for herself. She had made excuses for him when he did not write or come home for the holidays—even when word had it that he did not even write to his mother. She had found reasons, good reasons, why he did none of these things. She had continued to love him.
And her love for him had blossomed, briefly and gloriously—and ultimately painfully—into the love of a woman for a man when he had finally come home, grown up and handsome beyond belief and displaying the magical transformation that six years in England had wrought in him.
The pain of that love had never left her. And of his betrayal. It was terribly wrong, she thought, to think of the love of sixteen-year-olds as puppy love, as something less serious than real love, whatever real love was. She had loved Eurwyn. She had grieved terribly at her loss of him. Part of her would always love him and grieve for him. But that love and that grief had not been more painful, for all that, than the first love and the first grief.
That thought, which blossomed into her conscious mind in the middle of her father’s sermon, surprised Marged and alarmed her. But it was true, she knew. There was no point in denying it. It was true.
And the object of that first love was seated silently and stiffly at her side. She had loved him from the age of five to the age of sixteen. She had grieved for him for a number of years after that. And now for two years she had hated him. She had hated him in his absence. But the hatred was intensified many times now that he was here in person.
Geraint. Ah, Geraint, how could you have changed so much?
She wondered how much damage the sheep had done. It was a shame it was not later in the year, when there would have been flowers and more destruction to be done. But then she did not want to be destructive or violent. Merely a nuisance. She hoped he had been annoyed. She hoped he would be more than annoyed in the coming days.
The Reverend Llwyd kept Geraint talking at the top of the chapel steps after service was over, and Ninian Williams joined them there. Everyone else stood about in groups in the street, Geraint noticed, as they always had done, though it seemed to him that their gossip was quieter, more self-conscious than it had used to be. It seemed to him that everyone studiously avoided looking at him, as if they were afraid to be caught staring.
It had not been a good idea to come. But he had hoped that by attending chapel he would be able to demonstrate his good will, his desire to be a part of the lives of his people, though he knew that both his strange past and his present position would always keep him apart from them. There could be friendly relations, though, he hoped, as there were on his English estates.
But it was not going to be easy. And perhaps it had been a mistake to come today, so soon. Aled had been right in what he had said. Geraint had spent two days discovering that rents had been raised quite steeply for the past five years in a row. There did not seem to be any good reason for quite such a rise. Matthew Harley, his steward, had explained that there were too many potential farmers in Wales and too few farms. If one could not pay the rent, therefore, there was always another able and willing to do so.
It did not sound like a good enough reason for raising rents. To Geraint it sounded more like greed.
And he had discovered something he was ashamed of not having known sooner. The living of Glynderi parish was in his possession and therefore all its tithes were paid to him. He had a bailiff with a sound reputation for gathering outstanding tithes. Apparently Bryn Jones was the envy of all the neighboring gentry. It seemed to Geraint rather as if he were the beneficiary of double rents. Tithes had originally been devised as a way of financing the church, had they not? Yet almost all the people of Glynderi and its surrounding farmland attended the chapel while almost no one attended the Anglican church and the Earl of Wyvern received the tithes.
Something was wrong. It would have been farcical if it were not also deadly serious.