He watched her let herself in through the gate when she reached Ty-Gwyn and stayed where he was until she had entered the house without looking back at him.
He still did not know quite what had happened, though it was not difficult to piece together the main events. Eurwyn Evans must have been caught poaching for salmon on Tegfan land. He had been arrested and taken before the nearest magistrate for trial. He had been found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportation. And he had died in the hulks.
Marged had written to him, begging him to intervene on her husband’s behalf. He could have done so. He was not a magistrate, but it was on his land Eurwyn had been caught. All he needed to have done was to have written to the appropriate authority explaining that Evans had been fishing with his permission.
But he had never read the letters. His steward at Tegfan had been instructed not to bother him with estate business, and his secretary in London had been instructed to intercept anything that came directly from Tegfan and deal with it himself. He did not know if Marged’s letters had been presented at Tegfan or sent to London. He did not know which servant had withheld them from him. But it did not matter. Whoever it was had done so on his instructions.
It was his fault that the letters had not reached him.
It was his fault that Evans had been transported.
It was his fault the man had died.
Yes, he had in effect killed Marged’s husband.
By the time he arrived home, Geraint was bone weary. Even so he doubted that he would sleep. But he must lie down. Perhaps somewhere between now and dawn sleep would catch him unawares and give him some moments of oblivion.
But when he had undressed and entered his bedchamber and threw back the covers to climb into bed, he found himself staring down at black ashes over which a pitcher of water must have been dashed.
Geraint began to realize the enormity of the problem.
His efforts to come to some arrangement with the other owners of the road trust and the man who had leased it from them came to nothing at all. No one was willing to budge an inch. And everyone was downright angry with him for even suggesting that change was necessary. Was it not enough that the lower classes were seething with discontent? Was it not enough that in other parts of West Wales the rioting and gate breaking had resumed after three years and even in their own area Mitchell’s hayricks had been burned?
It was time to stand firm, not time to display even the slightest sign of weakness or wavering.
Besides, Geraint came to realize, the trust of which he was part owner was only one of several in the county. Even if he could gain concessions for his people in the immediate area of Tegfan, they would find the same oppressive tolls to pay as soon as they ventured farther afield—as they must in order to reach markets and in order to haul lime.
In fact, he came to realize that the whole problem was too large for him. If he lowered rents on his land, countless farmers on other people’s land would still be suffering. If he gave back the tithe money in services to his people, no other landowner would do so for theirs. The poor would still grow poorer and the workhouses would become increasingly places filled with human despair. He toured the one in Carmarthen with Sir Hector Webb and an alderman of the town. They displayed it with pride. It haunted his dreams for the coming nights. The upland hovel he had shared with his mother had been paradise in comparison. At least they had been together and at least they had been free.
Eurwyn Evans had not been fishing for salmon. He had been trying to destroy the salmon weir that trapped all the fish on Tegfan land and denied the people of Glynderi and the farms beyond one source of food. He had been caught and tried—Sir Hector had been one of the magistrates involved—and sentenced to transportation.
Geraint instructed Matthew Harley to have the weir destroyed. His steward protested but found himself impaled by the cold blue gaze of his employer. There was no love lost between the two of them, Geraint thought ruefully as he left the man’s study. Harley had had the sole running of the estate for two years and had done an admirable job when judged only by impersonal criteria.
Huw Tegid made similar objections to removing all the mantraps set up on Tegfan land. They were the best deterrent there was to poachers. There were not enough gamekeepers to patrol every corner of the land, and none of them liked to work nights, when poaching was most likely to occur. Like the steward before him, Tegid found himself facing an employer who chose not to argue with him but merely to look at him.
But Geraint felt frustrated. He would make changes on his own estate and gradually conditions would improve. Gradually his people would come to trust him. But it would all happen on a pitifully small scale. For the first time in ten years he felt again a confusion of identities. He was the Earl of Wyvern. In two years in England he had grown comfortable with the title. Now, after a mere couple of weeks in Wales, he was Geraint Penderyn again as well as the earl. He felt with his people. He felt angry with them. It seemed to him as if his real enemies were people like his aunt and uncle, the lessee of the turnpike trust, his steward, his gamekeeper, and—himself.
His two identities were in conflict with each other.
Chapter 11
THERE was a small forge attached to the stable block of the house though it did not have a full-time blacksmith. When there was work to be done, the Glynderi smith was summoned.
Geraint sat in the forge one afternoon watching Aled shoeing one of the workhorses. They did not converse a great deal—the noise of the forge made conversation difficult—but the silence was companionable enough. Geraint relaxed into it. It must be good, he thought, to have a trade, a skill, something one did well and enjoyed doing, something that occupied most of one’s time. He imagined that Aled was a happy man. He wondered, though, why his friend was not married. He was twenty-nine years old. But then Geraint was not married either and was only a year younger. His thoughts touched for a moment on Marged but veered firmly away again. He had spent a week avoiding thoughts of Marged—without a great deal of success.
Aled stretched, his work done. A groom led away the horse, the last of the day.
“I should have charged admission to the show,” he said, grinning.
“I could sit and watch work all day,” Geraint said, “and never grow tired. I can recommend it as a wonderfully useless occupation.”
“You will have to go watch your cook making your dinner, then,” Aled said. “I am done here.”
“Sit down and relax for a while,” Geraint said. “I want to talk to you.” He got up himself and strode to the adjoining door into the stables to call to a groom to fetch him two mugs of ale.
“And me a good chapel man,” Aled said.
“It is a good restorative, man,” Geraint told him. “Think of it as medicine.”
