by Mary Balogh
Verity’s conversation centered embarrassingly about Siân and what they had been doing together during the past week.
“. . . and I went to Sunday School with Mrs. Jones and met lots of boys and girls and they all spoke Welsh but I didn’t mind because I am going to learn it too. I already know lots of words. Don’t I, Mrs. Jones? And Mrs. Jones is going to sing in the eist—in the eisteddfod. There, I got it right. I think she is going to win this year though she only came second last year. But she has the best voice I have heard. And I am going to get Papa to let me go with her over the mountain because it is the most fun of anything the whole year, she says. Don’t you, Mrs. Jones?”
“Dear me,” Lady Fowler said, interrupting this excited monologue, “I am sure your papa will allow no such thing, Verity, dear. Such amusements are very well for your papa’s Welsh workers, but they are hardly the thing for a young English lady.”
“I have never mingled with Papa’s laborers,” Tess added. “It would be lowering, dear Verity. You have to remember that your papa is their master and that they all look up to you as the lady of the manor.”
Siân was aware that her shoulders had straightened and her chin had lifted only when she caught the marquess’s eye. He was looking steadily and unsmilingly back at her, though Tess was simpering at him for his approval.
“Mrs. Jones does indeed have a lovely voice,” he said. He had said very little for half an hour. “But then, being Welsh, she has an unfair advantage over the rest of us poor mortals. Will you sing for us, ma’am? The one about the bird?”
Verity clapped her hands.
If the floor would only open up, Siân thought, she would gladly drop through it. Had he not sensed her extreme discomfort? Or the intense, spiteful dislike of his lady guests? She looked up at him as he got to his feet and held out a hand for hers. She had not even had a chance to feel the embarrassment and discomfort of being in company with him. Only a little more than a week ago in this very room . . .
“We should be leaving soon, John,” Lady Fowler said.
“In a little while,” he said. “Let Mrs. Jones sing to us first.”
Siân set her hand in the marquess’s and allowed him to escort her to the pianoforte. At least this week, she thought, she could play with greater confidence. But she would rather be anywhere else on earth than where she actually was. She set her fingers on the keys and began to play the opening bars of “Y Deryn Pur.” The marquess stood quietly behind her for a while after she began to sing and then went back across the room to join his guests.
She thought he had come back again, but when she looked up from the keyboard, it was to find Sir John Fowler standing close to the pianoforte.
“Well done,” he said when she was finished. “Will you sing another?”
“Yes, please, Mrs. Jones,” the marquess said.
Siân looked at her hands and realized she had no choice. Saying no would cause more of a stir than complying with the request. “‘Llwyn On,’” she said, naming the other competition piece that she was to sing at the eisteddfod. “‘The Ash Grove.’ It sounds lovelier with a harp accompaniment, but the pianoforte will do.”
Lady Fowler began to talk rather loudly when she was only partway through the song, Siân heard. She continued anyway.
Sir John was still standing to one side of the instrument when she finished. His wife was talking to the marquess, pointedly pretending that she had not even noticed the ending of the song. Tess was talking to Verity and laughing.
“Your voice has matured,” Sir John said quietly. “It is lovelier than ever.”
“Thank you.” She did not look up at him.
“I have heard,” he said, “that you are going to be married again.”
“Yes,” she said.
“To a puddler?” he said. “Not a miner this time?”
“Yes,” she said, “to a puddler.”
“Your first marriage, of course,” he said, “was a thumb of the nose to me. You went as low as you could go.”
The old antagonism she had always felt toward him was back. “Gwyn was a worthy and hard-working human being,” she said. “I married him for myself. I was fond of him. I was grieved by his death and by the death of our son.”
“I would not have allowed you to go back underground if you had let me know you were with child,” he said. “I did not know until it was too late.”
“You would have had no say in the matter,” she said angrily. “You are not a part of my life.”
“Siân—” he said.
“John.” Lady Fowler’s voice, sounding brittle, hailed him from across the drawing room. “Do come along. We have already stayed far too long for good manners. The marquess will think we have grown rustic indeed. Do come out to the carriage with us, Verity, dear, and wave us on our way.”
She acted as if Siân was not even in the room. Sir John bowed silently to her before turning away and joining his wife and daughter at the other side of the room.
“Wait here, please, Mrs. Jones,” the marquess said as he left with his guests and Verity.
She sat on the pianoforte stool, staring downward at the keyboard, feeling numb and very close to tears. He was her father. Her father! He had not even known that he was to be a grandfather. Because she had not wanted him to know. Because he was the last person she would have thought of informing. Because it should have been his business to find out what was going on in her life. But he had not cared. Not a word when she had married Gwyn. Not a word when he had been killed. Not a word when her baby—his grandson—had been born dead.
Siân reached out a finger and dusted off an already spotless key. She did not look up when the drawing room door opened and then closed quietly again.
* * *
He had invited her down to tea purely to convince Lady Fowler and Tess that he really had hired a competent governess for Verity and that his daughter was happy with his choice. They had been hinting since their arrival that Tess was still willing to come two or three times a week to instruct Verity—not for remuneration, of course. They had both been hasty to insist that it would be a labor of love and not by any means in the nature of employment.
Perhaps too, he admitted to himself, he had sent up the invitation because it gave him an excuse to see her again after more than a week of keeping himself very strictly away from her. He had even refused to take Verity back to the chapel on Sunday. He felt almost starved for a sight of her and for the distinctive sound of her voice with its musical lilt. He should not have given in to temptation at all, of course, but then he had the other reason for sending for her.
He certainly had not intended to arouse any sort of situation to cause anyone discomfort. It was quite unexceptionable to have his daughter’s governess accompany her to tea. No one could be expected to take umbrage over having to take tea with a social inferior under such circumstances.
Perhaps things were different in Wales, he thought at first. So much was different in Wales. Perhaps there the social lines were observed more strictly. Certainly the atmosphere in his drawing room seemed thick enough to be cut with a knife, and Lady Fowler lost no opportunity of making Siân feel three inches high.
Alex blessed his daughter for being her usual garrulous self and for seeming totally unaware that anything was amiss. And something definitely was. It was not just that he was in a different country and did not understand its ways.
He thought he understood after he had tried to cover up for a particularly cutting rudeness of Lady Fowler’s by suggesting that Siân sing to them. He noticed how Fowler got up and crossed the room to listen to her. He noticed how he talked quietly to her after she had finished singing. Even from across the room he could see the tightness and anger in her face, though he could not hear anything that was said—Lady Fowler and Tess were too loudly busy ignoring her very existence.
She was a beautif
ul woman. An unusually attractive woman. He knew that to his own cost. She was attractive to Fowler too. Perhaps there had once been something between them. Perhaps there still was. The thought made Alex clamp his teeth together with unreasoned fury. And perhaps now he was molesting her, though he was speaking quietly to her. Perhaps he was making suggestions . . .
And then another thought struck Alex.
Of course. But of course! It would explain everything. The whole ghastly atmosphere that had pervaded tea so that he was not certain if he had eaten food or cardboard. But it seemed an unbelievable idea. Looking at the two of them over at the pianoforte, it seemed unbelievable. Looking at Tess, it seemed impossible.
When the Fowlers were taking their leave, he took Verity by the hand to lead her outside to see them on their way. He asked Siân to stay where she was. It was perhaps not a wise thing to have done, he thought as he took his daughter back upstairs to the nursery and left her in the charge of her nurse. Siân had been looking upset, but he was hardly the one to comfort her. And the rest was none of his business.
It was going to be dangerous to be alone with her.
He stepped into the drawing room and closed the door quietly behind himself. She was still seated at the pianoforte. She did not look up.
“The second song was lovely,” he said. “It was familiar. ‘The Ash Grove,’ did you say? What did you call it? It began with that most unpronounceable of Welsh sounds.”
“‘Llwyn On,’” she said. “It sounds lovelier with a harp accompaniment.”
“That is what you will be singing at the festival?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Siân”—he stopped beside the pianoforte and rested his elbow on it—“I am sorry that you had to put up with such bad manners and such well-bred insults.”
“It does not matter,” she said.
“It does.” He searched her impassive face. She was still looking down at the keyboard. “He was saying something to upset you. Was he insulting you?”
“No,” she said.
He could not leave it alone. He could not mind his own business. He could not stay out of her life. “What is he to you?” he asked quietly.
She rubbed one finger over a key without depressing it and then looked up at him, her eyes huge and blank. “He fathered me,” she said.
The way she expressed the relationship said volumes. “Ah.” He nodded. “Then I was not mistaken. He turned you off when your mother died?”
“He turned me off,” she said. “I turned myself off. We never could like each other. He resented me—perhaps for being conceived in the first place, certainly for always being in the way when he visited my mother. I resented him—perhaps for begetting me and stranding me in a world shared by no one except my mother and me. When Mam died, there was nothing left between us except mutual dislike.”
And yet she did not look indifferent. There had been more than that, even if she did not know it herself.
“He made no attempt,” he asked, “to look after you? After spending a great deal of money on your education?”
“He had a marriage planned for me,” she said. “I would have been caught forever between two worlds. I don’t think he ever understood that. Provided one is safe and well cared for, one must be happy. He has no imagination.”
Alex had an uncomfortable memory of offering to make it worth her while to become his mistress. Of offering to strand her forever between two worlds.
“Whom did he want you to marry?” he asked.
She smiled fleetingly, though there was no amusement in the expression. “Josiah Barnes,” she said.
He felt a little as if someone had punched him in the stomach. No imagination? she had said. Fowler must be a complete blockhead. And another question flashed into his head.
“How did you end up working in the mine?” he asked. “Your grandfather and your uncle, I understand, are both at the ironworks. I have also learned since coming here that working in the mine gives a person a lower status than working at the ironworks. You had the worst job of all for a woman.”
“I preferred it,” she said, “to the alternative.”
“Did Barnes give you the job?” he asked.
“He said there was nothing else available,” she said. “It was take it or leave it. I took it.”
“Your grandfather was unable to support you?” he asked.
She looked at him steadily. “I had lived a life of privilege,” she said. “To anyone who had not lived it, it would have seemed that I had a far better life than most of my peers. I had something to prove—to my family, to the people of Cwmbran, and to myself.”
He gazed at her, trying to imagine what it must have been like. What if he suddenly had to leave the life he had always lived in order to work in that coal mine, harnessed to a heavy coal cart in dust and darkness all day? He thought it altogether possible that his spirit would be broken in no time at all. Yet Siân Jones had done more than survive. She looked back at him with pride and dignity.
“It was not as bad as it may sound,” she said. “You cannot imagine, perhaps, how I had yearned all my life to belong to my mother’s people. She used to tell me stories about them and about her life as a girl. I longed for it. Here.” She spread a hand over her left breast. “You would not be able to understand. Most people would not. The longing to be a part of something, no matter what the cost.”
“Hiraeth,” he said softly.
She laughed unexpectedly and then sobered again. “Not quite,” she said. “But something like that.”
“The cost was a few years of your life in the mine,” he said.
“Yes.” Her eyes grew luminous. “And my Dafydd.”
“Your husband?” he asked.
“My son,” she said. “He never breathed. He was so perfect. So very perfect. But too small. He came too early. He never breathed.”
Alex felt robbed of breath. He could feel her pain like a tangible thing. And he was not sure what sort of Pandora’s box he had opened with his curiosity. She was being transformed before his eyes from a lovely and desirable woman into a very real person. Something in him wanted to stop her. He did not really want to know her. He did not want the burden of the knowledge. He could not have explained to himself why that was.
Perhaps because knowledge might transform his feelings from simple desire to—something else? And feeling something else for her would only complicate his life impossibly.
But it was too late to stop her or his own need to know.
“He told me,” she said, “that he would not have allowed me to go back down the mine if he had known I was going to have a baby. But he had never made any inquiries at all. He had never shown any interest.”
He had missed something essential. She was looking down at the keyboard again and was scrubbing at one of the keys.
“You worked,” he asked, “when you were pregnant?”
“Gwyn died,” she said. When she looked up at him suddenly, her eyes were brimming with tears. “We needed the money. His dada was already home with the coughing sickness and Iestyn was still too young to be earning much. Gran and Grandad stormed at me and Uncle Emrys too, but I went. I had to prove that I was one of them. But I think it was the working that brought on my time too soon. He was dead. He never even had a chance to live. He was dead.”
God! He watched a tear spill over from each eye and roll down her cheeks. He felt frozen to the spot. He could not even reach for her and hold her. The loneliness of her memories and her grief was too intense.
“Why were you allowed to work if you were pregnant?” he asked after a while. He was whispering, he realized.
“There is no rule against it,” she said. “Sometimes it is necessary.”
Lord God. “Is it still happening?” he asked. “Do you know of any woman right now who is with child and pullin
g one of those carts?”
“Yes.” She scrubbed at one tear with the back of her hand. “Blodwyn Williams. Her husband is injured and they have a little one to feed.”
Alex felt as if all his insides had turned to ice. He stared down at her bowed head.
“Who would not have allowed you back down the mine if he had known?” he asked.
“Him,” she said. “Sir John Fowler. He said it just a little while ago, standing where you are now. As if he cared. Just as if he cared.”
“Perhaps he did,” he said.
“There was not a word,” she said, “after I had gone to live with Grandad and when I went to work in the mine. Not a word when I married Gwyn. Or when he was killed. Or when Dafydd was born dead. His own grandson, he was, my little one. Not a word. Or in the years since. Nothing until today. Yet he said he would have stopped me going back down the mine if he had known. Does he expect me to believe that he cares?”
“Perhaps, Siân,” Alex said, “he really wanted to provide for you the best he could. He could not take you into his own home. He had a wife and daughter there. He planned a marriage for you. To a man with little imagination, it would have seemed a good marriage. Barnes has a steady job and a good income. He has considerable power. Perhaps your—father was hurt when you rejected his plans and returned to your mother’s people.”
“Hurt.” She laughed a little. “Hurt.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “that I unwittingly brought you into this situation today. I had no idea.”
“Well”—she got to her feet at last—“you had no way of knowing. I will be going home. It is late.”
“And I am sorry about the child,” he said. “I believe it must be about the most devastating thing that can happen to a woman. I am sorry, Siân.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “Perhaps I will have—I am going to be married next month.”
Perhaps she would have Parry’s child nine months after next month.
“Yes,” he said softly, reminded again of what he had tried not to think of.
