“Aye?”
“And my mam do tell him to shut his mouth, eh, the wicked old bastard.”
“Do not say bastard,” I answered. “Least of all about Grandfer.”
Nodding now, the blankets up to his chin. “Do all men wear petticoats when they do the courting, man?”
Just looked at him.
“I see’d you, remember – night after night – sitting on old Randy, wearing the petticoat, and I told my mam and she said hairpins in the bed next, poor old Jethro.”
“Mistaken,” I said. “Pretty snowy lately, Dick. When I go courting with the lady I come back covered. It wasn’t a petticoat.”
“O, aye?”
I examined his eyes for disbelief, finding none. O, for the eyes of children – innocent, trustful, read as a book. I had settled him, but not myself.
Coming sick of it, fearful of the danger. God knows what would happen to them here if the dragoons tailed me one night. More than once I had galloped Randy to shake off the military, for the new Colonel just come in had a nose for Rebecca. Only last week I had laid in a hedge a hundred yards from Cae White waiting for a patrol to move off. Very interested in the house, it appeared, and I had sweated. Rhayader said somebody was informing – somebody among us but he did not know who. So we watched each other at the meetings now; took breaths while eyes switched, the sentences stopped half way. And now a child was tracking me – little hope if the dragoons got onto him, aged six. God help him if I find that tongue, said Justin Slaughterer. I will have the thing out bloody and dripping.
Terrible to be harbouring the ears of a Judas.
“Sleep now, Dick,” I said. “Don’t forget your prayers.”
“Our Father, is it?”
“He will listen. Just pray. Good night, boy.”
I was going down the stairs when Morfydd met me halfway.
“Is Grandfer in?” she asked.
Opening his bedroom door I looked in; shook my head.
“Little devil,” said she. “We thought he was abed. He is worrying that girl into her grave.”
“Leave the back door,” I said. “I am off to bed.”
“Early tonight?”
“Yes,” I said, “I am tired to death.”
She smiled. “You won’t serve Job Gower and Rebecca, too, man. Bed with you. At least I will sleep tonight.” She came up the stairs and kissed me.
“Goodnight.”
The problems multiply in darkness, pressing in heat and sweat. Yet when morning comes, fortified, you wake and face the molehills that were mountains last night. But even this remembering does not bring you peace, and you toss and hump about, knees up one minute, six feet down in the bed the next. Distantly that night I heard the thumps and clanks of the dragoons and waited with pent breathing till their galloping drifted into silence, and sleep came, fitfully, with visions of Tramping Boy Joey parting the hedges for a journey to St Clears and the special constables. It was close to dawn when the door of my room rasped and I rose up in the bed.
Mari stood there in her nightdress, hair down over her shoulders, holding a candle like a wandering saint.
“Jethro!”
She came towards me, drifting. “Grandfer,” she said. “I have been waiting and it is nearly dawn. He has rarely been as late as this.”
I sank back, sweating, cruelly relieved. “He will come in soon.”
“Jethro …” now she was standing above me, her face pale, her eyes moving in anguish. “I am worried.”
“For God’s sake go back to bed,” I said. “Does he give a thought for you?”
She sat on the bed then, shifting my knees. Beautiful she looked. Her clenched hand was lying an inch from mine, and my fingers itched to be upon it. I looked at her, closed my eyes as the magnet drew me, gripping myself in the bed as I flew against her, cursing myself.
“Jethro, please,” she said.
“Away, then, let me get up.”
She gripped my hand at this, her eyes narrowing with some kind of love and her touch brought fire to me, with a longing greater than I had ever known before, to hold her, to be one with her.
“Poor old Jethro,” she said, smiling down. “Loaded with women and kids and drunkards, worrying day and night, trying to make ends meet, pestered with women like me.”
God, the stupidity of women. She was leaning above me. The white smoothness of her breast, I saw, neck and throat. And her womanhood flashed between us in the instant I moved towards her, and she drew away sharp, eyes startled. Unblinking, we looked, in the year of that second as the understanding flew into her, and she caught her breath, her fingers pulling together the neck of her nightdress.
“Damned woman,” I whispered. “Do you think I am stone?”
“I … I did not know, Jethro,” she said, and lowered her face.
“Now … now get out before it’s two in the bed.”
Faltering, she stood, eyes closed.
“Go on, get out,” I said, and turned away from her.
I did not hear the door shut but knew she was still there, and turned. She was standing with the candle, a look of infinite kindness on her face, and pity.
I dressed in a daze to go out looking for Grandfer, and crossing the snow-covered shippon I looked back at the house. Mari was standing by the window of the landing where Morfydd had stood when I first went out with Rebecca; holding the candle, misty in white, beautiful, looking as a soul in search of God. She waved.
I did not wave back but ran, taking the track to Tarn.
Raw cold are the peat bogs when they dress themselves in shrouds. I kept to the track through the peat, knowing the way Grandfer took on his stumbling journeys home. An unholy place this, billowy and wraithy in the hour before dawn; a world of tinkling icicles shivering in sweeps of the wind, with the branches
