The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  But the best and strangest omen was yet to come. For when I had been alone there in the silence a great while, and was about to rise and go in from the chill of the air, suddenly I heard from the window above me the paired murmur of two voices, in words too soft to be distinguished, and needing no interpreter, two threads of sound that interwove and caressed like the strands of a song. And then the deeper voice pealed out in a cascade of exultant bronze laughter, and over it the other soared like a silver fountain of sparkling drops. And I sat lost in amazement and giving thanks to God, as I listened to the sweetest sound ever I heard, the prince and princess of Wales laughing aloud together for joy, and in each other's arms at last.

  AFTERGLOW AND NIGHT

  FALL

  CHAPTER I

  I, Samson, clerk, servant and friend life-long to Prince Llewelyn, born under the same roof and in the same night as my lord, have told how he laboured steadfastly to make of Wales a noble sovereign state, peer to England and in peace with her, how for a few years that aim was achieved, when after the treaty of Montgomery he lived side by side in amity with King Henry the Third until that monarch's death, and how thereafter, with the succession of King Edward, all things changed, and England and Wales were again driven to war.

  Of that year of struggle I have told, when the lesser Welsh princes, not yet ready for the vision of nationhood and clutching each at his own local right, fell away before the king's lance, and a hard-fought war ended perforce in a hard-fought peace. By that treaty, drawn at Aberconway, my lord was forced to relinquish half his realm, won with his own hand, in order to keep inviolate his hereditary stronghold of Gwynedd-west-of-Conway, the mountain fastness of Snowdon. And having accepted with fortitude this grievous diminution, he did homage and swore fealty to Edward, accepting also the bond of his pledged word.

  Yet in this great loss there was also great gain, for in sacrificing the labour of many years he achieved also the desire of many years, his promised wife, Eleanor de Montfort, the great earl's daughter and the king's own cousin, whom Edward had not scrupled to seize by piracy at sea and hold prisoner as his cruellest weapon of war, but whom now, appeased by victory, he brought forth to her bridal.

  And one more thing, to him of great value, my lord regained on his wedding eve, the love and allegiance of his youngest, best-loved and most perilous brother, David, three times traitor and three times forgiven.

  I tell now of what befell after the peace was a year old, of how that marriage and that reconciliation fared, and how the war continued by other means, with words for swords, and courts of justice for battlefields.

  From the marriage at Worcester we rode home to Gwynedd in the soft, moist October weather, all that great company of us, Llewelyn's household and David's together in amity, Llewelyn and David side by side, after so long of estrangement, and all the leisurely string of us, their retainers, drawn out after their heels like a bright ribbon trailed across the green fields of England, to the border at Oswestry.

  Thus far, to mark his patronage and favour to the very rim of his English lands, King Edward paid the expenses of his cousin's travel and baggage, having already borne the cost of the wedding-banquet, and bestowed the bride on her bridegroom with his own hand. The same huge and heavy hand that had turned the key upon her to prevent that very marriage, until it could be celebrated on his terms and under his auspices. But Edward's shadow lengthened and dwindled behind us when we reached Welsh soil, and pressed the upland turf of our dismembered homeland above Glyn Ceiriog.

  In vast content we rode, bringing Eleanor home at last to her own place. But ours was a contentment muted and still, no loud and easy happiness. We were like men spent after great endeavour, having both won and lost, and once having valued and acknowledged our losses, the more grateful for our gains and the more aware of them. With falconry and music we passed the gentle time on the journey, but our hawking was subdued and languid, and our music pensive and soft, like the autumn country through which we made our homeward way. At morning the sun was veiled and coloured like gold, and the dew feathered from our horses' hooves, and over the slopes of the hills the warm purple flush of heather burned slowly into the sombre fire of bracken. The skies over us were pale and lofty, and the birds flew high, and even their songs had a rueful sound, as though they, too, owned their losses while they hymned their gains. For it is great gain to be alive, and have heart to sing, but great loss, even in the beauty of autumn, to feel and dread that the golden summer is over.

  Eleanor rode at her husband's side every mile of that journey. There was no need for any man to wonder what measure of happiness those two had in being matched at last, for though they spoke but little, and looked more often upon the fair, loved land than upon each other, feeling no need to gaze or to touch, they so shone that their radiance kindled the very air into gold about them, no midday dazzle, but the mellow and tender gold of the sun drifting towards its bed, after the long climb to the zenith.

  They were autumn thoughts I had, those days, and there is no autumn without regret, however kindly the air, and bright the leaves, and rich the harvest. And I could not choose but remember that I, like my lord and friend, was forty-nine years old, drawing close to fifty when the year turned, and he had waited thirteen years for his love before he won her, and I longer still for mine, and fruitlessly still. Yet whenever I rode beside the horse-litters in which David's wife and children were carried, my heart was comforted, beholding Cristin among the cushions with Elizabeth's youngest girl in her lap, and the two elder sisters nestled one on either side of her, as confidingly as if she had been their mother instead of their nurse, and a happy and prolific wife instead of a misused and barren one. And then, as surely as the love and worship rose in me cool and fresh as spring water filling a dried well, Cristin would raise her head and turn her iris-grey eyes to meet mine, and there I saw another manner of radiance, not fecund and joyous like Elizabeth's, not fulfilled and crowned like Eleanor's, yet radiance for all that, and knew that it belonged to me, and to no other man in all this dear world. For there are many kinds of harvest, and the bevy of vigorous, blossoming children that surrounded David and Elizabeth furnished but one make of precious fruit. There are others, invisible, unweighed, uncounted, not to be assessed by the world's values, vouchsafed sometimes even to those who find their loves too late.

  But this was the bride's festival, and the bride's triumph. She looked about her at a fair, wild, melancholy world that changed with every mile, and up into a sky alive with birds and feathered with sailing clouds, and was filled with wonder and delight.

  "No, this is not England! It is another earth," she said, "and another air."

  At David's entreaty we halted for one week of November at his castle of Denbigh, though Llewelyn would rather have gone home at once to Gwynedd-beyondConway, which was now his whole principality. But the reunion of those two brothers required a visible sacrament, therefore he accepted with good will the invitation extended, and while Tudor ap Ednyfed, the high steward of Wales, went ahead into Gwynedd with all but the prince's immediate household, we who were closest lingered and hunted in Denbigh, and were entertained lavishly until it was time to move on to Aber and prepare for the Christmas feast.

  That stay at Denbigh came strangely to me and to many. David had held his two inland cantrefs of the Middle Country but a year, having been granted them by King Edward after the war that snatched them out of Llewelyn's hands. David was Edward's vassal now, like any baron of England, and owed no fealty to his brother, whose undoing he had surely been, second only to Edward. Yet here, so soon afterwards, he was playing host to the brother and lord he had deserted and betrayed. It was not easy for good Welshmen to stomach, and there was no man knew it better than David. On the night before we left, at the high table in hall, he chose to get the matter into the open.

  "I take it as a great grace," he said in a clear voice, looking Llewelyn in the face, "that you have consented to break bread and be a guest in my house,
and a royal favour that your lady honours my hall with her presence. Since it's known to all men how we have been estranged, so I would have all men know that we are reunited. Concerning desert or blame we two have said no word. For my part, I'm content to be thankful for peace between us, and to pledge my good faith to keep it."

  Llewelyn understood his need, and readily went to meet him. "There's no profit," he said heartily, "in looking back. We begin from where we stand, and no complaints. A few weeks, and we go together into a new year, and what we had or had not, and did or did not do, three years ago is no help and no harm to us now. Let's live with what is." And seeing that they had at that moment, as David had intended, the silent attention of all that teeming household in hall, he added: "And since we're at peace, and travelling is safe and easy again, I pray you'll come as before, and share Christmas with us at Aber, with your lady and the children."

  David grew pale at that, remembering the Christmas feast at Aber four years earlier, when he had plotted against the life of this brother who now publicly opened that life to him again. Out of that treachery arose all Llewelyn's losses, and all the grief and damage of the war, and the restrictions of the hard peace. But they eyed each other steadily and were content.

  "With all my heart," said David.

  So they made plain to all men that whatever had happened between them, and however they were now divided by fortune, Llewelyn prince of a shrunken Wales, but its prince still, David a baron holding from King Edward and owing feudal allegiance only to him, they were by their own deliberate choice brothers once again.

  Certainly there must have been many who still doubted. Three times treacherous, who was David to pledge his good faith now and be trusted? Three times magnanimous and each time the loser by it, was not Llewelyn incurably his own enemy and his brother's dupe? Even Cristin, when I spoke out this misgiving to her, said only: "God knows! But as they could never live together, so they cannot live separated. The prince is right, they must manage with what they have, and handle it as best they can." Even as we, though that she did not say.

  While we remained in Denbigh I had at least the opportunity of speaking with her now and then as we went about our work. Every word and look of hers was bread and life to me, I was rich while we were within the same walls, and for that reason the accord between Llewelyn and David was all the more precious to me.

  "Elizabeth is satisfied," said Cristin. "She would be friends with everyone, and have contentment all about her. Where David goes, she will go, and whatever David undertakes, she will plunge her hands into it with him, to the shoulder, to the heart. But she was not happy when he left Llewelyn. She felt him broken in two, and is certain now that he is healed. Should we question her knowledge, because it is a child's knowledge? Children are guided by God. I am willing to trust where she trusts."

  And I where Cristin trusted, though I did not say that, either. So I went from her comforted, since I loved both Llewelyn and David, the one with every reason, the other against almost all reason. Are we not all in some measure children? And should we question what we know as children know?

  Godred ap Ivor was in the stables when we went to saddle up for departure. I had seen little of him while we were in Denbigh, which suited me well, and yet to some degree made me uneasy, so far was it from his old usage of me. True, his pursuit of me had passed through many changes, from his youthful calculation that my privilege with Llewelyn might be made to advance his career, and his shameless dangling of Cristin before me as bait to that end, through his malice and offence at finding us able and resolute to love in abstinence where he found it easy to gorge without love, to his realisation that he had a better and sharper weapon, and his persecution of her, so long a wife neglected and misprized, with an unsparing lust now loathsome to her, until he got her with child not for love, but in my despite. But it was common to all these phases that where I was, there he would follow me if he could, with his fondling fingers and insinuating voice, dropping poisoned honey. Now, unless chance threw us in each other's way, he let me alone, only watching narrowly from a distance. Since his wife miscarried and his son was born dead, the small pinpricks of his venom, though he used them still, afforded him no relief. His long hatred had corroded his being so deep there was no fit expression for it within his scope, and he was waiting for his hour of tremendous revenge.

  But if he did not haunt me now, neither did he avoid me. He turned from the pony he was saddling, and his flaxen hair against the dappled shoulder showed in ashen pallor, more grey than fair. I could never look him in the face without being reminded how like we were in our differentness, though he was taller, and still comely, and had been bright and debonair in his youth, and I was swart and dark and plain. As two carvers may copy the same model, and produce two alien stone images, yet each true to the original, so we both mirrored the father we shared, of whom he was the true mintage, and I the bastard.

  "You're away then," he said, and showed his even teeth in a narrow smile. "There'll be changed times about the court from now on, now he's got his princess at last. Your nose will be out of joint." And when I made him only a brief greeting in reply, he watched me over the pony's neck with light, malignant eyes, and grinned without mirth. "After so many years so close in his confidence and favour, you'll feel the cold. He's got himself a closer confidante now, and has better than music in his bed-chamber."

  There was never any profit in answering him, he kept his tongue always just short of public offence, though always insinuating foulness. So I merely said something empty about having no fears for my employment as long as the promising spate of lawsuits cast up by the war continued, and went about my own saddling.

  "But I'm forgetting," he said softly at my back, "you're in favour with the princess, too. A double assurance is good! I tell you, Samson, my friend, they've set you an example. Have I not been holding up marriage to you for years as the only estate for a sensible man? If my wedded happiness could not convince you," he said, grinning like a famished wolf, "the prince's should win you over. Find yourself a wife, Samson—a beautiful gentle wife like my Cristin. Only not barren," he said, suddenly in a breathy whisper from a shut throat. "Get one able to carry your son full-time, and bring him into the world alive…" He strangled on the end, and turning, flung away silently among the bustle in the stable-yard, and left me stricken to stone.

  I could not go from Denbigh and leave things so. I sought out Cristin, where she was busy with the little girls, dressing the younger ones for the day, and braiding Margaret's long hair.

  "You need not fret," said Cristin calmly, when she understood what was on my mind. "Godred is not mad, he intends me no harm. If you have no other warranty of that, you have his own self-interest. He has a good office and some influence here in David's service, and I am the privileged companion of David's wife. How long would he keep his place and his easy living if he did me any hurt? Or his life and liberty, for that matter?"

  "With such a load of hatred in him," I said, "he may some day forget even his own interests for the pleasure of sating it, and you here within his reach, and I far away."

  "No," she said with certainty, "not Godred! Never! That is one thing he never forgets. Hatred can wait its turn, if it threatens his comfortable bed and fat table, and the money in his pouch. Besides, it is not me he hates the worst. He has ceased even to use his tongue on me. I do not matter enough to him now to be persecuted. Godred has done with me, except as his body-servant, the mender of his clothes and fetcher and carrier of his wants. I wish I could be as sure he will never attempt anything against you! You matter to him altogether too much. You are the shadow on his self-esteem, the spot on his skin that he scrubs and gouges at, and cannot scrub away. Guard yourself, Samson, wherever he is. No, I know you are not afraid of him, but I am in earnest. Do not be with him but among people. Never alone!"

  "He never seeks me out now," I said, "as he used to. Perhaps I am making too much of a moment of spleen."

  "He has had
little chance lately," said Cristin. "In England it was my one consolation that you were out of his reach. And even after the peace was made, there was no visiting between the prince's household and ours. But now they're reconciled there'll be the old easy in-and-out between them, David's people and Llewelyn's rubbing shoulders freely every few weeks. Within a month we're to come to the prince at Aber."

  She was gazing at me very earnestly as she said it, frowning at the risk she saw in this free mingling, but then she drew breath softly, and so did I, seeing the sweet reverse of that danger. She said again: "You need not fret. My bed is with the children, close to Elizabeth's chamber. There he never has any call to come. With five of them to care for, I'm seldom anywhere else, and even if Nest takes my place, and I sleep in my own chamber, he never troubles me. He has plenty of other beds, as he always had, mine only chills him to the bone. You need not fear for me. You can go in peace."

  "Before the new year," I said, "you will come after us to Aber. It is only a very short while. God be praised!" I said, very low, and "God be praised!" said Cristin in her turn almost silently, and smiled.

  We came over the high, rolling hills of Rhos towards evening, but before the sun was low, and so to the crossing on the Conway at Caerbun. A mellow afternoon it was, the westward sky all soft and misty gold, and the colours of the forests like fading flames, as we emerged upon a grassy crest, and saw the silver coil of the river below us, coming from the south and widening before our eyes into tidal water. Thus, from above, we could see the pale tints of the sand under the silver, and the deep blue-green of the channels where the salt sea mingled, and beyond the valley the high mountains soared, fold upon fold and peak behind peak, all gilded with that molten western light that dropped out of the sky like tears from the eye of a veiled but splendid sun. They were like a great army drawn up in battle array, with no break in the wall of their lances, or like a giant castle of bronze and steel, impregnable, without gates. To us they were home. We knew the ways in, where no way showed, and had the password that opened the invisible portals. To her, born in Kenilworth in the rich lowlands of England, raised in the cloister of Montargis in the green, civilised pastures of France, God knows what they were, but it was wonderful. She was the first to rein in, and sit and gaze, and all we drew aside and left those two together, waiting, as he waited, and with the same agony and rapture, for her to speak.