Hearts of Gold Read Free

out on the stool the night before. Warm legs were worth the risk of an official reprimand, even from Sister Church.
    Heaving the drawer shut with her foot as well as her hands, she went to the washstand. She picked up the unwieldy old-fashioned yellow jug decorated with transfers of sepia country scenes and tried to pour its contents into the washbowl.
    Nothing happened. Shivering as the chill atmosphere permeated her dressing gown she brushed her dark hair away from her face and looked down into the jug. Pushing her fingers into the neck, she confirmed her suspicions. A thick frozen crust capped the water.
    Even if she succeeded in breaking through it without cracking the jug, the thought of washing in chunks of ice didn’t appeal to her. Pulling the collar of her dressing gown as high as it would go she tightened the belt and left the bedroom, stepping down on to the top stair.
    Unlike the bedroom, the stairs were carpeted with jute, held in place by three cornered oak rods. She trod lightly on the third and fourth stair from the top. Their rods were fragile – broken when her brothers, Haydn and Eddie, had purloined them to use as swords after watching a Douglas Fairbanks’ film. The rods had survived the fencing match, but neither had survived the beating her mother had inflicted on the boys with them when she’d found out what they’d done.
    The light was burning in the downstairs passage as she made her way to the back kitchen. Her father, mother and eldest brother were up and dressed, breakfasting at the massive dark oak table that, together with the open-shelved dresser, dominated the room.
    ‘Good morning, Bethan,’ her mother offered frigidly with a scarcely perceptible nod towards the corner where their lodger Alun Jones was lacing his collier’s boots.
    Alun looked up and for all of his thirty-five years turned a bright shade of beetroot.
    Irritated, Bethan tied her dressing gown even closer around her shivering body.
    ‘Good morning,’ she mumbled in reply to her mother’s greeting. ‘The water in the jug is frozen, so I came down for some warm,’ she added, trying to excuse her state of undress.
    In middle age, Elizabeth Powell was a tall, thin, spare woman. Spare in flesh and spare in spirit. Bethan, like her brothers and Maud, was afraid not so much of her mother but of the atmosphere she exuded which was guaranteed to dampen the liveliest spirit. Elizabeth certainly had an outstanding ability to make herself and everyone around her feel miserable and uncomfortable.
    But she hadn’t always possessed that trait. She’d acquired and honed it to perfection during twenty-one years of silent, suffering marriage to Evan Powell.
    Her silence. His suffering.
    At the time none of the Powells’ friends or acquaintances could fathom exactly why Evan Powell, a strapping, tall, dark (and curly-haired with it) handsome young miner of twenty-three had suddenly decided to pay court to a thin, dour schoolmistress ten years older than himself. But court her he had, and the courtship had culminated a few weeks later in a full chapel wedding attended by both families.
    Elizabeth’s relatives had been both bemused and upset by the match. In their opinion Elizabeth hadn’t so much, stepped down in the world, as slid. True, she had little to recommend her as a wife. Thirty three years old, like most women of her generation she was terrified of being left on the shelf.
    She certainly had no pretensions to beauty. Even then, her hair could have been more accurately described as colourless rather than fair. Her eyes were of a blue more faded than vibrant, and her face thin-nosed, thin-lipped, thin-browed, tended to look disapprovingly down on the world in general, and Pontypridd and the working-class area of the Graig where Evan Powell lived in particular.
    She was tall for a woman. Five feet nine inches and Evan’s younger brother, William, rather unkindly commented that the one good thing that could be said about