The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  The prince had every reason to be highly content with his gains in the treaty of Montgomery, for it had established him as lord of all Wales, and of all the homages of the lesser Welsh chiefs, recognised and honoured in his title and right. And he was bent on fulfilling his part of the agreement loyally, restraining his men from the border raiding to which they had been accustomed as of right all their lives, and paying punctiliously the instalments of the moneys due in fine for his recognition and alliance. If King Henry had such another prompt and cheerful payer, I never heard him named.

  By the same token, he willed to abide by the prescribed arbitration in all cases where he held claim to land disputed by others. It was wearisome to wait out the delays, but he bore them with patience and good-humour. There was but this one matter that roused him to the edge of action.

  In the south, in the land of Glamorgan, where the earl of Gloucester had a great castellany about Cardiff, he found himself now close neighbour to the prince, and fearing for his hitherto undisputed power, wished to extend northwards into the lands of Senghenydd, and create such another castle and administration there. The lord of Senghenydd was the last of a princely Welsh line, and had held as vassal of the earl, though only perforce, for his heart was with Wales and Llewelyn. And having his own suspicions of this, the earl had seized him and shipped him away to captivity in Ireland, at Kilkenny, and taken over Senghenydd as his own. When he began the building of a great castle at Caerphilly, to hold down the commote he had usurped, Llewelyn at once protested to the king, for this was plain breach of treaty. King Henry did his best to keep the peace between them, and to bring about some form of compromise that would satisfy both, but while the conferences and councils went on and on, so did the building of the earl's castle, and even the prince's patience was not made to last for ever.

  Thus this matter stood when Cynan brought the king's invitation. And in the privacy of the high chamber he could offer some reassurance.

  "The Lord Edward goes next month to confer with King Louis in France about the order of their sailing, the supplying of their ships, all the business of the crusade. In the summer of next year they intend to sail from Aigues Mortes. Gloucester is pledged, he must go. And when he goes, you have time to make your own dispositions, and to bring others, more accommodating, to reason. Two years and more! The king wills well to you, so does the Lord Edward. Oh, I grant you, the earl is already anxious to get out of his obligation, on the plea of his right to defend his border lands, but that goes down very ill with the Lord Edward, who is more than suspicious of the earl's good faith, and bent on forcing him to keep his pledge. It will be hard for him to stand out against his prince, especially when his own young brother is ardent for the crusade, and was among the first to swear. He cannot for shame let himself be displayed as recreant. It would take a brave man to outface Edward."

  "Or a foolhardy one," said Llewelyn, "and that he is."

  "So he may work his own undoing. But for my part I think he must resign himself to the crusade, and then you are rid of him."

  Then Llewelyn went on to ask him again of England, and how the days went there, and this time Cynan understood him in the deeper sense, and so answered him, with much thought.

  "England," he said, "walks very gently and warily, like a sick man only a short while out of his bed, carefully watching every step before, and not looking behind. The wounds of civil war heal slowly, the worst wrongs to those who chose the losing side have been compounded by better sense, and the land is weary, and grateful for this new quietness. It came as something of a shock to them to be taxed, every free man on his belongings, to help to pay for this crusade, and they grumble as usual, but they'll pay, and take it as a mild penance or a thank-offering for peace in the land. The king is safe on his throne again, the succession secure."

  "And that better order that Earl Simon promised and died for?" said Llewelyn sombrely. "And Earl Simon himself? All forgotten?"

  "Nothing is forgotten," said Cynan as darkly.

  "And nothing changed!" said Llewelyn, with remembering bitterness.

  Cynan shook his head. "It is not so. Two things are changed, and for my life I cannot be sure whether for the better in the end, or the worse, or whether the one strikes out the other and leaves the land but a step from where it stood before. The crown came safe out of all that battering because the king was too soft to be crushed. Also the crown is a unity. But the baronage of England has been rent from head to foot, for it went two several ways and tore itself in half, and if it has not bled to death, it lies very sick. There was a balance there between king and baronage on which England depended for her power, and Earl Simon tried to restore it to true when it leaned perilously one way, and even to better the balance struck before. But God was not pleased to give him the victory, and now the scale dips heavily, for where is the force in the nobility to weigh against it? King Henry is old, and has learned a little sense, and moreover he is a weak man who finds it easier now to own his weakness. But when this overweighted power of monarchy is handed down to a powerful heir, then we shall discover the best and the worst of this changed order."

  Llewelyn watched him and said no word, for Cynan spoke as one equally bound to both England and Wales, faithful in giving to us all the benefit of his wisdom and penetration, yet in his own fashion as true to England as Earl Simon de Montfort himself had been when he ripped her apart with the splendour of his vision and the passion of his virtue. King Henry's clerk knew what passed in the mind of his prince, and smiled at him his smooth and rueful smile.

  "I take his pay," he said, "and while he wills well to Wales, so do I to him, and will not leave him. I, too, grow older. I am not sorry to sleep easy in my bed. But if ever he, or any other in his room, thinks to tear up this treaty and take to the old games, I shall remember my blood. I have not lost my old skills."

  "I will remember it," said Llewelyn with a shadowed smile. "Go on. You had more to say. What is this other thing you find changed that may restore the balance of the first?"

  "It is that men's ideas need not die with them," said Cynan, "any more than scattered seed dies. In the stoniest of places they may root and grow. Even a man's enemies can learn from him. And if King Henry is too old, the Lord Edward is not, and has cold enough reason and shrewd enough judgment to take what he finds good, and make use of it, though he must take it from the hands of a man he has destroyed. Earl Simon will not be the first to turn his enemy into his heir. And England may be the better for it."

  I caught Llewelyn's eye then, and knew that he was recalling, as I was, the last speech ever I had with Earl Simon, on the high tower of the abbey church at Evesham, before the battle, as we watched the Lord Edward's army in a glitter of steel and wavering veil of dust draw in to our destruction, in confident purpose, without haste, forming their strict array on the march. "I taught them that," the earl said with critical approval. And after: "If he can learn the discipline of battle, he can learn the discipline of statecraft, too. From his enemies, if need be." Those words Llewelyn had never heard but from my lips, I being then his envoy with the earl's army, but I knew he was hearing them now, as I was, in a voice not mine.

  "Not England only," said Llewelyn, with the face of his dead friend and ally still before his eyes, "but I pray, Wales also."

  "There are signs," said Cynan. "Next to the cardinal-legate who made the peace it was Edward who did the most to curb the bloodiest of the victors, and save what could be saved for the disinherited. He leans to the sensible notion that men who pay the tallages and aids should have their own representatives to see they are fairly levied, and men who fight the battles and bear the weight of policy should have a small voice in forming it. And he is all for law. Yes, there are signs."

  "So nothing is utterly lost," said Llewelyn.

  "Nothing lost," said Cynan, "and nothing forgotten."

  He stayed with us the night, and Llewelyn wrote a cordial letter to King Henry, accepting his invitation to the feast. An
d when Cynan left us, it was to ride on across north Wales into Lleyn, to carry the like bidding to David, certainly to be accepted no less heartily. Llewelyn added a message of his own, with the hope that they might ride together in one royal party, to do Wales the greater honour and show a brotherly front. At that time, though David had been settled on his own agreed lands, approved by commission as his due, for over a year, they met but seldom except in formal council, for it needed time to restore without damage the old relationship between them. And that rather to accommodate David, the betrayer, than Llewelyn, the betrayed, who in the hour of his triumph at Montgomery had kissed and forgiven in honour of Wales and in the vastness of his own content. But it is not so easy to forgive the man you have twice deserted, when his largeness of mind only redoubles your deep discontent with yourself, and David still went stiffly and formally with his brother and over-lord. His homage and fealty cost him dear because he had paid so little for them. I, who knew him better than most, yet never knew him well enough to know whether he would have welcomed the sting, had he been denied grace and countenance and humbled as he deserved, or named into open revolt and defiance. I think he himself did not know, for it was never put to the test. The only time he was shaken into complaining to me, it was that he was mislaid and received again with no more heart burning than if he had been a strayed hound, both his defection and his return taken as events too light and trivial for passion or overmuch ceremony. That to Llewelyn he was worth neither a blessing nor a blow. Which was false, though fiercely he believed it. Llewelyn's passion was not as David's, a bitter fire consuming the heart within, but a glowing warmth that shone on the world without. But the one was as hot as the other.

  Howbeit, David replied as civilly, and brought his party to join his brother's at Bala, in Penllyn, from which maenol the court set out in state, in good time to enjoy the fine autumn by the way, and reach Westminster a full week before Saint Edward's day.

  I looked for their coming with both eagerness and pain, knowing they would come lavishly attended, and that among their retinue would be two closer to me than my own skin, one whom I longed for, one whom I dreaded, and that I could not have the one without the other.

  They rode in on a September evening, before sunset. I was down by the lake, in the fields gleaned to a bleached white after the end of the harvest, and sun-gilded in the slanting light, when I heard first the horns sounding merrily in the distance, on the uplands to the north of the maenol, and then the moving murmur that is compounded of the easy thud and rustle of hooves in grass and gravel, and many voices in talk and laughter, the jingle of harness and the chimes of little bridle bells, and the brief, cajoling calls of falconers after their hawks, a far-off music brought near even in its quietness by the stillness of the air. Then there was a high, pure peal of joyous laughter, a child's utterance in sheer delight of heart, and I knew the child unseen from afar, and turned back to the maenol to be beside my lord when he came out to the gate, as come he would, to welcome his guests. The bright procession wound down the bleached track through the deeper upland grass, and brought all its colours and sounds and voices down to the gate where we waited, half the maenol out to do them honour. David showed very splendid in black embroidered with silver, his head uncovered to the freshening breeze, the curving strands of blue-black hair tossed across his forehead, his eyes, that were blue as harebells, just clouding from their journeying innocence into the veiled withdrawal from which he gazed upon his brother. And he on a tall English horse, a red roan, Edward's gift, like the pretty white palfrey that nuzzled at his elbow, and the girl who rode it, astride like a boy, and booted in soft French leather.

  David lighted down, and went before us all to bend the knee to Llewelyn, and kiss the hand that had reached to embrace him. I do not say he did it to offend, rather in stiff insistence on the hard identities of vassal and overlord, but there could have been no surer way of offending. Yet Llewelyn would not resent him, but let him have his way, and only offered him the kiss of kinship when he rose from his knee. They made each other the common offerings of enquiry and acknowledgement, the one in tolerant patience, the other in unsparing duty. Then David turned to his wife, and here we saw another creature, warm and eager, with the veil lifted from his gaze, and his long, arrogant, icy lips molten into a smile. She slipped her feet from the stirrups and reached down her arms to him, and he swung her easily aloft out of the saddle, and held her eye to eye with him and heart to heart a moment, before he set her on her feet and brought her by the hand to Llewelyn.

  The kiss that David's stiff cheek had resisted was welcome to her, as was every gesture of friendliness and affection. Llewelyn had to stoop low to her, for she barely reached David's shoulder, and the prince was by the width of three fingers the taller of the two. And seeing her thus accept with impulsive pleasure what he had suffered like a blow or an insult, David, too, flushed and softened a little, though against his will and in his own despite.

  She was then no more than twelve years old, and even for her years not tall, but sturdy and well-made. Nor was she beautiful, but for the bloom that all young creatures have. She had great brown eyes like a hind, innocent and wild, and curling hair of the same colour, and a soft, grave mouth given to rare but sudden and wholehearted laughter. Loud and talkative enough when she was with David, she was quiet and shy in company, though not at all timid. And this was Elizabeth Ferrers, daughter of Robert Ferrers, earl of Derby, and wife to Prince David of Wales.

  Child as she was, she was already once wedded and widowed. She was close kin to the king, her mother being his niece, Mary, daughter to the count of La Marche, Henry's eldest half-brother, a royal lady who had been married to Robert Ferrers when she was but seven years old, and her bridegroom only two years older. After the same dynastic custom they had married Elizabeth as a child to one William Marshal of Norfolk, who by his first wife already had sons old enough to be father to this tender creature. But her elderly husband followed the fortunes of Earl Simon, and died in that cause in the year of Evesham. Maid and widow, she had come into the king's wardship when her father, too, was dispossessed of all he had for his part in the civil wars, and since law had allowed her part of her dower lands from the Marshal inheritance, she had brought with her certain manors in Norfolk when King Henry, at the Lord Edward's instance, bestowed her upon David in marriage. A match not to be missed, and David accepted it willingly, lands and lady and all, together with the Lord Edward's patronage and favour. Of all of which, I fancy, he thought he knew the relative values. Yet I saw for myself, now for the third time seeing those two together, a year married after the world's practical fashion, that Elizabeth had had something to teach him, and he had found himself learning without resentment. For every look they exchanged, every touch of their sleeves brushing every intonation of their voices when they talked together, was eloquent beyond words.

  I looked among the dismounting company within the courtyard for the face I most desired to see, knowing she would not be far from Elizabeth. For ever since David had brought his bride home, Cristin had been her closest confidante and attendant. David would have no other to care for the child, for in a world where he doubted most men and held most women gently enough but lightly, for Cristin he had and kept always a deep regard and that alone was enough to incline his wife most warmly to her, even if they had not, from the first, been drawn to each other. And I was glad that Cristin should have a fair young creature close to her, to love and guard, she who had no child by her husband, and never would have child by her love. For we were cursed and blessed, she and I, in mutual loving blessed indeed, but cursed in that ours was a love forbidden and impossible of fruit, since she was the wife of my half-brother.

  I found her among the first to follow into the maenol, Cristin, Llywarch's daughter, her black hair hidden under a white wimple, and a white mule stepping delicately under her. And as happened always with us at every new meeting when I found her, her eyes were on me, and when mine held them they grew
so large and crystal-clear in their purple-grey, the colour of irises, and so drew me into them like the seduction of deep water, that I died in them and was reborn into bliss as a drowning man by the mercy of God and the grace of faith may sink through death into the peace of paradise.

  She was within a month or two the same age as David, both being then thirtythree years old. We were long experienced in loving without greed or regret, she and I, and though we never spoke words of love, nor asked any fulfilment but the mutual knowledge we already possessed, neither did we avoid each other, nor any longer dissemble the truth that we had between us such trust and regard as few ever enjoy with man or woman. To what end? Godred knew very well how things stood with us, and knew that we knew, and by all means in his power, having glimpsed a passion of which he was incapable, had sought to drag it down to a level he could first understand, and then befoul. Who knows but it was Godred who kept us resolute in our purity?