Damn! Aled did not want the issues muddled. He could already feel conflict of interest weighing heavily on his shoulders.
Geraint was holding out his right hand again. “Agreed?” he said. “A week? Perhaps two? And then you can decide whether or not to sever your friendship with such a blackguard. Come on, man. You have not lost that fairness of mind that I always admired, have you?”
Damn! Aled took the offered hand and tightened his grip. “I really do have work to get back to,” he said.
Geraint stood back and let him pass. But Aled heard him laugh as he strode off in the direction of the village, feeling all the hopelessness of the conflict between the pull of friendship and the pull of loyalty to the people he represented.
“Perhaps I will challenge you to a boxing match next time,” Geraint called after him. “I have some small skill at the sport, I believe. I will relieve you of some blood via your nose, Aled.”
Aled smiled despite himself but did not acknowledge the challenge.
Geraint became gradually aware that he was not alone. It was not that he heard anyone or saw anyone beyond the disappearing figure of Aled Rhoslyn. It was just a feeling he had, an instinct he had developed years and years ago and had been unaware until now that he still retained. There were trees not far away, ancient trees with huge trunks.
“You had better come out from there,” he said conversationally in Welsh. “It would be more advisable than forcing me to come and get you.”
He was not sure who or quite what he would be facing. For several moments there was continued silence. And then a rustling heralded the appearance of a small, thin, untidy, shabbily dressed lad perhaps eight or nine years old. Staring at him, Geraint felt strangely as if he were looking into a mirror down a long time tunnel. Except that the boy’s hair was straight. He was standing on one leg, scratching it with the almost nonexistent side of the shabby boot he wore on the other foot.
“You had better come closer,” Geraint said, clasping his hands formally behind his back. The boy shuffled a few feet forward. “Much closer. One inch beyond the tip of my fingers if I were to stretch my arm out in front of me.”
The boy came to stand perhaps two feet beyond the indicated spot. He stood very still, his dark eyes fixed on Geraint’s. Geraint knew exactly how the boy felt, just as if the boy were his mirror image and he was the real flesh-and-blood figure. The child’s heart would be beating so painfully that it would be pounding in his ears and choking his throat. He would be considering escape. From the corners of his eyes, without betraying himself by letting them dart about, he would be scouting out escape routes. But he would know that there was no escape.
“Well?” Geraint asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was playing,” the child said in a piping voice. “I got lost.”
Exactly the excuse he himself had given the only time he had been caught—fortunately by one of the gardeners and not by any of the gamekeepers. Even so, by the time he had been allowed to take his leave, his backside had been so sore that he had not been able to walk normally and he had still been unable to sit down by the time he had scrambled up to the moors and the hovel that was home.
“Got lost hunting rabbits?” Geraint asked.
The boy shrugged and shook his head.
“You know who I am?” Geraint asked.
The boy nodded and Geraint recognized the bold, fixed look in his eyes as one of unadulterated fear.
“And who are you?” he asked.
“Idris,” the boy said.
“Idris? Just Idris?”
“Idris Parry.”
“Idris Parry,” Geraint said, “has no one taught you how to address adults?”
“Idris Parry, sir,” the boy said.
“And where do you live, Idris Parry?” Geraint asked. He hoped the answer would not be the one he fully expected.
“With my mam and my dada,” the child said, his voice less bold. “And my sisters.”
“I asked where,” the earl said.
The child pointed vaguely toward the hills. “Up there,” he said while Geraint inwardly winced. “Are you going to send me away, sir?”
Transportation. For poaching. The child had learned young the risks he took, just as he himself had learned.
“Please, sir, will you beat me instead?” he asked quickly, and Geraint knew just what it had cost the boy to show such a sign of weakness. “I got lost. I was just playing.”
“Well, Idris.” Geraint reached into a pocket. “There used to be wicked mantraps here, traps that would hurt your leg like a thousand devils and hold you fast until someone came to let you out. I think it altogether possible that they are still here. You are going to have to be very careful about where you play, aren’t you?”
The child nodded.
“Are you to be trusted?” Geraint asked. He had selected a coin neither too small to be useless nor too large to cause undue suspicion. He held it out to the boy. “Give this to your mam, Idris. And it would be wise to tell her that it was given to you somewhere else by someone else.”
The child suspected a trap—as an earlier child had suspected one the first time Mr. Williams had offered him money. He suspected that the coin was a bait to draw him near enough to be grabbed. Geraint tossed it into the air, and the boy caught it deftly.
“Be off with you now,” Geraint said. “And watch for traps.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy was on his way already. But he stopped dead in his tracks and looked back. “Thank you, sir.”
Geraint nodded curtly. He was feeling sick to his stomach. What on earth was a family doing living up on those moors with a child so ragged that he seemed not to possess a single whole garment? But at least there was a family, if the boy had been speaking the truth. A mother and a father. At least they were not living there because they had been made outcast from the chapel and from the community. At least the child was not a bastard.
But he still felt sick at the reminder that there was such poverty in the world. It seemed so much more personal on Tegfan land than it ever appeared on the streets of London.
Staying away had been selfish, he thought. Deliberately keeping himself ignorant of Tegfan affairs had been an unpardonable self-indulgence. He hoped it had not lost him Aled’s friendship or caused the permanent hostility of his people.
They were his people. He had realized that from the moment of his return, or perhaps even from the moment of that brief encounter on a London street.
They were his people.
Choir practice at the chapel was the one event of the week that regularly drew a large number of people together, except at the very busiest times of the year. Singing was the one passion and the one accomplishment that united most of the people of West Wales, or of any part of Wales for that matter.
Marged had conducted the choir since her girlhood in order to relieve her father of one of his many duties. Though perhaps it was misleading to describe her as the conductor, she often thought. A Welsh choir, unless it was competing at an eisteddfod, really did not need to have someone stand in front of it beating time or forcing changes of volume or tempo. A Welsh choir simply sang from the diaphragm and from the heart and sang as a choir. Welsh singers loved nothing better than to listen to one another’s voices and the harmony of the other parts as they sang.