Fair, Bright, and Terrible

by Kingston, Elizabeth

  She turned her eyes to him in a hard stare. She looked him up and down, unclenched her jaw at last, and spoke in a thoughtful tone. “You condemn it.”

  “I do.”

  “Because I am a woman, or because she is?” Her head tilted a little to the side, her brows lifting in inquiry. “If I send my son to fight for his lands and his people, am I an abomination? For how many fathers have survived battle, only to throw their sons into the jaws of war?” She turned her face again to the window, and the lines in her forehead were etched in high relief. “Valor and honor. Unnatural and heartless. Choose which you call it and I will tell you the sex you describe.”

  If he had been capable of finding words, he did not know what he might have flung at her. But he was speechless, his mind grasping for a way to articulate his outrage, and that saved him. In his silence there was only what she had said – valor and honor – and the resignation in her face as she seemed to wait for his protest.

  But he could not protest. She was right. He was angry only because she was not wrong. He loved Kit’s son dearly, could not think of the boy without a gentle pang in his heart, but when one day little Robin would ride off to fight in battle – and he would, of course – Robert would not condemn the father who sent him, or the king who ordered it. He would not even question it. Duty, honor, and glory. He could say to her that such was reserved for men alone and that women should be protected from it at all costs, but that would only invite disdain. She was Eluned, who scorned what the world expected of her and of her daughter, and who would say only a fool thought anyone could truly be protected from anything.

  “It was doomed,” he said, the only honest objection to be made. “You would send her to fight a war that could only end in defeat, and put her neck in a noose.”

  Nothing in her expression changed, but the blood drained from her face. She did not look at him.

  “She said that very thing.” A long moment of silence, a faint lift of her shoulder. “I say she doomed all hope by refusing to fight. We will never agree. But hear me: only two years before, Llewellyn moved against Edward and I did not aid him, nor commit Gwenllian to the fight. The time was not ripe, and it failed. There was only one perfect moment to strike, and it passed us by. That is what I see. My daughter will ever see it differently.”

  His eyes fell to the parchment where she had written her message to be carried to Gwenllian. “What message do you send to her?”

  Eluned turned her face up to the ceiling, a deep breath and her eyes blinking back the tears he knew she did not wish to shed. “Only that she was right to send her husband to me. That her best-loved cousin spoke of his devotion to her in the hour of his death. That I will come to her soon, and hold her children in my arms. That I love her more than my own breath.”

  She did not move, blinking up at the ceiling, her swallow traveling the graceful length of her neck. Robert thought again as he watched her of what William had said, of everything she had told him. He had known she was bold, had loved her for it from the first. But he had never imagined her plotting rebellion, giving her daughter to war, planning to murder a man with her own hands for revenge. He remembered a pretty picture of a young lover lost. It was every bit as foolish as how he had thought of his brother all these years, and his father: as though they did not exist except as he remembered them, as though they did not live outside his imagination at all. What a blind fool, to think they remained unchanged and waiting, like puppets put in a box between performances.

  Eluned looked again at the window, the reflection of light in the glass. She put a hand to it and watched the thin sheen of frost melt under her palm.

  “I have told you that losing you was the making of me,” she said. “And you see now, who I am become.” She turned to face him, her hand falling to her side. “It was not only the lack of you at my side. It was the losing of you – the way I was made to choose and the way I have been made to live. It is not like water that is made ice, and can thaw to be what it was. It is like iron made into steel, and beaten into a new shape. It cannot be unmade.”

  Something stopped him from rising, going forward to embrace her. It rattled at the back of his head, the sort of troubling thought he had always disregarded in favor of his own more agreeable version of things. Now he let himself think it, and say it.

  “It was only in service to your plans that you did consent to marry me.”

  She hesitated only a moment before she nodded, a slow and silent assent. “To bring me to court, where Mortimer was like to be. I thought you would be changed as I was, after so much time.” She bit her lips together to still their trembling. “But I knew you would still be a good man. I knew that could never change.”

  It did not cut as deep as he expected, to know she had not married him out of affection. It was far more difficult to accept how far was this woman from the girl he had loved so long. All these things that had changed her… No, she could not be unmade.

  No more could he stop loving her.

  He held his hand out to her. When she stepped forward and took it, he said, “Only lately have I watched you sleep and thought how the memory of you is nothing to having you here, warm and living and real, in my bed.”

  She tightened her fingers around his. “She is not completely lost, the girl you loved. But I cannot promise, cariad, that I will ever be who I once was. I will try.” Her smile was slight and sad and heartbreaking. “I miss her too.”

  He brought her hand to his lips and warmed her fingers with his breath. She stood before him as she was, with no apologies, no promises. She gave him the truth of herself, and he could only give her the same.

  “The first thing ever you said to me was that it mattered less which belief I held, than that I believed in a thing enough to die for it. And I chose then, in the moment you said it, what I believed.” He put his hand to her face, the same way he had touched her in the dark when he thought it would be the last time. “It is you I believe in, Eluned. Even when you do not. From that day to this one, and for all the days left to me, I believe in you.”

  Chapter 13

  The Terrible

  Eluned was relieved to know that Robert too wanted to be away from court as soon as was possible. At his urging, she came with him to meet with his brother and Burnell, the king’s right hand, and learned everything there was to know about the lands that would be granted to him. The division of Wales would be set forth by law in weeks and instead of feeling only fury and bitterness to see how it would be doled out to English lords, she had as well the satisfaction that one piece of it would fall into her hands. And she could not deny her pride in knowing that Robert would become the first Baron de Lascaux, lord of the new principality of Darian.

  She squeezed his hand when she heard the name. “Darian is a Welsh word. It means shield. Protection.”

  There would be access to the sea, which would facilitate the wine imports. Even better, they were formally granted Eluned’s childhood home of Dinwen, and they could easily go there now. Though other visitors to the court would wait a bit longer to scatter, she and Robert prepared to leave only a week behind Ranulf’s departure. While Robert drank and dined with her son-in-law, Eluned searched out Nan to tell the girl she would have a place in their household and need no longer suffer Mortimer’s advances. The girl blushed and stammered her thanks, but said there was a stable boy who wanted nothing more than to marry her, and he was not like to want to move deeper into Wales.

  Eluned did not press the matter. She only said that Nan and her stable boy were welcome if ever they wanted a new home. Then she went to find Robert’s brother and talked with him throughout the evening meal about his father, Simon’s hopes for his sons, and his own ambitions. It surprised her, how willing she was to believe the good in him. That was Robert’s influence. Without it, she would not have seen the genuine eagerness in Simon, the way he so clearly wished to know his brother better, the surprisingly little greediness in any of his desires.

  “If
we go to Dinwen now, we will be there for the spring planting,” she said to Robert as they lay in bed that night. “Haps I will ask Gwenllian if she will come to us there, to visit. Your brother has said he will come in summer with his sons, so that their education may begin.”

  “His education, or his son’s?” asked Robert, looking up from where he rested his head against her breast.

  She smiled. “Both, though God willing it is only his son will ever rule there, should we have none of our own. Tonight he assured me that the succession has been approved by the king and written into – why do you laugh?”

  “Nay, not for that,” protested Robert, pulling himself up to the pillow. “I only thought that while you spoke of grave matters of succession with my brother, I watched your daughter’s husband threaten Sir Hawse’s future generations. Hawse drank too much and said something unkind about…”

  A dark red flush came to his neck. “About me?” she asked, but then remembered it was Ranulf who had threatened the man. “Ah no, he insulted Gwenllian?”

  Robert nodded. “I think he did not realize Ranulf sat so near to him. Barely had he declared that she would make a better carthorse than a wife – your pardon, my love, they are his vile words and not mine – than Ranulf had slipped a dagger beneath his ballocks. I have never seen a man sip his ale so calm while his companion sweated and stuttered and dared not move a hair. And Ranulf said only that Hawse must never speak of the lady of Morency again in his life, unless he cared to lose first his manhood, and then his life at the point of Ranulf’s sword.”

  Eluned absorbed this description, relishing the picture he painted and furious at the insult to her daughter. Mostly, though, she grappled with a new and wholly unexpected emotion that accompanied the image of Ranulf of Morency defending her daughter with his famed blade.

  “God preserve me,” she said, as startled by the thought as by the giggle that suddenly escaped her. “I may actually come to like the man.”

  Robert’s look of mild disbelief caused her burbling of delight to gradually become shouts of laughter. His growing smile only made her laugh harder, until she was gasping and tears sparkled at the corners of her eyes. His rumble of laughter joined hers, and she thought there was no sweeter music in all the world.

  Oh, she remembered this kind of incautious joy. She remembered now what it was to be naked and carefree and happy. To be warm in winter, to know that spring would come again.

  She had expected to be overwhelmed to return to Dinwen after so many years but it only felt comfortable, and right, and good. The people greeted her warmly, though only a few of the oldest servants remembered her from her girlhood. When she spoke to them in Welsh – and more, when Robert greeted them with the few words of it he had learned – they breathed easy. When they were assured that until King Edward proclaimed otherwise, their grievances would be heard and judged according to Welsh and not English law, they gave their hearts completely to their new lord and lady.

  April brought with it the little blue flowers, wood bells that spread like a carpet across the ground in every direction. She took him to a place where they bloomed as far as the eye could see, an isolated clearing with trees all around, and there she laid back among the flowers and made love to him in the sunlight. Every day, more and more, there was hope in her breast and dreams in her head – and none of it felt new and different, but old and comfortable. She was meant to be thus, and if she ever worried that it could not be so easy to slip back into a skin she had shed so long ago, she reminded herself that he believed in her. He believed in her.

  When the message came, she and Robert were in deep discussion, trying to recall what Aaron of Lincoln had ever said about the methods used in England to persecute his people. “Be assured they will employ similar laws against the Welsh to prevent them having equal power to the English,” she said with a sigh. “Except they cannot say the Welsh are not Christian. We can hope that is some protection.”

  They had only got as far as determining which of the nearby churchmen were more likely to be unsympathetic to the Welsh when the messenger was announced. He brought word from Simon, who was leaving the king’s court sooner than he had planned. He was traveling to see their father, who was ailing unto death.

  “You think I should go to him, too,” said Robert when they were alone.

  She heard the question in it, how he wanted her to tell him why he should or should not go. But her only thought was the selfish one, that she did not want him to leave her side. There lived in her an irrational terror that he would not return. She forced herself to dismiss it as superstition, saying, “And you think he lies and says he is near to death, in hopes you will come.”

  Robert shrugged, the wry smile curling his lip as he looked away. “Haps.”

  “But it is Simon who has said it,” she pointed out. “And if your father were to deceive you into coming to him, he would not think his own poor health would be the best way to bring you to him.”

  He gave a huff of a laugh. “Now in your wisdom you will ask me which I would regret more – to go to him, or not to go? But I have no answer to that.”

  She put her arms around him. “Then I shall be very old and wise and tell you that the answer will come in the morning, do you sleep well on the question.”

  So he did, and in the morning he said he would go. When she replied that she would come with him, he stopped her words with a deep kiss, pressing her into the pillows and leaving her breathless. “Cariad,” he said. “Never would I forgive myself if I took you away from here when every day brings a hundred new decisions that will affect these people who are all your concern. Stay.”

  She stayed. It was nearly three weeks until she had word from him that his father had had last rites, and Robert would soon return to her. I have not spoken to him of his deceit, for I do not want to speak also of my many years of defiance, he wrote. A lifetime of strife cannot be reversed in an hour, even if it be the last hour, and no more can he or I be made different from what we have always been. But I am glad I have come.

  William had brought her this message in the last leg of its journey to Dinwen. Her son had come here after leaving court, on his way to Ruardean. She sat with him in the small solar one morning, distracted by how much he looked like his father and answering his queries about the management of the Ruardean estate, when a mud-covered man burst into the room.

  “Where is Robert?” she asked, her voice absurdly polite and calm while her heart stopped dead in her chest. For she recognized this man as one of Robert’s, who had ridden off with him a month ago and who should not be here without his lord. He was panting and covered in mud, and she could not rightly hear what he said for the panic rising in her.

  He was saying Mortimer and something about murder and hostages and retaliation. She could understand nothing at all in the world, except that Robert was not here. Finally she forced air into her chest and leaned forward to grasp the man by the ears, to hold him steady and silence his babbling. She spoke her words like a curse. “You must tell me plain if my husband has died.”

  His eyes went wide and he shook his head. “Nay, lady, not dead.”

  Blood seemed to flow into her heart again, all in a rush. Only when William touched her shoulder did she release the man, who sat back and rubbed his ears as he looked at her in astonishment. She stood, fighting the weakness in her legs, turning from them and demanding composure from herself. Oh Mary make me brave, she prayed. Let me not be undone.

  “Tell me,” she turned and said when she had command of herself, “and waste no words.”

  “Barely more than a day’s ride from here, we were overtaken by Roger Mortimer’s men. They accuse my lord of a plot to murder Mortimer. They claim he employed a servant who tampered with the saddle on Mortimer’s horse and when that failed, put poison in his wine. The servant was caught in the attempt.”

  She could feel her son’s bewildered look on the side of her face, like heat from a nearby fire. She did not take her eyes
from the muddy man who spoke.

  “Why does Mortimer believe it was my lord husband? What proof has he?”

  “Lady,” he said in a strained voice, “the servant was betrothed to a girl who was known to be in possession of a ring that Mortimer himself saw on your hand. Mortimer believed it was given to the servant as payment for the deed, and the girl was questioned. When asked on pain of death who plotted against Mortimer, she gave the name of de Lascaux.”

  The blood pounded in her ears, beating the name through her brain: Nan, Nan, Nan. For an instant, Eluned thought she might be ill. But it was only an instant. There was no time for blame, for this fury at herself. Later. She would indulge those thoughts later. Now there was only room for action.

  William was asking questions about where they had captured Robert, how many men – so many unimportant words flowing forth. She held up her hand in a silencing gesture to cut him off. “You tell me Roger Mortimer holds my husband captive, but you have not told me his demands. What ransom would he have?”

  The answer was unlikely, but she expected it all the same. “His life, lady.” The man spared a glance at William, but spoke only to her. “They hold him at a nearby manor called Rowland, to await Mortimer who is three day’s travel from there. They have said Mortimer himself will…” He seemed unwilling to put words to it. “With his own hands, they said.”

  “The king will never allow it,” said William.

  “The king will not know until it is done,” she said through numb lips.

  The man who delivered the news – what was his name? She must remember to ask – held worn leather gloves in his hands. She stared at the cracks and creases in them, her eyes following the lines that intersected like rivers, like lives. She could see it all there – how Mortimer would call it defense of his own life, how he would twist the facts and bide his time and somehow be forgiven. Likely he would arrange it so that someday, somehow, he would be granted these lands that had no natural heir. Why not? He had the advantage, so long as he did not hesitate to strike. She had three days.