From Across the Ancient Waters (3 page)

The sea beyond, however, remained an intoxicating mystery. She could stare at it for hours. Yet still it withheld its secrets.

She knew that her mother had lived somewhere on the other side of it, and that she had been born in her mother’s country. That connection with her unknown origins, and with a mother she had never seen, made the sea a living thing in her soul.

Inland from the girl at a distance of some five or six hundred yards, two riders on horseback trotted slowly down the road toward the village. The gray and the red they rode were well groomed and exquisitely outfitted. The two young people were themselves dressed in riding habits that none of the local peasantry or miners could have afforded for their sons or daughters. Their two hats alone might have cost a month’s wages for half the working men in the village.

“Hey look, Florilyn,” said the older of the two, a youth who had just turned eighteen. He had seen the girl walking along the promontory as they came onto the plateau. “There’s the witch-girl! How about some fun!”

“Like what?” answered his sister, younger by two and a half years.

“To see the little scamp try to outrun a horse!”

“Go chase her yourself, Courtenay,” said the girl called Florilyn. “She gives me the shivers. Besides, she’s afraid of no animal. She would just stand there and let you charge straight at her.”

“Then I’ll run her down!” Her brother laughed.

“And have Rhawn’s father to answer for it!”

“He wouldn’t do anything to me. Father wouldn’t let him.”

“You might be right. But I have no intention of making the girl angry. She’d probably put a curse on us or something. Suit yourself, but I’m going to see Rhawn.” She urged her mount forward down the incline.

A few seconds later her brother followed. Bullying is not a sport enjoyed in solitude. He wasn’t quite brave enough to upset the strange child by himself.

Unknown Ancestry

H
aving no idea she was an object of conversation between Lord Snowdon’s son and daughter, the girl they had been watching rose and continued on her way. After some distance, she turned toward the great blue expanse below her and suddenly disappeared over the side of Mochras Head.

At this point along the promontory, she
was
allowed within three paces of the edge. For between the northern and southern extremities of the rocky face, the cliff had worn inland through the eons, creating a slope seaward from the plateau noticeably more gradual in its descent. Down it a well-worn path crisscrossed back and forth until it reached a sandy beach. The inviting narrow strand was approximately forty yards in width at high tide between water’s edge and the bluff and stretched away in both directions under the shadow of the lofty headland.

Down this sloping trail the girl now made her way. She bent occasionally to pluck a wildflower from amongst the rocks beside her or kick at a pebble beneath her feet. Three minutes later she ran down the final winding slope and emerged onto the white sandy shore, bright almost to brilliance as it lay between the blue green of the sea and the gray-black of the rocky promontory. Her descent was not unlike that of the wide-winged sea birds—whose antics she glanced up at now and then with hand to forehead. She never tired of watching as they played on the currents and breezes between the cliff and water, occasionally dropping from great heights to the sea, almost paralleling the very trajectory she had herself just taken.

The joys of exploration and discovery of late afternoon were no doubt heightened by the fact that her days were not entirely filled with happiness. School was a painful ordeal for Gwyneth Barrie. She was slow of speech and insecure among the other children who were quick to make her the object of their derision. That she never defended herself and silently accepted the teasing of other children in the village as the natural order of things, invited their jeers all the more.

Her stature, too, tempted cruelty. As it has in all times, the smallest and least aggressive in the animal kingdom are singled out by others of their kind for intensified scorn. Poor Gwyneth had the misfortune to stand a head shorter than any other boy or girl her age in Llanfryniog.

No one but her father knew exactly how old she was. Everyone considered her several years younger than she was. The women who had suckled her, as they grew to fear her, had done their best to forget. The years, however, passed more quickly than they realized. Most assumed her eight or nine. She had actually just turned thirteen.

Pure white hair—lighter than was altogether natural, the old women said with significant expressions—added yet one more visual distinction to make her, in the eyes of young and old alike, more than merely different but
peculiar
from other children.

Codnor Barrie, stocky, muscular, and a harder working man at the slate mine than most, stood but a few inches over five feet. It was therefore no surprise that his daughter should also be a bantam among her peers. He had suffered similar indignities in his own childhood and youth. It had been assumed that by some quirk of nature his two average-sized parents had produced a dwarf for offspring. But Codnor grew into manhood manifesting no dwarflike attributes other than a simple lack of height.

None in Llanfryniog had ever laid eyes on his wife. Assuming from the daughter that she must have been as tiny as he, they would have been shocked to see her on her wedding day in Ireland, neither short nor blond, towering four inches above beaming young Codnor Barrie.

Notwithstanding his diminutive stature, in all other respects the Welshman, widowed less than two years later, had lived a normal life. This did not stop two or three of the low-minded men of the village from thinking that he, like his daughter, came from an inferior class of humanity. After several pints of stout in Mistress Chattan’s pub, such boors often made him the object of their base jokes, exactly as their sons did his daughter.

Courage, however, is measured by other standards. Young Gwyneth possessed more valor than any of her schoolmates among the things of
her
home—whose roof was the sky and whose furnishings and friendships were provided by nature itself. It required no fortitude to ridicule the defenseless. But let the heavens open and unleash their torrents, let thunder roar and lightning flash, and young Gwyneth Barrie was out the door of the school into the midst of it, rapture in her eyes. All the while her classmates cowered near the black cast-iron stove waiting for the tumult to pass.

Likewise not a youngster among them would tempt fate by walking toward the hills at dusk for fear of the water-kelpie of the mountain lakes.
Gwberr-niog
was known to come out only at night. They were as terrified of waking his hunger for human flesh as the fishermen who braved the waters of the Celtic triangle were of arousing his cousin-beast Gwbert-ryd. Gwyneth, however, romped and played among the trees and hills near her home as happily with a moon overhead as the sun.

Nor would any of the boys and girls of Llanfryniog on the cheeriest of days have crept among these rocks and caves where Gwyneth now frolicked beneath the promontory. Legends of dead pirates and live beasts abounded. Her own fearlessness only confirmed in the eyes of fellows, schoolmaster, and old wives of the village alike that Gwyneth Barrie exercised a closer acquaintance with the dark forces of the universe than was healthy in normal people.

Fear being a healthy ingredient in the human constitution, Codnor Barrie’s daughter possessed her appointed share. But she was well on her way at an early age to recognizing what
should
be feared and what should
not
, a vital distinction to a life of contentment.

Thus was young Gwyneth Barrie suspected of being preternaturally abnormal from other children—a view given credence by the impediment of her speech—freakish, queer, perhaps not quite “all there” according to Llanfryniog’s gossips. Even the calm sagacity of her countenance, it was assumed, hid something sinister. Had she been a prankster, mean-spirited, or a giggly simpleton, she would scarcely have been given a second thought. That she spoke little, and was
better
than other children, made her an object of mistrustful and dark speculation.

Her light hair, shooting out from her head in the disarray occasioned by being raised by a man not a woman, surrounded features pale but full of health. Out of their midst gazed wide, knowing, trusting eyes of deepest blue green. Their shades were as changeable as the sea itself. At one glance, they seemed to reflect the blue of heaven, at another the emerald green of several inland lochs at the height of spring’s snowmelt.

Young Gwyneth’s ageless face was one any thoughtful grown-up would pause over with mingled admiration and question. In truth, who could not admire the graceful loveliness of childhood, a beauty still dormant but waiting to blossom? In the midst of their awe, however, rose the riddle of those empyreal eyes. They surely possessed some secret that might be worth knowing but which would not be easily discovered. The face bore a complexity of expression only a true Celt could recognize. And then only one who knew the old mystery of the ancient race.

That her dead mother was no native to Gwynedd and, said some without a wisp of evidence to back up the claim, was more than a little disreputable herself strengthened the conviction that the odd child, if she was not one already, was well on her way to becoming a witch. The child’s tongue was cursed. That alone was a sign that must be heeded. No good would result when she came of age.

Hopefully before then she would disappear from among them.

Codnor Barrie himself came from a decent Welsh family. He was mostly respected among his fellow workers. He had no complaint against him other than falling in love with an Irish lass who had borne him a witch-child and then promptly died for her trouble. The poor widower was left alone with his baby. The good little man may have named his daughter for the Snowdonian region of Gwynedd. But that could not prevent her being what she was.

Once her peculiarities became evident, Barrie was offered no more help by the women in the village such as they would have given any other poor father with a daughter to look after. Those who had nursed and bathed her in infancy now feared for the day the curse of the growing girl would come upon them. They wanted nothing to do with her. The Christianity so deeply embedded in their Celtic blood was heavily laced with superstitious remnants of the paganism out of which it had grown. They trembled at the sight of her floral bouquets as maledictive charms against the doors of the village from the nether regions.

The mother’s untimely death, though rarely spoken of, was never forgotten. What could it be but a verdict from on high? It was only a matter of time before similar judgment was rendered upon the daughter. Doubtless some ill-fated misfortune would eventually fall upon Barrie himself for allowing the evil to invade Snowdonia from across the Irish Sea.

Secrets of the Sea

G
wyneth ran to the water’s edge and skipped merrily along it for some distance, then slowed. She realized that the tide on this afternoon lay uncommonly low. The flat, wet expanse of sand was much wider than usual. She gazed all about then returned in the direction from which she had come. She passed the end of the path from above then continued northward where a rocky shoreline gradually encroached on the expanse of sand until replacing it altogether. A stormy few weeks had prevented her coming here for some time. With the tide so low, she could again explore the crags and boulders and caves at the water’s edge.

Two or three minutes later she was scrambling about the base of the rocky headland, scanning the small pools left by the tide for tiny sea creatures and plants. Living things of all kinds and species gladdened Gwyneth’s heart. Hers was a continual search to discover new forms of life she had never seen before, whether insect or flower, weed or bird, tree or unusually colored rabbit. On this day what drew her attention where sea met land happened to be the limpets, sea snails, mussels, tiny crabs, whelks, cockles, and water bugs made newly accessible in the swirling eddies of the extraordinarily low tide.

The tide on this day lay lower than it had in years. The waves of previous weeks against the rocks and inlets of the promontory had rearranged the sandy floor of the caves and beach. The largest of the boulders remained unchanged. Yet the surface beneath Gwyneth’s feet was different as she scampered over it. Some rocks of great size previously exposed were nearly covered with sand. Others whose mere tops were partially visible before had been to all appearance thrust upward into the light of day. With every rise and fall of the tide, new changes came to the coastline.

She walked into the largest of the caves, which sat at the foot of the sloping bluff where the beach sand mostly gave way to rocks and boulders. Its height was sufficient that she could explore to a distance of thirty or forty feet inside it without bumping her head. It was one of her regular haunts, though only when the sea was calm and never when the tide was in its flow. Smooth slate walls beside her as she entered glistened black from constant salty spray.

The tide was still in retreat, and on this day there was no cause for concern. Gwyneth knew the signs of the sea, knew when danger was present and when it was not. She never allowed curiosity to compromise safety. She was, in truth, more “there” of intellect and savvy than most of the villagers had any idea.

If she was different than other children, the distinction came more likely as the result of genius than fatuity. Like most genius, however, it was invisible to the commonplace mind and would be slow to reveal itself. Whatever rare gift she possessed yet lay at rest, growing, deepening in the invisible recesses of her character, awaiting the kiss of a prince to bring it awake in power.

By now the shadows of afternoon were lengthening. The westerly sun cast its slanting rays against the cliffs of Mochras Head. It had not yet descended far enough on its daily journey to hover at the horizon and throw its light directly into the yawning mouth the girl had just entered. But dim visibility shone inside the cave as the tide approached low water.