Well, then.
She kept her back straight and her chin high and bent her knees in a deep curtsy, grasping the sides of her dress as she did so. “My lord,” she said, speaking deliberately in English, “what an honor, to be sure.”
His expression did not change at all. And yet she knew he had understood that her subservience was deliberate mockery.
He knew that battle had been engaged.
How she hated him.
He was unwelcome. He could see it in her eyes, could sense it in every line of her body. The foolish curtsy and her words, spoken unexpectedly in English, merely confirmed the fact. He did not realize until that moment how much he had hoped she had forgotten that foolishness of ten years ago. Or perhaps she had forgotten. Surely she had. It was just that circumstances had changed. Ten years had passed. She had been married and widowed during those years. He was the Earl of Wyvern now. She would expect him to have changed. And she would be right.
But he was disappointed. She had been his first friend. His wonderful friend. That was how he had described her to his mother that first day, when he had bounded back up the mountain, his mouth stained purple from berries. I have a wonderful friend, Mam. His mother had held him tightly, his face pressed against her too thin body, and smoothed her thin fingers gently through his curly hair.
“I hear that you run the farm yourself,” he said now in English. “I hear that your husband passed away. I am sorry about that, Marged.”
Her jaw tightened and her eyes grew hard. It was an expression he remembered from her childhood, though it had usually been used then against those who would have driven him away or scolded her for playing with him.
“I run the farm myself,” she said, “with a little help from laborers when I can afford it. Did you think it impossible for a woman to do? I have always paid the rent, even this year. And the tithes.”
Even this year? What was significant about this year? he wondered. He did not ask. But he understood her bristly manner suddenly, her belligerence. And it was so typical of Marged as he remembered her. She was afraid he had come to question her ability to run a farm herself. Her hackles were up.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you could show me the farm.” He looked about the yard and at the house. It all looked very well kept to him.
For a moment she did not move. She continued to look at him with her hard eyes and unreadable expression. And then she dipped into her curtsy again. “Certainly, my lord,” she said, “I am your servant.”
If she had been, he thought with a flash of annoyance, he would have put her in her place in a moment. He did not tolerate insolence from subordinates.
“The pigpen is too large for our needs,” she said, indicating it with a sweep of one arm. “My father-in-law built it years ago. But one does not rebuild a stone pigpen to accommodate one’s needs. We have only Nellie now, and she is still here only because on my marriage I made the mistake of naming her and making a pet of her and now cannot bear the thought of slaughtering her.”
She turned toward the house. And yet, he thought, it would be wise surely to buy or breed more pigs. When he had been a child, all the farmers had had half a dozen or so. Bacon and ham had been a staple food, though not with his mother and him, of course. He followed her across the yard toward the house. There were a few chickens pecking away at some grain in one corner. He could see some sheep grazing in a meadow to one side of the yard.
“The cows are still being kept inside,” she said. “I will be letting them out soon, but one can never assume that spring is here to stay merely because there has been some nice weather. I would not wish to put the calves or the milk at risk.”
She spoke briskly, impersonally, entirely in English. She walked with long, purposeful strides and no enticing swaying of the hips. And yet she looked utterly feminine, nevertheless.
He stepped after her through the front door and into the dark, cool passageway beyond. The cow barn was to his right. One cow lowed contentedly. Geraint counted ten stalls. Five of them were occupied. Three of the cows had calves with them. Although there were the inevitable smells of a barn, it was clean and orderly, he saw. The straw on the ground looked fresh.
“The stalls were all full five years ago,” she said. “We have had to sell half the herd gradually.”
He did not ask why.
“They look well cared for,” he said. “You do all the work with them, Marged? And all the milking?”
“My mother-in-law does most of that,” she said. “There are other things for me to do and only a certain number of hours in each day.”
He had seen no sign yet of the mother-in-law or the grandmother.
She led him through the passageway and out into a lean-to built onto the back of the house. It was a dairy, he saw. The dirt floor and the slate surfaces of the work area were clean. There were both butter and cheese in the making.
“You sell the produce?” he asked. He had used to envy the children of farmers, on their way to market with their parents, the carts in which they rode laden with produce.
“When there is a market for it,” she said. “There have been strikes in the coalfields and at the ironworks. There is no money there now for Carmarthenshire butter and cheese. And prices have fallen.”
“Have they?” He looked at her. “That is a pity.”
“Yes,” she agreed, her voice tight with anger, “it is.”
As if he was responsible for the shrinking market and the drop in prices.
“And your crops?” he asked. “You hire laborers to put them in for you?”
“I do it myself,” she said. “Plows are not so hard to use if one has well-trained horses. Ours are getting old, but they are good. I work the land myself. At harvesttime I need help.”
He had seen men pushing the heavy plows behind the horses or oxen, struggling to keep the furrows straight and uniformly deep. He did not believe for a moment that plows were not hard to use. Was she too stubborn to hire a man to do the work for her? Did she have to prove to every man about Glynderi and Tegfan that she was their equal?
He reached out on an sudden impulse and took both her hands in his. He turned them palm up and looked down at them. It was only as he did so that he realized that touching her was not such a good idea. Holding the backs of her hands cupped in his palms suddenly seemed unwisely intimate. And he had had to take a step closer to her in order to do so. He was holding her thumbs back with his own, he realized.
He looked up into her eyes. Another mistake. She had always had the steadiest eyes he had ever known. He could not remember ever trying to stare Marged down, but it would have been a useless game, one impossible to win. And he remembered now how those gray eyes had always been fringed by long lashes, several shades darker than her hair. They had not changed.
“Calluses,” he said softly, tightening his grip as he felt a tremor in her hands.
“You know the word and its meaning,” she said equally softly. There was no suggestion of sarcasm in her tone, though it was there undisguised in her eyes. “They come from hard, honest work, my lord.”
She licked her lips when his eyes lowered to them, though he knew she did not do so with any intention of being provocative. He felt his breath quicken even so. Belatedly, he released her hands.