“Idris Parry,” Geraint said, “has no one taught you how to address adults?”
“Idris Parry, sir,” the boy said.
“And where do you live, Idris Parry?” Geraint asked. He hoped the answer would not be the one he fully expected.
“With my mam and my dada,” the child said, his voice less bold. “And my sisters.”
“I asked where,” the earl said.
The child pointed vaguely toward the hills. “Up there,” he said while Geraint inwardly winced. “Are you going to send me away, sir?”
Transportation. For poaching. The child had learned young the risks he took, just as he himself had learned.
“Please, sir, will you beat me instead?” he asked quickly, and Geraint knew just what it had cost the boy to show such a sign of weakness. “I got lost. I was just playing.”
“Well, Idris.” Geraint reached into a pocket. “There used to be wicked mantraps here, traps that would hurt your leg like a thousand devils and hold you fast until someone came to let you out. I think it altogether possible that they are still here. You are going to have to be very careful about where you play, aren’t you?”
The child nodded.
“Are you to be trusted?” Geraint asked. He had selected a coin neither too small to be useless nor too large to cause undue suspicion. He held it out to the boy. “Give this to your mam, Idris. And it would be wise to tell her that it was given to you somewhere else by someone else.”
The child suspected a trap—as an earlier child had suspected one the first time Mr. Williams had offered him money. He suspected that the coin was a bait to draw him near enough to be grabbed. Geraint tossed it into the air, and the boy caught it deftly.
“Be off with you now,” Geraint said. “And watch for traps.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy was on his way already. But he stopped dead in his tracks and looked back. “Thank you, sir.”
Geraint nodded curtly. He was feeling sick to his stomach. What on earth was a family doing living up on those moors with a child so ragged that he seemed not to possess a single whole garment? But at least there was a family, if the boy had been speaking the truth. A mother and a father. At least they were not living there because they had been made outcast from the chapel and from the community. At least the child was not a bastard.
But he still felt sick at the reminder that there was such poverty in the world. It seemed so much more personal on Tegfan land than it ever appeared on the streets of London.
Staying away had been selfish, he thought. Deliberately keeping himself ignorant of Tegfan affairs had been an unpardonable self-indulgence. He hoped it had not lost him Aled’s friendship or caused the permanent hostility of his people.
They were his people. He had realized that from the moment of his return, or perhaps even from the moment of that brief encounter on a London street.
They were his people.
Choir practice at the chapel was the one event of the week that regularly drew a large number of people together, except at the very busiest times of the year. Singing was the one passion and the one accomplishment that united most of the people of West Wales, or of any part of Wales for that matter.
Marged had conducted the choir since her girlhood in order to relieve her father of one of his many duties. Though perhaps it was misleading to describe her as the conductor, she often thought. A Welsh choir, unless it was competing at an eisteddfod, really did not need to have someone stand in front of it beating time or forcing changes of volume or tempo. A Welsh choir simply sang from the diaphragm and from the heart and sang as a choir. Welsh singers loved nothing better than to listen to one another’s voices and the harmony of the other parts as they sang.
Marged conducted in the sense that she began the practice, putting an end to the noisy chatter as everyone exchanged news of all that had happened since Sunday, and choosing the hymns they would sing the following Sunday and the order in which they would sing them. When they sang she sat and sang with them while Miss Jenkins thumped away at the keyboard of the ancient pianoforte in the Sunday schoolroom.