Born of Woman

by Wendy Perriam

  Lyn stared out of the window. The snow had stopped falling now and the heavy sky was lightening at the edges, the first hint and tremble of sunlight glimmering through the grey. Edward’s face was still in shadow, but he himself had thawed. The cold and cautious stranger who had arrived an hour ago, was now opening up, confiding. ‘I used to love that bit in the story. My foster-mother would say ‘‘And the baby’s name was …’’ and I’d shout ‘‘Edward, Edward!’’—an unfortunate name, really, in the circumstances, since the Welsh Llewelyns were always fighting English Edwards. But I don’t imagine my foster-parents knew much about medieval British history. Mind you, I had four of the oldest English Christian names in …’

  ‘Three,’ corrected Lyn.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Edward Arthur James.’ Lyn could see the names shouting raw and scarlet from the white void of the Will-form. Edward Arthur James. Matthew Thomas Charles. Both his half-brothers had three names each, he three puny letters.

  ‘Edward Arthur James William. They added the William later, when I was confirmed. It was the name of our local Bishop, who performed the ceremony and was a close friend of my foster-father. But it was all a bit top-heavy for a child. I was rather a weedy lad and all those formal names seemed to weigh me down, especially the bishop’s. I felt him like a heavy silver cross hanging round my neck.’

  Lyn shifted in his chair. ‘Weedy? But you must be more than six feet tall.’

  ‘I was the smallest boy in my class till I’d turned sixteen. I shot up then, but I was still so thin, I looked like one of those … pines out there—all trunk and no branch.’

  Lyn stared at Edward’s broad shoulders, the barrel of his chest. Was he mocking him again? He tipped the last of the wine into Edward’s tumbler. If a glass or two had loosened him up so much, a third might encourage still stranger revelations.

  ‘To tell the truth, I felt a … bit of a muddle as a child. On top of all those first names, I also had three surnames—well, not legally, I suppose. But I used to try them out in turn, not just in my head, but in my writing-books. None of them felt quite … mine.’

  ‘Why three?’

  ‘Ainsley, Fraser, Powys. Ainsley was the name I always used, of course. My … er … mother had apparently insisted. But it made for complications when I was living with two Frasers. Sometimes I pretended I was Fraser. That was simpler. Powys was my father’s name. I’d been told it, you see, but I wasn’t allowed to use it. I wanted to. Other boys took their father’s name, and I … hated being different. If he’d lived, I suppose he’d have reserved it for his lawful sons who would carry on his castle and his line. I had nothing of my father—not even his Christian name. Strange that Hester gave you that, when it really belonged to me.’

  Lyn stiffened. Was Edward threatening him? No, his voice was neutral and reflective. Certain words had fallen on the table and were lying there like stains. Weedy, distorted, different. This man was tied to him by fears and frailties, as well as blood and genes. Hester had left them both a legacy of fear. His mother’s eyes were staring at him now—from his father’s chair. He and Edward shared not just a mother, but a new stranger-father who had somehow bequeathed to him his name.

  ‘I envy you that name.’ Edward was leaning forward, the immaculate necktie trailing in his plate. ‘My foster-father’s family was old and very respected, and I was given the family Christian names. But they didn’t really … fit me, since I wasn’t his true son. I think I … I disappointed him, in fact. I was rather a … timid child and he doubtless hoped for better things with my soldier’s heritage. Mind you, we never talked about my father. I had only the photo and Hester’s … fairy-tale. But when I got older, I longed to know the facts—not just magic swords and enchanted castles. I always felt a bit of a … blank about my background. I wasn’t a Fraser and … Anyway, when I was twenty-one, I hired a chap to do some geneological research for me, in Wales. I suppose it was stupid, really, and I always kept it secret. The researcher got quite excited, discovered that the Powys were actually descended from a branch of the family distantly related to Llewelyn ap Iorwerth and going right back to the thirteenth century. They made the Frasers look like … new boys.’ Edward laughed. ‘They had in fact been princes, so the fairy-tale was halfway true.’

  Edward paused, took a mouthful of his lunch. He had eaten almost nothing up to now. ‘I got so involved and interested, I steeped myself in the whole tangle of Welsh history. Wales is a very impressive place, you know. It has some of the oldest rocks on earth—and one of the oldest languages in the whole Western world—and literatures. And it’s always remained—well— independent, however many times it was overrun.’

  Lyn put his fork down. How could Edward sprawl there demolishing tomatoes while talking high romance? He had returned to his glass again. For a man who drank but rarely and who had been reluctant to sit down and eat at all, he had certainly relaxed.

  ‘Llewelyn ap Iorwerth became a sort of … champion for me. He was the first Prince of Wales and the only Llewelyn to be called ‘‘The Great’’. He and my father became … well—fused in my mind, I suppose—the two Llewelyn heroes. That’s what so upset me when people back home started … speculating about where I’d sprung from and who my real father was—suggesting he might have been a ruffian or even criminal, when in fact he came from such a noble background and proved worthy of it—won a medal, distinguished himself in battle …’

  Lyn said nothing. He, too, had made those idle suppositions, imagined drunken louts pawing at his mother.

  ‘I never put them right. Why bother? Whatever I’d said, they’d have twisted that, as well.’ Edward shrugged and frowned. ‘I just kept both Llewelyns to myself.’

  Lyn drained his own wine. ‘I must admit, I’m no great shakes at history. I’ve never even heard of Llewelyn the Great.’ Edward lived thirteen thousand miles away and yet knew more about the British Isles than he did as a native.

  ‘You ought to read his life, then. He is your namesake, after all. I think you’ll find it fascinating. He was a man of many talents with several different sides to him. He was chiefly a warrior, of course, but he patronised the bards and ended his life as a Cistercian monk, so he must have had spiritual leanings, too. In fact, the name Llewelyn seems to have come from a Celtic deity who was god and king at the same time. It’s one of the most stirring names I know. I used to keep a book of all the Llewelyns once, and it read like a roll of honour.’

  Lyn was silent. His girl’s name, his sissy, pansy name had turned into an accolade, a badge of honour. He was first son now, granted the first son’s name and privilege. Hester had saved the name for her legitimate son, her best beloved and most important son who was heir in all but empty legal formulae.

  Edward had still not touched his hunk of bread. Lyn cut another, thinner slice, divided it in two. Their fingers brushed as Edward took his half slice. Each broke the bread and swallowed. The cheerless meal had become a sacrament.

  ‘Would you like to see that photo of my father?’ Edward fumbled for his wallet. ‘It’s very faded now and almost in shreds. I’ve carried it around with me for more than …’

  ‘No. Thank you, but …’ Lyn flung his chair back, trembled to the door. ‘Excuse me just a moment, will you?’ He started up the stairs. There was no need to see a likeness—stolid flesh and blood, something which might jar or disappoint. Hester had already painted her own picture, bright and glowing in that schoolbook. How had his stern and unromantic mother been involved with one of the most fabled families in history, turned her early life into a fairy-tale, loved and lost a prince?

  The Hester he had known had been old and crabbed and scorned romance. If she had ever found him reading fancy stories, she’d thrown the book away; she never went to weddings, not even to his own. She blighted love like frost. Yet, all the time, she’d had another, secret side, the gold and scarlet side he had called Susannah and grafted on to her. She had been a Susannah herself, but had hidden th
e scarlet under widow’s black. The marriage to Thomas had been merely convenience—he knew that well enough. His father had needed a permanent and reliable nursemaid, someone who knew his ways and wouldn’t leave him for a better job, a companion in his old age—which he never lived to enjoy. Hester, for her part, wanted a home to call her own, the status of a wife rather than the lowly role of housekeeper. Marriage suited both of them, but there had been little love to spare. He had always resented his mother for that—wanted her to love, wished with all the passion of his boyhood that her life had included passion, so that she could pass it on to him, leave it as a legacy.

  His shame and resentment at her teenage affair had been chiefly that he had seen it as a sordid one, like those gossips back in Warkworth—even rape, perhaps, a brutish assault which had somehow damaged him, as well. He had always had high ideals, yearned to believe in love and romance in a grey and grudging world where they seemed so often tarnished. Yet now Edward had brought them back again, made Hester a Susannah and him a Llewelyn. Hester had given him the name of the man she loved more than man had ever been loved before, the hero who was named for heroes, the leader-prince, god-king.

  He stopped outside her room, the room she had slept in, died in, and which he had always been forbidden to enter in his childhood, had only ever seen when she was dead. He had sometimes stood outside it as a boy, turned it into Susannah’s room—imagined the tumbled underclothes, the glass bottles full of scents and salves—Susannah things, fragrant and forbidden. Now the room was almost nun-like—frowning furniture, simple wood-backed brushes on the battered dressing-table, high and chilly bed. He inched further into the room, touched the pale and faded counterpane. Hester had lain on a bed like that with Lyn, shocked and rumpled it, turned it into a lovers’ bower. For a quarter of a century, she had hidden and concealed that love, sent away the fruit of it. Only when he himself was born, had she resurrected it, bestowed on him the honour of being her first son and her second Lyn-Llewelyn.

  He walked slowly to the window, gazed out at the hills which had been looking in at his mother for over thirty years. The sun had broken through at last, and was pouring its elation on the snow, every smallest crystal glistening in the golden light, the far ridges touched with pink. He drew the curtain aside. Gold and silver fell across the counterpane as if Hester had embroidered it. He tried to scoop the gold up in his hands. He realised now what riches he possessed compared with Edward. Edward was a bastard and a refugee who had been fobbed off with an alien mother and alien country, sent abroad because he was an expense and an embarrassment; a weedy, muddled boy with no firm name or lineage. Edward might be the elder son, but he was the legitimate one. He had enjoyed his mother’s hands and voice and lap, her lifetime and her certainty, when Edward had only a letter and a death. He understood the letter now—it was just a substitute. Edward was bequeathed the house only because he had been deprived of everything else. Hester was simply allaying the guilt she felt towards an infant she had flung across two oceans and several continents and then killed in all the records. A house was only a puff of smoke compared with a mother’s presence and thirty years’ devotion. It was like a rich child being asked to give up a toy or bauble to an orphan. He might weep to part with it, but the orphan had wept far longer and far earlier.

  Lyn ran downstairs, fetched Edward’s port and whisky from the sideboard, tore the wrappings from the chocolates. Edward was still sitting in the master’s chair, finishing his lunch. Lyn poured port into a clean glass, proffered nuts and figs.

  ‘Happy Christmas!’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it’s your own port, but I do have something for you—a … er … sort of Christmas present.’ Lyn opened the kitchen drawer, drew out a package, not Christmas-wrapped, but stuffed in a plain brown envelope.

  Edward smiled. ‘For me? You shouldn’t have bothered, really. I wasn’t expecting … presents.’ He ripped the envelope, found a second one inside, slit it with his cheese-knife. Was he hoping for a tie, a pure silk handkerchief, a slim carton of cheroots? He drew out a folded piece of parchment.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Read it and you’ll see.’ Lyn was reading it already—in his head. ‘I hereby revoke all former Wills heretofore made by me and …’

  Edward unfolded the paper, clutched the arms of his chair—Thomas Winterton’s chair. ‘B … but I thought …’ he swallowed. ‘My lawyers said there wasn’t a Will. It had either been lost, or never made at all.’

  Lyn nodded. ‘It was lost.’ Lies didn’t matter any more. ‘We searched the place for it. I even came back here on my own and turned all the lofts and attics inside-out. But still no Will. It was only when I came up this time that I found it.’

  ‘But how had you missed it before?’ Edward still hadn’t read the contents. It was as if he were gaining time—crumbling bread, asking questions—before he dared see what it said.

  Lyn stared down at the table. Lies were easier told to wood. ‘Well, I knew if there had been a Will, my mother would have kept it in her bureau. She kept all her private papers there. We’d searched for it a score of times, emptied the whole thing out, found bills, letters, everything but that. But this time, I was cannier.’ The lies came out as smooth as marzipan. He had prepared them carefully. ‘I came across a sort of … secret drawer, right at the back and concealed behind a panel. I’d seen something similar in an antique shop in Cobham and that gave me a clue. I took the thing apart—and there was the Will.’

  It hadn’t been quite that easy. He had gone blundering into the forest on a freezing December day, searching for the gigantic Douglas fir which had marked the infant grave. All the firs looked massive. His face was torn by overhanging branches and a cruel stinging sleet began to strafe between the trees. He trudged deeper and deeper in, then round and round in circles, close to panic as the tall trunks hemmed him in. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, yet as shadowy dark as dusk. After half a numbing hour, he was tempted to give up. Yet he couldn’t remain a criminal, for ever on the run.

  He tried again, taking it more slowly now, checking every step and landmark until at last, drenched and footsore, he found the spot, started scrabbling like a dog. The ground was frozen hard. Even when he’d loosened it, he had a strange irrational feeling that the package would be gone. It wasn’t. Only cold and slimy, streaked with mould and mud. He slipped it under his coat, started to run, ducking under branches, tripping on snaking roots, smashing through the undergrowth, then squeezing through the fence and back to his hidden car. He had flung the package in the boot, not glanced at it again until late last night at Hernhope, when he had swapped the damp and soil-stained plastic bag for that clean brown envelope.

  Edward was holding it at a distance, as if it were a trick, a trap. In the absence of a Will, he had been pressing for a half share of all his mother’s assets. Did he now suspect that the younger and legitimate son had been named as sole heir, he sent away a second time with nothing? He would look a total fool after all his claims and clamourings, trumpeted round the world. Lyn watched his hands trembling on the still-folded piece of parchment.

  ‘That’s really why I got in touch with you,’ he added.

  ‘But why? What’s wrong? What …?’

  ‘Oh, nothing’s wrong. In fact, I think you’ll be quite pleasantly surprised. That’s the reason I suggested Christmas Day. I felt it was the most suitable occasion to give you your mother’s … gift.’

  ‘I … don’t understand.’ Edward’s voice was wary again, his shoulders tensed. The man who had waxed ecstatic over ancient Wales and Princes had disappeared, leaving only the confused suspicious boy.

  Lyn drew a sharp breath in. He was tense enough himself. ‘Hester left you this … house, Edward, and all its contents. The whole thing—not just half. You’re her only heir and …’

  ‘I … I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Why don’t you read it for yourself?’ Lyn jerked away from the table. I bequeath to my first and eldest son … Belove
d son. He knew it off by heart now. He walked blindly to the door, laid his head against the cool unfeeling wood, turned round again, tried to calm his voice, act the cool executor, the hard-sell estate agent. ‘I … I’m afraid it needs some renovation. The roof’s leaking, the garden’s like a jungle, and if you want electricity, you’ll have to start again from scratch. But basically, it’s as solid as a fortress. The walls are three foot thick. It was built to last, this house.’

  Edward wasn’t listening. The Will, the documents, were spread in front of him, but he wasn’t reading them. He was staring beyond them to the snow, the hills, the harsh line of the horizon. The sun had disappeared now. For the first time in his life, Edward had his mother in his hands, his past taking shape before him, not in golden fairy-tales, but in stark black ink in formal legal jargon.

  ‘You … you didn’t know about this?’

  Lyn shook his head. He couldn’t speak. Despite his elation over Lyn-Llewelyn, it still hurt to be disinherited, to lose a house which had been womb, cradle, bolt-hole, as well as wilderness and prison.

  Edward was rubbing his eyes, as if he had just awoken from a dream. ‘No, of course you couldn’t have known. I’m sorry, it’s all a bit of a shock.’

  Lyn returned to the table, picked up a walnut, crushed it in the nutcrackers. What was wrong with the man? Edward had been squalling for his rights, yet now he had actually got them, he sounded more alarmed than elated or relieved. He hadn’t opened the letters, had hardly glanced at the Will. Was he scared of drawing too close to a mother he had made into a myth, or did he fear that the princess in the fairy-tale would turn into a lonely old woman struggling with guilt and death? Lyn recognised his own fears.