The Brothers of Gwynedd

  "He swore to the Provisions himself," I said, "he cannot say any man forced his hand."

  "He swore in order to get his way over Sicily, and now that he has lost Sicily he feels himself released from his oath. The bargain's broken. It makes no difference that they did their best for him, however reluctantly, even if he believed that, and he does not believe it. Did I tell you he wanted to put the earl of Leicester on trial for acts of treason? But for King Louis he might even have done it, but Louis has far more sense than ever King Henry will have, and sent the archbishop of Rouen over to intervene, of course on some other excuse, but that was the reason for it. So it all passed off into a private clerical enquiry, and they found Earl Simon innocent of any wrong act or intent. Just as well, for he made a strong and calm defence. Strange, that man can take fire at a private quarrel over anything, even money, but when he is under grave public attack he turns quiet, reasonable and patient as any saint. So the quarrel's dropped. By Earl Simon, no doubt, for ever, with no look behind. But the king never forgets. Now he feels himself strong enough to rid himself of this chain of the reform round his neck, soon he'll be bringing back all the Poitevins, elbowing the new sheriffs out of office one by one, and putting back his own men in their places. I'll tell you a thing not everyone even among his own counsellors knows! He has applied to Pope Alexander for formal absolution from his vow to support the Provisions. His best clerk, John Mansel, has gone to Rome on his behalf, to plead for it. And he will get it," said Cynan.

  I said: "He will still find all the lesser folk of England in the other camp. They have had a taste of getting brisk and impartial justice, through the knights of the shires and the justiciar's perambulations, of seeing malpractices hunted out and punished, even of seeing right done to the lesser man against the greater. Will they give that up easily?"

  "It will be done slowly and gently," he said, "and by one who believes in his absolute right. But more important, it will be done by a power very well backed in arms."

  "If it rests with the feudal forces of England," I reasoned, "they may well be very evenly divided. Supposing, of course, that it ever comes to arms, of which at present I see no sign. Surely this Easter affair was a false alarm bred in the mind of a sick man, and one easily frightened."

  He acknowledged that it was so. Sitting there with me among the bushes, deep in the woods upstream from the ford, he made a strange figure, that smooth, well-combed man in his brushed gown, and yet he was as much at home as in his own office. There was but one change in him, that here, so near to Wales, the rounded softness of his face had sharpened to show the strong Welsh bone beneath the flesh, and his eyes had lengthened their look, and had the narrowed brightness of the mountaineer.

  "Keep fast hold of your truce," he said earnestly. "Keep fast hold of it and draw it out as long as you can, for it will not always be the feudal host you have to face. The old order grows stiff in the joints, like an old man. The feudal host serves so many days, and goes home, and gladly. Earl Simon may not have brought any French mercenaries into the country, as he was rumoured to have done. But King Henry did! And so he will again, Gascons, Poitevins, whatever offers. It is a living, like any other; there are plenty of men who have skills to sell. A paid army does not go home in the winter, or put down its bows and lances to get in the harvest. Times are changing very quickly. So a king who feels he has the pope, and half the nobility, and enough of the paid soldiers of Europe on his side may not greatly care if the common folk of England are against him." He dropped his white, ringed hands into his lap, and there they knotted suddenly into a grip as still and as hard as stone. "Or the common folk of Wales!" he said.

  All that I had heard from Cynan I related to Llewelyn. We had our truce, we had our peace, so far as it went. Two years is better than one. But the turmoil of England had now become more than our danger or our opportunity, for those ideas that moved men there were surely valid for men everywhere, and moreover, there were not many in the eastern parts of Wales who had not kin upon the other side the border.

  Before Christmas, of that year twelve hundred and sixty, Edward was in Gascony. He had been allowed to stay in England until the keeping of the Confessor's feast, the thirteenth day of October, a festival dearly loved by King Henry. There he had knighted a great number of young men, among them the two eldest sons of Earl Simon de Montfort, and then, with several of the new knights in his train, he left for a long jousting tour in France, on his way to his regency in Gascony.

  "It is exile!" said David, moved and angry. "The king is turned idiot, if he conceives that Edward would ever do anything to harm him. Why, even as a child he talked of his father as a gentle simpleton who must be protected. And now he accepts this injustice because it comes from his father. Do you think he would tolerate it from any other?"

  "You know him," said Llewelyn. "I do not." And he watched his brother along the table with eyes aloof and attentive, for David had known a life at the English court which was closed to him.

  "I do know him," said David vehemently. "The best and the worst of him I know, and if you think I am harking back to a childhood affection and seeing him all white, you are greatly mistaken. I never did see him so—nor any other man, for that matter. But of all the things Edward would not do, this is the most impossible. And it is gross injustice to send him away out of the country, like an exiled offender too noble to be put on trial, but too dangerous to be left at large about his father's court."

  "He is going in considerable state," said Llewelyn, smiling, "and to a court of his own. And if things go on as they have been threatening in England, you may well see the king beckoning him back to his aid in a hurry before long."

  That proved a true prophecy in the end, except that it took longer to fulfil itself than he had supposed. For the year that we were then about to welcome in saw a deal of change in the situation in England, but all in the king's favour. The shock of the supposed plot had had its effect; Henry had only to play the same strain again and again to keep the greater half of his magnates in more horror of seeming to countenance treason than of continuing to countenance mismanagement and corruption. As for the common people, they were not consulted, or the issue might have been very different. They had tasted a kind of diligent and honest rule that was very much to their liking, and they wanted to keep it, but the process by which it was gradually whittled away was so subtle and oblique that they hardly realised how it was slipping out of their grasp.

  It was not further into the year than March, when William de Valence came back, bringing his train of officers and friends with him, and was welcomed at court, for by this time King Henry felt his position so strong that he could boldly set them back in their old position in his favour. Especially did he take courage after the end of May, when John Mansel, his clerk, returned triumphantly from Rome with Pope Alexander's new bull. Cynan had prophesied truly. As the pontiff had refused all countenance or aid to the reform, so now he took his warfare a stage further, for the bull absolved the king from his oath to keep the Provisions, and very shortly afterwards Alexander went further still, releasing not only the king, but all those who had taken the oath, and threatening any who tried to force their constancy, or used any violence against them, with excommunication.

  The king made gleeful preparations to announce this decree to his people. He had a large force of foreign mercenaries and levies privately raised at home and, thus fortified, he installed himself in the Tower of London, and thence made public proclamation of the pope's judgments. With the temporal and spiritual power on his side, he was no longer afraid, and when he was no longer afraid he would begin to be vindictive, and also to presume too far on his luck.

  The first we heard of this reversal was in late June, when the king wrote to Llewelyn in virtuous jubilation, saying he was now free to consider talks aimed at peace, being firmly established again in his royal authority. As though only the business of the reform had kept him from accepting the prince's offers of peace earlier, thou
gh we knew well enough that only the same vexed business had twice, at least, kept him from making war upon us.

  "We have nothing to lose by talking," said Llewelyn warily, and certain exchanges of letters did begin, which if they did nothing else provided us with regular news from England and beyond. And very odd some of those items seemed to me, if any pattern of sense was to be looked for in them. As, for instance, that at the end of May Pope Alexander died, as though the hurling of those two bulls against the reform movement had drained the final energy out of him, and within three months there was a new pope in St. Peter's chair, and the parties were at work all over again arguing and angling for his favour as before. Or that King Henry, in the over-exuberance of success, nearly stumbled over into disaster by moving too fast, hunting out of office all the newly-appointed officials he did not like, and replacing them with his own favourites, some so objectionable that even the moderates demurred, and for a while it looked as if the new sheriffs of his appointing would be able to take over the royal castles only by force.

  Thus things stood when the autumn began, and we, having made the most of our immunity and a very favourable year, were packing the fruits of our harvest into the barns and thinking ahead to the provisions for winter. Trade being free, we had no lack of salt, the summer having been hot and full of flowers we had honey in plentiful store. And Anglesey had provided a good grain harvest, which we were at pains to house safely. And I thought, I remember, viewing the shorn fields around Bala, when the work was done and the pale gold of stubble shone strangely in the sun, that this was a more blessed life than fighting, and that we were a happy land. If we had few riches, we had few needs. If we lacked power over others, we had a stronghold in ourselves. If we could not command the splendour of popes, we had the small, pure and homely holiness of the saints in their cells, who laid their prayers over us like sheltering hands, instead of hurling bulls of damnation against us. I would not have changed for any land upon earth, so beautiful and particular to me was this land of Gwynedd.

  But into this contentment, not mine alone but embracing us all, came the envoy of death, that takes away blessed and banned alike. He came in the person of a squire of Rhys Fychan's galloping into Bala lathered and weary and stained, with the entreaty that we would forward his message also to the Lady Senena and David in Neigwl. For his mistress, the Lady Gladys, Rhys Fychan's beloved wife, was brought to bed prematurely of a dead child, and slowly bleeding to death of that unstaunchable wound, in the castle of Carreg Cennen.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Lady Senena scorning the slow ease of a litter, mounted a round Welsh cob, astride like a knight and with skirts kilted, and came like a storm-wind from Neigwl with David attentive and patient at her elbow. For though he used her very lightly when times were good, cheating, teasing and cozening her as best suited him, nonetheless he dearly loved her, and at her need reined in hard all his own indulgences. Now in her age she loved and leaned upon his raillery, as old women banter love boldly with young and comely men, in a manner of elegant game kindly and flattering to both. Threatened with bitter loss, his presence beside her reminded her of her remaining treasures. How much she understood of his ways with her, that I do not know. There was nothing he did not understand.

  She let herself be lifted down in Llewelyn's arms, and wept upon his breast. Such a condescension she had not vouchsafed to him or any within my knowledge of her, for she was a very masterful lady.

  "Mother," he said, holding her thus, "we go every one by the same narrow door. One before, and one a little later, does it matter if the way is the same?"

  I was standing beside David then, and I felt him grip my arm with his long and steely fingers, and looked aside in time to see the blinding contortion of his face, bitter and brief like a shattered smile, as if he questioned whether the narrow door did not open wider and more generously for some than for others, and whether the way, if not the end, did not bear a variation as extreme as the severance between dark and light. But he never made a sound, and I think he did not know he had clenched his hand upon my arm.

  All we set out together to Carreg Cennen, except for Rhodri, who sent word that he was delayed on important business and would follow us and, as ever, came late. For though he was the one who had most attached his mother to him in childhood, perhaps after the Lady Gladys, by his very weakness and a tendency to ill-health, yet he was the one least disposed to family feeling, and most suspicious always that he was being slighted and disparaged. Nor could he bring himself to show as selfcentred as he was, as I think Owen Goch the eldest, might have done had he been a free man, but must always do the correct and ceremonious thing, but always grudgingly and with little grace.

  We could not wait for him. Llewelyn had already sent forward a courier to have changes of horses waiting for us along the way, and this time the Lady Senena rode pillion behind a lightweight page of the escort, on a big, raw-boned rounsey, well able to carry the double load, for the lady was somewhat shrunken in her elder years, and had never been a big woman. Thus we made forced time, for the time left to the Lady Gladys was measured now in hours, not in days, unless the physicians found some way to stop the slow drain of her blood, which no draughts or potions could replace.

  It was near the dusk of a September day when we came into the foothills of the Black Mountain, to that crag that rises above the river Cennen, and climbed the long ridge between the gate-towers, and in the inner bailey Rhys Fychan came out to meet us by the flare of torches. He was drawn and hollow-eyed with lack of sleep, his fair beard untrimmed and his dress untended. He looked at us all as we leaped down at his door, and said only, in a voice cracked with weariness: "She still lives. Barely lives!" Then he took the Lady Senena in his arm and led her within, and we followed to the antechamber of the room where the Lady Gladys lay.

  I did not go in with them, but waited outside the doorway, but the wide door was left open, and what was within I saw clearly, for the bedchamber was small. The evening was warm, and the window-spaces stood uncovered to the afterglow in the west, so that the single lamp by the bedside looked pale and wasted as the face on the pillow. They had raised and propped the foot of the bed, and beneath the sheepskin cover that draped her from the waist down she was swathed and packed with cloths to quench the flow that would not be quenched. She had on a white, loose gown, its sleeves no whiter than the wasted wrists and hands that lay beside her body like withered and discarded flowers. Between the heavy coils of her blue-black hair, as dark as David's, her face was waxen and translucent. It was as though I could see, clear through the delicate, blue-veined eyelids, the dark eyes that once had lifted upon King Henry's face in the hall of Shrewsbury abbey, and charmed him into smiling. For indeed she was, even thus in the awesome pallor of her strange death, a very beautiful lady.

  There was a woman sitting on a low stool beside the bed, and when Rhys entered with his visitors she started up and made way for the Lady Senena, drawing back into the shadowy corner of the room. Thus I saw Cristin again in the presence of death, as I had first met her, and as then her influence was a palpable blessing, though she kept silence and stillness, and her calm was unshaken. She watched as the Lady Senena took within her strong hands the pallid hand that lay nearer to her, and nursed and fondled it, and still the face on the pillow lay mute and marble-cold. The mother crooned endearments over her one daughter, and for a long time was not heard, but at length there was a faint convulsion of the large, pale lids, and a flutter of the dark lashes on the ashy cheeks. Rhys Fychan shook even to that omen, but with little hope.

  "She has been like this more than a day and a night," he said, low-voiced, "growing ever paler. But sometimes she has spoken to me. She may to you. It will be but a thread, you must lean close."

  So they did, the Lady Senena on one side, Llewelyn on his knees on the other. And he also began gently talking to his sister, whether she heard him with the hearing of this world or of the world to come. He told her that all they who were clos
e kin to her would care for her children as their own, and that he would be a heedful lord and a good uncle to Rhys Wyndod and Griffith, and in particular to his godson and namesake, the youngest of her sons. And whether it was the deeper notes of his voice that reached her even through the folds of her sleep, or whether the time had come when she must make her last rally and bid the world farewell, she stirred and opened her lips, and her fragile eyelids lifted from the dimmed darkness of her eyes. One on either side they leaned to her, either holding a hand, though she paid as little heed to their touch as if death had already taken all sense from every part of her but the mind and the spirit.

  Something she said, for her lips moved, but sound there was none, and whoever would might interpret her last message to his own liking, and twist it, if he would, into his own name. But I think she was already speaking only with God. For her eyes closed again, and opened no more.

  Through most of that night she breathed, though ever more shallowly, and all they watched with her. Rhys's chaplain came again to pray, though he had already ministered to her last wants. And in the hours before the dawn, the time of departures, she departed. I saw the very breath that was but half-drawn, and there halted, leaving her with pale lips severed, as though about to speak, or smile.