by Mary Balogh
"I appointed Harley as my steward at Tegfan because he was the best man available," Geraint said. "I have never had cause to question his running of the estate." Almost the only thing Geraint knew about Tegfan was that it was prosperous.
"You would do well to leave everything in his hands even if you plan a lengthy stay," Sir Hector said. "He is a good man."
"And after all," Lady Stella added, an edge of malice to her voice, "you were not educated to run an estate, Wyvern."
It was not strictly true. His education from the age of twelve on had been devoted to little else. What his aunt meant, of course, was that he had not been raised from birth to run an estate. Geraint inclined his head, rose to take his leave, and did not dignify her remark with an answer.
It was the fourth day before he ventured beyond the park to the village and the farms. He felt strangely reluctant to meet people he might or might not know. Almost shy. He wondered how many he would remember. He wondered how many would remember him. Though he could not expect that they would have forgotten him, he supposed ruefully. His was the sort of story on which local mythology could be expected to thrive for a century or more.
He went first to call on the Reverend Llwyd—the Anglican vicar had already waited on him at Tegfan. It seemed the courteous thing to do, to call first on the nonconformist minister, whose chapel most of the villagers had used to attend and probably still did. And it seemed not quite the thing under the circumstances to hold a grudge.
The Reverend Llwyd looked older and thinner and not as tall or as formidable as he had used to appear. He still dressed severely in clerical black. He wore wire spectacles now. Geraint had to admit to himself that he rather enjoyed looking down at the man and receiving his bow and his formal speech of welcome—delivered in English. He rather enjoyed making a stiff acknowledgment of the minister's greeting and taking the offered seat in the manse parlor. He could remember the time when he had been afraid of the man. The Reverend Llwyd had driven his mother out of the chapel when she had appeared there large with child—with himself. She had already been turned away from Tegfan. It was the Reverend Llwyd and his deacons who had made it impossible for her to live in the village or to get work at any of the farms. It was they who had driven her onto the upland moors.
"It is an honor to have you back in our midst," the Reverend Llwyd was saying now. He was squeezing his hands together and nodding his head. "Praise the Lord that he brought you safely here. The road offers many perils to the unwary traveler."
Geraint had been half-afraid, half-hopeful that it would have been Marged who had opened the door to him a few minutes before. But Marged was only two years his junior. She must be twenty-six now. She would no longer be here at the manse. She was probably not even in Glynderi.
"I trust Miss Llwyd is well," he said. She was probably no longer Miss Llwyd.
"Marged?" The minister stopped rubbing his hands. "Well indeed, I thank you, my lord, the dear Lord be praised. Busy, of course. Always busy. It do not seem right for a woman to be doing a man's work, but she do refuse to come back here to live with her dada, though she would be very welcome, I always tell her. But she do feel responsible for Eurwyn's mam and gran, and I can only honor her for that."
"Eurwyn?" Geraint raised his eyebrows. She was married, then? He had known she must be by this time. The slight sinking of the heart that he felt was involuntary.
"A nasty business, that." The Reverend Llwyd looked almost flustered and he drew off his glasses to polish them with a large handkerchief. "It was handled in the only way possible, of course, by the authorities. It is a pity the outcome was so tragic, but it was no one's fault. These things happen. They are in the Lord's hands."
Eurwyn Evans''! Old Madoc Evans's son? The child Geraint had kept himself well beyond reach of Madoc's boot after once being kicked painfully in the backside with it. Marged had married his son? And he had died in some tragedy?
"She lives on the farm?" he asked.
"At Ty-Gwyn, yes," the minister said. "The White House, that is," he translated, perhaps assuming that the Earl of Wyvern had forgotten every word of Welsh he had ever spoken. "Still white it is, my lord. Marged whitewashed it just last spring. She is a good worker, I will give her that."
He tried to picture Marged living on a farm, doing the work of a man. Whitewashing the longhouse. Refusing to move back home because there were two other women who presumably could not carry on without her help. Marged, who had loved books and music, who had played the harp well enough to draw tears to the eyes and yearning to the heart, and whose singing voice had been unequaled in a country of lovely singing voices.
But yes, he could imagine that it was true. There had never been anything soft or shrinking about Marged. Quite the opposite. She had been the first child to adopt him when he was seven and she was five and she had spied him hiding in a hedgerow behind the village, wistfully watching while she gathered berries with a crowd of other children, all singing and laughing. He had been a mere waif, with skinny arms and legs and rags and bare feet. She had smiled at him and spoken politely to him as if he were a real person and had offered him a palmful of berries.
She had continued to be his friend even after her father, the Reverend Llwyd, had explained to her that Geraint Penderyn was not a suitable playmate for the children of Glynderi. And even at the age of five she had done so openly, defying her father, scorning to deceive him.
Aled had become his friend too. Aled and Marged. Until he was torn away from them and forbidden to have any further dealings with them, even by letter, though his mother had taught him to read and write.
He got to his feet now to take his leave of the Reverend Llwyd and received with a curt nod the man's bow and his effusive thanks for the honor of the visit.
Chapter 3
He had intended making one or two other calls in the village. One in particular. Aled Rhoslyn had succeeded his father in his blacksmith's business a few months before Geraint came home for his mother's funeral. And he still was the village blacksmith. His forge was beside the chapel. Geraint had intended to call there.
But he found himself unexpectedly reluctant. One of his few good memories of childhood was Aled's friendship. But time had passed. They would have grown apart. Geraint was content with his life as it now was, and he had a number of close friends. But he did not want to be confronted with the knowledge that his first friendship with someone of his own gender no longer existed.
Perhaps some other day. He walked past the blacksmith's forge and was aware of faces at windows the length of the village street and nodded to the one curtsying woman he passed—he did not recognize her. But he did not stop anywhere. He had walked to the village. He found himself walking now beyond it, away from the park and the house. He found himself walking along beside the river and turning onto the rough path that led gradually upward into the hills. He followed almost instinctively a route that he must have walked a thousand times when he was a child.
He knew where Madoc Evans's farm was, more lately Eurwyn Evans's, now Marged's. He had passed it numerous times, though he had never been beyond its gate. It was while standing on the bars of the gate one spring day, watching a new calf walk about the yard on spindly legs, that he had encountered the boot of Madoc Evans, who had come up the lane behind him, unheard. Ragamuffins from the uplands were not welcome near the farms of the respectable.
Geraint paused after he had walked perhaps a mile. Was he going to call on her? He had hoped she was not at the manse or in the village. He had hoped she had married and moved away onto someone else's land. He had hoped never to see her again. And yet, having heard that she was at Ty-Gwyn, he had turned his footsteps immediately in that direction.
He turned to look back the way he had come. The gradient had not seemed steep, and yet he was high up already. He was assaulted with the familiarity of the scene below him—the river, flowing straight until it bent to curve around and into the park of Tegfan; the trees and smooth lawns of th
e park, and the large stone house; the village stretched out along the river; the farms dotted about in the lowlands and on the hills, the fields, bare now in early spring, but each looking different from every other; the pastures, in which a few sheep and cattle were grazing.
He felt a sudden and unexpected wave of longing again—the same feeling he had had on the pavement in London when he had overheard the snippet of a conversation in Welsh.
But I miss the hills…
The hills had been a part of his childhood, a part of him. He had missed the hills, he remembered now, for weary years before forgetting them entirely, suppressing all memory of them until that meaningless encounter with two Welsh drovers had brought it jolting back. And the hills had beckoned again.
It had been much higher in the hills he had lived with his mother. He turned to look upward, but there was no clear view to the top. He would never again go up there. It was a place he did not want to see.
Would he go higher at all today? He looked broodingly about him. He could not see Ty-Gwyn, but he could see another farmhouse, built of stone, its roof neatly tiled with slate. It had been thatched when last he saw it. He thought for a moment. Mr. Williams. He was not sure he had ever known the man's first name. He had been a large and formidable-looking man. And yet occasionally when he had passed Geraint on the path, he had reached into a pocket and handed him a coin. Once, when he must have been on his way to market, he had given the boy a bunch of turnips and told him to take them to his mam for their dinner. And then, when Geraint had been scurrying away with his treasure, he had called him back and added two large brown farm eggs as an afterthought.
Mr. Williams had had a young daughter who used to run and hide when she saw Geraint coming, though he could remember her smiling shyly at him once or twice from behind her mother's skirts.
The Williams farm was his now, the Earl of Wyvern thought, if indeed it still belonged to the same man. Just as the Evans farm was his, and all the farms he could see from his vantage point, for as far as the eye could see. Perhaps he would call at the Williams farm this morning and then return home. He had no real wish to see Marged. And yet it seemed that his feet worked independently of his brain, for they carried him past the entrance to the short lane that would have taken him to the stone farmhouse, and led him upward.
And so ten minutes later he found himself again outside that gate, gazing in at the farmyard and the house of Ty-Gwyn. It looked so much the same that for a moment he felt disoriented. It was a longhouse, something so out of fashion that he had never seen one in England. It was one long, low building, the entrance to one side of the center, the house occupying the longer half, the cow barn the other. Animals and humans were housed together during the winter, separated by the passage from front door to back. The building was thatched and whitewashed. It was old-fashioned and certainly no symbol of wealth. And yet it was as neat as the proverbial pin.
His impression was formed in a mere moment. He did not have a chance to stand there and observe more fully. It was not a boot from behind that disturbed him this time, but the sight of a figure in the farmyard. She must have been feeding the single pig, which was in an open pen. It seemed she had even paused to talk to it or pet it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was the sight of him at the gate that had turned her utterly still.
He opened the gate and stepped inside onto the neatly swept path that led past the plot that would soon be planted to vegetables and into the yard itself. He walked along the path.
She did not move. She wore a plain and faded dress, which was covered by a large apron, slightly soiled from the morning's work though still crisp and white. She wore no cloak or hat, despite the chill of the breeze. Her light brown hair was pulled back from her face and confined in a simple knot at the back of her neck, though a few errant tendrils were blowing about her shoulders and face.
She was tall, as he remembered her, and well shaped. And as proud as she had ever been as the minister's daughter. She was standing with straight back and lifted chin and face devoid of all expression.
He knew instantly from that expression, or lack of expression, that she had not forgotten. At the age of eighteen he had been an unhappy, confused, and insecure boy, still not quite sure in which of two worlds he belonged. He had finally been allowed to return home on the death of his mother only to find that it was not home, that perhaps it never had been. Naively, he had expected people to welcome him, to rejoice in his change of fortune, to be apologetic for the way they had once rejected him and his mother. He had been very ready to forgive. But he had met reticence and suspicion and even some open hostility. Except in Aled and in Marged.
Marged. She had grown into a lovely sixteen-year-old. She had been beautiful and accomplished. She had played her harp for him and sung to him and had brought flooding back to him all his memories of Wales and of Welsh music. She had smiled at him and walked with him and held his hand and even kissed him. He had tumbled inevitably and deeply into love with her. He had been so desperate for love.
Too desperate. One afternoon up in the hills he had made an utter idiot of himself by pulling her to the ground and pawing her and trying with fumbling and totally inexperienced hands to get beneath her skirts. His head had been ringing from her resounding slap moments later and she had been running from him. The next day, when he had gone to the manse to apologize to her, she had treated him so coldly and been so much on her dignity and he had been so terrified and so embarrassed that he had turned utterly craven and directed all his conversation toward her father and had ignored her completely apart from one long and languid and insolent perusal of her body when her father was not looking. It was the mask behind which he had hidden all his hurt and guilt and insecurity. It was the mask he had worn for everyone else in the village except her and Aled. And now for her too.
He had returned to London the following day. He had not seen Marged since. And her look told him now that she had not forgotten. And that perhaps she had not forgiven, though it had been ten years ago and she must have realized during the intervening years what a gauche puppy he had been then.
He stopped six feet away from her. She was a woman now, he noticed. More beautiful than she had been as a girl.
"Marged," he said quietly.
She had been expecting him. Or if not exactly that, at least she had been aware since Sunday that he was at Tegfan, that Ty-Gwyn and all the land for miles around belonged to him, and that he might come at any time. She had prepared herself for his coming. She had prepared herself so that she would not be taken off guard.
And yet when she looked up from feeding old Nellie and saw him standing still and quiet at the gate, she felt rather as if a great fist had landed against her stomach with all the weight of a great arm behind it.
He opened the gate without invitation—he did not need an invitation—and came inside, walking slowly up the garden path and into the farmyard toward her. She watched him come, helpless to stop him, unable to move. He was dressed as she supposed English gentlemen of wealth and fashion dressed—such gentlemen were not in the habit of passing this way. He wore a long dark cloak with a single cape at the shoulders and had removed a tall hat. Beneath the cloak she could see a dark, full-skirted coat, ending several inches above his knees, and a dark green waistcoat and white shirt with starched collars and dark neckcloth. His dark, slim trousers hugged his legs. There was not a detail of his dress to be criticized.
And not a detail of the man himself either. He must have grown another few inches after the age of eighteen. He had been slim then and graceful. He was still slim, but he was a man now and not a boy. His shoulders and chest were broad. His waist and hips were slender. His dark hair was not as long as it had been when he was a child or as unruly as it had been when he was eighteen. It was expertly styled but still thick and curly. His eyes seemed bluer, more intense.
His face had changed. It had thinned into the face of a man. An aristocratic man, handsome, hard, and ruthless. It looked like
a face that rarely if ever smiled or showed any other strong emotion. It was a disciplined, cold face. She could see nothing in it of the big-eyed, bold, soulful waif he had been 20 years before.
She hated him with an intensity that surprised even herself. She hated him because she had loved him and had made a fool of herself over him. Because he had let her down and shown her arrogantly and cruelly the gap in their stations. Because he was responsible for Eurwyn's death. Because he had come now to fill the role of the authority figure who had always most angered her in her life. Because he was the Earl of Wyvern. Because he was Geraint Penderyn. Because she had loved him at the foolish age of sixteen and because even then—especially then—love had hurt. Because even though she had prepared herself for his coming, her apron had become soiled and her hair had been buffeted by the wind and she had a visible patch on the sleeve of her dress. Because she was twenty-six years old.
She hated him.
"Marged," he said quietly.
He rolled the r of her name in the Welsh way. He pronounced her name correctly. And yet the Englishness of his voice was apparent even in the one word. And how dared he call her by her given name? She was Mrs. Evans to strangers, and he was a stranger. But of course he was the Earl of Wyvern and she was merely a tenant farmer, one who paid him rent and tithes. He was putting her in her place, very firmly in her place, by walking into her farmyard uninvited and by calling her Marged.
Well, then.
She kept her back straight and her chin high and bent her knees in a deep curtsy, grasping the sides of her dress as she did so. "My lord," she said, speaking deliberately in English, "what an honor, to be sure."
His expression did not change at all. And yet she knew he had understood that her subservience was deliberate mockery.
He knew that battle had been engaged.
How she hated him.
