good as tomorrow’s. Tomorrow there was to be a large delivery of coal to Tegfan. But that coal, every lump of it, was to suffer an accident on his lordship’s driveway. It was to be spilled out in every direction.
She smiled in some embarrassment at Glenys. “It does not matter,” she said. Unless . . . It was madness. Sheer madness. But sometimes madness was necessary when there were great injustices to be fought. That was what she could remember Eurwyn saying on one occasion. “No, wait.”
Glenys, half turned back to her young man, looked politely at her.
“Glenys,” she said, “could you show me where his bedchamber is? Could you show me how to reach it? Without being seen?” She listened to her own words, appalled.
“His lordship’s bedchamber?” Glenys sounded mystified, as well she might.
“You have heard about the sheep?” Marged asked. “Your brothers must have told you, I am sure. They were both with me last night. And you were in chapel this morning.”
Glenys smiled, her eyes dancing with amusement. “We all thought Mr. Vaughan would start foaming at the mouth this morning,” she said, naming Tegfan’s head gardener.
“But none of us knew that the sheep did not get out by accident. There is a good joke it was, Mrs. Evans.”
“There will be more,” Marged said. “You heard too what happened to Glyn Bevan yesterday?”
Glenys sobered. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, I do hate that Mr. Jones, I do. He loves his job. A person ought not to love such a job.”
“No,” Marged said. “Can you show me the room and the way to it, Glenys? Without getting yourself into any trouble at all? It will be just another joke, I promise.”
Glenys swallowed and then nodded.
Marged laughed as they parted a couple of minutes later. “Watch for the coal delivery tomorrow,” she said. “It should be amusing.”
But it was not amusement she wanted to feel. And indeed it was not amusement she felt. It was excitement. And determination. Soon he would know that it was not just a series of clumsy accidents that was making his life less than comfortable. Soon he would know himself to be the victim of hatred.
It would happen the night they planned to let the horses out of the stables. Friday night. She would do it that same night. Before the night was over he would know.
Finally Marged directed her steps downward. It must be almost teatime.
It was not a good week for Geraint.
He talked to his steward, and Matthew Harley chose to be indignant and to take offense at the suggestion that there was something wrong at Tegfan and on its farms. He pointed out that the estate was the most prosperous in West Wales and was the envy of every other landowner. He explained with some pride that other stewards and even some landowners had visited him to ask his advice on a wide range of topics concerning estate management. He pointed out that tithes and road trusts and the poor rate were beyond his power to control but that rents certainly were not. By raising rents annually, he had ensured the continued prosperity of Tegfan and the continued superiority of the farms.
“How so?” Geraint asked, questioning that last point.
There were many more farmers than there was land for them to rent. It was a competitive business. If a man with land could not afford his rent, he was proving that he was a poor manager. It made perfect business sense to see that he was replaced by a better man. The knowledge that they might be replaced by someone better able to run their farms was incentive enough to keep everyone working hard.
It sounded reasonable. It sounded admirable. But Geraint had always suspected that business was often an impersonal thing, ignoring the human factor. He could not shake from his mind the image of Idris Parry, thin and ragged and poaching on his land. And the memory of what it felt like to live in stark, frightening poverty.
He talked to his neighbors. One of them, who was also in full possession of the tithes of his parish, stared at him in incomprehension when Geraint raised the matter. Tithes were a part of the whole establishment of the church. Church and state would collapse without them. And if one man refused to collect them on the grounds that he did not need them, then the whole fabric of society might crumble.
“One might almost call such a man a traitor,” the neighbor said severely.