Aled thought again about what they had done and what there was still to do—all the uncertainties and all the dangers. And for that he had given up this. He turned his head to look at the woman he had loved with single-minded devotion for six years. Sometimes it seemed a poor exchange.
“You are stepping out with Harley, Ceris?” he asked. He had not meant to ask the question. He knew the answer but did not want to hear it from her.
“Yes,” she said.
He felt deeply wounded, as if he were hearing it for the first time. But he could not leave it alone.
“You care for him?” he asked.
“Yes.” There was a dullness to her voice—so unlike Ceris.
“And he is good to you?” He did not want to know how good Harley was to Ceris, God damn his soul to hell.
“Yes,” she said. He thought their poor stab at conversation was at an end, but she continued after a short silence. “He is courting me.”
Well, he had invited it. He should not have asked the first question. Courting was rather more serious than stepping out. Courting was a preliminary to a marriage offer and to marriage itself.
He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell her that he wished for her happiness. Or that he was glad she was getting on with her life. Or that he was pleased she had chosen a man who would be able to provide well for her. Or that he envied Harley. But there were no words he could force past his lips.
They had reached the end of the lane leading up to her father’s house. It was the place where he had always kissed her whenever he was not going to go into the house with her. They both stopped walking, though he had expected her to keep on going.
“Aled.” She looked up into his eyes—the sparkle in her own was all gone, leaving only sadness and beauty behind. “Marged says that R-Rebecca is a good and a compassionate leader, if those qualities can belong to a man who also destroys property. But I can see that she is at least partly right. Was it his idea to compensate the gatekeepers who lose their homes and jobs? And to help the poor? Was it his idea to help Marged and Waldo Parry, both at the same time?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “It was all his idea, Ceris. It is not something that is part of the usual role of Rebecca.”
“I know,” she said. “And you are his right-hand man, his Charlotte. Did you volunteer to call on Marged?”
“He asked me,” he said, “and I agreed.” He smiled briefly. “I did not expect it to be as easy as it was. Marged is about as proud as it is possible for a woman to be.”
“Aled,” she said, “perhaps I have done your cause some injustice. Perhaps it is doing some good. If only it were not also doing a lot of evil.” She sighed.
Hope had revived painfully in him for a moment. But there was no hope. Besides, another man was courting her.
“I must go and help Mam with the wash,” she said.
He nodded and smiled at her and turned away. But when he had taken several steps down the path and assumed that she was on her way to the house, her voice stopped him again.
“Aled,” she called.
He turned and looked at her. Her unhappy eyes had grown luminous.
“Be careful, car—” she said. She lifted her shoulders and tightened her hold on her shawl. “Be careful.”
Cariad. She was going to force herself to love Harley and to marry him. She was of an age at which she needed a home of her own and a man of her own and little ones. But being Ceris, she would not go with her heart when her heart led her away from her deeply held principles.
But she loved him.
Perhaps if he asked her to wait . . . This would be over one day, settled one way or another. If he was still free then, perhaps . . . But no. Nothing would have changed. He would still be a man who had fought in the Rebecca Riots, and she would still be a pacifist.
He nodded. “I will,” he said, and turned back to continue on his way back down to Glynderi.
It was going to become far more tricky and far more dangerous, of course. There were constables, not in Glynderi, but right in Tegfan itself. There was a firm promise of soldiers. The temptation was to lie low for a while, to postpone further action until the fever to catch Rebecca had died down. And until the landowners had got over their outrage at the letters they had all received from Rebecca, clearly enumerating the people’s grievances and the conditions under which they would suspend further destructive action.
The Earl of Wyvern was one of the most furious. He grumbled to the constables and mumbled to Matthew Harley and raged to Sir Hector Webb and Lady Stella about gratitude for favors given and how he would know in future to keep his favors to himself. He was sorry he had ever set foot back in Wales, but he would be damned now if he would leave before the trouble had been settled and Rebecca caught and punished.
It was too soon for there to have been any response from England. But Carmarthen and Swansea newspapers had boldly published the letter that had been sent to each of the landowners. Perhaps copies of those articles would be published elsewhere—perhaps in England, perhaps in London. They could use all the publicity they could get.
No, it was not the time to hold back. It was not the time to become cautious. Everything so far was happening according to plan. They had known the dangers would become greater with every appearance of Rebecca. It was not the time to run and hide.
Friday, Geraint had agreed with Aled, and two gates west of Glynderi since all the vigilance of the constables was being focused east and south. But everyone was going to have to be far more careful about leaving their homes and returning to them. And they must gather at a place more distant from the village. But Friday would remain the night for their next attack.
As he cut himself off more and more from his people—he rarely left the park and always wore a grim expression whenever he did—Geraint came more and more to identify with them. His Welshness returned to him almost as if the sixteen years of his exile in England had never been. He walked about the park of Tegfan, breathing in Welsh air and gazing about him at rolling Welsh hills, and knew that he was home at last after a long, long absence. What had he said to Marged when she had asked where Rebecca was from?
I come from the hills and the valleys and the rivers and the clouds of Carmarthenshire.
Perhaps he had not realized at the time how much he spoke the truth. And it angered him intensely that his people were not free to live lives of work and contentment and freedom in their own homes, in their own country.
Oh, yes, he would continue to fight for them even if the danger doubled, as well it might.
But with the reassertion of his Welsh identity came the need to go all the way back, to find his roots, his beginnings. To face the pain.
His mother. She had always appeared beautiful to his child’s eyes with her dark wavy hair and blue eyes, like his own. But she must have been beautiful by any standards, he thought now. It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that Viscount Handford, his father, had been so smitten by her when she was Lady Stella’s governess that he had been reckless enough to elope with her and marry her, though she was only the daughter of a nonconformist Welsh minister.
For the first time since his return, Geraint went to see her grave in the Anglican churchyard. And his father’s grave. They had been buried side by side, GWYNNETH MARSH, VISCOUNTESS HANDFORD, the inscription on the headstone read. His mother. She did not sound like his mother.