with food to such a degree that plates had to overlap one another. Mrs. Howell and Morfydd had been baking for two days, and not a woman guest had arrived without at least one plate of baking in each hand.
The farmers and their families ate sparingly and plainly throughout the year, but they knew what was due a party. They knew how to feast when there was good reason for a feast.
“Or if we put Marged’s harp in with the cows,” Eli Harris suggested.
“Don’t listen to him, Marged,” Olwen Harris said, digging an ample elbow into her husband’s ribs. “Eli do love a little bit of harp music. All the way up here he has been saying that if no one else brought it down for you, he would.”
“It was brought here at my request,” Mrs. Howell said from her place of honor beside the fire. “We will have music tonight and song to raise the thatch off the roof. Sing for our supper it will be, is it?”
Mari Bevan slapped the back of her young son’s hand as it tried to slide a jam tart off the table.
“Ow, Mam,” he protested.
“It is a good thing this room is crowded,” Glyn Bevan said sternly from some distance away. “It would be your backside getting tanned if I were over by there, boy.”
Idris Parry, invisible beneath the white cloth that covered the table and fell over its sides almost to the floor, licked the jam out of his own tart and caught crumbs of pastry with his free hand.
“I hear you are going into the business of catching and caging mice, Dewi,” Ifor Davies said to Dewi Owen, Dylan and Glenys’s brother. “It will make your fortune, will it?” There was a general burst of laughter.
“A pity you lost them under the table at Tegfan, mind,” Ifor said. “I hear that the old cat there had a decent supper.” The laughter grew louder and merrier.
But the Reverend Llwyd cut it short. “It has come to my attention,” he said, raising both arms, not an easy feat in the crowded farm kitchen, “that certain members of my congregation have taken it upon themselves to show the Earl of Wyvern that he is not welcome here. You must know that I am as unhappy as anyone to see that he has been acting with some greed in the past few years, but what he has done is his lawful right. It is not our lawful right to punish him.”
“It is our lawful right as Britons, Reverend,” Aled Rhoslyn said as Marged drew breath to make some retort, “to be free to live our lives without fear of ruin and starvation and to earn our living with the honest labor of our own hands. When those in power try to deny us that right, then we have the right to assert ourselves.”
“Here, here,” someone said.
“Amen,” someone else said.
There were murmurings of assent from all around.
“Duw, Aled,” Ifor Davies said, “I thought you were Penderyn’s friend. I saw you go off walking in the park together just yesterday.”
“I was not talking about anyone in particular,” Aled said. “I was talking about those in power. That nameless mass of aristocrats and gentry who believe we exist only for the purpose of making them richer. Perhaps some of them, some individuals, might change if they can see what is happening, if they can see that we are people.”
“No,” Marged said fiercely. “They are all the same, Aled. And it is time that we showed them we can be pushed only so far and no farther.”
“I can be pushed as far as a tollgate,” someone said. “I pay my rent and my tithes and my taxes, and then I find I cannot even travel the roads about my home without paying for the privilege. I do not know where the money is going to come from to haul the lime when May comes. There is almost no butter to sell and no one to sell it to.”
“And you would have to pay the tolls in order to take it to market and to bring yourself and your horse and cart home,” someone else added.
“It is the gates we want down,” a third man said over the swell of grumblings around him. “Gates first, I say. And if the idea of getting together all the farmers of this part of Carmarthenshire to do so is not going to work, then maybe I will have to start doing it myself.”
“It