The coal mines of Wales were not in Carwyn’s
future. The boy was smart, very smart. His mother made sure he went to an
Anglican school to get the best education available. At the turn of the last
century, the Edwardian Age was rapidly replacing the Victorian era with
modernity. Carwyn fancied himself a modern young man with modern ideas gleaned
from the books he read.
Sent to live with a benefactor after the death
of his mother, the eighteen-year-old boy finds that he enjoys the solitude of
tending the flock of sheep. The pastoral life gives him time to reflect on
himself and his attraction to his own gender. His benefactor, Mr. Leslie, encourages
the boy to accept himself and read the
works of Plato and Walt Whitman as justification for his feelings.
When he receives word that his Uncle in America
has died and left him a farm and a small fortune, Carwyn rescues his father,
Gwilym, from the coal mines and brings Gwilym and his stepmother, Dilys to
Vermont for a better life. The death of his father
takes Carwyn to meet a local witch, Rhian Dyn, is not at all what she appears
to be. Rhian becomes his guide in the small, rural Vermont town. A gypsy lover
is not to be his, but he does find the one man to make him happy and love him.
