Longing

by Mary Balogh

  “Then I am coming too,” she said firmly.

  There were some hearty cheers and a few ribald comments from the men who were within earshot, and some gentle persuasions from Iestyn to go home, but Siân walked stubbornly on. If they would not release Iestyn, then she would go with him to protect him.

  But word of her presence in the column somehow reached farther down the line. A short while later a grim-faced Owen appeared beside her.

  “I might have known it,” he said. “The only surprise would have been if you had not come, Siân. I should have the march stopped and have you publicly beaten.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, not even looking at him.

  “I will give you my word not to try to escape even if you release me,” Iestyn said. “But leave Siân alone, Owen. Let her go home.”

  “So that she can tell her bloody lover that we are on the march and that we have prisoners with us?” Owen said.

  “Lover?” Iestyn’s voice was shaking. “Watch your mouth, Owen Parry.”

  “It is all right, Iestyn,” Siân said quietly. “You need not fear that I will inform against you, Owen. I am going with you to Newport.”

  “Bloody right you are,” he said through his teeth. “And don’t think you are going to slip away into the hills once we get into trees, either. You and you.” He pointed at two men Siân did not even know, two men presumably from Penybont. “Find two lengths of rope and confine her wrists as with the men who had to be persuaded to come with us. And don’t let her go, or you will have me to answer to.”

  “Owen,” Siân said coldly, “how ridiculous you make yourself. I told you I am coming. I have no intention of escaping.”

  But he did not stay to listen. He lengthened his stride in order to return to his place at the head of the column, and one of the Penybont men, grinning, clamped a hand on her arm while the other went in search of rope. Five minutes later she was walking between the two of them, her wrists firmly bound.

  And so she marched for what seemed like days more than hours though the gloom of daylight gave way only gradually to the greater gloom of dusk and then the full dark of night. They stopped twice to eat at small public houses that were far too small to enable them all to get out of the wet even for a few minutes or to provide them all with adequate supplies of food and drink.

  Sometimes they sang to keep up their spirits. But mostly it was just the sheer press of numbers and an individual stubbornness of will that kept them all trudging onward down the valley until very late—Siân found it unbelievable that morning had not dawned hours ago—a halt was called and even those toward the back of the column could see that they had come to a place where hundreds—perhaps thousands—more men were waiting for them.

  They were at Cefn, just north of Newport, the men around Siân were beginning to say. John Frost was there and had been for hours, but he was in a roaring temper because they were late and the other two columns had made no appearance at all.

  They waited around in the cold and the wet and the dark for what seemed hours longer. It had seemed while they marched that there could be no greater discomfort or misery, and yet the wait was far worse. They did not know why they waited or for how long they were to stand around. They did not know where they were to go from here or for what purpose.

  Some of the men, sullen and almost mutinous, began to wonder if there was any plan or organization at all. Or any leader capable of making some decision.

  And then finally there was the suggestion of morning on the horizon and the darkness began to lift. And finally too they were on the move again. Through the means of imperfect communication, they gathered that John Frost was not going to wait any longer for the other columns to arrive. Already his planned march on the town was hours later than scheduled. They were to circle around the town and enter it from the southwest. They were to march to the Westgate Inn, the largest building in Newport, and the focal point of its existence.

  Word was somehow passed down the line that prisoners were to be untied.

  “I suppose they feel that you will not desert now, fach,” one of Siân’s jailers said as she rubbed at her wrists. “It will be safer to stay with the column. You stay next to me and I will shield you from harm.”

  “Thank you.” Siân smiled at him. He had done his best through the night to keep her cheerful. He had even released her once and persuaded his companion to do likewise so that she could go into the trees to put herself comfortable, and had stood guard to make sure that no one interrupted her and embarrassed her.

  * * *

  Something went drastically wrong. No one afterward could ever explain exactly what it was. Perhaps the best explanation was that it was an explosive situation and that it was almost inevitable that a spark be ignited. Who ignited it was not the important question. Someone did as someone inevitably was fated to do.

  The large column that descended on the Westgate Inn was armed, the front and side lines with guns. Inside the inn the mayor waited with special constables and soldiers, all armed, all ready to face trouble. Some of the demonstrators entered the inn and shots were fired. No one ever knew who shot first.

  But the demonstrators got the worst of it. Several of them were fired on at point-blank range inside the inn and yet could not retreat quickly because of the press of more men behind them. As some demonstrators, hearing the sound of shots from outside, broke windows in their attempt to get inside to help their comrades, the soldiers began to direct their fire outside the inn as well as inside.

  Shortly after the demonstrators had begun to arrive at the inn, and long before all of them had done so, word began to spread that the crowd was being fired upon and the order was given to retreat. It did not take long for panic to spread.

  The demonstration broke up as hundreds of men fled along every available street or hid in any available building. It did not help matters that one of the missing columns, arrived at last, was trying to enter the town from the north, the route along which most of the fleers were escaping.

  * * *

  Siân was not outside the hotel when the shooting began, but she was close enough to hear the sound of shots. It felt rather as if the bottom was falling out of her stomach, she thought even before others reacted and confirmed her suspicion that it was indeed guns she heard.

  She looked around, panicked, for Iestyn, but there was no sign of him. She had not seen her grandfather or Emrys or Huw all night, but she knew they must be up ahead. And up ahead were the guns.

  And then the crowd ahead of her was pressing back and breaking into a run and panic became a blind and a clawing thing that threatened madness and death. Siân’s staunch companion from Penybont took a firm hold on her arm and drew her close against him, but she shook him off and found herself pushing against the tide of humanity. She was reacting with as little thought as they. Pure instinct, pure panic, drove her forward into danger.

  Iestyn. Emrys, Grandad, Huw. She had to find them. She had to know they were safe.

  By the time she had fought her way into the square before the inn, it was no longer dense with humanity but was filled instead with fleeing men and dotted with some who lay still on the ground. Siân looked about her with panic and terror. Where were they? Were they on the ground? Were they dead? She ran out into the open.

  But before she had taken more than two steps, an iron-hard arm came around her waist and lifted her right off her feet.

  “All the devils in hell!” a voice bellowed in her ear. “Are you mad?”

  “Iestyn.” She was sobbing. “I have to find Iestyn.”

  “Get out of here,” Owen said. “They are shooting. Aah!”

  She crashed painfully down onto cobbles, her forehead thudding against them, almost robbing her of consciousness for a few moments. Owen’s weight came down heavily on top of her. But she was still sobbing.

  “I have to find Iestyn,�
� she said. “Please, Owen, I have to find him.”

  It was only gradually that she became aware that something was wrong. Foolish to think of something being wrong under the circumstances, but she had the unmistakable feeling that something was. He should be shaking her, yelling at her, threatening her.

  “Owen?”

  He grunted.

  Somehow, despite his great weight, she turned herself over under him. His head flopped against her shoulder.

  “Owen?” she whispered again.

  There was a curious silence all about them. Everyone must have fled.

  “Cariad.” His voice was very faint.

  She got her arms about him. But the wetness she felt with one hand was not the expected wetness of rain. It was warm and thick to the touch.

  “You have been hurt?” she asked foolishly. She listened to her voice as if it belonged to someone else. She felt almost as if she was above her own body, looking down. A spectator.

  There was no answer. She knew with absolute certainty that there would be no answer. Ever.

  Cariad, he had said.

  His last word.

  Cariad.

  She held Owen’s lifeless body in her arms and closed her eyes.

  Time was a meaningless commodity. She did not know how much of it passed before she opened her eyes. Someone was leaning over her and then coming down on his knees beside her.

  “He is dead,” she told the Marquess of Craille in a voice that matched the announcement. “He died saving my life.”

  * * *

  He had managed things badly, Alex admitted to himself as the night wore on. Unbelievably badly. It came to feel almost as if he were in one of those dreams in which a person is trying to run and cannot seem to propel himself forward or trying to accomplish something but unable even to start.

  His first instinct when he left Angharad was to rush to Siân’s home to find out if indeed she had gone up the mountain in pursuit of her brother-in-law. It was an instinct he followed. He took the time only to grab a cloak and hat and went into town at a run. It would take as long to have a horse saddled and ride there, he thought, as to go there on foot.

  But of course she was gone. Her grandmother looked at him with wide and frightened eyes and tried to pretend that nothing was amiss at all. He grasped her upper arms and looked intently into her face.

  “I know they have gone,” he said. “You must tell me if Siân has gone too, ma’am. I shall go and bring her home for you.”

  She nodded. “Mari sent one of the children to tell me she went after Iestyn,” she said.

  There was a man sitting silently beside the fire. He was neither Siân’s grandfather nor her uncle, Alex saw when he looked fully at him. He frowned at a sudden suspicion.

  “You are the man who brought the news about Iestyn Jones?” he asked.

  The man shrank back against the chair. His eyes shifted from Alex to Mrs. Rhys.

  “I shall want a word with you when I return,” Alex said curtly, and left the house.

  He half ran up the mountain in the hope that the men would still be gathered there—and that Siân would be doing nothing more dangerous than spying on them as she had done on two previous occasions. Even apart from Siân, he was lividly angry. He would do nothing to interfere with their freedom to march, he had told the men, provided they did nothing to coerce anyone into joining them. They had defied him.

  He had accomplished nothing at all in his months at Cwmbran.

  The meeting place was empty. And though he shaded his eyes and squinted off into the distance, so was the valley below. The men must be well on their way. Perhaps Angharad had been wrong about the time. She had spent the afternoon in bed with Barnes. Probably more time had passed than she had realized. Though over two hours was long enough.

  Despite the coldness and wetness that had already seeped beneath his clothing, Alex was aware of an extra coldness about his heart. Siân had not returned home. He had seen no sign of her on the mountain. That could mean only one thing.

  She had been caught and taken along on the march.

  And he had wasted precious time running after her on foot. There was at least a mile and a half of rough hillside between him and his stables. Instinct would have sent him off and running again—running in pursuit of his marching men—and Siân. But belatedly he decided to use thought and common sense. It would take time to go back for a horse. But in the long run he would be faster. It would take the men many hours to march to Newport. He would overtake them long before they arrived there.

  Quite what he would do, one man against hundreds, when he came up to them, he did not know. He would think of that when the time came.

  And so he went back for a horse—because it was the sensible thing to do and he should have done it to start with. And while it was being saddled, he went into the house to change into dry clothes and to kiss Verity and tell her he would be away on business until tomorrow.

  And then he galloped away along the valley, in pursuit of a column of men who could march at only a fraction of his pace.

  Except that his horse threw a shoe after less than an hour because he was pushing it too hard over rough terrain, taking risks that he had no business taking. And because he would not abandon the horse in the middle of nowhere, he had to lead it slowly to the nearest smithy—a walk at snail’s pace of well over an hour.

  Good sense in the end had served him no better than impetuosity. He had to walk the rest of the way and was severely hampered during the night by the oppressive darkness and his unfamiliarity with the landscape. For long stretches, when trees blocked out even the suggestion of light from the sky, he had to walk with his arms stretched out ahead of him, like a blind man.

  He ground his teeth impotently, worried sick about Siân. And about his men. But mainly and constantly about Siân.

  * * *

  And so he arrived at Newport too late. Just too late as was the nature of nightmares. Men by the hundreds were fleeing in undisciplined panic, wildness and fear in their eyes. He caught one of them by the arm and forced him to a halt, though the man took a swing at him. He was no one Alex recognized.

  “What has happened?” he demanded to know.

  “Thousands of soldiers,” the man gasped out. “All shooting at us. Hunting us down.”

  “Where?” Alex snapped out the question. “Where were they shooting from?”

  “There,” the man said, waving back vaguely into the town with his free arm.

  Alex let him go. He drew a few steadying breaths. It would be the easiest thing in the world to panic himself. Where was she? Where to God was she? How was he to find her in the midst of this madness?

  It was somehow easy to find his way to the focal point of the whole trouble—a cobbled square with a large building to one side of it, seemingly an inn. It was strangely empty of panicked men, like the eye of a storm. But it was swarming with armed constables and uniformed soldiers. They were turning over dead bodies with their boots and pointing bayonets at those few who were groaning or even screaming from their wounds.

  Alex felt cold at heart again. They were all men, one quick glance around at the dead and wounded revealed to him. But the welling of relief the realization brought lasted for only a moment. God in heaven. His worst fears had been realized. There had been a bloody battle here, or more likely a bloody massacre. There were perhaps twenty dead lying on the ground. Were any of them his men?

  His mind was almost paralyzed with anxiety over Siân’s whereabouts, but he forced himself to walk about the square, looking down at the dead and the wounded. He breathed a fresh sigh of relief each time he looked into a stranger’s face.

  And then he saw two bodies tangled together, the one sprawled over the other. And his heart lurched again as he noticed that the lower body wore skirts. She was a woman.

  He was not sure ho
w his legs carried him across the short distance. But they did. And he stood looking down, his heart turned to stone.

  She was wet and disheveled and as pale as parchment. Her forehead was smeared with blood. Sprawled across her, his head cradled on her shoulder, her arms about him, was Owen Parry, a huge bloodstain on the back of his coat.

  Alex gazed down at them, unable to move or to think or to feel.

  And then she opened her eyes.

  He dropped to his knees beside her, hardly daring to hope that this was more than her last gasp of life.

  “He is dead,” she said to him, her voice flat but quite firm. “He died saving my life.”

  She was, he realized—and he was glad that he was on his knees so that they could not buckle under him—very much alive.

  “Siân,” he said to her. “Siân, my love.”

  26

  SIN lay lethargically on the ground, holding Owen. His weight was squashing the breath from her. Her head was sore. She was cold and wet. But now suddenly there was only one thought in her mind, one focus of her being. He had come. All would be well now. He had come.

  “Alexander.” She tried to smile at him.

  And then there were others there, scarlet-coated soldiers, one of them pointing a gun down at her, while two of them grabbed Alex by the arms and dragged him to his feet.

  “The game is over,” one soldier said roughly. “You can dry off and cool your heels in jail for a while, the pair of you. That one is dead by the look of him.”

  But while the soldier whose gun was pointed at Siân gave Owen’s body a great shove with his boot so that he rolled off her, Alex was transformed before her eyes. He shrugged off the hold of his captors with apparent ease and looked at them with cold hauteur. Despite the fact that he was soaked through and liberally splattered with mud, there was obviously no mistaking the fact that his clothes were costly and fashionable. And even if one discounted the clothes, there was something about him, Siân thought, some indefinable air, that would have convinced the soldiers that he was not of the common rabble. They stared at him without trying to take hold of him again.