The Brothers of Gwynedd (10 page)

  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.

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.

  But David did more, for he formally repudiated the treaty made under duress with King Henry, and sent an envoy with letters to Pope Innocent stating his case, and appealing for support in maintaining the independent right of Wales. This did not come to light until later in the year, when the king was greatly startled and incensed to receive a writ from the abbots of Cymer and Aberconway, as commissioners for the pope, summoning him to appear at the border church of Caerwys, to answer the charge that he had discarded the promised arbitration in his dispute with David, and resorted wantonly to war, thus procuring by force what should only have been decided, perhaps differently, by discussion and agreement. I spoke with a clerk who had been in council when this writ was delivered, and I vouch for the terms of it on his word. And I have heard it said, though for this I cannot vouch, that the one particular factor which most enraged David, and put it in his mind to resort to the pope, was a rumour reaching him that King Henry, in his casting about for a fresh hold on what he had gained, after the restraint of Griffith was removed, had secretly considered having his elder son Edward, the long-legged four-year old who ran wild about the stables with our young David, declared Prince of Wales. It may be so. If he was not cherishing this intent then, he certainly did so later. And if true, it was justification enough for tearing up the treaty.

  Howbeit, the king naturally did not go to Caerwys, but merely made haste to send fresh letters and envoys to Pope Innocent on his own account, putting his own case, no doubt very persuasively. Yet this play filled up the latter months of this year, and caused him to walk warily until he got the answer he wanted, transferring the case once again from Welsh to English law, the English purse being the heavier. So Wales gained half a year in preparing for the battle to come.

  At first the defence was left to the wardens of the march, for Henry still preferred to concentrate on compiling his evidence for the pope, and sharpening for use the only subtle weapon he had left. He withdrew Owen Goch from his prison, took him into his own household, and nursed his ambition and ardour until he prevailed upon him to swear allegiance to England in return for the king's support in winning his birthright.

  The Lady Senena was no longer so innocent as to believe that she could repose any trust in King Henry's faithfulness, but she had still a shrewd confidence in his selfinterest, and indeed it seemed that his need of Owen at this pass was urgent enough to ensure his good behaviour towards him. She therefore made no objection when her son eagerly accepted the king's offer, and willingly swore fealty to him. But in private she advised him to be always on his guard, and in particular to acquiesce until he found out what the king had planned for him. "For," said she with a grim smile, "either Shrewsbury or Chester, at need, is nearer to Wales than the Tower."