The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  Afterwards, in hall among the whole household, everything went as it always went, yet with a kind of secret and ceremonious wonder, as if we played a pageant of our own daily life, with redder torches, richer laughter, sweeter music and stronger wine than ever graced meal in hall on working days. Until the prince and princess, surely at her instance, withdrew early to their own chamber. And there, I think, in his bed, in his arms, on his heart, there she told him.

  It was he himself who told me, and never knew that I needed no telling. I think he was in great need to open his heart to someone, for he was so full of joy that he could not contain it alone, and as in older days the stars of our shared birth drew him to me. I had still a small room close to theirs, and I lay long awake, for their sake exultant and fearful and grateful, taking to myself a morsel of his burden and his blessing even before he offered it. And I was in no way astonished when my door opened, and in the light of my tiny lamp I saw him come silently within, and shut out the world behind him. He had a woollen gown wrapped about his nakedness, and above its high collar his face looked strangely young and in great awe. Fine, abrupt bones he had, that took the light and caused him to shine in outlines of gold, and the close-clipped traces of beard he wore only drew those lines in softer, broader strokes and mellowed their sharpness. His eyes, which were always the soul of his face, shone huge and dark, with a profound brilliance under their brown depths. He was fifty-two years old, and I had good reason to know it, being day for day the same age, and I would have sworn this man was new to the burning maturity of thirty years, and the blessed burdens of marriage and fatherhood. Such illusions the night commands, and the little lamps of night light up for us.

  "Are you waking, like me?" he said in a whisper, and came to my bedside, as I rose among the covers, and stood looking down at me with that rapt smile I saw on his lips once before, on his marriage-day. "I am too full to lie still. I have left her sleeping," he said, seeing how I gazed at him. "She will not miss me. She has company, the nearest and dearest wife could have or desire. Our child sleeps with her. Oh, Samson, Eleanor is with child!"

  With all my heart I gave him joy, and made room for him on the edge of the brychan beside me. He had little need of words from me, so many welled up from within him to his wonder and her praise.

  "All that beauty and bravery and generosity," he said, "will be repeated to the world's gain. Oh, Samson, I feel myself enhanced and diminished both, diminished and comforted. Why should I dare hope to do all things, alone, to make a nation in one lifetime? I am only man, and fallible, it is time I admitted it, and now I may, for there will be a future, and it belongs to another generation, and will be shaped by other hands. It does not matter if my hands grow feeble. I will cede my rights and my burdens into my son's hands without reluctance, and never grudge him his battles and his triumphs. What I have failed of achieving, he will achieve, or his son after him."

  I said, and truly, that now he was more than ever justified in standing by the treaty that was the best protection Wales had, and all his arduous patience and faithfulness under provocation was vindicated.

  "I know it," he said. "There was never any other way possible, and not only for my sworn word and honour, but for the preservation of what is left to us. I am bound, but God grant that before my boy is grown, he need not be bound. He has pledged no fealty, sealed no treaty. He will take his own way, and in as far as I can prepare the ground for him, I will do it. I will serve as long and as humbly as I must, and stand down when I should, ungrudging, if I can see a better man to come. The great-grandson of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, the grandson of Earl Simon de Montfort, Eleanor's son—how can he be less than glorious?"

  Had it been any other man who so left himself out of the reckoning, I tell you, I would have been certain he did so only in the assurance that another would reprove and repair the omission. But with him that was not so, for he had always this rare humility that had no falsity in it, but, was experienced from the heart. And I felt no need to say to him what my own heart knew, that the son of Llewelyn ap Griffith would have the seeds of splendour in him even had his mother been much less than the jewel she was.

  "You may yet find yourself nursing a daughter," I said, to draw him a little nearer to the earth. But he only laughed silently.

  "And I should be sorry for that? Then she will make some discerning king a most imperial queen. And she will have brothers to follow her."

  "One brother," I said, thinking of those four of whom he was the second, and the great trouble and loss the other three had caused him between them. "One will be enough, so he come lusty and strong into the world." But at that, too, he only smiled.

  "Ah, but her sons will be true brothers, and stand by the heir as extra arms for sword and shield. How could she bear small and envious children? Oh, Samson," he said, "we have waited three years for this sign from God, and neither of us ever said word about the waiting, never until now. And truth to tell, I have been so glad of her, and so greedy, I seldom thought of children, and might have felt some jealousy if I had, yet now that I know—something I never thought possible, and how to contain it I have still to learn!—now that I know, she is twice as dear even as before."

  It was wonderful how this promise of an heir put new life and heart into us all, from the highest to the lowest, how it made endurance seem easy, and the pinpricks of provocation light to bear. But Llewelyn did not let pass any occasion for just complaint, all the same, for now it was his future heir's prerogative that was slighted, and not merely his own. He wrote to Edward plainly concerning the frustration he had suffered at Montgomery, and the scandal of the loss of his writ, making it clear that he had no intention of countenancing an appearance in December, nor any faith in Master Ralph de Fremingham's ability to produce the writ, since there was no conceivable legal reason why it should be in his possession. He required, instead, that proper enquiry should be made for it, or for the record of its issue, where such records should be expected to be, in the royal chancery.

  Early in November Edward replied at length to this letter, in a strain which was becoming familiar to us, so civil and anxious to please—though of course unable!— that I could see between the lines not only the droop of his left eyelid, but also the small, ironic curl of his lips that never quite became a smile. He opened as he always opened, by vowing fervently that he had faithfully considered the matters put to him, and would most happily do what Llewelyn asked of him, if he could do so without wronging anyone else, that he felt for the prince, and that his intent was, as it always had been, to observe the treaty of Aberconway faithfully, so far as he was able. But he could not, on that account, do less than justice to his barons and magnates, who also had rights.

  "More, it seems," said Llewelyn, "than I have." But he said it now with an even voice and an unfurrowed brow, even with disdain.

  He had talked these matters over earnestly, said Edward, with his justices and council. Greatly as he longed to accede to the prince's wishes, he was advised that Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn had been perfectly correct in saying that as a baron of the king he was not obliged to answer without a writ. Another search of the rolls only confirmed this, and there was no way round it. For though they had hunted assiduously through all the records of writs issued, the original writ said to have been sworn out by the prince could not be found. And as the case could not proceed at all without the issue of a writ, without gross injustice to Griffith, there was nothing to be done but swear out a new writ and begin again. The prince, he said, with sad sympathy and mild reproach, must not resent the necessity.

  To my way of thinking it was a cruel and insolent letter, meant to sting, but its point was blunted by Llewelyn's calming happiness, which strengthened his purpose and resolution rather than weakening them, but armoured him against humiliation and insult.

  "He may bait me as he will," he said, "but he shall not gain anything by it, neither a step in retreat nor a spark to amuse him." And for the Christmas season he let this matter
lie, and we went with high hearts to Aber to keep the feast, and sent messengers to bid David and Elizabeth join us there.

  They came riding in from Denbigh some days before the Nativity, having heard Eleanor's news, and Elizabeth flew to embrace the princess and give her joy, and thereafter hardly left her, being so full of good advice and sisterly confidences concerning childbirth and children that the days were not long enough to accommodate all she had to say. She was by five years the younger of the two, and yet had eight children of her own, and what she did not know of bearing and raising them was not worth knowing, but all was offered with such glowing and childlike goodwill and such visible reassurance and vigour and joy that Eleanor loved and bore with her, smiling. She was in serene health, the sickness she had suffered and hidden in the first days was gone, and her beauty was radiant, assured and glorious during all the time that she carried her child.

  Elizabeth had brought with her only her youngest daughter, eleven months old, leaving the rest of that lovely tribe with their covey of nurses at Denbigh. It went against the grain with her to go anywhere without them, but in a hard winter it was something of an undertaking to transport so many little ones about the country. Therefore the only attendant she had with her was Cristin, and to complete my joy, Cristin without Godred. David had brought but a small company, and left all his knights at home. For this brief while I could brush sleeves with my love about the maenol as we went about our duties, and feel no need to look round for Godred's lurking, peering face. No need, either, to keep from looking round, for loathing of the bitter spark I should see flare in his eyes when they met mine. It was a good Christmas.

  I said to her when we met in hall that first day that David, for all he had given his brother joy most affectionately, and kissed Eleanor's hand and cheek with reverent tenderness, was somewhat quiet and grave, liable to fall into deep thought, and thought that darkened his countenance.

  "We've seen him moody before this," said Cristin. "He may well be weary, he's been in the saddle more than at home these last weeks, up and down into the south and the west, visiting his nephews in Iscennen, and Meredith ap Owen's sons in Cardigan, and I know not what others besides."

  "For what purpose?" I questioned, astonished, for though doubtless he felt some family affection for those young men in the south, his dead sister's sons, yet it was David's way to expect them to come to him, rather than go running after them.

  "To compare his grievances with theirs, I suspect," said Cristin with a shadowed smile, "though I doubt if he'll get much comfort that way, or they, either. There isn't a chief in the Welsh lands who is not burning with his wrongs, and when they lay two fires together, who knows how far the blaze may spread? The sixteenth of this month he should have made an appearance in the Chester shire-court, where Venables is still encouraged to sue against him for Hope. Grey is justiciar there again, and all the Middle Country is taking that as a sign the noose will tighten from now on."

  "And he defaulted?" I said.

  "He paid no heed whatever. He was somewhere in the west then, he got back only in time to ride with Elizabeth on this visit. And half of him he has left somewhere far distant, occupied with other matters than celebrating Christmas," she said, and shook her head anxiously. "And yet so quiet and so contained! We have not seen him in a fury but once in the past six weeks. Time was, he would rage over his mangled forests, and the many exactions he considered illegal, and being cited into Chester for this due and that, and a hundred things besides. Not all for himself!" she said, and her smile was wry and sweet, for she suffered, as I did, from an old and incurable affection for him. "Lately I've heard him cry out but once. I think you will hear of it. I am sure Llewelyn will."

  I asked her: "What was it happened?" And I chilled as I listened for her answer, for when had David been tolerant and patient, and withheld instant and fiery outcry when his prerogative was infringed by so much as the touch of a finger? And I saw him for myself sombre, withdrawn and mute.

  "They have killed two of his men," she said. "A party went into Chester market for salt and honey, and to sell wool. There was some quarrelling there between them and some of the justiciar's people, but they kept their tempers and set out for home, and were over the border by Hope when the English waylaid and set on them. There was an English man-at-arms killed in the squabble. David's men drew off, but there were more of the English, and they cut out two of the Welsh and had them away into the shire, prisoners. Murder, they made it in the shire-court. They hanged them. By Welsh law it would not have been murder but homicide, and a blood-price would have salved it. But David's men are dead. And they were men he valued. And their widows cry to him."

  I was sick, for however the Welsh fall apart into warring clans, however they fail of comprehending anything larger than their kinship and their tribe, within those bounds they cleave by their own, and every death cuts into the flesh of all. And David, as in my heart I knew, was Welsh in the old way, for all his English upbringing, and the many ways he had been tugged by his many affections.

  "And he so still!" I said, seeing him even then at the high table, inclining to right and to left and making civil reply, with the sweet veiled smile upon his face.

  "They are not the first," she said, "to be slain for offences we would have

  compounded rather to heal. And not all in his cantrefs. There are many with the same burning grievance. And he, I doubt he has them all by heart." She watched him as I was watching him, with her great, iris-grey eyes that darkened so when most she was wrung. "Samson, he may speak out to you, who does so now to none of us. If you can bring him to confession, do it for his sake. Not that he needs absolution, God knows he's been out of all nature virtuous and forbearing. But he does greatly need to shed whatever this load is upon his heart."

  "Does he not confide in his wife?" I asked. And Cristin smiled her pardonable scorn for such a question.

  "He takes nothing to her but what is sweet, open and gay. He'd no more cast a shadow willingly upon her than he would upon his children. He may drag them all into the blackness of the pit with him yet, and they'd go, and never think twice. But that's another matter."

  I said that if he offered me any chance I would do what I could with him, but if he had it in mind to unburden himself to the prince, Llewelyn might well do more and better than I.

  Howbeit, David kept his counsel and his ominous calm all through the Christmas feast, awaiting his best occasion, for he did not speak until the day, well into January, when Llewelyn got word from Reginald de Grey in Chester of a sudden and fresh distraint upon his property, in satisfaction of Robert of Leicester's long-discredited claim for his goods lost by wreck. If Llewelyn blazed up at this letter, he did so but briefly and hotly, and then recorded the new offence grimly among those matters he had still to take up, not with Grey, but with Grey's master. David, instead, burned into a fierce and corrosive silence, and made occasion, after we left the hall that night, to shut himself in with Llewelyn and me in the prince's private audience chamber. He had found the moment he sought, I knew then that he had come to speak, not to keep silence.

  "This matter of your goods taken in Chester," said David, standing tall and stiff over the glowing brazier, and himself burning almost as fiercely, "is only the latest outrage of many, you know it as well as I. And do you believe Grey ever took up this persecution afresh, without direct orders from Edward? He would not dare, after such clear orders went to Chester earlier, to cease distraints and refer Robert to the Welsh court, where they admitted the case belonged. No, Edward has held this goad in abeyance for a while, until it suited him to use it again, and it is his hand that has acted against you now. And what will you do? How long will you go on enduring wrong after wrong? And watching us endure worse? You at least, within your own principality, are master of your own house, and cannot be arraigned or challenged, cannot see your rights and your lands taken from you, and your tenants robbed and ousted. They are not so lucky in the Middle Country. They have
no such immunity in the south and in the west. We are worse treated than you, and we do nothing. Nothing!"

  "If what I enjoy is immunity," said Llewelyn drily, "it is the strangest immunity ever I heard of. True, no one has yet crossed my borders to meddle within, but enough mischief can be done from without. Still, I grant you I can no longer do anything to help those cantrefs that have passed out of my hands. They are no longer my men in the Middle Country, nor in the south, nor in Cardigan, and I am no longer their lord." He did not say that David, also, was no vassal of his, but David could not help but be reminded whose fault that was. "If you think I do not feel for those who used to be mine," said Llewelyn with warmth, "you are foolish and mistaken. But I have no right now to speak for them or act in their name. Those grievances you have you must take to your own liege lord. I cannot help you."