The Brothers of Gwynedd (106 page)

  "While I," he said, so softly and drily that he seemed to be speaking to himself rather than to me, though I knew it was meant for my ears, and meant to disquiet a little, "I have heirs—perhaps a prince by now!—but no kingdom. Thus is this world arranged at cross-purposes, Samson. Have you never wished to move the pieces into a better pattern? Or do you still believe God knows best, and should not have his elbow jogged?"

  "Go home," I said, "and take your mischief with you, and forbear from plaguing your wife as you delight in plaguing me."

  And at that he laughed aloud, and stooped low from the saddle to embrace me about the shoulders, and rode out of the gate with a plunge of his heel and swirl of his cloak, keeping the rimy edges of grass along the coast road to avoid the glassy ice. And after him his retinue, well-mounted, rich and bright with colours, equipped and harnessed most princely, a king's retinue.

A small judgment awaited David and Elizabeth that January for their too much pride and delight in their fruitfulness, for the expected son was a second daughter, as fine and dark and bold as the first, but not so beautiful, taking after her mother rather than her sire but for the black hair. She came as sweetly and readily as the other, for this lady was gifted for bearing as few women are, and all her children lived and flourished, and she, meantime, remained so young and vigorous that after some years of tending her girls she appeared rather as their elder sister than their mother.

  This girl they named Gladys, after David's only sister, many years dead in her bloom. And I think that the check to their exultation was but mild and brief, for they both loved their children, and took great pleasure in enjoying them. Moreover, Elizabeth had proved her gift of giving birth, and he his generosity in engendering, and as for the sons, it was but a matter of time. So the little one was never made to feel she must pay for her error in not being a boy, but was cherished and worshipped from her birth. And as love is a rare virtue, and surely prized in heaven, so I count the family blessedness of those two perilous and hapless creatures as their justification and their crown. By this time David so loved, as she deserved and exulted in his love. He was a creature hard to trap, but she had him in the snare of her own immeasurable worship. He never swerved from her, never again looked at any other woman, he who had ensnared all the beauties of England and Wales before Edward cast this innocent child-widow in his path, brown as a mouse, mild as rain, plain as a little sister.

  "Is he happy?" asked Llewelyn, in some doubt, when we got word of the child's birth. "He wanted, he expected, a boy." Of his voice I knew even those tones that were lost in the quietness of his speech. He suffered what David never knew, all his bowels cramped with longing, for he was all a man, and obstinately celibate for his love. A passing strange thing is love, outside the regulation of the flesh, entering into the spirit. I have seen his face so translated by desire, he passed beyond David's recognition.

  "He is happy," I said. "You need not fret for David." But for Llewelyn my heart turned and curdled in me, remembering David's grievance and David's vaunt, crying aloud that he had a prince without a kingdom, or would have soon, while Llewelyn had a kingdom without an heir. With all the goodwill in the world on Llewelyn's part, and, for all his stiff-necked insistence on his vassal status, a great deal of obdurate and hurtful love left on David's, yet this division of their personal fortunes was no way helpful to the restoration of the old trust and affection between them.

  In the early spring of that year twelve hundred and seventy-three we had news from Cynan at court that disquieted Llewelyn more than he would confess. King Edward on his slow way home from the Holy Land had sent his wife into Spain, both to visit her brother the king of Castille, and also to conduct certain minor matters of business on his behalf in those parts, while he went into Italy, to Orvieto, to renew his friendship with Pope Gregory the crusader. The queen was then carrying another child, and had with her her baby daughter Joan, born at Acre. Doubtless she was glad to rest awhile in her native country, before she went on into Gascony to meet Edward there. He had written to his council that he would make haste to get home, but kings never have quiet from affairs, and there were some restive lordlings in Gascony who were still prepared to outface even Edward, so that his presence was needed there. In the end he delayed a whole year.

  But as at this time of which Cynan wrote, he was with Pope Gregory at Orvieto. And there he learned that Guy de Montfort, the murderer of Henry of Almain, was still at large, sheltered and safe in the territories of the people of Siena, having his father-in-law, the Red Count of Pitigliano, as a most powerful ally. Edward in great fury demanded aid from the Sienese to hunt down the assassin, and though they refused him, they did so in fear and trembling, and Siena and Florence and other cities of Tuscany begged the king not to resort to war. So, doubtless, did his friend the pope, and Edward could not well go against him, but he did use every possible legal threat to induce Guy to submit himself to the church's condemnation and penance. His unremitting hatred and rage appalled all who witnessed them, not that Guy had not earned it, but that its intensity and deadliness were more and less than human, giant like his body, but not subject to any curbs or temperings of time, or resignation, or magnanimity, as human rages should be.

  "In the end," wrote Cynan, "he has failed to get his enemy into his hands, but has done the best he could to destroy him, inducing the pope to issue against him the most frightful bull of excommunication possible. He is left no human rights, he can hold no lands, own no property, take shelter nowhere without imperilling those who shelter him. With that the king has had to be content, and has now left Orvieto on his way to the pass of Mont Cenis. But from all I hear, feeling in Italy is not near so unfavourable to Guy, and as soon as the king's back is turned there will be ambassadors enough willing to try to bring the man to submission and absolution. More ominous is the revelation of King Edward's mind towards those who incur his displeasure."

  "As well," said Llewelyn wryly, reading this dolorous account of the turbulent fortunes of Earl Simon's third son, "that I am making no move at this time, and can make none, in the face of the countess's absolute rejection. At waiting, I believe, I am the most accomplished of princes, certainly the most experienced. I can wait yet a year or two. Even King Edward's animosity must wear itself out sooner or later. At least I can take good care of Wales, while I wait for the day when I can lay it at Eleanor's feet."

  At this time he was concerned to repair certain gaps in the main border defences, which he wished to ensure by means of a string of castles, as the English did. From the north, by Chester, he had Mold, and Whittington in Salop, and safe support at Dinas Bran, but in the middle march, over against Montgomery, his position was less well established, and for some time he had been planning to place a new castle, a strong building in stone, somewhere in that region, and preferably in conjunction with a town and a market. He chose the crest of a great ridge overhanging the valley of the upper Severn, just where the lesser river Mule flows into it, in the cantref of Cydewain, perhaps four miles from the ford where our conventions met, and five from the royal castle of Montgomery. From the summit of that hill, where the rock breaks through the turf, there is a glorious view over all that grand valley, for many miles to the south, and less widely to the north, while across the river valley the folded hills rise again, hiding Montgomery, but revealing all the river crossings between. It seemed a most defensible site, and the river junction below a very profitable place for a township, access being both good from all directions, and controllable from the castle. As soon as the weather was favourable for the moving and cutting of stone and laying of foundations, building began, with a great army of workmen and masons.

  This place the people of Cydewain called Dolforwyn, the "Angels' Meadow," and the township Llewelyn founded beneath it, where the rivers joined, we called Abermule.

  About the twenty-fourth day of June, when the building was forward and in good heart, and Llewelyn in the summer weather, after some weeks encamped below the hill to supervise the work, had withdrawn with his entourage to Dinorben, he was astonished to receive a visitor in the person of the reverend prior of Wenlock, which is a Cluniac abbey in Salop, not too far distant from those parts of the border, bearing a letter from King Edward's regents, issued through the royal chancellery. The prince received the reverend father with all courtesy, and such soldierly hospitality as we could offer him in a summer camp, and contained his curiosity about the message until we were out of the presence of the messenger. For the prior was old and gentle and very benign, and knew no more than we did what he carried, being charged only to deliver it, and to bring back the prince's answer.

  "I have a premonition," said Llewelyn, hesitating to break the seal, "that these lieutenants of the king use the most innocent and well-willing to carry their worst crudities. It is one way of disarming offence." But he would not give it to me to open and read to him, being, I rejoice to remember partly at my instruction, fluent in Latin as in Welsh, and almost as good in English, if his French, like mine, was something wanting. He read slowly, burning visibly into pure, silent anger, his burnished summer brown flushing into copper-red, but all in stillness. When he looked up at me, the skin of his face was drawn tight over starting bones, his eyes, which were normally peaceable in their deep, rich peat-brown, had red flames tall and bright in their depths.

  "This is not to be borne," he said, smouldering but quiet, torn between indignation and disdain. "They have run mad with the glory of being deputies to greatness. Do you know what they dare to write to me, Samson? They straitly forbid me to continue with my plans to build a castle at Dolforwyn, or to found a market town at Abermule, to the hurt of his Grace's crown rights and neighbouring markets. They forbid me! In my own Welsh lands! What market rights has England on this side of Severn to be infringed? None! And what right has one sovereignty to forbid another to build or found within its own territories? None! I am not even appropriating a site from a vassal of my own. I am the one person who has the right to build there without asking leave of any man living."

  And this was true, for Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, the greatest of his vassals and the last to come to his fealty, held only a part of Cydewain. Nevertheless, I fancied then that Griffith was not best pleased by the founding of the castle, having an eye to his own trade rights and privileges at his castle and town of Pool, though that was a matter of eight miles distant from Abermule, and it could hardly be said that the prince was encroaching, trade with England in those parts being brisk, and the border not as turbulent as further south. But Griffith was jealous of his power, and grudging of his homage even when he came to it finally of his own free will and for his own ends.

  "This outdoes their order to rush to swear my oath of fealty to a couple of abbots, almost before Henry was in his tomb," said Llewelyn, and suddenly laughed, though angrily, remembering how little sleep he had lost over that. For having chosen, and stated his choice firmly, to wait for Edward in person, I think he had quite forgotten the matter of the summons to the ford of Montgomery, assuming that his decision would be accepted, and the matter dropped until the king came home. Whereas, as we afterwards learned, on the January day appointed in the original order, the abbots of Dore and Haughmond, escorted by a company from Montgomery, duly attended at the ford of the river, and waited until well into the afternoon for Llewelyn to come to the meeting. And since that was a bitter winter month, and the ford a bleak enough place in such weather, no doubt they had hard things to say in private about the prince's contumacy. Nevertheless, the regents must have shrugged off their too zealous attempt and recognised Llewelyn's right to prefer a direct meeting, for from that day nothing more was ever heard of persuading him to the oath until the king's arrival.

  "But this shall not pass so simply," he said warmly. "Insolence and presumption towards me I can repulse without aid, but when they presume grossly against the laws that unite and separate England and Wales, they injure more than me, and do no service to their own lord, and he shall know it."

  "Will you send an answer by the prior?" I asked, thinking he might prefer rather to send a formal protest to Westminster by Welsh clerks at law, or even by one of Tudor's sons, who often did such errands for him where ceremony was advisable.

  "As well by the prior as by any," said Llewelyn, "since he will respect the seal, and be witness to whom it was superscribed if others show less respect." And he asked: "Where, according to Cynan's last despatch, is the king arrived now?"

  Then I caught his drift, and approved, and so did Tudor when he heard, and those few of the council who were then with us. For according to Cynan, who was well informed about all the news from Edward's wandering court, they were now on their way to Paris, after delaying a while among the queen-mother's relatives in Savoy, and by the end of July they should be guests of King Philip in the French capital. Moreover, the king intended to take to himself a great part of the business of England, now that he was so close to home as France, and a steady stream of messengers, envoys, clerks, clerics and barons was already crossing and recrossing the Channel on his affairs.