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 twenty 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.
He was unwelcome. He could see it in her eyes, could sense it in every line of her body. The foolish curtsy and her words, spoken unexpectedly in English, merely confirmed the fact. He did not realize until that moment how much he had hoped she had forgotten that foolishness of ten years ago. Or perhaps she had forgotten. Surely she had. It was just that circumstances had changed. Ten years had passed. She had been married and widowed during those years. He was the Earl of Wyvern now. She would expect him to have changed. And she would be right.
But he was disappointed. She had been his first friend. His wonderful friend. That was how he had described her to his mother that first day, when he had bounded back up the mountain, his mouth stained purple from berries. I have a wonderful friend, Mam. His mother had held him tightly, his face pressed against her too thin body, and smoothed her thin fingers gently through his curly hair.
“I hear that you run the farm yourself,” he said now in English. “I hear that your husband passed away. I am sorry about that, Marged.”
Her jaw tightened and her eyes grew hard. It was an expression he remembered from her childhood, though it had usually been used then against those who would have driven him away or scolded her for playing with him.
“I run the farm myself,” she said, “with a little help from laborers when I can afford it. Did you think it impossible for a woman to do? I have always paid the rent, even this year. And the tithes.”
Even this year? What was significant about this year? he wondered. He did not ask. But he understood her bristly manner suddenly, her belligerence. And it was so typical of Marged as he remembered her. She was afraid he had come to question her ability to run a farm herself. Her hackles were up.
