The Brothers of Gwynedd (111 page)

After I had left the miller I took that singular story back to Llewelyn, and repeated it for his ear alone.

  "Have up young Owen," said Llewelyn at once, "and let's see what he has to say to this. But first ask Tudor to come to me. No one else."

  I took my time about finding and bidding in Owen ap Griffith, that the prince and Tudor might have time for consultation. For beyond question the boy would deny, and cling fast to his own story, but more depended on the manner of his denial. He went in with me very quiet and wary, but in his situation so he well might, and we did not hold that against him as proving or disproving anything. He saluted the prince very respectfully, and sat but gingerly and stiffly when he was bidden, eyeing Llewelyn with apprehensive eyes.

  "Tell me again," said Llewelyn amiably, "for I wish to be informed in every detail, all the course of that wild ride you made in the floods to try to reach Dolforwyn. We had but the outline before. Now fill in the colours."

  "I fear," said Owen, licking his lips, "the lord prince wishes only to remind me of an iniquity I already regret, and would wish out of mind. But I have deserved it." Which was no bad beginning, considering all things, and as I have said, there was more of his secret and guileful mother in him than his overbearing father. And he drew breath and described, with increasing confidence, in the end almost with relish, every mile of the way, which brooks they had crossed, where they camped miserably overnight, where they found themselves perilously bogged between rivers in flooded heath, never too stable even in better weather. A good story it was, all the more as he cannot then have expected to have to produce it, and must have been improvising.

  "That is comprehensive enough," said Llewelyn at the end, "and leaves not an hour unaccounted for of all those you wasted in this quest. So the miller from upstream here is wrong, is he, if he says you were ranging with this same band along the Dee on the first night of February, seeking a crossing, when by rights you say you should have been somewhere in the peat-bogs north-west of Dolforwyn? If he says that
you, leading this migrant company, tried every means to get him to ferr
y you over? Mistaken, do you think? Or lying? Or dreaming, perhaps?"

  Owen turned a yellowish white like old parchment, and shrank where he sat, but he kept his countenance better than I would have thought was in him. Twice he swallowed hard—we watched every move—and tried to find a voice to answer, but I think he was giving himself a little time, all he dared, for thought. They came in the night, they were many, cloaked. Could the miller know any man of them again? It was Owen's only weapon, and he clung to it.

  In a dry and laboured whisper he said: "My lord, I will not claim any man lies, when I do not even know him. I must answer only what I do know, that I was not there, nor any men of mine. I have told you where my men were that night. To my shame! Is not that enough?"

  "Shall I send to the mill," asked Tudor, "and have the miller come in person to testify?" And Llewelyn said: "It would be well," and still watched Owen. But the young man had played it off in the only possible way, desperate wager though it was, and had no option now but to sit out whatever came, and still steadily deny.

  "Then there were two companies of men out in arms for no good purpose," said Llewelyn, "in two separate parts of my realm, were there? Some forty in number in each? And both at the same most fortuitous time? It is asking a lot to ask me to believe it."

  "My lord, how can I answer for other men? I have told you the truth, and I am paying the price asked of me. What more can I do?"

  So he said, and clung to it through all questioning, even when Tudor and Llewelyn from both sides pressed him hard and fast, and with whatever traps they could devise. Later, the next day, the miller was brought, and Owen was confronted with him, but so straitly that the man was told not to show recognition or nonrecognition or say a word in the young man's presence, the more to agonise him with doubt of the outcome, that if he feared enough he might prefer to confess and be done with it. But he feared confession more, knowing what he had to confess, than continued obduracy.

  "My lord," he said, sweating, "let me know if this fellow claims he saw me that night and knows me again. For if he says so, then indeed he lies, though he may have seen armed men, and may say so in all good faith."

  "He does not claim to know you again," said the prince honestly. "In the dark, among so many, it would be a very long chance. And your livery and any marks of your household I'm sure were well hidden. No,
he
is not the liar. But I bid you now, think well what you are about, for it's you I hold, and on you it depends how I hold you. I want the truth of this strange business, and however you deny, I tell you to your face I believe it was you and yours trying to cross the Dee that night. You had much better cleanse your breast now, for in the end I shall find out all."

  From the green pallor of Owen's face I fancy he was even then equally sure of it, but he could not do other than persist in his denial, and so he did, against all pressures. Thus he came into a stricter keeping, and from a guest became a prisoner. But nothing could we get out of him. Nor now could we let it rest, for doubt of what lay behind it. All through June and into July Llewelyn had his clerks and agents questioning about the Dee and also in Cydewain, for north of the Dee we never heard word more of this armed band, thus confirming that they never got across the river. But in Pool by this time everything was so dissembled and dispersed that there was nothing to be learned there. And it was not until well into July that the prince received at Rhuddlan a letter from Cynan, brought by that same Welsh groom of his.

  "The bearer," wrote Cynan, "has recently been in the king's castle of Montgomery with me, on some minor business, and having better access to the gossip of the stables than I, learned somewhat more of the matter of your troubles with the lord of Powys. I do not take gossip for proof, but it is worth noting. You may not know, but the garrison at Montgomery are very well aware, that one very close to you paid a visit to the castle of Pool in November of last year, and was a guest there more than a week, and that without any ceremony, but rather softly and with few attendants, which is not his habit, and without his wife, which is even more strange. There are some in the neighbourhood who whisper that he may not be quite innocent of taint in the treason to which Griffith and his son have confessed. If I trespass, hold me excused. The precedents you know better than I. I speak of your brother, the Lord David."

Llewelyn sat long, after he had read this, withdrawn into himself, before he roused himself with a great effort to question the groom, who said out freely what he had heard, and knew the difference, too, between common castle gossip and the grain of hard but ambivalent truth within it. Then with thanks and a reward, and in his normal calm manner, the prince dismissed him.

  "Dear God!" said Llewelyn then, to himself rather than to Tudor and me. "It must not be true." But he did not say that it could not be. And I, for my part, was so stunned that at first I could not bring my mind to connect and examine as it should have done, and make sense of what I knew but he did not, those night hours in February when David deserted his bedchamber and his wife to stand out the cold of the night on the wall like a sentinel, while the distant mischief he might well have had a share in brewing either succeeded or failed. As soon as I remembered his face, in the chapel as on the guard-walk, I knew that he had known. Something, if not all. But what he could have had to gain, by some furtive raid on Dolforwyn or any other of the prince's garrisons, was mystery to me. The torment was, that in his love there was so much hate, jealousy and resentment that he was capable, in the last anguish, of acts unfathomably senseless, so long as they were sufficiently hurtful.

  So little was I enlightened at that point, that my dismay and my understanding stopped there, when I had so much more knowledge, had I been able to arrange the pieces in their true pattern. If, indeed, to this day I know the true pattern. Perhaps only God knows it, and just as well. In his hands justice is assured, and mercy possible.

  "Griffith's son has been paying court to him a year and more," said Llewelyn, vainly fending off what he knew he must do. "Why should he not pay a visit to Pool, since he was welcome there? There's nothing in that."

  "Softly, and almost unattended?" said Tudor. "Without his wife and children?"

  "It is not like him, no. But what is like him? He changes like the sky. I will not believe he has taken pan in anything aimed against me."

  "Would it be the first time?" said Tudor harshly.

  I said, and it was labour to say it: "I have somewhat to tell you that perhaps should have been told earlier. But I thought it was over and done, and no grief to any man. Hold me excused, for I did not deliberately keep it from you, but only let it lie as something finished, something I had no cause to remember. I have cause now!"

  Llewelyn turned his head and looked at me curiously, all troubled and saddened as he was, and a little smiled, seeing me as lost and daunted as he was himself. "Tell me now," he said.

  I told him everything I recalled about that night, even to what David had cried out to Elizabeth when she ran to clasp him, how she should not, for she might soil her hands. And I reminded him how, after that night, David had been gentle and calm and almost humble, like a man grateful for deliverance out of danger. "For so it always was with him," I said, "that as often as his right hand struck a blow at you, his left hand would reach to parry it."

  "It was God parried it this time," said Llewelyn grimly, "with snows and rains."

  I said: "David prayed."

  "For better weather to prosper his design?" said Llewelyn.

  "So he bade me pray," I said. "But what his own prayer was at the chapel in Aber before I came, only God knows, and David."

  "I have not judged him," said Llewelyn heavily. "Not yet. I shall not be his judge." And he laid aside Cynan's letter with a steady hand, and said to Tudor: "Call a council, and let them deal. I am the complainant, they must advise me what to do."

  And so in due course they did, with one voice ordering that David should be summoned to appear before a court at Rhuddlan on a date in the middle of July, to answer to a charge of implication in treason. As I remember, he sent back word, as it were with raised brows and a disdainful smile, that in view of the tone of the summons, which was to him incomprehensible, he must refuse to appear except under safeconduct. Llewelyn without comment issued the required letters. But his face, when he thought himself unobserved, was so full of grief that it was hard to bear.

  And just at this most unhappy time came the news that Edward was again in Paris on his way home, and that his coronation had been fixed for the nineteenth day of August. All England was waiting for its king, and we hung upon David's word from Lleyn, David's word which was always and endlessly fatal for us, as if he had been created to destroy what his brother built, whether he would or no. For if he was fatal to us, how much more fatal was he to himself.

  "In the name of God," said Llewelyn, wrung, "how can I go to Westminster for this crowning? What, and leave this dangerous riddle still unsolved behind me? Unless I can get to the bottom of it and resolve all, I will not go to England. I'll send and excuse myself from attending, and by all means send venison for Edward's feast, but I'll not leave Wales in such a tangle of treachery and secrets. He will have to hold me excused for the sake of my own realm, and there's none should understand that better."

  As he had said, so he did. For indeed there was great danger to Wales in the eruption of such a case at law between the prince and his own brother, worse than the more understandable clash with the lord of Powys, and it was vital that Llewelyn should be seen and known to be present in his principality, and in full control of its destinies. The stability of Wales was too new and fragile to withstand any shocks. Moreover, David accepted the letters of safe-conduct, and condescended to set out to face the council at Rhuddlan in the middle of July. At that time Edward was on his way from Paris to Montreuil, and thence, after concluding a sound trading pact with the countess of Flanders, he soon embarked for Dover.

  Now I know that afterwards there were many men willing to swear that even at this time the prince had resolved, in his own mind, not to attend King Edward's coronation, and to reserve his fealty and homage if by any means he could, having turned against the king on the suspicion that he had some part in, or at least approved, the border infringements that constantly plagued us, and even the affair of Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn. But I know that this is not true, that his mind towards Edward was as it had always been, and he had not then even considered the possibility of enmity or ill design on Edward's part. I know, for I wrote the letter at his command, that was sent to Reginald de Grey in Chester as late as the twenty-sixth of March of that year, pointing out that he had not yet been informed of the king's intended date of arrival in his kingdom, or the new arrangements for his coronation, and asking to know as soon as possible. And this letter was sent from Aber just before we set out for Dolforwyn, which was
after
the first news reached us of the treachery of Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn. It never entered his head, until much later, to suspect Edward of anything, or to seek to evade the fealty and homage due to him. He would have attended the coronation in due state, and certainly in friendship, if it had not been for this far more grave matter of David's implication, and the dangers it threatened to the unity of Wales.