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.”
