“What have I done?” Geraint asked him, still in Welsh. He was no longer either laughing or panting. “Is it just that I was Geraint Penderyn and am now the Earl of Wyvern? Is that all it is, Aled?”
Aled grunted. “You cannot expect people to be comfortable with you, man,” he said. “Just look at you, or at the way you looked fifteen minutes or so ago anyway. No one was ever comfortable with your grandfather either. You must remember that.”
“And why did you know,” Geraint asked him quietly, “exactly what I was talking about? It is more than discomfort, Aled. There is hostility. Why? What have I done? Apart from not showing my face here for the past ten years. Is that it? Is it?”
“You are imagining things, Ger,” Aled said. “You always had a vivid imagination.”
“Goddammit,” Geraint said, “we were friends, Aled. You and Marged and I. Marged told me to get away from Ty-Gwyn. She told me I could shove my sympathy for her down my throat—I believe she was itching to suggest a different location. She told me I was not welcome. And you tell me I have a vivid imagination. Don’t make this lonelier for me than it has to be, man. What have I done?”
Aled sat up and draped his arms over his knees. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Why the bloody hell had Geraint come home? And wouldn’t he be listening to a blistering reprimand if the Reverend Llwyd could listen to the language of his thoughts.
“Made it almost impossible for anyone to live here,” he said shortly.
“What?” Geraint shot up into a sitting position beside him and glared. “I have not even been living here myself, Aled. How could I have been making it impossible for anyone else to do so?”
“Yields and prices have been going down,” Aled said, “and rents have been going up. Tithes now have to be paid in money, not goods, and enforcement has been stricter. Poor rates have gone up and yet the poor are worse off than ever with the building of the workhouses. The turnpike trusts have been putting up more tollgates and making it more expensive for farmers to transport their goods than to produce or buy them. Trespassing and poaching are being more strictly controlled and punished than ever before. Need I go on?”
He did not look at his friend’s face, but he could tell that Geraint was looking aghast.
“But I know nothing about any of this,” he said. “None of it is my fault.”
Aled turned his head at last and looked at the Earl of Wyvern with surprise—and for the first time with some contempt. “Ah,” he said. “I have work to do. If you will excuse me.” He reached for his coat and would have got to his feet, but Geraint’s hand clamped on his arm.
“Ignorance is no plea, is it?” he said. “But I cannot be blamed for all those things, Aled. Tithes are the church’s, not mine, and I did not make that new law about cash payments. I did not make the new Poor Law or conceive the idea of workhouses. Those grievances at least cannot be laid at my door.”
“Are you sure, Ger?” Aled got to his feet despite the staying hand and shook the grass from his coat before putting it back on.
Geraint stayed where he was. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “I know nothing about Tegfan, Aled. I have avoided knowing anything about it. I do not know what I am doing here now except that I passed two men on the street in London who were talking Welsh to each other.”
“Perhaps,” Aled said, “you should have stayed away. Perhaps it would have been better for you and better for the people here.” He himself would have found it far easier to fight against the impersonal earldom of Wyvern in its capacity as owner of Tegfan.
Geraint was on his feet too before Aled could walk away. He was rolling his shirtsleeves back down to his wrists. “No, you are not striding off on that note,” he said. “You owe me another bout, Aled. You know you won that one by sheer luck, just as you won all our fights as boys. Every one of them a lucky win. How many times did we fight? A dozen? Fifty? A hundred? There will be at least one more. And I make it a rule only ever to wrestle with my friends. Give me time, Aled. Give me time to find out the truth and to decide what I am going to do about it.”
Damn! Aled did not want the issues muddled. He could already feel conflict of interest weighing heavily on his shoulders.
Geraint was holding out his right hand again. “Agreed?” he said. “A week? Perhaps two? And then you can decide whether or not to sever your friendship with such a blackguard. Come on, man. You have not lost that fairness of mind that I always admired, have you?”
Damn! Aled took the offered hand and tightened his grip. “I really do have work to get back to,” he said.
Geraint stood back and let him pass. But Aled heard him laugh as he strode off in the direction of the village, feeling all the hopelessness of the conflict between the pull of friendship and the pull of loyalty to the people he represented.
“Perhaps I will challenge you to a boxing match next time,” Geraint called after him. “I have some small skill at the sport, I believe. I will relieve you of some blood via your nose, Aled.”
Aled smiled despite himself but did not acknowledge the challenge.
Geraint became gradually aware that he was not alone. It was not that he heard anyone or saw anyone beyond the disappearing figure of Aled Rhoslyn. It was just a feeling he had, an instinct he had developed years and years ago and had been unaware until now that he still retained. There were trees not far away, ancient trees with huge trunks.
“You had better come out from there,” he said conversationally in Welsh. “It would be more advisable than forcing me to come and get you.”
He was not sure who or quite what he would be facing. For several moments there was continued silence. And then a rustling heralded the appearance of a small, thin, untidy, shabbily dressed lad perhaps eight or nine years old. Staring at him, Geraint felt strangely as if he were looking into a mirror down a long time tunnel. Except that the boy’s hair was straight. He was standing on one leg, scratching it with the almost nonexistent side of the shabby boot he wore on the other foot.
“You had better come closer,” Geraint said, clasping his hands formally behind his back. The boy shuffled a few feet forward. “Much closer. One inch beyond the tip of my fingers if I were to stretch my arm out in front of me.”
The boy came to stand perhaps two feet beyond the indicated spot. He stood very still, his dark eyes fixed on Geraint’s. Geraint knew exactly how the boy felt, just as if the boy were his mirror image and he was the real flesh-and-blood figure. The child’s heart would be beating so painfully that it would be pounding in his ears and choking his throat. He would be considering escape. From the corners of his eyes, without betraying himself by letting them dart about, he would be scouting out escape routes. But he would know that there was no escape.
“Well?” Geraint asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was playing,” the child said in a piping voice. “I got lost.”
