Here Be Dragons

  “My lord.” A servant stood in the doorway. “There’s a woman seeking admittance out at the gate.”

  “I’d not turn anyone away in such foul weather, least of all a woman. Give her shelter for the night.”

  “My lord, you do not understand. This woman says she is your sister!”

  Joanna had stripped off her wet clothes. Wrapped in one of Eve’s bedrobes, she stood as close to the hearth as she could get, and when Richard handed her a goblet of hot mulled wine, she drank in deep, thirsty gulps. He watched uneasily, saying nothing. They were alone; Elen and Joanna’s maids had been bedded down in an upper chamber, and Eve had uncomplainingly withdrawn so Richard might speak privately with his sister.

  “How did you know I was at Grantham, Joanna?”

  “I went to Conisbrough Castle. Your mother told me.” Joanna set the goblet down, began to towel-dry her hair. There was an exaggerated and painstaking deliberation about her movements that Richard had occasionally seen in those who’d had too much drink or too little sleep. He moved closer, close enough to see that Joanna’s face was free of all cosmetics, that the skin was discolored and smudged under her eyes, stretched so tightly across her cheekbones that it put him in mind of silk strained to the breaking point. It was an unsettling thought. Her tension was contagious; Richard could feel it constricting his muscles, eroding his composure. How much did she know?

  “It worked, that warning you sent Papa. He has called off the invasion of Wales. He was truly shaken by your revelation, Joanna. He demanded hostages from all those he suspected. Most complied, how reluctantly you can well imagine. But Eustace de Vesci and his cousin Robert Fitz Walter fled the court, de Vesci to Scotland and Fitz Walter to France. To Papa, that is all the proof needed of their guilt. But he suspects that others, too, were involved in the plot, and as long as he does, I think it unlikely that he’ll risk going into Wales.”

  A fortnight ago that would have been the answer to Joanna’s every prayer; now it was salvation come too late. She could not rejoice, felt only a numbed sense of relief.

  “Joanna…did you hear what I just said?”

  “Yes, I heard.” She turned from the hearth. “You were at Nottingham, Richard. You saw the hangings.”

  It was not a question, but he nodded, said reluctantly, “Yes, I saw them.”

  “I did not believe it, Richard. I tried to comfort Llewelyn by assuring him that it could not be true. I kept faith with my father, and all it cost me was my marriage.”

  “Joanna…”

  “Papa had Prince Maelgwn’s younger son hanged in Shrewsbury. Did you know that, Richard?”

  “Yes…I heard.”

  “He was not yet seven. Did you know that, too?”

  Her voice was low and so brittle that Richard sensed any answer would be the wrong one. “Papa did give the command to hang Prince Maelgwn’s son; I cannot deny that. But he may have forgotten how young the boy was. He may not even have known—”

  “Richard, no!” Joanna had begun to tremble again. Richard pulled a blanket off the bed, draped it about her shoulders. As their eyes met, she said softly, “Why did you not tell me about Maude de Braose?”

  Richard expelled his breath in a sound much like a sigh. “I hoped you would never have to know.”

  “You should have told me, Richard. I had the right to know.”

  “I did not tell you, Joanna, for the same reason that Llewelyn did not. We wanted to spare you if we could.”

  “I know what Llewelyn told me is true. I have to accept it, to learn to live with it. But I do not know if I can ever understand it. How do I reconcile my memories with what Papa did at Nottingham…at Windsor? How, Richard?”

  “I do not know,” he admitted, and she reached out, grasped his arm.

  “But you must. You’ve done it…somehow. Tell me, Richard. Tell me how you’ve done it.” When he was silent, she cried, “For God’s sake, help me! Papa never raised his hand to me, not once. He was oft moved to pity at sight of a crippled beggar, and he never refused alms to the needy. He liked to play with his dogs, and I once saw him rein in to berate a drover who was whipping his cart horse. Yet now I must believe that same man sent children to the gallows, gave the command to starve two people to death. How could he do it, Richard? Did he never awaken in the night, thinking of them? Did Maude’s shadow never once fall across his table?”

  “Joanna, do not do this to yourself.”

  “How can I stop? There are reasons beyond counting why men murder, but there can be only one reason for a death such as Maude’s. Papa had to want her to suffer. He had to want to prolong her agony as long as possible.”

  “No,” he said, “no.”

  “No more lies, Richard. Do you not think it time I faced the truth?”

  “I’m not lying, Joanna. I’ve had months and months to think on this. All his life our uncle Richard did as he damned well pleased, with explanations or apologies to no one. But Papa is not like that; he needs to justify his actions, even to himself. He wanted Maude dead, but he had no right to execute her, and he knew it; all knew it. If he’d had her beheaded, there could be no doubt that it was done at his command. But prisoners are often neglected, often sicken and die. I truly think that is why he chose starvation and not the axe. Not to see Maude suffer. To enable him to deny responsibility for her death, to be able to claim it was not of his doing.”

  “Maude’s guards misunderstood their orders? Forgot to feed her? Christ Jesus, Richard, who could ever believe such a fable?”

  “Uncle Will believes it. He’s managed to convince himself that Maude and her son died through neglect. He has to believe that. How could he continue serving Papa if he did not?”

  “How, then—” Joanna stopped herself in mid-sentence, but he finished it for her.

  “—can I continue to serve him? I do not often ask that question. And when I do, I tell myself it’s because he is still my father. Because he is still the King. Because the only difference between Papa and other men is that he has the power to do what they cannot.”

  “You cannot truly believe that, Richard,” she said, and he shrugged. “What of Isabelle?” she asked, after a long silence. “Think you that she knows?”

  “About the hostages, yes. About Maude, not likely; who’d dare to tell her? You need not fret about Isabelle. She has very selective senses, sees and hears only what she wants to know.”

  “Was I…” Joanna swallowed. “Was I like that, too?”

  “You loved him, Joanna. I doubt that anyone loved him the way you did.” Richard hesitated. “When Papa decided to delay the invasion of Wales, he moved up into Yorkshire. But he expects to be back at Nottingham within the fortnight, wrote and requested that I join him there. I mean to do that, Joanna. Would you be willing to go with me? Mayhap if you talked to Papa…”

  He felt no surprise, only a sad sense of futility when she said in a wretched whisper, “I cannot, Richard. I cannot…”

  “I know,” he conceded. “This is a de Warenne manor. You’re welcome here as long as you like.”

  “I’ll stay until you return to court. After that I shall go to stay at the White Ladies priory in Brewood Forest.”

  The White Ladies priory was a small Augustinian nunnery in Shropshire which had occasionally benefited from John’s largesse. Richard knew Joanna had twice visited it with John, at age eight and then again a few months before her marriage to Llewelyn. He thought her choice of santuary a very telling one, and he ached for her, thinking it ironic that he, who had always valued competence as the highest virtue, should now feel so utterly ineffectual, able to offer such meagre comfort.

  “Joanna…you have not left Llewelyn?”

  She slowly shook her head. “No. I could never leave Llewelyn. But I’m not at all sure, Richard, that he wants me back.”

  “Mama, look!” Elen balanced precariously on the tree stump, and when she was sure she had Joanna’s eye, she dived like an otter into the October leaves heaped about the st
ump. Joanna hastened to the rescue, anticipating scraped knees and sobbing, but Elen was already sitting up. She had dirt on her dress, leaves in her hair, and a satisfied smile on her face.

  “Did you see me jump, Mama, did—Ohhh! What is that?”

  Joanna followed the grubby little finger, saw two twitching ears protruding from a nearby thicket. “That is a rabbit or coney, Elen,” she said softly. “Be still so you do not frighten it away.”

  “It’s smaller than a hare,” Elen observed, with the knowing eyes of a country child. “Do we have them back home? Can I pet it, Mama? Can I keep it?”

  “I do not know if there are coneys in Gwynedd, Elen,” Joanna admitted. “It is not native to England, was brought over some years back by the Normans for their sport.”

  Elen’s other queries now became academic; the rabbit fled as soon as she moved. “Oh, Mama, it’s gone!”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Joanna was, sorry for so much. These weeks at Brewood had not been happy ones for her daughter. Not a day passed that Elen did not ask when they were going home. Sometimes she sounded fretful, petulant, at other times unbearably plaintive, and at no time did Joanna have a satisfactory answer for her. “Soon” meant little to a homesick five-year-old who missed her father. It was coming to mean less and less to Joanna, too.

  Several nuns were passing, lugging heavy oaken buckets of well water. They paused to beam upon Elen; she was a great favorite with them all, and when Sister Avelina offered to take her into the kitchen for bread and honey, she accepted readily. But she’d taken only a few steps when she stopped, whirled, and came running back to Joanna.

  “Kiss me, Mama,” she directed, and Joanna knelt, for a moment hugged her tight. Elen grinned, and then she was sprinting after the nuns, while Joanna stood very still, fighting her fear. If Llewelyn could not forgive her, she’d lose more than his love; she’d lose her children, too. When a marriage broke apart, the husband kept the children, and if he chose to deny his wife the right to see them, she had no legal recourse. Her own plight was even more perilous than that of most rejected wives, for her husband was a Prince, a Prince with the power to banish her from his domains, from their children’s lives.

  Joanna did not move until Elen’s small figure was no longer in sight. And then she turned, began to walk away from the priory, under the leafy, rustling clouds of autumn oak and dappled elm. When her grandmother had divorced the French King, their two little daughters had remained with Louis. They were six and two then, and Eleanor did not see them again until they were women grown, in their twenties. Eleanor had apparently accepted the loss of her children as the price she must pay for Henry and the crown of England. But Joanna knew her own grieving would be beyond hope, beyond healing. The loss of her father she could, in time, accept. She could even learn to accept the loss of her husband. But not her children. Not Davydd. Not Elen. Not ever.

  More than four weeks had passed since she’d come to the priory, six weeks since she’d ridden away from Dolwyddelan. Soon after her arrival at Brewood, she’d dispatched a man with a stilted and terse letter for Llewelyn, asking his permission to keep Elen in England beyond the month’s grace he’d given her. In the weeks since, there’d been numerous sleepless nights when she’d labored over a second letter to her husband, a letter in which she sought his understanding, his forgiveness. Come dawn, she’d gather up her splotched and futile handiwork, feed it into the fire.

  She was no less homesick than Elen. Her yearning for Davydd was like a physical ache, one that no herbs or ointments could ease. Her need for Llewelyn was no less intense; her body’s thwarted cravings robbed her of sleep at night, and her memories wreaked havoc upon her daylight hours. But as much as she wanted to return to Llewelyn, she was terrified of doing so, terrified of having to face him and hear him say that their marriage was over. It was easier to do nothing, to cling to her shreds of hope and tell herself that all would somehow work out if only she gave them enough time.

  In her despair, she’d convinced herself that Richard would have the answers she needed. But Richard had failed her, and she knew she was now failing herself. Unable to face her future, unable to come to terms with her past. Grieving for the father she’d lost, not to death, but to merciless, recurring dreams in which she was walled up with Maude in that Windsor dungeon and the bloated little body swaying from a Shrewsbury gallows became Davydd’s.

  The woods were alive with the interior rhythms of its wildlife, echoing to soft rustles and muted trills. Joanna stopped under a maple tree, and the wind rained russet leaves down upon her. One leaf spread its wings, revealed itself to be a butterfly mottled in black and gold. The butterflies at Aber were the color of the sky; from May to September they hovered over wildflower and marsh grass, flickering blue flames to be extinguished at the first frost. Joanna leaned back against the tree’s gnarled trunk and closed her eyes. Did Llewelyn, too, lie awake till dawn? How was he dealing with his grief, his guilt? Had he learned to live with his ghosts?

  “Madame!” The scream was shrill, fraught with fear, utterly out of place in a setting of such peace. Joanna tensed; the cry came again, and she turned toward the sound. She soon saw a blur of white, found a woman on her knees beside a fallen log. She looked up as Joanna reached her, and Joanna recognized one of the young novice nuns. Her habit was torn and dirtied, her face scratched by her flight into the woods, and she had no breath for speech, not even when Joanna grasped her shoulders, shook her frantically.

  “Has my daughter been hurt? For God’s sake, tell me!”

  “Oh, Madame, thank Jesus I found you!” The girl was on her feet now, but had to lean on Joanna for support. “They took us by surprise, rode into the priory as bold as could be. We thought it was a raid, and Sister Avelina tried to hide your Elen in the chancel. But one of the men called to her and she ran to him, Madame, ran right to him. He demanded to see you, my lady, and then our Prioress. We were so very frightened, Madame; all know how godless the Welsh are. But…but they did not hurt us. They talked to Prioress Alditha, then rode away, and…oh, Madame, they took with them your daughter. They took away your little girl!”

  The quarter hour it took Joanna to reach the priory was the most terrifying time of her life. Running through the woods, she caught her gown repeatedly upon protruding branches, tripped over exposed tree roots and rocks, fought her way free of the thickets looming up in her path, seemingly set upon entrapping her forever in the midst of this God-cursed forest. By the time she was in sight of the priory walls, she was scratched and bruised and thoroughly disheveled, her ears echoing to the sobbing sounds of her own breathing, to the cry of “Elen!” that came to her lips of its own volition, that went unanswered in the strange silence that had enveloped the priory.

  The guest house was to the north of the church, set apart from the nuns’ dormitory and infirmary. It was there that Joanna shared a chamber with Elen. It would, she knew, be empty. She reached for the latch just as the door opened, and she all but fell into the room, into Llewelyn’s arms.

  He put his hands on her waist to steady her, said, “Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head, and he released her. She was suddenly dizzy, and leaned back against the door. There was a sharp pain pressing against her ribs, cutting off her breath. “Elen…where is she?”

  “On her way back to Gwynedd.”

  Joanna was too appalled for anger. “Jesus God, Llewelyn, did you have to do it like that?”

  “I was thinking of her safety. I did not want her here should word get out that I’m at the priory.”

  The common sense of that could not be denied; some of Joanna’s panic began to subside. But then Llewelyn said, “I made a mistake in letting you take her, Joanna. I thought she would be safe because of her sex. But the more I thought on it, the more uneasy I became. The risk was just too great. I’ll not allow her to leave Wales again.”

  Pride had always been of paramount concern to Joanna. But not now. “I know you have the power to take
Davydd and Elen from me. I can only beg you not to do that, to remember how much I do love them—”

  “Whatever happens between us, I’d not deny you the right to see our children. I would still provide for you, would allow you to remain in Gwynedd to be near Davydd and Elen if you did not want to return to England. How could you think I’d do less than that?”

  Joanna had no answer for him, for she could not explain her fear even to herself, an instinctive, elemental fear that had nothing whatsoever to do with logic or even love. She drew several shaken breaths. “Are you saying that our marriage is over?”

  “I do not know, Joanna,” he said, and there was in his voice a sadness that she found far more chilling than anger.

  “Is it not dangerous for you to be here, on English soil?” she asked abruptly, and he shrugged.

  “Probably. But I have no plans to tarry longer than necessary.” He saw that she was not reassured, and added, “The borderland is quiet at present. John has ordered his army to disperse.”

  He was close enough to touch; Joanna’s fingers brushed his sleeve, came to rest upon his arm. “Richard told me that twenty-eight hostages were hanged at Nottingham, all those who were being held at my father’s court…save only Gruffydd. But there were others, mayhap a handful, who were being held elsewhere, and they still live. Richard promised me he would seek out their identities, then pass on that information to you.”

  “And he did, a fortnight ago. A curious letter, Joanna, for an English King’s son to write to a Welsh Prince. He was cautious, made no promises that might compromise him, but he implied, nonetheless, that he would speak for my son if he could.” Llewelyn reached out, traced the path of a scratch that marked her throat; at the unexpected touch, so like a caress, Joanna began to tremble. “He told me, too, that your warning saved Gruffydd’s life.”

  “And do you believe him?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”