White Ravens

by Owen Sheers

  Within a few months that distress had grown into more persistent problems. The cottage was isolated but Matthew and Branwen could only live there through interaction with the village where they bought and sold produce and where they got their only news and entertainment. Branwen’s beauty, which had seemed such a prize on their arrival, soon became a thorn in the sides of many of the local women. They eyed her delicate features, her poise, her dark hair, with suspicion, as if anyone this beautiful on the outside had to be hiding an ugliness within. That, at least, is what they said to each other. In private they knew it was the eyes of their own husbands that fed their distrust, the way they lingered a second too long over Branwen when she came in to market. Or, even worse, how they looked at them, their wives, afterwards.

  To compound this growing suspicion of his wife Matthew had, while drinking in the village pub one evening, told another farmer what happened on their wedding night. A sober man during the war, Matthew had, since his return, increasingly been finding refuge from his family tensions in drink. On this occasion another argument with his father had sent him to the pub where a quick succession of whiskies loosened his tongue and seduced him into an indulgence of storytelling. Through the lens of those shot glasses he even found a morbid delight in vividly evoking the scene for his enraptured listener; painting for him in gory detail Mullie’s earless, lidless, lipless head, the great gashes torn along his sides and the flash of Evan’s bayonet in the moonlight.

  It didn’t take long for the story to spread, or for Branwen to hear it, stage-whispered in the bakery a week later. In the eyes of the village, as Evan’s sister the shadow of his crime fell over Branwen too. Those women who’d first suspected her beauty felt themselves, in the wake of this story, somehow justified and said as much, nodding their heads with the weight of their wisdom.

  When Branwen returned home that day she was furious. It was the first time Matthew had seen her anger, the first time he’d seen those mountains, rocks and tearing winds of her home come alive in her accusing eyes, in her shrill, shouted voice of betrayal. In the face of her fury he’d accepted her blame and he’d felt his wrongdoing painfully for weeks afterwards. For a time the transgression looked as if it had been just that; no more than a temporary diversion from their true journey together. But then Matthew’s attention was taken by another story being whispered through the village; a story not about his wife, but him.

  Matthew had returned to Ireland as a spy for the British. That was how the rumour ran. That the war in Europe was as good as done and now the British would be turning their gaze back west, towards Ireland. Matthew, so the story went, was one of many Irish men who’d fought for the British and now been recruited to their cause.

  It was preposterous and at first, when his father took him aside to tell him, Matthew had done no more than laugh in disbelief. But as the story passed from ear to ear, so it strengthened, until he began to feel the force of its influence every day. Nothing he said made any difference, no defence he offered seemed capable of damming the story’s flow and as the months cooled towards winter Matthew realised, with horror, that the very gossip that had been his trade at the Rumour Mill could all too easily become his undoing.

  The village, already suspicious of the rare beauty he’d brought back from Britain, began to turn openly against them. Branwen found herself shouldered out of conversations in the market, while Matthew increasingly found himself sitting alone on his nights in the pub. His own parents, fearing the community more than the abandonment of their son, became distant and although only half a mile up the lane may as well have been living in Dublin for all they saw of them.

  As the year turned, as the nights drew in, and the coastal salt winds harried the land, so a turning began in Matthew too. The new confidence he’d found in marrying Branwen was gradually unpicked and unravelled by both his drinking and the village’s endless gossip. The combined pressure of these, the fog and depression of the drink, the cruel claustrophobia of the gossip, pressed in with ever greater force upon Matthew’s already fragile mind. Within just a few months of first hearing that rumour about him being a spy, Matthew, in desperation and without knowing it, began to side with the village against his wife.

  At first it was in such a way as neither of them noticed. But side with them he did, subtly, within himself, to save himself. Through a confused haze of fear, drink and insecurity, Matthew began to blame Branwen, the victim of the villagers’ scorn, for their situation, rather than the perpetrators themselves.

  As Matthew had said that day they’d ridden back from the chapel to find Evan so twisted up with anger, most men returning from the war brought back more of it than they should. But not all showed the change as immediately as Evan had that night. For Matthew, it seems, the years of war, the ravaging of his leg, the months in that dark basement in blitz-broken London, all of it finally began to surface through him now, over that long cold winter in Ireland. A slow seepage of regret and hate that spread through his body to gradually infect every part of him. It was his hate for the gossiping, ignorant villagers, for his father, blinded by prejudice, for Evan’s sneering disdain and even for the wider world which had allowed all this to happen. All of this found an outlet in his turning against Branwen. For what? He couldn’t say. For being the innocent cause of their pain? For making him fall in love with her in the first place? He had no answer, and often he felt as if he were watching another man treat her the way he did; sullenly refusing to speak with her, leaving a room when she entered, retreating more and more to the company of a bottle when he knew she ached for his touch and loving word. It wasn’t that he no longer found her attractive, he did. Or that he no longer loved her. Again, he thought that he did. It was, if anything, as much a turning from himself as from her. A spiteful refusal to reach for the one true note in his out-of-tune life; a refusal tragically strengthened, rather than weakened, when Branwen gave birth to their son.

  Branwen already knew she was pregnant when she’d arrived in Ireland, although she’d waited another month before she told Matthew. She’d hoped the birth of their son would be a salve to their growing troubles, but it wasn’t. On the contrary, Matthew seemed to resent the love and attention his wife lavished on the baby, while his son’s open, untouched innocence only made him feel even more damaged by the world. Branwen, lost in the face of her husband’s cruelty, moored herself tighter and tighter to her child. It was as if, she thought, she’d been cursed by her own name, and like those white ravens, too different, too beautiful for the nest of their parents, she was being abandoned to suffer and starve on the cold rocks of Matthew’s indifference.

  Branwen endured a year and a half of this life before she began to consider how she might leave it. Now and then she’d thought she’d seen flickering moments of hope on the horizon; the rare hour when Matthew seemed to come back to himself, a blissful two days without seeing anyone else from the village or the area. But these had always been brief and ungrounded on any real change in their situation. Soon, she knew there was no hope and, for the sake of herself and for her young son, she began to look for a way to return to Wales.

  They had no telephone in the cottage and any letters she’d ever sent home were posted over the counter at the village post office. Now, with the way things had turned, this was the last thing she wanted to do. Someone there was bound to tell Matthew she’d written home to Wales and, as bitter as he’d become, he’d want to know why she was writing and to whom. No, she had to find another way to let Ben know how lonely and scared she was, how much she wanted to return to the farm and to escape from her husband who, though she still loved him, she no longer recognised.

  The thread of an opportunity finally blew her way one morning the next summer. She’d been down at the village’s small harbour buying fish from the fresh catch brought in the night before. Having once again suffered the cold shoulders of the other women Branwen was about to begin pushing her son’s pram up the winding lane back to their cottage when, suddenl
y, she heard a scrap of Wales blown her way on the air. She stopped and listened. Yes, there it was again, more clearly this time. It was a song, the same one she’d sung that morning when Matthew had first come down those stairs for breakfast, Ar Lan Y Môr. Turning the pram around she followed the voice, a man’s smooth baritone, back down to the far end of the harbour where, at the very end of the jetty, she saw the singer. He was a young man working on a small seiner, untangling a heap of nets spread over its cramped deck. The boat’s name was painted in red over its green-washed planks, Y Ddrudwen. Taking a deep breath for courage, Branwen pushed the pram on, calling out when close enough, ‘Mae’n dda i glywed cân o gartref!’

  The young fisherman, Alun, had been all too happy to stop in his work and talk with this pretty young mother, to speak Welsh across the sea from his home. He was, he told Branwen, from Fishguard, but now and then when the tides were in his favour and the weather was good he’d dock along the Irish coast and sell his catch here, before setting out to fish again on his way home to Wales. An hour later Branwen was waving Alun goodbye, promising herself, as she watched his boat pitch and roll on the waves, that from now on she’d always walk this way on fine days, on the chance of meeting him again.

  For many weeks Branwen found excuses to make that walk down to the harbour. Despite her searching of the bobbing boats though, she never heard Alun singing, and each time she returned to the cottage with the letter she’d written to Ben still folded in the pocket of her skirt. After two months of repeating this pattern she began to think Alun and his boat had been no more than just another false horizon, another taunting possibility faded out of sight.

  But then, one August morning, when the sun was turning the choppy sea to diamonds, Branwen walked to the harbour once more and, this time, heard Alun’s voice again, rising and falling over the buckets of fish, the mounds of nets and the boats tugging on their moorings. ‘Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion.’ The words brought tears to her eyes and, fearful she’d somehow miss him, that he was at that very minute piloting his seiner out of the harbour, Branwen broke into a run, pushing her son’s pram before her. To her relief Alun was exactly where she’d found him before, mending his nets on the deck of Y Ddrudwen, moored at the end of the jetty. An hour of talking later and Branwen was pushing her son’s pram back up the lane towards home, still humming the song’s tune, the pocket of her skirt empty.

  The first Matthew knew of the letter Branwen had written, and the first Branwen knew that Alun had actually posted it and hadn’t, as she’d feared, lost it overboard or among the tangle of nets on his boat, was a single firm knock on the front door of their cottage which, ever since they’d lived there, had never been knocked on before.

  Branwen was playing with her son who, having discovered his walking legs several months earlier, was now tottering back and forth between his mother’s chair beside the fire and the edge of the table. Matthew was sitting in an armchair on the other side of the fireplace, reading his paper and listening to a radio news report about the aftermath of Japan’s official surrender following that summer’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America’s use of those terrifying new weapons had, in the weeks since, sent him even deeper into himself, as if the world, once again, had proved it would only ever meet violence with greater violence; that even in the name of good, evil would always be done.

  The single knock caught both Matthew and Branwen by surprise. For a moment they just looked at each other as their son continued to shuttle between the chair and the table, giggling to himself at the amazement of this new-found feat. Eventually, folding his paper, Matthew rose from his chair and went to the door. Branwen strained to listen, a sudden cocktail of emotions coursing through her body. From just the depth of that one heavy knock she knew it was Ben at the door. But simultaneous with that knowledge was an instant confusion as to whether she should be dismayed or overjoyed by its sound. She looked around the little room of the cottage which, with the fire roaring, a crisp autumn night at the windows, the folded paper on the arm of the chair, looked, without Matthew’s sullen presence, like the picture of domestic fidelity. And even with him there, had it really been so bad this evening? They’d had a better day than usual. Matthew had, as ever, been sombre and while he hadn’t exactly been kind to her, he hadn’t exactly been unkind either. Then she saw her son, their son, his face already budding with Matthew’s features. He was toddling back on another lap to her chair. When he reached her she kept hold of him, telling him gently to ‘shhh now cariad’ as she continued to strain for a sound from the door.

  The first voice she heard was her older brother’s deep bass, resonant with determination. ‘We’ve come for Branwen, Matthew.’

  Then her husband’s, slow, steady response, failing, despite his effort, to smooth out the waver of surprise in his reply. ‘Ben. Evan. Come in, let’s talk.’

  Matthew limped back into the room, looking suddenly pale. Throwing Branwen a pleading glance, he made way for her brothers to enter behind him. And then, there they were, Ben’s massive frame bowing through the door into the living room and Evan, the tan of Burma shed from his skin, but the nervous tick still flicking there underneath. They’d left the same day they’d received her letter and had been travelling for two whole days. They still wore the farm clothes they’d been wearing when the letter arrived and had brought nothing with them other than a bag of bread and cheese and some water for the journey. At least, this is what Ben thought. Unknown to him Evan had also packed a Nambu Japanese service pistol. He’d taken it off the body of an Imperial Army officer in Burma and had carried it all the way back to Wales. Now, concealed in his jacket pocket, he’d brought it to this cottage in Ireland.

  ‘Won’t you sit?’ Matthew said, trying to sound as welcoming as possible. ‘You must be hungry. Can we get you something to eat?’

  ‘No,’ Ben said sternly. ‘We won’t stay. We’ll be leaving now, once Bran has packed her things.’ Turning to his sister, he said in Welsh ‘Dyna beth wyt ti eisiau, ynte Bran?’

  ‘What did you say to her?’ Matthew said, suddenly panicked.

  ‘I asked her if that’s what she still wanted Matthew.’

  ‘Still? What do you mean still?’ Matthew turned to Bran, but she lowered her head to her son instead. Unused to seeing anyone in the cottage other than his parents, and anyone at all the size of Ben, the boy had backed into his mother for refuge, hiding his face in her skirt.

  ‘I gave you your chance Matthew,’ Ben said. ‘You said my sister would always be enough for you. But she hasn’t been has she?’

  Ben’s great height and size, which Matthew had always thought of as being so benevolent, were now, imbued as they were with his suppressed anger, truly threatening. Sensing her husband’s rising panic, and wanting to speak before Evan said anything flamable, Branwen spoke to Matthew, as gently as she could.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be forever Matthew. Just a few months maybe. But I do need... I do have to…’

  ‘Forever?’ Matthew snapped back at her. ‘Forever? We were meant to be forever, have you forgotten that Bran?’

  ‘Don’t speak to her like that!’ Evan burst out, stepping towards Matthew.

  ‘Evan, paid!’ Ben said, blocking his brother with his arm. But it was too late. The raised voices, the edge of anger in the air, it was all too much for the little boy. Realising for the first time in his young life that his new-found legs might be used not just for play, but also to take him away from that which frightened him, he slipped free of his mother’s arms and made for the door. Ben tried to bend and catch him but his height made him too slow. Evan was quicker and, making a lunge for the toddler, almost caught him. Another inch closer and he would have grabbed him. That was all it would have taken; an inch, no more, and this story might have ended differently. As it was Evan’s hand grasped at thin air before making contact with the boy’s running leg, tripping him headlong into the open fire.

  With the instincts of a mother Branwen was instant
ly both screaming and lifting her son from the flames at once. But the boy’s jumper was already alight, the wool catching like dried tinder, sending a combustion of flames raging the length of his arm. In the following seconds many things happened at once. Ben dived to help his sister, smothering the flames eating his nephew’s arm with his huge hands. Matthew, already outraged at just the sight of him, went for Evan. Evan, with the instincts of Burma still woven into his fabric, drew his pistol.

  The shot sent Matthew flying across the room. He landed heavily, thudding onto his back behind the table. Suddenly, in the wake of the gunshot’s ear-splitting crack, the only sound was the boy, crying and writhing in pain and fear. The three adults around him were all silent and frozen, Ben and Branwen both staring in shock at the smoking barrel of Evan’s pistol and Evan himself also looking down at the gun, as if it were held in another man’s hand and not his own. Confusion and alarm ran through his features like a sudden gust through a field of wheat. Lifting his head, the first thing he saw was Matthew’s motionless legs protruding from behind the table, then the faces of his brother and sister, transformed in shock and disbelief. He watched, as if through a thick pane of glass, as Branwen turned, painfully slowly, towards the prone body of her husband, and witnessed the terrible transfiguring of grief, her expression contorting into a silent, choking scream of horror.

  Something in Evan’s own features must have betrayed the wave of thought arriving in him then; the sudden realisation that must have felt, however fleetingly, like the only thing left for him to do. Even before he’d started lifting his arm Ben was already rising from where he’d been crouched beside the boy, shouting his brother’s name once more, ‘Evan!’ as loudly as he had that night he’d run into the paddock and knocked him from his feet with a single blow. But for the second time that evening Ben wasn’t quick enough, and there was nothing he could do as Evan slid the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.