The Brothers of Gwynedd (9 page)

  But on the other hand, the king was by no means inclined to alienate us in other ways, once he had us tightly secured. For as soon as he was aware that the Lady Senena had fallen into some state between resignation and despair, and accepted her fate, she was invited very often and as of right into the queen's company, and became a minor figure of this court. And since she could do nothing about her deprivation, she took what she could get and made the best of it, and as I believe, those two strong-willed, resolute women got on well together by reason of their likeness, where had they met on truly equal terms they might have clashed resoundingly for the same reason. But the queen could be generous and warm without condescension to one who was not a rival, and the Lady Senena could take with dignity from one she felt to be at once her creditor and debtor. The Lady Gladys, too, with her budding beauty, became an admired figure among the young women of the queen's retinue, and was much favoured by her, and after some months whispers began to go round that a good match might be made for her. As for the two little boys, they went in and out freely among the other noble children about the court, and being very young, soon took this lavish state for their right, and forgot the more austere customs and habits of Wales. David in particular, with his beauty and his winning ways, was made much of by the noblewomen, and became a favourite even with the king. And surely this imprisonment seemed to them rather an enlargement, for never had they been so indulged and lived so finely.

  Thus King Henry hedged his interests every way, keeping his puppets close under his hand, but treating them with every consideration and make-believe honour that should maintain them sharpened and ready for use at need. And their efficacy was made plain, for that year ended with no word of any unrest in Wales, and all through the two years that followed the same heavy quietness held. David of Gwynedd knew only too well the sword that dangled over his head, and he went peacefully, minding his lopped princedom and biding his time, with never a false move.

  As for us, what is there to tell? We lived a life unbelievably calm on the surface, but it was a furtive, watchful calm, in which all but the children moved with held breath. Yet no man can live for ever taut like a strung bow, and I remember days when indeed this life of ours seemed pleasant enough, comfortable and well-fed as we were, and like the children we drew perilously near to being content with it.

  But not the lady. She closed her lips upon her great grievance, but in her heart she thought of nothing else. I think she hoped at first that David would blaze up again in revolt, and cause her husband to be taken hastily out of his cage and sent with a strong force to draw off Welsh allegiance from him. But as the slow year wore away, and the uneasy peace held fast, she lost hope in this, and fretted after some other way. And she took into her confidence the only Welshman left her, but for myself, still a boy, and that was my mother's husband.

  It was fitting that those two should cleave together, for next to her, and doubtless the Lord Griffith himself, whom now we never saw, my mother's husband was the unhappiest among us. For that slothful ease of mind under which the rest of us laboured in this well-furnished prison was impossible to him. There was no taste but wormwood ever in his mouth, and no weather but winter and cold about him, his torment being perpetual, for my mother was ever before his face and by his side, and even in his bed, and at all times submissive and dutiful, and at all times indifferent to him, and by this time he was assured, whether he admitted it or no, that there was nothing he could do, between this and death, to change her or himself. He had her, and he would never have her. Her hate he could have borne, but as she could not love, so she could not hate him. She was now thirty-four years old, and even more beautiful than as a girl, and he could neither live happily with her nor without her.

  So it was some relief at least to his restlessness when the Lady Senena began to employ him as news gatherer for her about the Tower. I was not in their confidence, but I saw that he spent much of his time wandering about the fortress, observing at what hours the guard was changed at every gate, and when the wardens made their rounds, and every particular concerning the daily order of this city within a city. To this end he made himself agreeable and useful to the guards, and made himself out, surely truthfully enough, as weary and discontented for lack of work, so that after some weeks he had a few regular familiars among them who were willing to use him as messenger, and would talk freely to him. So patiently was all done that there were some he might truly call his friends. From them he brought in morsels of news from Wales more than were to be heard about the court, where the Lady Senena might pick them up for herself. Also, being very wise with horses, he made himself well accepted in the stables, and was several times among the grooms who went out to buy or to watch at the horse sales at Smithfield on Fridays. And as I know, after the second such occasion the Lady Senena gave him money for some purposes of her own.

  It was late in the autumn of the year twelve hundred and forty-three when he came back from the outer world after a trip to buy sumpter ponies, and was closeted a while, as was usual, with the lady. It was as they came out into the hall where I was sitting with my mother and the children that he turned and looked again, and closely, into her face, and said: "Madam, I have heard mention made of your son Llewelyn."

  It was the first time that name had been uttered openly among us since we had left Shrewsbury, though what she had told her lord in private I do not know. She halted as though she had turned to ice, and in her face I could read nothing, neither hostility nor tenderness.

  "What can the horse-traders of London know of my son Llewelyn?" she said, in a voice as impenetrable as her countenance.

  "From a Hereford dealer who buys Welsh mountain ponies, and trades as far as Montgomery," he said. He did not look at her again, and he did not speak until she asked.

  "And what does this dealer say of my son?"

  "Two drovers came down from Berwyn with ponies. They told him they were bred on their lord's lands in Penllyn. And the name of their lord was Llewelyn ap Griffith. He lives, madam, he is well, he has his manhood, and he is set up on his own lands."

  "Set up by his uncle," she said, so drily that I could not tell whether there was any bitterness there, or any wonder, or whether she was glad in her heart that he should be living and free, and in some sort a princeling, or whether she grudged him all, and chiefly his freedom. "So he got his pay," she said, "for betraying me, after all. Why else should David give him an appanage, and he with so little left for himself?"

  My mother's husband said bluntly, for he had the Welsh openness with those he served: "Madam, if he had betrayed you we should never have reached the border. Do you think one well-mounted courier could not move faster than we did, with two litters and a gaggle of children? He got his commote for soldier service. These men of his said he was in arms with his uncle at Rhuddlan."

  "There was no blood shed there," she said sharply, "and little fighting." But whether she said it to belittle what he had done or to reassure herself in face of a danger she had not known one of her children was venturing, I could not be sure. And then she said in a muted cry, gripping her hands together: "He was not yet thirteen years old!"

  Then I knew that for all her hard front, and the bitterness that tore her two ways where he was concerned, she still loved him.

That winter came and passed in mild, moist weather, with scarcely any frost but a sprinkling of rime in the mornings, washed away by rain or melted by thin sunshine long before noon. And I noticed that daily the Lady Senena watched the skies and the wind, and bided her time, and was often private with my mother's husband for short whiles. In February, when for the first time the true winter came down, a fair fall of snow and then iron frost to bind it, it seemed to me that their eyes grew intent and bright, as though they had been waiting only for this. And when it held all the last ten days of February, with every day they drew breath more easily and hopefully, and spoke of the weather as though it held more meaning for them than for us, how the word went that the great marshes of Moorfields, outside the north gate of the city, were frozen over hard as rock, but with overmuch deadening snow for good sport, so that the young men who went out there for play were forced to sweep small parts of the ice for their games. And I thought how this way from the city would be the quickest and most secret, once that marsh was past, for the forest came close on that side. But they told me nothing, and I asked nothing.

  The last day of February matched all those before. My mother's husband went out from us in the afternoon, and did not come back with the night, but the Lady Senena came in the dusk from visiting her lord, and told us that she would spend the night in the lodging with us, for the Lord Griffith was a little unwell, and she had entreated him to rest, and the guards not to disturb him again until morning.

  What she told my mother I do not know, but those two women slept—or at least lay, for I think much of the night they did not sleep at all—in the same bed that night, and I know they talked much, for I heard their voices whenever I stirred from my own slumber. The girl had a little chamber of her own, and the boys slept as children do, wholeheartedly and deeply. I lay in the dark, listening to those two muted voices within, that spoke without distinguishable words, my mother's pitched lower, and now that I heard them thus together, far the calmer and more assured, and the lady's tight, brittle and imploring, like one lost in prayer. I doubt she was not heard.

  Towards dawn she slept. When the first light began I was uneasy with the silence, and I got up and pulled on my hose and shirt and cotte, and went stealthily and lifted the latch of the high chamber, to be sure if they breathed and lived. For sleep and silence draw very close to death.

  There was a wick burning in a dish of fat, paling now that a little light came in from the sky. My mother lay open-eyed, high on the pillows, her face turned towards me as though she had known before ever I touched the latch that I was coming. She held that great lady cradled asleep on her breast like a child, and over the greying head she motioned to me, quite gently, to go back and close the door. And so I did, and in a few moments she came out to me.

  At this time I was already taller than she, but she was so slender and straight that she had a way of towering, not rigidly or proudly, but like a silver birch tree standing alone. She had only a long white shift on her, and her arms were bare, and all her long, fair hair streamed down over her shoulders, and hung to her waist. In this harsh frost, now twelve days old, she seemed to feel no chill. And I have said she was beautiful, and strange.

  "Make no sound," she said in a whisper, "but let her sleep, she has great need. Samson, I am not easy, I cannot see clear. Somewhere there is a death."

  Daily there is a death waiting for someone, for one who departs and others who remain to mourn. But she looked at me with those eyes that missed what others see and saw what others miss, and I knew that this was very near.

  I was afraid, for I understood nothing, though something I did suspect. I asked her: "Mother, what must I do?"

  "Take your cloak," she said, very low, and peering before her with eyes fixed as it were on a great distance, "and go and look if there is anyone stirring about the keep, or under Lord Griffith's windows."

  So I wrapped my cloak about me, and crept out shivering into the icy morning, where the light as yet was barely grey, though very clear, and still full of fading stars. It was too early for anyone to be abroad but the watch, and I knew their rounds, even if they kept to them strictly, and on such mornings I had known them none too scrupulous about patrolling every corner, preferring the warmth of the guardrooms. I went softly, keeping under the walls of the houses, and left their shelter only when I must. I could see the great, square hulk of the tower outlined clear but pale against the sky, and beyond it, across the open ground, the tooth-edged summit of the curtain wall, and the ruled line of the guard-walk below its crest. All the grass was thick and creaking with rime, the bushes that stood silent and motionless in the stillness rang like bells when I brushed too close, and shed great fronds of feathery ice on my hose and shoes. I drew closer, circling the rim of the ditch and avoiding the main face where the great doorway was, and the ditch was spanned. There was such a silence and stillness that I should have heard if another foot had stirred in the crisp snow, but there was nothing to hear. I was the only creature abroad.

  The Lord Griffith's apartment was very high at the rear part of the keep, with two small windows at the base of one of the corner turrets. I made my way round by the rim of the ditch, which was deep and wide, and for the most part kept clear of briars and bushes. Everything was quiet and nothing strange, until I came under the part where his dwelling was, and looked up at those two round-beaded windows, set deep in the stone. And hanging from the ledge of one of them I saw a dangling line of knotted cloth, no more than two or three yards long, that seemed to end in a fringe of torn threads, light enough to stir in the high air while the coil above hung still. My eyes were young and sharp, and this frayed material I knew for a piece of brocaded tapestry such as might furnish the covering of a bed, or wall-hangings.