The Brothers of Gwynedd (19 page)

  "I see," said Llewelyn, between amusement and wonder, "you have not wasted your time in England. Is it Edward who discusses these intimate matters with you? Before the king's own council know them?"

  "I use my eyes and ears," said David, and smiled. "And given a certain sum of knowledge, more follows without questions asked or answered. As, for instance, that if King Henry does indeed want to pursue this latest hope, he can hardly get far with it while he's still at odds with the king of France, and it needs no prophet to judge that sooner or later there'll be an accommodation. Those two will be friends yet, trust me."

  "I had rather they stayed enemies," Llewelyn owned. "I breathe more easily so. But you could be right, and I'll bear it well in mind. If my enemy has no enemies elsewhere, how shall I thrive? Go on, tell me what you have heard concerning this Castillian marriage. A great appanage, you said, to set the prince up as a married man. Gascony, that we know of. What else? There'll be equally large endowments nearer home."

  "It's no way certain," said David, "what they'll be, for there's no decision made yet, no more than talk. But they say he'll have Ireland. And Chester and its county, and most likely Bristol, too. And Wales, all the crown possessions here. The Middle Country, the castles of Diserth and Degannwy, the lordships of Cardigan, Carmarthen, Montgomery and Builth. Maybe the three castles of Gwent. But nothing's yet certain."

  His face, intent and bright, said that nevertheless it was known to him, as surely as if it had been sealed already. And Llewelyn saw that certainty in him, and sprang upon it.

  "But you had this from Edward!"

  David acknowledged it, but with reserve, for Edward's father was an everhopeful, light and changeable man, and what was not yet made public could be taken back unsaid.

  Said Llewelyn: "I begin to see this boy, this Edward of yours, as a shape that threatens my plans. Chester and Bristol, that's my northern march and the southern one, too. Gwent and the Middle Country, spears into my side. While they stayed with Henry, did they matter quite so much? Henry shifts. This son of his has an immovable sound about him. I would I knew as much of him as you know. God knows I need it, for Edward is the future. And like to live? Yes, surely, you spoke of his rough health, he's for a long life. Talk to me of him," he ordered, and his voice was urgent and low. "Tell me all that you know, all that you feel concerning him. Shut your eyes, if you will, and forget I am here. Show me your Edward!"

  I know of no one to whom such an order could be easy to obey. It closed David's mouth as though some curse had sealed it, but that was only for a while. He shut his eyes, to me an astonishment, for he rebelled by nature against all such suggestions, and in a little while the tight, bright lines softened in his face, and he did begin to speak of Edward. Softly and haltingly at first, then as if in a dream, with curious happiness and eloquence, so that he seemed to be speaking only to his own heart. He had known this boy, three years younger than himself, for some ten or eleven years, and the king's second son, Edmund, had never made any great mark in their companionship, Edward's bent being always, as it seemed, towards those somewhat his elders. For he was a strong, clever and serious-minded child, able to grapple with those more grown in body and more tutored in mind. And past doubt, as we heard from his own lips, David had been involved in both loving and misliking him, the prince being adventurous and gallant to a degree, willing to match himself against his older comrade, yet able to revert into royalty when outmatched or displeased. A strange child, well aware of his destiny from early years, but proud, too, of his body and its competence, of his mind and its brightness. There was a certain largeness and warmth in him then, that would take a tumble and never grudge it, provided no one laughed. But from what I heard out of David's lips, as he talked blindly from behind closed eyelids, sometimes smiling and sometimes grim, I would not have given much for any who outmatched the prince constantly and innocently, unaware of offence, and trusting to have their own magnanimity reflected in his. For there are those who cannot abide to be any but first, and can afford to throw away one lapse, or two, as largesse, but never more than one or two, for after that the sin is mortal.

  When he had talked himself out of breath and words, and into some deep, private place of recollection and discovery, David opened his eyes, and they were wild and a little affrighted, as though only now, with the return of vision, did he realise all that he had revealed. As though the first person he saw was the Edward he had painted for us, his back turned, walking steadily away. For surely he had never before looked inward and examined what he knew and felt of his royal companion, and now that he did so, the very depth and width of his knowledge frightened him, and his having shared it went beyond, and in some way horrified and shamed him.

  "What have I done?" he said in a dismayed whisper. "I have said too much. What right had I to strip him so for you?"

  "You did no more than I asked you," said Llewelyn, smiling at him with astonished affection, "and did it very well. If I needed a portrait, I have it."

  "But to bind him hand and foot, and stand him in front of you naked!" David cried, twisting and knotting his hands.

  At that Llewelyn laughed, and flung an arm rallyingly round his shoulders and shook him. "I did not see him so! Far from it! Very well and richly clothed in his own abilities you showed him to me, and well worth looking at, too. You're too tender of your loyalties. Faith, I think you've come back to us more an English courtier than a Welsh prince!"

  He meant no more than the lightest of touches, and yet it went in like a barb. David shook off the arm that held him and bounded to his feet, white-faced with passion.

  "You dare say so to me? You dare? I am as much Griffith's son as you are, and no one, not even a brother, can use such words to me and not be called to account. Is it my fault if I grew up at King Henry's court? You think I've turned my coat for Edward's favour? Every drop of blood in me is Welsh, as Welsh as yours, as royal and as true!"

  Llewelyn was too taken aback by this outburst to get his breath for a moment. He stood open-mouthed, the rallying laughter still on his lips, and a great astonishment in his eyes. And before he could retort either with indulgent mockery or blunt and forcible reproof, David had caught himself a little back from us into shadow, as if to hide, turned one wild and angry glance like the sweep of a sword to hold off both of us, and flung out of the room.

  "Now what in God's name ailed him," Llewelyn demanded, gazing after him, "to take me so desperately in earnest? Does he know so much of his Edward, and so little of me?"

  I said no, that he knew well enough, had known even while the words were pulsing hotly out of his throat, that the sting he had felt had never been delivered but in his own mind. But if that was comfort to Llewelyn, it was oddly discomfortable to me. For if, in his unguarded moment, David had been so ready and quick to resent the imagined charge of a divided and shifting allegiance, it was surely because his own heart had already accused him. Llewelyn had touched a wound that was already waiting, open and painful. More, for I had seen the boy's face as he leaped to his feet, and I was sure that if he had not shown his prince to Llewelyn naked and bound, naked and bound he himself had suddenly seen him, and that cry of his: "What have I done? I have said too much!" was his own recognition of an act of treason on one side, barely a moment before he felt himself assailed by the like accusation from the other.

  It seemed to me then that we had none of us given enough thought to the stresses under which those two younger ones laboured, thus translated so late back to their own land, when all their most formative years had been spent in another, and that in innocence, protected and indulged, when they were too young to understand the agonies and wrongs that had brought them there. What they now knew and professed, and even understood, they had never been forced to feel. And Rhodri, perhaps, was centred so shallowly in himself as to be proof against too much thought, but David was subtle, brooding and deep.

  Llewelyn had been thinking much as I had, for he said soberly: "He's newly back, and it comes hard, I daresay. But it will pass. Give him a month or two to settle down at Neigwl, and he'll be too busy and content to look back towards Westminster. All the same, better not make that journey too often, the cost comes too high."

  I asked if I should go after him, for the disquiet and desperation of his face as he left us tormented me, and he was fond of me, and would not bite too viciously if I offended him. But Llewelyn said no.

  "Let him alone. He'll come back of his own will, and better so."

  And so he did, before many minutes were past, entering almost as abruptly as he had left us, and taking his stand before Llewelyn, within touch and in the fullest light of the room, with a clear face and wide-open eyes, only a little flushed in the cheeks now after his bitter pallor.

  "I ask your pardon," he said outright and easily, "for being so ill-humoured. It was foolish to think you meant any evil."

  "Call quits," said Llewelyn, "for it was a very feeble joke. That's one subject I shall know better than take lightly again. Faith, it was like putting a torch to tinder!"

  "And over as quickly," said David, with a trace of bitterness, before he hoisted his shoulders and laughed. "If a real enemy sets light to me you shall find I burn both hot and slow."

  So suddenly and vehemently he made his peace, and they went out together to the mews with David's arm about Llewelyn's neck. But at times he did revert to this flare thereafter, always without warning, and always as one excusing himself, saying how he grudged it that only Llewelyn, of the four brothers, had fought and starved for Wales, while he fattened in comfort as a pampered child at the English court, and how this sense of having been cheated out of his morsel of glory made him sore to touch on that point. So that sometimes I questioned within myself whether it was indeed so soon and safely over, or whether he brooded still in his heart, keeping his trouble to himself. And above all, whether what he revealed of it was the true core, or whether he went about, unknown to himself, to dress it more acceptably for our eyes and his own.

  But Llewelyn, who seemed to be most wise in his youngest brother, took him peaceably as he came, and made no to-do, letting him alone with his own good heart and good sense to find his way aright. And when David thus spoke of playing the child in England while Wales bled, and not even chafing at his helplessness for want of understanding, Llewelyn would say bluntly that he need have no regrets, for the true struggle for Wales had not yet even begun, and he had plenty of time in the years ahead to make his name as a paladin.

  Once I asked him, when we were alone, if he truly meant this. For we seemed then to be so securely pinned down in our restricted lands, and yet so tolerated and accepted in this limited state, that I could not see how we could again be brought into conflict with England. King Henry was utterly absorbed in his Sicilian plans and his son's marriage, in the business of bringing to an end his long enmity with France, in settling Gascony for Edward and resigning himself to relaxing all hold on Normandy. His face was set constantly eastward, not westward. It seemed that he had no thought for us, and no intent to trouble us further. And if he had no will to make war, we had no means, or means so slight that the attempt would be madness.

  "As yet," said Llewelyn. "Yet even now we are not so unready as you may suppose. Still, I grant you there are stones in the way." He mused for a moment on the greatest and most immovable of these, but went on without naming it. "It will, it must, come to war in the end, the art will be in choosing the time. For this most marked stress upon Wales, in Prince Edward's appanage, with the earldom of Chester held fast by the crown for him, and Bristol in the south, this is a new threat, whatever its appearance in the documents. His is not meant to be any parchment title. This is a planned move to tighten the royal grip upon Wales. The time will come when we must fight to regain what we have lost, if we are not to find ourselves fighting hard to keep even what they have left us. It cannot stand long as it is. They will take all from us, or we must regain all from them."

  I had learned to have great faith in his judgment, and I knew by his face and his tone that he was in strong earnest. Yet it seemed to me, considering the cautious stillness in which we had lived now such a number of years, that our situation rendered action as impossible to us now as before the peace of Woodstock.

  Llewelyn shook his head. "No! The king's officers are doing our work for us, we need not lift a finger yet, they win friends for us right and left. This la Zuche who holds the Middle Country in his grip, and has sworn to bring it under English control for all time, is worth an army to me. I could not so soon have convinced every knight and lord and tenant in the four cantrefs of his Welsh blood, and his need to remember it, as this man has done. I could not have united all those quarrelling borderers as he has done, in one patriot hate of England and her officers and all her works. He calls recruits for me out of the ground like corn from seed. The time will come when I need only to go and reap the harvest. And a little success there could call back to their allegiance great numbers of those princes elsewhere who offered King Henry their homage out of fear. Success breeds true and fast. Only," he said, and looked out long over the sea towards Ynys Lanog, for we were riding by the salt-fiats of Aber, "there must also be unity at the top, or we split and fall."