his first friendship with someone of his own gender no longer existed.
Perhaps some other day. He walked past the blacksmith’s forge and was aware of faces at windows the length of the village street and nodded to the one curtsying woman he passed—he did not recognize her. But he did not stop anywhere. He had walked to the village. He found himself walking now beyond it, away from the park and the house. He found himself walking along beside the river and turning onto the rough path that led gradually upward into the hills. He followed almost instinctively a route that he must have walked a thousand times when he was a child.
He knew where Madoc Evans’s farm was, more lately Eurwyn Evans’s, now Marged’s. He had passed it numerous times, though he had never been beyond its gate. It was while standing on the bars of the gate one spring day, watching a new calf walk about the yard on spindly legs, that he had encountered the boot of Madoc Evans, who had come up the lane behind him, unheard. Ragamuffins from the uplands were not welcome near the farms of the respectable.
Geraint paused after he had walked perhaps a mile. Was he going to call on her? He had hoped she was not at the manse or in the village. He had hoped she had married and moved away onto someone else’s land. He had hoped never to see her again. And yet, having heard that she was at Ty-Gwyn, he had turned his footsteps immediately in that direction.
He turned to look back the way he had come. The gradient had not seemed steep, and yet he was high up already. He was assaulted with the familiarity of the scene below him—the river, flowing straight until it bent to curve around and into the park of Tegfan; the trees and smooth lawns of the park, and the large stone house; the village stretched out along the river; the farms dotted about in the lowlands and on the hills, the fields, bare now in early spring, but each looking different from every other; the pastures, in which a few sheep and cattle were grazing.
He felt a sudden and unexpected wave of longing again—the same feeling he had had on the pavement in London when he had overheard the snippet of a conversation in Welsh.
But I miss the hills. . . .
The hills had been a part of his childhood, a part of him. He had missed the hills, he remembered now, for weary years before forgetting them entirely, suppressing all memory of them until that meaningless encounter with two Welsh drovers had brought it jolting back. And the hills had beckoned again.
It had been much higher in the hills he had lived with his mother. He turned to look upward, but there was no clear view to the top. He would never again go up there. It was a place he did not want to see.
Would he go higher at all today? He looked broodingly about him. He could not see Ty-Gwyn, but he could see another farmhouse, built of stone, its roof neatly tiled with slate. It had been thatched when last he saw it. He thought for a moment. Mr. Williams. He was not sure he had ever known the man’s first name. He had been a large and formidable-looking man. And yet occasionally when he had passed Geraint on the path, he had reached into a pocket and handed him a coin. Once, when he must have been on his way to market, he had given the boy a bunch of turnips and told him to take them to his mam for their dinner. And then, when Geraint had been scurrying away with his treasure, he had called him back and added two large brown farm eggs as an afterthought.
Mr. Williams had had a young daughter who used to run and hide when she saw Geraint coming, though he could remember her smiling shyly at him once or twice from behind her mother’s skirts.
The Williams farm was his now, the Earl of Wyvern thought, if indeed it still belonged to the same man. Just as the Evans farm was his, and all the farms he could see from his vantage point, for as far as the eye could see. Perhaps he would call at the Williams farm this morning and then return home. He had no real wish to see Marged. And yet it seemed that