“Oh, Duw, Duw,” she said, “you will be trying to catch her yourself if she comes up this way, your lordship, but you never will. All the other gentlemen tried last time and the constables too. There were even soldiers looking to catch Rebecca and her daughters. But no one else was trying, do you see? Everyone else cheered them along and even went with them to smash the gates. And will again. Word has it that it is all starting again.”
Ah. A local rebellion against the turnpike trusts. Led by a man disguised as a woman. It was a wild idea, not without a certain romantic appeal, he supposed. A man fighting apparent oppression. Yes, he could understand why such a man would not be easy to catch. He would have far more protectors than hunters. And yet he fought a doomed cause—if indeed he was coming back to life after more than three years. One could not fight the whole force of law and society and hope to win.
“If they have not started yet,” he said, “perhaps they will not. Mrs.—?”
“Phillips,” she said, bobbing another awkward curtsy. “Dilys Phillips, your lordship. But there have been a few other fires like tonight’s, mind. It will be gates next.”
“I will be living at Tegfan for a while, Mrs. Phillips,” he told her. “I will see to it that you are not harassed. You will be safe here. My word on it.”
“Oh, Duw, there is kind you are,” she said, “and you the earl from Tegfan. But I will keep my big stick by me anyway.” She laughed merrily and moved out into the road to unlock and open the gate. She appeared elderly and rather frail for such a job, the Earl of Wyvern thought. But she was able enough to perform her duties, he supposed, though it was a lonely life for an old woman. And what was the alternative? he wondered. The workhouse?
He rode forward and held out a coin. But she shook her head and took a step back. “It is free passage for the gentry,” she said. “Good night to you, your lordship, and watch where your horse do set his feet. The road is rough and the night is dark.”
He did not withdraw his hand though he knew that the gentry, who could afford the tolls, often rode free while the poor, who could not, were forced to pay or stay at home.
“Take it anyway,” he said. “I dragged you from your bed and alarmed you by coming through so late.”
She took the coin and curtsied once more.
He rode onward, hearing the sounds of the gate closing behind him. He wondered if Mrs. Dilys Phillips had noticed that the whole conversation had been conducted in Welsh. His grandfather had not spoken a word of the language. And he himself had not spoken it for the last sixteen years except sometimes during the early years in the whispered privacy of his own room—when he had had a room to himself.
And sometimes in the silent depths of his own heart.
There were two churches in the village of Glynderi, the one picturesque with its slim Gothic lines and tall spire, the other squat and solid and less attractive in appearance. The one was Anglican, the other nonconformist.
Only a handful of people from the village and surrounding farms and a few of the forty servants from the house of Tegfan ever attended the church, though everyone paid tithes to it—in cash rather than produce since the new law passed a few years earlier. It was a bitter grievance with the people. And what made it worse was that the tithe money did not go to the church but to the man who had the living in his possession.
Their tithes, like their rents, enriched the owner of Tegfan and Glynderi and the farms and all the land most of them had ever traveled in the course of their lives. The Earl of Wyvern.
Almost everyone from the village and from the farms for miles around attended the chapel. It was the spiritual center of the community and the social center too. And the center of music and song, of course, so essential to the Welsh soul. The Reverend Meirion Llwyd’s sermons were always at least twice as long as the Anglican vicar’s. But in addition to length they always had enough hwyl, or fiery, almost hypnotic emotion, that his congregation could have listened and responded for as long again. The fact that the Anglican service was over well within an hour of its start whereas their own frequently lasted far closer to two was no inducement to any chapel member to switch allegiance.
And then, of course, there was always the best part to look forward to when the service was finally over, though no one ever put it quite that way. There was the gathering in the street outside if the weather was fine or crowded into the porch and the back pews or even spilling into the Sunday schoolroom if it was raining. It was a gathering for fellowship, for the exchange of news and opinions, for the sharing of gossip. For people who worked long, hard hours through the week, many of them on farms too far distant from each other or from the village to allow for much company, Sunday morning was the time to look forward to, the time to cherish. The best morning of the week.
Glenys Owen, kitchen maid at Tegfan, had never felt quite so important in her life as she did on this particular Sunday morning. This morning she had come to chapel, bringing with her the news that the Earl of Wyvern had arrived unexpectedly from London in the middle of the night and thrown the whole household into consternation. Glenys had not yet seen him herself but he was there right enough.
“Praise the Lord,” the Reverend Llwyd said. He was standing at the top of the stone steps leading down from the porch to the street, shaking hands with his departing congregation. He raised both arms as if in benediction. “Praise the Lord for bringing him safely home.”
Not everyone agreed.
“After all this time?” Glyn Bevan, a farmer, said. “I wonder what for, then?”
“He has never shown much interest in the place before,” Gwen Dirion, a farmer’s wife, remarked to Blodwyn Jenkins, who kept the general store next to the chapel. “Glad to get away from here, he was.”
“And never came to see his poor old mam,” Miss Jenkins said, nodding about to include others in her remark, “until she was in a wooden box. Too late it was then.”
“Geraint Penderyn.” Eli Harris, the harness maker, turned his head to spit into the dirt roadway, perhaps forgetting for the moment that he was wearing his Sunday best and should therefore be on his Sunday-best behavior. “Come here to show off his fine clothes and his fine English ways and his fine English voice, I suppose. Come to lord it over us, is it? It do make me sick to my stomach.”
“Eli,” Mrs. Harris said reproachfully, glancing furtively at the minister.
“Well, it do, woman,” Eli said, half-sheepishly, half-defiantly.
“Penderyn,” Ifor Davies, the cooper, said. “Who broke his mam’s heart, as Blodwyn has said, and does not care the snap of his fingers for us. A cheek, I do call it, mind, coming down here to sneer at us all.”
“Not that any of us treated his mam very well for many years, mind, to be fair,” Mrs. Olwen Harris said with ruthless honesty, nodding about at the other women for approval. “Not until we knew, that was.”
“Geraint Penderyn,” Aled Rhoslyn, the village blacksmith, said almost pensively, not talking to anyone in particular. “It is not the best time for him to come down here, is it? He may be sorry that he did. And so may we.”
“Perhaps,” Ninian Williams, a farmer, suggested, his hands spread over his ample stomach, “we should wait and see why he has come and what he intends to do. He has every right to be in his own house, after all. Perhaps we should give the man a chance.”