he had not been a morose man. Geraint drank his tea silently.
He was without a doubt the most handsome and the most attractive man she had ever met, Marged decided. And the thought angered her. If his whole life had not changed suddenly at the age of twelve, if he had not been educated as a gentleman, if he had not inherited the wealth with which to dress expensively, would he be any more attractive now than Eurwyn had been? Or any other man of her acquaintance?
Yes, an annoyingly honest part of her mind admitted. Even as a child, as a thin and ragged and frequently dirty waif, he had been beautiful. She had fallen in love with his beauty at the age of sixteen. With nothing else. There had been nothing else to love. Well, she was ten years older now. Ten years wiser. Beauty alone could no longer seduce her.
And heaven knew she had reason enough to hate the man behind the beauty.
He was rising to take his leave, nodding to her in-laws, thanking them for the tea, turning to her with a look of inquiry, commanding her with his eyes and his whole aristocratic bearing to see him on his way. He picked up his cloak and his hat from the settle.
She walked to the gate with him in silence, her chin up. She had called herself his servant earlier, but in reality she was no man’s servant. He might own the land on which they walked and he might in a few years, if rents continued to rise and prices continued to fall, force her out, but at the moment it was her land. She had worked for it. She had earned every callus on her hands.
He opened the gate and stepped out into the lane. He closed the gate, turning toward her in order to do so. He looked at her, and she would not look away from his eyes.
“I am sorry your husband died, Marged,” he said. “But you appear to be doing very well here on your own.”
Something snapped in her. She threw back her head and glared at him. “You are sorry,” she said almost in a whisper. But the fury could not be controlled. Her eyes flashed. “You are sorry! You may take your sorrow, Geraint Penderyn, and stuff it down your throat. Go away from here. I have paid my rent and this farm is mine until rent day next year. Go away. You are not welcome here.”
He looked startled for a moment. But he did not retaliate. She would have liked nothing better than a fight, which she could not possibly have won. But he kept his gentlemanly calm.
“No,” he said quietly. “I realized that from the start, Marged.”
He put on his hat—it succeeded only in making him look even more elegant—and turned away from her. She watched him walk down the lane and itched to hurl some choice epithets after him. She knew a few despite the fact that she was her father’s daughter and was a regular chapel goer. She would have loved to hurl more than epithets, but her hands were empty. Besides, it would be lowering to yell with shrill hysteria or to throw missiles.
She was not sorry for her outburst. If his skin was so thick that he had not got the message during his visit, then he would know now. He would know to stay away from her and Ty-Gwyn.
She tried not to think of the fact that Ty-Gwyn belonged to him and that the annual rent day seemed to gallop up faster each year.
It was the first and the worst of such visits that Geraint paid to his tenant farmers during the coming days. But worst only in the sense that Marged had been his friend and almost his lover once upon a time and now seemed to hate him with an intensity in excess of the facts. No, it was not that she seemed to hate him. Her unexpected outburst when he was leaving Ty-Gwyn, just after he had tried to sympathize with her and compliment her, had cleared away any doubt he might have had. She hated him.
All the other farmers he visited were polite. A few of them were almost friendly—the Williamses, for example. And their daughter too, still pretty, still shy, and still unmarried. Ceris Williams had poured tea for him and found it impossible to converse with him beyond monosyllabic answers to his questions, but she had