The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Read Free Book Online

cannot remember a time when I did not know he was a hero, saving his ruined inheritance, overcoming all manner of adversity, winning a reputation throughout the length and breadth of the Gower Peninsula as a just landlord, a hardworking farmer and a devoted family man. At that time, when I was two months short of my sixteenth birthday, he was still only thirty-six, three years older than my mother, but as he stood facing me in the library I thought neither of his youth nor of his hero’s looks, which were so familiar that I took them for granted, but of his lack of education which my mother had recently underlined to me.
    My father was a gentleman, a member of an Anglo-Welsh family which had survived in Gower for many hundreds of years, but at that moment I suddenly saw him through the English eyes I was busy acquiring at Harrow and I realized for the first time how hard it would be to place him within the conventional framework of the English class system. His casual country clothes were in impeccable English taste but there was something foreign about the way he wore them; Englishmen are prone to be shabbily, not elegantly, informal. Then his hands were wrong; they hinted at past manual labor, not gentlemanly pursuits. But his voice was the most marked anomaly of his gentleman’s appearance, even more marked than the unfashionable beard which any English gentleman would have been tempted to shave off years before. He had a country accent. In the eighteenth century this would have been unremarkable in a provincial gentleman who seldom went to London, but here we were, almost in the twentieth century, and my father did not speak English as it should be spoken. His accent, the curious hybrid of Gower in which Devon meets and conquers Wales, was not marked, no more than a steady Welsh inflection mingled with Devonian vowels, but it was sufficient to label him an oddity in a society where every man is immediately placed as soon as he opens his mouth. My father was a Welshman living in a little corner of England which history and geography had combined to maroon behind the Welsh frontier, and in his English Welshness Oxmoon stood reflected, English yet not English, Welsh yet not Welsh, a cultural and racial conundrum endowed with an idiosyncratic charm and grace.
    “Well, Robert,” said my father, so charming, so graceful, so anxious to help me in any way he could, “let me explain why I approve of this engagement which you find so detestable. It’s like this: a girl such as Ginevra, a beautiful girl, an heiress, lives in constant danger as soon as she’s old enough to go out and about—and even before she’s old enough; I don’t have to remind you of what happened with Conor Kinsella. Now, an early marriage to a suitable young man is the best thing that could happen to a girl like Ginevra, particularly a girl who’s already got herself talked about in an infavorable way.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Believe me, Ginevra could do worse—much worse. This is a good match. Socially the Applebys are beyond reproach, and I’ve no doubt Ginevra would enjoy the future Timothy has to offer—an amusing sociable sort of life divided between London and Gower. Also the two of them have plenty of friends and acquaintances in common and no one denies marriage is easier when the partners share a similar background. Besides, they find each other good company. I don’t see why they shouldn’t do tolerably well together, indeed I don’t.”
    “I can see the truth of what you’re saying, but—”
    “I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how she could be happy with a plain boy who wears spectacles and likes collecting butterflies instead of playing cricket. Well, there’s more than one kind of happiness, Robert. He’ll make her happy because he’ll give her a secure respectable status as a married woman. And if she wants a more exciting sort of happiness she’ll be eligible to look elsewhere later.”
    I stared at