If I knew any of Rebecca’s followers, I would encourage them to continue what they are doing. Perhaps I would even become one of them myself. And perhaps I would see Rebecca as a hero, as someone to be admired and respected. Someone to be followed.”
She did not care about the recklessness of her words. She had promised herself on a previous occasion that she would not allow him to play cat and mouse with her.
“He is a criminal, Marged,” he said. They had stopped outside the gate and he was looking at her with his hard blue eyes—eyes that had been tear-filled and beautiful up on the moors just a short while before. “He has no way of winning.”
“Sometimes”—she leaned a little toward him and looked directly into his eyes—“people, both men and women, would prefer to fight a hopeless cause than not to fight at all. Sometimes the worst that can happen to a person is that he lose his self-respect or his soul. Or hers. Don’t threaten me, my lord, or try to make me run in a craven panic to warn off anyone I may know who marches with Rebecca. You are wasting your breath.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. “Yes,” he said, “I can see that. Be careful, then. Far more careful than you were the night you put wet ashes in my bed. I caught you then, remember?”
She had just told him that he could not make her tremble with fear. But she felt cold with it as he took her right hand in his, raised it to his lips, and kissed the palm as he had done with both hands on a previous occasion. He knew. Not just about the ashes—of course he knew about those. He knew that she followed Rebecca. He was warning her that he could easily catch her, as he had that night. And that he would not help her when he did.
Was he warning her in the hope that he would not have to catch her and see her punished? Was it his way of acknowledging that he had once cared?
He turned without another word and continued on his way down the hill. She watched him go, the man who was so much a part of her that not even hatred, not even her love for another man could quite dislodge him.
She could not love him, she thought, frowning slightly for a moment. She had loved him once, then Eurwyn, now Rebecca. That at least made sense—one man at a time. She could not have loved him while she loved Eurwyn. But she knew she had. She certainly could not love him now while her passionate love for Rebecca was so new and so wonderful—and so painful. But she knew that she did in some strange, strange way.
In some way she would always love Geraint Penderyn. Unwillingly and with denial on her lips and in her mind at every turn. But in this moment of painful truth she knew that he would always be there—in the depths of her heart.
Where she did not want him to be.
But where he was and always would be.
Matthew Harley was taking a Friday afternoon off. It was something he rarely did, though he was entitled to it and to far more spare time than he ever took. Usually he did not look for time off. He was happiest when at work. But work was no longer satisfying. He had even wondered if he should start looking for a post elsewhere.
Except that he did not want to go elsewhere. He had begun to think of Tegfan almost as his. He had made it as prosperous and efficient as it was. He had made a reputation for himself. He had won the respect of every landowner in Carmarthenshire. He did not want to have to begin again somewhere else.
It did not seem fair to him that he would always be someone’s steward, that he would never own land for himself. But then life was not fair and he had never been one to complain about what could not be helped. But he had begun to think of Tegfan as his own. He had begun to believe that the Earl of Wyvern would never want to live there himself. He had two larger estates in England, after all, and he was known as a man who preferred life in London to country living, anyway.