by Mary Balogh
Rebecca!
She sat motionless on the horse, appearing to tower over the crowd on foot and even over her mounted and darker daughters.
Who was he? Marged wondered, staring at him. He looked even more grotesque than Aled. And many times more magnificent. Aled rode forward with the other daughters from their group and they took up their positions to either side of Rebecca.
And finally she raised both arms upward and outward. White sleeves fell like wings from her wrists to her sides. It was an unnecessary gesture since there had been no noise to hush. But it was a commanding gesture. The silence became almost a tangible thing. Marged could almost hear the beating of her own heart.
"My daughters," she said, "and my loyal children, welcome."
It was a rich male voice, speaking Welsh. A voice that seemed not to be raised and yet spoke clearly enough to be heard by the farthest man in the crowd. It was a voice that sounded accustomed to command.
"I will lead you to a gate," Rebecca said, "a gate that ought not to be there, taking as it does the freedom of passage away from my countrymen. You will destroy that gate, my daughters and my children, and the house of the gatekeeper. You will destroy them when I give the command. You will not harm the gatekeeper or abuse him with words. My followers are courteous people who perform a necessary service for their families and neighbors and friends. If anyone wishes to turn back, now is the time."
No one moved. There were low murmurings of assent.
He was magnificent, Marged thought again. They were a rabble with destruction in mind. But he was converting them with very few words and in a very short span of time into an army with a noble purpose. He had them all eating out of his hand, herself included. She felt at that moment that she would follow him to hell and back if he asked it of her.
"Lead on, Mother," Aled said.
"'We will follow you, Mother," a few of the other daughters said.
Marged found that her heart beat faster at the foolish ritual, which somehow at this moment did not seem foolish at all.
And then Rebecca lowered her arms, and they were all making their way down from the bleak hillside on which they had gathered. Down toward the road and a tollgate, though it was invisible in the darkness. In the darkness it was hard to see even the ground ahead of one's feet. The horses ahead and the hundreds of men on either side were mere shadows in the darkness, felt more than seen. The only thing that could be seen with any clarity was Rebecca's white garments. Marged fixed her eyes on them.
Who was he? He was someone from another valley, another village. The chances were that his name and face would mean nothing to her even if she heard the one and saw the other. She knew he was no one from near Glynderi. He had not come with them. Besides, she would recognize a man with such a commanding presence no matter how well he was disguised, if she knew him at all. It was hard to believe that in everyday life he must be a farmer or a tradesman. Or perhaps a lawyer. She knew that the few men who had been arrested for participating in Rebecca Riots had all been defended by such able lawyers that none had yet been convicted. Those lawyers were rumored to be Rebeccaites themselves. Perhaps one of them was actually a Rebecca. He spoke perfect Welsh—almost as if he were an educated man.
And then suddenly, without any warning, they were on the road and turning to walk along it. Marged could feel its harder surface beneath her feet. And the dark shadow ahead of the horses suddenly resolved itself into the distinctive outline of a tollgate across the road and a squat house beside it.
The horses stopped and the crowd closed in behind. Marged was almost at the head of it. There was an eerie silence. And then Rebecca raised both arms again.
At the same moment there was light. Only a thin thread of it, but it was startling to eyes that had looked into nothing but almost total darkness for a few hours. The door of the tollhouse had opened and a man and woman had come out, huddled together. The man held a lantern aloft. In its light Marged could see that both were terrified.
The reality of it all hit her powerfully then. What they were doing, what they were about to do suddenly had a human face. And the danger of the moment was so apparent that she thought the beating of her heart would make it impossible to catch her breath. There were hundreds of men all about her, angry men, as she was angry. Men who were perhaps looking for a scapegoat. It would need only one spark to ignite a fire of violence and revenge. Rebecca had appeared commanding up in the hills. But the real test had come.
Now.
Rebecca spoke, her voice as quiet and as clear as it had been earlier. She ignored the gatekeeper and his wife. "My daughters," she said, "there is something in my way. What is it?"
Aled was the one who replied. "It appears to be a gate across the road, Mother," he said.
"But why is it there? I wish to ride on with my children but cannot."
Marged recognized the ritual she had heard of. It sounded very much more menacing in reality.
"It is there to stop travelers like you and me, Mother," Aled said. "It is there to force money from us, the money we have already paid to our landlords in rent and tithes and poor rates."
"It is there to impoverish us and force us from our land, Mother, and into the workhouse." Another daughter took up the story.
"It is there to prove to us that we Welsh are not free in our own country, Mother," a third said.
A fourth spoke up. "Shall we destroy it for you, Mother?"
Marged felt a stirring about her as men grasped clubs and crowbars and axes more tightly and prepared to surge forward. But Rebecca had not lowered her arms.
"In a short while, my daughters," she said. "But we will not be hasty." For the first time she looked at the gatekeeper and his wife. "This is your home, my friends?" She spoke to them with quiet courtesy.
The man pulled himself together. "You will not get away with this," he said. "Powerful men own this trust—the Earl of Wyvern, Sir Hector Webb, Mr. Maurice Mitchell. You will be caught and punished."
"Our quarrel is not with you and your good wife or with your personal possessions," Rebecca said. "My children are not patient, but they will obey their mother. They will wait for ten minutes while you remove your possessions from the house and make your way to the nearest habitation for shelter. Ten minutes."
The man took a step forward, seemingly prepared to take on the whole army of them. But his wife plucked at his sleeve and dragged him back toward the house.
"Don't do anything stupid," she said. "Let us hurry, then, Dai."
His arms must be tired, Marged thought several minutes later, watching Rebecca from behind. They were still raised and spread. He looked like the statue of an avenging angel. And the control he held over the crowd was amazing. She could feel the tension all about her, the eagerness to be at the job they had come to do. And yet no one moved and the few who spoke did so in whispers.
The gatekeeper and his wife reappeared before the ten minutes had passed, their arms laden with bundles. The woman would have stumbled away into the darkness, but the man stood his ground and glared up at Rebecca.
"My wife has an oak chest in by there," he said. "It is too heavy for us to carry. I will hold it against you for the rest of my life." He spat in the dirt at his feet.
Rebecca spoke with continued courtesy. "Charlotte, my daughter," he said, "choose two of my children who are on foot, if you please, and direct them to carry out this good woman's oak chest and set it down with care some distance from the house."
Aled turned and pointed to the Owen brothers. They scurried into the house to do Rebecca's bidding.
"And now, my children," Rebecca said when the job was done, raising her voice only slightly, "you will destroy this obstruction across the road and the house beside it." Her arms swept downward.
And then at last there were noise and movement as more than two hundred men surged around the house and the gate. Marged went forward with them, raising the club she had brought with her.
This is for you, Eurwyn,
cariad, she thought as she brought it down on the top bar of the gate. This is for you. And this is a blow against him. For your sake I will never stop hating him.
It was over in a matter of minutes. The gate was down and strewn in several pieces across the road. The house was a mere heap of rubble. Several men were sweeping the bits clear of the road so that horses and vehicles and pedestrians might pass unobstructed.
Chapter 13
Marged joined in the general cheer. She did not believe she had ever felt so exhilarated in her life. It was a blow for justice, for freedom, for the dignity of their lives. Dylan Owen was slapping her on the back, as excited as she.
"Now we have shown them, Marged," he said. "And we will continue to show them."
She smiled back at him, but she became aware suddenly that one of the horses had moved up close to her other side. She looked up, startled.
Rebecca leaned down from his horse's back and set a hand beneath her chin to keep her face turned up. It was some sort of a woolen mask, she saw, hugging his face tightly, with only small slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth. Long blond ringlets cascaded down about the mask and over his shoulders. It was impossible to know what the man behind the mask looked like and would be impossible even in daylight, Marged believed. She felt unaccountably frightened. There was such a contrast between the effeminacy of the woman's attire and the power the man had shown tonight.
"Is it possible," he said, his voice low and soft and quite audible despite the noise by which they were surrounded, "that one of my children is a real daughter?"
"Yes." She looked directly back into his eyes, which gleamed darkly through the slits of the mask. "And there are a few others here too. We represent all the women who feel as strongly as the men that it is time to protest against oppression but who have been kept at home by the orders of fathers or husbands or by the needs of children."
"Ah. Brave words, my daughter," he said.
She felt almost as if she were just that for a moment. She felt absurdly pleased by the implied praise.
He released her chin and raised his arms again and called for silence. Amazingly he got it after only a few moments. "My children," he said, "enough for tonight. Next time we will destroy more than one of these abominations. My daughters will tell you where and when. I have been proud of you tonight. You have behaved with courage and determination—and discipline. Go now. Most of you have a long walk home."
It seemed almost anticlimactic. And it really was a long walk home. Marged smiled at Dylan, determined not to show her weariness. But a hand came to rest lightly on her shoulder and she turned to look up again at Rebecca, who had not moved off. He took his hand away and offered it to her, palm up.
"Come, my daughter," he said. "Take my hand and set your foot on my boot and ride up with me."
The prospect was unaccountably frightening. He was not her enemy. He was the leader she had hoped and prayed for. Even better than Eurwyn would have been, she thought treacherously. He had won her respect and admiration and loyalty tonight. But he looked ghostly and yet massively real all at the same time. And it was the dead of night. And she did not know who he was.
"I am not afraid of the walk home," she said, "even though I am a woman."
She could have sworn that his eyes smiled at her. "Then ride up here for my sake," he said. "I am a woman in need of company so late at night."
She smiled then. And certainly it would be pleasant to ride for a part of the way, until their paths took them in different directions. Of course, by then she would be separated from her friends and would have to walk the rest of the way home alone. But she was certainly not going to give in to a fear of the dark.
She set her hand in his and lifted her foot to rest it on his boot in the stirrup. The next moment she was seated sideways on the horse's back in front of the saddle, his arms like a safe barricade on either side of her while he gathered the reins in his hands.
He held his horse still until everyone had disappeared into the darkness. Only then did he give it the signal to start. Marged sat very still, fighting breathlessness so that he would not notice. One thing had been very clear from her brief contacts with Rebecca and the ease with which she had been lifted onto the horse.
Rebecca was a very powerful man.
All three of his identities had merged in the course of the night. His education and training had reinforced the natural ability to command that he had possessed even as a child. Yet tonight he had used that training and that ability to assert his Welshness, his identification with his people. He felt passionately throughout the night the lightness of what he was doing. He felt a deep love for the people whom he commanded and a deep commitment to their cause. And he found that the role of Rebecca suited him. The role of woman and mother served to remind him that it was a cause for which he fought and that it could be done with dignity and a measure of compassion.
It was a night he frankly enjoyed. It took him back to childhood years and made him realize just how much of his identity he had been forced to give up at the age of twelve, and how much he had finally given up voluntarily in order to retain his sanity. He felt almost as if he had been living a suspended life for sixteen years and was now vibrantly and gloriously alive again.
He watched as a few hundred men broke down the tollgate and the keeper's house—by tradition Rebecca and her daughters did not participate in the actual destruction.
And then he saw Marged. He would not have been quite sure, perhaps, if he had not seen her dressed in the same garb the night his horses were let loose from the stables and he found wet ashes in his bed. She was wearing a cap tonight and he could see from the brief glimpse he had of her face that it had been blackened as almost everyone else's had. But she was undoubtedly a woman. Undoubtedly Marged.
His first instinct was to keep his distance. How impenetrable was his disguise? But he had ever been bold as a boy. If the disguise could not fool Marged, then perhaps it would not fool someone else—someone who might betray him. Conversely, if it could fool Marged, then it could fool anyone.
And so he put it to the test, leaning down from his horse's back, cupping her chin with his hand so that she would be forced to take a good look at him, speaking to her with his voice only a few inches from her ears, bending his head so that she could see him despite the darkness.
She did not know him.
His exhilaration and boldness grew as he dismissed the men and sent them on their way home. It had been a brief encounter. What if it were a longer encounter and at even closer quarters? He had been careful about detail. He had even made sure that he did not wear his usual cologne and that none of it lingered on any of the clothes he wore beneath Rebecca's robes. But was there a detail he had neglected, one that would betray him?
It was something he did not need to put to the test. It was something it might be dangerous to put to the test. And even if he could deceive her, it would perhaps be unfair to do so. She hated him with very good reason.
But temptation was something he had never been able to resist as a boy, and the years of discretion that had intruded since that time had fallen away in the course of the night. The more daring an enterprise, the more likely he had been to try it as a child. It was a miracle he had never come to any grief more painful than that blistering spanking he had had at the hands of one of the gardeners at Tegfan.
He leaned down again and touched Marged on the shoulder.
And talked her into riding with him.
And watched the men disappear into the darkness on their way home, trying to calm his breathing as he did so. He had no excuse to be breathless. He had not participated in the exertions of the last half hour.
But he was beginning to realize that perhaps he had made a mistake. His arms, bracketing her body though not quite touching her, burned with her body heat. His thigh felt singed where it rested against her knee. He could smell ashes and sweat and woman—an unbearably erotic perfume.
Marged. Ah, Marged.
<
br /> "Where do you live, my daughter?" he asked her.
It was incredibly difficult to turn her head sideways and look into his eyes when she was this close to him. They were light eyes, gray or blue—it was impossible to tell which. He looked even more solid from close to, even larger than life. And strangely masculine despite the grotesque woman's garb and the mask.
"On a farm beyond Glynderi and Tegfan park," she said. "Do you know the area?"
"I know it," he said. "When we have passed the village you must direct me to the correct farm."
"Oh," she said, realizing his intent, "you must not take me all the way home. It is late and I would not take you out of your way."
"Ah, but it would be my pleasure," he said. "What is your name?"
"Marged Evans," she said. Sitting sideways on a moving horse was not easy. She had never done a great deal of riding. He must have sensed the fact. His right arm came firmly about her waist, and she felt instantly safe.
"Well, Marged Evans," he said, "perhaps as you said earlier, there were other women out tonight, but I did not see them. Why did you come? It was strenuous and dangerous business."
"I do a man's job at home," she said. "I run a farm. My mother-in-law looks after the house and milks the cows and does some of the work in the dairy, but I do everything else. I do not shrink from hard work."
"Where is your husband?" he asked.
"Dead." The horse was moving upward into the hills and was throwing her balance sideways. She tried to stay upright, but her shoulder touched his chest and then pressed heavily against it. And his arm held her against him. She had not been mistaken. He was very solidly male.
"I am sorry to hear it," he said softly, and she felt that he meant it. She felt warmed by his sympathy. "You came out, then, to prove that you are any man's equal?"
