The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken

Author:Joan Aiken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

8

The little port of Malyn was huddled in a V-shaped cleft at the point where the Gaff river emerged from underground long enough to grind its way through the black Cliffs of Draig (where once a dragon was said to have nested) and so out into the stormy Atlantic.

No dragon nested on the cliffs nowadays. But there were plenty of fisher-folk in Port Malyn who considered, although they would not have dared even whisper the thought aloud, that the Marquess was just as bad, if not worse. High above the town, approached by one narrow, winding, precipitous road, his castle brooded like a raven perched on the very brink of the cliff; it was said that if the Marquess chose to toss a peach-stone from his bedroom window it would fall a thousand feet before it sank into the waves. And many believed that more things than peach-stones had been hurled from that window; guests who offended the Marquess, prisoners who had the foolhardiness to defy him, were known to have vanished without a trace. But of course it was quite possible that their bones still mouldered somewhere inside the castle, which was very extensive, or down in its dark dungeons which burrowed deep, nobody knew how deep, into the cliff below.

On a wild gusty evening, at about the time of Owen’s encounter with the wild boar in the Fforest Mwyaf, another traveller, conveyed in a hired chaise and pair belonging to the Boar’s Head Inn at Nant Agerddau, was rapidly passing through Port Malyn.

“Humph,” this personage observed, glancing about him as the driver guided his horses carefully along the quay-side, between lobster-pots and piles of fishing-nets, “a romantic hamlet, verily, but it appears to be a trifle blighted, down-at-heel, nodding to its fall, would you not say, my good fellow?”

In fact many of the little tumbledown houses stood empty; the tenants had been turned out, due to their inability to pay Lord Malyn’s extortionate rents.

“Wb,” grunted the driver, who considered that he was paid to drive, not talk, and he got down to lead his horses up the last steep, zigzag ascent to the castle, glancing somewhat resentfully at his passengers. The traveller’s small dark-skinned servant, who, like his master, was dressed in furs, quickly took the hint and jumped out, but his master ignored the driver’s expression and continued to sit comfortably in the chaise, exclaiming at the wild prospect of mountain and forest that began to open out behind them as they mounted the hill.

“And that will be the Shambles Light, I infer, presume, dare say? Most picturesque, most! And yonder, far off, must be the brow, apex, peak, of Fighat Ben, the famous summit I observed at Nant Agerddau? Summit to write home about, as you would say, ha ha!”

“Hwch,” said the coachman.

“And this battlemented edifice ahead is belike the seat, snuggery, diggings of the excellent Marquess of Malyn? A most desirable and commodious residence, indeed!”

“Hwt,” said the driver. He pulled his team to a halt—not

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