Band of Angels Read online

  Also by Julia Gregson

  East of the Sun

  Band of Angels

  JULIA GREGSON

  A TOUCHSTONE BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER

  NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Julia Gregson

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2004 by Orion, an Hachette Livre

  UK company

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof

  in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights

  Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Touchstone trade paperback edition May 2010

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gregson Julia.

  Band of angels : a novel / Julia Gregson.

  p. cm.

  1. Young Women—England—Fiction. 2. Nurses—Fiction. 3. British—

  Ukraine—Crimea—Fiction. 4. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6107.R44494B36 2010

  823’.92—dc22

  2009042198

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0113-1 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-1778-1 (ebook)

  For Vicki, Richard, Caroline, and Poppy

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part Four

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Band of Angels

  A CONVERSATION WITH JULIA GREGSON

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Daphne Tilley, for taking me on a long-distance ride across Snowdon to the Lleyn Peninsula, where I discovered the drovers’ roads and the beginnings of my story. Jenny and David Clifford, for lending me their house. Turkish Airlines, for flying me to Istanbul, where I took a boat across the Bosphorus and saw Florence Nightingale’s room at the Barrack Hospital; Alex Attewell, director of the Florence Nightingale Museum at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London for his advice. Special thanks to Delia.

  For love and support, thanks to my late mother, Vicki Sutton; to my sister Caroline; to Sarah, Charlotte, Hugo, Natasha, and Poppy; and, of course, Richard, for patiently reading all those drafts. I owe Kate Shaw a big debt of gratitude for her advice and support, and many thanks to my agent, Clare Alexander, for her professionalism and encouragement.

  Prologue

  Wales 1844

  When I say ‘Charge,’” said Deio, “Charge!”

  She hesitated for a moment. The sea was high and her pony already excited. She leaned forward.

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” he bellowed against the wind. “Not till I say.”

  The flounces on her pantaloons were streaked with mud and the dark stains from her stirrup leathers would not wash out. Mair would be so angry.

  “Now,” he said. “Go!”

  It was always the same, the split second between the order and its execution, the moment when she saw it all: her pony red-eyed, iron-mouthed, out of control. The shock of falling, the crunch of her bones. Mother and Father, Eliza and Mair, trudging behind her small coffin. Mother’s one red rose hurled into the raw earth.

  “I am coming,” she shouted into the snarling wind. “For Wales, for glory.”

  Now that they were galloping, the wet sand made a thrumming sound under Plover’s feet and the waves crashed like falling buildings.

  “I am flying,” she thought. “I am God and I am flying.” Ahead, in a cloud of sand, was Deio’s pony, and beyond him the waves and the cliff.

  They were turning now, jumping the swirling eddies, jumping through air, around the curve of the beach, faster and faster. When he wrestled his pony to a halt near the rock pools his face was wet with wind tears.

  “Oh Deio,” she said. “She flew. I could hardly hold her.”

  His pony, a mad little black thing scarcely broken, snatched at its bit and showed the whites of its eyes.

  “Again,” she said. “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Why not, peasant? You are not the boss of everything.”

  “Don’t call me that. The charge is over. We won. You don’t keep doing a thing once you’ve done it.”

  She watched him pull an old fob watch from his buckskin breeches. Almost everything he did had magic for her. He was twelve years old, with jet black hair and dark green eyes. A cast in his right eye, more pronounced when he was being perverse or was tired, gave him a certain air of the gypsy.

  “Oh goddamn and blind it. ’Tis half past one,” he said.

  “Please, Deio, don’t tease, don’t. If I’m late, I’ll get a lathering.”

  “Caw, caw, caw,” he cried at a group of seagulls flying above his head. He leaned over his pony’s shoulder and flicked her with the length of elder he used as a crop. It hurt a bi
t, but she wouldn’t tell-tale-tit any more than she would about the other tests.

  “I am going with Da to the blacksmiths.” His father was a drover, he always had interesting things to do.

  Now they were climbing up the narrow sheep path that led to the bad stretch of cliff that they called Giant’s Mouth, and the wind was tugging at her hair with a ferocity that pleased her. They loved this place, forbidden to all local children ever since Ceris Jones, a fisherman’s daughter from Abersoch, had gone over the edge during a picnic and been carried home stone-cold dead on a sheep hurdle.

  Up here the air was pure and earthy, with the boom of the sea below and waves bashing and bubbling like great gobs of spit between the black teeth of the rocks, and you could hardly breathe for fear that your foot would catch a loose stone or a piece of wet grass and you’d go plunging and cartwheeling down through space, down and down and down forever.

  They got off their ponies and stared toward the horizon. It was clear enough to see Bardsey Island. Without looking at her and with no change of expression he put his arm around her.

  “There’s an apple tree in the Dinas Field,” he said. “We’ll get some tomorrow. I’ll hold you up to the branches.”

  They cantered to the top of the track where it joined the main road to Aberdaron. He was always in flight and she was always half glad. At the top he made a comrade’s clenched fist. His house, Pantyporthman, the Drover’s Hollow, was two miles to the left, up a track gouged with cattle hooves.

  After she caught up with him and they’d said good-bye, there was a pain in her chest as she watched him canter back down the road. His words—bugger bastard—but she needed them now and it was a bugger wanting to go back with him and wanting to go home, too. “I’ll hold you up to the branches,” she whispered.

  Now she stood with her back to the sea and looked down on the green blur of hills dotted with whitewashed cottages. The Lleyn Peninsula. Deio, who had ridden to London on a drove and who knew, said this was the end of Wales.

  Then Mair ran up the lane shrieking. Mair was their maid, fat and with wild, red, frizzy hair.

  “Are you insane completely, Catherine Carreg?” she shouted. “Your poor mother’s frantic. Where have you been?”

  “Down to Whistling Sands. I’m allowed.”

  “Only a few times when your mam was ill—and don’t you ever dare tell her I said you could.”

  “More like fifty, a hundred, two hundred times, when Mama was ill,” thought Catherine giving back a crafty look.

  “And what sort of state is that to come home in with your auntie coming for lunch? Did ye fall in the cow muck?”

  From her pony, she could see inside Mair’s mouth, the place on her lower jaw where she had lost two teeth and the spittle ballooned.

  “Eliza is washed and dressed already and looking a perfect picture, and look at you!” She wondered how fast he was riding home and if he would jump the fallen log near the gate. Another test. If he’d get her a horseshoe from the blacksmiths so she could hang it in the tack room at home. If she could see him tomorrow and the day after that and was it a sin to hope Mama would carry on having rests in the afternoon?

  “Oh Mair.” She put her maid’s hand on the pony’s sopping neck. “I went so fast.”

  Their eyes locked for a moment in perfect complicity. They were both in their own way trapped.

  “Don’t give me fast, madam,” said Mair with a spiteful look. “One day you’ll go down there and the Water Horse will get you, it happened to another little girl I knew.”

  Catherine shivered. “Don’t Mair, please!”

  “He’ll come out of the water, all beautiful and wet, and you’ll want to ride him, and you will, and then he’ll bite your neck with his big teeth and then he’ll drown you.”

  “No he won’t,” shouted Catherine. “He knows where I am and he doesn’t come. He likes me.”

  “Oh, well he will,” said Mair in a mysterious voice. “He’ll come.”

  “Don’t Mair, please stop. You’re frightening me.” She put her hand into the maid’s rough red one and gave it a squeeze. “And keep my great big magic secret.”

  “You silly little girl.” Mair’s eyes were unsmiling as she bounced down the hill toward Carreg Plâs. “It won’t last long.”

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  She so wanted her mother to be happy, but she never really was, and for the four years that her mother had suffered from the variety of illnesses, the headaches and bad backs and bouts of insomnia that were really all a kind of anguish, it had suited her parents to drop her next door, and Pantyporthman had become her second home.

  There she met Deio. He was a few years older than she and, at first, tried hard to ignore her. Then, because the drovers were always busy, he’d let her tag along. She’d backed ponies, gone fishing, learned to stalk, to make a fire out of nothing, and, in between, they’d taken the tests: the breakneck gallops down the steepest paths, the sickening jumps, hair flying above her head, from the cliffs into the sea. He taught her to swear and told her matter-of-factly one day while they were out on the horses what men did with women. He brought her a piece of amber from London when his dad took him there on a drove. He’d carved her a lapwing out of driftwood that she wore around her neck. She shivered when she looked at him, at his careless grace on a horse, his dark hair against the sky. Nothing at home made her feel so alive, so free.

  And then, a few months after her sixteenth birthday, it stopped.

  The gossip began when Catherine—who had wild tawny hair and a spirited, mobile face—grew, it seemed overnight, from a curious-looking child into a beauty. Local opinion thought it “a bit whatsname” to see her still riding out with Deio Jones, who frequently traveled to London and who was known to be wild. Eventually it fell to the vicar, the Reverend Hughes, to saddle up his skinny horse and ride the eight miles from Sarn to Aberdaron in order to have “a little, ahem, talk” with her father, “in a private place so to speak.”

  It was glorious that early spring morning; the air smelled of salt and wildflowers and the Reverend, who lived on his own in a dark damp cottage, enjoyed the chance to get out and to observe the Carreg family at closer quarters. They were a curious tribe; Huw Carreg, Catherine’s father, came from a family who had lost a great deal of money in lavish improvements to a series of houses and at the gambling table. Either way, the money had gone. Huw, had he not then married Felicia, might have been allowed to reinvent himself in the community as a hardworking farmer, which was all he ever wanted to be. But Felicia, Catherine’s mother, had sealed his fate. She was beautiful and strange and, once he had got her home, confused him and them and made him, forever, not exactly foreign, but never really local.

  The house he rode toward, Carreg Plâs—the name in Welsh meant place of stones—had been Catherine’s home for as long as she’d been alive. It was the last remnant of her grandparents’ once-flourishing estate, a no-nonsense L-shaped farmhouse, built of brick and stone, with slate walls on the Atlantic side to withstand the worst of the winter gales. In the twelfth century, it had been the home of the abbots of Bardsey Island, where thousands of saints were said to be buried. Thousands of pilgrims had come here, their last resting place before they took the boat to Bardsey. They’d washed their bruised feet under the pump in the herb garden—for them a place of joy or relief, for her mother a prison.

  Hidden by trees, the house, dark and with higgledy-piggledy rooms, was designed to endure rather than impress, but upstairs, from its different windows, you saw wonderful things—the foothills of Snowdon, the Atlantic Ocean, Cardigan Bay—lit up with the hard sparkle of diamonds on this spring morning. The Reverend had been having trouble with his false teeth. A dentist from Rhyl had come in his horse and trap, given him a whiff of chloroform, and filed down the roots and affixed the new teeth, but they still seemed to wobble slightly as he sucked them in now, for duw, how the place had run down over the last ten years. He frowned at the tangle o
f bramble near the gate, the messy circle of grass at the end of the drive, the two stone greyhounds on either side of the front door with their heads half-eaten away.

  Later, over a drop of Bristol in the parlor, the Reverend—a stoop-shouldered man with a perpetual dewdrop at the end of his nose, and a manner both snobbish and servile—talked about the great harvest that year, and the high prices cattle were fetching in Caernarfon; the lower classes seemed to be getting a taste for meat. Then, seeing Mr. Carreg look wistfully toward the door, he grasped the nettle. There was talk in the village that Catherine, a fine girl, had been riding out with the Jones boy. Now, as far as he knew, he was a fine boy, too—although he’d have to take this on hearsay as the family were not regular attenders of the church. He had thought hard about coming up, he said. After all, if the tongue told all the bosom knew, none would be neighbors, but in a small community like this, and with the Carregs being such a fine old family, the best candle surely, was prudence?

  Father, who had a gentleman’s disdain for gossip, could not bring himself to confide in this man any details of his wife’s illness or the chain of circumstances that had led his family into such an intimate relationship with his neighbors. He thanked him for his visit and showed him the door.

  Shortly after the Reverend Hughes had gone, Father had a sharp and urgent discussion with his wife, then called Catherine and her sister, Eliza, into the parlor. One look at his face made Catherine’s heart thump.

  “Catherine,” he said, “I expect you had a nice day today, did you?”

  “Yes, Father,” she said. “I think so.”

  He put his cheek closer to her, he’d shaved for this and his skin smelled of witch hazel. Then he said, in the same dull voice, he was glad she had had a nice day because he was working hard on the farm all day, and now that Mother was much better and she was growing up, it was time for her to spend more time at home, helping. At this, Eliza, always the peacemaker, had made gentle, encouraging noises.

  “And of course”—Mother gave a pleading look to her husband—“we’ll have some fun, too. It has been quiet for you girls and you have been so patient, so good.”