The Brothers of Gwynedd (126 page)
Llewelyn was at Rhydcastell when we came there after that journey, late in May. We were barely dismounting and leading our jaded horses into the tableyard, when someone must have run to him with the news, where he was newly in himself from riding, and stripped to shirt and chausses, for it was an early summer, and hot there between the hills. He came out in haste, his bared breast russet-brown, and the small lines of thought and frowning graven into his brow in ivory against the sunburned gold, which the bleached brown of his clipped beard did no more than outline in a single shade darker. The marks of the summer were on him, but the marks of the winter, too. Not all Edward's harassment, not all the border malice of the marchers, operating with their master's tacit approval, could have honed down the lines of that bold, bright face to this fine-drawn carving, or put the first traces of grey in his hair, either side the brow. He was fretted for Eleanor, as she for him. Those two had never yet seen each other in the flesh, and they were pared away to spirit and longing for love.
He cried: "Samson!" in a shout of joy, and came to embrace me, and of his gladness I was so glad as to be shaken almost to tears. "I thought I had sent you to your death," he said. "You are whole and free, thank God, you at least! Come in with me and tell me all you have to tell, let me know the best and the worst, for I am starved. No man of mine could get any true word or any comfort in Westminster. I have begged in vain, and thundered in vain, they would tell us nothing but that he has her, and all her company. You, too, Samson! And now you are here! If I can accept a first miracle, so I can believe in a second!"
I told him in a breath what seemed to matter most. "She is well, and unshaken, and sends her true mind by me. I am here with her blessing and at her wish."
He laid his arm about my shoulders, and turned suddenly in revulsion from going within, and haled me away instead into the fields, to a high, grassy knoll that looked down upon the valley, and there we lay in the rich green grass together, in the scent of the little spicy pink flowers of pimpernel and centaury, and the sweet air of freedom. And I was grateful to him for this blessing, that we had no walls about us, no listeners, no echoes. Under that sky it was possible to believe in the victory of truth, and the reunion of divided lovers.
There I told him all that melancholy and angry history, from first to last, dredging up for him out of my memory every look and every word of Eleanor's, and indeed not one was ever forgotten. And it was like the sudden bliss of steady and gentle rain upon a great drought, slaking the thirsty soil, setting the sap flowing in new life, filling the world with a young, green sweetness in which all the flowers of hope burst into bud. He lay with his chin in his hands, and listened, sometimes asking a quick question, perhaps only to imagine again her voice repeating its calm and queenly defiance.
"Whatever he may hold against me," he said, not angrily but heavily, "whatever suspicions he may have of me, it was vile to make her the victim, and viler to try to use her as a weapon. And I tell you, Samson, when first I got word of it, I was in two minds, and if I had been a free man I should have massed all my power in one great thrust, hopeless or not, as much to destroy him as to deliver her. But I am not free to be senselessly brave and throw my life and all away. I hold Wales in my hands, this land I have half-made into a nation, and cannot abandon now. It is hers as well as mine, but most of all it is the hope of the future, of my sons by her, and of other men's sons, every soul who speaks the Welsh tongue has rights in it. I have not had long enough!" he said, drumming his fist tormentedly against the thick grass. "It is not made, but only making! If I had had ten years more, if King Henry had lived ten years longer, this danger need never have been. But I have not had long enough! Not long enough to wipe out all those centuries of disruption."
"You could not have delivered her," I said, "you could only have fallen helpless into Edward's hands, which is what he wants, for if you fall, Wales falls."
"I know it!" said Llewelyn. "It would have been folly to abandon the way of law for the way of war. My envoys are still at the papal court, waiting for a new appointment now Gregory is dead. God rest him, he did his best for us. I have sent further letters. The new pontiff will know from the first of Edward's crime. I had complaints enough before, now this becomes my chief and first complaint, and manifestly just. No, it would have been mad to rush to arms, I should have destroyed my own case, for I take my stand on the treaty, which he wants broken and discarded. If he could goad me into being the one to shatter it, he would have won. But, oh, it was hard not to fight for her!"
I said: "She is of your mind. You cannot yield now, not by a single point. The terms you stand on are just, and you have offered homage according to treaty and custom."
"I have done more," said Llewelyn, half enraged with himself even for that. "I have offered to take the oath of fealty to his envoys, if he will send them to me, to satisfy him until we can agree on a safe place to meet for homage. He has refused. He stands absolutely on my total submission, and my consent to attend wherever he summons me. I stand absolutely on seeing the treaty honoured and reaffirmed, its breaches repaired, and my wife sent to join me, before I will take the oath or lay my hands in his. It is deadlock. This one concession I offered, to break it, and he refuses. I shall make no more. I shall not offer that again."
"She above all," I said, "understands the necessity for standing fast against him. "I could not bear it," she said to me, "if Llewelyn so mistook me as to think I valued my freedom above his honour and dignity. I ask nothing of him," she said, "but to maintain his truth and his right." If you once give back an inch, he will press you back again and again, toe to toe, and give you nothing in return."
"I confess," said Llewelyn, brooding, "I still do not understand him. He was not always so with me. Why this stony enmity now?"
"It is the first touch of resistance," I said, "that turns Edward mad. What does not move at his thrust, even if it mattered nothing to him when first he laid hand on it, becomes to him the total enemy, and he cannot rest until he has hurled it out of his path and ground it to powder under his feet."
"He should sooner have practised on Snowdon," said Llewelyn grimly, "than on Eleanor and me."
Afterwards I told him, when what most mattered was done, what I had until then withheld, and he pointedly had not asked, who it was had won me out of Windsor.
"So I supposed," said Llewelyn drily. "He had always a kindness for you, in spite of all the times he used you ill. It is the one thing that still does him honour. As for me, I have been through this to-and-fro of his once too often. David is dead to me."
But concerning Cristin I did not tell him anything, not because I grudged him the half of my load as I would have given him the half of my joy, but for a simpler reason that confounded me more. For when I opened my lips to speak of her, my throat closed, and I had no voice. So I accepted the judgment of God, and held my peace.
In the months that followed Llewelyn manned his borders, fended off the offences that grew with every week, and steadily sent complaints, with details, times, witnesses, in every case that came to his notice. To Rome he sent again to remind the new pope, whose election we awaited with hope and anxiety, of the utterly illegal detention of Eleanor, and all the other, lesser wrongs which defaced the treaty relationship between the two countries. And at the beginning of July we heard, with great joy, which of the candidate cardinals had been elected. He had taken the name of Adrian, as he had been the cardinal of St. Adrian, but we knew him by another name.
"They have chosen Ottobuono," cried Llewelyn, understandably elated, "Ottobuono Fieschi. The very man who made this treaty, and took pride in it. He was our friend then, and laboured honestly for us. Praise God, we have a friend there who knows every article of the document he himself fashioned. He will not let it be repudiated."
We rejoiced indeed, with what seemed to us good reason, knowing this to be a man of incorruptible good-will, and knowing that he understood as well as we did the importance of the treaty he had worked out of the end of the barons' war. We rejoiced too soon. He was all we believed him, but he was also old and frail. That was a year of deaths. Before August was out, when he had been pope but one month, Adrian the Fifth died.
Wales was again left friendless. There came in a Spanish pope, with a great reputation for learning, and having a progressive and forceful mind, or so we heard, but one that knew nothing of us, and had never set foot in these islands, much less played any part in bringing them to an arduous and equitable peace. I do believe Pope John listened, and did his best to hold a balance, but it was Edward who first got his ear, and Edward, crusader, vassal of France, king of England, duke of Gascony, was universally known, and carried weight in every court of Europe and the east. It would have needed a voice more peremptory than the thunder of God to shout him down.
I do not see what Llewelyn could have done in that year that he did not do, to make known the true state of the case. In April, while I was still captive in Windsor, the dean and chapter of Bangor had written to the archbishop of Canterbury, repeating the full facts of the conspiracy of David and Griffith against the prince's life, as Owen had confessed them, so that Archbishop Robert should not be able to plead ignorance of the crime and criminals that Edward was harbouring, and the seriousness of the breach of treaty that that protection constituted. In June Llewelyn himself also wrote to the primate, who had urged him to keep the peace in the march, pointing out how frequent were the disturbances of that peace caused by English attacks, now so constant and apparently so organised as to amount to a state of war. In July, again, he sent a complaint that his men, going on their lawful business to the fairs and markets of Montgomery and Leominster, had been robbed of their goods, and some hundred or more imprisoned, and one at least killed, and that the marchers made no secret of their intent to continue such seizures, in defiance of the treaty.
"Even if we cannot get justice now," he said, "at least we'll make sure the truth is on record, for other and less prejudiced minds to judge. For I'm sure Edward never writes one word of cherishing my traitors and assassins, or seizing my wife, but only and always that he has summoned me to do homage and I have refused him. And not even that is true."
Long afterwards Cynan told me of the letter Edward wrote to Pope John in September of that crisis year, when I am certain he had already not merely made up his mind to resort to war, but actually set the machines of war secretly in motion, before ever he got his desired condemnation of Llewelyn from his parliament. What Llewelyn had guessed at was accurate enough. There was not one word of any offences on the king's side. David and Griffith might not have existed. He wrote only of the homage refused, and then charged all the border clashes to the prince's account. You would not have known from those despatches, said Cynan, that there was in the world, much less in Edward's prison at Windsor, a lady who was princess of Wales by right.
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