Longing (15 page)

“Not at all,” Siân said, wondering how her grandmother would react.

“Oh, please, please, please.” Verity was bouncing on the spot.

“Very well,” he said, looking down at her. “But behave yourself and watch your manners. And do as you are told. If you do not obey Mrs. Jones at all times, I will want to know the reason why afterward. Understood?”

Verity's smile was radiant. “Yes, Papa.”

He bent down and kissed her upturned mouth. “Thank you,” he said to Siân. “I hope she is no trouble. I will come to meet her after the school is over.”

She nodded. There was something curiously intimate, she thought, about standing thus with him in the now-empty chapel, a
child between them. She thought it might be possible to like the Marquess of Craille. She remembered suddenly seeing him kneeling beside Iestyn on the mountain, his hand resting reassuringly on her brother-in-law's head, his cloak spread over the boy to keep him warm. She remembered his offer to help Huw take Iestyn back home. And his telling Iestyn that he was a brave lad. A fox and a weasel, Owen had called him. Perhaps she had better not fall too easily into the trap of liking the marquess. He was, after all, all-powerful in Cwmbran. And some people were hungrier this week than last because the marquess of Craille's first act after his arrival had been to cut wages.

The street outside the chapel was far from empty. Almost the whole of the congregation gathered there every Sunday after service to talk and to gossip. And today, of course, they had the extra treat of watching Mrs. Siân Jones emerge a full two minutes after the last straggler, holding one hand of the Marquess of Craille's daughter while he held the other.

Siân tried not to feel embarrassed. After all, she had freely taken the job of Verity's governess and everyone must know about it by now. But she thought regretfully of all the efforts she had made during the past eight years to fit in, to be part of the community that had spurned her mother, to belong so that she would no longer be lonely. She wondered if her insistence on living at home with Gran and Grandad would save her from being cut off as she had been cut off throughout her childhood and girlhood. But it was too late for regrets now.

She led Verity first to where her grandmother stood with a group of neighbors and explained that the child would be coming home for dinner. And then she took her toward a group of men, all listening to something Owen was saying to them. He stopped talking and looked at her, unsmiling. She had a sudden, unreasoned fear that even Owen might turn against her. Unreasoned because he had urged her to take the job and had been pleased when she decided to do so. But of course it was since then that he had called Verity's father the bloody Marquess of bloody Craille.

Her world would fall apart if she lost Owen, she thought.

“Verity is coming for dinner at Gran's,” she told him, “and then to Sunday School with me.”

He turned from his friends. “I thought perhaps you had not even noticed I was at chapel,” he said in Welsh before looking down at Verity and switching to English. “So you are going to go to school today as well as all next week are you,
fach
? Hold hands, then, is it?”

Verity set her free hand in his and tripped along the street between him and Siân. “Vark means little one,” she said. “Mrs. Jones told me. Chapel was fun. I am going to meet other children at Sunday School. What is your name?”

He was offended, Siân thought, because she had sat with Verity and the marquess instead of in front of him, where he liked to look at her during the sermon, he had told her once to make her laugh and blush.

Again she felt that quiet, unfounded fear of losing him. Of being isolated between two worlds again, as she had been for the first seventeen years of her life.

She wished as she watched him talk with Verity—oh, she wished she had let him in when he had begged to be let in up on the mountain. She wished she belonged to him now, body and soul. She wanted him. She needed him. He was her rock and her anchor.

*   *   *

Alex
had no idea how long Sunday School lasted. It was something of a real school, he had gathered, in which children actually learned to read and write. The chances were, then, that it would last quite a while. He did not go to meet Verity too early, but even so he paced up and down the pavement before the chapel for more than half an hour before the doors finally opened and children came rushing and whooping out.

It disturbed him that they had only this small chance for schooling. There should be a school in the town, accessible to all children daily, just as there was on his estates in England. Perhaps some of these children would like to be clerks or lawyers or preachers, Siân had said to him.

But he was given no time to brood on the matter. Siân Jones herself was coming out of the chapel, Verity holding her hand. His daughter whooped just like the other children when she saw him and came hurtling toward him, talking as she came.

“. . . and they have a wooden settle that I sat on and all the dishes set up on a dresser, and Mrs. Jones sleeps in the dearest little cupboard bed right in the kitchen, and Uncle Emrys—Mrs. Jones's Uncle Emrys—made me say good afternoon and thank you to him in Welsh and then laughed at me, and Mrs. Rhys—Mrs. Jones's grandmama—scolded him, and she held the loaf of bread right up against her stomach as she sliced it, and . . .”

He stooped down and swept her up into his arms, feeling a rush of almost painful love for her. She was still so young. So easily excited. So lonely. He should have married Lorraine or someone else before now and had more children. No child should be without brothers and sisters if it could be helped.

“I hope you were a good girl,” he said, “and remembered to say thank you to Mrs. Rhys, either in English or in Welsh. Did you?”

Siân was standing quietly a few feet away. “I shall say good day, then,” she said. “I shall be at Glanrhyd Castle at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.”

He spoke from impulse and from a reluctance to turn away and lose sight of her until tomorrow morning. Tomorrow he would not even see much of her. He could hardly hang about in the nursery all day. And the sun had come out to make a rather pleasant day after all.

“Come walking with us for a little while?” he asked, setting his daughter's feet back on the ground. “I thought we would walk along the valley and look at the river.”

“It is dirty,” she said, “until you get past the houses and the mine.”

“Then we will walk past the houses and the mine,” he said. “Will you join us?”

He saw her hesitation and compelled her shamelessly with his eyes to say yes. She nodded and fell into step beside him, Verity and about six feet of space between them.

She was quite right. The river was very dirty and smelled unpleasant.

“There are no waterworks in the town?” he asked, and realized even as he did so how strange it would seem that he had to ask her such a question. This was his property. It was something he should know.

She laughed, a rather bitter and derisive sound. “No,” she said.

“It seems unhealthy that there are not,” he said, frowning. “This is quite a sizable town.”

“There is no money for such an improvement,” she said. “I heard somewhere that more children die in the valleys of South Wales than anywhere else in the country.”

He was appalled and looked uneasily at the water, which was also quite obviously the town sewer. It all looked so very picturesque from up in the hills.

But Verity wanted to tell him about the Sunday School and he gratefully let go of the topic of the river. It was something—yet another thing—that he must look into at a more appropriate time, and with Barnes. Just as was the matter of a school.

“One of the worst things about mining,” he said later, “is that the waste has to be dumped somewhere. Coal tips are not attractive features of a landscape, are they?” He looked with some distaste at the black hills of slag to one side of the buildings and great wheel that denoted the entry to the coal mine.

“Industry is not attractive,” Siân said. “But it is a fact of modern life. We have to make the best of it. I hate to see my valley being gradually made black and ugly. It was so very beautiful. It is where our music and our dreams and our passion came from. And now it is being—”

“Raped?” he suggested.

She looked even lovelier when she blushed. “It does seem an appropriate word,” she said. “Will we just destroy the beauty of our world? I wonder.”

Verity had run on ahead. And finally the town with its terraced houses and the mine were past and it was as if they were walking
in a different world. The river water seemed already cleaner and the grass all about them was green. Alex drew in a deep breath and the air seemed to be free of the smoke that belched eternally from the chimneys of the ironworks.

“Industry is so new,” he said. “We have not yet learned to adjust to a way of life so totally different from that lived by our ancestors for hundreds and even thousands of years.”

“The valley was all like this a mere hundred years ago,” she said, gesturing ahead and to either side of them. “Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong age. But we cannot choose, can we?”

Verity had gathered some sticks and was throwing them as far out into the water as she could. She looked happy and absorbed in her game. She looked as if she had forgotten their presence.

“To me,” he said, “all this is more of a shock than it is to you. I have lived all my life on a country estate, where everything is run much as it has been run for generations. I know it and understand it and feel competent to run it both well and wisely. Industry was little more than a word to me until I decided to pay a visit here. I feel rather as if I have been transported to a different planet or even universe. Do be careful not to trip over that root.”

She circled around the root and stepped closer to him as a result. He offered his arm without thought and she took it. It was only her touch that made him aware of what he had done. From the way she looked quickly up at him and the way her arm suddenly stiffened, he guessed that she had had the same realization at the same moment. It would be very easy, he thought, to develop a friendship with this woman. He should not have offered his arm. It was not at all the thing. She was, after all, only his servant. He had a vivid memory of her as she had looked when she had almost butted him in the stomach down in the mine.

They strolled on together arm in arm, neither one having the courage to arrange matters differently.

“I feel totally out of my depth,” he said. “I know and understand only what I have been able to learn since my arrival. There is so very much that I still do not know and do not even realize I am ignorant
of. Like the lack of waterworks, for example. I had not even thought to ask. In the meanwhile I have to defer to the superior knowledge and experience of my agent. He has, after all, run a prosperous business here for a dozen years.”

Was he trying to justify himself to this woman? he wondered. Was he trying to convince her that if there were things wrong at Cwmbran—and there was obviously an appalling number of things wrong—it was not really his fault? Of course it was his fault. He had been the owner of this property for two years and had done nothing to shoulder the responsibility that ownership always brought along with it.

“Prosperous, yes,” she said quietly. “We are all marvelously wealthy. One of us even owns a home with seventy-two rooms.”

It was a remark that deserved a blistering setdown. Except that he could not deliver it. He had spoken to her as to an equal. He had never before bared a part of his soul to a servant. Could he blame her for responding in kind?

“Verity”—he called ahead to his daughter—“it is time to turn back. We are already late for tea.” He used the excuse of turning around to disengage his arm from Siân's.

“Wealth brings with it responsibility, Siân,” he said. “I am not convinced that abolishing wealth would solve anything. Would it bring equality and justice to the world? Ideally it would, I suppose, but I do not believe that human nature will ever allow for the ideal. I have always taken my responsibilities seriously.” Except his responsibilities to Cwmbran.

Verity had turned obediently back toward the town. She was taking little runs up the hill and faster runs down again. She still seemed lost in her own child's world.

“If you feel bitter about anything,” he said to Siân, “then complain to me. Give me details, like the detail you gave me about the children dying. Tell me all the things that are wrong here. I cannot even think of putting right what is wrong if I do not know about it. I asked your lover if he would be willing to attend a meeting with
some other representatives of the people here to talk about improving life and conditions. But he was playing stupid at the time. Am I so much the enemy that I am not to be given a chance?”

She was gazing at the ground before her feet, he noticed, her face shuttered—and very beautiful. Ah, they were from different worlds. It was pointless to try to build bridges. He did not know why he was trying, except that he had kissed her twice, and thought about her almost constantly, and dreamed of kissing her again.

He thought she was about to answer, but Verity came hurtling down the hill at just the wrong point and collided with Siân, who bumped sideways into him. He had to spread both arms and brace his feet to save all three of them from landing in a heap on the grass. Verity was shrieking with laughter and Siân was laughing too—as was he.

“That might have been quite spectacular,” he said, “had we been a few feet closer to the river. No more, please, Verity. Mrs. Jones, will you come and take tea with us?”

“No,” she said quickly, “thank you. My grandmother will already be wondering where I am.”

“I will not press the point, then,” he said. “I believe Verity and I will take the hill route back to Glanrhyd. You will continue this way?”