Gwyn realized that if she said nothing, her tongue thick in her dry mouth, she would be regarded as less than nothing. Her whole hope was to let William know that she was not afraid of him. “What is your plan for me, sire?”
It was little enough in the way of defiance, but it was all she could manage.
William said, “I should like your lands.”
Gwyn searched her mind swiftly for the meaning of this. He could not confiscate her lands, at least not according to law, without making some arrangement for her future. But without her lands, there would be little enough future. For no one wanted an heiress without anything to inherit.
“But, sire, you already have the income from my lands,” protested Gwyn. “The harvest has not come in yet, as you know. But when it does, it is yours according to law. So I do not understand.”
Flambard intervened. She suspected rightly that it was his idea, and not William’s, that the king was proposing. “The king wishes you to forgo any claim to Ramsey lands. He himself is the true heir of any subject, and it is therefore only out of kindness that he will bother to arrange your future.”
Gwyn shook her head. “I confess I do not see the reason for this. If my lord the king wishes, he may hold me unwed for my lifetime and claim the revenues himself.”
The king interrupted. “It is not for you to understand,” he said heavily, “it is simply for you to do. But I will have the Ramsey lands in my hand, to dispose of to any man with a price and without question from you. For there are still some of my barons who are not converted to our new philosophy — that the king is heir to every man. I wish no argument from them.”
She protested daringly, “Fine, sire. I thank you for your consideration. I shall then be free of my Norman inheritance, and can go home to Wales, where my mother’s people are.”
Flambard interrupted. “There will be sufficient left to you for a dowry,” he pointed out, “and therefore you will be wed to a Norman. Let us have no more talk of Wales.”
Gwyn fell silent. It was a long time before she could marshal her thoughts to order. This was worse than she had expected. During the three months since her father’s death, she had expected to be able to bestow her hand upon some man of prestige and wealth. The great Ramsey lands, which were now Gwyn’s, were a sufficient dowry to command a princely husband. But now with William taking away most of her lands and leaving her no more than a modest dowry, she could look forward, if she were fortunate, to the life of a begging wife, who brought nothing to the marriage, except herself and a modest income. It was degrading, it was shaming, and there was nothing she could do about it except to accept gracefully.
This she could not do. She glanced up then and caught William’s eye. He was clearly gloating over the money that he would have at his disposal. The Pope’s messenger must have been unduly exigent, for William was not one to give way to panic. He would have been perfectly capable, so rumor ran, of killing the Pope’s messenger and pretending he had been lost at sea. Instead, he was insulting his allies by asking them to hire out as mercenaries to him, he was divesting one of his great heiresses of her land, and extorting additional illegal fees from FitzOmer. A king so bedeviled was unpredictable and very dangerous.
“I shall leave you Foxwood,” said William, consulting a roll that Flambard held out for his perusal. “That and the three villages at the east, along the river, and there — what does that say, Ranulf? Fish? Is there good fishing?”
“No more than ordinary,” responded his chancellor. “The carp are quite small, I believe, no bigger than a finger’s width along the back.”
“I shall not envy the villagers their paltry fish,” said the king, with his bellowing laugh. “But now, Lady Gwyn, you shall not say I have taken all from you.”
“Not all,” retorted Gwyn, “but sufficient to rob me of my legitimate dowry.”
“Rob?” said the king with silken malice. “The king does not rob, lady. Take care that your tongue wags with caution, lest I find Foxwood, too, to my liking.”
Gwyn cast her glance to the floor. She could not speak words of submission, but her liege lord apparently felt her attitude was sufficiently cowed, for he said, “I thought I might give you to FitzOmer — in jest, you know — but he prefers younger flesh.” The king pursed his lips in distaste. “I cannot understand such things, but no man can say I am intolerant of others’ pleasures.”
“Sire, would you not receive much more if you were to wed me with my lands? My hand would certainly be worth a great deal more if I had a substantial dowry.”
The king eyed her speculatively. “Perhaps there is a way, after all, to send you to Wales. Such pleasure at the prospect of leaving my realm? I must make inquiry — the Welsh prince, he styles himself, but even a prince may be pressed for money. Nay, the leeches even attack a king’s purse! I wonder … No, I think I cannot permit you to ride off into the Western Marches, even with a prince. For he might wish all your lands back, don’t you know, and I suspect that your countryman can be devilishly persistent!”
“Oh, no!” cried Gwyn in a strong voice. “I could not wed him!”
Flambard was surprised at Gwyn’s defiance. It was almost as though a small kitten had turned into a roaring tiger. He leaned over and whispered something to his sovereign, and whatever William had in his mind, it was Flambard the devil who put it there, Gwyn now realized.
For when Flambard had finished his suggestions, William smiled from ear to ear, a gross grimace of devilish amusement. But William had made his decision, and Gwyn was not listened to again. The king rose, signifying that the audience was at an end. She thought for a dreadful moment that he was going to reach out and pat her on the head, and she thought, I cannot stand the touch of those fat fingers. She had a fleeting recollection of young Jeanne, expressing a similar loathing of being touched. But she need not have worried, for William had no designs on her. Instead, William said, “Leave everything to me, my dear.”
She was glad when Flambard escorted her out of the room to the stairway leading from the great hall. Flambard said quietly, as they descended the stairs, “I shall see that you have an escort across the court to your keep. We must make very sure that nothing happens to you, at least for a while. Your dowry will be sufficient, at least the way it is planned now, but we do not wish it augmented by ammolrog.” He winked grossly at her and added, “Isn’t that what you Welsh ladies call it?”
Gwyn responded with dignity. “I do not recognize the term.”
But she did. It was the payment due to an overlord when a maiden lost her virtue. And if Flambard was taking such good care of her as to keep her what looked to be a prisoner, unable to move about the courtyard even without an armed escort, then there was a reason for it. And a reason for anything that Flambard did was bound to be an unpleasant reason.
“You must remember, Lady Gwynllion,” he said in a sly, ingratiating way that turned her stomach, “that your father rarely came to court. The king misliked your father’s absence.”
“My father fought the king’s wars,” she said stonily. “The king had no vassal more loyal. It goes hard to think of the Baron Ramsey’s faithfulness so badly requited.”
“But believe me, lady, your father’s loyalty to the crown during the uprising three years ago is what keeps Foxwood in your hands. Otherwise —” He made a telling gesture with his hands — she would now have been a prisoner in some royal castle, or worse.
Her green eyes glittered defiantly. “My father would not have treated a vassal so meanly.”
“Your father, I think, had no vassal who wed a savage tribeswoman from the mountains of the enemy.”
“My mother was a princess!” she cried indignantly.
“But barbarian — so the king thinks.”
Upon delivery of that unanswerable shaft, Flambard left her at the round tower.
Upstairs Maud and Brian were waiting. Countess Maud was old in experience with her Norman overlords. When her husband had died, leaving her in
sole charge, she had fought bitterly to keep Brian with her, for her liege lord wished to send Brian to his own castle to undergo training that would win him his spurs.
But Countess Maud had won out, and although now she thought it a hollow victory, yet she was experienced in the ruthless ways a Norman lord used to get his own wishes.
Gwyn stepped inside the door, and Countess Maud rose to greet her. “What on earth? You are as pale as a sheet,” cried Maud. “What did those two want?”
Leaning against the door, Gwyn said, “All the Ramsey lands. That’s all.” She allowed a short brittle laugh to escape her. She had few illusions as to the king and his trustworthiness. Even worse, when Flambard whispered in his ear, she knew that William’s vulgar greed would be augmented by some plot straight from the pit. And yet, she could not burden her friends with her suspicions.
But Maud was already aghast. “What on earth will you use for a dowry? If all your lands are gone, what happens to you?”
Brian, plucking aimlessly at the strings of his new lute, said, “Whatever they want, they will get.” Brian looked up, and Gwyn was horrified to see that he had not, as his mother had hoped, recovered from the shock of the night she remembered so well. Gwyn forgot her own troubles for the moment, in an outburst of compassion for the boy who had grown up too fast. What was to become of them all? She knew herself to be tougher than Brian, and yet she had dark doubts of her own ability to live through whatever lay ahead. She would try and might with divine intervention win out at the last. It was a forlorn hope, she knew, but still it was all she had. But Brian, she believed, would not be able to hang on until the end. What had happened to Brian could have diverted his life into new, probably unpleasant, and certainly unpredictable ways.
She was puzzled by him. She had expected that he would be crushed by the terrible attack on him — and he had been, at first. But now he had fallen into a musing abstraction that she could not penetrate. It was almost — poet and singer that he was — as though he were listening to faraway music, stretching his hearing to the limit to catch the faint notes.
“Whatever they want, they will get,” Gwyn echoed. “That is the bare truth. The king wants money, so he took mine.” She sank down beside Maud on a low stool. “I am beginning to believe that it is the conquered who have won out. The Saxons need only wait until the Normans destroy each other, and they will again have all they have lost.”
Maud interrupted her thoughts. “Without a dowry,” she said, “what ever will you do?”
Gwyn addressed herself to the problem at hand. “I have been thinking, more than once, that if I went to my lands, to Ramsey Manor, my people would be loyal and we could fight off the Normans.”
Maud laughed and said, “The way the Saxons held them off?”
It was true, Gwyn reflected. The Saxons had put up no great resistance to her grandfather. They had read him aright, for he proved to be a kind overlord. But she reflected upon the wooden palisades of her home, and the determination of William to retain what he considered his, and she knew that she could not put the lives of all her people in jeopardy. She had no illusions as to what would happen to them when the walls fell, as they must, and the Normans poured in across the drawbridge.
Ramsey Manor had been thrown up in a fortnight by her grandfather, so Gwyn had been told, in haste to protect the new Norman lord and his men from Saxon reprisals. The motte-and-bailey design lent itself to rapid construction, for immediate safety. There would be leisure later to strengthen the walls further and to fortify the timbered keep with facings of stone as time and circumstances warranted. But the Ramsey serfs were docile from the start, for the Ramsey knights, father and son, were just and fair men.
Now the daughter of the house lamented the lack of strong defense. “A timber frame,” she told Maud, “and a thatched roof.”
“The roof would last no more than half a day,” agreed Maud. “And your serfs would fall like flies.” Maud smiled briefly. “Besides, Prince Henry could never marry a traitor to the crown, as you would be. Even if you lived.”
“He would not marry me anyway,” said Gwyn stoutly, denying a quavery hope, “without the Ramsey lands.”
Maud added, “Besides, you are a Norman. You are as loyal to the king as any of us.”
Gwyn thought a moment and then answered honestly, “Yes, I think I am as faithful as most of us. Which, as you know, says little for our loyalty.”
Besides, she thought, I am more Welsh every day, and the beginning of an idea crossed her mind. If she had no lands in England, no Norman allegiance to the king, then she was free to be as Welsh as she chose. She would like to talk to Rhys about it, but her guard stood at the tower door below.
As the day wore on, Hyrtha left the sick room, and Gwyn went in to sit beside Jeanne. Jeanne seemed better this morning and was full of hope. Even though it was misplaced, Gwyn could not dash the child’s bright thoughts.
“The man has not come near me,” said Jeanne. “This means I don’t have to marry him, doesn’t it?”
Gwyn said, “You really must not get excited. If the man is going to the Holy Land, then you won’t see him for a long time.”
Jeanne cried, “I wish I had the Three Butterflies. I would have them take him to the Holy Land, and allow him to come back to England the length of one barleycorn every hundred years. No, make it every two hundred years! Then I wouldn’t have to see him ever again!” Gwyn smiled. The story of the wicked carpenter and the three butterflies he held captive, told in an attempt to amuse Jeanne, had almost turned into an article of faith with the child. And yet she could but agree. If FitzOmer were transported to the Holy Land and came back an inch every hundred years, then truly life would be easier for the child.
The child’s bruises were fading, and the deep gash — where the bottom of FitzOmer’s armor sleeve had raked her thigh — had healed well.
Jeanne would allow no one but gentle Hyrtha to wash her, to put clean shifts on her thin body. She had not left the small cell-like room since the ugly day of her wounding.
Gwyn talked quietly to Jeanne, avoiding by a wide detour any mention of the scene the night before in the great hall, where FitzOmer had insisted on an immediate wedding. Time enough to deal with that when it came. She wondered later if she had made a mistake in not trying to prepare Jeanne for what was to come.
At last Jeanne fell into a sleep, troubled by her dreams, and Gwyn was free to think her own thoughts. They were not pleasant. Without lands she was nothing in the scheme of things in William’s court. They had mentioned once that there were no ladies in William’s court, and this was certainly the case. She and Countess Maud were the only women regularly at the dining table. Sometimes visiting ladies stopped, but soon they had enough of William’s court and moved on with their retinues to their own homes.
Gwyn moved quietly to the small window to look out. She was glad to be alone at last, to consider what she had learned this morning. She was penniless, save for Foxwood, a small manor, sufficient to call a dowry, but not to bring wealth to its possessor.
The slit window, wide enough only to allow an arrow to be fitted and released, gave a narrow view of the surroundings. The river wound along the east border of the city, to the south of the tower and out of sight. Beyond the new fortification of the Normans, which protected the route from the sea at Southampton, she knew the river turned, but her view of the stream was blocked by the squat, ugly tower of the great keep. Possessing none of the comforts of the residences in the bailey — the round tower and William’s great hall — the keep stood aloof and austere within its encircling moat, ready for a last-ditch defense.
Beyond the keep, in the curve of the river, the Pope’s men camped, but from her vantage point she could see nothing of them. Below her, jagged rocks, left from the building of the bailey, tumbled down the scree to level ground. There was nothing to break the sheer fall from where she stood, no window below, no handhold even — nothing except empty air between her and the pointed
rocks reaching up like broken teeth. She shuddered and turned back to the room.
There was no one to turn to. Countess Maud had her own problems, and she could not add to them by asking for help, or even for consolation. She longed once again to talk to Rhys. She remembered the afternoon on the sunny hillside, with Rhys sitting near her feet and telling her of the wonders of his homeland. A Welsh lord, he held the loyalty of his own people. She knew that he did not speak for all of Wales, for Wales was a turbulent, rebellious land. She had enough Cymric blood in her heart to recognize another such rebel as herself.
And yet, if Rhys had said the word, she would have picked up and gone with him wherever he wanted. She had a quick vision of herself riding pillion on the tiny, rugged Welsh pony, far away from Winchester. She wished life were as simple as in the old stories, so that all she needed was to call on three butterflies, very special butterflies, of course. But her own troubles faded away, as that sunlit afternoon, with Rhys nearby, so near she could reach out and touch him, took over her thoughts. She remembered the quick way he looked at her under his heavy eyebrows, and light shining in his deep-set eyes, as he recognized a graceful thought. It had been an enchanted afternoon, short as it was, for the interplay of their thoughts, and even, she suspected, the attraction that ran between them. She was so conscious of that current, flowing like a deep river, that she feared she would be swept off her feet. But had Rhys felt the same current?
At length Jeanne stirred and cried out in her sleep. The spell of the sunny afternoon past was broken, and Gwyn began to think more seriously of what she could do next. If Prince Henry were here, she would lay her problems on his shoulders, for he had already helped her out of trouble. But she suspected darkly that this was deeper trouble than even Prince Henry could rescue her from. But at least she could ask him, and perhaps he could think of something.
He was on a mission to the North, she knew only that much, and surely he would be back soon.
Hyrtha came in, and Gwyn wondered again where Hyrtha spent her spare time. She would leave the tower, and that was the last Gwyn would see of her until suddenly she reappeared. But her curiosity was to be answered this time, for Hyrtha had a message from Daffyd!
Crown of Passion Page 15