Court of Foxes (8 page)

That accounted perhaps for much of his abstraction during the evening; for the stilted conversation, the brief impersonal replies. But, meanwhile… She was shaken suddenly by a storm of temptation. ‘Catti — I would like…’ She broke off. She improvised: ‘If I — now that I am married — were to speak with David Llandovery, were to hold out a — a hand of friendship to him, were to try to heal the breach… My position isn’t easy, Catti, married secretly to my lord, without the knowledge or acceptance of his mother; how greatly it would ease matters if I might be the means of bringing her sons together again…!’ And she urged the girl on. ‘Run down, Catti, find out if he’s still here; seek him out, ask him — ask him if I may — but secretly, Catti — have just one word with him.’ The girl looked at her sharply, enquiringly, she was astonished no doubt at so fantastical a notion: that the unknown bride of an hour might patch up a quarrel of many years’ standing; and Gilda recalled that this was a servant of her husband’s, bound to him no doubt by long ties of family service in the half feudal conditions that would probably still continue in the ancient mists of Wales. But there was no time to be wise; here might be her last chance ever to speak to her beloved… You are a married woman, her conscience said to her, a married woman for less than a day, and already planning treachery to your husband — and with his own brother. But she did not care. I loved him first. I have loved him only: my husband, whether he knows it or not, has bought me for money, I care nothing for him; he’s seduced my virtue out of me by some magic of his own, but for the rest he is nothing, nothing to me… And she shoved the girl out. ‘Run, run and find out! Find out if he has left the house and if not, make an assignation with him for me… And secretly, secretly, Catti, I’ll reward you well…’

It seemed a long time before Catti came back; in that time she had settled her dress, touched her face to new beauty with a shadow of paint here, a dusting of powder there; arranged the lovely sheen of her brushed-out hair into a very allurement of its own unrivalled beauty. I’m a traitor, she thought, a cheat and a liar and no better than a whore! But it was as nothing else that she and her family had embarked upon this adventure. In my husband’s arms I’m no better than a whore indeed; but this other I love, in his arms I shall be pure and made whole again because I love him, I love him — not for what he has or may give me but for what he is. However I may come by it, my love with him will be pure…

But the maid came at last to the door and, silently curtseying, shook her head. David Llandovery had passed on down the stairs after their brief meeting; and not pausing to speak to anyone had walked out of the house and not come back.

She slept alone that night and undisturbed, Catti Jones curled up on the couch at the foot of the great bed. Next morning very early she was wakened and while she dressed, was brought a cup of chocolate and a hot roll. By seven the coach was at the door with more bobbings and bowings, the staff saw them off and the door of her new home closed after her. So this is greatness, she thought: this is grandeur! A moment of love without passion; an hour of passion without love — for the rest, an oasis of ponderous boredom, never free for a moment from servile eyes watching, respectful ears listening, from eager hands working at what one would very much rather do for oneself. With her husband she had exchanged no more than a perfunctory word of greeting as, in his three-caped great coat, he joined her in the hall and handed her down to the coach, Catti Jones scrambling in to perch on the seat opposite them, clasping milady’s dressing-case since no jewel-box had been brought with her. From under white, lowered lids she flicked up a glance rather anxiously at their two faces. What might Catti have told him of that mad attempt last night to see his brother? Not for one moment, she thought, would my lord of Tregaron accept any nonsense about hopes of bringing about a reconcilement. He looked very grave, and for a moment she was afraid. But after all… You had but to go up close to him, stand with your hands behind your back, raise your lips to his, yet not kissing him… Shame filled her at the readiness with which the thought sprang to her mind, but it was not the shame that had come on that first occasion, in those first early days when she had discovered the power of her body over his senses; she knew that, little by little, that shame was dying, that shame would die. Such gifts, after all, were but weapons, put into a woman’s hands.

The coach rolled and rumbled over the cobbles, every turn of the iron-shod wheels taking her further away from all those she knew and loved. Cold, aloof, withdrawn, her husband sat in silence; she looked over at Catti’s face, and Catti was looking down with a hangdog air. Traitorous bitch! she thought; and was for a moment disconcerted when, as though in reply, the girl returned a look of dislike and resentment hardly less violent than her own. A fine pair, she thought, to be travelling with, two hundred miles.

At midday the coach drove off along a side road and at last stopped at an inn. There was a flutter and a flustering, a great deal of bowing and protesting, but the accommodation was villainous and the meal not much better. They ate in chill silence, broken only by necessary civilities; in silence resumed the drive. But at the Cheltenham inn that night he came to her room, dismissed the maid with a wordless gesture, threw himself across her body and began, at first violently and then with slow, sensuous mouthings that turned her bowels to a sickness of desire, to kiss her white shoulders and breast: possessed her briefly, rose and still with hardly a word spoken, was going to the door. Unsatisfied, filled with shame at her body’s longing, she sought to conceal it in anger. She said:

‘Your lordship has, I now perceive, but one use for a wife.’

He stopped, his hand on the door. ‘Have you some complaint to make of my love-making?’

‘I think only that there is very little love in it,’ she said, and as he remained silent, ventured, almost timidly: ‘I think that a man and his wife should be not only lovers but friends.’

He came back and stood over the bed. ‘A man and his wife — and all his relations?’

‘Having no family of my own, of course I — I hope yours will be my friends. Your mother; and your sister also—’

‘And my brother?’ he said. ‘Is he also to be your friend?’

So now she knew. ‘It was only that—’ She stammered and faltered. ‘The girl perhaps told you? May she not have misrepresented the situation? It was only that I thought the hand of a sister — of a new sister—’

‘You had seen my brother once, I think, before this?’

‘He sent me flowers—’

‘He gave you flowers. Others sent them but from him alone you, personally, received them. And I saw the glance that passed between you: the same glance passed last night upon the stairs. I had thought it the thing of a moment, long forgotten; but last night I saw that look again. Well…’ She sat, almost cowering, huddled against the white pillows, looking up into the angry brilliance of his eyes. ‘Well, Madam, Take heed! My brother and I, in spirit as well as in actuality, live apart. You’ll not meet him again; and if you should, will do your husband the courtesy of ignoring his enemy. Moreover, since he is betrothed—’

‘Betrothed?’ she said, her heart sinking.

‘To Lady Blanche Handley, daughter of the Earl of Trove. A binding engagement.’

She did not remind him that his own engagement had apparently proved less than imperatively binding. Her heart was too sick with a stab of jealousy, the first she had ever known, at thought of her beloved affianced to another. Marriage was a humdrum business, she knew that already after less than a day and a night of it: a jog-trot of boredom interspersed with taken-for-granted occasional violent moments of pleasure. But betrothal — a time for whisperings and kissings, for the murmurous pleadings, the slow, sweet, creeping-on of the intimacies of love. She made up her mind, from that moment, to detest the Lady Blanche Handley, daughter of the Earl of Trove.

It was a grey September day when, next morning, they set out on the last lap of their journey: keen and cold for the time of year but fine, with the leaves just here and there beginning to turn and the nuts on the hedgerows of hazel growing brown and fat. Within the coach it was dark and warm with the gleam of old black leather polished through the years by the rubbing and shifting of seats and shoulders, the clutching of hands as the wheels lurched over the ups and downs of the rutty roads. The straw at their feet smelt strong and sweet, the rumble of the wheels ground out a rough lullaby. They clattered through the narrow streets of Gloucester, past the white, glittering twin-towered hump of the cathedral, over the crook-backed Severn bridge and out again into the country. It was afternoon when Lord Tregaron said to her: ‘We are passing into Wales.’

‘It looks very much like the same England to me,’ she said, not very agreeably; for with every turn of the wheels she came away, alone and dejected, from all the light-heartedness of the life she had lately known. Rogues we may be, the whole lot of us, she thought; but it seems there is but dullness in virtue. And if this be Wales, it is only that much further from all I love.

‘Why, what did you expect?’ he said. ‘These are not the high mountains and great passes of North Wales. These are but the foothills of those mountains, a sweeter land to me by far, for all it has less of grandeur. But you will see soon how the roads twist and turn, with never an inch of flat land between the wild hills with their hanging forests of scrub oak, that have been here since the Romans and before them.’ And sure enough, soon the roads ran only uphill or down. It was sundown when he said, as they clattered through a small townlet: ‘This is Llandovery. In two hours we shall be home.’

Llandovery. At that name, her heart turned over. ‘From which your brother takes his name?’

‘It’s the family name. The title comes from the great Bog of Tregaron, which lies in Cardiganshire, twenty miles northeast of Castell Cothi; five miles and more of bogland where the tall, pale grass that covers it all takes on, in sunshine, a sheen of gold—’

‘And yet more pink than gold,’ said Catti from her corner. She spoke dreamily, her mind so far away, that she omitted the respectful ‘my lord’. But he appeared not to notice it; the formalities in Wales it seemed were less extreme than in the
haut monde
of London. I’ll soon change all that, thought the new countess — she who had so lately railed at the empty obsequiousness of the inn-keepers; I’ve not come to the ends of the earth to be on terms of easy familiarity with serving girls. She listened in disdain as he answered, simple and friendly in the cool assumption of a superiority beyond necessity of condescension. ‘You are right. And yet gold also, a pale gold — have you not seen it, Catti, when the sun lay on it? — miles and miles of it, moving a little, shifting a little as the wind blows over the grasses, as though there were ripples on a broad lake of gold. And there are creatures there, wild birds that you’ll never see in any other part of Wales, and the great salmon come up the River Teifi to their spawning beds…’ He said to Gilda: ‘You shall see it some day.’

‘Don’t keep me too long waiting. Wild birds and spawning salmon,’ she said, irritably scornful, ‘have long been the passion of my life.’

They had come through a winding valley, and now struck off down a narrow path where to their right the river hurtled and tumbled to green fields eked out of spare soil by a farmer, far below. ‘This way was hewn out by the Romans from the solid rock, in the building of the culvert which runs by a thousand tricks of land level and water pressure, from the waterfall behind us to the gold mines of Pumsaint, eight miles ahead. You may still see the mark of its progress through the fields, no tillage obliterates it.’ As she remained indifferent, contemptuously bored, he added: ‘We begin now the ascent through the forests of scrub oak that have been here since those days and for all the years before. Within half an hour we shall be in sight of home.’

Home. Some dreary castle in this dreary land of rock paths hewn out by Roman legions (and not much improved upon since, reflected Gilda, jolted this way and that by the rough riding of the iron-rimmed wheels over boulders and pot-holes) — of stark mountains, patched with gorse and heather, of stunted oak pouring down the mountain side to the green fields fringing the quiet-flowing river, dotted with grazing cattle, blurs now in the failing evening light… My home is not here, she thought; my home is a bijou house with frilled curtains and a white door leading in from the cobbled street where the coaches rattle and the link boys clatter and the watchman cries out, All’s well! My home is a four-poster bed with the one I love to hold me in his arms and be not violent and rough but tenderly kind… My home is where all is laughter and fun and gaiety and love, where the talk is a sputter and a sparkle, not this flat dull conning-over with a servant wench of whether some salmon-ridden bogland be pink or gold… And she leaned her head against the padded leather of the coach and listened for any sound above the rumble of the wheels; and heard nothing, nothing — only the eternal silences of the countryside, the stillness, the dullness, the nothingness, the hush of the evening…

The hush of the evening: slashed across suddenly, violently, by the high, shrill whinney of a horse, the clatter of hooves, the jingle of harness, the breaking of branches, the sound of men’s voices yelling…

And a man’s voice crying: ‘Stand and deliver! Your money or your lives!’

*
Dafydd:
the single f is pronounced like a v in Welsh, and the doubled like the hard th in ‘the’. Roughly, then, Duv-ith, accent on the first syllable.

Bach:
a gutteral sound, almost impossible to the English tongue — bar-ch, without any sounding of the r.

Dai:
is pronounced to rhyme with ‘dye’.

T
HE COACH ROCKED WITH
the sudden check, the rearing and stamping of frightened horses, brought too abruptly to a halt. She could hear the cursing of the coachman on his box, the yells of two outriders, unable to come near. ‘ ’Tis Y Cadno, my lord! ’Tis the Fox!’
*