The Brothers of Gwynedd (134 page)

  There were young lords there, and new officials, and many ladies, who saw the prince of Wales for the first time, though the chief officers of state knew him, even those who had never had direct dealings with him, from his visit at the translation of St. Edward the Confessor. Thus many awaited their first glimpse of him as a defeated man, out-thought and out-fought and brought now to an act of submission he was held to have resisted for five years. And for once he had given some thought to his appearance in this hard role, for his pride could be stung by scorn, mockery or pity like any other man's, and he had the dignity of Wales in his hands, as well as his own. Yet he, who had never denied his defeat, or called it anything but what it was, would not stoop to arm himself with compensatory finery. He wore his best, and he wore jewellery, the polished mountain stones of his own Snowdon, but only as he would have decked himself at any feast to do honour to his host and the season. He chose to be dark, plain and without weapons, putting off even the ornamental dagger that would have passed muster well enough at his belt.

  "Homage is homage," he said, "and I have incurred it and am bound by it. Unarmed is unarmed. There shall not be so much as a brooch on me that could prick his hand or my honour."

  But the talaith, the gold circlet of his rank, that he wore. For Wales, though shrunken to the bounds of Gwynedd-beyond-Conway was still a distinct and separate princedom, not held from Edward, not subject to him. Thus the prince made plain his own reading of the relationship between them.

  When the earl of Lincoln brought him into the king's great hall, every head craned to see him, and every eye fixed upon him, and that is a heavy ordeal when the necks stretch only from curiosity, not ardour, and the eyes are the eyes only of enemies or of those indifferent. The good opinions of individual men among them he had still to win, and did win, in the two weeks and more he was to be a guest in London. But he looked only at Edward, huge and grave and splendid in crown and state, and kept his eyes steadfast on the king's face as he walked the length of that great room to the steps of the throne.

  Two of his brothers were among the crowd of lords and officers flanking the throne on either side, David close to Edward's shoulder, Rhodri withdrawn among the lesser men. The eldest was lording it happily in his new freedom on his lands in Lleyn. At his testing time, Llewelyn was brotherless. He had no one to lean on, and there was no one to let him fall. And better so.

  He needed no one, he was prepared for this moment long before, and he was able to put away from him the circumstances in which it was required of him, and to perform it as directly and simply as if that first meeting planned at Shrewsbury had truly taken place. It was not he who paled and stiffened as he went on his knees on the steps of Edward's throne and lined up his hands to the king, joined palm to palm, large, brown, able hands. Not he whose brows drew sharply together as in a spasm of pain, when Edward leaned and enclosed the prince's hands in his.

  I was watching Llewelyn, but I was aware of David. Very handsome and fine he was in black and gold, and very confident and graceful at the king's side. Elizabeth among the queen's ladies might well glow with pride in him. But with every step that Llewelyn took towards his homage, those high, winged cheekbones of David's tightened and burned slowly into points of blazing white, and fine lines of pallor drew themselves along his jaw, until it seemed the bones would start through the gleaming skin. White as bone and smooth as bone, like an ivory carving of a face, he watched his brother kneel and lift up his hands. There was no contortion, no movement of that face, until the sharp, brief convulsion of his brows. Only his eyes were so desperate a blue that they looked like lapis lazuli inlaid under the high-arched lids. And I could not choose but wonder if he had suffered such pain when he paid his own homage for Rhufoniog and Duffryn Clwyd. I think not. Then he would have been graceful, easy and inwardly scornful, for he had shown Edward already, by his usage of this same brother, how lightly he held his troth, and it was Edward's fault if he paid no heed. But Llewelyn's troth was not light. A heavy load it was, and a tight shackle upon his freedom, yet he could bear it, and go his own way without discarding it. It was David, of all people in that great concourse, David, who found this joining of hands hard to bear.

  There was a moment when it came into my mind that I might be seeing this the wrong way round, that it was Edward he grudged to Llewelyn, and not Llewelyn to Edward. And that was when the king very graciously clasped the hands he had been enclosing, and himself raised the prince to his feet, spoke some words of sudden, smiling condescension to him, and wanned from stone into human flesh. Until I looked again at David, and saw the blood flowing back easily into his cheeks, and his cool, bright eyes attentively studying Edward's face, flushed into content and benevolence at having got what he wanted at last, by force or fraud or no matter how. It hardly needed the slow curl of David's lip, aloof and disdainful, to set me right. It was not every man, Welsh or English, who had the hardihood to feel scorn for Edward.

The feast that Christmas night in Westminster was long, rich and splendid, and the prince of Wales was its guest of honour. No question but Edward was elated with his prize, and at his board and about his palace did everything to display him and show him favour. And gradually I began to understand the curl of David's lip as he beheld the first token of that favour. For I was present at many of those business meetings that took place during the last days of December, and the first two weeks of the new year twelve hundred and seventy-eight. Publicly in hall, feasting, dancing, out and about the city and on London river, wherever the queen and her ladies were, Edward showed his most friendly and beneficent face to the prince of Wales. But privately in conference, over the complex details of the treaty arrangements, his hold was tight and arbitrary, and his voice dry and commanding. The first great thing he had wanted, that he had got, and that was Llewelyn's fealty and homage. Everything else he sat down to exact in the same manner.

  "For God's sake, what should we expect?" said Llewelyn, shrugging. "He asks but what is due. He has not stepped one pace beyond what the treaty gives him."

  "Nor drawn one pace back," said Goronwy ap Heilyn.

  "Why should he? You and I, my friend," said Llewelyn with good humour, "both agreed to the terms as written. How can we complain now? He has not been ungenerous. He has put back a fair number of dispossessed young men into their lands, my nephews among them."

  "As vassals of the crown," said Tudor sadly.

  "According to treaty. And we know it, every man of us."

  It was true. Rhys Fychan's two young sons were installed once again as lords of Iscennen, along the Towy, as their elder brother had been allowed home again earlier, though not repossessed of his castle of Dynevor, which the crown intended to keep. Similarly several of Llewelyn's former tenants in the Middle Country were restored to their lands, but holding them from the crown. It pleased and comforted Llewelyn that these unfortunate young men should have protection still when he could not protect them. He had lost them, but they had not lost everything.

  But though he was jealously aware of his duty to watch the interests even of the vassals who had been taken from him, since they were most of them loyal Welshmen, as deprived and repressed as he, the first thing he had sought on his own account was news of Eleanor, grace to meet her at last, and a firm promise that his proxy marriage with her would be allowed to be blessed finally in a more formal ceremony. It did not gall him to bend the knee and do homage to Edward, but it chafed him bitterly to have to ask grace of another to be allowed to visit his own wife. Nor was he spared the pain of waiting and watching at the Christmas feast, to allow Edward, if he so planned, to make the generous gesture of bringing her from Windsor of his own accord. He did not do it. Llewelyn was forced to make the approach. Nor was his request granted at once. Edward first desired to examine for himself the arrangements made, the nature and location of the dower lands the prince proposed to settle on his bride. The lady was the king's cousin, and in his care, and it was his duty to approve the proposals made for her future establishment, and to ensure that provision for her was adequate to her rank and needs.

  I could not but remember, when this was said, that Amaury was also the king's cousin, and Amaury was still prisoner in Corfe castle, for no crime, however much Edward might dislike him, and still close—kept though two popes in succession had requested, urged and demanded his release. Some half-dozen of Eleanor's knights and officers were likewise in captivity, in spite of her pleas for them, for I was sure she had never ceased to protest at their detention, and to affirm that they had done nothing but their simple duty in serving and accompanying her.

  Yet the manner in which Edward countered and delayed in the matter of Eleanor was not unfriendly, only cautious and austere, as though he still distrusted, and yet was disposed to give his blessing to the match. At the beginning of January he indicated to Llewelyn that he might send his proctors to Windsor to talk with the princess about her dower and her marriage settlement, and the constable would be instructed to allow the party free access, and leave to confer with her in private or with witnesses, according as they might desire. It was the first concession, and on the fourth day of January Goronwy ap Heilyn, with two others, paid that visit, and came back so deep in slavery to the lady that his face spoke for him. Llewelyn, starving, stooped to beg for what had not been offered. I think it was the one thing for which he came near hating Edward, that he had to ask what even a tyrant should have given freely. And strangely, Edward hovered half a day on the edge of refusal, though avoiding rather than speaking plainly, and then veered about and resolved to grant, and that with every mark of favour and approval, as if the idea had stemmed from him in the first place. He allowed the visit, he would himself accompany and present the prince to his bride.

  They rode for Windsor handsomely escorted, but by none of Llewelyn's people, only a gay company of Edward's knights and squires. Either the king still did not quite trust in his hold over the prince, and wanted this meeting under his own eye to observe every word that passed, or else he was truly making an effort to convince us of his goodwill, and meant his patronage as an honour, an earnest of favour and familiarity to come if Llewelyn behaved well towards him and kept to terms. Llewelyn himself, though he would far rather have had the freedom of riding alone, took the king's attention at its open value, and was encouraged and reassured by it.

  "I know well I am on probation," he said to me, somewhat grimly, before they rode. "Was there not some worthy in the Bible who served fourteen years for his chosen bride? I am like to run him close for mine."

  Being free of all duties while they were gone, on a fine wintry day without frost, I went out alone beyond the great church to the west gate, and so into the palace court, and crossed to the alley of St. Stephen's, for David was lodged in one of the houses of the canonry with his family and his body-servants, the men of his following being at the Tower. All these days in Westminster I had half-hoped and half-dreaded to catch a glimpse of my dear in attendance on Elizabeth, but when that lady was in the queen's company Cristin was never with her, being left, as I guessed, to take care of the children. There were five of them now, as I had heard, and their mother placed absolute trust only in Cristin. So many of us, God knows, had learned to do that, too many leaned upon her. I was famished for the sight of her face and the sound of her voice, even if I might hope for no more, and this day I was resolved at least to walk by the house, and touch the walls within which she moved and breathed.

  David himself had been sparing of his appearances, attending on the king only when he was summoned, and then remaining, as far as possible, apart from the Welsh guests. Not shame, but some manner of dire struggle with himself held him off. Edward, no doubt, thought he had only to issue his order, and himself behave as though no strains and stresses existed, and all men would fall into the pattern. But it is not so easy to take up and knit again threads torn from the heart, and truly Llewelyn had said, and meant, that he had been through David's to-and-fro once too often, and David was dead to him.

  In the royal hall they had met and passed without words several times, but among so many who was to take particular note of how Llewelyn looked through his brother, as though he had not been there? They were not the only enemies of recent months now forced into proximity, and compelled to contain whatever hatred and enmity they still felt. They were only the two greatest of many like them.