Read Online Kingdom's Dream by Iris Gower - Free Book Online Page B

warmth of the brazier, rubbing them impatiently. ‘Bloody bone-ache! It’s driving me mad – this damp weather worsens it.’
    Bull watched as Cookson’s clothes steamed in the heat and the smell of wet serge permeated the small hut.
    â€˜Want a smoke, Bull?’ he asked affably. He took out his pipe and rubbed it sensuously as if it was a beautiful woman.
    â€˜No, thank you, sir.’ Bull did not indulge in the almost universal habit of smoking: he had seen his father die coughing, his teeth stained brown from the tobacco, his moustache turned yellow.
    â€˜You’re not like your run-of-the-mill navvy, Bull.’ Cookson took his time lighting his pipe. ‘I’d say you’re a cut above the rest.’ He regarded Bull steadily. ‘Had any education, man?’
    Bull almost smiled. His education had consisted of a few hours a day spent at his mother’s side, but she had taught him to read and write and do his figures. She had been a woman of distinction who had married beneath her, in her family’s eyes, but she had been in love with Donald Beynon until the day she died.
    â€˜My mother was an educated lady, sir.’ His brief reply forestalled further questions.
    â€˜I see.’ Cookson cleared his throat. ‘Well, no good hanging around here in this weather. Why not take a bit of time off? Get down the Castle with the other men – a break will do you good.’
    â€˜Aye, you might be right, sir. It looks as if it’s coming down even harder.’ He watched as the engineer took a flask out of his pocket and drank from it, then offered it to him.
    â€˜Thanks.’ Bull took the flask out of politeness rather than because he enjoyed the taste of rich dark rum, which was the engineer’s habitual drink. It was fiery in his throat and he instantly felt warmed by it.
    â€˜How’s that woman of yours, Bull?’ Cookson pushed back his hat. ‘She’s a fine, comely girl.’
    â€˜She’s a good enough woman to share a hut with, sir.’
    â€˜Good enough to bed but not the sort you’d want for a wife, eh?’
    â€˜That’s about the length and breadth of it, sir.’ Bull felt disloyal to Rhiannon but he would never marry her. He knew it and so did she.
    â€˜Well, I’ll be off now and we’ll meet again bright and early in the morning.’ Cookson walked out of the hut, took the reins of his horse from the hitching post and mounted. He touched his whip to his hat and rode away. Bull envied the man his breeding, education and money, but he had determined that he would not be a navvy for the rest of his life. One day, and soon, he would be a respectable, if not wealthy, member of the community.
    Rhiannon sat in the rough shanty staring out at the waterlogged landscape, which was grey and miserable in the pouring rain. She wished Bull would come home. Once he took her in his arms the world would be full of colour again. She sometimes dreamed of being married to Bull, walking down the aisle of a sun-filled church wearing a pretty gown and carrying a bunch of wild flowers – they were the only ones she liked. In fact, they were the only ones she knew, unless she spotted a rose in the garden of a grand house.
    Rhiannon picked up the speckled mirror Bull used for shaving and studied her reflection. She was quite pretty, she supposed, her skin browned by the weather and her hair hanging loose to her shoulders, not swept up in curls like the styles of the gentry. Once, when her father had been alive, she had worn good boots and pretty bonnets, but that had been another life, in the northern part of Wales. Even later, before her mother’s death, she had been happy. But from the age of thirteen she had been alone. ‘You’re not a bad-looking girl,’ she told herself, ‘considerin’ what you’ve been through.’ She remembered the pangs of hunger even now. She had been a thin,