The Brothers of Gwynedd (93 page)
Some cunning artist had made this tiny image of a great beauty. A little face in profile, pure like a queen on a coin, with one large, confiding eye gazing before, a folded, dreaming mouth, and a braid of dark, gilded hair on her shoulder, the Lady Eleanor de Montfort, twelve years old, looked with a grave, high confidence into her future, towards a bridegroom and an estate fitting her nobility. A wonderful thing it was, but not wonderful enough, for it missed the warmth of her full-face gaze, that stopped the heart with its trust and its challenge.
"You have seen her," said Llewelyn in awe. "Is she truly so?"
I said: "This is but the half. She is more. If this image could turn its head and look you in the eyes, and speak to you, then you would know."
"And can this face," he said, rather to himself than to me, and brooding upon the little medallion in fascination and dread, "ever look upon me as I saw Cristin look upon you?"
It was not my response he wanted, nor even hers, for she was still barely fifteen years old, and a long way off in France, with more than distance, dividing her from him. Rather he longed for a sign from God that he had the right to believe and to hope. And when there was no sign, he took that for a sign in itself, that the duty was laid in his own hands. He took the medallion into his palm and held it before him in the little circle of reddish light, and the face flushed into rose, as if the blood stirred under her pearl-clear skin, and the movement caused the lamp to quiver, so that its light trembled briefly over her folded lips and caused them to smile. He saw it, and smiled in return, in the night of his triumph, with the golden talaith gleaming in his hair.
"There is nothing you or I can do but wait and trust," he said, "but that we have learned how to do. I had two vows registered in heaven, to win the acknowledgement of my right, the birthright of her sons, and to lay it at her feet. The first is done. The second, God helping me, I will do, though I wait life-long. You see her, the bud of a royal stem, and the daughter of that tremendous man, better than royal. From such blood, what princes will spring! If they took her away to the end of the world, I would not give her up. Her father pledged her to me, and I have pledged myself to her. The more spears they array between her and me, the more surely will I reach her at last. I have waited but two years for her yet, and she is still hardly out of childhood. For Earl Simon's daughter I will wait as long as I must. Either I will have Eleanor de Montfort, or I will have none."
So he said, and so he kept. For however Goronwy and Tudor and all his council, thereafter, urged on him his duty to take a wife, and ensure the succession to that throne of Wales which was his own perfected creation, he smiled and passed on unmoved. And however they paraded before him the names and persons of all the noble ladies of Wales, any one of whom he might have had at will, still he never took his eyes from the image of Eleanor, that shone like a private star to him day and night. And still he saw her twelve years old and in profile, waiting, like himself, for the miraculous moment when the bud would blossom, and she would turn her head and look him in the eyes, and reach him her hand upon their marriage day.
THE HOUNDS OF SUNSET
CHAPTER I
In the autumn of the year of Our Lord, twelve hundred and sixty-nine, King Henry of England, third of that name, brought to a triumphant completion his great new church of Westminster, the dream and passion of his life. For such was his devotion to the Confessor that the dearest wish of his heart had always been to create a worthy tomb for the precious relics of that great king and saint, and house it in a splendid church, as a jewel in a casket. And though his long reign—for this was his fifty-third regnal year since his nobles set him on the throne, a child of nine—had been troubled and torn constantly by wars and dissensions and feuds, by entanglements with popes and kings and princes, and though power had slid in and out of his hands, and the winds of other men's wills blown him hither and thither like thistledown, for all these griefs and follies and misfortunes he had never relinquished that purpose and intent, but always returned to it as soon as he was master of his own actions.
As a child he had laid the foundation stone of the new work, when the monks in their ambitious zeal for their saint and their concern for the proper honouring of Our Lady grew dissatisfied with their old church and set out to rebuild, and in particular to add a great Lady Chapel at the eastern end behind the altar. Their plans outgrew their pockets, and devoured all the alms and grants within their reach, and when they despaired and owned their helplessness the king took the work upon himself as an act of piety. Certain follies of his own in the matter of Sicily, certain unattainable ambitions, certain exasperations of his nobles and people tore him away from the work again and again, and counted almost fifty years away before he came at last to this happy consummation. But in this year of his blessed achievement I think he saw all that procession of life and death as but a painted scene of judgment upon a chapel wall, to be contemplated in peace for its colours when its perils were no more than half-remembered dreams.
And we in Wales, who had contended with him life-long until the peace of Montgomery, then two years old, did not grudge him this victory, of all victories. Give him his due, in this passion at least he was not changeable, he who in all things else span with the wind and ebbed and flowed with the tide. He was happier building than fighting, and it showed in the quality of what he built.
It was in July, in the highest summer, when my lord Llewelyn's court was at Rhuddlan, that King Henry's messenger came, bearing a most cordial invitation to the prince of Wales to attend the festivities in October at Westminster, when the body of the Confessor was to be translated with great splendour and ceremony to the new tomb. It was an earnest of the easy relationship between these royal neighbours that the prince should be among the first to be bidden to the feast, and an even more marked sign of the times that the royal messenger should be that very Welsh clerk of the chancellery who had often served us, in the years of enmity, as our closest intelligencer to the English court. Cynan was not and never had been suspect, but before Montgomery he would never have been sent on the king's errands into Wales, his Welsh blood being reason enough for trusting him only close about the royal offices, and with the lowly work of copying, at that, whatever his ability. Now he came not as clerk and servant but as envoy in his own right, and with a groom to attend to his needs on the way. He did his formal office in hall with a beaming face but an earl's solemnity, but at meat at the high table afterwards he unbuttoned and was a boon companion, proving himself with a good clerkly voice when there was singing. This man I knew well from many meetings in old years upon Llewelyn's business, and to the prince himself Cynan's fine legal hand was familiar enough, but never before had they sat at one table together.
"I see," said Llewelyn, smiling as he complimented him, "that we made your fortune at Montgomery as well as our own. You may climb now in the king's favour with a good heart and a single mind."
Cynan shook his head at that, and said there were no gains without losses, for he grew fat and easy now that his best occupation was gone. And so in truth he did, for he had still that white smoothness about him, but as if somewhat swollen, with the first signs of a paunch under his gown. He had been an old young man, and in time would be a young old man, changing without much change. His brow was by some inches higher, and time was setting about giving him the tonsure I had coveted in my boyhood and never attained.
"I was meant always to be a good doer," he said, grinning a little wryly at setting himself among the stock we reared, "but there's no thin living can wear away the flesh like the fret of danger, or keep the neck lissome like the eternal need to be looking over a man's shoulder. Now I rest easy, and turn my victuals into fair, fat meat. Your peace, my lord, may have made my head more secure on my shoulders, but it looks like turning my body into a bladder of lard."
"God forbid," said Llewelyn, laughing, "that I should have to call out my guard again and break this land apart to keep you in hard condition. Are you so discontented with a quiet life? You talk like David. Where there's no mischief there's no sport! Though I think my brother's new little wife has broken him to harness, if her spell holds, and of that we may all be glad."
So lightly then he spoke of David, whom he had loved best of his three brothers, and who had twice deserted and betrayed him, and twice returned, half-grudging and half-famished, into his too lavish grace.
"And do you carry," he said, "the like invitation to David? I take it the Lord Edward would see to that." For King Henry's heir had grown up, until his thirteenth year, in close companionship with David, then ward at the English court, and that early alliance wrung them both, and had cost us pains enough before our two countries came to so arduous a peace.
"I do," said Cynan, "though what part the Lord Edward needed to play is more than I know. The king is happy, he wills less to no man. I think he calls every lord of his acquaintance to share his own blessedness."
"That I believe," said Llewelyn, and smiled in some wonder but little bewilderment at the image he had of King Henry, who in happiness would scatter his own substance of mind and body like largesse, and in apprehension or fright would strike out about him with feeble but inexhaustible malice, like a child. In both he was childlike. When he was wounded he would deal out wounds to any who ventured near, when he was in bliss he would spend himself like a fountain of love. But always he must be the centre and spring from which ban and blessing came. "Tell me," said Llewelyn, "of how things go with England."
This order, tendered in open hall and before the entire household of five hundred and more, Cynan understood as it was intended, and regaled us freely with all the current gossip and news of the court, but not yet with any deeper observation drawn from beneath that surface. The Lord Edward's preparations for his crusade, and the king's for the great celebration in honour of his favourite saint, said Cynan, between them had crowded every other interest out of court. The list of those who had taken the cross and intended to go with Edward to the Holy Land made a resounding catalogue of noble names, among them his brother Edmund, his cousin Henry of Almain, William of Valence, who was King Henry's half-brother, Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, Roger Leyburn, and many more of the young men who frequented Edward's company.
"And the Lord Edward's wife intends," said Cynan, "to go to the east with him. She is as absorbed in this enterprise as he, and he thinks of nothing else."
"So I have seen," said Llewelyn, "when he came to meet me in Montgomery in May, in the matter of the dispute in Glamorgan. Truly I believe he was bent on being fair, and we did get some business done, but while his feet walked the Severn water-meadows, I doubt his head was in Jerusalem."
"Gloucester has taken the cross, no less than the rest," said Cynan mildly. But he did not pursue that subject until the prince had withdrawn from hall into the high chamber, and had only a few of his closest with him, Tudor ap Ednyfed, the high steward of Wales—for his elder brother Goronwy, who had held that office before him, was a year dead at that time—the royal chaplain, and myself, his private clerk and servant. Then there was open talk of the dispute my lord had with Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, the only matter of large significance then troubling the good relations we had with England. Not, indeed, the only source of disputation, for when peace is made after ten years and more of border fighting and civil war, when lands have changed hands ten times over, and large honours been dismembered into a number of lesser holdings, with the best will in the world to word the agreement fairly and honestly, there must still be a hundred plots of land hotly disputed at law, and with reasonably good cases on both sides. The only remedy is in arbitration and give and take, in goodwill on both sides to do justice and keep the peace. But land is land, and ambition is ambition, and all too often goodwill was in short supply when it came to sacrificing an acre or two of meadow or woodland.
Other books
Lords of Desire by Virginia Henley, Sally MacKenzie, Victoria Dahl, Kristi Astor
The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon
The Enforcer (Untamed Hearts Book 3) by Kele Moon
Brooklyn Sinners 3 -A Sinner Born by Avril Ashton
Hiding Place (9781101606759) by Bell, David
The Captive Heart by Griep, Michelle;
Wild by Eve Langlais
Running Out of Night by Sharon Lovejoy
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels by Nawal El Saadawi