The Brothers of Gwynedd Page 7

  It was late in the autumn of the year twelve hundred and forty-three when he came back from the outer world after a trip to buy sumpter ponies, and was closeted a while, as was usual, with the lady. It was as they came out into the hall where I was sitting with my mother and the children that he turned and looked again, and closely, into her face, and said: "Madam, I have heard mention made of your son Llewelyn."

  It was the first time that name had been uttered openly among us since we had left Shrewsbury, though what she had told her lord in private I do not know. She halted as though she had turned to ice, and in her face I could read nothing, neither hostility nor tenderness.

  "What can the horse-traders of London know of my son Llewelyn?" she said, in a voice as impenetrable as her countenance.

  "From a Hereford dealer who buys Welsh mountain ponies, and trades as far as Montgomery," he said. He did not look at her again, and he did not speak until she asked.

  "And what does this dealer say of my son?"

  "Two drovers came down from Berwyn with ponies. They told him they were bred on their lord's lands in Penllyn. And the name of their lord was Llewelyn ap Griffith. He lives, madam, he is well, he has his manhood, and he is set up on his own lands."

  "Set up by his uncle," she said, so drily that I could not tell whether there was any bitterness there, or any wonder, or whether she was glad in her heart that he should be living and free, and in some sort a princeling, or whether she grudged him all, and chiefly his freedom. "So he got his pay," she said, "for betraying me, after all. Why else should David give him an appanage, and he with so little left for himself?"

  My mother's husband said bluntly, for he had the Welsh openness with those he served: "Madam, if he had betrayed you we should never have reached the border. Do you think one well-mounted courier could not move faster than we did, with two litters and a gaggle of children? He got his commote for soldier service. These men of his said he was in arms with his uncle at Rhuddlan."

  "There was no blood shed there," she said sharply, "and little fighting." But whether she said it to belittle what he had done or to reassure herself in face of a danger she had not known one of her children was venturing, I could not be sure. And then she said in a muted cry, gripping her hands together: "He was not yet thirteen years old!"

  Then I knew that for all her hard front, and the bitterness that tore her two ways where he was concerned, she still loved him.

  That winter came and passed in mild, moist weather, with scarcely any frost but a sprinkling of rime in the mornings, washed away by rain or melted by thin sunshine long before noon. And I noticed that daily the Lady Senena watched the skies and the wind, and bided her time, and was often private with my mother's husband for short whiles. In February, when for the first time the true winter came down, a fair fall of snow and then iron frost to bind it, it seemed to me that their eyes grew intent and bright, as though they had been waiting only for this. And when it held all the last ten days of February, with every day they drew breath more easily and hopefully, and spoke of the weather as though it held more meaning for them than for us, how the word went that the great marshes of Moorfields, outside the north gate of the city, were frozen over hard as rock, but with overmuch deadening snow for good sport, so that the young men who went out there for play were forced to sweep small parts of the ice for their games. And I thought how this way from the city would be the quickest and most secret, once that marsh was past, for the forest came close on that side. But they told me nothing, and I asked nothing.

  The last day of February matched all those before. My mother's husband went out from us in the afternoon, and did not come back with the night, but the Lady Senena came in the dusk from visiting her lord, and told us that she would spend the night in the lodging with us, for the Lord Griffith was a little unwell, and she had entreated him to rest, and the guards not to disturb him again until morning.

  What she told my mother I do not know, but those two women slept—or at least lay, for I think much of the night they did not sleep at all—in the same bed that night, and I know they talked much, for I heard their voices whenever I stirred from my own slumber. The girl had a little chamber of her own, and the boys slept as children do, wholeheartedly and deeply. I lay in the dark, listening to those two muted voices within, that spoke without distinguishable words, my mother's pitched lower, and now that I heard them thus together, far the calmer and more assured, and the lady's tight, brittle and imploring, like one lost in prayer. I doubt she was not heard.

  Towards dawn she slept. When the first light began I was uneasy with the silence, and I got up and pulled on my hose and shirt and cotte, and went stealthily and lifted the latch of the high chamber, to be sure if they breathed and lived. For sleep and silence draw very close to death.

  There was a wick burning in a dish of fat, paling now that a little light came in from the sky. My mother lay open-eyed, high on the pillows, her face turned towards me as though she had known before ever I touched the latch that I was coming. She held that great lady cradled asleep on her breast like a child, and over the greying head she motioned to me, quite gently, to go back and close the door. And so I did, and in a few moments she came out to me.

  At this time I was already taller than she, but she was so slender and straight that she had a way of towering, not rigidly or proudly, but like a silver birch tree standing alone. She had only a long white shift on her, and her arms were bare, and all her long, fair hair streamed down over her shoulders, and hung to her waist. In this harsh frost, now twelve days old, she seemed to feel no chill. And I have said she was beautiful, and strange.

  "Make no sound," she said in a whisper, "but let her sleep, she has great need. Samson, I am not easy, I cannot see clear. Somewhere there is a death."

  Daily there is a death waiting for someone, for one who departs and others who remain to mourn. But she looked at me with those eyes that missed what others see and saw what others miss, and I knew that this was very near.

  I was afraid, for I understood nothing, though something I did suspect. I asked her: "Mother, what must I do?"

  "Take your cloak," she said, very low, and peering before her with eyes fixed as it were on a great distance, "and go and look if there is anyone stirring about the keep, or under Lord Griffith's windows."

  So I wrapped my cloak about me, and crept out shivering into the icy morning, where the light as yet was barely grey, though very clear, and still full of fading stars. It was too early for anyone to be abroad but the watch, and I knew their rounds, even if they kept to them strictly, and on such mornings I had known them none too scrupulous about patrolling every corner, preferring the warmth of the guardrooms. I went softly, keeping under the walls of the houses, and left their shelter only when I must. I could see the great, square hulk of the tower outlined clear but pale against the sky, and beyond it, across the open ground, the tooth-edged summit of the curtain wall, and the ruled line of the guard-walk below its crest. All the grass was thick and creaking with rime, the bushes that stood silent and motionless in the stillness rang like bells when I brushed too close, and shed great fronds of feathery ice on my hose and shoes. I drew closer, circling the rim of the ditch and avoiding the main face where the great doorway was, and the ditch was spanned. There was such a silence and stillness that I should have heard if another foot had stirred in the crisp snow, but there was nothing to hear. I was the only creature abroad.

  The Lord Griffith's apartment was very high at the rear part of the keep, with two small windows at the base of one of the corner turrets. I made my way round by the rim of the ditch, which was deep and wide, and for the most part kept clear of briars and bushes. Everything was quiet and nothing strange, until I came under the part where his dwelling was, and looked up at those two round-beaded windows, set deep in the stone. And hanging from the ledge of one of them I saw a dangling line of knotted cloth, no more than two or three yards long, that seemed to end in a fringe of torn threads, l
ight enough to stir in the high air while the coil above hung still. My eyes were young and sharp, and this frayed material I knew for a piece of brocaded tapestry such as might furnish the covering of a bed, or wall-hangings.

  Then, halfway to understanding, I looked below, and at first saw nothing stranger than a stony outcrop breaking the level of the ditch's grassy bottom, under the window, for this, too, was covered, thick with rime. But as I looked I knew that it was no stone, but a man, humped heavily upon one shoulder and half-buried in the ground, and about him the rope that had broken and let him fall had made serpentine hollows in the snow and then made shift to heal them with its own new growths of hoar-frost. The pool of darkness under and about him I had taken for a shelf of level shale, for it was so fast frozen and sealed over with rime, but it was his blood. And at first I had thought this body was headless, for he had so fallen that his head was flattened and driven into his shoulders.

  The Lord Griffith, ever a big and well-fleshed man, had grown heavier still in his enforced idleness, too heavy for the ancient and treacherous drapings of his bed to sustain him. His hopes and his captivity were alike over. He had escaped out of his prison and out of this world.

  CHAPTER III

  There was nothing I or any but God could do for him any longer. All I could do was creep back, shivering, to the living, and tell what I had seen. For when the warders of the Tower discovered it there would be such an outcry that we, shocked and stricken as we were, had no choice but to be prepared for it, and ready and able to meet all that might be said and done. Thus, that I might know the better what I was about, I came to hear the rest of it in haste.

  The rope she had contrived to take in to him, doubtless coiled about her body, for the warders examined all the gifts she carried to the prisoner, had proved too short at the test, and he had eked it out with the furnishings of his chamber. Unhappy for him that he secured this makeshift part of his line to the upper end. If he had trusted only the last few yards to its rotten and deceitful folds he might have fallen without injury, and made his escape. As it was, my mother's husband, shivering in the cold on the outer side of the curtain wall, had waited in vain until there was no hope left, and he must take thought for his own life, for he could not re-enter the Tower gates without condemning himself, if the plot was discovered. So there would be no shrouded travellers riding out at Moorgate with the first light, across the frozen marsh into the forest. Or at the best, only one…

  Somehow the thing passed over us, and we endured it. There was no sense in blaming wife or children, or the servants who served them, in face of a grief that could not now be remedied. We watched out the time, owned to nothing, told nothing we knew. And they took him up, that great, shattered man, and gave him a prince's mourning and burial, for King Henry was as anxious as any to be held blameless, well knowing that there would be those who suspected him in the matter of this death. But I know what I saw, and what was after told to me. Moreover, after our lord himself, there was no man lost more by this disaster than the king, for with Griffith dead he had no hold to restrain David, and no fit weapon to use against him. It was the end of his fine plans, as it was of ours. There was nothing he could do but begin over again, and mend his defences as best he could.

  My mother's husband did not come back, and though he was quickly missed, and certainly hunted, they did not find him. But for more than a month we waited in anxiety, for fear he should be dragged back, for him they would not have spared, having found the line he had secretly secured from a merlon down the outer face of the curtain wall in a secluded corner, for his lord's escape. It seems to me that all had been very well done, but for that too-short rope, for late though he must have left his own flight, yet he got clean away with both the horses he had provided, for they made enquiry everywhere after good riding horses stabled for pay and abandoned, and none were ever reported. Though truly the coper who had such a beast dropped into his hands masterless and gratis might well hold his peace about it.

  Afterwards, when we spoke of this lost venture again, for at first there was a great silence over it, they spoke also before me, being the last man they had. For two husbands were lost, one living and one dead, and they were left with only me, a man according to Welsh law by one year and some months. And freely they said in my hearing the deepest thoughts of their minds and regrets of their hearts, and strange hearing they were. For those two women were changed from that day. The Lady Senena, who had never doubted her own judgment and rightness, was saddened into many misgivings and questionings, and sometimes she said:

  "It was I who killed him. Not now, but long ago. I might have prevailed on him to accept a second place, to be content as his brother's vassal, and he might now have been alive and free both, and a man of lands, too. But I was as set as he on absolute justice. Is it now justice God has dealt out to me?"

  Now much of this I remembered, as men remember the burden of an old song, familiar but without a name, until it came to me that she echoed the entreaties of Llewelyn, that last day before he left her to go to his duty. But I never reminded her, and I think she did not recall where she first heard this prophecy: "It would not cost him so high as you will cost him, if you go on with this." She had cost him life and all, but what profit in telling her so?

  And my mother, who all these years had lived with that other man, had lain in his arms, cooked food for him, washed for him, been pliant and submissive to him, and all without letting him set foot over the doorsill of her mind and heart, and often without seeming to know that he lived and breathed beside her, she took to listening with reared head every time the guard passed, or if voices were raised in the courtyards, her eyes wide and her breath held, until she was satisfied that they had not found and hauled him back, bloodied and beaten, to answer for his loyalty with his life. And when this time was past, still she would say suddenly over the fire at night:

  "I wonder which way he took, and where he is now?"

  I told her he would certainly make for Wales, for his repute was clean there, and he would not want for a lord to take him into service. And I said that he must be safe over the border already, out of the king's reach.

  But that was not all that ailed her. For as often as the night was cold she would be wondering if he had a warm cloak about him, and when the spring storms came it was: "I hope he has a roof over him tonight, and a good fire. He takes cold easily."

  Also, where she had always called him by his name, which was Meilyr, and only now did I begin so to think of him, as a man unique and yet subject to fear and pain and cold like me, now she never spoke a name, but said always: "he." "I wish he took better keep of himself, I doubt he'll be out even in this weather." "He never liked leaving Wales. I pray he has comfort there now." And once she cried out in enlightenment and distress: "I was not good to him!" And once, in wonder and awe, she said as if to herself: "He loved me."

  Now when the news of the Lord Griffith's death reached Wales, as news from England did almost as fast as the east wind could blow that way, the manner and suddenness of it, the circumstance that it took place, like a blow aimed at Wales itself, on St. David's day, the injustice of the imprisonment which had brought it about, all these combined to make him a hero and martyr, who perhaps had been neither, and also to give to his whole story a fervent Welsh glow that turned every enmity against England, and quite misted over the old dissensions between Griffith and his brother.

  Long afterwards I heard an old bard at Cemmaes singing a lament for Griffith, made at his reburial at Aberconway, and hymning the great grief and indignation of the Lord David at this untimely cutting-off. And I was still young enough to make some mock of his singing, for I said that David had had good reason to be glad of the deliverance, for it set him free to strike afresh, and with a united Wales at his back now, for his right. And the old man, though he did not deny it, was undisturbed.

  "For," said he, "have you room in you for only one view at a time, and do you never look both forward and back
together?"

  I said that there was something in what he said, but nevertheless such extravagance of grief over a brother he fought with all his life, and whose removal eased his way to glory, was strangely inconsistent.

  "When you have half my years," he said, "you will have learned that where the human heart is concerned there is nothing strange in inconsistency. Only what is too consistent is strange."

  So it may be that there was truth in the story that David grieved sincerely over the fate of his half-brother, and nothing contradictory in the fiery vigour with which he took advantage of it.

  They had only one leader this time, not two, and only one cause, not two. Barely nine weeks after the Lord Griffith died, the Lord David had entered into an alliance with all the Welsh chiefs, but for those very few, like Gwenwynwyn's son in Powys, who were more English marcher barons in their thinking than princes of Wales. And before June began they were in the field, stirring up the spirit of revolt in every corner of the land, raising and training levies, and making rapid raids almost nightly across the border, and into that part of Powys that bordered Eryri, the citadel of Snowdon, the abode of eagles. King Henry's castle of Diserth, built after his bloodless victory of three years before, was in some danger of being cut off from Chester, whence all its supplies and reinforcements must come, and by mid-June the whole of the march was in arms.