by Mary Balogh
Men and women went about their work that morning subdued and a little fearful and a little puzzled.
The ironworkers were the first to hear it—the distinct, authoritative voice of the Marquess of Craille. It was not particularly loud, but it was a voice of his they had not heard before—a voice trained from birth to be heard and obeyed without question.
Work was finished for the day, he announced. He would see them in one hour’s time on the mountain, in their usual meeting place. Every last man of them. The women were to return to their homes.
The men looked at one another, stunned. And yet, as they laid down their tools and left their work areas, there was not one of them who even thought of disobeying.
The miners received the same message less than half an hour later as the marquess’s voice rang along first one coal seam and then another until every man, boy, and woman had heard the summons at least twice.
There was not a man who dared absent himself from the summons to the mountain. And not a man who would have done so even if he dared. The Scotch Cattle had gone too far this time. They had whipped a woman—the teacher Craille had employed to teach his daughter. Every man wondered in some fascination and not a little dread what the Marquess of Craille planned to do about it.
21
HE stood on the rise at one end of the hollow, where the speakers at the two meetings he had observed had stood. He waited, still and silent, for the last stragglers to come up from Cwmbran, though most of the men had been there ahead of him. They were uneasily quiet and were eyeing him warily.
He was driven by a cold fury. He had not thought of what he would say. He did not think of it now. The words would come when he began. He knew at least what he was going to do. But first he would speak. He tapped his riding whip slowly against his boot.
The men seemed to sense the moment when he was ready to begin though he did not raise his arms or make any other signal. All fidgeting and whispering stopped. All faces gazed up at him. It was a self-conscious silence, a faintly hostile one, perhaps. He did not care.
“I am tired of being at war with you,” he said, looking around at the upturned faces. “I am tired of being considered the enemy merely because I am an English aristocrat and the owner of the land on which you live and the industry at which you work. I am sorry that anyone who gives me information about your lives must be considered a base informer and punished with whips.”
There was a barely audible murmuring. Some men shifted their weight from one foot to the other. A few gazes slipped from his own.
“No woman has ever given me such information,” he said slowly and distinctly.
He waited while discomfort among the men grew visibly.
“The woman who was whipped last night was innocent of the charge against her,” he said. “She is my daughter’s teacher, not my spy.”
There was more shuffling, louder murmuring.
“More of that later,” he said, and the hush was suddenly loud. “I disapprove of the planned march on Newport. I disapprove because it will accomplish nothing but will put you all in considerable danger of injury and arrest. Government authorities are expecting such a move and are preparing for it. I disapprove of your going but will do nothing to stop you provided no one is coerced by Scotch Cattle whips to join those of you who decide to go and provided that there is no other violence concerning it here in Cwmbran. The decision is yours. You are all free men.”
He waited through the swell of sound that followed his words. It was unclear to him if it was merely surprise or if it was suspicion that set them all to talking at once.
“But in the meantime,” he said, “there is much to do here at home. I have owned Cwmbran and been your employer for two years. I have been deeply shamed in the past few months to discover how irresponsible I have been during those years, assuming all was well here when I should have come to find out for myself. There is enough to do here to occupy us all for a decade or more—new housing, waterworks and sewers, schools for the children, to name but a few of the more obvious. It has angered me and—yes—hurt me that you have not met me halfway on this, that you have ignored my requests to meet with your representatives so that we might get started.”
There was a roar of protest, most of it directed at him. So many men were speaking to him that he heard none of them. For the first time he held up a hand for silence.
“Do I understand,” he asked, “that you knew nothing of my requests?”
The men’s reaction convinced him that he had guessed correctly.
“Perhaps,” he said, “your leader saw fit to make a decision without consulting you. Perhaps Owen Parry decided not to accord you the democratic rights you have been demanding in the Charter. Perhaps he assumed that you would be unwilling to trust and to work with the enemy.”
“We should have been given the choice,” someone cried out with a growl, and there was a loud murmuring of assent.
“What Parry decided is good enough for me,” someone else shouted, and won for himself his own chorus of approval.
Alex held up one hand. “If I must make improvements alone,” he said, “I will do so. Both the right and the responsibility are mine. I would prefer to make decisions with you rather than for you, but I consider it your democratic right not to participate in democracy. I will ask the Reverend Llewellyn if a meeting may be held in the chapel schoolroom one day next week—on your ground rather than on mine. I will ask him to chair that meeting. I will attend it. I invite all of you to attend too—and to bring your women with you.”
“Oh, Duw,” someone said, “that is all we would need.”
There was a gust of laughter in which Alex briefly joined.
“Your women live in your houses all day and care for your children while you are at work,” he said when there was silence again. “You can be certain that they will have very strong ideas, and sensible ones too, about what is needed to make life healthier and more comfortable in Cwmbran. Perhaps we should learn to listen to them and give their ideas the respect they deserve.”
It was an idea with which the men were uncomfortable, he could see. But he had no wish to labor the point or any others he had made. They were there. He had spoken them in the hearing of almost every man from the valley. It was up to them now. Their lives would improve whether they wished it or not. But he could not change their attitudes or their perception of himself. It was up to them.
He waited until there was full silence, and then he waited a little longer until the silence became tense and expectant.
“Where is Owen Parry?” he asked.
“Here I am.” A voice rang out firm and clear from near the back of the crowd of men packed into the hollow.
Alex took his time locating the man in the crowd and then looked directly at him.
“Owen Parry,” he said, dropping his whip to the ground and removing his coat with deliberate slowness, “I once told you that if the Scotch Cattle returned to Cwmbran to terrorize and hurt any of my people, I would hunt them down and give them as good as they gave.”
“You did,” Owen said, challenge and defiance in his voice.
Alex unbuttoned his waistcoat and pulled it off, dropping it to the ground to join his whip and his coat. “They came back,” he said, “and put terror into a woman too courageous either to give in to their demands or to seek help from someone who might have given it. She suffered that terror for three days.”
The silence was louder than Scotch Cattle howls.
“Last night she was dragged up the mountain by men too cowardly to show their faces or speak above a whisper and confined to the ground and whipped,” Alex said. “Fifteen times. This morning she came to work and said nothing by way of complaint.” His cravat was on the ground with his other clothes. He pulled his shirt free of his breeches and began to unbutton it. All the while he spoke he had not taken his eyes off Owen Parry.
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“Even if she were guilty of the offense for which she was punished,” Alex said. “Even if, I would be her champion. She is a woman. You were one of those Scotch Cattle, Owen Parry.”
“Yes,” Owen said as the great swell of sound succeeding the accusation died down.
“The bloody bastard!” one voice roared. Alex recognized it as Hywel Rhys’s, though he did not take his eyes off Owen Parry. “Let me get at him. I will tear him limb from limb and go to hell for it too. It will be a pleasure to spend eternity in hellfire with the devil, knowing that Parry is there with me.”
But the men about him subdued him and silence fell again. Parry was looking directly back at him, Alex saw, his head lifted proudly.
“Strip down, Parry,” Alex said. “Perhaps the men you lead and I employ will be good enough to clear a space in the middle of this hollow. I will fight you man to man. If I defeat you, I will punish you as you and your thugs punished Siân Jones last night. Fifteen lashes with my whip.”
Owen Parry laughed. Alex could understand why, having seen the man stripped to the waist at the works. But then perhaps Parry had not had a good look at him, and certainly he could not know that Alex had been trained in one of the prestigious boxing saloons of London. And perhaps he did not understand what murderous rage love could find in a man’s heart and in his muscles.
An empty square appeared in the middle of the hollow as if by magic, and two paths, one leading down from the rise on which Alex stood and the other from the spot on which Owen Parry stood.
Alex pulled off his boots and his stockings and took the path to the square. “You may choose your seconds, Parry,” he said. “There are doubtless any number of men who will stand in your corner. I will stand alone—as I have done since coming to Cwmbran.”
“No, you won’t,” a light, youthful voice said from close by. “I’ll be in your corner, sir. For Siân.”
For the first time Alex removed his eyes from Owen. He looked in some surprise at Iestyn Jones, who had stepped into the square and moved now to one corner of it.
“And I.”
“Me too.”
The voices spoke simultaneously, and Huw Jones and Emrys Rhys joined Iestyn in the corner.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and turned his attention back to Owen Parry, who was stripping to the waist in the opposite corner of the square.
“I hope you don’t knock the bastard senseless,” Emrys Rhys said. “I want that pleasure for myself.”
It was a lengthy fight. Owen Parry’s sheer strength was pitted against Alex’s strength and skill and they gave punch for punch for long minutes, neither pausing to circle the other looking for an opening, neither backing up from the other, neither staying down when he was put down. For both it was more than a mere fistfight. It was a battle of the classes and of ideas. It was a battle of hatred on one side, determination on the other.
Alex was not at all sure he could win. He had not been sure from the start. And yet, win or lose, it was a fight he had to fight. But as they fought on, surrounded by hundreds of curiously quiet men, their landed punches and their grunts audible to all, he knew ultimately that he had the advantage. He fought to avenge what had been done to Siân. He detached his mind from his opponent and the pain that was being inflicted on his own body and focused his thought on the remembered sight of the red thread above Siân’s dress that morning and the raw welts across her back when he had bared it. He thought of her face, pale and controlled, her eyes dark-shadowed.
And he thought of her finally losing her control and weeping, not because of the pain but because she had had to admit at last to both him and herself that Owen Parry had been one of the Scotch Cattle who had dragged her from her home.
He focused on Parry again, his mind coldly furious, his own pain and near-exhaustion forgotten, the skills he had learned from a master suddenly remembered. He waited for an opening, for a momentary dropping of guard—not difficult at this stage of the fight, when they were both on the verge of collapse. And then with one powerful right and all his remaining strength, he hit Owen full in the face and felled him.
They had both been down before. Both had got up each time, shrugging off aid from their corners. But this time Parry lay where he was, facedown on the thin heather, breathing heavily. He had not lost consciousness, but the strength and the will to get up and fight on had gone from him.
The men of Cwmbran watched in awe and near-silence. It was many years since any man had dared face Owen Parry’s fists and even more years since any man had put him down. Those who had considered the aristocratic owner of Cwmbran an effete weakling—especially after the hasty way he had given in to the threat of a strike—looked uneasily at the evidence to the contrary stretched out on the ground in the empty square they surrounded.
Alex strode back to the rise from which he had addressed them earlier and slid his whip out from beneath the mound of his clothes. Men fell away from either side of him as he walked back again. He stood over the prostrate form of Owen Parry, feet apart, whip clenched in his right hand, gazing down at him. Owen watched him. He had made no move to get up and had waved away his seconds with weary annoyance. He had made no move to roll over onto his back or otherwise protect himself from the promised punishment.
“The whips were wet last night,” he said, defiance in his voice. “They were wielded full force.”
Alex gazed down at him for a long time. Parry would not move, he knew. He would lie there and take his punishment. But Siân had been given no choice. She had been spread-eagled on the ground, wrists and ankles tied to stakes. Wet whips. Wielded full force.
“Coward!” Owen Parry hissed up at him suddenly. “Are you afraid to draw a little blood, Craille? Or afraid that your arm is not strong enough to do so?”
Alex felt sick suddenly. Hatred upon hatred. Violence upon violence. An eye for an eye. He dropped his whip onto Owen Parry’s back and turned away.
“I’ll leave you to your conscience, Parry,” he said, “and I will hope sincerely that it will pain you far worse and for far longer than the lash of a whip.” He walked away toward his clothes.
“Right, you, Owen,” Emrys Rhys growled from behind him. “This is for Siân, you bloody cowardly bastard.”
There was the whistle of a whip, a thud as it connected with flesh, a grunt.
Alex did not look back. He dressed himself with slow deliberateness, ignoring the stiffness of his muscles and the soreness of his flesh.
The men were no longer silent as he walked down the mountain a few minutes later, minus his whip. He could hear a swell of sound from behind him. He wondered who would ultimately win the battle that had been fought that day—Owen Parry or himself.
He wondered if Siân still slept.
* * *
She had woken up at last and knew where she was and why she was there. She must have slept for a long time, she thought. She had had no idea that the effects of a drug could be so powerful. She shrugged her shoulders tentatively one at a time. Her back was sore again—the drug was wearing off, then—but not so painful that it enclosed her world in a nightmarish vise, as it had done that morning when she had come to work and sat with Verity.
She edged her legs over the side of the bed and sat up slowly and gingerly. The door on the opposite side of the room must lead to a dressing room, she guessed. She needed one badly. Her legs felt rather as if they were made of cotton wool but they conveyed her where she wanted to go and brought her back to the bed again five minutes later. She sank down onto it gratefully. It was a powerful drug, he had said. Powerful, indeed. She closed her eyes. Her back was tingling, but lying still eased the pain. She supposed that she must learn to live with it for several weeks. It had been a severe whipping. Perhaps the men wielding the whips had tried to make up for the fact that they were to give only fifteen lashes instead of the planned twenty.
She had intended,
when she got up, to go home. Gran would be worried. But she would be unable to get home. She was still so very tired. There was a voice in her memory—Miss Haines’s voice?—telling her that a message had been sent to Gran and Grandad that she would be staying at the castle at least for tonight.
She sighed with sleepy contentment. She would not have to make the effort. She could stay where she was. And sleep.
Someone had called her his little one. There had been a tenderness in his voice that she had yearned and yearned for all her life. He had cried over her. Dada, she had called him. Not Father or Papa, but Dada. There had always been an aching emptiness in her because there had never been any man to call Dada. An emptiness made worse by the fact that there was a man who might have been called that but never had. The man who had fathered her.
Dada, she had called him. In her dream. It must have been a dream. She ached to believe that it had been reality. But it had been a drug-induced dream.
“Siân?”
She had not heard the door open and close. She must have dozed off again. She opened her eyes and smiled.
“Alexander.”
“How is the back?” he asked.
“Bearable,” she said. “I am still drugged.”
“Good,” he said. “You needed its help.”
“Yes.” Her eyes roamed over his face. She swallowed. “You have been fighting?”
He nodded.
“Because of me?” she whispered. “Owen?”
He nodded again.
She closed her eyes. “Does he look as bad as you?” she asked.
“Worse,” he said. He spoke very quietly. “All the men of Cwmbran now know that you were wrongly accused and convicted, Siân, that the whips were given to an innocent woman. All watched you being avenged.”
“No one has beaten Owen in a fight for as far back as I can remember,” she said.
