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OTHER DAVEY BRYANT BOOKS BY DAVID WATMOUGH
Ashes for Easter (1972)
From a Cornish Landscape (1975)
Love and the Waiting Game (1975)
No More into the Garden (1978)
The Connecticut Countess (1984)
Fury (1984)
Vibrations in Time (1986)
The Year of Fears (1988)
Thy Mother’s Glass (1992)
The Time of the Kingfishers (1994)
Hunting with Diana (1996)
ALSO BY DAVID WATMOUGH
A Church Renascent (1951)
Names for the Numbered Years (1967)
The Unlikely Pioneer (1985)
Vancouver Fiction (1985)
THE MOOR IS DARK
BENEATH THE MOON
DAVID WATMOUGH
Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Stanzas—April 1814”
Porccpic Books
an imprint of
Copyright © 2002 by David Watmough
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.
This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, 226—2040 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 2G2. This is a Porcepic Book.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of the British Columbia Arts Council. The publisher also acknowledges the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Production and Design: Jen Hamilton
Cover Art: Copyright © Neil Robinson/Stone
Author Photograph: Edmond O’Brien
Printed and bound in Canada by Kromar Printing Ltd.
Epigraph from The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, as told by Joseph Bedier, translated by Hilaire Belloc, and completed by Paul Rosenfeld, copyright © 1973 by Random House, Inc. Published by Vintage Books, 1994.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Watmough, David, 1926-
The moor is dark beneath the moon/David Watmough.
“A porcepic book.”
ISBN 0-88878-434-1
I. Title.
PS8595.A8M66 2002 C813’.54 C2002-911089-0
PR9199.3.W37M66 2002
For Floyd and fifty years
“Alas, well must we weep! Tristan, fearless baron, must you die by such shabby treachery? And you, loyal and honoured Queen, in what land was ever born a king’s daughter so beautiful, so dear? Is this humped-back dwarf, the work of your auguries? May he never see the face of God who, having found you, does not drive his spear into your body!…But you, Tristan, you fought for us, the men of Cornwall…”
Night ended and the day drew near. Mark, before dawn, rode out to the place where he held pleas and judgement…. At the hour of Prime he had a ban cried through his land to gather the men of Cornwall; they came with a great noise and none but did weep saving only the dwarf of Tintagel.
—The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
ONE
“Are you going to her funeral?” Davey Bryant’s lover asked. “I see here in the paper there are some incredible buys on the airlines. The old girl couldn’t have died at a better time.”
“I was thinking about it,” Davey told Ken Bradley. “It’s only two summers since we had her here, but it seems like yesterday. It was just six weeks and felt like forever. And to think, if she hadn’t fallen ill it would have been the same all over again this year. Christ, what we’ve been spared! But if you say there’s a ticket bargain to London, then I could take in her funeral and also get some new shirts for you at Gieves. I could see Cousin Alyson and her kids. Maybe take ’em to the London Zoo where they belong!”
Davey brightened then to the task of planning. “I could also bring back some things from Marks and Sparks. You’re always complaining the stuff they sell here isn’t the same, so we could stock up on the nonperishables. I could do all that before going down to Tintagel and burying her.”
Ken leaned forward to ruffle his partner’s silvering hair. “Yet another reason to thank Auntie for popping off now. You might bring back a local Cornish recipe for a genuine saffron loaf. I don’t really like the one I’ve been using with the bread machine.”
Davey attempted to smile seraphically. “That’s because you don’t really like saffron bread in the first place. You only bake it for me. I think you also believe I need a break and that’s why you’re encouraging me to go and see the old girl off after that excessively long and miserable life.”
His partner of nearly forty years wagged a lawyer’s finger in the style with which he’d so often addressed an accused in court. “You’ve got it all wrong, sweetheart. It’s I who could do with you out of my hair for a few days. I want to go through all that crap in the cellar, give away stuff we’ll never read again, and fling out some of the junk we’ve been accumulating for thirty-eight years. I can’t do that with you around interrupting me and weeping sentimental tears.” Ken carefully refolded the Globe and Mail and dropped it neatly on the stool by his armchair before turning to kiss the man who was almost identical in height as they were within months of the same age. He then left the spacious living room. Seconds later Davey heard the bathroom door slam.
The retired editor of a city newspaper, suddenly restless, turned and faced the plate-glass window. There were wraiths of mist around the base of the scattering of spruce and cedar that framed the view of the open Pacific halfway down the Sunshine Coast, some miles north of the Vancouver where he had previously worked.
Davey had been restless of late. Both of them had. Now they were both approaching seventy, and every day brought reminders that each wasn’t quite as capable of coping so effectively with things as they had done a decade earlier. When he first stood and stared out that same window, most of the trees had been saplings, the lawn had been a field, and the landscaped garden was nonexistent. The human intrusion before their arrival had been hardly more than the occasional cutting of timber and sawing of logs.
He ruefully recalled that the distance to the open sand and sea had tended to be traversed by a limber and sprightly middle-aged gay couple—themselves when they