Geraint had been half-afraid, half-hopeful that it would have been Marged who had opened the door to him a few minutes before. But Marged was only two years his junior. She must be twenty-six now. She would no longer be here at the manse. She was probably not even in Glynderi.
“I trust Miss Llwyd is well,” he said. She was probably no longer Miss Llwyd.
“Marged?” The minister stopped rubbing his hands. “Well indeed, I thank you, my lord, the dear Lord be praised. Busy, of course. Always busy. It do not seem right for a woman to be doing a man’s work, but she do refuse to come back here to live with her dada, though she would be very welcome, I always tell her. But she do feel responsible for Eurwyn’s mam and gran, and I can only honor her for that.”
“Eurwyn?” Geraint raised his eyebrows. She was married, then? He had known she must be by this time. The slight sinking of the heart that he felt was involuntary.
“A nasty business, that.” The Reverend Llwyd looked almost flustered and he drew off his glasses to polish them with a large handkerchief. “It was handled in the only way possible, of course, by the authorities. It is a pity the outcome was so tragic, but it was no one’s fault. These things happen. They are in the Lord’s hands.”
Eurwyn Evans? Old Madoc Evans’s son? The child Geraint had kept himself well beyond reach of Madoc’s boot after once being kicked painfully in the backside with it. Marged had married his son? And he had died in some tragedy?
“She lives on the farm?” he asked.
“At Ty-Gwyn, yes,” the minister said. “The White House, that is,” he translated, perhaps assuming that the Earl of Wyvern had forgotten every word of Welsh he had ever spoken. “Still white it is, my lord. Marged whitewashed it just last spring. She is a good worker, I will give her that.”
He tried to picture Marged living on a farm, doing the work of a man. Whitewashing the longhouse. Refusing to move back home because there were two other women who presumably could not carry on without her help. Marged, who had loved books and music, who had played the harp well enough to draw tears to the eyes and yearning to the heart, and whose singing voice had been unequaled in a country of lovely singing voices.
But yes, he could imagine that it was true. There had never been anything soft or shrinking about Marged. Quite the opposite. She had been the first child to adopt him when he was seven and she was five and she had spied him hiding in a hedgerow behind the village, wistfully watching while she gathered berries with a crowd of other children, all singing and laughing. He had been a mere waif, with skinny arms and legs and rags and bare feet. She had smiled at him and spoken politely to him as if he were a real person and had offered him a palmful of berries.
She had continued to be his friend even after her father, the Reverend Llwyd, had explained to her that Geraint Penderyn was not a suitable playmate for the children of Glynderi. And even at the age of five she had done so openly, defying her father, scorning to deceive him.
Aled had become his friend too. Aled and Marged. Until he was torn away from them and forbidden to have any further dealings with them, even by letter, though his mother had taught him to read and write.
He got to his feet now to take his leave of the Reverend Llwyd and received with a curt nod the man’s bow and his effusive thanks for the honor of the visit.
Chapter 3
HE had intended making one or two other calls in the village. One in particular. Aled Rhoslyn had succeeded his father in his blacksmith’s business a few months before Geraint came home for his mother’s funeral. And he still was the village blacksmith. His forge was beside the chapel. Geraint had intended to call there.
But he found himself unexpectedly reluctant. One of his few good memories of childhood was Aled’s friendship. But time had passed. They would have grown apart. Geraint was content with his life as it now was, and he had a number of close friends. But he did not want to be confronted with the knowledge that his first friendship with someone of his own gender no longer existed.
Perhaps some other day. He walked past the blacksmith’s forge and was aware of faces at windows the length of the village street and nodded to the one curtsying woman he passed—he did not recognize her. But he did not stop anywhere. He had walked to the village. He found himself walking now beyond it, away from the park and the house. He found himself walking along beside the river and turning onto the rough path that led gradually upward into the hills. He followed almost instinctively a route that he must have walked a thousand times when he was a child.
He knew where Madoc Evans’s farm was, more lately Eurwyn Evans’s, now Marged’s. He had passed it numerous times, though he had never been beyond its gate. It was while standing on the bars of the gate one spring day, watching a new calf walk about the yard on spindly legs, that he had encountered the boot of Madoc Evans, who had come up the lane behind him, unheard. Ragamuffins from the uplands were not welcome near the farms of the respectable.
Geraint paused after he had walked perhaps a mile. Was he going to call on her? He had hoped she was not at the manse or in the village. He had hoped she had married and moved away onto someone else’s land. He had hoped never to see her again. And yet, having heard that she was at Ty-Gwyn, he had turned his footsteps immediately in that direction.
He turned to look back the way he had come. The gradient had not seemed steep, and yet he was high up already. He was assaulted with the familiarity of the scene below him—the river, flowing straight until it bent to curve around and into the park of Tegfan; the trees and smooth lawns of the park, and the large stone house; the village stretched out along the river; the farms dotted about in the lowlands and on the hills, the fields, bare now in early spring, but each looking different from every other; the pastures, in which a few sheep and cattle were grazing.
He felt a sudden and unexpected wave of longing again—the same feeling he had had on the pavement in London when he had overheard the snippet of a conversation in Welsh.
But I miss the hills. . . .
The hills had been a part of his childhood, a part of him. He had missed the hills, he remembered now, for weary years before forgetting them entirely, suppressing all memory of them until that meaningless encounter with two Welsh drovers had brought it jolting back. And the hills had beckoned again.
It had been much higher in the hills he had lived with his mother. He turned to look upward, but there was no clear view to the top. He would never again go up there. It was a place he did not want to see.
Would he go higher at all today? He looked broodingly about him. He could not see Ty-Gwyn, but he could see another farmhouse, built of stone, its roof neatly tiled with slate. It had been thatched when last he saw it. He thought for a moment. Mr. Williams. He was not sure he had ever known the man’s first name. He had been a large and formidable-looking man. And yet occasionally when he had passed Geraint on the path, he had reached into a pocket and handed him a coin. Once, when he must have been on his way to market, he had given the boy a bunch of turnips and told him to take them to his mam for their dinner. And then, when Geraint had been scurrying away with his treasure, he had called him back and added two large brown farm eggs as an afterthought.
Mr. Williams had had a young daughter who used to run and hide when she saw Geraint coming, though he could remember her smiling shyly at him once or twice from behind her mother’s skirts.