Longing (23 page)

“You are sleeping with him, then?” Emrys's voice, flat in tone, cut through her indecision.

Angharad wanted to deny it. She wished she could. But she could not lie to Emrys. That was why she had had to stop seeing him even before she was sure of netting Josiah Barnes.

“Well.” He got to his feet and stood with his back to her, buttoning up his trousers. He reached into a pocket and she heard the jingling of coins. And then a small shower of them landed with a plop on her stomach. “Thanks for the treat, Angharad. It's quite a while since I had a woman up on the mountain. I hope it's enough. I can't afford to pay as much as Barnes does.”

Angharad bit down hard on both lips while he strode away, leaving his coat behind. She would not let out a sound while he was within earshot. Then she felt about until she had three pennies in her hand and pressed them hard, with both hands, against her mouth. Hot tears ran diagonally across her cheeks.

*   *   *

Siân
met Verity before she found Owen. The child was heavy-eyed and yawning and clutched at her skirt.

“Where is Dada?” she asked, and Siân took her by the hand and led her back to the rock behind which he was sitting.

Siân heard his voice as Verity went around to him and did not go herself. She turned back to find Owen and saw him almost immediately. He took her hand and smiled, and they started down the mountain among a group of Owen's friends.

Siân wondered how the marquess would react to being called the Welsh Dada instead of the English Papa. Verity had even said it with a Welsh lilt.

She was in love with him. The realization came to her full-fledged and left her feeling quite calm. She held to Owen's hand, less than a month before their wedding, and half listened to the
conversation he was having with his friends, and knew that she was in love with the Marquess of Craille.

Alexander. Alex. She had not known his name before tonight.

She did not feel panic-stricken at the realization. Perhaps because it had come without passion. There had been no passion between them even though they had sat with their hands palm to palm. She had not even noticed that consciously until it was time to leave. There had been no real physical awareness at all. Just—oh, just an emotional one.

It had been wonderful. Truly the happiest part of the day. Comforting and soothing. She really had wished that it could last forever.

She should be feeling upset and alarmed, she knew. How could she be planning marriage with one man and yet be in love with another? But it was unreal, that other. He was an English marquess, a man of rank and fortune. He was the owner of Cwmbran. There was no possibility of a future with him. That very impossibility kept her calm.

She would be alarmed tomorrow, she thought. But tonight was magical. Tonight was for unreality.

A man and his wife are equals, he had said. A marriage had to be worked on day by day. It would be unfair for a husband to enforce his will on his wife merely because he was the stronger of the two. How wonderful it would be to be his wife, she thought. But thought had to stop there. She could not allow it to stray farther.

One thing was for sure. She did not believe any of the things Owen accused him of. He was a good and a gentle man and given time he would lift the oppression of years from the workers of Cwmbran. He had already stopped Blodwyn Williams from going underground and doing heavy work while she was with child. He had done it out of kindness, not guile.

She loved him.

Owen's arm came about her waist. “We will go across the hill here and down to the houses,” he said, “instead of going down into the town.”

“Oh-ho,” one of his friends said. “Watch him, Siân. A devil on the mountain is Owen.”

She laughed as a chorus of teasing calls followed them across the hill. They were almost down. This was the route of their usual evening walk.

“You went away by yourself up on top?” Owen said. “You were upset, Siân? We quarreled, didn't we?”

“It was nothing,” she said.

“It was,” he said, “and it was all my fault. Jealous I was. But I know I have no cause. I was the one to urge you to go there to teach his daughter and as soon as you did I grew jealous. I am eating humble pie, you see. Forgive me?”

Now at last she felt guilt. “Oh, of course, Owen,” she said. “Let's forget it.”

“And I spoiled the day of your triumph,” he said. “I was proud,
cariad
. Proud to know that it was my future wife standing up there on the stage singing to put everyone else to shame.”

“Owen.” She dipped her head sideways to his shoulder. “You did not spoil the day.”

They walked on in silence.

“Tired?” he asked at last.

“Mm,” she said. But she could not accept the comfort of the truce. “Owen, you would not really ever beat me, would you?”

“Don't be daft,” he said. “Of course I wouldn't. You would never give me cause. You are a good woman.”

Leave it, she told herself. He felt comfortable and safe. He was of the real world. He was her reality. A reality she wanted and one that would be fully hers very soon. Leave it. “But if I did give you cause?” she said.

He stopped walking to turn her into his arms. He was chuckling. “Then over my knee it would be with you,” he said, “and a good hiding to make sure you never gave me cause again. Silly talk, this. Kiss me, woman.” He lowered his head to nuzzle her neck below one ear.

She put her arms about his neck and clung to him. He had been laughing, joking. Not serious. She should not even have asked. He
was Owen. She had known him for years. She had never seen him being even discourteous to a woman. He had been courting her for many months. He had always been gentle with her. Even when she had unwittingly led him on and he had expected that she would let him make love to her, he had stopped when she had said no.

Yes, it was silly talk. Silly thoughts.

“Owen.” She kissed him back when his mouth came to hers. “Owen, time is moving so slowly. I wish our wedding day would come already. I wish we were going home together now.”

“One word from you,” he said, “and we will go higher up now,
fach
, and soothe ourselves for the wait. But it is not what you mean, is it?”

“No,” she said sadly.

“Well, home to your gran's, then,” he said. “The days will pass,
cariad
, and then we will make up for lost time, is it?”

“Yes.”

She let him kiss her again and kissed him back before he took her home. This was reality and she wanted to cling to it. The unreality had been left behind, and also the calm acceptance she had given it. It must be left there—in the past, on top of the mountain. Something that never really was and never could be.

She would never give Owen cause, she thought, and so he would never be put to the test. She would never give him cause.

*   *   *

Six
owners came to Glanrhyd Castle during an afternoon of the following week, and met there with Alex and Josiah Barnes.

Alex had called the meeting with the purpose of persuading his peers to raise wages back to their former level and of explaining to them the changes he wished them to join him in making so that the lives of their workers would improve. Everything had seemed so obvious and straightforward to him before the meeting began that he had not expected opposition beyond the natural reluctance most people feel to changing what has been common practice for years.

But opposition was stiff. Indeed, the other owners had misunderstood the invitation and had taken for granted that the Marquess of
Craille wished them to come to a common agreement on what they were all separately beginning to realize—that wages must be cut another ten percent in the coming week. The market for iron had still not begun to recover and a loss of profit was soon going to put them all in serious danger of bankruptcy.

They were all agreed, even Josiah Barnes. Alex listened, aghast.

“These people cannot live on ten percent less,” he said. “Most of them are having a hard enough time making ends meet now. My purpose in inviting you all here was to suggest very strongly that we put wages up ten percent.”

They all stared at him rather as if he had two heads, Alex thought.

“Do you know anything at all about the running of a business, Craille?” Mr. Humphrey asked.

It was, of course, the best question with which to silence Alex. No, he did not know much at all. Almost nothing. Only what he had learned in his weeks at Cwmbran.

“Business,” he said, “is not an impersonal, inanimate thing. Business is run by people. I have spent the last several weeks finding out as much as I can about the people who work for me and the lives they lead. I have watched them at work, and I have visited them at home. I have called at the truck shop. They cannot live on less than they have now.”

“Most of them do not have the intelligence to manage their money properly,” Sir Henry Packenham said. “Is that our fault, Craille? It is not a charity we run. It is a business.”

“There are always other people willing to work for less,” Sir John Fowler said. “The Irish would be only too glad to take these jobs.”

“If the companies collapse because too much has been paid out in wages,” Barnes added, “then there will be no work for anyone.”

Mr. Humphrey provided the winning argument. “Perhaps you can afford to operate at a loss, Craille,” he said. “We all know that you draw enormous incomes from your estates in England. The rest of us are not so fortunate. This is our livelihood.”

It was a losing battle he fought, Alex knew even as he argued and tried to devise other ways of protecting profits besides reducing wages. But it seemed that there was only one other way—laying off some of the workers. That was even less acceptable to him as a solution. He had to admit to himself finally that there was nothing he could do to prevent the further drop in wages. And he could not act unilaterally. He reluctantly agreed with the idea that solidarity among the owners was necessary.

But it was a nightmare situation, one in which his head and his heart were at war and could come to no agreement with each other. He was going to have to study the books with great care over the coming days, he thought, instead of concentrating on the human aspect of the business as he had done so far. He needed fully to understand the concepts of profit and loss as they applied to this industry. He needed to know quite clearly exactly how profitable or unprofitable the Cwmbran works were.

If he then disagreed with the other owners, he would call them back and throw at them a whole new arsenal of arguments. And if that failed, then he might consider breaking the solidarity after all in order to deal justly with his own people. But it was not a decision he felt informed enough to make now. Perhaps after all they were right and as much the victim of circumstances as their workers were.

“I will have to authorize you to reduce wages next week, then, Barnes,” he said. “But I do so with a heavy heart.”

The other owners appeared to breathe a collective sigh of relief. They seemed unconcerned with the state of his heart, Alex thought. They probably wished him in Hades. Doubtless everything had run far more smoothly when Barnes had had the sole responsibility for running the Cwmbran works.

“And now the other matters I wished to discuss,” he said, and saw wariness and some irritability return to the faces of most of his guests.

No one else seemed to feel any concern about child labor or the employment of pregnant women for heavy labor or the lack of compensation for workers injured on the job or the fact that workers
were regularly paid their wages in a public house—that complaint even won for itself a hearty laugh—or the absence of waterworks or sewers in the towns. The list went on and on.

The only answer he received from the other owners was the one that had been made before—they were not running a charity, but a business. But this time he was even more reluctant to give in to the need for joint action—or joint inaction.

“I cannot see,” he said to Sir Henry's angry objection, “that my putting in waterworks at Cwmbran will cause the collapse of the works at Penybont or elsewhere. But I do know that it will make life here cleaner and healthier and will perhaps save a few babies from dying.”

“You have no imagination, Craille,” Mr. Humphrey said irritably. “Dangle a piece of cake before one hungry person, and a hundred others will want it too.”

“Perhaps if they are hungry,” Alex said, “they have a right to want cake—or at least bread.”

But his answer, he saw, only angered them further. He had no friends, no allies in this group. In the end he compromised. He promised to do nothing in haste but to see how the markets progressed over the next month or so. Perhaps the demand for iron would return to its former level and wages could be raised again and there would be profits left over to make some of the improvements he suggested.

He would give himself that month, he thought as he saw his visitors to their carriages, to educate himself thoroughly, to see to it that he knew as much about Cwmbran as Barnes knew. Then he could make some informed decisions without having to feel that he was trotting along in the wake of men he could not quite bring himself to like.

He dreaded the thought of having to meet anyone's eyes next week after wages had been reduced again. How would he be able to do it without squirming with shame?

He thought back to the day of the
eisteddfod
, less than a week ago, when he had felt accepted by most of the people of Cwmbran.
They had tolerated and teased him and even talked and laughed with him. They had allowed Verity to mingle with their children.

How would he be able to face these people now?

How would he be able to face Siân? Although he had been careful not to be in company with her since the night of the
eisteddfod
, he had come to feel that they were in some way friends. He had felt on that night that they had grown comfortable with each other, that perhaps they had come to like each other.