“It was what happened when I came home?” he asked. “You cannot forgive me for the liberties I tried to take? You were a very desirable girl, Marged.”
She laughed, though she did not sound amused. She was matching him stride for stride along the path, he noticed.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Ten years.”
“Yes,” she said. “Ten years. Another lifetime.”
“Your singing voice has matured,” he said, changing the subject. “It is even lovelier than it used to be. You are even lovelier than you used to be.”
He was not quite sure what he was trying to accomplish. Perhaps he was trying to make her soften, to make her smile, to make her show pleasure in a compliment. But he knew he was being clumsy. He was not usually clumsy with women. Perhaps because he did not usually feel awkward or on the defensive with women.
She stopped walking and turned to him, her back straight, her head thrown back, her face tense with anger.
“What is it that you want?” she asked. “But I need not ask, need I? You think to get from me what you almost got but did not quite get last time you were here? Perhaps if I smile nicely enough it will not even be on the hard ground in the hills as it was then. Perhaps it will be in the earl’s feather bed in the earl’s grand bedchamber. Or am I being foolish? Whores do not merit being taken to the earl’s bed, do they? You will not find whores for your pleasure in this part of the world, my lord. You should have stayed in England for that.”
He reacted instinctively. He held himself erect and stared at her coldly. “Have a care, Marged,” he said, his voice quiet and under rigid control, “and remember to whom you speak.”
But she was not to be cowed. “Oh, I do not forget,” she said, her voice a passionate contrast to his own. “I do not forget who you are, my lord. Murderer!” She turned with a swish of her skirts and started up the path toward Ty-Gwyn and the hills.
He did not pursue her farther. He stood looking after her, startled and frowning. Murderer? She might have called him a number of derogatory things with some justification, but he had certainly not expected that. It sounded very dramatic, but it had no meaning. She was obviously very angry over something, though, and there was no point in following her. There was no chance of holding a rational conversation with her in her present mood.
He turned around and stood staring down into the water of the river for several minutes. Marged had always been one to espouse a cause, especially when it was more someone else’s cause than her own. She was probably angry over the way he was squeezing every last penny out of his people, herself included. He could hardly blame her. And he would not use ignorance as an excuse, even to himself.
He would change a few things after a little more careful investigation, and then perhaps he would redeem himself somewhat in her eyes.
He wanted to redeem himself, he thought. Especially in Marged’s eyes. He had had mistresses and flirts in the past ten years. Twice he had considered marriage. Once he had been on the very brink of making his offer. But he had loved only once in his life. And could love very easily again.
The same woman.
The realization surprised him. And disturbed him.
She was right. He wanted to bed her. But he wanted to impress her too. He wanted her respect and her liking and her friendship. And perhaps more than that again.
But she hated him. Perhaps for personal reasons, perhaps for broader reasons. And she had called him a murderer. What the devil had he murdered in her life? Her faith in him?
Could one restore faith when it had once been lost?
One could but try, he supposed.
He had been flirting with her. He had walked at her side, his body straight like an iron bar, his face like granite, his blue eyes roaming over her as if she had no clothes on, and he had paid her those ridiculous compliments.
Were English ladies so easily pleased, so easily deceived? So easily seduced? For flirtation was too mild a word. He had been attempting seduction, just as he had ten years ago. Except that she was no longer the naive girl she had been then. Not by any means.
How dare he. Oh, how dare he!
He had known exactly what he was doing, sitting next to her in chapel without a word or a glance in her direction, just letting her feel his warmth and smell his expensive cologne. He was a master seducer—he had improved in ten years. He must have known that tension had built in her to such a degree that she could not afterward say even what the text of her father’s sermon had been, let alone its contents. She could not even remember what hymns they had sung, even though she had chosen them herself last week.
Marged fumed for the rest of the day. She could do little else. It was Sunday. No unessential work could be done on a Sunday. While she had lived at home with her father, there were not even any hot meals on Sunday and no dishes were washed. Sunday was a day of rest, a day in which to recoup one’s energies for the hard week ahead.
After dinner, when Gran was already nodding in the inglenook by the fire and Mam was settling opposite her, Marged drew her shawl over her shoulders and went out walking. She took some Welsh cakes with her, freshly baked the day before, and some butter and cheese, and strode upward into the higher hills until she was on the bare moors. They had been common ground once upon a time. All the farmers had grazed their flocks there during the summer. Now they belonged to Tegfan, and only Tegfan sheep were allowed to fatten themselves on their scrubby grass.
But there were buildings up there too, if they could be dignified by such a name, ugly little sod huts with sparse thatch to keep out the cold and rain. There were not many, fortunately, but enough to testify to poverty and despair and suffering. Their inhabitants usually left for the workhouse eventually.
The Parrys had never been good farmers. Eurwyn had often used to cluck his tongue over the inefficiency and waste and lack of organization so evident on their farm. They had never been prosperous. But they had not been bad people, either. They had been honest and proud and there had always been love within the family.
Now they were living on the moors and there were not many farmers in a financial situation to be able to offer Waldo Parry any regular employment. There were three children, and Mrs. Parry was expecting another. It was one more evidence of their impracticality, Marged thought. The new baby must have been conceived after they were forced off their farm. But then, who was she to condemn an unhappy man and woman for indulging one of the few pleasures left to them?
Marged felt the old pang of regret that in five years of marriage and almost nightly intimacies she had never conceived a child of her own. She suppressed it, as she always did.
She made her deliveries, sat for a while with Mrs. Parry while one of the little girls hovered at her side and then climbed onto her lap, and continued on her walk. She strode across the moors, breathing in the spring air, gazing about her at hills that stretched to the farthest horizon in all directions. The hills of home. She could not imagine living anywhere else. The hills were a part of her.
She missed Eurwyn with a sudden pang so intense that she stopped walking and closed her eyes. She missed Eurwyn and she missed being married. She had never felt any wild passion for her husband, but she had liked him and admired him and loved him too. She had liked those brief nightly intimacies. They had become very much a routine part of her life, not consciously enjoyed, though never disliked either.