A String in the Harp
Read A String in the Harp Online
Authors: Nancy Bond
Map and frontispiece drawing by Allen Davis
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Bond, Nancy.
A string in the harp.
“A Margaret K. McElderry book.”
SUMMARY
: Relates what happens to three American children, unwillingly transplanted to Wales for one year, when one of them finds an ancient harp-tuning key that takes him back to the time of the great sixth-century bard Taliesin.
[ 1. Space and time—Fiction] I. Title.
PZ7.B63684St [Fie] 75-28181
ISBN Q-689-50Q36-X
ISBN13: 978-1-4424-6594-7 (eBook)
Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1976 by Nancy Bond
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
F
OR MY TWO PARENTS
AND FOUR GRANDPARENTS
11: R
OAST
C
HICKEN AND
M
ASHED
P
OTATOES
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars,
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over threescore Abers.
I have been a wolf, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas;
I have been a guest at the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand:
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in the harp,
Disguised . . .
—from the Book of Taliesin, VIII
Borth
A
N HOUR AND A QUARTER
from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth on the train. Jen thought she ought to feel exhausted—she’d been up more than twenty-four hours already, traveling by car, airplane, and now train, across Massachusetts, the Atlantic Ocean, and half of England. But it didn’t seem like three thousand miles. She was shielded by a cocoon of unreality. Right now she only wanted to arrive and see the familiar faces of her family.
Two stout, middle-aged women shared Jen’s compartment, littering the empty seats with all manner of bundles and shopping bags. They had given Jen politely curious glances, then absorbed themselves in conversation. Jen had had a bit of a jolt to realize after five minutes or so that they weren’t speaking English to each other. For a moment she had thought, they’re foreign. Then she remembered with a sudden surge of panic that no,
she
was foreign and they were probably talking Welsh.
The anesthetic of being managed by other people was starting to wear off, and Jen felt very much alone. Aunt Beth and Uncle Ted had driven her to the Boston airport the day before and put her carefully on the right airplane. And in London
her father’s friends, the Sullivans from Amherst, had met her and seen her across the city and onto the train for Shrewsbury. But at Shrewsbury there’d been no one waiting for her and she’d had to find the right train herself—not terribly difficult because the station wasn’t large—and there wouldn’t be anyone until her father, Becky, and Peter met her at Borth.
Beyond the train window a grudging December sun filtered through heavy drifts of cloud. Shrewsbury was practically on the Welsh border, Jen knew from studying a map before she’d left, so, presumably, they were now in Wales. Across the flat, green farmland ahead, suddenly and abruptly, rose mountains, the Welsh Marches Jen remembered from somewhere. And beyond them, what?
Jen glanced at her watch, willing the time to pass quickly. All had gone according to Aunt Beth’s painstaking plans. She thought again of the round dining room table in Amherst covered with maps, schedules, an atlas, endless pieces of paper and pencils, the paper filled with Aunt Beth’s neat but illegible writing: times and flight numbers, lists of clothing, emergency information, names and addresses. Most of the paper was now folded and clipped together in the huge new pocketbook, which Jen kept obediently hooked over her arm even while she sat in the train.
“For heaven’s sake, dear,
don’t
let it out of your hands! You just don’t know what may happen and all your money and documents are in it.” Aunt Beth had looked so worried in the Logan Airport waiting room that Jen almost decided not to go at the last minute, convinced by her aunt that the trip was impossible. But she had her father’s letter in her pocket, the one that told her how much he was looking forward to seeing her, and Uncle Ted grinned reassuringly at her and said, “Send us a postcard when you arrive.”
“Oh, I will,” Jen promised. “A letter.”
They were among the mountains now, the train following a valley between the great, stone-ribbed humps, patched with
dead, rust-colored bracken. Jen had grown up among the hills of western Massachusetts, the Holyoke Range along the Connecticut River, and she loved them, but they had never given her the strange feeling these did. These seemed immensely ancient and wild. Without knowing their history, she knew they had one.
Welshpool was the first of a string of little stations they stopped at: a collection of low, gray stone houses and narrow streets. Jen couldn’t begin to pronounce most of the names of the towns.
Not for the first time she wondered what Borth would look like. It was a tiny dot on the map beside the sea with nothing to make it different from hundreds of other tiny dots. She wondered if it were pretty and had gardens or if it were a fishing village with a harbor and boats; her father’s letters had told her very little, really. Becky’s notes were mostly concerned with school and the people she met, and Peter never wrote at all.