The Brothers of Gwynedd (5 page)

  "What are you doing? What is this?"

  "I sent for you," she said, "to come home to your duty. Tonight we leave here on a journey. If I have not consulted you before, you must forgive me that, for it was necessary. I could not risk any accidental betrayal, it was best the secret should remain within these walls until all was ready. It is ready now, and we leave here tonight. For Shrewsbury."

  He echoed: "Shrewsbury?" in an almost silent cry of astonished disbelief. When his brows drew together so, they were almost as formidable as hers, and very like. "Mother, do you know what you say? King Henry is on his way from Gloucester to Shrewsbury this moment, with all his feudal host. Bent against Gwynedd! Did you not know it? Whatever you could want in Shrewsbury, God knows, I cannot see, but this is no time to stir about it."

  He was slow to understand, though she had told him bluntly enough. And after all, perhaps my experience had made me a year or so older, not younger, than he when it came to probing the political moves of his noble mother. Or he was too near and fond, in the unthinking way proper to his youth, and I, kinless, fatherless, dependent, saw from outside and saw more clearly. Yet when the truth did dawn upon him, he spoke from a vision which I had not, and did not yet comprehend.

  His face had sharpened in the unseasonable firelight. I saw all the golden, reflected lines along his bones of cheek and chin quiver and draw fine and clear. He was not smiling at all then. He said: "Madam, let me understand you! Is that your reason for riding to Shrewsbury? To meet King Henry?"

  "I am going," she said with deliberation, and rising from her chair to be taller than he, "to confide your father's cause and yours to King Henry's hands, and ask him for justice. Which you well know we have not had and shall not have from any here in Gwynedd. The English in arms will restore us our rights. I am resolved to stake all on this throw. We have been disinherited and insulted long enough. I will have your father and your brother out of prison and restored to their own by the means that offers."

  "You cannot have understood what you are doing," he said. "You could not talk so else. The king of England is preparing now, this very minute, to attack our country, our people. You want to make our right in Welsh law one more weapon on the English side, to slaughter Welshmen? Your own kin? You will be siding with the enemy!"

  "You talk like a child," she said sharply, "and a foolish child! I have waited long enough for Gwynedd to do justice to my lord, your father, and talk of enemies is hollow talk to me. We are disinherited, against all law. I am appealing to an overlaw, and make no doubt but it will hear me, and do right."

  "You cannot do right to my father or any," he cried, blazing up like a tall flame, "by doing wrong to Gwynedd! To Wales!"

  "You talk of fantasies," she overbore him, looming against him like a tower, "while your father rots in Criccieth, a reality, deprived of what is justly his. And you dare talk to me of right! We are going, and tonight. Go, sir, do as you are bidden, go and make ready, and no more words. I did not send for you to teach me my duty, I know it too well."

  Long before this I would gladly have crept away if I could, but I dared not move for fear of reminding them that I was there. And even he, I thought, wavered and blanched a little before her, for in his father's absence she was the law here, and he was still two years short of his manhood, and could not act against her will. Yet I think now he did not give back at all, and even his hesitation was nothing but a hurried searching in his unpractised mind for words which might convince without offending.

  "Mother," he said, low and passionately, "I do know my father's case, and know he asks but what he feels his right. But I tell you, if I were in his place, rather than get my sovereignty at the hands of King Henry, I would make my full submission to my uncle David as his loyal vassal, and put myself and every man I had into arms to fight for him against England. There should be no factions here when a war threatens, but only one cause, Wales. Do not go! Go rather to Criccieth, and beg my father to remember his own father, and the greatness he gave to Gwynedd, and urge him to offer the oath of fealty to his brother, and come out and fight beside him. Even at his own cost, yes! But I swear it would not cost him so high as you will make it cost him if you go on with this. Do not go, to make traitors of us all!"

  She had heard him thus far only for want of breath and words to silence him, and found no argument, for they had no common ground on which to argue. But then she struck him, on the word she could not endure. The clash of her palm against his cheek was loud, and the silence after it louder, until she found a laboured, furious voice to break it.

  "Do you dare speak so to me? You have been too long and too often at your uncle's court, it seems! You had better take care how you use the word traitor in this house, for it may well echo back upon your own head. You have been spoiled at Aber! They have bought you, foolish child as you are. Now let me hear no more from you, but go and make ready. You are the eldest son of this house at liberty, and should be doing your duty as its head."

  He stood unmoving, his eyes fixed upon her angry face, and he had grown pale under the sunbrown, so that the marks of her fingers burned clear and red upon his cheek. After a long moment he said, in a voice quiet and even: "You say truth, and you do well to remind me. I am the eldest son of this house at liberty, and I will do my duty as its head. Have I your leave to go and set about it?"

  "That is better," she said grimly, and dismissed him with no greater mark of forgiveness than that, for she was much disturbed, and still angry. Nor did he ask any. He went out as abruptly as he had come, and the back view of him as he passed from dark to bright in the doorway did not look to me either tamed or penitent.

I saw him again towards dusk, when we brought in the stock. For all must go forward as usual and seem innocent after we were gone. He had chosen a horse for himself with care, and tried its paces about the courtyard, and professing himself but half satisfied, rode it out and round the llys to make certain of his choice. I had been sent out to bring down a flock from the hill grazing, north of Neigwl, and I came out of a fold of the track close to where the road swung away to the north, towards Carnarvon and Aber.

  He was walking his horse up the slope over the grass, away from Neigwl and the sea, and when he came to the road he halted a moment and looked back, motionless in the saddle. Thus, his back being turned to me, he did not see me until the first yearling lambs came down into the corner of his vision, and made him look round. He knew then that I was from the llys. Perhaps he did not know whether I was in the secret, or perhaps he did not care. He looked at me calmly, and did not recognise me, but he knew that he was known, and that I, whoever I might be, was reading his mind.

  That was a strange moment, I cannot forget it. He sat his horse, solitary and grave, examining me with eyes the colour of peat pools in the sun. He had brought away with him nothing at all but the horse, and a cloak slung loosely over his linen tunic. Whatever else was his he had left behind, to be taken or abandoned as others decided, for valuables are valuables, and we were going where we might soon be either in need or living on English bounty. He wheeled his horse and walked it forward deliberately some few paces along the road northwards, his eyes never leaving mine, and suddenly he was satisfied, for he smiled. And I smiled also at being read and blessed, for his confidence was as open and wide as the sky over us.

  He said to me: "You have seen nothing." Confirming not ordering.

  "Nothing," I said.

  "And I know nothing," he said. That, too, I understood. The Lady Senena could

never be told, nor perhaps would she believe it if any tried to tell her, that the son who would not go with her to England would not send out an alarm after her, either, or betray her intent in any way, having made his own decision yet still allowing her hers. No, it was for me he said it, that I might be satisfied as he was satisfied, and feel no guilt in keeping his secret, as he felt none in keeping hers. And that was no easy way to take, alone, for a boy twelve years old.

  He shook the reins, and dug his heels into the horse's flanks, and was away from me at a canter along the track towards the north. He had ridden much, and rode well, erect and easy, as I would have liked to ride. I watched him until he breasted the next rise and vanished into the dip beyond, and then I took the lambs down to Neigwl, and said never a word to any of that meeting.

  So when the dusk was low enough, and the hour came for our departure, when the sumpter horses were loaded and sent ahead, and the litters for the lady and her children stood ready, and the horses were being led out saddled from the stables, there was great counting of all the heads, and the word began to go round: "Where is Prince Llewelyn? Has anyone seen him?" No one had, since he took out his chosen horse to try its paces. We waited for him more than an hour, and men hunted in every possible and impossible place about the maenol, while the Lady Senena's face grew darker and bleaker and angrier with every moment. But he did not come, and he was not found. He was the eldest man of his house at liberty, and he was gone to do his duty as its head, according to his own vision.

  Even when she cried out on him at last that he had turned traitor, had abandoned and betrayed his own mother and brothers, I said no word. Unable to understand, she would have been unable to believe that he could go on his own way and not block and prevent hers. She feared pursuit, and therefore every hour became more precious, and she ordered our departure in great haste, and extended our first forced ride as far as Mur y Castell, where her advance guards had fresh horses waiting for us. She would not risk taking the old Roman road across the Berwyns, but had planned a route further south, to give all David's favourite dwellings a wide berth, and our first rest was at Cymer. Thence, with a greatly increased company, we made two easier days of it by way of Meifod to Strata Marcella, and crossed the Severn at a ford below Pool.

  And all the way she complained bitterly of her second son's treachery and ingratitude, until she went far to make her daughter Gladys, who was his elder by a year, hate him and decry him even as she did. Being the only daughter, this girl was very dear to her, and much in her confidence. Yet I think there was so much of grief and smart in their blame of him that even hate had another side, and in their softer moments they could not choose but wonder and harrow over old ground, marvelling how he had come to that resolution against all odds, incomprehensible to them, and blameworthy, but surely hard indeed for him, and therefore honest. And this all the more when the journey was nearly over, and no breath of suspicion or pursuit followed us. For if he had not garnered all the favour he could by setting his uncle's huntsmen after us, what was his own welcome likely to be after our flight was discovered? He was known to have been summoned by his mother, and obeyed and returned, the very day of the defection. The revenge that could not reach his mother might fall on him for want of larger prey. And sometimes those two women, a moment after cursing him, wondered with anxiety how he was faring now, and whether he was not flung into Criccieth with his father and his brother.

  As for me, I learned painfully to ride, if not well as yet, doggedly and uncomplainingly, I tended the two little boys, I wrote one or two letters of appeal for the Lady Senena to such English lords as she best knew by contact or reputation, urging her cause, and I did whatever clerking there was to be done by the way. But familiar as I became with her argument, I could not forget his. And for which of them was in the right, that I could never determine. For both were honest, and both spoke truth, though they went by opposite ways. Yet being of the party that went one way, I heard now nothing but this side of the case, and matter repeated again and again without opposition grows to fall naturally on the ear. So I doubt I veered with the wind, like other men older than I, and came to be much of the lady's way of thinking before we reached Shrewsbury, which we did, with safe-conducts from the king's council, on the fourth day of August of this year twelve hundred and forty-one.

This Shrewsbury is a noble town, formidably walled all round and everywhere moated by the Severn, but for a narrow neck of land open to the north, for the whole town lies within a great coil of that river. It has three gates, two of them governing the bridges that lead, one eastwards deeper into England, one westwards into Wales, and the third gate lies on the tongue of dry land, under the shadow of a great castle. I have seen larger towns since then, though none fairer. But when we came in by the Welsh gate, over that broad sweep of river and beneath the tall tower on the bridge, that August day in the heat, I saw such a town for the first time in my life, and thought it more marvellous than I can tell. For we in Wales had then borrowed very little from this crowding English life that pressed in on our flank, that used coined money, and markets, of which we had scarcely any, and lived in stone houses that could not be abandoned at need, for they were too precious, and grew ordered crops that tied men to one patch of soil. And above all, few of us had ever seen what the English called a city.