Longing
Page 41
“Yes,” Siân said.
“Siân”—he set his cup down in its saucer on the table—“forgive me. I was married already when I met Marged the year the eisteddfod was in Penybont. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and so I took her, wronging both her and my wife. And you. And yet, to be honest with you, I am not sure I would have married her even if I had been free. It is not done, you know, and I was never a man with the courage to break new ground. But I always loved her—and you.”
“Morality is not a simple thing,” she said, “though it should be. It sounds simple enough when one listens to sermons and reads good books. But it is not. Love and morality are not always in agreement, and sometimes love is stronger. Perhaps it should not be, but it is. How can I not forgive you? I have loved Alexander. And besides I would not be here if you had not given in to your love for Mam, would I?” She smiled.
He left soon after, having hugged her tightly again and assured her once more that she was doing the right thing. He would be back next week, he told her, unless he had a favorable reply to his letter before then.
She was not a strong person, Siân thought, sitting down beside the fire again and gazing into its dancing flames. If she were strong, she would have taken the opportunity of the cottage and gone with her father now, today. It was what she had longed for since waking up from her lengthy sleep and discovering that there was only intense pain to wake up to. It was why she had written to him. She had been desperate to get away, to put the memories behind her and the terrible danger of seeing Alexander again and bringing on more pain.
But when it had come to the point, she had not had the courage to go. She had made an excuse to stay for one more week.
It was absurd to feel that one could not go on living when there was no physical illness. She knew it was absurd. Her head told her so. She knew that the pain would recede and that life would reassert itself. She knew that at the age of twenty-five she might still hope that life had a great deal of richness and happiness in store. But it was the heart that was ruling today.
And her heart was breaking. Her heart felt as if it could not go on beating.
Although a day and a night and part of another day had passed since their good-bye, she still felt that distinctive soreness that was not really soreness inside where he had loved her four separate times. And her breasts were still tender to the touch. She set a hand flat over her abdomen. And she still yearned to discover that she had been fruitful for him. She wanted his child to be in her womb.
Oh, yes, it was definitely the heart that was ruling today.
And yet not a word to suggest that perhaps good-bye had not been quite good-bye after all. Just the almost silent journey home—two people yearning to be one as they had been one through the night, both sleeping and waking, but now very decisively two. Two separate entities. Two different worlds.
And then the terrible anticlimax of his slipping away while Gran was sobbing over her.
Emptiness was a terrifying thing, Siân thought. It sounded harmless—emptiness, nothingness. But emptiness was not a nothingness. It was a something. It was a heavy, all-encompassing, smothering load of despair.
She felt quite, quite empty.
* * *
There was much to do. There were his men to get back to work and a meeting to arrange—at the chapel again. There were arrangements to be made to bring home the body of Owen Parry. There was Iestyn Jones to talk to—the boy stood in his study, looking him steadily in the eye, and accepted the job Alex offered, promising to give it every effort of which he was capable though he had no experience of such work. The fact that his right arm was in a sling would not hinder him from beginning immediately, he explained—he was left-handed.
If the boy showed dedication and aptitude and character—all of which Alex fully expected—then next autumn Alex would send him to university or whatever type of college trained nonconformist ministers. The Reverend Llewellyn would be able to supply the necessary information.
And there were other, less pleasant matters to handle. It was not necessary to keep the mind dead, Alex found, just to keep it crowded with other matters. It would be best if he continued to do so for another two months. Then she would be gone to her new teaching post in Carmarthenshire. It would be best to let her go without another word. It would be unfair to offer what she might in a moment of weakness accept and make her unhappy for the rest of her life. She would not be happy having a function only in his bed. Neither would he.
Siân was a woman for his life, not just for his bed.
And yet he shied away from the implications of the thought. It would not be right either for her or for himself. He could not make it right just by wishing it were. But by God, he wished it. If he did not keep his mind and his days occupied with other thoughts and actions, he would go mad with the wishing.
And he might end up letting his heart rule his head. No good could come of that. Could it? But he would not let doubts intrude.
There were those less pleasant matters. He summoned Gwilym Jenkins to the castle. He suspected that just the fact of having to come there would put the fear of God into the man. He had Jenkins shown into his study and deliberately kept him waiting there a full ten minutes.
But he did not dismiss the man from his job or impose any punishment other than the visit itself and a severe tongue-lashing. Jenkins was the one who had put about the rumors that had resulted in Siân’s whipping, and he was the one who had sent her off in pursuit of the marchers to Newport and into a danger that might well have proved a great deal worse for her than had been the case.
But Alex did not dismiss him. The man had himself been whipped and had had all his furniture destroyed before his very eyes. And he had a wife and five children to support.
Alex sent him back to work with only one penance to perform. Gwilym Jenkins was to attend the meeting in the chapel, and he was to bring his wife with him if any of the children were old enough to look after the others.
And then there was Josiah Barnes to be dealt with. The man had worked hard for twelve years and made the Cwmbran mine and works efficient and profitable. If he had run the industry harshly, then so had every other owner in the surrounding valleys. And yet the man had done some dastardly things. He had allowed chagrin over the fact that Siân had refused to marry him seven years ago to fester in him and turn into vicious spite. And that spite had hurt her reputation and caused her anguish and terror and severe physical harm. In the Newport march it might have cost her her liberty or even her life—Alex frequently found himself waking up from sleep in a cold sweat, remembering how close she had been to Parry when the latter had been killed. The bullet might just as easily have taken her life.
Barnes just might have been a murderer.
And so Barnes was dismissed from his job. Alex forced himself to treat the matter in a dispassionate, professional manner, though his hands itched to deal out punishment as they had dealt it out to Owen Parry after the whipping. Barnes was summoned to the office, given a chance to defend himself, and dismissed when he could not do so. He was dismissed without a reference. Alex had agonized over that point, imagining what sort of a future he was dooming his former agent to. But he could not in all conscience vouch for the man’s character and integrity to another prospective employer.
He gave Josiah Barnes three days to leave his cottage and Cwmbran.
“If I see you here after that time, I will physically remove you myself,” he said coldly, face-to-face with a furious, defiant Barnes. “If I ever hear of your being within a one-mile radius of Mrs. Jones, I will kill you. I will not ask if you understand. You are dismissed.”
“You will be bankrupt before spring,” Josiah Barnes said. “All your workers will be starving and rioting. I will greet the news with all delight.”
Alex looked steadily and coldly at him until he turned and stalked from the room.
She answered the door herself, half hiding in the shadow behind it. Alex looked, appalled, at bruised cheeks, a blackened eye, swollen closed, and a swollen lip. She disappeared completely behind the door when she saw him.
“Ah, Angharad,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door quietly. “Barnes?”
“He found out,” she said. “He guessed. But I don’t care. Siân Jones came back alive.”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, “I am so sorry.” He closed his eyes briefly and remembered telling Gwilym Jenkins that he would be speaking with him on his return from Newport. Jenkins would have reported to Barnes, and Barnes would have drawn the obvious conclusion. And yet he, Alex, had promised her that no one would ever know who had told him. “Are there hidden bruises too?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. But she blurted as he took her hands in his, “He took me over his knee. Just like a naughty child. It still hurts to sit down. I am glad he never married me. I would have seen him more clearly from the start if he was not rich and powerful, I suppose. There is wicked I was to want to move up in the world. I deserved what I got. That is what my dada says. I will be run out of chapel if the Reverend Llewellyn finds out.”
Alex squeezed her hands. “You have a good heart, Angharad,” he said. “You put yourself in danger and gave up your hopes for the sake of your friend. No one can show any greater love than that—I am sure you know the Bible as well as I do, if not better.”
She hung her head and looked suddenly self-conscious with her hands in his. He released them.
“You work for the minister,” he said. “And you worked for Barnes. And Parry too, I believe?”
She swallowed and nodded.
“I would like to offer you employment at the castle if you are interested,” he said. “Miss Haines has been complaining of too few maids now that my daughter and I are in residence.” Miss Haines had complained of no such thing. “Would you like to call on her and discuss the matter—perhaps next week when your face should be back to rights?”
Angharad regarded him from one wide eye. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, please. I’ll be getting a pension, but I do like to work.”
He smiled. “I shall tell Miss Haines to expect you one day next week, then,” he said, his hand on the door latch. “And thank you again, Angharad, for your courage and your goodness. I shall consider myself in your debt for a long time to come.”
“Thank you, my lordship,” she said, looking flustered, as he let himself out.
Perhaps it was as well, he thought as he strode along the street, that he had visited her after his dismissal of Barnes. He was tempted even now to call at the lodge cottage on his way home and beat the stuffing out of the man. But he would not do it. Violence only seemed to breed more violence. And when all was said and done, the loss of his job and all his prospects was probably the worst possible punishment for Josiah Barnes.
Yes, it was the best possible course he could take, he decided during the first few days after his return from Newport, to keep himself busy, to keep his mind active, to fill his leisure hours with amusing his daughter. He would not think about Siân until after Christmas. Until after she had gone.
Perhaps then it would be safe to think about her. And safe to remember.
But not now. Not yet.
* * *
If possible, the chapel was more crowded than it was for Sunday services on the morning of Owen Parry’s funeral. There were a few who had always openly opposed him and more who had been intimidated by his physical strength and his power. There were those who had been shocked by the revelation that he was a member of the Scotch Cattle and that he had actually participated in the raid that had carried off his fiancée for whipping. There were those—mostly women—who blamed him for the fiasco of the demonstration on Newport, though by some miracle he had been the only casualty of that march from Cwmbran.
But there was scarcely a person in Cwmbran who did not respect him and who did not feel that his loss somehow diminished them all. Besides, he had been one of their own, and despite everything—despite the heightened feelings of the past months and the fears and the violence—their sense of community was central to their very lives.
Owen Parry had no remaining family. But in a sense every man, woman, and child in Cwmbran was his family. They turned out in force to mourn him and to raise the roof off the chapel with their singing so that he could not miss hearing them even from his place in heaven. They came to lay him to rest and to sing again in the cemetery across the river, under the wide sky, in case after all the chapel roof had prevented their songs of praise from reaching him in heaven.
The male voice choir lined up in their usual order, a deliberate and conspicuous space between two of the baritones to show that someone was missing, that the choir was the poorer for his absence. They sang “Hiraeth” for one who no longer had to feel the nameless longings that only prisoners of the flesh felt. They sang “Hiraeth” for one who had progressed past longing into the great fulfillment of the hereafter.
Siân sat in her grandfather’s pew at the front of the church and later stood close to the open grave, too numb to weep. He had wanted to marry her—she might now be experiencing widowhood again. He had wanted her to go up the mountain with him. He had threatened her with violence if she ever crossed his will after marriage. He had threatened violence to save her from a whipping. And then he had participated in that night of terror and violence—and had persuaded those with him to reduce her sentence from twenty to fifteen lashes. He had stopped the whipping when he had seen her biting her lips to shreds and stuffed a rag between her teeth for her to bite on. He had had her bound when he found her among the men on the march to Newport. He had cursed and yelled at her when he found her on the square before the Westgate Inn.
And then he had died for her.
She had held him in her arms as he died. He had called her cariad.
Owen. It was impossible to believe that the cold, silent coffin held Owen. All that power and energy and determination and passion and tenderness.
Owen.
Her eyes were drawn unwillingly to the gap in the lines of the male voice choir when they were out in the cemetery. And back to the coffin being lowered into the earth. As Mam had been lowered. And Gwyn. And Dafydd.
Owen. Ah, Owen.
Emrys’s arm came about her shoulders and held her like a vise. And finally she felt the tears course down her cheeks and drip off her chin. She would not brush them away, or look away from the fact of his death, or hide her face against Emrys’s shoulder.
Love had many faces. Owen had worn one of them. She did not try to hide from the pain of her grief for him or try to analyze the love she had felt for him. She had loved him and she grieved for his death.
He had been a part of her life. A part of her life was gone with him.
The Marquess of Craille was standing close by when she finally turned away from the grave. She had known he was at the chapel though she had not once turned her head to see. She had known he was at the cemetery. He took the few steps that separated them now.
“I loved him,” she said, looking up into his eyes.
He did not smile though there was a smile in him. She felt it. “I know,” he said gently. And he took both her cold hands in his, squeezed them almost painfully, and raised one of them to his lips. “I am sorry for your grief, Siân.”
Emrys still had an arm about her shoulders. She did not know or care who else saw or heard.
I loved him. I love you. The many faces of love.
The many faces of pain.
29
EMRYS knew that Josiah Barnes was leaving. Everyone knew that. Emrys even knew the full reason, t
hough rumor had to suffice for most people. He knew that Barnes was to leave the day of the funeral. But it was not until he was at the funeral that he found out what had happened to Angharad Lewis.
He took Siân home and left her in the care of his mother before changing out of his Sunday clothes and paying a call at the lodge house in Glanrhyd Park. He prayed as he strode through the town and past the ironworks that Barnes had not already left.
He had not.
Angharad’s father had gone to the Three Lions with a crowd of other men after the funeral. She was at home alone when Emrys knocked on the door. She only half opened it and peeped fearfully around it.
“Oh,” she said, leaving the door ajar and hurrying away from it into the room, “it is you. Dada is at the pub.”
“Angharad,” he said, stepping inside the house and shutting the door behind him, “Craille has sent him away. But even if he had not, Barnes would not be bothering you again.”
She turned her head and looked over her shoulder. He was holding up his hands, palms in. His knuckles were red and raw. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Sit down at the table,” she said, “and I will bathe your hands for you.”
He did as she told him and sat in silence while she filled a bowl, half with cold water and half with water from the kettle on the fire. She selected a soft cloth from a drawer and then came to stand beside him at the table. She bathed his hands with trembling care.
“Shall I find bandages?” she asked when she had finished. She had not once looked up into his face.
“Don’t be daft,” he said.
She stepped back. “Go, then, Emrys Rhys,” she said. “And thank you.”
“Angharad,” he said softly, “I have applied for Owen Parry’s job and his house. Maybe I won’t get either. But Craille is talking about building more houses in the spring.”