The Brothers of Gwynedd (114 page)

  "Go on," said the bishop.

  "My part was to win over David, and I did it. He has often shown discontent with his lands, and he is bold and able. He entered into a bond with us to enlarge both his estate and ours. He promised his eldest daughter to me in marriage, and he promised my father, and me after him, both Kerry and Cydewain to be added to Powys, in return for the armed aid we pledged him to accomplish what he most desired. I was to lead a strong company in secret to the lord prince's maenol at Aber, and that we sought to do, but the floods turned us back at the Dee and prevented our evil."

  "You say it was to Aber you were bound?" said the bishop, still astray and in great amazement. "In the name of God, with what intent? What could you hope to do there, in the very heart of the lord prince's power?"

  "What God in his wisdom prevented," said Owen, and knotted his hands in dread of his own words, and wrung out frantic tears. "We conspired to murder the prince in his bedchamber, and make the Lord David prince of Wales in his place."

  In the blank hush that came upon us all I heard not even a breath, and then the long, faint sigh of every man present, so soft that it might have been the sound of the sudden, bleak November sunlight creeping across the flagged floor. The bishop sat chilled to stone. My pen had stabbed deep into the parchment and splayed its point, blotting the leaf. God knows what we had expected to hear, but it was not this, never quite this. Bishop Einion drew back a little from being touched by Owen's shaking hands, and himself shook with anger and disbelief.

  "Wretch, do you know what you say? Are you lying still for some purpose of your own? If this was what you intended, the Lord David surely cannot have known it was meant to go so far."

  "I do know!" said Owen, shaking and weeping. "As God sees me, I am telling the truth. The proofs are written and sealed, my mother keeps all the agreements we made in a coffer at Pool, you may send for them. David's seal is there. He did know! He knew all! On the second night of February we were appointed to reach Aber in the darkness, and he was to let us in."

  Then there was no more mystery for me in all the curious detail of that night in Aber, David's face in the red glow of the altar lamp in the chapel, tormented and ravaged between exultation and loathing. David's restless prowling as he watched the weather, his words, his frozen vigil above the postern gate, that was barred but not guarded. Llewelyn was never as careful of his personal safety as he should have been, and who knew it better than David? Who could better lead a party of armed raiders to the prince's bedchamber in the dark, and in silence? But God had prevented, and saved him from the act. No one could save him from the intent. And perhaps only God, not even David, knew the content of those desperate prayers of his that night, whether they were for clearing skies and hardy fellow-conspirators and a princely heritage for his son, or that God would tear the skies open and send down the torrents of judgment to make an impassable moat about Aber. For as often as David's right hand launched a blow at Llewelyn—David who never repented his evil against any other—his left hand would reach to parry it.

  "He gave me to know," said Owen, bleeding words freely now that the worst was said, "that if he had no son of his body, by marriage with his first daughter I should be his heir."

  David must have laughed at that, knowing already what they did not know, that his Elizabeth was again with child, and certain in his own mind that this time she could not fail of providing him a son. And so she had, and the grand inheritance David had earned for him was a shameful exile in England, bereft of all lands and honours. So far had he overreached himself.

  "He was to let us in by the landward gate, and lead us to the lord prince's room. And when Llewelyn was dead, then David's men and mine would take possession of the maenol and name him prince in his brother's place. And to this we all swore, and set our seals, if you doubt my word. But the floods turned us back, and the day passed without that terrible sin."

  "I thank God!" said Bishop Einion.

  "And we thought it was over! That we had done no more than sinned in intent, and wasted our labour and time, as we deserved, that we were safe, and it had all passed without effect and without detection. But time and vengeance have pursued us ever since, thus slowly and surely, without any haste."

  "God's time is endless, and his patience without limit," said the bishop. "Never think that he has forgotten, or failed to see." And he said heavily: "Have you done? Or is there yet more to tell?"

  "I have done," said the poor wretch, grovelling.

  "I cannot yet give you absolution, there is more required of you than confession. Do you empower me freely to say to the lord prince all that you have said to me?"

  "Oh, my lord, with all my heart I entreat you to, and to lift this burden from me. I want to make what amend I can."

  "I will speak for you," said the bishop, "but with a heavy heart. Yet if you mean that truly, there is grace to be had." And he sent for those guards who had brought the prisoner, and committed him again to their charge, to be returned to his prison. And I wrote to the end all that I had to write, and took it with me to await the prince's bidding, after the bishop should have spoken with him. But all that while that I waited—for it was no short telling—I could not cease from seeing David's face, after the night was passed and he had lain lost in his wife's arms until late in the morning, a face so weary and so at peace, as though after his own confession. I remembered its wondering humility and gratitude, washed clean of all greed and desire, even if that state of chastened bliss lasted not long. That was when he had thought, like Owen but with how much more intensity, that it was over, that his mischief had been prevented and his better prayers heard, that he was delivered from evil. While at every step the shadow of his act, which was itself now only a shadow, trod hard on his heels and waited its due time to lay a hand upon his shoulder.

"Once I have heard it," said Llewelyn when I went in to him, "now let me hear it again as you took it down from his own lips." And I read to him, he sitting perfectly quiet and alert and calm, all that deposition of Owen ap Griffith, how the prince's death was to be brought about by the connivance of his own best-loved brother, and that brother exalted to his vacant sovereignty over the principality he alone had made, single-handed, out of chaos. By the time it was done the last daylight was dying, for the days were short then, and I got up to go and trim the candles, but he put out a hand with a sharp, pained gesture to halt me, and: "Let be!" he said. "There is light enough left for me to see where I am going." So I sat down with him again, and waited.

  "Once," he said, musing, "he rode at me headlong on the field of Bryn Derwin, mad-set to kill or be killed, but that was in open combat, face to face. I had not thought he hated me enough to conspire with so small a creature to spit me to my bed while I slept. Explain him to me, Samson, if you can, for I am lost."

  But I said never a word, for there never was any creature living under the sun could truly explain David, least of all David. He knew himself, and even his lies were never disguises from his own self-knowledge, but knowledge is not understanding.

  "Though it is but a step," Llewelyn said out of the gathering dark, "from seeing Wales as his inheritance after me, since I am celibate, to growing impatient at the waiting. He is not the first to want to hasten the succession. The same impatience has been the death of more than one Welsh father, since time was. Strange that I never saw it as having any influence between him and me. And now, Samson, tell me, how often am I to turn the other cheek?"

  "No more!" I said. "Now you must think only of yourself. He has made himself the enemy, it is none of your doing."

  "No," said Llewelyn, "there's more at stake. Bear with me an hour or so, Samson, while I think for Wales."

  In all that he said and did then, it was for Wales he was thinking, and for that cause he was able to suppress his own desolation and grief and anger, and forgo his own revenge.

  "I am walking a ridge between two abysms," he said after he had been some time silent. "The two most powerful men in Wales, after me, have made common cause again me, and what I do now against them every princeling in Wales will be watching, and what I do must be seen to be justice, that they may accept it and take warning, but it must not be seen to be tyranny or cruelty, or others will be antagonised. I stand to lose allegiance whether I am too harsh or too merciful. If they conclude they may lightly break my peace, and not be crushed, some will do it, as they did it lightly in the past when Wales was not one, but many. If they think the measures I take too extreme, they will fall away out of indignation. If only I had had this land twenty years longer, even ten years, without interruption! It would have withstood all forces bent on breaking it apart. But this is a perilous time. We are not yet what some day we may be, God willing. We are not a state, not even a people. We are a loose bonding of little lands and tribes and families, of men who see no further forward, as yet, than tomorrow, and for a small, snatched advantage today will throw even tomorrow away. There is no man but Llewelyn can hold Wales together. If," he said, very sombrely, but with resolution rather than misgiving, "if Llewelyn can."

  I waited and was still, for he needed no word from me. For a while he, too, was silent, and then he resumed: "I may not take revenges like other men. I may only bring offences to justice. Did you ever consider, Samson, what a cruel deprivation that may be, that afflicts kings and princes, not to be permitted to hate and resent, and feel outrage like other men?"

  I said, only too truly, that it was not a deprivation from which all kings suffered. In the darkness he laughed, but somewhat hollowly.

  "But by their own deed, duly sealed," I said, "all Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn's lands are forfeit to you."

  "No," said Llewelyn. "Only if they offended again, and that I cannot charge, for this, however magnified now, is the past offence. So much justification I have for being patient and lenient. Not for their sakes, God knows, though I would rather have them as allies than enemies, but for the sake of Wales. Owen I hold, and will hold. He is safe enough. David I have lost for the time being, and he must wait. But Griffith is there in Pool, and thinks this whole matter over and finished, for his part in it, for he knows nothing yet of his son's confession. I do not want Griffith dispossessed, I do not want him prisoner, I want him bound to me, with all Powys—for Powys I cannot spare. I want him shaken and chastened, but not broken or humiliated further, so that he shall be glad to hold fast to me and keep his own. And if I can bring him to a manner of reconciliation and renewed fealty, I will do it. I must preserve the wholeness of Wales as best I may, and at whose cost I may, liefer my own than break this land apart."

  "News travels fast, even when few seem to know it," I said. "Griffith knows of David's flight before now. He may draw the same conclusion from it as his son drew. There is need of haste."

  "There is," said Llewelyn sombrely, "but of care, too. And I have not forgotten that there are only a few days left before I must set out for Shrewsbury, to meet King Edward. I am bound to him by treaty, and I agreed to the twenty-fifth day of this month, and go I must, though I would rather far that I had this matter of Griffith and Powys safely behind me, and could come to my first formal meeting with Edward as master of all Wales past question, with no dissentient. My fealty and homage would be paid on so much sounder a stand, and I could press my demands over the borders with so much stronger a voice. But there is no time. Until I come back from Shrewsbury, the less that gets out about Owen's tale, the better. We'll not alarm Griffith too soon if we can avoid it. And it may be that the next move will come better from a prince already safely installed in fealty and alliance with the new king of England, and invested with his overlord's authority in the marches as well as his own."

  "And David?" I asked.

  "There is nothing I can do about David at this time," said Llewelyn heavily out of the mourne darkness. "Neither embrace him nor kill him. As well! I might be tempted to kill rather than to embrace. When next I meet with David we may finish, one way or the other, what was begun at Bryn Derwin."