Finders and Keepers (60 page)

‘Why are you doing all this for us?' She struggled to free herself and when he released her, she sat back at the table.

‘You know why.'

Her hands went to her bald head. ‘You can't still like me?' she whispered. ‘Not when I look like this.'

‘How can I not still like you? You're the same person you've always been, Mary. Hurt and a little battered and bruised, but still you.' He crouched beside her. ‘I'm not far away. I'm staying at the inn in front of the cottage. In fact, you can see my window from here. It's the one over the door.'

‘It's almost dark.' She looked out through the open door. ‘Do you know what I missed most in the workhouse, apart from Martha, David, Matthew and Luke, that is? The mountains, the trees and the grass – You could see the hills, but we were penned in concrete yards like animals. The walls were so high there was never any fresh air even outside the buildings.'

‘Mrs Morgan will stay with David if we ask her to. Why don't you walk outside with me for a couple of minutes now to get a breath of air? We could both do with it after spending most of the day indoors. There's an orchard just behind the house that belongs to the inn. It's pretty and full of apples and pears.'

‘I don't want anyone to see me in this smock.'

‘There's no one to see you except me, and I've already seen you in it.'

‘I need to check on David first.'

‘I'll wait for you outside.' He went into the garden, not really expecting her to join him. But she came out a few minutes later with a shawl he recognized as Betty's draped around her shaved head.

He slowed his steps to hers and they walked up to the orchard in silence. At the top, set in a copse of low bushes, was a rickety bench that he suspected was one of Alf's early attempts at carpentry.

The branches of the trees on the gently sloping hillside below them were bowed, heavy with green, red and gold fruit. Twilight had fallen, a purple mist that heralded the close of a fine, late-summer evening and portended an equally good day to come. He could almost feel the last traces of warmth leaving the air and the first cool breaths of autumn wafting in on the night breeze.

‘Why don't we sit for a few minutes?' He perched on the rickety bench and Mary sat the other end, leaving a gap between them that he was beginning to feel was unbridgeable. ‘You're cold.' He took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders when he saw her shiver.

She seemed oblivious to his attentions. ‘I never thought I'd be able to walk and breathe in the fresh air again.'

‘Stop thinking about the workhouse. I promise you that neither you nor your family will ever go back there.'

‘You said that before. The morning after you fought Robert Pritchard in the yard.'

‘I know, and I'm sorry I couldn't prevent it from happening. But it is behind you now, Mary. You have to believe that.' He took her hand into his. She looked at him and he gripped it tighter. ‘I was terrified that I'd never see you again.'

‘I thought I'd ever see anyone outside of the workhouse again,' she murmured.

‘I order you to forget that place.'

‘I don't think I'll ever be able to. Look what they did to me. I wasn't pretty before but now …' She bit her lips hard to stop tears coming into her eyes.

‘You were never pretty, but you were beautiful, and that's the way I'll always see you. I told my father about you.'

‘What did you say?'

‘That I loved you.'

‘You love me?' she echoed in wonder.

He moved closer to her. ‘I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you when you skinned my face.'

‘I hurt you, I treated you so badly.'

‘You were being the protective older sister and you had every right to do what you did to me,' he said softly.

‘You really love me?'

‘I truly love you.' He reached out and touched her face with his fingertips. ‘I love your wildness, the single-minded way you love and care for your brothers and sister, and the way you have fought to protect them. I love your dark, beautiful eyes, and I want to spend my whole life caring for you. I want to give you all the things you deserve and above all I want to make you happy. But the question is, could you ever love me?'

‘I already do.'

He smiled at her. ‘Really?'

‘I never thought anyone would love me, not looking the way I do, my hair -'

‘It will grow again, Mary.'

‘But it's still impossible. I could never leave Martha and my brothers.'

‘I know you would never leave them.' His smile broadened. ‘It might be fun to start married life with a ready-made family.'

‘You want to marry me?' She stared at him incredulously.

‘What have we been talking about, if not marriage, Mary?'

‘I don't know … I … the agent, I thought perhaps you'd visit sometimes like him'

He laid his finger across her lips. ‘I'm not him and I never want to hear you mention his name again. He's gone from our life for good. I'm not usually vindictive, but I hope they lock him and Ianto Williams up for years.' He opened his arms and she went to him.

He'd intended to hold her gently, but when she relaxed against him and responded to his touch, he drew her even closer, and when he kissed her, it was passionately with a longing born out of love, not lust as it had been with Diana Adams. She clung to him, and tentatively returned his caresses, cradling his head in her hands and running her fingers through his hair.

‘Mary, you have no idea what you are doing to me,' he murmured thickly when she pressed her body against the length of his.

‘You love me, but you don't want to make love to me?' she asked.

‘More than anything, but I'm terrified of hurting you. You need time to recover, you're so fragile …'

‘So skinny.'

‘I warn you, I intend to spend a lifetime feeding you until you grow plump.'

She kissed him again and thrust her chest against his. He cupped her small, hard breasts and remembered what his father had said:
Tread carefully. Damaged women are fragile: smother them with kindness and you'll suffocate them.

He hoped Lloyd was right, because he had lost all self-control. He raised her from the seat, lay on the grass and lifted her on top of him. Untying her overall, he pulled it away from her before peeling the hated smock over her head. She lifted her arms to help him and to his astonishment she was naked beneath it.

He unbuttoned his shirt and trousers, and tossed aside his own clothes. Moments later he entered her, and soon they were both lost in a world where the only thing that mattered was the overwhelming tide of emotion that engulfed them both.

Afterwards they lay, hidden by the long grass and the darkness. He ran his fingertips lightly over her naked back and reached for his jacket and shirt. He covered her with them as she lay on him, not from any sense of false modesty but because the chill in the air had brought goosebumps to her flesh.

She lifted her head away from his and looked down at him. ‘So that is what my mother meant when she said that love between a man and a woman could be beautiful.'

‘I never understood how it could be either, until now,' he confessed.

‘You've never felt like this before?'

‘Never. I won't lie to you, Mary. There have been other women -'

‘Like Miss Adams.'

‘Like Miss Adams,' he said, ‘but I now know that what happened between us was meaningless. This is my first true love affair and, my darling, I promise you it will be my last.'

‘I wish we could lie like this together for ever.' She snuggled close to him but he could feel the cold seeping up from the ground.

‘So do I, but not here. And much as this has been a night I'll remember all my life, I wish we'd waited until we were in a warm room under bedcovers.'

‘It is cold, but it didn't seem to matter.'

‘It does now.' He kissed her and tried to rise, but she locked her hands around his neck and pressed her body against his again. And once more, he lost all control.

‘You've bewitched me,' he said much later, ‘but no more, my sweet, not tonight or we'll both catch pneumonia.'

‘You're right, I can feel the cold now,' she admitted, when he lifted her away from him. ‘Autumn is coming.'

‘We'll be married before it begins.'

‘Married? You mean it, Harry?' She reached for her smock when he pulled on his trousers.

‘I have a house. A large new house in Pontypridd big enough for us and your brothers and sister. I know you're not used to town life. But my parents and my sisters and brother live next door. They'll welcome you with open arms and help you to settle down.'

Once he had begun to outline the plans he had made for them, he couldn't stop. Carried away by describing the life he had spent so many hours dreaming about, he failed to notice that she had fallen silent again.

‘You will be able to go into the shops I own and get anything you want. Clothes, furniture, things for the house and whatever the boys and Martha want. We'll go on holidays, stay in hotels and eat in restaurants. I'll take you to the theatre and picture houses. We'll go to London – Mary, if you thought Swansea was big, wait until you see London. It's huge. There are dozens of theatres and hundreds of shops there. I'll show you and your brothers and Martha all the sights – the Tower, Buckingham Palace – and we'll go on holidays abroad, as well as in this country. I'll take you all to France and Germany, Spain, Italy – Italy is beautiful, Mary, you'll love it. I'll find a tutor for your brothers and Martha; they're bright, they'll soon catch up and learn enough to attend school. You'll have maids to do all the housework. You'll never have to wash, cook, clean or scrub ever again -'

‘Then what would I do?' she interrupted.

‘You'd run the house, supervise the maids. There'll be tea parties, coffee mornings.' He racked his brains, wondering what women who had servants did with their time. His mother worked in Gwilym James, Aunty Megan ran the dairy on his uncle's farm and Aunty Rhian managed a china shop she owned in her own right.

‘You expect me and my family to move to a town, Harry?'

He heard the apprehension in her voice but chose to ignore it. ‘Pontypridd has picture houses, theatres, shops, a market and a fantastic library. I promise you, Mary, that all of you will love town life once you get used to it.'

‘But I'm a farmer's daughter,' she protested. ‘The only thing I know is farming. And that goes for the others too. We could never be happy in a town,' she said decisively.

‘But my house is in Pontypridd.'

‘And my family's future is here, where the Ellises have lived for generations.'

‘Be reasonable, Mary. You've lost the Estate and I told you I can't get it back for you for nine years -'

‘But you promised you'd help us to find another farm.'

‘You want to work all the hours God sends and be a skivvy all your life?'

‘I want to work to build a future for David, Matthew and Luke,' she broke in fervently. ‘I want to be able to save money so Martha can do whatever she wants with her life. I want to
earn
enough to buy a place that will belong to us – all of us. A home that will always be there when any of us need it.'

‘In that case, I'll buy you a farm near Pontypridd. We'll put in a manager and you can visit it whenever you like.' He picked up the shirt that she had dropped when she had put on her smock.

‘You can't visit a farm, you have to run it.' She fastened Betty's overall over her smock again.

‘Not if you've hired a manager to do all the work.'

‘Then it will be his farm not ours. I don't want to visit a farm the way people visit a hotel or a theatre, Harry. I want to run one.'

‘I'm not a farmer, I'm a businessman,' he said flatly.

‘I know nothing about business, or town living, and I don't want to.'

‘Then you won't live with me in Pontypridd?'

Tight-lipped, she shook her head.

‘Mary, I'm offering you and your family the chance of a lifetime.'

‘You're offering us a life as your pets. You want to break us and train us the way David does his dogs.'

‘That's ridiculous. I want to marry you because I love you. Isn't it only natural that I want you to live with me in my house?' he demanded.

‘I won't let you turn us into something we're not,' she persisted.

‘You can still do whatever you want to. All of you.'

‘In Pontypridd?' Even in the thickening gloom her eyes glittered, and he realized that although the workhouse had momentarily cowed her, she had lost none of her spirit.

‘Yes, in Pontypridd,' he said in exasperation.

‘I can't go to Pontypridd with you when I have to look after the others.'

‘I told you, I'll look after them for you.'

‘But we belong here, in the Swansea Valley, not Pontypridd. It's kind of you to want to help, but my family are my responsibility, Harry, not yours. If you're serious about renting us another farm, we'll take it. But I'd like one as close to the Ellis Estate as I can get.'

‘You stubborn -'

‘But I love you and I'll always be here whenever you come to see me. And you can make love to me whenever you want.'

‘I'm not Robert Pritchard,' he said acidly. ‘You don't have to pay me off, Mary Ellis.'

‘I love you.' There was sadness in her declaration.

‘So you keep saying, but you won't marry me or live with me in Pontypridd.'

‘That doesn't mean I'm not grateful to you for loving me. No one has ever done anything for us before, Harry.'

‘Damn you, can't you see that I'm not being kind,' he shouted, his anger getting the better of him for the second time that day. ‘Don't you understand that I love you? I want to make you my wife? That I want to give you everything -'