is pale and mute. When Silas makes her some tea she sips it as if she is a child.

  Myfanwy tugs at her dress. ‘Mam?’

  But Megan has retreated again. After she has finished the tea she stands, tucks in the blankets of Gwyneth’s cot as if the child is still there, and then walks to the fire to rearrange the kindling.

  ‘Mam?’ Myfanwy’s voice is uncertain. ‘Mam?’ This time it ends in a breathy sob. Silas picks his remaining daughter up in his arms. ‘Leave your mother in peace for a while, cariad fach.’

  ‘Why, Dadda? What’s wrong with her? Where’s Gwyneth?’

  ‘Your Mam’s sad. Jesus has called your sister to heaven to be with him too.’

  ‘Will Jesus want me next?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because...’ His voice breaks. He can’t carry on. Why? The pain has suddenly arrived in an overwhelming wave and taken away his voice. Instead he presses her to him and for once she doesn’t struggle but rests there peacefully.

  ‘Dadda?’

  ‘No more questions now.’

  ‘When will Jesus want me too?’

  He rocks her gently against him. ‘I said no more questions.’

  She wrestles herself from his grip and looks at him. ‘Dadda?

  He can’t bear to answer, can hardly dare to speak. He desperately thinks of something else to interest her. ‘Did you see the soldiers go?’ he says at last.

  She nods her head.

  ‘Did you see the track they made?’

  She nods again. ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Back to their home.’

  ‘When are we going home, Dadda?’

  The question jolts him a little from his misery. He is surprised she still remembers. Five months must seem like a lifetime ago to a five-year-old child.

  ‘This is our home now, cariad.’

  ‘But what about...?’ Then she catches his eye and stops. She places the tip of her thumb in her mouth and frowns as if she is thinking. ‘We’re going to stay here for Jesus to find us too, aren’t we Dadda?’ She waits for him to reply and when nothing comes carries on. ‘Otherwise he won’t know where we are, and he’ll look and look and look for us and never ever find us – and then we won’t see Gwyneth and Richard in heaven.’

  She waits a few moment for him to answer and when he does not tells herself, ‘That’s right, Myfanwy.’ And leans heavily against him. ‘Good girl,’ she says dreamily.

  In the morning Megan doesn’t rise but lies quite still facing the wall. Silas leans over to look at her. Her eyes are open but it is as if she is staring at something far away. Myfanwy is still asleep. He picks her up gently and puts her to lie beside her mother. She murmurs and presses herself against Megan’s warm back.

  ‘Cuddle up close now, cariad,’ he says and creeps out with a bucket for water.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mary Jones says, when she sees him in front of the fort, ‘John told me last night. If there’s anything I can do to help...’ Her voice fades for a few seconds, ‘but I don’t suppose there is, really.’ She looks down at her baby cooing in her arms and the two toddlers standing passively each side of her, and Silas thanks her and says that they will cope. She looks at him solemnly. She manages her family with a serious unsmiling efficiency – now a brood of six children. With her stubby frame, and equally stubby face and nose, she is as unlike her lanky daughter as it is possible to be. Whereas John and Mary are small and quiet, their children are large and loud. The three older ones stride around the place like over-sized puppies, yapping at each other in conversation that includes no one else, although Miriam sometimes manages a smile at the people she sometimes notices around her. Although too pale to look truly healthy, they never seem to sicken and as he regards her three youngest children he feels a slight pang of envy. For the Jones family life seems to continue unremarkably, without incident. Even the birth of their latest offspring at Port Madryn was not dramatic. In the shade of a hill which now bears the child’s name. According to the doctor it was an easy delivery.

  Silas walks on to the river but someone is already there. Cecilia Lloyd wringing out clothes then piling them into her basket. She seems so young and vulnerable. She’s aged about twenty-five he’d guess. Everything about her is unremarkable; from her ordinary-looking brown hair that is piled on top of her head, to her pale, unexpressive face underneath. It is so blank that it is as if her mind has been stubbed out inside. He sits out of sight behind a bush and watches her. Her face is perfect – each feature in proportion – but somehow not at all beautiful. Her eyes are a dull hazel, her lips neither broad nor thin, her nose neither retroussé nor long. As she passes him he can smell the soap she has used to wash the clothes and can see her hands red and raw with the coldness of the water and the wind. She’s thinner than he’d realised, or maybe, like the majority of the colonists, she has lost weight. She walks slowly up to the fort, her head tipped down. After waiting a few minutes he fills his bucket and follows her back.

  Edwyn’s cottage has a prime spot, high up, using part of the fort wall for support. She spends several minutes laying the clothes out in the sun to dry and then enters the house. Although she draws the door to, it doesn’t quite reach the doorframe. Silas sneaks closer, pretending that something on the wall has caught his eye and he is examining it.

  ‘That Baptist minister – Llewellyn – is he alone?’ Edwyn’s voice, speaking softly yet clearly audible through the turf wall.

  ‘Caradoc? No, he has a wife, Martha.’

  ‘Anything I should know about her?’

  ‘Martha – ah, a mousy little thing, prefers her own company – but she is secretl
y very fond of piano music which her husband thinks is akin to worshipping the Devil. She’s had several miscarriages, I think – not one came to term – and she lost her mother shortly before the ship sailed. She’s very quiet – much in thrall to that husband of hers.’

  ‘Ah. And Caradoc himself is almost fifty – about ten years her senior. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. A second marriage, just like John Jones – do you remember? The first wife died twelve years ago.’ Her voice, like her face, is almost without expression.

  ‘Are they for us or against us?’

  ‘A little against at the moment, though not as much as some.’

  ‘And your recommendation?’

  ‘The piano is important to Martha; I think she is envious of the little organ the Williams family managed to smuggle over. Maybe if you happen to mention your admiration for... Bach.’

  ‘Bach? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes, Martha Llewellyn would be very interested. Mention the Toccata and Fugue in D minor...’

  Suddenly someone calls from the entrance to the fort. ‘Silas! I’m so sorry! I just heard.’ Selwyn. He comes hurrying towards him and the voices inside the cottage are suddenly silent. Cecilia’s face appears at the door, her eyes slightly wide. She glances at Silas and her mouth opens. ‘Have you...?’ She stops and closes her mouth and Edwyn appears beside her. He steps towards Silas with his arms outstretched.

  ‘Ah Silas, I heard about your loss. I’m so sorry. Gwyneth, wasn’t it? Such a dear little one. All during that dreadful voyage south there was not a peep out of her. I used to say to my dear Cecilia it was probably because she was born at sea. That’s right, isn’t it?’