“I am Geraint Penderyn,” his friend said, and there was a hint of frustration in his voice.
Aled remembered the talk outside the chapel on Sunday and Marged’s suggestion that everyone make the earl feel unwelcome if and when he visited. Apparently he had visited and had been made to feel unwelcome. A village blacksmith tended to hear about such things.
“Yes,” he said, “and the Earl of Wyvern too.”
“We used to fight,” Geraint said unexpectedly. “Wrestling, not boxing. Almost every time we met. You always won. I believe there were no exceptions. Do you want to try to retain that record, Aled?”
Aled looked at him in amazement. “Now?” he said. “Don’t be daft, man.” His eyes took in Geraint’s immaculate clothes.
But Geraint had stopped walking and was stripping off his coat. “Yes, here,” he said, and there was the tightness of anger in his voice—and a familiar gleam of recklessness in his eyes. “Come and fight me, Aled. Let’s see if you can still put me down. No, don’t back away and look at me as if you think I should be consigned to bedlam. Fight me, dammit, or I will slap your face and make you fight.”
Chapter 5
THE world had taken leave of its senses, Aled thought, watching as white shirtsleeves were rolled up sinewy arms. He had not wrestled since he was a boy. He was twenty-nine years old and a respected workingman. And there had been no provocation. There was no reason to fight. Not that they had ever needed a reason when they were children beyond that simple fact—they had been children.
He shrugged out of his own coat and dropped it to the grass. He was taller, heavier, better muscled, he thought, looking critically at his opponent’s body. It should be no more difficult now than it had ever been to win the fight. Though he had never won anything else with Geraint, he thought ruefully. The younger, smaller, scruffier boy had always somehow been the leader. Where he had gone—and it had very often been where he ought not to have gone— Aled had followed along behind.
They fought for a long time, in silence except for their breathing, which grew progressively more labored. They circled each other, engaged each other, tripped each other, rolled over each other, put seemingly unbreakable holds on each other, broke apart, jumped to their feet, circled each other, and began the process all over again. It was sheer luck, Aled had to admit, that finally sent Geraint tumbling at an awkward angle so that Aled’s heavier body could bear his shoulders to the ground and hold them there before he could twist free.
And then they were lying side by side on the grass, staring upward and panting to recover their breaths.
Geraint chuckled after a minute or so. “One of these days,” he said. “One of these days, Aled. Ah, thank you, man. I have needed that for a long time.”
He was speaking Welsh. He sounded quite like the old Geraint, Aled thought. The cultured English accent disappeared when the language changed.
“You needed humiliating?” Aled switched languages too and joined in the laughter. “I could have spat in your eye, man, and saved us both some time and energy.”
Aled knew what was coming in the short silence that ensued. And he knew he was quite powerless to avoid it.
“What have I done?” Geraint asked him, still in Welsh. He was no longer either laughing or panting. “Is it just that I was Geraint Penderyn and am now the Earl of Wyvern? Is that all it is, Aled?”
Aled grunted. “You cannot expect people to be comfortable with you, man,” he said. “Just look at you, or at the way you looked fifteen minutes or so ago anyway. No one was ever comfortable with your grandfather either. You must remember that.”
“And why did you know,” Geraint asked him quietly, “exactly what I was talking about? It is more than discomfort, Aled. There is hostility. Why? What have I done? Apart from not showing my face here for the past ten years. Is that it? Is it?”
“You are imagining things, Ger,” Aled said. “You always had a vivid imagination.”
“Goddammit,” Geraint said, “we were friends, Aled. You and Marged and I. Marged told me to get away from Ty-Gwyn. She told me I could shove my sympathy for her down my throat—I believe she was itching to suggest a different location. She told me I was not welcome. And you tell me I have a vivid imagination. Don’t make this lonelier for me than it has to be, man. What have I done?”
Aled sat up and draped his arms over his knees. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Why the bloody hell had Geraint come home? And wouldn’t he be listening to a blistering reprimand if the Reverend Llwyd could listen to the language of his thoughts.
“Made it almost impossible for anyone to live here,” he said shortly.
“What?” Geraint shot up into a sitting position beside him and glared. “I have not even been living here myself, Aled. How could I have been making it impossible for anyone else to do so?”
“Yields and prices have been going down,” Aled said, “and rents have been going up. Tithes now have to be paid in money, not goods, and enforcement has been stricter. Poor rates have gone up and yet the poor are worse off than ever with the building of the workhouses. The turnpike trusts have been putting up more tollgates and making it more expensive for farmers to transport their goods than to produce or buy them. Trespassing and poaching are being more strictly controlled and punished than ever before. Need I go on?”
He did not look at his friend’s face, but he could tell that Geraint was looking aghast.
“But I know nothing about any of this,” he said. “None of it is my fault.”
Aled turned his head at last and looked at the Earl of Wyvern with surprise—and for the first time with some contempt. “Ah,” he said. “I have work to do. If you will excuse me.” He reached for his coat and would have got to his feet, but Geraint’s hand clamped on his arm.
“Ignorance is no plea, is it?” he said. “But I cannot be blamed for all those things, Aled. Tithes are the church’s, not mine, and I did not make that new law about cash payments. I did not make the new Poor Law or conceive the idea of workhouses. Those grievances at least cannot be laid at my door.”
“Are you sure, Ger?” Aled got to his feet despite the staying hand and shook the grass from his coat before putting it back on.
Geraint stayed where he was. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “I know nothing about Tegfan, Aled. I have avoided knowing anything about it. I do not know what I am doing here now except that I passed two men on the street in London who were talking Welsh to each other.”
“Perhaps,” Aled said, “you should have stayed away. Perhaps it would have been better for you and better for the people here.” He himself would have found it far easier to fight against the impersonal earldom of Wyvern in its capacity as owner of Tegfan.
Geraint was on his feet too before Aled could walk away. He was rolling his shirtsleeves back down to his wrists. “No, you are not striding off on that note,” he said. “You owe me another bout, Aled. You know you won that one by sheer luck, just as you won all our fights as boys. Every one of them a lucky win. How many times did we fight? A dozen? Fifty? A hundred? There will be at least one more. And I make it a rule only ever to wrestle with my friends. Give me time, Aled. Give me time to find out the truth and to decide what I am going to do about it.”