Fair, Bright, and Terrible

by Kingston, Elizabeth

  “I do not defend your father,” she said, and he knew she was choosing her words carefully, stepping lightly. “But do you not think he called it love for you that forced his hand? He wanted you here.”

  “He wanted the lands and titles, the rewards that a king might bestow on a de Lascaux. Advancement of the family name and fortunes, not love, was his concern.”

  “It is cold,” she acknowledged, “and calculated, that he would search a way to make you reach for a power you would otherwise shun. But I know well what it is to wish a thing for a beloved child, and when that child refuses it – how easily reason is lost. It does not mean there is no love there.”

  “Would you do it?” he challenged. “For your son or your daughter, would you lie and deceive and imperil those they love best, only for a chance to force them to become what you want them to be?”

  It almost alarmed him, the arrested look she gave him, the long, long pause before she answered. There seemed a thousand things that passed through her eyes, yet they were still and calm, looking steady in his. “No,” she said at last. “No. I would do that and more to protect them, if I must, but never to change their desires. I might plead and cajole, and beg they will not forget how well I love them.”

  “And if you pleaded for years and still they never heeded you, haps you would not care so much for them.” He shook his head, dismissing that. It made him feel like a sulky child to complain of it, and it did not distress him as much as his brother’s part in it. “It is Simon who deserved better of me.”

  The telltale pinch appeared in her lip. “It is Simon who will profit most from this scheme. Is no wonder he agreed to it.”

  “Nay, Eluned.” He reached out a finger to touch her tight mouth. “In faith I had only to open my eyes to him even once, to see that he…well, to see him at all. But I saw only what I wanted to see, and paid him too little regard.”

  She pressed his hand against her face, turned her lips to kiss his palm and said, “It is my failing too, husband. I have dwelled overlong on my own troubles when I had only to observe him, and consider the matter, to guess a little of their scheming. I am well practiced at finding deceit, when I care to watch for it.”

  A faint sound came from the outer room, so tentative that he would have dismissed it as imagination if Eluned did not turn her attention there. She called out and, with a quick glance to him for approval, told the girl to enter the bedroom.

  It was one of her ladies who carried in a fresh jug of water and asked if they would have wine or ale, and if my lady would dress now and which gown she preferred. He watched in delight as Eluned lifted her chin and waved her hand in a gesture that transformed the blanket she wore into a robe befitting a queen.

  “I would stay abed, Joan, and when you have brought enough refreshment for us to make our meal here, you may leave us until the morrow. If we have need of anything, I will find the servants.”

  The girl was trying her best not to gape in amazement. She nodded finally, and said as though it might change Eluned’s mind, “Lord Morency has arrived at court, my lady, deep in the dark of night.”

  But Eluned showed no surprise at this. “Pray you will discover for me when he returns to Morency. He may carry such messages as I have to send, but I would know if he will remain here at Edward’s side or if he stays only the night.”

  “Three days, my lady. I heard him tell Lord de Bohun, who did answer that the snow may keep many here longer when it comes.”

  “Does it snow?” Eluned asked, suppressing a yawn. She could not have slept more than an hour this morning.

  Robert stirred. “I will study the sky a moment,” he said, dropping a kiss on Eluned’s head and reaching for his tunic.

  Eluned’s broad yawn followed him as he walked behind Joan to the outer room, where servants were bringing plates of food. Robert pulled the tapestry away from the window. There was only a dusting of snow on the ground and the air felt too icy cold for there to be snow today. In the sky he saw only sun and no gray clouds on the horizon.

  When the servants withdrew, he filled a plate with bits of meat and cheese and bread and fruit, unsure of what she might want and so taking a bit of everything. He carried it into the bedroom, burning with curiosity to know why Ranulf of Morency had arrived in the dead of night – and why Eluned seemed already to know all about it.

  But when he came to the bed he found that she had fallen asleep, curled on her side and burrowed into the covers. He held the plate under her nose and poked hopefully at her shoulder, but she did not wake. Thus thwarted from hearing whatever she might know, he stretched out beside her and smiled to think of her declaration that even the king’s army would not drag her from his bed. They would be left undisturbed, by her orders, all this day and night.

  It was enough to watch her sleep, the light of day shifting slowly with the hours over her face. Day and night, awake and asleep, she was his – just as he had longed for through all that glorious summer, and just as he had secretly imagined every day since. No longer was she but a cherished memory, nor a ghost he conjured, but a woman real and whole. With secrets in her heart and sorrow in her past. With lines in her forehead and glints of silver in her hair – and a birthmark on the right of her throat, not the left.

  He did not love the memory any less. But he loved this more.

  He ate, and she slept. He hummed what he could remember of the Welsh air she had taught him when they were young, and she slept. He combed her hair through his fingers and braided it loosely, and still she slept. Finally in the late afternoon as the light was dwindling, after she had turned over and wrapped her arms around him and issued a deep sigh – and continued sleeping – he closed his eyes too.

  When he woke it was full night and he found himself alone in the bed. There was only an instant of alarm before he realized she was there, in a circle of lamplight near the window. As the wild beating of his heart slowed, he saw that she had ink and pen. She was bent over the small table in deep concentration, her ink-splattered fingers carefully scratching words onto the parchment. She seemed to pause often, considering every new word before setting another down.

  She noticed his wakefulness after a while, and her eyes lifted up to him. Such a simple thing, but it was filled with a sudden and breathtaking beauty. She had such lovely eyes, large and gray under heavy lashes that swept a graceful arc in the soft lamplight.

  “It is for Gwenllian,” she said, lifting the page. “I shall send it with her husband.”

  It seemed remarkably short, but he did not say so. Instead, he grinned and stretched and said, “Have you finished it? Then come back to bed, my love.”

  He could not say what was in her face as she looked back at him, for the briefest of moments, before lowering her eyes and saying, “I must wash the ink from my hands.”

  She set aside the parchment and reached for a small jar of oil that she spread over her fingertips, rubbing it in to loosen the ink before she wiped it off with a wet cloth. It was only because he watched so closely that he saw she spent too long at the task. Her hands did not shake, but they moved restlessly. He thought back to what her son William had said to him: there was something between herself, her daughter, and the king. And that things had changed between Eluned and her daughter, in a way that made Gwenllian uneasy and fearful.

  Robert waited to see what Eluned would tell him freely, those restless hands of hers worrying at the ink under her fingernails. But her silence went on too long, so he broke it.

  “You were not surprised to learn Morency is come.” He watched as she twisted the cloth in her hands. “You left the hall in the midst of the revelries. Did you meet him?”

  Her hands stopped. “Not by design,” she said, and now he could not mistake the misgiving in her face. She dropped the cloth into a bowl that sat on the table next to her letter.

  Robert sat up in the bed. She had put the lamp near the clouded window-glass, so that the light was reflected a little, and now she looked at the glow o
f light as she had looked at the stars. Like she could read the story of the world and all its workings there.

  “William told me,” he murmured, ignoring the almost imperceptible flinch at the mention of her son, “that so long as your secrets do not risk his rule of Ruardean, he need not know them. And so I will say to you now, Eluned: I care not what schemes and secrets you may hide, so long as they do not stand between us.”

  “And if it is the telling of it that will stand between us?” She pressed a finger to the surface of the table, and they both watched her fingertip turn white.

  “You need not fear it,” he said. “Eluned. Cariad.” She did not look up. “There is naught you can say will kill my love for you.”

  She looked at him then and her face seemed younger than he had ever seen it, but with eyes older than he could imagine. He could see she wanted contradict him, and also saw her decide that it was futile. There was a sudden and absolute stillness in the room. The faintest wisp of dread began to rise in him, like smoke.

  “Last night I left the hall and went to Roger Mortimer’s room with the intent to kill him.”

  He felt the words fall with a thud inside him, and knew she said it plain and blunt only so he could not claim to mishear her. It left him too stunned and bewildered to do anything more than wait for further explanation. The color was high in her cheeks, a flush that had no place in a room that had seemed to him to become impossibly cold. When moments had passed and he did not reply or look away, she stood.

  Her movement freed him from the dumb astonishment and set his mind to work. He knew her passion well, had savored the lingering taste of it on his tongue for eighteen long years. This was not passion, not a sudden and uncontrollable rage. All her distance for these many months, the careful watchfulness, the ice in her veins – she had been planning this.

  “Why?” he finally asked, and it felt as though he had not used his voice in days.

  “Why.” Her eyes grew bright, the flush in her cheeks deepening. Here was the feeling that had lurked, hidden for all these months. “Because he betrayed Llewellyn, a foul trick that felled a kingdom. Because Wales is lost, Wales is no more, and he will be rewarded with the spoils.” A look of bitterest disgust showed in her face as she looked down at the lamplight, fists tight at her sides. “Because the blood of my countrymen is on his hands, because he lusts after helpless servant girls, because he killed those Welsh boy princes, because I could not bear to think of him alive and well while my uncle is cold in the ground and everything I fought for, everything I loved–”

  She pressed a hand hard to her mouth to stop her rising voice. Her breathing was ragged, her eyes wide, avoiding his. Finally she lowered her hand from her mouth, pulled the heavy robe tight around her, and spoke more calmly. “There is such a hate has lived in me, Robert. Of late I perceive it was but a seed planted many years ago, in that same moment I knew I could not have you. It has grown like a weed in a corner of my heart until it has overgrown all my spirit. Until I am become nothing but anger and despair.”

  He looked at her hands clutching the robe about her, the knuckles white. How different they were, that even in the first moment of their parting he had never thought to hate anyone except, perhaps a little, her husband. “I only drank too much, and fought at Kenilworth, and ran to France.”

  “How lucky for you,” she said, “that you could choose whither you may come and go.”

  The thread of bitterness ran through her voice like a silver sparkling of river far at the bottom of a deep and empty gorge. It froze the tongue in his mouth, warned him off judging a lifetime of circumstance he could not even conceive. It would be easier by far to say nothing more about this.

  But no, he must not be deterred. He had no illusions about the limitations of his own wit. There was more here than he would ever be able to guess. He could only force his benumbed mind to the most important things.

  “Does Mortimer live still?”

  “He does.”

  “Will Morency…” He had heard the rumors, the whispers about her daughter’s husband. “Will your son-in-law kill him in your stead?”

  She gave a choked laugh. “Nay, it was he who stopped me.”

  He put aside the crop of questions that sprang up at this remark. Mortimer’s sins were only part of what drove her, he was sure. He thought and thought, made himself do what he should have done with his brother. He pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms about them and considered. He thought over everything William had said to him. The image of her on her knees before the king was burned into his memory.

  “What was there between you and your daughter, and the king? More than just the marriage the king made and you did not approve?” She seemed frozen, staring without seeing at the outer edge of the circle of light, where it gleamed against the window. “Tell me, Eluned.”

  It was something in her quiet breathing that told him she had not expected this, and something in the way she would not look at him that said she was fighting against tears. He wished she would come to him, sit next to him on the bed, but she looked rooted to the spot. She took a long, slow, deep breath and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “The king suspected my Welsh sympathies, and feared I would join the force of Ruardean with Llewellyn’s army. He thought I meant to be a part of the rebellion. And so he married my daughter to his favorite, that it might constrain me from acting and that Ranulf might learn if I plotted against the English crown. It was clever, but I…” She pressed her lips together a moment, judging her words. “I had spent years in making plans for my daughter that had naught to do with marriage. She was betrothed to old Morency, did you know?”

  He shook his head, at a loss for what other plans she might have had for the girl if not marriage, but content to know she would tell him.

  “Old Morency – Aymer was his name. He was cruel to all, but especially to his wives. He had already outlived three, each younger and healthier than the last. I objected to the match, not least because Gwenllian was only a girl of ten. But Walter said an angel had visited his dreams to tell him she must be married to this man without delay. I could convince him only to marry her by proxy, to keep her from him as long as possible, until she was older.” She looked up at him briefly, a quick and searching glance that asked him to remember how little she herself had liked being married young. “So he was her husband when he was murdered in his bed, and I made the claim that the lands which were her marriage portion should not go to Ranulf, who had killed him and who was named heir to Morency. There were details enough to keep the lawyers and clerics debating all those years and so long as it was in dispute, it was easy to claim she could not marry.”

  “And Walter?” he asked.

  “He was in the Holy Land then, and cared for nothing but his visions. Already had I arranged that Gwenllian might be made to learn such defenses as may protect her.” Now she lifted her chin in that old gesture, thrusting it out to dare the world to tell her she was wrong. “She learned the sword, and studied battle tactics, and in secret led the best men of Ruardean.”

  He could feel his mouth fall open slightly, his amazement too great to hide entirely. He only stared and held his breath to suppress the astonished laughter that threatened. If he laughed, she would think he mocked her. But it was only that it was so like Eluned, to come up with a scheme so bold and unexpected.

  “Have I not said you dreamed you no small dreams?” He put a hand through his hair, and let himself smile a little in wonder. “Had she any skill at the sword?” he finally asked.

  “More than even I dreamed possible,” she answered with an unsuppressed pride.

  He tried to imagine it, that little girl from his memories grown into such an improbable woman. And her mother, who fought to keep her unmarried, educate her as a man, all of it certainly in secrecy – what had it cost Eluned, to arrange and sustain it all? He would ask her, one day. But not today.

  “What were these plans for her, then,” he asked instead, “tha
t were interrupted when the king insisted she marry? You ensured she had defenses enough against any man, even one as villainous as Ranulf.”

  She looked at him a long time, and he could not decide if her eyes asked for pity, or pitied him a little. “Edward was right, cariad,” she said at last. “I planned a war against him, for the freedom of Wales. Llewellyn was to lead the country, and Gwenllian was to lead the army.”

  When Robert said nothing in response to this extraordinary statement, she turned her eyes back to the reflection of light in the window. “She used to dream of it, you know. There was another Gwenllian long ago, a legend who led an army against the Norman invasion. My Gwenllian wanted to be that. There was a time she spoke of little else. I had only meant her to learn defense, but then it became so much more. I should have seen…”

  “Seen what?”

  She shook her head a little, and a barely discernable crease appeared between her brows. “It was a youthful passion. There were other things too she wanted to learn, just as eagerly, but I did not let myself see it. It was my own misjudgment to think she would always want to lead the rebellion. When the moment came to act, she refused it. Though the king had her married by that time, still she might have declared for Wales. And so did I say it to her. Yet she refused.”

  He could hear, clear and distinct, the sting of betrayal in her words. It surprised him, after what she had seen in the last twelvemonth.

  “You watched as the last Welsh rebel leader was torn to pieces,” he said quietly. “Surely you must thank God that neither of you were part of such a plot.”

  “Never did I dream such a fate would meet those who fought against Edward. In my worst imaginings, she only died in battle.”

  She said it so simply. As her words settled in the room, his blood chilled by degrees.

  “You have no illusions what war is,” he said in disbelief, unable to hide how it appalled him. “You remember the carnage of Evesham, what they did to Montfort. Yet you would give your daughter to war?”