The Brothers of Gwynedd (125 page)

  I said I should be loth to leave her, but most vehemently she urged that he had the greater need of me, for hers here was but the passive part, and all she had to do was to refuse to be moved, while he had to sustain his country and his cause, even to the edge of war if need be. For to give way once to Edward was to be condemned to give way eternally. And she made me promise that if ever the chance offered, I would take it, as in duty bound to rejoin my lord.

  After two days Elizabeth came again. The good weather still held, and Eleanor with her ladies was again in the garden, which began to seem very cramped and poor in that blossoming spring. The guard at our gate opened for Elizabeth without question. Clearly David was well installed in his old place at Edward's side, and Edward's bounty was paying for David's household. But he did not appear with his wife this time. She came in flushed and proud and glowing, with her two little girls dancing beside her, one clinging by either hand. The elder was then approaching five years old, the second turned three, and both as active and bright as butterflies. And behind this trio came in my Cristin, in a loose grey gown, bearing in her arms David's son and heir, Owen, then within two months of his second birthday. There was a third daughter left behind at home with the younger nurse, for she was only five months old, born in Shrewsbury.

  Our eyes met the moment Cristin came in. It was always so. But I was aghast at what I saw, in spite of the radiance of her look, that told me there was no change within, for without she was so direly changed. She carried the little boy as lightly on her arm as once I had seen her carry a new lamb down from the hills of Bala, but her step was heavier and slower, and her face was fallen hollow and white, her eyes sunk deep within her head and the eyelids faintly puffy and soft, her lips also a little swollen. I could not move nor speak for dread that she was fallen gravely ill, and she so cut off from me and from all who knew her best, all but this child-woman Elizabeth, who lived only for her children, and did not seem to see the change in their nurse.

  Eleanor and Elizabeth sat down together in the sun, and the two ladies-in-waiting came in haste to enjoy the novelty of the children, and began an animated game with them on the grass. Elizabeth held out her arms for her son, and Cristin gave him to her. I had my freedom and opportunity, for she could very well hold this little group together and happy.

  Cristin drew back from them gently, and turned and walked with me, away beyond the shrubs and bushes, into the cool of the ante-room. I watched her poor, fallen face and ached for her. Even when we sat down together, we who for years had so seldom been alone with our love, for a while I could not speak. Then I got out in dread:

  "What is it with you? Are you ill?"

  "No," she said, and smiled, and even her smile was pain. "No, not ill. Listen, Samson, for we may not have long. I am charged with a message to you. You have friends here, others besides me. They have a plan to bring you safely away out of this place, and home to Wales. If you will go? Will you go? We dare not attempt more. Her they will never let out of these walls, nor out of their sight. You they may."

  I told her then what had been in my own mind, to get word to Cynan that might be sent on to Llewelyn, in reassurance at least that his wife was heart and soul with him in his stand, and desired him to make no concessions for her. But I knew, even without Eleanor's urging, that if the chance offered to get back to him I must take it, all the more as the clouds gathered more ominously.

  "One will come to the governor, while the court is still here in Windsor," said Cristin, "with the request to borrow you, as being fluent in Welsh and versed in Welsh law, to copy some documents for David. Oh, never fear, David's seal will be available, and David is so close to Edward, no one will question it. There will be horses waiting for you at a safe place."

  "And leave some poor soul to answer for stealing or copying David's seal?" I said, doubtful. "Or bring David himself into suspicion?"

  "No need," she said. Tour guide is coming with you. He also is Welsh, and if there is to be fighting, he wills to be home and fighting beside his own people. No one else will come into suspicion."

  "No one but you," I said. "You could suffer for me. Who else could have brought me this message?"

  "No," she said, shaking her head. "You need not fear for me. I am strongly protected, no one will point at me. I wish to God I could ride with you, Samson, as once we rode together to Llewelyn, but I can no more go and leave her now than I could when he brought us to the border, all in innocence, and only then let me see where we were bound. Now we go armed, David and I, enemies bound by a truce. But whatever evil he may have done, he will not let any harm come to me. I am the cross that dangles before his conscience, I am the voice saying: Repent! He cannot do without me, he would be lost."

  Her voice was soft and wild, and her low laughter very bitter. I asked her: "Was it he who warned Edward, and had him send pirates to seize our ships at sea? Is that also to his account?"

  "No," she said, "that was not David. That word came from Brittany, while you waited for the good winds. Hard to keep secret the passage of such a party, and Edward has his spies everywhere. Do not put down to David more than his due, his load is heavy enough. He can see no end now but destruction for himself or Llewelyn, he feels himself far past forgiveness. Now he wants to bring on the ruin he foresees, to pull down the house over himself or wipe his brother out of the world and try to forget him. Since there's no going back, he is frantic to complete what he has begun. If I left him, there would be no one who knows the truth, no face that has only to appear before him to remind him of the judgement. David needs me even more than she does. It would be hard for me to leave him."

  I said again, for her voice was so slow and grievous, and her face so burning with

white despair: "Cristin, something has happened to you! You are ill!"

  "No," she said, "I am quite well. Will you go, Samson? Promise, for my sake! I want you free, and far away from here."

  I promised, for she clung so to my hand, and her hollow eyes devoured my face with such longing. "Yes, I will go. Whatever you wish I will do, but don't ask me to go from you gladly. And you so changed, so pale and strange! If it is not sickness, it is worse. For God's sake, do not keep it from me! Something terrible has be fallen you…"

  She heaved a great, shuddering sigh, and clasped her hands under her breasts. "Yes, something has befallen me indeed. I did not want to own it, I did not want you to know, but it is written in my face, and you'll get no rest now for thinking and dreading. He has found a way at last of avenging himself on you and on me! So simple it was, and yet he never thought of it before! He, who fell into bed beside me and snored the night away dreaming of all his other women, suddenly he grasped what would most surely destroy me, and strike you to the heart. Since we came to England he has never let me alone, night after night after night with his hate and glee and pride in his cleverness."

  She stood up abruptly beside me, and spread her arms wide, to show how her girdle was tied high under her bosom, and her body gently swollen under the grey woollen gown.

  "Do you not see what God and Godred between them have done to me? I am four months gone with child!"

In this desolate situation I was forced to leave Windsor—my lord threatened, my lady captive, my love pregnant with Godred's monstrous progeny, a dagger, not a child, begotten in hate and despite. Ever since he married her, for policy and establishment like most marriages, he had slighted and misprized her, now he persecuted her with his attentions only to poison and kill both her and me. She said to me before she left me, with a calm more terrible than her desperation: "I will never bear any child but yours!" But I knew, and so did she, that she could not harm the life within her, however she shrank from it in horror. She would bear it and she would care for it, and Godred would gloat as he watched her wither, and the incubus devour her, and savour the thought of me eaten alive in Wales by the same disease. Above all, what cruelty to the child, to create it out of hatred and cherish it out of malice, making it a death before ever it lived, when she could so deeply have loved a child engendered in kindness. And even worse if he came, in his own way, to love and value it for the damage it had done on his behalf.

  So judge in what anguish I went to my duty.

  I told no one. I was tempted for a while to entrust Eleanor with that whole story, and pray her to stand friend to Cristin if by any means she might, for her heart was great enough to find room for the miseries of others, even when it might well have been full of her own. But I did not do it. There was no possibility of confiding Cristin's secrets, her darkness and her need, to any other soul, so passionately were they hers. So I was compelled to let her carry that burden alone.

  Duly they came for me, early in one of the first evenings of May, a young servant in David's livery, bearing a written request with David's seal, begging leave to borrow the services of the Welsh clerk, for some intricate copying that required knowledge of both Welsh and English law, since he had only his immediate household with him on this visit, and had left his own law-men in Shrewsbury. Clearly David's demand, thus proffered, was almost as good as Edward's order, it being assumed without question that he had Edward's sanction and approval for everything he did. And a clerk is no great matter, and hardly likely to risk breaking loose on his own when he can sit comfortably enough, even in a virtual prison, under the protection of his lady's name. So nobody made any bones about asking Eleanor's leave, which she graciously gave, and for the first time since entering Windsor, I passed that iron gate that sealed off the princess's prison.

  The last look I had from her, shining and private like a blessing, went with me down through the town beside my guide, and across the river to the house where David was lodged.

  There was nothing difficult in our escape, because no one was hunting us. We simply rode out of Windsor towards the north-west, briskly and confidently as though we were on approved business, and were never questioned until we reached Wales, though we pressed hard at first, and rode well into the night, lodging having been prepared for us at a grange near Oxford. There we slept out the rest of the dark hours, and went on with fresh mounts in the dawn.

  "We can be easy enough," said my companion contentedly. "No one will have missed you, not yet. The castellan will think you are detained overnight on David's business, and I take it your lady will make no mistakes, know nothing and say nothing?"

  I said he might rely on that. He was from Lleyn, and had been homesick, he said, ever since he had been fool enough to cross the English border in David's train, and was main glad now to be going home, where he belonged. If there was to be fighting, as everyone seemed to expect, it was not for Edward of England he wanted to fight.

  I asked after Cynan, and whether he had made proper preparation to defend his own innocence if suspicion should fall his way. But my companion did not even know the name, and was surprised at the question. Then who, I asked, were his fellows in my rescue, and who had arranged access, in any case, to David's seal, since that could hardly be Cynan's work.

  He looked at me along his shoulder, and considered how much to tell me. "His orders were that you were not to know, but I thought you must have guessed it. The Lord David's seal will have been mislaid somewhere about his household, where anyone—meaning your servant here!—might have got hold of it, and in due time it will be found again, no doubt very convincingly. He wants none of his people implicated, you need not fear. I am the scapegoat, once I'm safe in Wales, and I shall have no objection to that! But as to how it was planned—why, the simplest way possible. Who do you think affixed David's seal to the request for you, if not David?"

  It was not the surprise it might have been, once I accepted it. It fitted still with that image I had of him, for ever torn, so that in England, when he had cast in his lot there, half at least of his heart fought for Wales, and in Wales a hundred ties of almost equal potency drew him back towards England, and never, never could he be content anywhere, and never could he be faithful, because faith to one land was treason to the other.

  "Then all this is his work? The relay of horses, the night's lodging, all?" I thought of Cristin, who had wanted me away from her, very far away where I could not see her anguish or be a tormented witness of the birth she dreaded, and I could believe that David had had her, too, in mind. For there were some for whom he had always a kindness, and to them, after his fashion, he was faithful.

  "All his," said the young man. "Playing one hand against the other for plain wantonness, or wishing himself back where he can never go again—who knows? But if that was it, he'd grudge it to us—and it was he offered me the chance, and only smiled on the wrong side of his face when I jumped at it. He's snug enough there at the king's elbow, and has picked the stronger side, on the face of it. But it's my belief he'd change with you and me if he could."

  God knows he may have been right. Certain it is that David had deliberately extracted me from Edward's grip and restored me to Llewelyn, to the old land and the old loyalty, into which he was certain he himself could never enter again.