Hosts of Rebecca

Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Also by Alexander Cordell


About the Author
Alexander Cordell was born in Ceylon in 1914, was educated mainly in China and joined the army in 1932. After WWII, during which he served in France, he became a civil servant, spending three years in Hong Kong.
He wrote more than thirty novels including the highly acclaimed ‘Mortymer Trilogy’ – The Rape of the Fair Country, The Hosts of Rebecca and Song of the Earth. He died on 13 November 1997 aged eighty-three.


THE HOSTS OF REBECCA


Alexander Cordell
www.hodder.co.uk


First published in Great Britain in 1960 by
Victor Gollancz Limited
This edition published in 2014 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Alexander Cordell 1972
Copyright © Georgina Korhonnen 2014
The Rape of the Fair Country is available in paperback from Blorenge Books
The right of Alexander Cordell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 473 60369 1
Paperback ISBN 978 1 473 60368 4
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk


For Georgina


… I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of today. And last of all, my faith is the working class. As some Frenchman has said, ‘The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.’
Jack London


CHAPTER 1
1839
A PEBBLE HIT the window, bringing me upright.
In the sea of Grandfer’s fourposter bed I sat, staring into the nothingness between sleeping and waking, shivering in the pindrop silence.
A handful of gravel at the glass now, spraying as thunder. Out of bed head-first then, scrambling over the boards. Nightshirt billowing, I raised the sash.
“Hush you for God’s sake,” I said. “You will have Morfydd out.”
“Then move your backside,” said Joey in the frost below. “It is damned near midnight.”
Twelve years old, this one – a year and a bit younger than me, with corn-coloured hair and the face of a churchyard ghost, starved at that. A criminal was Tramping Boy Joey, the son of a Shropshire sin-eater; raised in a poorhouse, thumped by life into skin and bone, but the best poaching man in the county of Carmarthenshire. Our bailiff had fits with his legs up when Joey was loose, for he poached every meal. You keep from that Joey, said Morfydd, my sister – you can always stoop to pick up trash.
I dressed like a madman in the stinging silence of December with the window throwing icicles into the room, for it was a winter to freeze dewdrops, and the moon was shivering in the sky that night, rolling over the rim of the mountain. Ice hung from down-spouts, water butts creaked solid and the white plains were hammered into silence. Black was the river where the hen coots were skating, and the whole rolling country from Narberth to Carmarthen city was dying for the warmth and tumble of spring.
“You got a woman up there or something?” whispered Joey, blowing on his fingers and steaming.
I flapped him into silence.
A house of ghosts, this one; ruined and turreted, where the creak of a board was clatter. I listened. No sound but Grandfer’s hop-reeking snores from the kitchen below. A hell of a Grandfer I had – back teeth awash every night regular, head sunk on his chest and bellowing in the place like a man demented, legs thrust out before the fire. Had to get past him somehow. A peep and a listen at the bedroom door and I crept back. Under the bed now, fish out the china, wrap it in a bedsheet and lay it snug, with a pillow below it for the curve of the body. Enemies right and left when you are thirteen. Back to the window with me like lightning.
“Right, you,” I said.
“About time, too,” said Joey, stroking his ferret.
With my boots in my hand I crept down the stairs, pausing outside Morfydd’s door, for she was the true enemy. Thunderbolts could fall and nobody stir but Morfydd, my sister, for when my mam hit the bed she died. But Morfydd’s sleep was the sleep of a conscience, breathing as something embalmed but one eye open for saints. And the step of a mouse would bring her out with hatchets, a wraith on tiptoe that peeped round doors and bent over beds.
Down to the kitchen now with its smells of last night’s supper. A shadow moved from under the table, a crescent of whining joy that encircled my legs. Ever wakeful was Tara, like all Welsh terriers, and already hearing the stamp of the rabbit.
“Quiet!” I breathed, gathering her up. With my hand over her muzzle I tiptoed past Grandfer. Flat out in the armchair was Grandfer, his snores spouting up from his belted belly, his goat beard trembling in the thunder of his dreaming. The big lock grated its betrayal, but I got out somehow and clicked the door shut.
“Look!” whispered Joey, pointing. “Rebecca is at it again,” and the name snatched at my breath. For bonfires were simmering and flashing on the white hills and a rocket arced in a trail of fire and drooped, spluttering into stars.
“Rebecca rioters, is it?” I