Hosts of Rebecca

and I could have had one a minute from Hettie Winetree, though Dilly Morgan was sharp with backhanders, her dad being strict. But the kissing of gentry is a very different thing, and practice is needed to get the thing perfect.
Morfydd’s mirror. Into her bedroom for a good clean parting, polished up and pulled in, hair flat with water.
“Tessa!”
I would have given my soul to be gentry just then; cool, calm, sure of myself. And then I remembered a painting Mam had once, of a poor chap grovelling, all wigs and laces, beseeching a bone from a lady disdainful.
“Tessa!”
Try one knee, for both looks like begging, giving it to her with a voice like a tombstone, and Morfydd comes in. Took one look, the bitch, and sat down rocking. Just sat there holding her stays, beetroot in the face to burst blood vessels, making no sound.
Up scalded me.
“A damned sneak you are!” I shouted.
“Aye? Then whose damned mirror, whose damned bedroom? Cross my palm with silver or it is going over the county,” and she reeled away to the bed and went flat on it, thumping.
“What is the trouble, what is the commotion?” Mam now, feathers waving, just come from Chapel. “And bad language, too – I will not stand for it, Sunday at that!”
But Morfydd just shrieked, thumping the pillow.
Away, me. Downstairs like a bullet, skidded through the kitchen and out the back, upending Grandfer coming in for dinner.
Sunday afternoon.
Along the spring lanes, me; full of beef undercut and Mari’s plum pudding, for we were eating better these days; whistling to lose my front ones, hands in pockets, special combed and fluffed up like a hen coming broody. Quite determined, now. One day, I knew, I would marry Tessa Lloyd Parry and bring some gentry into the Mortymer blood and knock some of the pugilism out of it. One day from Tessa I would bring forth my kind, though just then I couldn’t imagine her bringing anything forth save a little silver slipper. Dainty, she was; Welsh dark, only up to my shoulder, but educated. Fifteen today, too, with Greek verses and Homers on her table at tea: raised in a hammock between two cherry trees, eating honeybread to pass the time while I was into oatmeal soup and crawling under the county. Queer old pair we made, come to think of it.
Some nights, when we first came to Cae White, I would walk in the darkness of her home at Squire’s Reach and watch the comings and goings behind the lace-covered windows. There, dying for a peep at Tessa, I would see the gentry; the men, elegant in their frock coats bowing to carpets; slim men, tall, the pick of the English officers, some billeted there to put down Rebecca. And lovely were the women, with waists for dog-collars and their high-pushed breasts curved white under the chandeliers. Minuet now, the hand-drooping dances, with harpists brought in for the price of a dinner. I am partial to music myself, being Welsh; preferring a good solid choir with plenty of brass under it to a milky minuet. And colour and dignity I like, too, seeing them sometimes in a woman off to Chapel or the sight of a big man hewing in strength. But the bowing and scraping of lords and ladies I could never bear, especially in the men. For the fingers of Man were made for clenching and handclasp, not for waving lace, and I would rather stink of honest cow muck than despoil my manhood with perfume.
Beautiful was Squire’s mansion up on the Reach, with the flowering clematis and creeper of centuries drooping in profusion over its entrance, while behind the marble columns all the pride and wealth of the county danced and curtseyed to the bowed good evenings. And sometimes, in the glitter of the room, I would see my Tessa staying up late for a special occasion, being delicate. In her high cane chair she would sit with the beaux of the county dancing her attention. About my own age, some of these, and I longed to get among them three at a time. Bitter, unequal, I would watch from the shadows of the drive, born the wrong side of the blanket, listening for the gardener and his get to hell out of it. But sustained within by the truth of it – that Tessa Lloyd Parry didn’t give a damn for the gentry sons while I was loose – me, Jethro Mortymer, torn coat and hobnails.
We met first on Waldo Bailiff’s afternoon off. Up on the Reach I was, looking for suicide salmon, Mam being partial to it, though it damned near choked her with the speed she got it down. But a salmon has a right to die as anyone else, I reckon, being sick of the parasites and weary of the journeyings. So down on the bank you go, slip in a stick with a wire noose on the end. For hours you might lie till the poor creature comes, jaded, unhappy, seeking an end to it. In goes his head, pull the noose tight, out on the bank with him and a crack with a boulder, and you slip him back in the river to float past Cae White where Morfydd, by chance, happens to be waiting. Salmon, I think, are much like humans. Like Jess Williams, Grandfer’s neighbour about thirty years back – dying to meet his Maker, was Jess, and down he comes in his nightshirt, a rope in one hand, a bucket in the other, with Moc, his twin brother, waiting in their barn. Up on the bucket went Jess with the rope over a beam, and Moc kicked the bucket away at a given signal. Helpful, I call that; brotherly love. Murder they called it in Carmarthen, and they hanged Moc in public.
“Die hard, Moc Williams,” called his mam from the crowd. “Die hard like our Jess,” and Moc did so, for he loved his mam.
Wrong,