The Brothers of Gwynedd (120 page)

Of that journey, the first and last ever I made out of these islands, my telling must be brief. The ship from the Cinque ports took us up off Carnarvon from one of Llewelyn's own coastal boats, the abbot of Cymer, his chaplain, and the notary Philip ap Ivor, the prince's envoys to the papal court in Rome, and I, alone, sailing to join the household of Eleanor de Montfort at Montargis. It was then September, but a very pleasant autumn, blue-skied and breezy, excellent for sea-going, though I am not gifted in that kind, and even a brisk wind and some feathering of the waves were enough to make me queasy. The master of the ship was a great, thick-set man shaped like one of his own wine-casks, and of the independent and masterful mind of all the Cinque ports men. He owned his ship; and it was to him the same as owning a kingdom. Even Edward, after the civil wars, in which the south-coast sailors had favoured Earl Simon's cause, had found it expedient to make peace with them on generous terms, and turn their minds to the future and the promise of good trading conditions and royal patronage, rather than trying to take revenge for their siding against him. He was not always so reasonable with those who wielded no sort of power to make his revenges cost him dear.

  This master, who had been one of the last to abandon the piratical harrying of the royal ships at the end of those wars, and had held out until it was clear not only that he could do no further good, but also that he had his chance of coming to the king's peace without penalty, talked freely of those days and his own exploits, and spoke the name of Earl Simon boldly and simply as one revered and remembered, as saint and legend. Also he knew many ballads and songs about the earl and his heroic deeds, and his miracles, and could sing them very well, and when he found that I was interested he repeated them over to me that I might take them down and learn them. That was enough to seal him my friend, and he put himself out, the weather down the coast being easy and brisk, to show me something of the governance of a ship, the use of the steering oar, and how the great sail might be manipulated to suit the wind. But I did not tell him that I had known that great man who was his idol, nor that I was bound to the dwelling of the earl's only daughter, to speak the marriage words with her in my prince's name.

  He was a good man, stout and fearless, and both able and daring in his use of his ship. I would we had had him on the return journey, it might have turned out very differently. What he could not run from he might very well have rammed.

  All down the coast of Wales we had favourable winds and clear skies, and I saw the long, beautiful shore of my land as I had never yet seen it. But after the passage of the headlands of Dyfed the winds grew stronger and the sea rougher across the open water, and round the toe of England the crests of the waves were white and high. I was grown used to it by then, and could walk the deck securely even as we leaned and creaked in the swell, and I began to take pleasure in the voyage for its own sake, which had been to me, until then, only a mild hardship between me and the fulfilment of my errand. I marvelled no longer at our master's sense that his own element, which he rode and ruled and endured more than half the time he spent living, was the true and manifest reality and freedom, and the land was a kind of prison full of limits and bars, where he felt himself cramped and diminished. Once in the mid-sea there was no man was his master, neither king nor pope, though he respected both as he required to be respected.

  It was a long journey across the south parts of England, so drawn out that I learned somewhat of the ground of English power, which habits mainly in this southern land. Here are those parts fronting France, which is a very great country and in peace and alliance with England, hence the power is redoubled as long as this
amity
continues. We of Wales habit but a part of the western fringes, and have no such access to the wider world of Christendom. Popes and kings listen to us as best they can, but we are a voice from very far away, and out of a strange land. England lies between us and all those ears that otherwise might hear our complaint.

  In sudden cloud and mild rain we came to our master's home port of Winchelsea, and put ashore part of our cargo, all the timber and half, perhaps, of the wool. Then we made across to Calais, in the last week of September, and there disembarked, the abbot and his colleagues to take the long road to Rome, I with them as far as Paris, for under the abbot's holy shadow travel was safer and more respected by the sheriffs. And at Paris we separated.

  I had but a short way to ride from the capital city, to the castle of Montfort l'Amaury, from which place Earl Simon's family took their being and their name, and where Eleanor's cousins of the French branch made their principal home. For a party from that place was to ride with me to Montargis. I had very gay company, therefore, for the rest of the journey, those twenty or so leagues to the convent founded by Earl Simon's sister Amicia. Round this family foundation there lay rich estates and a fair town, and all the guest apartments of the convent, and the houses of grace to which the Countess Eleanor had retired with her household after Evesham, were full of the relatives and knights and friars attendant on Eleanor, her daughter. She was niece and cousin to kings, and provided already with the household of a princess.

  We came there in the late afternoon, in time to show me those fair fields about the convent in the slanting light before sunset, all golden. It was then past the middle of October, but still serene and mild. Amaury de Montfort came to me in my lodging to conduct me to his sister.

  He was then about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, cleric, scholar and wit, a papal chaplain and a man to be reckoned with in Christendom. I had not seen him since he was fifteen, in the old days at Kenilworth, and I doubt if I should have known him again, for he had grown somewhat away from the family build and the family face, hair and complexion darkening with time, his countenance lengthened and narrowed instead of keeping the massive, bony grandeur of the earl's imperial head. His cheeks were olive and lean, his eyes very dark and deep set, and intensely brilliant. They say he had a sharp and biting tongue that made him many enemies, but that I had no occasion to experience, for to me he was open and gracious after the manner of all his house.

  He had not known, until my coming, who would be sent from Wales to be Llewelyn's proxy, and but for my name I am sure he would not have known me, as there was no reason he should after so long. But the name Samson touched some old memory. He looked at me with fixed attention, and then unlocked his thin dark brows and said: "Yes, now I remember you! You were the prince's man with my father, at Kenilworth before Lewes."

  "I was," I said, "but there was no reason why I should stay in your mind for so many years on that account."

  "But on another account, perhaps," he said. "My brother Guy, when he escaped from England and the king's prison after Evesham, told us the whole story of that battle. You were bidden to leave my father's battle-line and go with the bishops, and you refused to leave him."

  "So did others," I said. "Earl Simon was not an easy man to leave, once drawn to him."

  "Some did not find it hard," said Amaury, suddenly grim, and I knew he was thinking of all those young men who had made the earl their idol for a while, but fallen away when the road grew steep and dark. And in particular of Henry of Almain, the best of them and the most bitterly resented. Amaury had never reconciled himself to the loss of his family's English possessions or his own clerical prebends in England, and continued from France and Italy to wage legal war against all who now held them. I might even have considered him far more likely than Guy to have committed that murder at Viterbo, had it not been known and proved that he was in Padua at the time, and had not spoken with his brothers for some time previously.

  I asked after Guy, as we walked together through the courts of the convent and into the cloister garden from which Eleanor's apartments opened. For Pope Gregory had ordered his incarceration in one of the fortresses in papal territory, after his submission, and all we knew since then was that he had been absolved from excommunication, but not from any of the other bans imposed upon him.

  "He is still a prisoner in Lecco," said Amaury. "It is not the most rigorous of custodies, it might well be possible to slip out of it, and our cousin John would be willing to set him up in some sort of command if he could, but it's impossible anywhere in papal lands. And all this is due to Edward!" It needed no great penetration to see that there was no love lost between these two cousins, however well-disposed the cousins of Montfort l'Amaury might be. We had reached the green enclosure outside Eleanor's rooms then, and suddenly Amaury looked up straightly at me, and said seriously:

  "You realise how ill Edward may take this marriage?"

  I was surprised, and said what seemed to me obvious, that no one in his right wits could possibly attribute any share in Guy's guilt to his innocent young sister, who had never taken any part in the dissensions of the past.

  Amaury smiled again, but darkly. "How well do you know Edward?" he said, but not as one requiring or expecting an answer. And I thought no more of it then, for we had stepped into the cool stone doorway, and entered a long, low-ceilinged room, lit by two candelabra branching from the walls. At the far end of the room, where long windows still let in the sunset light, three women were sitting in tapestried chairs about a table, two of them stitching at the same piece of sewing, a blue, brocaded gown spread across the board to let them take each a sleeve. The third, who sat with her back to the sunset, with her book lifted before her to receive the light, was reading to them in a full, clear, childlike voice, low-pitched and moving. I did not know the poem she was reading, but it was a love-poem. When she heard our steps on the stone she laid by her book, and rose and came round the table to meet us, and so stepped from the sunset light that made an aureole about her, as round a virgin on an altar, to the light of the candles that fell full upon her face and breast, and caused the hieratic image to flower suddenly into a woman sculptured in dark gold and ivory.

  At twelve years old she had been tall for her age. At twenty-two she was only a little above the middle height, but so erect and slender that she seemed taller than she was, and the coil of braided hair above her great ivory brow, still honestly wide and plaintively rounded like a child's, caused her to move with a marvellous, upright grace, as if she balanced a heavy crown on her head. She wore a gown of a colour hardly darker than parchment, but its silken texture and the candle-light turned it to the same muted gold as her hair. And she gazed at me, between long lashes almost black, with those wide-open, wide-set, translucent, green-golden eyes I remembered, so huge and clear that only honesty and goodness dared look straight into them, for fear of their mirroring magic.

  I looked at her, and I saw again the young, ardent, grave face of her best brother, Henry, dead with his father at Evesham, and the noble, austere head of Earl Simon himself, as first I saw it in the church at Oxford, with great eyelids closed, and deliberate lips silently forming the measured words of his prayers. She was all the nobility of her house in one flower, and all the beauty. Those English chroniclers who afterwards wrote of her in superlatives, as most beautiful and most elegant, did not lie.

  She stood with the soft candle-light flowing down the folds of her gold and reflecting from her whiteness, with a half-smile on that mouth of hers, that folded together firmly and purely as the leaves of a rose, and gazed upon me for a moment with the sweet, courteous grace she showed to all strangers. But as I stepped before her into the same charged space of light, and she saw me clearly, her eyes burned brighter gold, and her lips parted in joy.

  "Master Samson!" she said, and held out her hands to me.

  I clasped and kissed them, moved beyond measure that she should remember and recognise me after so long. Behind me Amaury said drily: "I see you need no office of mine here, you are old friends." And he went away quietly and left us together. The two ladies went on serenely with their sewing. And I sat down with Eleanor de Montfort, and talked of Llewelyn. And it was as it had been at Kenilworth, when she was a child, and questioned me of Wales, and of the prince I served, and learned of me that he was a man to be loved, since I so plainly loved him.