“But it is a lovely, musical language,” Samantha protested, “and I intend to learn it.”
“Splendid.” Mr. Rhys beamed at each of them in turn and rubbed his hands together again.
They took their leave as soon as they had finished drinking their tea.
“It is habitable, Ben,” Samantha said as they were being driven slowly up a steep hill on the way back to their hotel. “I feel quite dizzy with the knowledge. Though I expect it is very tiny. I wonder what a tidy sum amounts to. Do you suppose I am vastly wealthy?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But maybe it will be enough to buy you plenty of coal for your fires during the winters. They are supposed to be milder here than in other parts of the country, but if my experience of Cornwall is anything to judge by, they can be mighty damp and cheerless. And windy.”
It was windy here today.
“I suppose that is the penalty of living close to the sea,” she said. “Oh, Ben, Mr. Rhys is so … respectable, is he not?”
“Of course,” he said. “What did you expect? A wild heathen? He is as old as the hills too.”
“He knew my great-aunt,” she said.
“You know nothing about her but her name?” he asked. “Are you curious about her, Samantha? And about the rest of your heritage?”
“My mother almost never talked about her life here,” she told him. “I think she was unhappy. Or perhaps just restless. She ran away to London when she was seventeen and never came back. Perhaps she intended to tell me more when I was older, but she died very suddenly when I was only twelve.”
She had not answered his question about whether she was curious or not, though. She was a bit afraid to be curious, actually. She was afraid of what she might discover. Her mother had been abandoned by her parents, Samantha’s grandparents. That at least she knew. She doubted she wanted to know the details.
Her great-aunt had owned her own cottage, though. That meant something at least. She had obviously not been penniless. Neither had her father, Samantha’s great-grandfather, if he had left her a tidy sum, whatever that might be. But where had her money come from before that to purchase a cottage? She had apparently never been married. She had had enough money to live upon without the sum her father left her. She had been able to leave most or all of that to her niece, Samantha’s mother, in addition to the cottage.
Samantha had always thought of her Welsh relatives as impoverished. Yet even a little bit of thought would have made her realize that her great-aunt could not have been penniless and that her money must have come from somewhere.
“Oh,” she said with a sigh, “perhaps I am just a little bit curious, after all.”
But they had arrived outside their hotel.
“Shall we rest for what remains of today and explore tomorrow?” Ben suggested. “Or would you—”
She interrupted him. “You are going to go to your room to lie down for a while,” she told him. “I can always tell when you are in pain. You smile too much.”
“I shall have to frown ferociously,” he said, suiting action to words, “in order to convince you that I am hale and hearty.”
He did not argue, though, about withdrawing to his room.
The day after tomorrow, Samantha thought as she closed the door to her own room, she was going to be moving into her own home. Her new life would begin in earnest. And Ben would start on his way up the west coast of Wales and the rest of his life.
Oh, dear, how could one’s spirit be so elated and yet so depressed all at the same time? She had better take her mind off things by walking Tramp.
Two hours later, when Samantha was back in her room and sitting by the window, alternately looking at the sea and trying to read, there was a knock on her door. She opened it, smiling in anticipation of seeing Ben on the other side. But a thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed girl stood there instead.
She had been sent by Mr. Rhys’s clerk, she explained, to be Mrs. McKay’s maid and look after her clothes and fetch her washing water and do her hair and anything else that was asked of her, if Mrs. McKay pleased, but she was a good girl and Mr. Rhys himself could testify to that fact since her own mother’s sister had been working for his wife’s cousin for five years now and never any trouble, and would Mrs. McKay give her a chance, please, and she would never be sorry for she would do anything Mrs. McKay pleased and besides, the clerk had told her she must stay for the night even if not forever as the silly English girl who had been Mrs. McKay’s maid had gone away on the stage this morning and abandoned her because she did not like Wales, though what was wrong with Wales, who knew, for it was surely a hundred times better than that England, where there was scarcely a mountain or molehill to make the land interesting and people could not sing to save their lives, but anyway, it would not be respectable for Mrs. McKay to be alone in a hotel without a maid even though her dead husband’s friend, who was both a major and a sir, was here to protect her, though in another room of course, and … and would Mrs. McKay consider her for the job, please?
Samantha was not sure the girl had stopped once to draw breath. Her eyes were wide with mingled eagerness and anxiety.
“You have the advantage of me,” she said. “You know my name.”
“Oh,” the girl said. “Gladys, Mrs. McKay. Gladys Jones.”
“And how old are you, Gladys?” Samantha asked.
“I am fourteen, Mrs. McKay,” the girl said. “I am the oldest of us. There are seven younger than me and none of us working yet. I would be much obliged to you if you would take me on so that I can give some money to Da to help him feed us all. I am a good worker. My mam says so, and she says she will miss me if I go into service, but Ceris will do almost as well in my place. She is a good girl too and she has just turned thirteen and she is nearly as tall as me. But perhaps you would not need me to live in just yet, and I could go back and forth really easy because I live in Fisherman’s Bridge, no more than a bit of a walk from the empty cottage where you are going to move to. Mam is expecting another of us in a few weeks, and I would rather be there with her for the nights anyway until the new babe is in the cradle. After that I would be more than happy to live in. Though I will live in right away if you would rather and just have my half day to visit Mam and help Ceris out as much as I can.”