by Mary Balogh
She nodded.
Aled looked surprised and relieved. "Good. Then it is settled," he said, taking a package out of his pocket and handing it to her. "This should be enough for six months' wages. You will speak to him, Marged? It would be better, perhaps, if he did not know the story behind his new job."
Marged nodded again.
Aled looked uncertainly at Ceris and cleared his throat again. "Will I walk you home, then, Ceris?" he asked.
She stood for a long time without moving. But then she nodded and stepped forward. "Yes," she said. "Thank you."
She hugged Marged as she passed. "I am so happy that you will have help and that Waldo will have work," she said. "Perhaps some good will come of all this after all."
Marged nodded and made no attempt to leave either the barn or the house with the two of them. She stood where she was, looking down at the package in her hand. She used her free hand after a minute or two to swipe at a couple of tears that had escaped from her eyes and were trickling down her cheeks.
Chapter 18
She had agreed to allow him to walk her home, but she had pretended not to notice his offered arm. She held her shawl with both hands and kept her eyes on the path ahead of them. She kept two feet of clear space between them. And she made no attempt at conversation.
They had used to hold hands when they walked, except when they were among the hills, off the beaten track, when often he had set an arm about her shoulders and she had set one about his waist. Her eyes had always sparkled at him and there had always been a brightness in her face, a smile on her lips. She had always chattered to him about anything and everything.
He thought about three smashed gates and the letters Geraint had written and sent to local landowners and to various people in England. He thought about the odds against success and the odds in favor of capture and punishment. There were constables actually posted at Tegfan—there at Geraint's invitation. Aled's childhood admiration for his friend had returned and doubled in force over the last couple of weeks. He was as daring as ever, but now there was a sense of purpose and a sense of responsibility to temper the daring. Geraint was no longer reckless. Except perhaps where Marged was concerned. Aled knew they had ridden off home together on both gate-breaking nights. But Geraint had fixed his aristocratic blue stare on his friend when Aled had suggested to him that it was perhaps unwise.
Aled thought again about what they had done and what there was still to do—all the uncertainties and all the dangers. And for that he had given up this. He turned his head to look at the woman he had loved with single-minded devotion for six years. Sometimes it seemed a poor exchange.
"You are stepping out with Harley, Ceris?" he asked. He had not meant to ask the question. He knew the answer but did not want to hear it from her.
"Yes," she said.
He felt deeply wounded, as if he were hearing it for the first time. But he could not leave it alone.
"You care for him?" he asked.
"Yes." There was a dullness to her voice—so unlike Ceris.
"And he is good to you?" He did not want to know how good Harley was to Ceris, God damn his soul to hell.
"Yes," she said. He thought their poor stab at conversation was at an end, but she continued after a short silence. "He is courting me."
Well, he had invited it. He should not have asked the first question. Courting was rather more serious than stepping out. Courting was a preliminary to a marriage offer and to marriage itself.
He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell her that he wished for her happiness. Or that he was glad she was getting on with her life. Or that he was pleased she had chosen a man who would be able to provide well for her. Or that he envied Harley. But there were no words he could force past his lips.
They had reached the end of the lane leading up to her father's house. It was the place where he had always kissed her whenever he was not going to go into the house with her. They both stopped walking, though he had expected her to keep on going.
"Aled." She looked up into his eyes—the sparkle in her own was all gone, leaving only sadness and beauty behind. "Marged says that R-Rebecca is a good and a compassionate leader, if those qualities can belong to a man who also destroys property. But I can see that she is at least partly right. Was it his idea to compensate the gatekeepers who lose their homes and jobs? And to help the poor? Was it his idea to help Marged and Waldo Parry, both at the same time?"
"Yes." He nodded. "It was all his idea, Ceris. It is not something that is part of the usual role of Rebecca."
"I know," she said. "And you are his right-hand man, his Charlotte. Did you volunteer to call on Marged?"
"He asked me," he said, "and I agreed." He smiled briefly. "I did not expect it to be as easy as it was. Marged is about as proud as it is possible for a woman to be."
"Aled," she said, "perhaps I have done your cause some injustice. Perhaps it is doing some good. If only it were not also doing a lot of evil." She sighed.
Hope had revived painfully in him for a moment. But there was no hope. Besides, another man was courting her.
"I must go and help Mam with the wash," she said.
He nodded and smiled at her and turned away. But when he had taken several steps down the path and assumed that she was on her way to the house, her voice stopped him again.
"Aled," she called.
He turned and looked at her. Her unhappy eyes had grown luminous.
"Be careful, car—" she said. She lifted her shoulders and tightened her hold on her shawl. "Be careful."
Cariad. She was going to force herself to love Harley and to marry him. She was of an age at which she needed a home of her own and a man of her own and little ones. But being Ceris, she would not go with her heart when her heart led her away from her deeply held principles.
But she loved him.
Perhaps if he asked her to wait… This would be over one day, settled one way or another. If he was still free then, perhaps… But no. Nothing would have changed. He would still be a man who had fought in the Rebecca Riots, and she would still be a pacifist.
He nodded. "I will," he said, and turned back to continue on his way back down to Glynderi.
It was going to become far more tricky and far more dangerous, of course. There were constables, not in Glynderi, but right in Tegfan itself. There was a firm promise of soldiers. The temptation was to lie low for a while, to postpone further action until the fever to catch Rebecca had died down. And until the landowners had got over their outrage at the letters they had all received from Rebecca, clearly enumerating the people's grievances and the conditions under which they would suspend further destructive action.
The Earl of Wyvern was one of the most furious. He grumbled to the constables and mumbled to Matthew Harley and raged to Sir Hector Webb and Lady Stella about gratitude for favors given and how he would know in future to keep his favors to himself. He was sorry he had ever set foot back in Wales, but he would be damned now if he would leave before the trouble had been settled and Rebecca caught and punished.
It was too soon for there to have been any response from England. But Carmarthen and Swansea newspapers had boldly published the letter that had been sent to each of the landowners. Perhaps copies of those articles would be published elsewhere—perhaps in England, perhaps in London. They could use all the publicity they could get.
No, it was not the time to hold back. It was not the time to become cautious. Everything so far was happening according to plan. They had known the dangers would become greater with every appearance of Rebecca. It was not the time to run and hide.
Friday, Geraint had agreed with Aled, and two gates west of Glynderi since all the vigilance of the constables was being focused east and south. But everyone was going to have to be far more careful about leaving their homes and returning to them. And they must gather at a place more distant from the village. But Friday would remain the night for their next attack.
As he cut himself off
more and more from his people—he rarely left the park and always wore a grim expression whenever he did—Geraint came more and more to identify with them. His Welshness returned to him almost as if the sixteen years of his exile in England had never been. He walked about the park of Tegfan, breathing in Welsh air and gazing about him at rolling Welsh hills, and knew that he was home at last after a long, long absence. What had he said to Marged when she had asked where Rebecca was from?
I come from the hills and the valleys and the rivers and the clouds of Carmarthenshire.
Perhaps he had not realized at the time how much he spoke the truth. And it angered him intensely that his people were not free to live lives of work and contentment and freedom in their own homes, in their own country.
Oh, yes, he would continue to fight for them even if the danger doubled, as well it might.
But with the reassertion of his Welsh identity came the need to go all the way back, to find his roots, his beginnings. To face the pain.
His mother. She had always appeared beautiful to his child's eyes with her dark wavy hair and blue eyes, like his own. But she must have been beautiful by any standards, he thought now. It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that Viscount Handford, his father, had been so smitten by her when she was Lady Stella's governess that he had been reckless enough to elope with her and marry her, though she was only the daughter of a nonconformist Welsh minister.
For the first time since his return, Geraint went to see her grave in the Anglican churchyard. And his father's grave. They had been buried side by side, gwynneth marsh, viscountess handford, the inscription on the headstone read. His mother. She did not sound like his mother.
"Mam," he said softly.
He had seen her only once alive after that strange morning when the Earl of Wyvern, his grandfather, had appeared in person up on the moors and had spoken to his mother until she was in tears and Geraint had launched himself at the man and punched him and kicked him until servants pulled him off and held him. Only once, on the morning he was leaving Tegfan and Wales for school in England. A brief, deeply emotional farewell. A good-bye, though he had not realized it at the time. He had never been allowed to write to her and he guessed that she had not been allowed to write to him.
He had had to be ruthlessly purged of everything from his first twelve years of existence that made him unworthy of being the Earl of Wyvern's heir.
"Mam," he said again, and his eyes moved to his father's grave. He knew little about the man who had been killed only weeks after his son's conception, beyond the fact that he had been handsome and daring and full of laughter. And that he had loved Gwynneth Penderyn, Geraint's mother.
Geraint wondered about the loneliness of his mother's life for the eighteen years following the death of his father. For twelve of those years she had had only him and had loved him fiercely. For the last six she had had—no one? He did not know about her last six years. The pain and the emptiness of not knowing stabbed at him and reminded him that he had put them aside with everything else when he had left Wales forever—or so he had thought. He had felt the deep guilt of his neglect of her, though he had been only a boy and had been given no choice at all. But still there had been the guilt. She was dead, and he would never be able to tell her that he loved her constantly through the years of their separation.
"Mam." He knelt down and rested a palm against the turf beneath the headstone. He hoped there was a heaven. He-hoped she had been with his father there for ten years, though time would be meaningless in such a place, he supposed.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he had nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. But he did not want to go back to Tegfan. Someone there was always seeking him out for some purpose and there was always the chance of visitors, especially these days. He did not want to talk with anyone. His heart was too heavy with remembered emotions. He stood up and looked around—and up.
He had told himself on his return that it was one place he would never go. It was too much a part of his deepest nightmares—the isolation, the ostracism, the hunger and cold, the bareness of home, his mother's loneliness and unhappiness, masked for his sake, but always known to him. He did not want to go back. But it was the only place to go. If he did not go back, he thought suddenly, then he would never really be able to go forward.
And so he went, trudging determinedly uphill, his head down. Perhaps there would be nothing to find except the remembered contours of the bleak upper moorland. Perhaps it would all look familiar yet different. Perhaps he would be able to look about him and breathe in the fresh air and know that it was all gone, all in the past. And that his mother was gone and at peace. Perhaps he would not find any ghosts at all. And those hovels were built of sod and thatch and could not be expected to last long against the elements of the uplands.
But the hovel in which he had lived with his mother had not gone. Not completely. It had been built against an outcropping of rock and had been sheltered from too rapid deterioration. One side of it had collapsed and the thatch was sparse and almost black with age, but it was still recognizable as a wretched habitation. And there was still a doorway to the interior.
He stood some distance away, looking at it, for a long time before approaching the doorway and peering inside. There were only darkness and mustiness to greet him.
He had never felt this dread as a child. Children were so very adaptable, he thought, especially when they had known nothing else. It had not seemed abnormal or even very terrible to him as a child to live here in such poverty that it was amazing they had survived. It was only in retrospect that it had become a place of horror, a subject for his nightmares.
And yet he had known love here. The only love of his life. His mother. Perhaps that was why it had become a dreaded place, suppressed from his memory and surfacing only in his nightmares. Perhaps it was not so much the poverty and the bleakness that haunted him but the love— the total, unconditional love he had received here. Perhaps this was the place where the riches of his life had been. For sixteen years he had had everything in his life except love.
He had dreaded coming back because something deep in him had known that doing so would reveal his present poverty to him.
He moved to one side of the hovel, to the side still standing, and rested his arm along the dirty thatch of the roof. And his head sank onto his hands. If only they had let him write to her, even once.
He wept.
She did not waste any time. She made a quick explanation to her mother-in-law and then threw a shawl about her shoulders and made her way up to the moors with long, mannish strides.
She wanted to share her exuberance and her good fortune.
She had to go carefully, of course. She was not sure if the Parrys would reject the offer if they knew the truth. Perhaps not, but even so it was probably as well if as few people as possible knew about the coffers of Rebecca.
So she told Waldo Parry that she had set aside a little money and had now decided to use it to hire help, certainly for the summer and perhaps permanently. She hoped he was available and would be willing to help her. She hoped some other farmer had not beaten her to it. She knew how much his services were coveted.
He had had a few offers, he told her. Nothing that he fancied until now. He would enjoy working for her, though, and he knew how much she and her in-laws needed a man about the place. Mrs. Parry smiled and nodded and looked suspiciously bright-eyed. The little girls sat and gazed from their father to the visitor and back again as each spoke. Idris stood in the doorway, darting glances all about and drawing attention with strategic shuffles to his new boots until Marged complimented him on them.
It looked as if Rebecca had already partly taken care of the Parrys. The little girls, Marged noticed, were wearing new dresses. How did Rebecca know of them? she wondered. Through Aled? Doubtless he had someone in each community reporting to him. Or perhaps it was the committee itself, acting in the name of Rebecca, which was helping where there wa
s need.
But it was Rebecca himself who had decided to help her. She did not doubt it. She hugged the thought to herself as she left the Parrys to their pride and their newfound joy— which, of course, they had not shown in full measure while she was there with them. But she did not feel like returning home just yet. She wanted to be alone to feel the full extent of her own joy.
Nothing really had changed. He had still warned her quite clearly that he wanted no permanent connection with her, that if he was forced to marry her it would not be a good situation. But the point was that he would marry her if her condition made it necessary for her to ask and that he did care. Perhaps he would never look at her or speak with her again. Perhaps she would never ride with him again. Or make love with him again. And it would be painful. She had no doubt about that. But she would hug those facts to herself and she would remember for the rest of her life her brief and glorious fling with romantic love.
She strode across the top of the hill, letting the wind take her unconfined hair, and relived that night of love. She relived every kiss, every touch. She relived their union and the unexpected passion of it. She had not known it could be like that. Not that she would ever admit that it was better than it had been with Eurwyn. With Eurwyn there had been warmth, affection, marital closeness. With Rebecca there had been… Oh, there were not words. Marged lifted her chin and closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.
She was in love with Rebecca—deeply in love. And she could not feel sorry that she had known everything with him. Even if, by some strange quirk of fortune, she was with child. She felt a moment's stabbing of panic. But he would not leave her in disgrace, he had said. And how wonderful it would be—oh, Duw, how wonderful—to find that after all she could have a child of her own. His child.
She opened her eyes again and smiled. She did not know who he was. She had never even seen his face. And yet she was wishing for his child?