“Now we have shown them, Marged,” he said. “And we will continue to show them.”
She smiled back at him, but she became aware suddenly that one of the horses had moved up close to her other side. She looked up, startled.
Rebecca leaned down from his horse’s back and set a hand beneath her chin to keep her face turned up. It was some sort of a woolen mask, she saw, hugging his face tightly, with only small slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth. Long blond ringlets cascaded down about the mask and over his shoulders. It was impossible to know what the man behind the mask looked like and would be impossible even in daylight, Marged believed. She felt unaccountably frightened. There was such a contrast between the effeminacy of the woman’s attire and the power the man had shown tonight.
“Is it possible,” he said, his voice low and soft and quite audible despite the noise by which they were surrounded, “that one of my children is a real daughter?”
“Yes.” She looked directly back into his eyes, which gleamed darkly through the slits of the mask. “And there are a few others here too. We represent all the women who feel as strongly as the men that it is time to protest against oppression but who have been kept at home by the orders of fathers or husbands or by the needs of children.”
“Ah. Brave words, my daughter,” he said.
She felt almost as if she were just that for a moment. She felt absurdly pleased by the implied praise.
He released her chin and raised his arms again and called for silence. Amazingly he got it after only a few moments. “My children,” he said, “enough for tonight. Next time we will destroy more than one of these abominations. My daughters will tell you where and when. I have been proud of you tonight. You have behaved with courage and determination—and discipline. Go now. Most of you have a long walk home.”
It seemed almost anticlimactic. And it really was a long walk home. Marged smiled at Dylan, determined not to show her weariness. But a hand came to rest lightly on her shoulder and she turned to look up again at Rebecca, who had not moved off. He took his hand away and offered it to her, palm up.
“Come, my daughter,” he said. “Take my hand and set your foot on my boot and ride up with me.”
The prospect was unaccountably frightening. He was not her enemy. He was the leader she had hoped and prayed for. Even better than Eurwyn would have been, she thought treacherously. He had won her respect and admiration and loyalty tonight. But he looked ghostly and yet massively real all at the same time. And it was the dead of night. And she did not know who he was.
“I am not afraid of the walk home,” she said, “even though I am a woman.”
She could have sworn that his eyes smiled at her. “Then ride up here for my sake,” he said. “I am a woman in need of company so late at night.”
She smiled then. And certainly it would be pleasant to ride for a part of the way, until their paths took them in different directions. Of course, by then she would be separated from her friends and would have to walk the rest of the way home alone. But she was certainly not going to give in to a fear of the dark.
She set her hand in his and lifted her foot to rest it on his boot in the stirrup. The next moment she was seated sideways on the horse’s back in front of the saddle, his arms like a safe barricade on either side of her while he gathered the reins in his hands.
He held his horse still until everyone had disappeared into the darkness. Only then did he give it the signal to start. Marged sat very still, fighting breathlessness so that he would not notice. One thing had been very clear from her brief contacts with Rebecca and the ease with which she had been lifted onto the horse.
Rebecca was a very powerful man.
All three of his identities had merged in the course of the night. His education and training had reinforced the natural ability to command that he had possessed even as a child. Yet tonight he had used that training and that ability to assert his Welshness, his identification with his people. He felt passionately throughout the night the rightness of what he was doing. He felt a deep love for the people whom he commanded and a deep commitment to their cause. And he found that the role of Rebecca suited him. The role of woman and mother served to remind him that it was a cause for which he fought and that it could be done with dignity and a measure of compassion.
It was a night he frankly enjoyed. It took him back to childhood years and made him realize just how much of his identity he had been forced to give up at the age of twelve, and how much he had finally given up voluntarily in order to retain his sanity. He felt almost as if he had been living a suspended life for sixteen years and was now vibrantly and gloriously alive again.
He watched as a few hundred men broke down the tollgate and the keeper’s house—by tradition Rebecca and her daughters did not participate in the actual destruction.
And then he saw Marged. He would not have been quite sure, perhaps, if he had not seen her dressed in the same garb the night his horses were let loose from the stables and he found wet ashes in his bed. She was wearing a cap tonight and he could see from the brief glimpse he had of her face that it had been blackened as almost everyone else’s had. But she was undoubtedly a woman. Undoubtedly Marged.
His first instinct was to keep his distance. How impenetrable was his disguise? But he had ever been bold as a boy. If the disguise could not fool Marged, then perhaps it would not fool someone else—someone who might betray him. Conversely, if it could fool Marged, then it could fool anyone.
And so he put it to the test, leaning down from his horse’s back, cupping her chin with his hand so that she would be forced to take a good look at him, speaking to her with his voice only a few inches from her ears, bending his head so that she could see him despite the darkness.
She did not know him.
His exhilaration and boldness grew as he dismissed the men and sent them on their way home. It had been a brief encounter. What if it were a longer encounter and at even closer quarters? He had been careful about detail. He had even made sure that he did not wear his usual cologne and that none of it lingered on any of the clothes he wore beneath Rebecca’s robes. But was there a detail he had neglected, one that would betray him?
It was something he did not need to put to the test. It was something it might be dangerous to put to the test. And even if he could deceive her, it would perhaps be unfair to do so. She hated him with very good reason.
But temptation was something he had never been able to resist as a boy, and the years of discretion that had intruded since that time had fallen away in the course of the night. The more daring an enterprise, the more likely he had been to try it as a child. It was a miracle he had never come to any grief more painful than that blistering spanking he had had at the hands of one of the gardeners at Tegfan.
He leaned down again and touched Marged on the shoulder.
And talked her into riding with him.
And watched the men disappear into the darkness on their way home, trying to calm his breathing as he did so. He had no excuse to be breathless. He had not participated in the exertions of the last half hour.
But he was beginning to realize that perhaps he had made a mistake. His arms, bracketing her body though not quite touching her, burned with her body heat. His thigh felt singed where it rested against her knee. He could smell ashes and sweat and woman—an unbearably erotic perfume.