Band of Angel by Julia Gregson

left of the house. His older brother, Rob, stopped when he saw him.
    “Where you been, boy?”
    “I went to Matthew Butts.” Deio named a blacksmith who lived near Nevin.
    “Any luck?” said Rob, tensely. If they couldn’t shoe their cattle, they couldn’t leave for London.
    “None at all,” Deio teased, glad he’d got one thing done that day. “He can only do it tomorrow if we ride them over.”
    “Thank God for that,” said his brother, smiling. “He’s been getting himself in such a lather you could shave with him.”
    Deio looked swiftly across the yard toward his father, Lewis Jones. He was dosing a heifer and had his arm over its neck and a finger in each nostril. “Yer varmint,” he said softly, “ged in there. Give me the horn,” he said to Rob. A thick green mixture was poured down the hollow horn. The cow rolled its eyes and coughed.
    “I couldn’t swear to him having the hoosh,” said Lewis in his deep, slow voice, “but I’m not taking no chances.”
    He loosened the noose, clouted the beast on its rump, and with his eyes half-narrowed took a long measuring look at the other cattle in the yard. Lewis Jones knew just about as much as it was possible to know about a herd of cattle without actually growing horns himself. He saw them with a stockman’s eye, constantly on the alert for hoven and hush and garget and pleural pneumonia; for the streaming noses and listless eyes that could decimate a herd and spell their ruin. They were banknotes on four legs: each one of these cows bought at ten pounds apiece in Wales would double in value in London.
    It took months of detective work to assemble the group of Welsh Blacks such as he looked at so impassively now. First, the long, carelessly inquiring chats about who was going broke and who was selling cheap, then going to summer fairs and leaning over gates as if you had all the time in the world, until it was the right time for a palm to be slapped and a deal struck and another ten or fifteen cattle entered into his books. His reputation rested on his shrewdness: the locals expected nothing less from a man who held their livelihood in his hands.
    When the cow was drenched, he straightened himself up slowly and bellowed at Deio.
    “What kept you? You’ve been hours gone.”
    “I’ve been getting a blacksmith,” shouted Deio. “
Working.
”
    Lewis Jones in his worst moods reckoned none of them worked as hard as he did. Once, because Deio was as hot-tempered as his father, this might have led to a fight. Now he knew that on the nights before they left rows sprang up sudden as electrical storms and it was better to keep your mouth shut. He’d learned, too, after three trips to London, the point to his father’s tyrannical behavior in the matters of punctuality and oiled leathers and tightly wound ropes and checked supplies of medicine. Out on the mountains, a sick beast, a thrown shoe, a lame horse, could mean ruin.
    Ten minutes later, when he walked into the tack room, his father was rolling the tarpaulins up into the tight cigars each man would tie on the front of his saddle.
    “There’s some ale and bara brith in the kitchen if you want it, lad,” he said. “Get it down you while you can.”
    “Yes, Father,” Deio gave him his cocky smile, and his father put his head down, glowering. It didn’t do to let a boy like him get too familiar.
    Deio walked back into the house, through a door scuffed with dog paws, into the warm heavy, stale atmosphere of the kitchen. His mother, Meg, was surrounded by saddles, canvas bags, men’s boots, leather gaiters, cow horns, hammers, nails, flitches of bacon, girths, sacks of flour, and bread. He walked in and smelled bara brith hot from the oven, cats, leather dubbin, cows, old pies and rabbit stews and sticky fruitcakes and new baked bread. The smell of home.
    Meg sat by the fire sewing a saddlebag. He looked at her closely; like his father, he missed nothing.
    “You are crying because he is going,