unmarried and living with your mam and dada at your age if Aled means nothing to you?”
“I have not found the right man,” Ceris said.
“You have,” Marged told her. “That is the trouble. He will not go to burn Geraint in his bed tonight, you know. More is the pity.” She laughed briefly.
“You do not mean that, Marged.” Her friend looked at her reproachfully.
“No,” Marged admitted. “Not quite, I suppose.”
“But it does not matter, don’t you see?” Ceris’s voice and face were unhappy. “Aled is committed to disobedience, to worse than disobedience. As soon as he agreed to represent Glynderi—”
“On the committee?” Marged completed the sentence for her. “The less said out loud about that the better. So far it has been kept so secret that no one who ought not to know about it does. Let us pray it stays that way. None of us know who the other members are. Perhaps it would be better to pretend we do not even know Aled is a member. Perhaps it would be better not to talk about it openly among friends.”
“Aled was more than a friend,” Ceris said with unusual candor. “I know it in my heart, Marged. Even if I must never talk about it, even if I must pretend even to myself that I do not know it, I do know it. Aled represents this area on the committee that is to decide what we can do to show our displeasure to the landowners and perhaps to draw the attention and sympathy of the government in London. There, it is said. I cannot love such a man. I cannot.”
Marged sighed again. “Then it is better to suffer oppression and injustice in silence?” she said. “It is better to be driven from our land and our means of livelihood? It is better to watch children starve? It is better to see families forced into the workhouse, where they are separated from one another and where they are slowly starved? Where their spirits are broken even before their bodies die?”
“Oh, Marged.” Ceris looked up at her, tears in her eyes. “You have learned it from your dada, that way of talking you have. You make it sound like a glorious thing to fight against oppression. You make it sound cowardly to refuse to use violence. But violence does nothing but breed more of itself. Look what happened to Eurwyn. Ah, I am sorry. I ought not to have said that.”
“Eurwyn would rather be dead than alive and at home now, afraid to act on his convictions,” Marged said. “And I am proud of him even though I have been left alone without him. Yes, I am, though it was cruel. Ah, it was cruel, the way he died. And nothing from Geraint Penderyn, from the Earl of Wyvern, though I lowered myself to write him letters and remind him of a time when I had befriended him. Oh, yes, I could almost wish that Aled would go and burn him in his bed tonight.”
“No, you do not, Marged,” Ceris said.
“I did say almost.” Marged was tight-lipped and angry. They lapsed into silence.
She did not want him back at Tegfan, Marged thought. She had been hurt too deeply by him. When he was a child and smaller than she even though he was two years older, she had befriended him. She had championed him even though it was her father who, with the deacons, had driven his mother from chapel. She had continued to champion him throughout his boyhood after he had been sent away to England and never came back or wrote letters to any of his former friends. She had always been one for causes, she thought rather bitterly now.
Clouds were moving across the sky from the west, heavy clouds. It would rain later. She drew her hood up over her head and wished her cloak was not so old, so close to being threadbare. There was so little money for anything but the bare necessities. But then for some there was not even that much.
Even when he came back to Tegfan for his mother’s funeral, she had been prepared to take his part, even though he was silent and morose and arrogant in manner and spoke nothing but English—in a very cultured way. She had told herself and everyone else that he was merely shy, that he needed time. And she had been very eager at the age of sixteen to fall in love with his handsome face