father’s grave. They had been buried side by side, GWYNNETH MARSH, VISCOUNTESS HANDFORD, the inscription on the headstone read. His mother. She did not sound like his mother.
“Mam,” he said softly.
He had seen her only once alive after that strange morning when the Earl of Wyvern, his grandfather, had appeared in person up on the moors and had spoken to his mother until she was in tears and Geraint had launched himself at the man and punched him and kicked him until servants pulled him off and held him. Only once, on the morning he was leaving Tegfan and Wales for school in England. A brief, deeply emotional farewell. A good-bye, though he had not realized it at the time. He had never been allowed to write to her and he guessed that she had not been allowed to write to him.
He had had to be ruthlessly purged of everything from his first twelve years of existence that made him unworthy of being the Earl of Wyvern’s heir.
“Mam,” he said again, and his eyes moved to his father’s grave. He knew little about the man who had been killed only weeks after his son’s conception, beyond the fact that he had been handsome and daring and full of laughter. And that he had loved Gwynneth Penderyn, Geraint’s mother.
Geraint wondered about the loneliness of his mother’s life for the eighteen years following the death of his father. For twelve of those years she had had only him and had loved him fiercely. For the last six she had had—no one? He did not know about her last six years. The pain and the emptiness of not knowing stabbed at him and reminded him that he had put them aside with everything else when he had left Wales forever—or so he had thought. He had felt the deep guilt of his neglect of her, though he had been only a boy and had been given no choice at all. But still there had been the guilt. She was dead, and he would never be able to tell her that he loved her constantly through the years of their separation.
“Mam.” He knelt down and rested a palm against the turf beneath the headstone. He hoped there was a heaven. He hoped she had been with his father there for ten years, though time would be meaningless in such a place, he supposed.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he had nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. But he did not want to go back to Tegfan. Someone there was always seeking him out for some purpose and there was always the chance of visitors, especially these days. He did not want to talk with anyone. His heart was too heavy with remembered emotions. He stood up and looked around—and up.
He had told himself on his return that it was one place he would never go. It was too much a part of his deepest nightmares—the isolation, the ostracism, the hunger and cold, the bareness of home, his mother’s loneliness and unhappiness, masked for his sake, but always known to him. He did not want to go back. But it was the only place to go. If he did not go back, he thought suddenly, then he would never really be able to go forward.
And so he went, trudging determinedly uphill, his head down. Perhaps there would be nothing to find except the remembered contours of the bleak upper moorland. Perhaps it would all look familiar yet different. Perhaps he would be able to look about him and breathe in the fresh air and know that it was all gone, all in the past. And that his mother was gone and at peace. Perhaps he would not find any ghosts at all. And those hovels were built of sod and thatch and could not be expected to last long against the elements of the uplands.
But the hovel in which he had lived with his mother had not gone. Not completely. It had been built against an outcropping of rock and had been sheltered from too rapid deterioration. One side of it had collapsed and the thatch was sparse and almost black with age, but it was still recognizable as a wretched habitation. And there was still a doorway to the interior.
He stood some distance away, looking at it, for a long time before approaching the doorway and peering inside. There were only darkness and mustiness to greet him.