The Brothers of Gwynedd (142 page)

  "But I'm forgetting," he said softly at my back, "you're in favour with the princess, too. A double assurance is good! I tell you, Samson, my friend, they've set you an example. Have I not been holding up marriage to you for years as the only estate for a sensible man? If my wedded happiness could not convince you," he said, grinning like a famished wolf, "the prince's should win you over. Find yourself a wife, Samson—a beautiful gentle wife like my Cristin. Only not barren," he said, suddenly in a breathy whisper from a shut throat. "Get one able to carry your son full-time, and bring him into the world alive…" He strangled on the end, and turning, flung away silently among the bustle in the stable-yard, and left me stricken to stone.

  I could not go from Denbigh and leave things so. I sought out Cristin, where she was busy with the little girls, dressing the younger ones for the day, and braiding Margaret's long hair.

  "You need not fret," said Cristin calmly, when she understood what was on my mind. "Godred is not mad, he intends me no harm. If you have no other warranty of that, you have his own self-interest. He has a good office and some influence here in David's service, and I am the privileged companion of David's wife. How long would he keep his place and his easy living if he did me any hurt? Or his life and liberty, for that matter?"

  "With such a load of hatred in him," I said, "he may some day forget even his own interests for the pleasure of sating it, and you here within his reach, and I far away."

  "No," she said with certainty, "not Godred! Never! That is one thing he never forgets. Hatred can wait its turn, if it threatens his comfortable bed and fat table, and the money in his pouch. Besides, it is not me he hates the worst. He has ceased even to use his tongue on me. I do not matter enough to him now to be persecuted. Godred has done with me, except as his body-servant, the mender of his clothes and fetcher and carrier of his wants. I wish I could be as sure he will never attempt anything against
you
!
You
matter to him altogether too much. You are the shadow on his self-esteem, the spot on his skin that he scrubs and gouges at, and cannot scrub away. Guard yourself, Samson, wherever he is. No, I know you are not afraid of him, but I am in earnest. Do not be with him but among people. Never alone!"

  "He never seeks me out now," I said, "as he used to. Perhaps I am making too much of a moment of spleen."

  "He has had little chance lately," said Cristin. "In England it was my one consolation that you were out of his reach. And even after the peace was made, there was no visiting between the prince's household and ours. But now they're reconciled there'll be the old easy in-and-out between them, David's people and Llewelyn's rubbing shoulders freely every few weeks. Within a month we're to come to the prince at Aber."

  She was gazing at me very earnestly as she said it, frowning at the risk she saw in this free mingling, but then she drew breath softly, and so did I, seeing the sweet reverse of that danger. She said again: "You need not fret. My bed is with the children, close to Elizabeth's chamber. There he never has any call to come. With five of them to care for, I'm seldom anywhere else, and even if Nest takes my place, and I sleep in my own chamber, he never troubles me. He has plenty of other beds, as he always had, mine only chills him to the bone. You need not fear for me. You can go in peace."

  "Before the new year," I said, "you will come after us to Aber. It is only a very short while. God be praised!" I said, very low, and "God be praised!" said Cristin in her turn almost silently, and smiled.

We came over the high, rolling hills of Rhos towards evening, but before the sun was low, and so to the crossing on the Conway at Caerbun. A mellow afternoon it was, the westward sky all soft and misty gold, and the colours of the forests like fading flames, as we emerged upon a grassy crest, and saw the silver coil of the river below us, coming from the south and widening before our eyes into tidal water. Thus, from above, we could see the pale tints of the sand under the silver, and the deep blue-green of the channels where the salt sea mingled, and beyond the valley the high mountains soared, fold upon fold and peak behind peak, all gilded with that molten western light that dropped out of the sky like tears from the eye of a veiled but splendid sun. They were like a great army drawn up in battle array, with no break in the wall of their lances, or like a giant castle of bronze and steel, impregnable, without gates. To us they were home. We knew the ways in, where no way showed, and had the password that opened the invisible portals. To her, born in Kenilworth in the rich lowlands of England, raised in the cloister of Montargis in the green, civilised pastures of France, God knows what they were, but it was wonderful. She was the first to rein in, and sit and gaze, and all we drew aside and left those two together, waiting, as he waited, and with the same agony and rapture, for her to speak.

  She looked down at the serpent of river that marked the harsh limit of the lands left to her lord, and her face was bright and still and aware, and her eyes, wide-set under a lofty ivory brow, immense and attentive, golden-hazel, green-flecked, the colours of a radiant autumn in her early summer face. Eleanor's eyes were always mirrors through which God gazed. Those who looked into them saw themselves there, and all but the best turned their own eyes away, and dissembled. They mirrored and matched what she saw. The mountains of Wales did not bow their heads nor quench their golden light before her, and neither did Eleanor lower her eyes. Once she had lifted her head to behold their summits, there she was held. I saw the reflected gold colour her cheeks, and the parting of her lips widen into the promise of a smile.

  When she had looked her fill, she turned her head the little way she needed to look into Llewelyn's eyes, and he was gazing at her with a face withdrawn and almost grim, but as for her, she never ceased to reflect unshadowed splendour. Once she glanced down again at the spilt ribbon of the Conway, before she spoke.

  "All that lies beyond," she said, "is yours?"

  "And that is all," he said, "that is mine. It is not what I had thought to bring you, when I plighted my troth to you. Nor am I the man I meant to offer you."

  His voice was low and equable, for he had been resolute from the first in accepting his diminished state and making the best of it, as he had made the best of his remaining bargaining power to exact from Edward better terms of peace than many had thought possible. But the grief of loss, and especially the thwarting of his lifelong ambition for Wales, was none the less bitter for that, and all the more desolating now that he had brought his wife at last to behold for herself, on this journey through the ravished Middle Country, the magnitude of his deprivation, which was also hers. And for all he would not suffer his pain to appear in his face or shake the firmness of his voice, he could not be so wrung and she not know.

  A moment she was silent, her eyes still upon the distant peaks, and the flush of the west reflected in her face. Then she said: "As to the lands, they may be narrower than once they were, but they are loftier than anything my cousin has in his realm, and there is room enough there for me. As to the man," she said, and turned and looked at him with burning certainty, "he has never been greater than he is now. My heart could hold no more."

  "God willing," he said very quietly, "there shall be more, some day, when the time favours us and we have paid all our dues. If not for us, for those who come after. I will never cease from hoping to give back to you in honour all that I have failed to keep safe for you now. And there will be room in your heart for all."

  "I need nothing more," said Eleanor. "I want for nothing. I have what I wanted."

  Such a way she had with words, enlarging and glorifying them so that the briefest and simplest utterance spoke more than gilded phrases. A moment they sat eye to eye, caught away from us and we forgotten. Then he reached a hand to her bridle, and they led the way down together out of the hills to the Conway shore opposite Caerhun, and there we crossed the silver barrier into Gwynedd, and Eleanor had come home.

  That evening we rode only as far as Aberconway, along the river-bank, and there at the abbey we spent the night, and the following day took the Coastal road to Aber. The weather was changing then, there was a wintry wind, and the touch of frost before the dawn. There was beauty still in the colours melting and changing over Lavan sands, under the vast steel-blue shoulder of Penmaenmawr, and mystery in the distant grey thread that was the coastline of Anglesey drawn along the horizon. Eleanor looked about her with wide, grave eyes of joy, at the sword-edges of the cliffs on her left hand, at the white curl of foam hissing along the sand on her right, at the far-off point of Ynys Lanog of the saints across the grey waters, at the tumbled, screaming flight of gulls all about the clouded sky. The grandeur of our land did not daunt her, rather it fulfilled her own greatness of heart and mind. She had said well, there was room enough for her in the mountains of Gwynedd. She was not made for the cloistered life, nor for a small, confined sphere of action, she with Earl Simon's blood in her veins.

  Thus we brought her in great but sober happiness to Aber, and there made ready for the Christmas feast. And whatever loss Llewelyn still suffered, in her he knew nothing but gain.

  David brought his family and a princely retinue to share the festival with us, as he had promised, and things were almost as in the old days. But he brought with him also a fine, Davidish fury over his usage at the hands of the justiciar of Chester, and would hold council with his brother and demand his sympathy. And that, too, was like old times, and did them both good rather than harm. David without a passion to occupy him had always been David looking for mischief, and if he could not have battle in the field, he would as soon have it in the justiciar's court as anywhere.

  "You have already had sour experience of law under the treaty," he said. "What do you say to this? There's a claim out against me for lands I've held barely a year and a half, and had openly from the king's own hand. William Venables has taken out a writ of entry against me for possession of Hope and Estyn!"

  It came as a true astonishment to Llewelyn, as his startled face bore witness. For whatever the prince's tangles at law might be, David had come out of the recent treaty as an ally of the king, and a favourite into the bargain, set up in life with two of the four cantrefs of the Middle Country, and granted the lands of Hope and Estyn, on the borders, to provide him with a second castle in addition to Denbigh. For any man to come forward and lay claim to those lands, in the teeth of that grant, was surely an instance of the litigious madness that was driving so many lords and tenants into follies that would prove both ineffective and costly. There were enough recent and genuine grievances to be set right, after a year of turmoil during which lands had changed hands three or four times, and the treaty of peace made provision for any man who felt himself to have legitimate claims to put them forward in whatever court was appropriate. But others had caught the acquisitive fever, and were digging up tenuous claims traced back to a grandsire who had once held a manor under very different circumstances, or an ancestor who had married a minor heiress and never succeeded in getting hold of her dower lands. The whole country on both sides the march seethed with lawsuits. But it was something new for one of the king's recent gifts to be challenged.

  "Venables?" said Llewelyn, frowning. "On what grounds can he possibly put forward any such claim?" The Venables family was old and of importance in Cheshire, and as Mold had bounced in and out of Montalt hands a dozen times within a century, so at some distant point a Venables might have had a precarious hold on Hope.

  "Do I know," said David impatiently, "until he opens his plea? Whatever his line may be, I'm ready to answer it. How can there be a better claim than mine? That is not the issue! Venables has sworn out his writ in the justiciar's shire-court at Chester, and the justiciar has accepted it and summoned me there to answer it. Into England! Into Chester! He cannot do it, and he knows it. It's plainly stated in the treaty that causes concerning land shall be tried according to the custom of those parts where the land lies, whether it be Wales or march land. Chester is an English shire-court, and Hope and Estyn are in Wales, and I will not appear to any plea concerning them in the justiciar's court. I blame Venables for the attempt, but Badlesmere more for abetting it."

  "You and I, it seems," said Llewelyn with a wry smile, "are contending against the same monster. My case was exactly as yours when I opened my claim to Arwystli. Like you I was cited to Montgomery, a royal town, when the impleaded land is wholly Welsh."