“Yes.” She kept her eyes closed. “I think I am brave. But I do not know for sure. Perhaps I would break. I am glad he has refused to tell me who he is.”
“You have spoken with him, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” She felt a sudden surging of anger and of spite. A sudden need to hurt, though she did not know if he would be in any way hurt by the information. “I have loved him too. I have made love with him. I love him. I believe his secret would be safe with me even if he had trusted me with it. But he did not.”
It seemed to her that the silence lasted a very long time. And stupidly, inexplicably, insanely she felt suddenly bereft. She wanted to reach out a hand to touch him again, to tell him that she had not quite meant it that way, that she still cared for him. Geraint. That part of her still loved him and always would. And she wondered how she could love Rebecca as deeply and passionately as she did and yet still love Geraint too.
“Marged,” he said, “what you have told me in this room must never be told outside it. Do you understand me? You have been typically rash and outspoken and untypically dishonest. You have lied to save a friend who did not need saving. Your motive was admirable. Your method was foolhardy. If you tell this story to someone else, he might believe you.”
She lifted her head at last and looked into his eyes. They were so close to her own that she almost took a step backward. But she held her ground.
“I do not have to tell you what jail is like, do I?” he said. “Or what is involved in a sentence of transportation. Your lies would lead you to be transported.”
She knew that he knew she had not lied.
“Geraint—” she began.
“Go back home now,” he said. “Your mother-in-law and your grandmother-in-law need you.”
“Geraint—” She bowed her head again and set her hands loosely over her face. She found herself wanting to tell him that she had lied in what she had said about her feelings for Rebecca. And yet she had not. She did love him—with all her being. And she noticed at the same moment that he was not wearing his usual cologne this morning, that he was wearing no cologne but smelled merely—clean. One of those moments caught at her consciousness again but refused to be grasped.
“Go home, Marged.” His voice was suddenly and unexpectedly gentle. “It must be a wonderful thing to have you for a friend. In fact, I know it is. You were my friend once. I remember running home to tell my mother that I had a wonderful friend. My first friend. Go home now. Your lies will go no farther than me and I will remember our friendship.”
“Geraint.” Her voice was high-pitched and quavering, she heard in some alarm. “Why is life so far beyond our control even when we try to abide by all the rules? Sometimes life frightens me.”
She turned, bent on following his advice before she made a greater fool of herself than she had already done this morning. Fortunately he had made no move to reach out to her. If he had done so, she would have gone all to pieces and despised herself for the rest of her life. But the door was flung back before she could take a step toward it.
“What the devil is going on, Ger?” Aled Rhoslyn said, striding inside—the butler hovered helplessly behind him. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Marged.
“I take it,” Geraint said, “that you have come to bargain for the release of Ceris Williams as Marged has done, Aled?”
Aled was looking deathly pale, Marged noticed. But then the news would have been worse for him than it had been for her. Aled loved Ceris.
“Say nothing, Aled,” she said quickly. “Ceris has been released. It was all a mistake.”
His eyes met Geraint’s over the top of her head.
“Her fiancé vouched for the fact that they were out together, involved in the business of courtship, when they somehow got caught up with a gang of Rebecca rioters about their work,” Geraint said. “Miss Williams is a friend of yours, Aled?”
For one moment Marged thought he was going to faint. “You might say so,” he said.
“Ah,” Geraint said softly from behind her.
It was strange, Marged thought—the three of them together again as