The Brothers of Gwynedd (2 page)

  It may be that had not the prince's raid put an end to all play he would have looked for her again, and not grudged her his name, whether he meant a match or no. But that bold stroke put an end to more things than my mother's brief love, and I was fatherless.

  They tell me, and I believe it, that in those first years in Lleyn I was the constant companion of the young Llewelyn, that we played together and slept together, and that sometimes, even, I was the leader and he the follower, and not the other way round, as I should have judged invariable and inevitable. But this part of my life lasted not long, and the memory of it which I retain is of a sunny, disseminated bliss, void of detail. It ended soon. When I was five years old one of the Lady Senena's grooms took a fixed fancy to my mother, and offered marriage, and though she was without any strong wish one way or the other, she did always what her mistress desired, and to the lady this seemed a happy way out of a problem and a burden. Others aforetime had been caught by my mother's beauty, but all had been frightened away by her mute and mysterious strangeness. This man—he was young and strong and good to look upon—wanted her more than he shrank from her. So she was married to him, she acquiescing indifferently in all.

  Me, as it proved, he did not want. Before marriage, though he knew of me, I had counted for nothing. But now that he had her, and could in no wise move her to any show of passion, whether of love or hate or fear, or get from her any response but the calm, uncaring submission she showed him always, he began to look round everywhere about her for whatever could touch where he could not, move where he was but suffered, strike a spark where his fire and tinder failed. And he found me.

  That year I had with him I do remember still, as one remembers a distant vision of hell. I have been hated, and that most thoroughly. What he could do to avenge himself upon me he did, with every manner of blow and bruise and burn, with every skill of keeping me from the sight of my betters and the company of my prince-playmate. Whatever comforted me he removed, or broke, or soiled and ruined. Whatever I loved he harmed, so that I learned to hide love. And though he never maltreated me before the Lady Senena, he took a delight in letting my mother see my misery. He thought by then that she had not that core of life in her that others have, to make any voluntary action possible, and that she could do nothing to save me.

  That he did not know her is not a matter for wonder, for I think none ever did know her, certainly not her son. She was a secret from all men, and she held more possibilities than any man thought for.

  When the Lord Griffith had been six years in prison he made an act of submission to his father, and was released, and restored at first to the half of his old lands in Lleyn, and then, when he continued in good odour, to the whole of that cantref. It was the occasion of great joy to his wife and her court, life was set in motion again in the old manner, and it was a time for asking favours. My mother knew the moment to approach her mistress, and did so in my interest, though thereby losing me. For she begged her lady to take me in charge for my protection, and said that she had a great wish to see me lettered, and a priest.

  Now the Lady Senena was herself royal, for she was great-granddaughter to Rhodri, lord of Anglesey, and came of a race which had been lavish in gifts both to the old Welsh colleges of lay canons and the new Cistercian abbeys and Franciscan friaries. Therefore she had but to indicate, to whatever community she thought best, her wish that I should be accepted into care and taught, and it was as good as done. She placed me with the lay canons at Aberdaron, in her own Lleyn, and gave a generous sum for my endowment there. And thus I escaped my purgatory and got my schooling at her expense, and her name was shield enough over me, even if the brothers had not been the saints they were.

  Nevertheless, I wept when I parted from my mother. But then I thought of her husband, and I did not weep. And Nevin was not so far that she could not visit me now and again, or I her. So I went without more tears, though a little afraid of the strangeness before me. I was then six years old, within a month. It was shortly before the Christmas feast.

  Now the clas at Aberdaron was one of the best regarded and richest of all the colleges of North Wales, which were themselves the flower of all the land, unsullied by Norman interference. For it lay on the mainland directly opposite the blessed isle of Enlli, that men begin now to call Bardsey, and there the hermits have kept the old austere order pure to this day, and the very soil is made up of the bones of thousands of saints. Those who would withdraw to Enlli to die in holiness must come by Aberdaron. There they halt and enjoy the hospitality of the canons, and bring with them all the learning and piety and wisdom of mankind to add to the store. There could be no better place for a boy with a great thirst for knowledge. Even one who came with no such thirst could not choose but quicken to the fire of those visitors passing through.

  There were twenty lay canons then at Aberdaron, and three priests, besides the abbot: a strong community. Because of the great number of travellers entertained there, the enclosure was large and fine, and there were many officers, among them, besides the scribe, a teacher. Into his hands I was confided. I slept in the doorway of his cell, and later had a cell of my own beside him. I had my share of work about the lands the canons tilled, according to my age, and I took my part in the services of the church, and learned my psalter in Latin by heart. But in the time that was left to me I had never enough of the marvel of studying, and once blessed with the first letters I ever learned, could not rest from adding to them. Finding my appetite was genuine, and not feigned in order to please, my teacher Ciaran took very kindly to me, and came as eagerly as I to the lessons we had together. In opening books to me, he opened the world, and he was good and gentle, and I loved him and was happy. From him I learned to read and write in Welsh and in Latin, and later also in English. And I began to help the steward who kept the books and accounts, for these values and amounts and reckonings were also strong enchantment to me.

  Six years I spent thus in the purest peace and serenity, and all this while the world without went on its way, and the news of it came in to us like the distant sound of the waves on the shore, ominous to others, but no threat to our haven. The things that were told to me seemed like stories read in one of Ciaran's books, vivid and alarming, but not real, so that even alarm was pleasure. For the stories of the saints are full of terror and delight, no less than the legends of heroes that the bards recite to the harp.

  So I heard that after the return of her lord the Lady Senena, in her joy at the reunion, again conceived, and her third son was born in the spring of the following year. A fourth followed a year later, David, the last of her five children. But whether she named him after his uncle, with that same hope of softening her lord's fortune which had prompted her to give her second son the name Llewelyn, I do not know. There was peace then between them, the prince had enlarged the Lord Griffith's lands greatly, adding to the whole cantref of Lleyn a large portion of the lands of Powys, designing, I think, to leave him with an appanage which should recompense him for the surrender of his wider rights by Welsh law, and reconcile him to becoming a loyal vassal of his brother. But it was not in his nature to see beyond his own wrong to a larger right, and he knew only the title of Gwynedd, and could not envisage Wales, for all he quoted Welsh law. A man is as he is. The Lord Griffith was a fine man, tall and splendid to look upon, fully as tall as his father, and he was of great stature, though gaunt, where Griffith was full of flesh. He was openhanded to a fault where men pleased him, and too quick to lash out where they displeased. He was hasty in suspicion of affront, and merciless in retaliation. He was readily moved by generosity, and lavish in returning it. He never forgot benefit or injury. But he could not see beyond what helped or hurt him and his, and that is a small circle in a vast world, too narrow for greatness.

  Doubtless he loved, but never did he understand, his father, that Llewelyn who is rightly named the Great.

  This last child of theirs, the boy David, touched my own fortunes nearly. For my mother had at last conceived by her husband, and brought forth a still-born girl three days before her lady bore her boy. And since the Lady Senena was low with a dangerous fever for two weeks after the delivery, and my mother was heavy with milk and yearning, she naturally became wet-nurse to the royal child. I had lost my sister, but I had a breast-brother, a prince of the blood-royal of Gwynedd, seven years and more my junior. This came early in my peace, and moved me deeply. I thought much of this helpless thing drawing its life from my mother, who had given me life also, and of whatever this mysterious thing might be that we two shared. And the bright, resolute, fearless creature who shared the stars of my birth with me, and who had been my fellow before I knew what royalty was, had fallen away from me then, and was almost forgotten.

  I had been four years at Aberdaron, and was approaching my tenth birthday, when first we heard from a pilgrim bard that the great prince had been taken with a falling seizure. It was as if the earth had shaken under us. True, the attack was not severe, and had done no more than weaken him in the use of one arm, and draw his mouth a little awry, but we had never thought of him as being subject to age, like lesser men, even though he was now in his sixty-fifth year, for his vigour seemed to reach like a potent essence into the furthest corners of the land, and inspire even those, like me, who had never seen him in the flesh. Truly that flesh was now seen to be mortal. And the shudder of foreboding that shook most of Wales became a tremor of anticipation and hope to those who had sided with Griffith and were biding their time with him. And not only these, for beyond the march in England they surely licked their lips and tasted already the pickings the dogs find after the lion is dead. Him they had let alone now for four years, and would let alone while he lived, with all his conquests rich and fat about him, for they dared not tempt again the force they had ventured too often already to their cost. But with the great prince gone, and an unknown, or untried at least, in his place, then they would close in on all sides to snatch back, if they could, the many lands they had lost to him.

  It was the first time that I had ever considered how those who felt as England felt towards us could hardly be anything but enemies to Wales; and it caused me some uneasiness even then, but being so young, I did not apply it too closely to those I had known and served all my life. And soon I forgot the qualm it had cost me, in thinking of other things. For towards the end of this same year—I think it was on the 19th of October, and the place I know was the abbey of Strata Florida, a foundation beloved of the prince and always faithful to his house—there was called a great assembly of all the princes of Wales, and there every man among them took the oath of fealty to David as the next heir. Then indeed we felt that death had moved a gentle step nearer to our lord, and none knew it better than he, or felt less fear of it for himself, or more for Wales. Doubtless he knew better than any how the marcher lords were sharpening their knives, and what a load his son would have to bear.

  Now I cannot say whether this ceremony at Strata Florida so inflamed the mind of the Lord Griffith that he took some rash action to assert his rights, or whether the Lord David, armed with so formidable a support, moved against him in expectation of just such a defiance, but certain it is that at the end of this year Griffith was stripped of his lands in Powys, and left with only his cantref of Lleyn, and that by order of his younger brother. By which it was made clear to all that the Lord David had already assumed a part of his royal privilege before his father's death, and that undoubtedly with his father's knowledge and sanction, for no son in his right wits would have reached to take any morsel of power out of those great hands but by their goodwill and grace. And surely the lords along the march, who had lost so much to Gwynedd these last twenty years, were counting days and mustering men already. Prince David had King Henry's word to accept and acknowledge him, and none other, and doubtful though King Henry's troth might be, if it held for any it would hold for his nephew, his sister's son. She, that great lady, her husband's right hand and envoy and counsellor all her days, was dead then more than two years, and buried with all honour and great grief at Llanfaes in Anglesey. She had but one son, though her daughters were married into all the great houses of the march, for better assurance. Yet there remained the Lord Griffith, and he was irreconcilable. And the year following there was sudden bitter blaze between those two brothers, the confiscated lands held hostage being insufficient to keep the elder in check, rather goading him to worse hostility. And before the year was out we heard that David had taken his brother prisoner, and his eldest son Owen with him, and lodged them in the castle of Criccieth under lock and key.

  This Owen Goch—"the Red" by reason of his flaming hair—was the Lady Senena's first child, and being nearly three years older than I, was then approaching thirteen, only a year away from his majority. And I suppose that it seemed a folly to shut up the father and leave in his place a son on the edge of manhood, round whom the same discontents could gather. The girl Gladys came next, a year before Llewelyn. She would not present the same danger, and the younger boys were but children as yet, and could be left with their mother at liberty. Thus for the second time that household was broken apart, and the lady was left to protect her own and manage her family's affairs alone. But she was not molested in her home at Nevin, and the boy Llewelyn, they said, was welcome always at his grandsire's court, and spent more than half of his time there, very gladly, for there was life there, and hunting, and riding, and all the exercise and company a lively boy loves. Nor did his mother hinder, even when she knew that he was much in favour with his uncle David, who was childless by his wife Isabella. The boy was too young, said his mother, to understand, and could not be guilty of disloyalty to his house, and surely it was well to have one child covered by the protection of royal favour, a warranty against the loss of all, if the greatest must be lost. But I think, knowing or unknowing, she was using this boy to go back and forth in innocence and keep her informed of what went forward at Aber, while she waited for the prince to die. For she knew, none better, that there was a well of sympathy for Griffith's case, and that its time for gushing would not come while the lion yet lived. And she had learned how to wait with dignity, and in silence.