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‘Good Lord,’ Tom said, ‘I was sure there’d be something we’d forget. I remember now, that was the custom in Hendre Ddu when one of the older servants died without kith or kin. We’ll have to remedy that. Tell Prosser that the youngsters must call here next Sunday after chapel.’

‘But what about that first cousin from Tregaron?’ Lowri said. ‘Anyway, I wonder what money she will have left. She was very generous, you know, nobody from chapel ever got married or had a baby without her giving them a brand new crown, they could depend on that. And Christmas-time too, she used to get half a dozen pairs of woollen socks for all the men and stockings for the maids and always the best quality. Dear old Miss Rees. I really miss her. I don’t think I ever realised how much I loved her.’

Tom admitted that he felt exactly the same. ‘In a way we made fun of her loyalty to the family, but in fact we appreciated it and loved her for it.’

‘Where’s May?’ Josi suddenly asked.

‘She’s up with Catrin and the baby. Catrin has been showing her all the old photographs. She’s seen photos of you since you were a few days old,’ she told Tom. ‘Little Rachel May is going to be christened in her grandmother’s old christening gown and bonnet and Catrin’s asked May and me to be her godmothers.’

‘I only hope the baby will put on a bit of weight before that,’ Graham said, sighing like an old man, ‘or she’ll look like a little shrimp in all that magnificence of lace and tulle.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ Josi said with more assurance than he really felt. ‘What, lad, do you doubt that this thriving farming family with its history of breeding prize-winning stock is going to fail with one of their own? Not likely. I remember Tom here giving his mother a very anxious few weeks but look at him now.’

They all turned towards Tom who looked as strong and handsome as if he’d been on the continent doing the grand tour, not fighting in the mud and stinking slime of the trenches for two and a half years.

Three days later, May went back to London. On her last day at Hendre Ddu she seemed strangely dispirited and distant. Tom was worried, but comforted himself with the thought that she was dreading the time they would spend apart. Perhaps she expected her father to object to her sudden decision to get married and live so far away. He would quite understand it; if she were his daughter he’d feel exactly the same.

Chapter seven

It was Lowri who made the discovery. In the old press in Miss Rees’ bedroom, under a pile of linen, was a brown canvas bag containing a great weight of gold sovereigns.

‘Great Heavens,’ Tom said when she took them to him. ‘However did she manage to save this much money? Her wages were ridiculously small for all the work she did here. She always said that her status in the family was sufficient reward, but I was never convinced of that.’

‘Shall I count it, Tom?’ Lowri asked. ‘I didn’t want to touch it until I’d handed it over to you.’

‘Let’s do it together and try to decide what we’ll do with it. I suppose she hasn’t left any instructions or any sort of will?’

‘No, I’ve been through all her papers. Though I’m afraid I’ve been unable to throw much away. It’s all so interesting, accounts of how much Mrs Ifans spent on her wedding outfit when she married your father, stuff like that. How much was spent on the Harvest Festival supper and at Christmas and the New Year festivities. We should keep it all together in a big cardboard box. It would make a history of the house since she first came here at fourteen, over sixty years ago. About 1854 I think it was, not long after Mrs Ifans’ mother died. And as well as that, as the minister said, she had gleaned information about the Morgan family over generations and had taken the trouble to write it all down in her lovely copperplate handwriting.’

But Tom seemed unable to think of anything but the money. ‘Let’s put them in piles of ten and add them up. I’m beginning to realise what joy misers have in counting up their gold, doesn’t it give you some sort of a deeply sensuous pleasure? I’m afraid it does me.’

‘Well, it’s in your family, they say, that miser strain. Your great-grandfather now, he was a hard, grasping man according to what I’ve heard.’ It was the first time Lowri had dared tease Tom, as Josi and Catrin always did.

‘And don’t I know it! It was that man who took my father’s inheritance, Cefn Hebog, to pay off some paltry debt. He’s never let me forget that. Hasn’t he ever told you about it?’

‘No. He must have forgiven him now that you’ve righted old wrongs and given it back to him. He loves Cefn Hebog and so do I.’

‘When May and I are married and we’ve got a farm manager here, you might be able to go back there. Though I shall dread the day. I think families should stick together. I even love having Catrin and the baby back here.’

‘Have you noticed anything about the dates of these sovereigns?’ Lowri asked him after a few moments.

‘No, should I have?’

‘They’re all quite old. I mean, all of them have Victoria’s head on them. When did her son, Edward, come to the throne?’

‘In 1902 or 1903. I know Catrin and I are both Victorian babies and so are you probably.’

‘Yes, I’m six months older than Miss Catrin, Catrin I mean.’

‘When did my grandfather die? I was about four years old then. Catrin doesn’t even remember him. But you’re quite right, none of these is from the new century. Perhaps she got all of them from my grandfather, they all seem from the time he was alive. Great Heavens, I wonder whether Miss Rees was his mistress. It would explain why she never got married. She used to tell us about all the rich widowers who’d courted her. She used to say that it was Mother she couldn’t leave, but there might have been another reason.’

‘Oh Tom, Miss Rees has only been dead a week and you’re already blackening her character.’

‘Not at all. Why shouldn’t they both have had some pleasure in life, they both worked hard enough. Anyway, it was you who noticed that they were all old, what were you thinking about when you mentioned that? It’s certainly intriguing. I think we’ve got about five hundred sovereigns here all told. Whatever shall we do with it all?’

‘You could take May to London for your honeymoon and stay in a grand hotel with great gold bathrooms and carpets everywhere and live a life of luxury for six months or more.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing. That first cousin from Tregaron is not going to have a penny of it. She never visited Miss Rees in all the years I remember, though Miss Rees was always so proud of her. She was a schoolmistress and later married a sea captain from New Quay and had “visited the heathen lands across the sea”.’

‘She’ll have plenty of money then. Sea captains have always been rich.’

‘Is that my father coming in? Tell him I want to see him please, Lowri. What’s he going to think of this little lot?’

Josi had plenty to say. ‘I don’t know how she came by it and I don’t much care. But I know what you should do with it. You should make Davy Prosser your manager and build him a decent house with some modern facilities. Brithdir is all but falling down, but naturally the man just tries to patch it up instead of complaining about it. Speak to him about it this very afternoon.’

‘That’s a good suggestion. Just as long as no one else has any claim on it. Perhaps we should wait a few days in case something else turns up amongst her papers.’

‘No, I think I’ve been through pretty well everything now,’ Lowri said. ‘But anyway, you can surely have a house built on your own land for a fraction of that money.’

‘I think Tom’s loath to part with his little haul,’ she told her husband.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s the Morgan blood coming out in him. Did I ever tell you about old Thomas Morgan, the one he was named after? He was a noted money-lender and thief. What he used to do was offer to lend a little struggling smallholder fifty pounds or so when his harvest had failed on the understanding that he would pay it back in a year’s time. Of course the man would take it. What other option did he have? And that’s how he’d lose his little farm. How do I know? Because that’s what happened to my grandfather, old Amos Evans, that’s how he lost Cefn Hebog that had been in his family for three hundred years.’

‘How many times have you told me that story? What would it take to shut you up once and for all? I thought giving you back Cefn Hebog might do it, but no. You’re a pitiless, unforgiving wretch.’

‘Apologise to your son,’ Lowri said, ‘And make it up, I beg you.’

‘We’re friends really, don’t worry. I like to tease him a bit, that’s all. I don’t want him to forget that he’s got bad blood in him.’

‘I’ll put this money back in Miss Rees’ room then until you decide what to do with it,’ Lowri said. ‘We don’t want Tom to get too fond of it,’ she added.

That night, Tom had another nightmare, but this time when his father had rushed to his bedroom he cried and talked for a short while. About treading on blackened corpses in the slime of the trenches. ‘So many dead,’ he moaned, ‘so many arms and legs, so many mutilated faces.’

‘You must work towards a lasting peace, my son,’ Josi murmured tenderly. ‘It’s being called the war to end all wars. You must see to it that it is. Make that your life’s work. What could be more worthwhile? You’ve got the energy and the means. You must work to stop the killing. Work for world peace.’ Josi went on repeating the same sentences until he hardly knew what he was saying, and Tom fell asleep again, still holding on to his hand. And Josi sat at his side until morning.

On Monday morning Tom was surprised and disappointed that there was no letter from May. ‘Do you think her father has forbidden her to marry me?’

‘Of course not,’ Josi said. ‘Why should he? And you a soldier and, he probably thinks, a gentleman. And he must have heard something about you two. After all, she’s been writing to you for nearly three years and all that time you’ve been writing back to her. He can’t have been unaware of all those army letters reaching her from France. She’s probably got a lot of people to see and hasn’t had too much time for letter writing. You’ll hear from her by the end of the week I’m sure.’

Josi was wrong. Tom heard nothing at all from his fiancée until the Monday of the following week and that letter brought heart-rending news. May was very sorry but felt she’d promised to marry him without sufficient consideration. Now that she’d given the matter further thought she’d decided that she didn’t know him well enough to commit to being his wife and would be pleased if he would be good enough to free her from her too-hasty engagement. She hoped that they could remain friends and that he would still write to her from time to time.

Tom was completely devastated. ‘What happened to her?’ he asked his father and Lowri. ‘I can’t take this rejection, can’t make any sense of it. When she left here everything was fine. All I had to worry about was her journey back to London, the trains being so badly affected by the war.’

‘I’m not so sure that she was absolutely happy even on that Friday morning,’ Lowri said at last. ‘I felt she was worried about something. I asked her how she was feeling, expecting her to say she was excited about telling her father or something of that sort, but all she said was that she would always remember us. I felt it was an odd thing to say, but put it down to the fact that she was so sad to be leaving Tom even for a week or two. What’s at the back of this change of heart? I feel really disappointed in her. Unless there’s some explanation we haven’t thought about.’

‘There is a very obvious explanation. Look at me. I’m a wreck.’

‘You’re a war hero,’ Josi said. ‘And even Mari Elen thinks you’re as handsome as a prince. She wondered last night whether you would marry her if you were free. I said I thought you would.’

‘And May wouldn’t have fallen in love with you if she thought you were a wreck. And she certainly did fall in love with you, Tom. I saw Catrin and Edward years ago, I saw your father with Miriam. I know the face of love.’

‘Josi,’ Lowri suddenly added. ‘I’m going to go up to London to find out why she’s changed her mind. I’m not going to let Tom lose her without a fight. I shall make her tell me what it is that’s worrying her.’

‘Great heavens, Lowri, what a little fighter I married. Just look at her, Tom. I’m terrified of her…. Are you sure you feel up to it, cariad? You’ve never been to London.’

One look at her face gave him the answer. ‘So when will you go, my love?’ he asked meekly.

‘On the first train tomorrow morning. No, I’ve never been to London, so I don’t want to arrive late in the evening.’

‘But how will you find your way about? I’d have no idea how to set about it. She told me that she and her father lived in St John’s Wood. What part of London is that? I’d never heard of it.’

‘Tom will give me her address and I’ll take a taxi from Paddington. It’ll probably cost a lot of money, but someone has to speak to her. I’m not having Tom trying to work out what happened and probably blaming himself for something that isn’t his fault.’

‘Lowri, I’ll always remember this,’
Tom said. ‘If I wasn’t so incapacitated I’d be going myself.’

‘Well, I’m your step-mother now, don’t forget. You two look after Catrin and Mari Elen and leave May to me.’

‘But do you have any London clothes and a suitcase and so on?’

‘Oh, I shan’t stay long, one night at the most, and my chapel clothes are surely good enough for a day trip to London. I have my wedding hat too, don’t forget. Everyone said I looked a proper toff in that. You needn’t feel ashamed of me.’