Chapter 28
Marged had relinquished the spinning wheel to her mother-in-law and was playing her harp and singing at the request of Eurwyn's grandmother. She was feeling a certain melancholy enjoyment of the quiet evening. Change was imminent. She was not quite sure what was going to happen, but something was going to. If Rebecca married her—when Rebecca married her, would he be willing to take on two other women too? Two women who were related to her only through her first husband? Would he be able to afford to take them on even if he was willing? Perhaps Waldo Parry would continue to work for them so that they could live independently.
"There is busy the lane is tonight," her mother-in-law said, pausing in her spinning as Marged came to the end of a song. She sat in a listening attitude.
And then Marged heard it too—the sound of footsteps and voices. She crossed to the small window and peered out into the darkness. Actually it was not so dark. The moon and stars were beaming down from a clear sky. There were definitely men going past. And then she both heard and saw horses—two of them. Her face jerked closer to the glass. One of the riders was Rebecca. The other—Aled—was bending to open the gate, and the two of them were riding into the farmyard.
"What is happening, Marged, fachl" her grandmother asked from the inglenook beside the fire.
"Visitors," she said, and darted for the passage and the outer door.
"Marged!" Rebecca was calling for her even before she had the door open. There was a note of urgency in his voice.
Had they been out without her? she wondered. Or were they on their way and had come for her? But there was someone on the horse with Rebecca, she saw as she hurried across the farmyard toward him.
"This is Mrs. Phillips from the Cilcoed tollgate on the other side of the village," he said. "They are after us, Marged. We have to get to Ninian Williams's farm. May Mrs. Phillips take shelter here for the night? I'll make other arrangements for her tomorrow."
"Of course." Marged looked in some bewilderment at the little old lady who had used to live in Glynderi until the death of her husband. Rebecca was swinging down from the saddle and lifting Mrs. Phillips down even as she spoke. "Ninian Williams's?"
"He is giving an engagement party for Ceris and me," Aled said with a grin. He was scrubbing at the blacking on his face with the sleeve of his robe. "Your father has arranged it."
"Oh, Duw, it feels good to have my feet on firm earth again," Mrs. Phillips said. "I do remember your Eurwyn's gran well, Marged Evans."
Rebecca was escorting her to the door. Marged went after them to open it. She was feeling rather as if she had stepped into some bizarre and senseless dream. "They are after you?" she said.
"Take Mrs. Phillips in, if you please, Marged," Rebecca said. "Your in-laws would not appreciate the sight of me. I must be going."
But her mother-in-law had come to the door, drawn by curiosity. Her mouth gaped when she saw Rebecca.
"You are not to worry, Mrs. Evans, fach," Mrs. Phillips said. "It is only Rebecca. And a more courteous gentleman I could not hope to meet this side of the grave. He has rescued me from ruffians who would have harmed me—if they could have got past my big stick." She cackled with amusement.
Marged caught at Rebecca's sleeve. "You are going?" she said. "To Ninian Williams's?"
"There is not a moment to lose," he said. "They may be at our heels even now."
"I am going with you," she said. "Mam, look after Mrs. Phillips, will you? Give her my bed. I will sleep on the settle when I get back." She stepped inside the door, grabbed her cloak from a hook inside, and strode over to the horse, which Rebecca had already mounted.
He reached down a hand and helped her up. "I have the feeling this is going to be the denouement," he said. "I suppose it is fitting you be there, Marged."
They followed Aled through the gate and turned downward toward the Williams farm. He had sounded reluctant, Marged thought, turning her head to look into his masked face. They had been out tonight—to Mrs. Phillips's gate— and had not let her know. Had that been Aled's oversight or had it been done on Rebecca's instructions? I suppose it is fitting you be there. They were grudging words. Did he not really want her there?
"Don't look at me like that," he said. "There was a trap set for us tonight, Marged, and I knew about part of it. I could not stay at home, though. I had heard that they were to set up their own Rebecca to harm Mrs. Phillips and discredit me with my own people. There was more danger than usual tonight and still is. I instructed Aled that you were not to be told."
"Because I am a woman," she said.
"Yes, because you are a woman," he said, his voice exasperated. "Not because I did not want you with me, Marged."
But there was no time for more conversation. They turned into the laneway leading to Ninian Williams's farm and were there a minute later. The door was wide-open and there was light and noise coming from inside. There were a few men in the yard, scrubbing their faces at the pump, and two women bearing towels.
"Down you get, men." Ninian himself was greeting them in the yard. "I will have your horses put with ours and no one will know the difference. Into the house with you. We have an engagement to celebrate and now we will have both halves of the couple in attendance. Hello, Marged. I am glad you could come at such short notice."
They were inside the house a few moments later, blinking in the lamplight. Rebecca had a hand against the small of her back. The room was full of men and women and even a few children. The kitchen table was laden with food, as though the party had been planned a week ago. And then silence fell.
"Rebecca," Mrs. Williams said, her hands clasped to her bosom. She sounded frightened.
"Aled, you are safe." Ceris flew toward him, her hands outstretched as he peeled off his dark wig. "Take off the gown quickly and we will hide it with the wig. Wash your face."
Marged continued on her way across the room to hug her father, who was standing with his back to the fire. "Thank you, Dada," she said into his ear. She was just beginning to understand what was happening. The trap must have been set in the village and this had been her father's idea to give all the men an excuse to be away from home. But Rebecca need not have shared the danger. He might have ridden safely home.
The Reverend Llwyd patted her waist. "Get rid of that disguise quick," he said, looking across the room at Rebecca. "There is no hiding the truth from everyone any longer. Get it off and we will have Ceris push it under the manure pile with Aled's."
Marged caught her breath in a gasp and whirled about to gaze across the room. Of course! But she did not want it this way. She had wanted it to happen when they were alone together. She did not want it to happen now. She was not ready for it. She was not sure she wanted it to happen at all. She would be staring at the face of a stranger—her lover.
The wig came off first. Mrs. Williams took it from his hand. The mask, as Marged had suspected, was a cap that fitted right over his head and face. It was peeled away next and handed to Mrs. Williams.
The silence became almost a tangible thing.
"Duw, " someone said softly.
"We have been betrayed. We are done for after all." It was Dewi Owen's voice spoken into the silence though no one responded to it.
"Off with the gown!" the Reverend Llwyd said. "Ceris, take those things out with Aled's now. The Lord be praised that everyone is safe. And everyone is safe, Dewi Owen. His lordship, the Earl of Wyvern, has been your Rebecca from the start."
Geraint Penderyn dragged the white gown of Rebecca off over his head and Ceris whisked it away with the rest of his disguise and Aled's.
Then he looked across the room and met Marged's eyes.
There was no shock in her eyes, no accusation, no anger, no bewilderment. Nothing. She stared at him blankly.
And then someone came darting through the door and broke the tension like a knife slicing through butter.
"They are coming," Idris Parry called in his piping child's voice. "A whole crowd of them on their way up the hill. All of them on horseback."
"Thank you, Idris." The Reverend Meirion Llwyd, from his position of command before the fire, raised both arms, his Bible clutched in one hand. "Let us show these men, my people, how the Welsh celebrate an engagement, the solemn promise of a man and a woman to enter into matrimony together in the sight of the Lord. Not with noisy frivolity but with the singing of the praises of our Lord."
Incredibly, Geraint saw, everyone gave the minister his or her full attention and all put on their Sunday faces. And yet there was no sense of false piety. Ceris had come back from the manure pile and had joined Aled in the middle of the room. They smiled at each other with warm love and joined hands.
"Let us give them Sanctus in full harmony," the Reverend Llwyd said. "And think about the words we are singing, if you please. You will start us, Marged."
Marged hummed a note and without further ado the house was filled with the glorious music in four-part harmony.
"Glan geriwbiaid a seraffiaid," they sang. Geraint joined his tenor voice to the next line. "Fyrdd o gylch yr orsedd fry."
The room was crowded. Nevertheless there was a space all around him, as if he had some sort of contagious disease that no one wanted to come in contact with. He was going to look suspiciously unlike a partygoer. But someone must have had the same thought—two people actually. Idris moved to his side and gazed worshipfully up at him. Geraint smiled and set a hand lightly on the boy's head. And then Marged was at his other side, her shoulder almost brushing his arm. He turned his head to look at her, but she was singing and resolutely watching her father, who was rather ostentatiously conducting. If she felt his eyes on her, she did not show it.
The door, which Idris had closed behind him, crashed inward.
Sir Hector Webb, Matthew Harley, and a dozen special constables filled the doorway and the space beyond it until the third and final verse of the hymn came to its glorious conclusion.
"Sanctaidd, sanctaidd, sanctaidd lor!" everyone sang, clinging to the words and the melody with all the passion of a deep faith and an equally deep love of music. Holy, holy, holy Lord.
Sir Hector and Harley looked about the room with sharp eyes. Harley's lingered on Ceris and Aled and lowered to their joined hands.
The Reverend Llwyd kept his arms raised to hold the people silent and looked politely at the new arrivals. "Good evening," he said in heavily accented English. "Ninian, here are more guests for your party."
"What is going on here?" Sir Hector asked, his frown ferocious.
"We are celebrating as a community the engagement and impending marriage of two members of my congregation," the minister said. "Ceris Williams and Aled Rhoslyn."
Harley's head snapped back, rather as if he had been punched on the chin. He drew back among the constables.
"Aled Rhoslyn!" Sir Hector exclaimed. "Aled Rhoslyn was out with Rebecca tonight, smashing tollgates. He is Rebecca's chief daughter, the one called Charlotte."
"I am flattered," Aled said. "Second only to Rebecca? It sounds like a great honor, sir."
"And you." Sir Hector's arm came up and he pointed accusingly at Geraint. "Rebecca! Traitor! I'll see you hanged, Wyvern. There will be nothing as soft as transportation for you."
"Hector." Geraint clasped his hands behind him and strolled toward the door. "You are making an ass of yourself. Do I understand that Rebecca has been out again tonight and has slipped through the fingers of these constables—again? And that somehow you think Aled and I were involved? Ceris would not have been amused if her betrothed had decided to go gallivanting with a white ghost instead of attending their engagement party. And I had the honor of being invited—Aled and I have been friends since boyhood, you know. You had better go and search elsewhere— unless Ninian would care to invite you to join the party?" He turned his head and raised his eyebrows.
"You would be very welcome, sir," Ninian Williams said.
"And all your men too. There is plenty of food for everyone."
"Harley," Sir Hector called over his shoulder, "take the men and search every inch of this farm. And what did you do with Mrs. Phillips, Wyvern? Kill her and hide her body with all the rest of your things?"
"Mrs. Phillips?" Marged sounded startled. "From the Cilcoed tollgate down the road, do you mean? She is spending the evening and night with my gran at Ty-Gwyn. She is lonely out there at the gate and sometimes slips away for a night. She says that no one ever wants to pass through at night anyway. Is she in trouble?"
"No," Geraint said. "She is elderly. I will have a word with the lessee of the trust on her behalf." He turned back to Sir Hector suddenly. "It was not her gate that went down tonight, was it?"
"You know it was, Wyvern," Sir Hector said between his teeth. His face was deeply flushed. He was realizing, perhaps, that he had come too late, that he had lost the game, and that there would be no other chance.
"Well, then," Geraint said, "it is a blessing that she chose this night of all nights to absent herself from her post."
Sir Hector stood glaring about him, his eyes taking in the women gathered there with the men, the feast spread out on the table, the Bible tucked beneath the minister's arm, the newly betrothed couple, flushed and hand in hand in the middle of the room.
A cough drew his attention behind him. "Nothing, sir," Matthew Harley's subdued voice said. "Except that his lordship's horse is in with Ninian Williams's."
"Well?" Sir Hector impaled Geraint with a glance.
Geraint raised his eyebrows. "I beg your pardon?" he said haughtily. "Is my horse incriminating evidence, Hector? Is the Earl of Wyvern expected to walk to a tenant's party?"
It was evident from the slumping of Sir Hector's shoulders and the dying light in his eyes that he was giving in to defeat. But he rallied briefly. "We will leave you to your party, then," he said. "But just remember, the whole lot of you, that the next time you decide to go out smashing tollgates, we will be waiting for you."
"Gracious, Hector," Geraint said, "you have us all shaking in our boots. I shall have to give up being Rebecca. And Aled will have to give up being—Charlotte, was it? And all these men will have to give up being my children. Whatever are we expected to do for amusement now?" Scorn and sarcasm dripped from every word.
Sir Hector turned and strode out the door.
Matthew Harley stood there for a moment, looking at Ceris before transferring his gaze to Geraint.
"You will have my resignation tomorrow," he said.
"And you will have a letter of warm recommendation to take to your next employer," Geraint said quietly.
Harley turned to follow Sir Hector and the constables. A minute or so later horses could be heard leaving the farmyard and cantering along the lane to the main path back to Glynderi.
"My lord?" Eli Harris spoke hesitantly. "It has been you all the time, then?"
"It was me all the time," Geraint said. "Do none of you remember how I had to be in the thick of every piece of mischief when I was a child?"
They all gawked at him.
He grinned about at them. "I am merely that child grown to manhood," he said. "Did you think that wealth and a title and an English education would change me into a different person? I was getting nowhere fast as the Earl of Wyvern when I returned here. Come, you must all admit that. I met suspicion or coldness or open hostility wherever I turned. All my suggestions for change and reform were spurned— either by you or by my fellow landowners. And so I had to become Geraint Penderyn again. And once I was Geraint, then I had to become Rebecca. There was no one else to take the job, was there? And I was ever a leader, especially when it was mischief that I must lead others into."
"He convinced me and the rest of the members of the committee," Aled said, "that he was the man for the job. And I believe his actions have proved that we were right."
"Well, I for one," Ifor Davies said boldly, "will thank you, my lord, and will shake your hand too if you will shake mine." He walked toward Geraint, hand outstretched.
"Me too," Glyn Bevan said.
The ice was broken and the men formed a rough line to move forward for the privilege of shaking their Rebecca by the hand.
"I think it is not being too optimistic to say that our goal has been reached," Geraint said. "Mr. Foster of The Times has assured me that his editor and the paper's readers are avid for more details of the Rebecca Riots, and that they appear to be sympathetic to our cause. And a commission of inquiry is almost certain to be set up here—I have heard that one of the commissioners is to be Thomas Frankland Lewis, himself a Welshman and familiar with life on a Welsh farm. And I have heard too that the commissioners will allow everyone who cares to testify to have his say—or hers—rich and poor alike. We will all have a chance to give our side of the story."
"Duw be praised," Morfydd Richards said, and her words were greeted by a flurry of fervent amens.
"It is more than praise we must give to our God tonight, Morfydd Richards," the Reverend Llwyd said sternly. He waited until everyone's attention was on him before continuing. "We must pray for forgiveness for all the lies we have spoken here tonight and for our Lord's pardon so that our souls do not spend eternity writhing in hellfire."
Everyone gazed mutely at him as he raised his arms.
"Let us pray," he said.
All heads bent and all eyes closed.
Except Geraint's. He looked all about him as unobtrusively as possible. But he was not mistaken.
Marged was gone.