Chapter 3
He had intended making one or two other calls in the village. One in particular. Aled Rhoslyn had succeeded his father in his blacksmith's business a few months before Geraint came home for his mother's funeral. And he still was the village blacksmith. His forge was beside the chapel. Geraint had intended to call there.
But he found himself unexpectedly reluctant. One of his few good memories of childhood was Aled's friendship. But time had passed. They would have grown apart. Geraint was content with his life as it now was, and he had a number of close friends. But he did not want to be confronted with the knowledge that his first friendship with someone of his own gender no longer existed.
Perhaps some other day. He walked past the blacksmith's forge and was aware of faces at windows the length of the village street and nodded to the one curtsying woman he passed—he did not recognize her. But he did not stop anywhere. He had walked to the village. He found himself walking now beyond it, away from the park and the house. He found himself walking along beside the river and turning onto the rough path that led gradually upward into the hills. He followed almost instinctively a route that he must have walked a thousand times when he was a child.
He knew where Madoc Evans's farm was, more lately Eurwyn Evans's, now Marged's. He had passed it numerous times, though he had never been beyond its gate. It was while standing on the bars of the gate one spring day, watching a new calf walk about the yard on spindly legs, that he had encountered the boot of Madoc Evans, who had come up the lane behind him, unheard. Ragamuffins from the uplands were not welcome near the farms of the respectable.
Geraint paused after he had walked perhaps a mile. Was he going to call on her? He had hoped she was not at the manse or in the village. He had hoped she had married and moved away onto someone else's land. He had hoped never to see her again. And yet, having heard that she was at Ty-Gwyn, he had turned his footsteps immediately in that direction.
He turned to look back the way he had come. The gradient had not seemed steep, and yet he was high up already. He was assaulted with the familiarity of the scene below him—the river, flowing straight until it bent to curve around and into the park of Tegfan; the trees and smooth lawns of the park, and the large stone house; the village stretched out along the river; the farms dotted about in the lowlands and on the hills, the fields, bare now in early spring, but each looking different from every other; the pastures, in which a few sheep and cattle were grazing.
He felt a sudden and unexpected wave of longing again—the same feeling he had had on the pavement in London when he had overheard the snippet of a conversation in Welsh.
But I miss the hills…
The hills had been a part of his childhood, a part of him. He had missed the hills, he remembered now, for weary years before forgetting them entirely, suppressing all memory of them until that meaningless encounter with two Welsh drovers had brought it jolting back. And the hills had beckoned again.
It had been much higher in the hills he had lived with his mother. He turned to look upward, but there was no clear view to the top. He would never again go up there. It was a place he did not want to see.
Would he go higher at all today? He looked broodingly about him. He could not see Ty-Gwyn, but he could see another farmhouse, built of stone, its roof neatly tiled with slate. It had been thatched when last he saw it. He thought for a moment. Mr. Williams. He was not sure he had ever known the man's first name. He had been a large and formidable-looking man. And yet occasionally when he had passed Geraint on the path, he had reached into a pocket and handed him a coin. Once, when he must have been on his way to market, he had given the boy a bunch of turnips and told him to take them to his mam for their dinner. And then, when Geraint had been scurrying away with his treasure, he had called him back and added two large brown farm eggs as an afterthought.
Mr. Williams had had a young daughter who used to run and hide when she saw Geraint coming, though he could remember her smiling shyly at him once or twice from behind her mother's skirts.
The Williams farm was his now, the Earl of Wyvern thought, if indeed it still belonged to the same man. Just as the Evans farm was his, and all the farms he could see from his vantage point, for as far as the eye could see. Perhaps he would call at the Williams farm this morning and then return home. He had no real wish to see Marged. And yet it seemed that his feet worked independently of his brain, for they carried him past the entrance to the short lane that would have taken him to the stone farmhouse, and led him upward.
And so ten minutes later he found himself again outside that gate, gazing in at the farmyard and the house of Ty-Gwyn. It looked so much the same that for a moment he felt disoriented. It was a longhouse, something so out of fashion that he had never seen one in England. It was one long, low building, the entrance to one side of the center, the house occupying the longer half, the cow barn the other. Animals and humans were housed together during the winter, separated by the passage from front door to back. The building was thatched and whitewashed. It was old-fashioned and certainly no symbol of wealth. And yet it was as neat as the proverbial pin.
His impression was formed in a mere moment. He did not have a chance to stand there and observe more fully. It was not a boot from behind that disturbed him this time, but the sight of a figure in the farmyard. She must have been feeding the single pig, which was in an open pen. It seemed she had even paused to talk to it or pet it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was the sight of him at the gate that had turned her utterly still.
He opened the gate and stepped inside onto the neatly swept path that led past the plot that would soon be planted to vegetables and into the yard itself. He walked along the path.
She did not move. She wore a plain and faded dress, which was covered by a large apron, slightly soiled from the morning's work though still crisp and white. She wore no cloak or hat, despite the chill of the breeze. Her light brown hair was pulled back from her face and confined in a simple knot at the back of her neck, though a few errant tendrils were blowing about her shoulders and face.
She was tall, as he remembered her, and well shaped. And as proud as she had ever been as the minister's daughter. She was standing with straight back and lifted chin and face devoid of all expression.
He knew instantly from that expression, or lack of expression, that she had not forgotten. At the age of eighteen he had been an unhappy, confused, and insecure boy, still not quite sure in which of two worlds he belonged. He had finally been allowed to return home on the death of his mother only to find that it was not home, that perhaps it never had been. Naively, he had expected people to welcome him, to rejoice in his change of fortune, to be apologetic for the way they had once rejected him and his mother. He had been very ready to forgive. But he had met reticence and suspicion and even some open hostility. Except in Aled and in Marged.
Marged. She had grown into a lovely sixteen-year-old. She had been beautiful and accomplished. She had played her harp for him and sung to him and had brought flooding back to him all his memories of Wales and of Welsh music. She had smiled at him and walked with him and held his hand and even kissed him. He had tumbled inevitably and deeply into love with her. He had been so desperate for love.
Too desperate. One afternoon up in the hills he had made an utter idiot of himself by pulling her to the ground and pawing her and trying with fumbling and totally inexperienced hands to get beneath her skirts. His head had been ringing from her resounding slap moments later and she had been running from him. The next day, when he had gone to the manse to apologize to her, she had treated him so coldly and been so much on her dignity and he had been so terrified and so embarrassed that he had turned utterly craven and directed all his conversation toward her father and had ignored her completely apart from one long and languid and insolent perusal of her body when her father was not looking. It was the mask behind which he had hidden all his hurt and guilt and insecurity. It was the mask he had worn for everyone else in the village except her and Aled. And now for her too.
He had returned to London the following day. He had not seen Marged since. And her look told him now that she had not forgotten. And that perhaps she had not forgiven, though it had been ten years ago and she must have realized during the intervening years what a gauche puppy he had been then.
He stopped six feet away from her. She was a woman now, he noticed. More beautiful than she had been as a girl.
"Marged," he said quietly.
She had been expecting him. Or if not exactly that, at least she had been aware since Sunday that he was at Tegfan, that Ty-Gwyn and all the land for miles around belonged to him, and that he might come at any time. She had prepared herself for his coming. She had prepared herself so that she would not be taken off guard.
And yet when she looked up from feeding old Nellie and saw him standing still and quiet at the gate, she felt rather as if a great fist had landed against her stomach with all the weight of a great arm behind it.
He opened the gate without invitation—he did not need an invitation—and came inside, walking slowly up the garden path and into the farmyard toward her. She watched him come, helpless to stop him, unable to move. He was dressed as she supposed English gentlemen of wealth and fashion dressed—such gentlemen were not in the habit of passing this way. He wore a long dark cloak with a single cape at the shoulders and had removed a tall hat. Beneath the cloak she could see a dark, full-skirted coat, ending several inches above his knees, and a dark green waistcoat and white shirt with starched collars and dark neckcloth. His dark, slim trousers hugged his legs. There was not a detail of his dress to be criticized.
And not a detail of the man himself either. He must have grown another few inches after the age of eighteen. He had been slim then and graceful. He was still slim, but he was a man now and not a boy. His shoulders and chest were broad. His waist and hips were slender. His dark hair was not as long as it had been when he was a child or as unruly as it had been when he was eighteen. It was expertly styled but still thick and curly. His eyes seemed bluer, more intense.
His face had changed. It had thinned into the face of a man. An aristocratic man, handsome, hard, and ruthless. It looked like a face that rarely if ever smiled or showed any other strong emotion. It was a disciplined, cold face. She could see nothing in it of the big-eyed, bold, soulful waif he had been 20 years before.
She hated him with an intensity that surprised even herself. She hated him because she had loved him and had made a fool of herself over him. Because he had let her down and shown her arrogantly and cruelly the gap in their stations. Because he was responsible for Eurwyn's death. Because he had come now to fill the role of the authority figure who had always most angered her in her life. Because he was the Earl of Wyvern. Because he was Geraint Penderyn. Because she had loved him at the foolish age of sixteen and because even then—especially then—love had hurt. Because even though she had prepared herself for his coming, her apron had become soiled and her hair had been buffeted by the wind and she had a visible patch on the sleeve of her dress. Because she was twenty-six years old.
She hated him.
"Marged," he said quietly.
He rolled the r of her name in the Welsh way. He pronounced her name correctly. And yet the Englishness of his voice was apparent even in the one word. And how dared he call her by her given name? She was Mrs. Evans to strangers, and he was a stranger. But of course he was the Earl of Wyvern and she was merely a tenant farmer, one who paid him rent and tithes. He was putting her in her place, very firmly in her place, by walking into her farmyard uninvited and by calling her Marged.
Well, then.
She kept her back straight and her chin high and bent her knees in a deep curtsy, grasping the sides of her dress as she did so. "My lord," she said, speaking deliberately in English, "what an honor, to be sure."
His expression did not change at all. And yet she knew he had understood that her subservience was deliberate mockery.
He knew that battle had been engaged.
How she hated him.
He was unwelcome. He could see it in her eyes, could sense it in every line of her body. The foolish curtsy and her words, spoken unexpectedly in English, merely confirmed the fact. He did not realize until that moment how much he had hoped she had forgotten that foolishness of ten years ago. Or perhaps she had forgotten. Surely she had. It was just that circumstances had changed. Ten years had passed. She had been married and widowed during those years. He was the Earl of Wyvern now. She would expect him to have changed. And she would be right.
But he was disappointed. She had been his first friend. His wonderful friend. That was how he had described her to his mother that first day, when he had bounded back up the mountain, his mouth stained purple from berries. I have a wonderful friend, Mam. His mother had held him tightly, his face pressed against her too thin body, and smoothed her thin fingers gently through his curly hair.
"I hear that you run the farm yourself," he said now in English. "I hear that your husband passed away. I am sorry about that, Marged."
Her jaw tightened and her eyes grew hard. It was an expression he remembered from her childhood, though it had usually been used then against those who would have driven him away or scolded her for playing with him.
"I run the farm myself," she said, "with a little help from laborers when I can afford it. Did you think it impossible for a woman to do? I have always paid the rent, even this year. And the tithes."
Even this year? What was significant about this year? he wondered. He did not ask. But he understood her bristly manner suddenly, her belligerence. And it was so typical of Marged as he remembered her. She was afraid he had come to question her ability to run a farm herself. Her hackles were up.
"Perhaps," he said, "you could show me the farm." He looked about the yard and at the house. It all looked very well kept to him.
For a moment she did not move. She continued to look at him with her hard eyes and unreadable expression. And then she dipped into her curtsy again. "Certainly, my lord," she said, "I am your servant."
If she had been, he thought with a flash of annoyance, he would have put her in her place in a moment. He did not tolerate insolence from subordinates.
"The pigpen is too large for our needs," she said, indicating it with a sweep of one arm. "My father-in-law built it years ago. But one does not rebuild a stone pigpen to accommodate one's needs. We have only Nellie now, and she is still here only because on my marriage I made the mistake of naming her and making a pet of her and now cannot bear the thought of slaughtering her."
She turned toward the house. And yet, he thought, it would be wise surely to buy or breed more pigs. When he had been a child, all the farmers had had half a dozen or so. Bacon and ham had been a staple food, though not with his mother and him, of course. He followed her across the yard toward the house. There were a few chickens pecking away at some grain in one corner. He could see some sheep grazing in a meadow to one side of the yard.
"The cows are still being kept inside," she said. "I will be letting them out soon, but one can never assume that spring is here to stay merely because there has been some nice weather. I would not wish to put the calves or the milk at risk."
She spoke briskly, impersonally, entirely in English. She walked with long, purposeful strides and no enticing swaying of the hips. And yet she looked utterly feminine, nevertheless.
He stepped after her through the front door and into the dark, cool passageway beyond. The cow barn was to his right. One cow lowed contentedly. Geraint counted ten stalls. Five of them were occupied. Three of the cows had calves with them. Although there were the inevitable smells of a barn, it was clean and orderly, he saw. The straw on the ground looked fresh.
"The stalls were all full five years ago," she said. "We have had to sell half the herd gradually."
He did not ask why.
'They look well cared for," he said. "You do all the work with them, Marged? And all the milking?"
"My mother-in-law does most of that," she said. 'There are other things for me to do and only a certain number of hours in each day."
He had seen no sign yet of the mother-in-law or the grandmother.
She led him through the passageway and out into a lean-to built onto the back of the house. It was a dairy, he saw. The dirt floor and the slate surfaces of the work area were clean. There were both butter and cheese in the making.
"You sell the produce?" he asked. He had used to envy the children of farmers, on their way to market with their parents, the carts in which they rode laden with produce.
"When there is a market for it." she said. "There have been strikes in the coalfields and at the ironworks. There is no money there now for Carmarthenshire butter and cheese. And prices have fallen."
"Have they?" He looked at her. "That is a pity."
"Yes," she agreed, her voice tight with anger, "it is."
As if he was responsible for the shrinking market and the drop in prices.
"And your crops?" he asked. "You hire laborers to put them in for you?"
"I do it myself," she said. "Plows are not so hard to use if one has well-trained horses. Ours are getting old, but they are good. I work the land myself. At harvesttime I need help."
He had seen men pushing the heavy plows behind the horses or oxen, struggling to keep the furrows straight and uniformly deep. He did not believe for a moment that plows were not hard to use. Was she too stubborn to hire a man to do the work for her? Did she have to prove to every man about Glynderi and Tegfan that she was their equal?
He reached out on an sudden impulse and took both her hands in his. He turned them palm up and looked down at them. It was only as he did so that he realized that touching her was not such a good idea. Holding the backs of her hands cupped in his palms suddenly seemed unwisely intimate. And he had had to take a step closer to her in order to do so. He was holding her thumbs back with his own, he realized.
He looked up into her eyes. Another mistake. She had always had the steadiest eyes he had ever known. He could not remember ever trying to stare Marged down, but it would have been a useless game, one impossible to win. And he remembered now how those gray eyes had always been fringed by long lashes, several shades darker than her hair. They had not changed.
"Calluses," he said softly, tightening his grip as he felt a tremor in her hands.
"You know the word and its meaning," she said equally softly. There was no suggestion of sarcasm in her tone, though it was there undisguised in her eyes. "They come from hard, honest work, my lord."
She licked her lips when his eyes lowered to them, though he knew she did not do so with any intention of being provocative. He felt his breath quicken even so. Belatedly, he released her hands.
"My lord," she said, "would you care to step into the kitchen and take a cup of tea with us?"
Why did she hate him so much? he wondered. Could a boy's fumbled attempts at seduction have made her so angry even ten years later? Or was it merely the fact that he was now wealthy and she was not? The possibility that Marged of all people could be so mean-minded annoyed him. He inclined his head curtly.
"Thank you," he said.
For a few moments longer she stared into his eyes, unconcealed resentment and hostility in her own. And for those same moments he stared back, angry himself, on the verge of asking her straight out what he had done to offend her. But he had learned years and years ago, perhaps from his birth, but certainly from his twelfth year, not to open himself deliberately to disappointment or hurt or rejection.
He recognized danger with Marged and closed himself off against it.
And then she turned and strode off back down the passageway to the low doorway leading into the kitchen of the house. He followed her and found himself standing on the flagstones of the kitchen floor, turning toward the large open fireplace. Sitting in the inglenook beside the fire was an elderly woman, whom he could not remember seeing before. She was nodding her head, presumably in acknowledgment of his appearance. In front of the fire, the Mrs. Evans he remembered—Madoc Evans's wife—was bobbing a curtsy and directing her flustered gaze at his feet.
He inclined his head to them both and bade them a good morning.
"His lordship is doing us the honor of taking a cup of tea with us, Mam, Gran," Marged said, still speaking in English. "Do take a seat, my lord." She motioned him toward a bare wooden settle close to the fire and turned toward the dresser to lift down cups and saucers.
Geraint sat.