someone? What if they were caught? What if some of them were hurt or killed? Or thrown in prison to await trial as Eurwyn had been? She had felt sick for every one of them, especially those she knew. She had visualized them one at a time in her mind, all those men she knew had gone. And Marged.
She had not thought of Aled. And she had thought of no one else. Her father had told them that Aled was playing the part of Charlotte, Rebecca’s favorite daughter. The one who would be closest to Rebecca. The one who would be in most danger.
She had still been sick with worry this morning. Had they really done it? Had they all returned safely? And then in chapel she had seen that no one was absent except Miss Jenkins’s elderly father, who sometimes stayed in bed on a Sunday morning although they lived right next door to the chapel.
Marged was there.
And Aled was there. Her legs had felt like jelly as she walked behind her mother to their pew. Thank God, oh, thank God, Aled was there. He had come back safely.
And then of course, just when relief should have helped her to relax so that she could concentrate on worship, the guilt hit her. She had worried all night and all morning over Aled—and had not spared a thought for Matthew. She had put Matthew off when he had wanted to walk with her last evening. She had been afraid he would see something.
She had thought she was growing fonder of him. She was. She enjoyed his company. He talked to her about his childhood in England and about life there. He opened up a different world to her imagination. She was trying to enjoy his kisses. She did enjoy them. And she was trying not to flinch from some rather more intimate touches. Aled, after all, had done more than just kiss her. There had to be more than just kisses between two people when they were courting.
And she had agreed to be courted.
He was showing interest in her, making her feel that she mattered to him as a person. He was asking her about her life and her people. He had even asked her about Aled and why they had broken up.
“Well,” he had said, not pressing the point when she had given him a vague answer, “all I can say, Ceris, is that I am glad you did and that I never thought him worthy of you.”
She was glad he had kissed her then. She could not have responded in words.
She was trying very hard to fall in love with him. She had thought she was close. And yet all last night and all this morning she had thought only of Aled.
She wondered in some despair, as she walked home after chapel, not participating in the conversation Marged and her mother were holding, if she would ever stop loving Aled. One should be able to stop loving someone of whom one disapproved. One should be able to fall in love with someone one liked. But love did not work that way.
Sometimes she wished—although she had denied it to Aled at Mrs. Howell’s party—that they had married before all this had started to happen. And sometimes she wished that on one of those occasions when they had walked up into the hills together and their embraces had grown hot, one or other of them had not stopped the embrace before it went too far. Sometimes she wished that she had known Aled in the biblical sense at least once in her life. And that she had at least one of his little ones to hold in her arms.
And God forgive her for the sinfulness of such thoughts.
Perhaps if she married Matthew and knew with him what she had never known with Aled, and perhaps if she had a child with him—perhaps . . . Did love work that way? she wondered. She had no way of knowing—yet.
“Ceris,” Marged said, speaking to her directly at last and forcing her friend’s wandering thoughts back to the present, “you are walking out with Mr. Harley? I have known it for some time—everyone knows it by now—but we have not been exactly the closest of friends lately, have we?”
She smiled rather awkwardly and Ceris noticed that her mother had walked on up the lane to the house, leaving them alone together.
“Is it wise?” Marged asked.
“Wise?” Ceris became instantly wary.
“Well, he is the steward