by Mary Balogh
She had come to her grandparents’ house in Cwmbran. She had come begging. But not to live on their charity. Two days after they had taken her in Josiah Barnes gave her a job—grinning at her as he offered it and undressing her with his eyes. It was the lowliest, hardest, and dirtiest job for women. She had accepted and worked in the mine for three years, until she married Gwyn Jones, a miner, and moved into the small miners’ house he shared with his parents and brothers. Such had been her determination to fit in.
After Gwyn’s death from a cave-in underground that had killed two other men too, Siân had gone back to work though she was pregnant. Gwyn’s family was large and it had been a time of low wages. But after her son had been stillborn a month early, she had moved back to her grandparents’ and returned to the mine though her grandfather had tried to use his influence to get her a better job in the ironworks.
Siân started suddenly as there was a knock on the door and the latch lifted after her grandfather’s call.
“Good evening, Mrs. Rhys, Hywel, Emrys, Siân,” Owen Parry said, cap in hand. “Lovely day it has been, hasn’t it, now?”
The only time Owen ever looked uncomfortable or sheepish, Siân thought, was when he came calling on her, though he had been coming several evenings a week for months. He was courting her.
“Good evening, Owen,” Gwynneth said. “Yes, a lovely day indeed. All my washing dried in no time at all.”
“Hello, Owen,” Siân said.
“Well, Owen,” Emrys said, “a good number of signatures there were on the Charter last night. And almost no one missing from the meeting.”
“Yes,” Owen said, “but a few did not sign. And more would not pay their pennies to join the Association. It was a disappointment.”
“There will always be some who will not follow others,” Hywel said. “And I myself am a little uneasy, Owen. I could not countenance any violence, mind.”
“There will be no—” Owen said.
Gwynneth coughed significantly. “And to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, Owen?” she asked, smiling sweetly at him.
Owen flushed and turned his cap in his hands. “Siân,” he said, looking at her, “will you step out with me for some air, then? A lovely evening it is. I won’t keep her out late, Mrs. Rhys.”
Siân got to her feet and reached for her shawl behind the door. She was twenty-five years old and a widow, but Owen always gave the same assurance to Gran, who was now nodding her approval.
“Let me see now,” Emrys said. “It is half past eight, Owen. Have her home on the dot of nine, is it?”
“And not half a minute later, mind,” Hywel added.
“And no going up the mountain,” Emrys said as Owen opened the door and stood to one side to let Siân pass him.
“My watch stopped,” he said. “I left it home in the dresser drawer. And what are you going to do about it, Emrys Rhys?”
Grandad and Emrys were laughing merrily when the closing door cut off the sound. Siân smiled at Owen.
“Imbeciles,” he said, drawing her arm through his. “A couple of comedians. It is time they thought of something new to say, though.”
Siân laughed outright.
“Did you have a hard day?” he asked her as they walked along the street and turned at the end of it to stroll up into the lower hills above the valley and the river and works and rows of terraced houses. “I didn’t know if you would be too tired to come out.”
“But the air is lovely,” she said. She drew a deep breath of it. “It feels so good and smells so good after the dust of coal underground all day.”
“Your hair is what always smells good to me,” he said, moving his head closer to hers for a moment. “You wash it every day. I like that about you.”
Although she bound it every time she went underground, it was always gray with coal dust by the time her shift was at an end.
“Did you see the Marquess of Craille today?” she asked. “He was touring the ironworks with Mr. Barnes, Grandad and Uncle Emrys said. He looks really English, they said.”
“As blond as they come and dressed up like a toff,” he said. “And Barnes was all puffed up like a peacock, showing him around.”
Any doubt that Siân might still have had about the identity of the man on the mountain the night before finally fled. The Marquess of Craille was blond.
“I wonder why he has come,” she said. “He has never been here before.”
Owen shrugged. “For a pleasant holiday,” he said. “To watch all his slaves sweating for him.”
They were up on the lower hills and turned to look down, hand-in-hand, at the valley below them. The river still looked clean from up here, Siân thought. And peaceful. The sun was setting over the hills on the other side. She tried to put out of her mind the marquess and her terrible dread of what must surely be about to happen. Perhaps this would be the last evening. The last time she would walk in the hills with Owen. Despite herself she felt a welling of panic. She breathed deeply again.
“I don’t think there can be a lovelier place on earth, can there?” she said. The hills had never yet failed to bring her some measure of peace. She had missed them during her years at school with a terrible emptiness that had seemed to lodge in the pit of her stomach.
Owen laughed scornfully. “It is hell down there,” he said, gesturing with his head first at the ironworks and then at the coal mine. “We work like slaves, Siân, and the likes of Craille rake in the profits. The English. Robbing the riches of our valley. Our country. Though we are much to blame. We stand for the poor treatment we get and console ourselves by saying it is all God’s will—the Reverend Llewellyn’s favorite phrase. He is as much our enemy as Barnes and Craille, if we but knew it.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Soon you will be talking about unions and strikes and the Charter. Don’t spoil the evening. I have been hearing too much about last night’s meeting.” And she knew too much. More than any of the unsuspecting men. She felt sick suddenly with worry for Owen.
“Such things have to be talked about,” he said. “Especially the Charter, which is to be presented to Parliament any day now and will bring equality and freedom to the common man. To us, Siân. Once we can vote, we can have some say in the condition of our own lives. We will no longer be slaves. All the men of the valley have to be persuaded to sign it and to force its passage through Parliament. This is no time for fear of how our masters will punish us.”
Siân felt coldness in her nostrils and the beginnings of dizziness in her head. This was worse than last night.
Owen stopped talking to wrap an arm about her waist and turn her against him. He kissed her hard and long. She set her arms about his neck. Life would be good with Owen. He had a skilled, secure job and the rarity of a house of his own since his mother’s death the year before. He was respected by the other workers. He was handsome. She would be able to give him sturdy children and would be able to get out of the mine. Except that it all seemed a little calculated. She had been determined to be one of her people. Was she now trying to force her way to the top just so that she could be more comfortable than most of the others? If she was honest with herself, she would have to admit that she did not love Owen as she had always dreamed of loving a man. But then she had not loved Gwyn that way either. Perhaps there was no such thing.
And perhaps there was no such thing as a comfortably secure future with Owen. Perhaps they had no future together. How long would it be before the Marquess of Craille made his move? Should she warn Owen to run away? But he would not go. She knew he would not. She tightened her arms about his neck.
“Mmm.” He nuzzled her neck. “We will go up the mountain, then, will we, Siân?”
It was a question he had asked twice before. All the town courtships were conducted on the hillside. It was tradition. There was nowhere else to find any privacy in the crowded houses and na
rrow streets of the valley. Advanced courtships proceeded on the mountainside, higher up, where there was more assurance of being quite alone. She had been up on the mountain once with Gwyn a week before their wedding. It was where she had lost her virginity, as she had known she would when she had said yes. That was what going up on the mountain meant. The ground had been hard and cold. She had been almost unable to breathe beneath Gwyn’s weight.
“Not tonight, Owen,” she said, wanting to go, wanting to settle her future once and for all, wanting to forget her sick fears. Owen was a chapelgoer despite his frequent criticisms of the minister. If he took her up the mountain, he would marry her afterward. Asking her to go was just one way of proposing to her. She wanted to go with him—part of her wanted to go. “Not yet.”
“A tease are you, then?” he said. “Your kisses say yes, Siân. Very gentle I will be if you come with me. You think I cannot be gentle because I am big?”
She kissed his lips. “Give me time,” she said. “I am sure you can be wonderfully gentle, Owen.”
“Summer will be over soon, mind,” he said. “It will be cold on the mountain when autumn comes.”
“I don’t mean to tease.” She turned her head to rest her cheek against his shoulder. “I just don’t want to go yet, Owen.” But part of her did want it. She wanted the reassurance of a man’s loving. She had liked that part of marriage with Gwyn—except for that one time on the mountain. There was comfort in being that close to another human being.
“Next week I’ll be asking again, mind,” he said. “You are the prettiest woman in Cwmbran, Siân Jones, married or single.”
She smiled at him. “And you are the handsomest man, Owen Parry,” she said.
He kissed her again, briefly. “Home now, then, is it?” he said. “And early rising for the morning shift?”
She nodded and smiled ruefully.
“Ah, Siân,” he said, bending his head close to hers once more, “you were not made to be down the mine, girl.”
“No man or woman was,” she said, “but we all need to eat.” She linked her arm through his and raised her face to the sunset. She breathed in fresh air once more before they descended the hill to the town. She hoped she would be able to sleep. She hoped that by some miracle her terrors were unfounded.
3
ALEX took his daughter for a walk during the evening. She should have been going to bed, according to her nurse, but she was fretful and he felt guilty for having left her alone all day. She had had nothing to do beyond exploring as much of the house and the park as her nurse had allowed. Apparently her nurse was rather fearful of Wales and the Welsh and had not given her a great deal of freedom.
Alex took her to walk on the hills. They looked very different in the light of evening, he found, the heather brightened on their side of the valley by the rays of the evening sun. Last night seemed now rather like a dream.
It was definitely picturesque, he thought, stopping to gaze down into the valley and across the river to the hills opposite. Verity clung quietly to his hand. Picturesque and peaceful. A different world. It seemed that he must be separated by oceans and continents from his own world. But it felt strangely good to be here. Perhaps in time he would come to understand the industry on which the wealth of the property depended. Perhaps he would come to know the people who lived and worked here. Perhaps he would be content to stay for a while.
“What are they doing, Papa?” Verity was pointing downward.
He smiled. He had noticed them too, the couple below, though he had kept his eyes off them until now. They obviously thought themselves unobserved.
“They are kissing,” he said. “Men and women do that when they are considering marrying each other. And when they are married. It is to show that they care for each other.”
“Like you kiss me at bedtime,” she said. “But you do not take so long about it, Papa.”
“It is a little different with men and women,” he said. “But we must not stare and intrude on their privacy, even if they cannot see us. What do you think?” With a sweep of one arm he indicated the slope about them, the valley below, and the hills and sunset opposite.
“I think it is very lovely, Papa,” she said, “though I do not like all that smoke coming from those chimneys down there.” She wrinkled her nose and pointed to the ironworks, where the furnaces were kept lit day and night. “I think Grandmama was wrong, though. She said we were coming to the back of beyond, and she made it sound like somewhere no one would wish to be.”
He smiled. The setting sun was turning the sky orange behind the hills opposite and was making a gold ribbon of the river. He glanced down involuntarily at the lovers again. They were no longer embracing, but were still standing close together. A tall, slim woman with long dark hair, and a broad-chested, dark-haired man only a little taller than she. He had seen them both before, if the distance did not deceive his eyes. He was last night’s leader and today’s half-naked puddler. She was the maiden of Cwmbran. Though perhaps not a maiden after all.
Alex felt a sudden and quite unexpected stabbing of envy and loneliness. They seemed somehow a part of their surroundings. A part of this picturesque and remote Welsh valley whose steep hillsides closed it in away from the world.
Except that the world had come looking for it last night.
The sun was dropping behind the hills opposite, deepening the orange to red. Already it was dusk in the valley. Soon it would be dark. He felt something—some longing, some yearning that he could not quite grasp or name. Some sense, perhaps, of being an outsider in something that was beautiful. Some sense of being in a place where he did not belong but wanted to belong. Some sense of—home. But no, that could not be it. He could not put words to the feeling. The valley was lovely despite the signs of industry, and he was seeing it at its loveliest, at sunset on a summer evening. Was it surprising that he was affected by its beauty and a little dissatisfied that there was no one with whom to share it except his young daughter?
The two lovers, he saw, looking downward again, were making their way down toward the terraced houses, arm in arm.
“Well,” he said, looking at his daughter, who was unusually quiet, “shall we go home before it gets dark and we get lost?”
“But I am with you, Papa,” she said, still holding tightly to his hand. “Are we going to live here forever?”
“Perhaps not forever,” he said. “But for a while. Will you mind?”
“No,” she said. And she added with the candor of a child, “It annoys me to be with Grandmama sometimes. She thinks that if I am enjoying myself I must be doing something wrong. That is silly, is it not, Papa?”
Yes, very. But one had to be loyal to one’s mother-in-law. “Grandmama wants you to grow up to be a proper lady,” he said.
“If a proper lady frowns all the time, I do not want to be one, Papa,” she said firmly.
He wisely dropped the topic. But she was not quite finished.
“Nurse is just as bad,” she said. “She would not let me go downstairs today to talk with the servants, as I do at home. And she would allow me to walk only just outside the house, with her close by. You know how fast and how far Nurse walks. She will never allow me out here on the hills. She thinks I might get lost or eaten by wolves. There are no wolves, are there, Papa? People have funny ideas about Wales, don’t they? I think Nurse is just lazy.”
And rather elderly. He had kept her as Verity’s nurse because she was the one woman who had been with his daughter since birth—and because it was his mother-in-law who had originally selected her. But Verity needed more than a nurse. She needed companionship, but he could not spend a great deal of his own time with her.
“Perhaps it is time for a governess,” he said. “You are six years old, after all. I shall have to see what I can do.” He should have thought of it before they came. He should have seen about hiring someone and bringing h
er with them.
“Grandmama taught me how to read and do sums,” she said, tripping along at his side. “I don’t need a governess, Papa. Just someone to take me out. Someone who is willing to do things with me.”
A governess. Yes. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
He wondered foolishly and uncharacteristically what he would do for companionship. And he thought again about the strongly muscled puddler and the dark-haired woman whom he himself had kissed the night before.
She had aroused an unwelcome yearning in him. He could still feel it.
* * *
Alex slept, as always, with his window wide open. He woke during the night with the feeling that something had woken him, though he did not know what. It must be the moonlight, he thought, opening his eyes to find it in a bright band across his bed. In a short while it would be right on his face.
If he turned over onto his side, could he ignore it? He felt too cozy and too lazy to get out to close the curtains. But he did so with a sigh. Moonlight on his head would definitely keep him awake.
He stood at the window for a few moments before pulling the curtains. He rested his hands on the sill and drew in a deep breath of fresh air as he looked out over treetops to the hills. It was as bright a night as last night. Though a little chillier, he thought, shivering slightly. He reached up a hand to one of the curtains.
But his hand froze there. There it was again. The sound that had woken him. He remembered it now that it was being repeated. A mournful and prolonged howling. Wolves? He frowned. Were there wolves? There was more than one of them. But more than one animal too. There were howls, but there were also bellows, as if there were cattle out there.
Alex shivered again. The sounds seemed somehow out of place in the peace of the valley. And almost human in their plaintiveness. He must remember to mention them to Miss Haines, his housekeeper, in the morning. And to Barnes. He did not want Verity wandering outside the park, governess or no governess, if there really were wild animals out there.