And there was the other excitement too. She had to admit it to herself. She would see him again. Rebecca. She had been so very impressed with his air of command, with his dignity, with his compassion for the gatekeepers of Penfro. And she had hugged to herself since Saturday her memories of him as a man. It had been a magical ride they had shared and a magical kiss. She knew she would remember both for the rest of her life.
Her hands stilled on the butter churn. She was behaving like a young girl over her first kiss. But it was not a happy comparison. She thought of the eighteen-year-old Geraint kissing her sixteen-year-old self and the wonder of it and the conviction that the love she had felt would brighten all the rest of her life. And she thought of him as he had been on Monday, handsome and virile in his shirtsleeves while he picked stones, cold-eyed and autocratic as he spoke afterward about Rebecca and her followers.
She did not want to think about Geraint. She wanted to think of Rebecca. And she wanted tonight to be a repetition of Saturday night. But she knew that something so wonderful could not be repeated—just as there had been no repetition when she was sixteen. The next time she had met Geraint he had tried to . . . Somehow, thinking back on it now, it did not seem so very dreadful. He had tried to make love to her. At the time she had known nothing. She had had her head and her heart full of sweet romance and kisses and young love. She had known nothing about the yearnings of the body, nothing about the carnal act of love. She had been sickened and terrified.
She wondered what would have happened if she had known more. Would she still have stopped him? Would he have stopped? Would they have loved, there on the hillside? And what would have happened afterward? Would that have been the end of it? Or the beginning?
“Marged? What is the matter, girl?” Her mother-in-law’s voice brought her back to reality with a start, and she realized that she was clutching the butter churn and staring into space.
“Oh.” She laughed. “I am taking a breather, Mam, that is all. Is Gran still sleeping?”
“You go in and have a cup of tea, fach,” her mother-in-law said. “There is some warm in the pot and nice and strong. I’ll take over here, is it? You are working too hard, Marged.”
Marged relinquished her place at the butter churn with some guilt and some relief. “A cup of tea sounds lovely, Mam,” she said. “Thank you.”
She must expect nothing of tonight except a long, hard march and the smashing of a gate at the end of it. And a long, hard march home. She must not think of the danger. And she must not expect that Rebecca would even notice her tonight, let alone give her a ride home. And kiss her.
It would be enough just to see him and to dream of how he must look beneath the rather bizarre disguise.
Except that she knew it would not be enough at all.
Some special constables had been sworn in by the magistrates of the area. A few more had been sent from Carmarthen. Geraint knew that more attacks were expected this week. The logical gates to attack were the ones along the same road as the Penfro gate. Constables had been quietly posted at two of them in the hope that at least one of them would be the next target.
And so tonight the gates to go would be two on the road south of Glynderi, across the river. They were strategic gates. The farmers had to travel south to the lime kilns. Many of them would have to pass these two gates. And they belonged to two different trusts—two tolls to pay even though there were no more than two miles between the gates.
He wondered tonight what he had stirred up. His fellow landowners were outraged and determined at all costs to stamp out the protests. The constables had guns. So would the soldiers if and when they came. Perhaps he had begun something that could only lead to violence and defeat. After all, very few protests or uprisings against the established ruling classes ever succeeded. The chances were strong that this one would not.