Read Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven for Free Online Page A

tale.”
    The postmaster was only too happy to be prompted. “He waited till the place had been cleaned up, then came up with his old shotgun and shot it up the chimney with no warning and no covers laid. Soot and clinkers and soot dust, and bits of swallow’s nest and a skellington of a rook, everywhere! A waterfall of soot! Sawyl was black as black, and grinning because he recked it was worth it!”
    There was a gale of laughter. “I was there. He had t’hire my ald woman to char all over again. It looked like a coal mine in there!” exclaimed old Bran Codd, wheezing with laughter. “Oh, he was madder than a washed cat! He had to pay her handsome to get it cleaned up again!”
    “And he had the nerve to ask Sawyl what he was doing, having a shotgun!” said Mrs. Fychan. “And Sawyl says, with a straight face, ‘’Tis for fishing. ’Tis how we get bream hereabouts.’”
    The tightly packed crowd roared with laughter again, as Mari wiggled in to the counter to make her purchase. “Half a yard of red flannel, sir, please,” she said. Mr. Bythell measured it out and sold it to her, then said, “Now, imagine this, if you please. The snoop has even been making inquiries about the Protheros!”
    Mari blanched, as the others growled or muttered in indignation.
    “Oh he has!” Mrs. Awbrey confirmed. “All manner of questions. Who’s got the cottage? Why’ve they got a cottage where there ain’t a farm? Who’s their landlord? Why ain’t they got one? Have there been unusual comings and goings? On and on… and not just to me!”
    “Asked the very same of me, he did,” Mr. Bythell confirmed. “Probably to half the village. Has a nasty mind, does that one.”
    “Well, and I told him as much. ‘You’ve a nasty mind, Constable Ewynnog,’ I told him straight to his face,” said Mrs. Awbrey. “‘Daffyd Prothero is the hard-workingest, honestest fisherman on the water, like his father, and his father before him, and his fore-fathers back to Owen ap Tudor. Out on the water in every weather, supporting that little bit of a girl all on his own, and evil to him that evil thinks, I say.’ Sent
him
away with a bee in his ear.”
    “Well done, Mrs. Awbrey,” Mr. Bythell said, and Mari sighed with relief, seeing that if the village was closing ranks, it was closing the Protheros inside those ranks. The postmaster patted her on the head as if she was a child. “Don’t you worry, Mari. We’ll abide no nastiness about your da.”
    She thanked them, and wiggled her way out of the crowd and down to the pub to see about getting her da’s beer keg refilled. And there, in the other site where village news could be gleaned, she heard more stories.
    If the man had wanted to put every man’s hand against him, he could not have gone about it more thoroughly. To begin with, he was clearly a city man, and expected things that simply didn’t exist out here. The cottage had clearly unsettled him. He’d asked about gas, about water lines, and with increasing desperation, about other cottages he might get, only to be looked at blankly.
    Then he had done the most foolish thing he could have. Constable Ewynnog had begun his tenancy in Clogwyn by putting on airs of importance and ordering people about as soon as he entered the village and discovered the state of the cottage he was being given.
    First, on being told there were no other vacant cottages, he had gone up to the “English landlords” at the Manor and tried to evictothers from
their
rightful homes. That had gotten him short shrift up at Gower Manor, where—so Mari heard—he was told in no uncertain terms that no one was being displaced, that he wasn’t wanted nor needed and hadn’t been asked for, and that he could act like a man, hire what needed to be done, and get his own affairs in order. And if he didn’t like it, he could appeal to his superiors for help, for he’d be getting none from the Manor.
    Which was interesting, since it meant that the Manor