The Brothers of Gwynedd (143 page)

  "And you accepted it!" said David, between reproach and sympathy. "It was your mistake. You put yourself in their hands once you acknowledged such a court."

  "I made a proxy appearance to present my writ, and that was all. And I wrote at the same time to the king, and made the very point you are making, that I should not have been cited there, and did not accept that it was proper procedure. You'll find, as I found, that he has a legal answer to that. He'll tell you, if you challenge him, what he told me. He'll agree with you as to the clause in the treaty, but point out that in cases between two barons or magnates holding in chief of the crown it has always been customary, even where Welsh law is concerned, to hear them at fixed dates and places, appointed by the justices. He'll tell you you must not resent falling in with this procedure—just as he told me."

  "I've not forgotten!" said David, glowering. "He himself appointed you a day at Oswestry, and you conceded the place but not the process of law. And little enough it got you! Only a reference back to the king himself, and a hearing before him at Rhuddlan."

  "Under Welsh law," said Llewelyn.

  "Granted! And he presided over a hearing by Welsh law, with the proper Welsh judges in court to hear the pleas, and by rights you should have got your verdict then and there. Edward had an answer even then! He adjourned the court, arbitrarily, on his own responsibility, without allowing the judges to pronounce a verdict. Did you not feel, then, that there would always be a legal answer, if your case showed signs of coming to a successful conclusion? Oh, I've followed the Arwystli case from the beginning," he said, "and learned by it. I can also devise answers—even to Edward's answers!"

  "Granting they're in the wrong over this business of Hope," said Llewelyn reasonably, "you can hardly blame the king for that before you've informed him of it. You may well be wasting all this rage, he may take his officer's action as ill as you do. He gave you the lands, he'll surely do you justice if you do but apply to him."

  "That I shall do, and profit by your example. But I'll deal with Badlesmere, too," he promised, gnawing his lip vengefully. For this Guncelin de Badlesmere, then justiciar of Chester, was no friend of his, and they had had high words before over other matters, David's lands lying so closely neighbour to the county of Chester. "I have not yet had any satisfaction out of him," said David, brooding, "for his thinning out my forests, as if they were on English land, and cutting great roads through them across the border. Half the cantref is up in arms about it. Those are our hunting coverts, and our pig-pastures, yes, and our protection, too. What right have they to destroy them?"

  "You are not the only one," said Llewelyn drily, "to be breathing fire over that ordinance. The same thing is happening in our cousin Mortimer's lands in the middle march, and by the clamour he's making over it, it's no more pleasing to a marcher baron than it is to a Welsh prince. The king has a reasonable plea enough. You know yourself it's true that the forests are the best haunts of robbers and masterless men, and safe roads through will be to the benefit of trade on both sides."

  "Well for you!" said David fiercely. "Your forests they cannot touch, yours is still a principality, and sovereign, if it is smaller than once. But even you would do well to keep a close watch on these new roads…" There he bit off whatever had been skipping so vehemently from his tongue, and prowled the room for some minutes in silence, to begin again abruptly upon another course. "You have been given another day to proceed with your plea on Arwystli, have you not?"

  "The fourteenth day of January," said the prince, "at Oswestry."

  "And will you go? And concede the place?"

  "I shall send my attorneys," said the prince, "and bear with the king's ruling that causes in chief are heard where the justices appoint. I shall make no other concession. The plea must be heard by Welsh law, and no other."

  This matter of Arwystli was becoming increasingly important to him by reason of the delays and prevarications he felt he had encountered in pursuing it. Most of that cantref, which lies in the very heart of Wales, remained in the hands of his arch-enemy and traitor, Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, who had plotted against the prince's life in peace and taken the opposing side against him in war, and like most gross offenders, could never forgive the man against whom he had offended, but now from the safety of King Edward's overlordship and favour pursued every possible means of pestering and wounding him. Arwystli had had a troubled history, sometimes held by Gwynedd, sometimes by Powys, but in ancient times it had been considered unquestionably as belonging to Gwynedd, and Llewelyn grudged it bitterly to a renegade Welsh lord who now aped and flattered the English and did all possible offence to his own Welsh neighbours, besides his spite against the prince himself. So there was far more at stake in this matter than the worth of the land in question.

  "And you?" said Llewelyn, watching his brother with wary affection. "What will you do? There's this to be thought of, neither you nor I can wish to seem obdurate against the authority of the king, and even when his officials are at fault, the summons comes in his name. To enter a formal protest is fair, even necessary. To make an equally formal appearance in answer to the summons, while rejecting the
court's
authority, might be wise."

  "I had thought of it," said David. "That I might even enjoy," he said, with a dark and mischievous smile.

  "By your attorneys, I would advise," said Llewelyn hastily, foreseeing David's enjoyment dropping into the smooth surface of Badlesmere's shire-court like a stone into still waters. But he smiled.

  "In person," said David, "or where's the sport? Oh, never fear, I can be discreet where my own good's involved. But I'll make Badlesmere sweat!"

  "Whatever the case," said Llewelyn mildly, "you need not fear the result. What plea can Venables possibly put up, to compare with your right, when the king himself gave you the lands, and so recently? The man's a fool to waste his time in the attempt."

  At that David looked at him long, and seemed to debate within himself whether to say what was on his mind, or leave well alone. In the end he did not speak, but shrugged off the matter for the time being, and returned to his wine and his Elizabeth, who was as fierce in the cause of Hope and Estyn as he was, and eternally confident of his wisdom and rightness in all he did. As for Eleanor, she listened with a thoughtful face but a silent tongue, and left them to dispose of their legal problems as they saw fit. Out of deference for her, I think, David had somewhat curbed what otherwise he might have said outright against Edward, for not only he, but half the lords and chief tenants of the Middle Country were seething with resentment at the arbitrary ways of the king's bailiffs, and their encroachments on ancient Welsh rights which had never before been threatened. In a single year the administration had made malcontents of those who had gladly sheltered under its shadow when war loomed, and enemies of those who had fallen away from Llewelyn to serve the king and save themselves. There was a kind of rough justice in it, that they had rushed to embrace English protection, leaving Wales to its fate, only to find out, and so soon, that they did not all like the governance they had invoked, and were already looking round for someone to rescue them from it. In vain, if they looked to Llewelyn. He had set his seal to a treaty, and his word was his bond. The men of the Middle Country lay in beds they themselves had made, and found them beds of thorns.

  I met David again later that evening in the inner ward of the maenol, taking a breath of the night air before he went to his rest. He was standing under the stars, gazing up with a still face at the guardwalk above the postern gate, where once he had kept vigil by night, waiting for the men of Powys to ride in silently to the work of murder, and set him up as prince in his brother's place. As soon as he was aware of me, I knew he was remembering that time, and he knew as much of me. I never had asked him, I never was to ask him, anything concerning that night. When Llewelyn called him back to him, asking nothing, and he came in desperate and rebellious love, making no confession and expressing no penitence, all question was for ever put out of my power. But when David was alone, he remembered, and so did I.

  I would have passed by and let him be, but he spoke me softly and calmly: "Samson!" and I stayed. "Samson," he said, laying his arm in the old way about my shoulders, "after that hearing at Rhuddlan, when Edward adjourned my brother's plea so strangely, that same month he set up a commission to enquire into how barons of Wales had been accustomed to plead in land disputes. I remember they sat at Oswestry towards the end of the month. Reginald de Grey had the commission, and one of the king's clerks with him—Hamilton, that's the man. William Hamilton. Edward claimed it was set up to make doubly sure of proceeding justly. But I have it in mind, Samson, that it was for exactly the opposite reason. Tell me this, since the commission sat two full months ago, and reported its findings immediately, can you think of a reason why those findings have never been made known? Did anything ever come of them? Nothing! Yet the record of that inquisition is lying somewhere in the king's treasury, very quietly. It is on my mind, Samson, that it will never be heard of again, at least, never in Wales. For good reason! It must have found absolutely for Llewelyn's claim, that Welsh land is ruled by Welsh law, and no other."

  I said, and meant it, that while I did not cherish any blind confidence in the king's disinterestedness, neither did I think this judgment on him as yet in any way justified, and we should await the outcome of the January hearing at Oswestry. It was common knowledge that English law was always tedious in its delays and prevarications by comparison with the clear simplicity and promptness of our own laws of Howel the Good, and further, that Edward was so in love with its complexities as to be a little mad on the subject.

  "Edward's madness," said David with a hollow laugh, "like Edward's generosity, exists only in the service of Edward's interests. I advise you, for my brother's sake, keep a careful watch on everything the king says or does, and in particular everything he writes. When he becomes most voluble and obscure, then watch him most carefully. And if the Oswestry session proves me wrong, I'll do penance gladly, and you, my beloved confessor, shall set it for me, as sharply as you will."

  I said that the prince's men of law were inevitably in expectation of trickery to begin with, that being the nature of law-men everywhere. And then I said, to lighten his sombre mood, that in any event his own case was different, since he held what he held by the king's own wish.

  "We shall see!" said David. "You heard Llewelyn say that Venables is a fool to challenge the king's grant? To the best of my knowledge, Venables is no fool at all, but very shrewd, and with an eye to his own good. Who's to say that someone—oh, not Edward!—has not whispered in his ear where his best interests lie, and how far he may go with impunity? My demon prompts me that this is the king's way of recovering what he already regrets having given. And that, too, will be seen, all in good time."

  We walked back to the tower together, and he took his arm from about me, and yawned, and turned towards the stairway. But there he paused and looked back, and in the dim light from a single torch I saw his face sharply and sombrely outlined.

  "One more thing, Samson! Should you ever be in those parts where they are, look for yourself at Edward's new trade roads through the forests. Granted a clear way, where officers can patrol freely, may be good for trade. But ask yourself whether any merchant, with pack-horses and a few stout journeymen, needs that breadth of open land. Then remember how we moved up from Chester to Flint, from Flint to Rhuddlan, how many thousands strong, in that last war, with the foresters felling and the labourers carting ahead of us. Oh, speak out on me!" he said, seeing how I watched him without a word. "Do you think I have forgotten on which side I fought then? Curse me, if you will. But after that, listen to me!"

  "I shall never curse you," I said, "until he does. And he never will. And I am listening."

  "Samson, I cannot get it out of my head or my heart, or wherever it so lodges and oppresses me," said David, "that after all the arguments at law are exhausted, those roads are Edward's last argument."

I was present in court when the bench of judges under Walter de Hopton sat at Oswestry, that Hilary session, to hear the prince's plea on Arwystli, for I went as a clerk to Llewelyn's attorneys. Therefore I know all that passed in that courtroom, and I set it down here that it may not be lost or forgotten. For this was the first time that ever the two opponents joined battle fully over this plea, almost a year having been drained away in delays and adjournments.