When hell is dripping with icicles, Marged thought, but she said nothing. She sat down and picked up her own cup of tea. It should have been a rare luxury to sit thus in the middle of the morning, but she would far rather have been at work. He was sitting where Eurwyn had liked to sit. Her own fault—without thinking she had indicated that particular corner of the settle. It did not matter.
Except that she could not stop herself from comparing the two men. Eurwyn had been heavy set, ruddily handsome. He had rarely worn anything but work clothes and had laughed at her for wanting to wash them almost every day. She would wear them out in no time with her scrubbing, he had told her. And he had always drunk his tea in noisy sips. She had hated to sit listening to him. She had always tried to occupy herself with something that would make a noise and drown out the sounds. It had been a silly irritation that she had never been able quite to quell.
Geraint—the Earl of Wyvern—was slim and quietly elegant and immaculate. He had removed his cloak and set it on the settle beside him. Even his boots appeared to have picked up none of the dust of the path. He conversed with apparent ease, though Marged guessed that he felt the discomfort the rest of them were less adept at disguising. Eurwyn had never seemed to feel the need to keep a conversation going. He had spoken only when he had had something to say, though he had not been a morose man. Geraint drank his tea silently.
He was without a doubt the most handsome and the most attractive man she had ever met, Marged decided. And the thought angered her. If his whole life had not changed suddenly at the age of twelve, if he had not been educated as a gentleman, if he had not inherited the wealth with which to dress expensively, would he be any more attractive now than Eurwyn had been? Or any other man of her acquaintance?
Yes, an annoyingly honest part of her mind admitted. Even as a child, as a thin and ragged and frequently dirty waif, he had been beautiful. She had fallen in love with his beauty at the age of sixteen. With nothing else. There had been nothing else to love. Well, she was ten years older now. Ten years wiser. Beauty alone could no longer seduce her.
And heaven knew she had reason enough to hate the man behind the beauty.
He was rising to take his leave, nodding to her in-laws, thanking them for the tea, turning to her with a look of inquiry, commanding her with his eyes and his whole aristocratic bearing to see him on his way. He picked up his cloak and his hat from the settle.
She walked to the gate with him in silence, her chin up. She had called herself his servant earlier, but in reality she was no man’s servant. He might own the land on which they walked and he might in a few years, if rents continued to rise and prices continued to fall, force her out, but at the moment it was her land. She had worked for it. She had earned every callus on her hands.
He opened the gate and stepped out into the lane. He closed the gate, turning toward her in order to do so. He looked at her, and she would not look away from his eyes.
“I am sorry your husband died, Marged,” he said. “But you appear to be doing very well here on your own.”
Something snapped in her. She threw back her head and glared at him. “You are sorry,” she said almost in a whisper. But the fury could not be controlled. Her eyes flashed. “You are sorry! You may take your sorrow, Geraint Penderyn, and stuff it down your throat. Go away from here. I have paid my rent and this farm is mine until rent day next year. Go away. You are not welcome here.”
He looked startled for a moment. But he did not retaliate. She would have liked nothing better than a fight, which she could not possibly have won. But he kept his gentlemanly calm.
“No,” he said quietly. “I realized that from the start, Marged.”
He put on his hat—it succeeded only in making him look even more elegant—and turned away from her. She watched him walk down the lane and itched to hurl some choice epithets after him. She knew a few despite the fact that she was her father’s daughter and was a regular chapel goer. She would have loved to hurl more than epithets, but her hands were empty. Besides, it would be lowering to yell with shrill hysteria or to throw missiles.
She was not sorry for her outburst. If his skin was so thick that he had not got the message during his visit, then he would know now. He would know to stay away from her and Ty-Gwyn.
She tried not to think of the fact that Ty-Gwyn belonged to him and that the annual rent day seemed to gallop up faster each year.
It was the first and the worst of such visits that Geraint paid to his tenant farmers during the coming days. But worst only in the sense that Marged had been his friend and almost his lover once upon a time and now seemed to hate him with an intensity in excess of the facts. No, it was not that she seemed to hate him. Her unexpected outburst when he was leaving Ty-Gwyn, just after he had tried to sympathize with her and compliment her, had cleared away any doubt he might have had. She hated him.
All the other farmers he visited were polite. A few of them were almost friendly—the Williamses, for example. And their daughter too, still pretty, still shy, and still unmarried. Ceris Williams had poured tea for him and found it impossible to converse with him beyond monosyllabic answers to his questions, but she had smiled kindly at him. He found himself hoarding the few smiles he was favored with. Most of the people he visited were polite and little else. With a few he felt hostility bristling just behind the politeness.
It seemed that the past few years had not been kind to farmers. There had been more rain than usual and damage had been done to the crops. Market prices were down for almost all farm products. A few farmers stated, as Marged had done, that they were carrying fewer livestock than formerly. Clearly no one was prospering. Geraint felt rather ashamed that he had avoided learning anything about his estate in Tegfan. He had appointed the best steward he could find to look after it for him and had closed his mind to a place and a past he preferred not to remember. But he should at least have read reports from Tegfan. He should at least have known that his farmers were struggling. He could hardly blame them for showing some resentment at his appearing suddenly, well-dressed and clearly not suffering financially at all.
Also he had grown past his naïveté of ten years before. Ten years ago he had expected to come home to find everyone rejoicing in his good fortune. It was rather like a fairy tale for the discovery to be made twelve years after the birth of a penniless waif that he was the legitimate heir to an earldom and three vast estates—although his mother, of course, had always told him to hold his head high as she held hers because she had been married to his father, the earl’s son, before he had been killed, though she had no proof and no one would believe her. In fairy tales everyone always rejoiced at the reversed fortunes of the Cinderella-type characters. But he knew now that it was not so in real life. He knew that his people must resent him just because of who he was.
He was going to have to stay in Tegfan, he thought reluctantly as the days passed. He thought of spring approaching in London, bringing the Season and all the giddy round of social activities with it. But he would have to let it proceed without him this year. He was going to have to stay to convince his people that he was not the enemy, that he did not look down upon them with smug satisfaction because he had now been elevated above them. He was going to have to find out about his property and the true state of his farms. It would not be difficult to do. He was very knowledgeable about his other estates and had a reputation as a fair and approachable master, he believed. He had real friends among his English tenant farmers.