‘I’ve kept this place respectable all my life, and I don’t intend to start anything different,’ said the landlady severely. ‘I think you’d better look somewhere else.’
Mary, half shocked, half frightened, would have taken the children away at once. ‘Come along, Abner,’ she said. But Abner would not be beaten.
‘Look here, missus,’ he said to the landlady. ‘If we wasn’t respectable, we could have took you in, and you been none the wiser. I’m here looking after this young woman. There’s nothing else between us. If there was I should have codded you we was married.’
‘Don’t, Abner!’ said Mary.
The landlady looked from one to the other of this strange couple. Morgan began to whimper, and the sight of the child’s tiredness melted her heart.
‘You’d better come on upstairs,’ she said to Mary, and then, with a defiant glance at Abner: ‘But the young man will have to look out for himself. There’s no bed here I can give him. My husband and the boys’ll have to sleep in the loft as it is. I oughtn’t to take you in, by rights, and that’s the truth.’
‘Never you mind me,’ said Abner. ‘It won’t hurt me to sleep rough.’
She took Mary and the children upstairs. Abner stayed on in the long room alone, listening to the busy clatter of the house. The landlord, his sons, and a couple of village girls, who had been brought in to deal with the rush of business, went running up and down stairs and stone passages and in and out of the bar as quickly and apparently as aimlessly as the inhabitants of a disturbed ants’ nest. The sun dipped behind the mountains. A train arrived from the north, then another from the south, and each time the street was flooded with a crowd of excitable men knocking at door after door in search of lodging for the night. Abner heard the landlord in the bar refusing them one after another. With the second train arrived the important Mr Prowse, a tall, lumbering man in cord breeches and black leggings covered with the red dust of the Black Mountain, from the slopes of which he came. He wore a close red beard, and spoke in a high sing-song, for part of his mountain pasturage was in Wales. He had already drunk too freely at the Craven Arms station buffet to be much worried by the idea of a sleeping companion.
‘What is it you’re after this fair, Mr Prowse?’ asked the landlord.
‘Draught horses,’ said the farmer. ‘They’re very scarce down our way, and a price that would frighten you.’