Longing (4 page)

“You are partial,” he said, “because he is Gwyn's brother, Siân. Your brother-in-law. But he is too cowardly to pay his penny and stand up for what he believes in.”

“That is not being a coward,” she said indignantly. “Perhaps it is the opposite, Uncle Emrys. It would be a lot easier for him to do what almost everyone else is doing. Including Huw, his own brother. But Iestyn believes in law and order.”

“Well,” he said, “it is only by acting together that we are going to get anywhere in this life. Perhaps he will be persuaded to see things differently,
fach
.”

“Persuaded?” She looked at him warily and remembered what Owen had said the night before.

“Enough,” Gwynneth said firmly. “You may throw the dishwater out the back if you will, Hywel. Enough talk of Charters, is it? There are better things to talk about in one's own home when work is done and evening is here. We can be thankful for home and family and nice summer weather.”

“Yes, Mam,” Emrys said affectionately. “Sit down and take the weight off your feet, Siân. I do hate to think of you down in that mine every day, girl, doing the hardest job there is. I could still plant a fist in Barnes's nose for sending you there.”

“He gave me a job at least,” she said, sinking gratefully into the chair he had recently vacated. “That was more than I could get at Penybont.”

“He gave you a job all right,” Emrys said. “He did it to humiliate you, Siân.”

“Well,” she said quietly, “he will not succeed in doing that. Many other women do the same job. There is no reason why I should not be one of them. I am not afraid of hard work.”

“You should not be working at all,” her grandfather said gruffly. “I take it as a shame that any woman of my family is forced to work outside the home. Especially in the mine. Emrys and I earn enough to keep your gran and you in the house.”

“But, Grandad—” she began.

“But Siân has her pride,” Emrys said, cutting her off. “When she came to live with us after my sister died, she was too proud to make it seem that she was asking for charity. And again after Gwyn died.”

“Oh, there is wicked,” Gwynneth said indignantly as she sat at the kitchen table, a pile of darning on the table before her. “As if our own granddaughter would be accepting charity by coming to live with her own gran and grandad. Don't talk nonsense, Emrys.”

And yet it would have seemed like charity, Siân thought, looking into the last embers of the fire and setting her head back against the chair. Emrys understood that. She had grown up alone with her
mother, who had been driven out first from the chapel and then from the community of Cwmbran when her womb had begun to swell. She had been housed close to Penybont farther up the valley by the man who had disgraced her—Sir John Fowler, owner of the Penybont works. Siân had never been invited to call him Dada or even Papa. She could not quite think of him as her father, though he had sent her to an expensive girls' school in England when she was old enough to go. And he had tried to provide for her at the age of seventeen when her mother died by offering her in marriage to Josiah Barnes. It would be an excellent match, he had told her. Barnes was an important and powerful man.

But Siân had refused to marry him. Lonely and caught between two worlds, she had wanted to join the one to which perhaps she could belong. She could never belong in Sir John Fowler's world. No one there, including Josiah Barnes, would ever let her forget her origins or her illegitimacy. And so she left her mother's cottage, where she had no wish to live any longer. But she had been refused a job in any capacity at her father's works.

She had come to her grandparents' house in Cwmbran. She had come begging. But not to live on their charity. Two days after they had taken her in Josiah Barnes gave her a job—grinning at her as he offered it and undressing her with his eyes. It was the lowliest, hardest, and dirtiest job for women. She had accepted and worked in the mine for three years, until she married Gwyn Jones, a miner, and moved into the small miners' house he shared with his parents and brothers. Such had been her determination to fit in.

After Gwyn's death from a cave-in underground that had killed two other men too, Siân had gone back to work though she was pregnant. Gwyn's family was large and it had been a time of low wages. But after her son had been stillborn a month early, she had moved back to her grandparents' and returned to the mine though her grandfather had tried to use his influence to get her a better job in the ironworks.

Siân started suddenly as there was a knock on the door and the latch lifted after her grandfather's call.

“Good evening, Mrs. Rhys, Hywel, Emrys, Siân,” Owen Parry said, cap in hand. “Lovely day it has been, hasn't it, now?”

The only time Owen ever looked uncomfortable or sheepish, Siân thought, was when he came calling on her, though he had been coming several evenings a week for months. He was courting her.

“Good evening, Owen,” Gwynneth said. “Yes, a lovely day indeed. All my washing dried in no time at all.”

“Hello, Owen,” Siân said.

“Well, Owen,” Emrys said, “a good number of signatures there were on the Charter last night. And almost no one missing from the meeting.”

“Yes,” Owen said, “but a few did not sign. And more would not pay their pennies to join the Association. It was a disappointment.”

“There will always be some who will not follow others,” Hywel said. “And I myself am a little uneasy, Owen. I could not countenance any violence, mind.”

“There will be no—” Owen said.

Gwynneth coughed significantly. “And to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, Owen?” she asked, smiling sweetly at him.

Owen flushed and turned his cap in his hands. “Siân,” he said, looking at her, “will you step out with me for some air, then? A lovely evening it is. I won't keep her out late, Mrs. Rhys.”

Siân got to her feet and reached for her shawl behind the door. She was twenty-five years old and a widow, but Owen always gave the same assurance to Gran, who was now nodding her approval.

“Let me see now,” Emrys said. “It is half past eight, Owen. Have her home on the dot of nine, is it?”

“And not half a minute later, mind,” Hywel added.

“And no going up the mountain,” Emrys said as Owen opened the door and stood to one side to let Siân pass him.

“My watch stopped,” he said. “I left it home in the dresser drawer. And what are you going to do about it, Emrys Rhys?”

Grandad and Emrys were laughing merrily when the closing door cut off the sound. Siân smiled at Owen.

“Imbeciles,” he said, drawing her arm through his. “A couple of comedians. It is time they thought of something new to say, though.”

Siân laughed outright.

“Did you have a hard day?” he asked her as they walked along the street and turned at the end of it to stroll up into the lower hills above the valley and the river and works and rows of terraced houses. “I didn't know if you would be too tired to come out.”

“But the air is lovely,” she said. She drew a deep breath of it. “It feels so good and smells so good after the dust of coal underground all day.”

“Your hair is what always smells good to me,” he said, moving his head closer to hers for a moment. “You wash it every day. I like that about you.”

Although she bound it every time she went underground, it was always gray with coal dust by the time her shift was at an end.

“Did you see the Marquess of Craille today?” she asked. “He was touring the ironworks with Mr. Barnes, Grandad and Uncle Emrys said. He looks really English, they said.”

“As blond as they come and dressed up like a toff,” he said. “And Barnes was all puffed up like a peacock, showing him around.”

Any doubt that Siân might still have had about the identity of the man on the mountain the night before finally fled. The Marquess of Craille was blond.

“I wonder why he has come,” she said. “He has never been here before.”

Owen shrugged. “For a pleasant holiday,” he said. “To watch all his slaves sweating for him.”

They were up on the lower hills and turned to look down, hand-in-hand, at the valley below them. The river still looked clean from up here, Siân thought. And peaceful. The sun was setting over the hills on the other side. She tried to put out of her mind the marquess and her terrible dread of what must surely be about to happen. Perhaps this would be the last evening. The last time she would walk in the hills with Owen. Despite herself she felt a welling of panic. She breathed deeply again.

“I don't think there can be a lovelier place on earth, can there?” she said. The hills had never yet failed to bring her some measure of peace. She had missed them during her years at school with a terrible emptiness that had seemed to lodge in the pit of her stomach.

Owen laughed scornfully. “It is hell down there,” he said, gesturing with his head first at the ironworks and then at the coal mine. “We work like slaves, Siân, and the likes of Craille rake in the profits. The English. Robbing the riches of our valley. Our country. Though we are much to blame. We stand for the poor treatment we get and console ourselves by saying it is all God's will—the Reverend Llewellyn's favorite phrase. He is as much our enemy as Barnes and Craille, if we but knew it.”

“Don't,” she said. “Soon you will be talking about unions and strikes and the Charter. Don't spoil the evening. I have been hearing too much about last night's meeting.” And she knew too much. More than any of the unsuspecting men. She felt sick suddenly with worry for Owen.

“Such things have to be talked about,” he said. “Especially the Charter, which is to be presented to Parliament any day now and will bring equality and freedom to the common man. To us, Siân. Once we can vote, we can have some say in the condition of our own lives. We will no longer be slaves. All the men of the valley have to be persuaded to sign it and to force its passage through Parliament. This is no time for fear of how our masters will punish us.”

Siân felt coldness in her nostrils and the beginnings of dizziness in her head. This was worse than last night.

Owen stopped talking to wrap an arm about her waist and turn her against him. He kissed her hard and long. She set her arms about his neck. Life would be good with Owen. He had a skilled, secure job and the rarity of a house of his own since his mother's death the year before. He was respected by the other workers. He was handsome. She would be able to give him sturdy children and would be able to get out of the mine. Except that it all seemed a little calculated. She had been determined to be one of her people. Was she now trying to force her way to the top just so that she could be more comfortable
than most of the others? If she was honest with herself, she would have to admit that she did not love Owen as she had always dreamed of loving a man. But then she had not loved Gwyn that way either. Perhaps there was no such thing.

And perhaps there was no such thing as a comfortably secure future with Owen. Perhaps they had no future together. How long would it be before the Marquess of Craille made his move? Should she warn Owen to run away? But he would not go. She knew he would not. She tightened her arms about his neck.

“Mmm.” He nuzzled her neck. “We will go up the mountain, then, will we, Siân?”

It was a question he had asked twice before. All the town courtships were conducted on the hillside. It was tradition. There was nowhere else to find any privacy in the crowded houses and narrow streets of the valley. Advanced courtships proceeded on the mountainside, higher up, where there was more assurance of being quite alone. She had been up on the mountain once with Gwyn a week before their wedding. It was where she had lost her virginity, as she had known she would when she had said yes. That was what going up on the mountain meant. The ground had been hard and cold. She had been almost unable to breathe beneath Gwyn's weight.

“Not tonight, Owen,” she said, wanting to go, wanting to settle her future once and for all, wanting to forget her sick fears. Owen was a chapelgoer despite his frequent criticisms of the minister. If he took her up the mountain, he would marry her afterward. Asking her to go was just one way of proposing to her. She wanted to go with him—part of her wanted to go. “Not yet.”

“A tease are you, then?” he said. “Your kisses say yes, Siân. Very gentle I will be if you come with me. You think I cannot be gentle because I am big?”

She kissed his lips. “Give me time,” she said. “I am sure you can be wonderfully gentle, Owen.”

“Summer will be over soon, mind,” he said. “It will be cold on the mountain when autumn comes.”

“I don't mean to tease.” She turned her head to rest her cheek
against his shoulder. “I just don't want to go yet, Owen.” But part of her did want it. She wanted the reassurance of a man's loving. She had liked that part of marriage with Gwyn—except for that one time on the mountain. There was comfort in being that close to another human being.

“Next week I'll be asking again, mind,” he said. “You are the prettiest woman in Cwmbran, Siân Jones, married or single.”

She smiled at him. “And you are the handsomest man, Owen Parry,” she said.

He kissed her again, briefly. “Home now, then, is it?” he said. “And early rising for the morning shift?”

She nodded and smiled ruefully.

“Ah, Siân,” he said, bending his head close to hers once more, “you were not made to be down the mine, girl.”

“No man or woman was,” she said, “but we all need to eat.” She linked her arm through his and raised her face to the sunset. She breathed in fresh air once more before they descended the hill to the town. She hoped she would be able to sleep. She hoped that by some miracle her terrors were unfounded.