“Mam,” he said softly.
He had seen her only once alive after that strange morning when the Earl of Wyvern, his grandfather, had appeared in person up on the moors and had spoken to his mother until she was in tears and Geraint had launched himself at the man and punched him and kicked him until servants pulled him off and held him. Only once, on the morning he was leaving Tegfan and Wales for school in England. A brief, deeply emotional farewell. A good-bye, though he had not realized it at the time. He had never been allowed to write to her and he guessed that she had not been allowed to write to him.
He had had to be ruthlessly purged of everything from his first twelve years of existence that made him unworthy of being the Earl of Wyvern’s heir.
“Mam,” he said again, and his eyes moved to his father’s grave. He knew little about the man who had been killed only weeks after his son’s conception, beyond the fact that he had been handsome and daring and full of laughter. And that he had loved Gwynneth Penderyn, Geraint’s mother.
Geraint wondered about the loneliness of his mother’s life for the eighteen years following the death of his father. For twelve of those years she had had only him and had loved him fiercely. For the last six she had had—no one? He did not know about her last six years. The pain and the emptiness of not knowing stabbed at him and reminded him that he had put them aside with everything else when he had left Wales forever—or so he had thought. He had felt the deep guilt of his neglect of her, though he had been only a boy and had been given no choice at all. But still there had been the guilt. She was dead, and he would never be able to tell her that he loved her constantly through the years of their separation.
“Mam.” He knelt down and rested a palm against the turf beneath the headstone. He hoped there was a heaven. He hoped she had been with his father there for ten years, though time would be meaningless in such a place, he supposed.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he had nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. But he did not want to go back to Tegfan. Someone there was always seeking him out for some purpose and there was always the chance of visitors, especially these days. He did not want to talk with anyone. His heart was too heavy with remembered emotions. He stood up and looked around—and up.
He had told himself on his return that it was one place he would never go. It was too much a part of his deepest nightmares—the isolation, the ostracism, the hunger and cold, the bareness of home, his mother’s loneliness and unhappiness, masked for his sake, but always known to him. He did not want to go back. But it was the only place to go. If he did not go back, he thought suddenly, then he would never really be able to go forward.
And so he went, trudging determinedly uphill, his head down. Perhaps there would be nothing to find except the remembered contours of the bleak upper moorland. Perhaps it would all look familiar yet different. Perhaps he would be able to look about him and breathe in the fresh air and know that it was all gone, all in the past. And that his mother was gone and at peace. Perhaps he would not find any ghosts at all. And those hovels were built of sod and thatch and could not be expected to last long against the elements of the uplands.
But the hovel in which he had lived with his mother had not gone. Not completely. It had been built against an outcropping of rock and had been sheltered from too rapid deterioration. One side of it had collapsed and the thatch was sparse and almost black with age, but it was still recognizable as a wretched habitation. And there was still a doorway to the interior.
He stood some distance away, looking at it, for a long time before approaching the doorway and peering inside. There were only darkness and mustiness to greet him.
He had never felt this dread as a child. Children were so very adaptable, he thought, especially when they had known nothing else. It had not seemed abnormal or even very terrible to him as a child to live here in such poverty that it was amazing they had survived. It was only in retrospect that it had become a place of horror, a subject for his nightmares.
And yet he had known love here. The only love of his life. His mother. Perhaps that was why it had become a dreaded place, suppressed from his memory and surfacing only in his nightmares. Perhaps it was not so much the poverty and the bleakness that haunted him but the love— the total, unconditional love he had received here. Perhaps this was the place where the riches of his life had been. For sixteen years he had had everything in his life except love.
He had dreaded coming back because something deep in him had known that doing so would reveal his present poverty to him.
He moved to one side of the hovel, to the side still standing, and rested his arm along the dirty thatch of the roof. And his head sank onto his hands. If only they had let him write to her, even once.
He wept.
She did not waste any time. She made a quick explanation to her mother-in-law and then threw a shawl about her shoulders and made her way up to the moors with long, mannish strides.
She wanted to share her exuberance and her good fortune.
She had to go carefully, of course. She was not sure if the Parrys would reject the offer if they knew the truth. Perhaps not, but even so it was probably as well if as few people as possible knew about the coffers of Rebecca.
So she told Waldo Parry that she had set aside a little money and had now decided to use it to hire help, certainly for the summer and perhaps permanently. She hoped he was available and would be willing to help her. She hoped some other farmer had not beaten her to it. She knew how much his services were coveted.
He had had a few offers, he told her. Nothing that he fancied until now. He would enjoy working for her, though, and he knew how much she and her in-laws needed a man about the place. Mrs. Parry smiled and nodded and looked suspiciously bright-eyed. The little girls sat and gazed from their father to the visitor and back again as each spoke. Idris stood in the doorway, darting glances all about and drawing attention with strategic shuffles to his new boots until Marged complimented him on them.
It looked as if Rebecca had already partly taken care of the Parrys. The little girls, Marged noticed, were wearing new dresses. How did Rebecca know of them? she wondered. Through Aled? Doubtless he had someone in each community reporting to him. Or perhaps it was the committee itself, acting in the name of Rebecca, which was helping where there was need.
But it was Rebecca himself who had decided to help her. She did not doubt it. She hugged the thought to herself as she left the Parrys to their pride and their newfound joy— which, of course, they had not shown in full measure while she was there with them. But she did not feel like returning home just yet. She wanted to be alone to feel the full extent of her own joy.
Nothing really had changed. He had still warned her quite clearly that he wanted no permanent connection with her, that if he was forced to marry her it would not be a good situation. But the point was that he would marry her if her condition made it necessary for her to ask and that he did care. Perhaps he would never look at her or speak with her again. Perhaps she would never ride with him again. Or make love with him again. And it would be painful. She had no doubt about that. But she would hug those facts to herself and she would remember for the rest of her life her brief and glorious fling with romantic love.
She strode across the top of the hill, letting the wind take her unconfined hair, and relived that night of love. She relived every kiss, every touch. She relived their union and the unexpected passion of it. She had not known it could be like that. Not that she would ever admit that it was better than it had been with Eurwyn. With Eurwyn there had been warmth, affection, marital closeness. With Rebecca there had been . . . Oh, there were not words. Marged lifted her chin and closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.