A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Read online

  He was on his feet, roused and content, and looking round for his cloak; and she was there with it, lifting it to his shoulders. His eyes encountered hers, and smiled in pleasure and gratitude; hers smiled, too, but mutely, making no marked acknowledgement. Rhodri Parry thrust himself stiffly out of his chair.

  “I shall look to hear from you,” said Hotspur, fastening the clasp of his cloak, “in a week, if all goes well. God speed you, and bring me a hopeful answer—both for England and Wales!”

  “So I pray, too, my lord.”

  “Master Parry, I owe you my thanks. Should I ever be able to serve you, I pray you let me know.”

  “We are still in your lordship’s debt,” said Rhodri formally.

  Hotspur had withdrawn a step or two towards the door when he turned again to look at Iago. “Carry my respectful greetings and compliments to your kinsmen, Gwilym and Rhys ap Tudor and their brothers, and say I still owe them a shrewd knock for their taking of Conway on Good Friday of last year. It cost me a deal in time and labour and money to get my castle back from them, and if we had not had such a pious garrison—all but the lame and bedridden in church!—they would never have prised their way into the place. I look for an adjustment some day.”

  “I make no doubt they will accommodate your lordship,” said Iago. “Yet if I speed too well you may have no remedy.”

  “I’ll bear that as the yoke of God. Mistress Hussey—Master Parry—Master Vaughan—I bid you good-night.”

  “I’ll light you down to the gate,” said Julian, the candle ready in her hand.

  The door of the solar closed behind them; their feet felt a way silently down the staircase. At the house door she left the candle burning upon a shelf within, and took him by the hand to lead him across the stones of the court to the wicket gate; but he halted her suddenly, drawing her back within the shelter of the doorway. In the soft, still light she felt his eyes earnestly and faithfully searching her face.

  “Madam, are you content?”

  She knew he did not mean with their night’s work. Evenly she said, in the same undertone he had used: “All is very well with me, my lord.”

  “I would I could be sure of it. I have in some sort made myself a party to your situation, and it will go hard with my conscience if you find yourself no better blessed than in your old condition. If ever you should be in need of a place of refuge, you have a resort in my wife’s household. You need only come to her.”

  She offered her thanks with composure. In her heart she thought: Kind as she has been to me, and much as I respect her, your wife, my lord, is the last lady living to whom I am likely to apply. Nor is it a place of refuge I want, among the women of a countess’s retinue. I do not know as yet what it is, but I know it is not that.

  “Well, bear it in mind. In case of need, it will always be open. God be with you!”

  “And go with you, my lord,” she said.

  His hand withdrew from hers, and he was gone, stepping silently through the narrow wicket into the darkness of the street. But the warmth of his touch remained with her, in spite of the chill of the night, as she dropped bolt and bar into place, and fastened the house door.

  * * *

  She let herself into the comfort and glow of the solar to hear her father’s querulous voice complaining, in terms in which surely he himself did not believe: “My mind misdoubts me we have done wrong to have any part in this. How if he is sending you with a bait to bring Owen to his death under cover of a parley, as the king’s council urged? Our lord would not be the first to come to bargain and stay to bleed.”

  “You trouble needless,” said Iago, undisturbed. “You know as well as any what answer he made to their urging and how fast they dropped it, at least in his hearing. Do you think they would send such a lure through such a palpably honest man?”

  His eyes, fragments of pale, clear sky, and yet so impenetrable, were on the doorway, waiting, she thought, for her. They did not leave her as she closed the door and drew the curtain over it, and came forward into the room. He saw his own words sink deep into her mind like water into a secret thirst; but her face was motionless and indifferent.

  “Fool,” said Rhodri impatiently, “would they be likely to send it by one palpably dishonest? There’s hardly a man in England but this one to whose lure Owen would stoop now. And perhaps his father! And why? They’re well-disposed enough, all the Percy tribe, because their own holdings are in the north, and they have nothing to lose here on the Welsh border, it would be a different tale if they were in the king’s own shoes, for he’s a marcher lord himself by reason of his Bohun marriage, and when Wales is in question he thinks like a marcher lord, and there’s an end of it. No, if they want to flush him out of hiding, there’s hardly a man they could use but Hotspur.”

  “I would stake what I have,” said Iago, still watching the girl, “that this Hotspur is not an easy man to use. And in November at the council he let see how much trust he was ever again likely to put in the little law-givers at Westminster. Never be deceived by his simplicity and honesty. In defence of that same honesty I think he could be shrewd enough, and ruthless enough, too. And as for deliberately lending himself—why, he would cheerfully hew off Owen’s head in fair fight in the field, and never lose a night’s sleep for it, though he’d grieve for the loss of a grand fighter. But as for putting poison in his wine, or setting a pitfall under his feet at a hunt—no, he’d hew off the head of any man who tried to put him up to it. What they call policy nowadays he’d still call by its old and uglier names. And he has a sense for it, as the cleanly know by instinct how to avoid filth.”

  The girl had lifted her head and turned her face towards him, though he could not flatter himself that she was looking at him; rather at the image he drew before her, that spare portrait of the departed visitant, sketched in so few lines on the firelit air. He saw her breath quicken ever so slightly, and her chin lift, and the light glittered in her half-hooded eyes, red as the embers. It caused him to look back in some compunction, in case he had lied to discover what he wanted to know; but he could find no lies. Hotspur was as he had painted him. He seldom had to meet a man twice to be certain of his ground with him. Women were another matter. How was it that it had taken him so long to see Parry’s daughter thus clearly?

  “In any case,” he said, rising and stretching lazily before the fire, “you lose your pains if you trouble on Owen’s account, unless you think him easily gullible. A letter in a man’s own hand is evidence to be read, along the lines and between the lines, and Owen can read as well as any, and better than most. You think he will move unless he’s sure of his ground? And now I’m off to pick up my cloak and pack, ready to shift before dawn.” He had put away the letter, somewhere inside his ample tunic. He moved towards the inner door by which he had entered, no long time ago.

  Before he reached it he was aware that Julian’s eyes had shortened their focus, and were fixed with sharp intelligence upon his face. She said nothing, but she met his gaze fully and did not veil her own. Rhodri was still muttering, unwilling to give up his customary pessimism, but he might as well not have been in the room with them, he counted for so little at this moment. As little as she did to him, Iago thought, for now that he was to have half his money back, that he had staked on her ennoblement and his grandchild’s inheritance, he scarcely noticed her. She filled her place, she fetched and carried for him, but any tame girl would have done as well. He had no need of this mewed, motionless falcon, waiting now only for the moment and the means to shake off her jesses. In the world into which she intended to soar there was little room for Rhodri Parry. But there might, he thought, if he knew how to wait, be room some day for Iago Vaughan.

  3

  In the foothills of the Clocaenog forest, snugly folded within the pleats of thickly-wooded ground, the camp was invisible from all sides at any distance, covered on one flank by an upland bog, and guarded on the other by a line of outposts. Long before an enemy could get near enough to disti
nguish any glint of arms, the whole company could fold their belongings and slip away into the mountains at their back. They needed little and carried little. They were expert at vanishing silently and reappearing suddenly in some unexpected place; and in case of need the Lord Owen’s main stronghold of Glyndyfrdwy was no great distance away, mound and manor guarded by a curve of the Dee, down there to the south in the close confine of the valley.

  The weather that mid-April had turned fair and mild; the trees were coming into delicate leaf, and ladysmocks fluttering over the marsh meadows. It was pleasant to live in the open, and easy to provision both men and ponies; and the courtier and man of law who had lived a high life in the London Inns and colleges, and been in the king’s own service, was nonetheless a hardy Welshman, well able to campaign in the hills winter or summer, and never complain of a hard bed or a scanty meal. He was the master of most of North Wales and part of the central lands, but a swathe of bracken and heather covered by a skin rug and his own cloak was bed enough for him, and he ate what his men ate, and wanted no more. He had the roads to Ruthyn and Denbigh under his eye from this eyrie, and Mold was not too far for a raid if the weather and the omens were good; but since his active autumn of last year he had contented himself with holding and consolidating, and swooped down in the occasional raid along the border only to keep his hand in for greater things if the season should indicate the necessity.

  He sat on a couch of deerskin, under the awning of his tent, a long, sinewy man in the prime of his powers, forty-eight years old, black of eye and black of hair, but for the first frostings of grey at temple and lip. He was changed since his days at Lancaster’s court; with all his polish and scholarship, which neither time nor place could tarnish, he had nevertheless shed all the cramping tensions of city life, and moved like a young stag, long-stepping in motion and magnificently abandoned in repose. His armour was piled not three yards away, arrayed ready to be donned at short notice. Everything he bore in hand was but half-achieved and for ever in the balance; yet if at this moment there was a prince in Wales, his name was Owen, and Owen knew it.

  Outside, on the grass stippled with the bright embroidery of light and shadow under the trees, Iago Vaughan sat clasping his little travelling harp. Of the prince’s bards he was the least, the stray; but his touch on the strings was no less sure than that of Owen’s court poet.

  “And he said he had known you somewhere before?”

  “He said so.”

  “I doubt it may have been somewhere in a circle of exiles, plucking that familiar of yours.” For in England every bard was an incendiary, with however much deceptive mildness he chose his songs; he was the voice calling the Welshman home, and for what purpose except to join the golden dragon in arms? There had been disaffection among the Welsh in the universities for more than eighteen months now, and many a wandering musician had been thrown into prison for stirring up sedition with his tribal songs, and more than one had been put to death. Welsh labourers, however indentured, however bound, had somehow found a means to slip away, and England well knew where, and for what purpose.

  Iago shrugged and smiled, muting his vibrating strings with a flattened palm. “It’s true he was in Oxford while I was there, and the schools were no very safe place to be singing about great Llewelyn in his seven-foot grave, or making verses after the manner of Cynddelw. God knows we were not always as discreet as we might have been. But more likely it was some time in London. He has his own town house in Bishopsgate Street. Does it matter?” he said, lazily watching the dew distil into vapour as the sun drank it. “Even if he remembers, it’s a year and more ago now, and he’ll remember to forget.”

  “You at least have confidence in him,” Owen said, thoughtfully frowning down at Hotspur’s vehement hand.

  “Yes. Confidence in his will to end this war, even upon terms not ungenerous. By comparison with that, what is it to him if one bard goes free? I’m of more use to him, if I carry his letters faithfully, than all the statutes and limitations and restrictions they’ve clapped on the Welsh trade. He knows them for folly, and has no patience with the little, grudging, timorous minds that made them.”

  “Will you hear what he writes to me? Listen, then, you’ve seen and spoken with the man, and have some insight into his mind.”

  The prince unrolled the scroll, and read aloud:

  “‘To the most noble and puissant Owen, lord of Glyndyfrdwy and Cynllaith, Greeting and Respect!

  “‘By this it will have come to your lordship’s ears what little success my attempt to put forward your terms for negotiation achieved in the council. There are those among the ministers and members who have little knowledge of Welsh affairs, and are not well-disposed to proffer any concessions. But I beg you to believe that there are also men of a wiser and more experienced sort, who by no means decline all consideration of negotiating terms. For my part, I promise you I will continue at all times to have this possibility in mind, and to take every opportunity of bringing it to the minds of those who can best move in the matter. The same guarantee I can offer for all my house, whose will to you is as mine. And I am in haste to get this word to you, that you may know your affair is not in abeyance, and that the undeclared truce which has held good, but for some small brushes, since the council met in November may continue unbroken. This circumstance of restraint on your part is the most favourable argument they can have, who are your well-wishers here. Every day that passes without further raiding speaks for you, the more confirming those who give their voice for reconciliation, and by little persuading those who were against. But if you again burn and provoke, for every enemy you slay you raise up in England a score of enemies, and do but increase the odds against your cause. Which, as I esteem it, is a cause not all unjust, and not to be distorted by ill-judged action.

  “‘I charge you, therefore, for the present abjure all fighting but that is forced upon you, when no man can blame if you do valiantly in your own defence. But forswear all attacks upon cities and towns, upon travellers going their way without ill-thought towards you, all provocation of all kind against the borders, and avoid, so far as ye may, any meeting with any English soldiery. You well may do so, as I know, where every valley and hill and track is known to you. And in return, I promise you that if I get from you the reply for which I hope, I will be about your business presently.

  “‘But further, my lord, one stipulation I make, for your own protection: do not upon any consideration come to any meeting, or respond to any advance, however seeming honest, that does not come to you by my hand, and by this same messenger. For notwithstanding I trust to bring you off happily, with the goodwill of our lord the king and all who best speak for this land, yet I do know there are some who may have other thoughts concerning you. Therefore bide your time and refrain from all action, until I send you word that you may come with my warranty to the council table. Which warranty, when I have given it, I will make good with my life.

  “‘I trust to have word from you by this messenger, and delay only to know that you wish me to proceed. Thereto I pray all good both to you and to Wales, again reconciled soon, I trust, to the king’s Grace.

  “‘Given by my hand at Shrewsbury, the seventh day of April, this year of our Lord fourteen hundred and two.

  “‘Henry Percy, Knight.’”

  “By God, he goes a degree beyond even what I had thought,” said Iago, roused and vindicated, “to warn you not to put your trust in princes and councillors. Surely he knows you’re well warned already, but for his honour he cannot keep from underscoring it three times.”

  “It was he laid my terms before them, and put the idea into their heads,” said Owen with a wry smile. “He may well feel the need to scare me off. But I grant you there are not many would have gone to the trouble. You’ll need a fresh horse, Iago. Go and see to it. Einion will find you whatever you need. And ask Philip, and Griffith Fychan, to come to me here. I have a letter to write.”

  “You’ll remember, my lord,” said
Iago, rising with alacrity from the grass, “that he is but an earl in the making and has no Latin.”

  “It shall be in English,” the prince promised him drily.

  “And favourable?”

  “God granting, everything shall be as he wishes. I will keep my hands from the English—any and all but one,” he said grimly.

  Iago slung his harp over his shoulder, where it carried snugly under his cloak on horseback, and hunched one shoulder slightly under the cape of his capuchin when he went afoot in England. He had made no more than half a dozen strides towards the heart of the encampment when Owen called him back suddenly, in a sharp, changed voice; and when he looked back in surprise:

  “What was that you said of him?—of Hotspur? “‘He is but an earl…’”

  “An earl in the making, I said, but it was a foolish saying. In what does he fall short of an earl now? Why, my lord, what is it?”

  Owen’s black eyes, deep-set and far-seeing, stared blindly inward, narrowed after some vision they had almost captured, and yet let slip. His face was honed bright, like carved ivory.

  “Nothing! I cannot be sure now. The fire kindled, Iago, when you spoke. Now it’s gone.” Colour came back into his weathered cheeks; the volcano of prophecy that was known to burn in him had cooled and crusted over. There would be no further prodigy. “I have it in me, Iago, that this Hotspur, whatever he be, will never be an earl. Strange! Less and more I see him, but never that. Never Northumberland!”

  * * *

  Iago ambled down out of the forest in mid-afternoon, on a Welsh mountain pony with a barrel like a butt of wine, a cross-grained temper, and a turn of speed no one would have credited from her build. He wanted no more showy mount; for all his notably individual looks, he could jog like a pedlar and fade anonymously into any background when he chose. He had Owen’s letter in the breast of his tunic, and his harp tucked away behind his shoulder, and three days of his promised week left for getting back into Shrewsbury. He could have moved directly south into the valley of the Dee, but instead he chose to head eastwards towards the vale of Clwyd, to take a cautious look at the borders of Lord Grey’s domain before he turned south to cross the mountains to Valle Crucis. The truce, after all, did not depend all on one man’s goodwill.