“And there,” she said, “beyond his manor, the old Leybourne lands begin. There are no Leybournes now, they’re all dead, the land fell into the hands of Sir Roger de Trumpeton, but he never comes near it. He has leased it out, like so many others, and sold parts of it. You cannot work land here now by feudal labour. My father bought a holding there, with fields running down to the river, but for a Welshman it’s impossible now to buy land, and unwise even to keep what he bought before. An old journeyman of his owns the place today, Walter Hanner. A simpleton, but an English simpleton. It was a way of keeping it. A farm by the river here is worth a great deal. Far enough from the town, close enough to a clear run westward.”
“You store the woollens there, until they can be moved south?”
“And other things,” she said, “until they can be moved west.”
“Men?” He could ask it simply enough now, between two friends who had no secrets.
“Men and arms—bows, arrows, swords, pikes, lances…Even money. You cannot fight without money.”
“That I’ve found out for myself,” he said ruefully. “Though I had thought it hardly applied to Owen. He seems to keep men in the field with nothing but the splendour of his countenance and the promise of plunder.”
She smiled. “That may once have been true of our people, but you’ve changed us to your own pattern. Look, ahead there where the trees begin. Did you see a gleam of light across the water?”
They had followed the long, soft winding of the river upstream, north-west from the town, first at a distance, glimpsing the metallic sheen of the surface only occasionally, but now they drew close to the banks again; and ahead of them copses of scattered trees closed in above the shores, an ideal screen.
“Yes, there!” It came and went in one instant, tall and upright like a thin lance of light kindled and put out in one breath. “A door opened and closed!”
“Walter’s toft. It lies on the edge of the trees. The barn beyond, in the field, is bigger than the house. And such a riverside toft needs no excuse for having its own boat. There’s the elver run in the spring. And good fishing—even salmon in season.”
“It was well chosen,” he said appreciatively. For men on the run from north or midlands there was no major water to cross to reach this refuge, and north-west to Glyndyfrdwy, or due west for Montgomery and beyond, there would not be wanting, from this point on, way-stations where a Welshman might lie overnight in safety. He found his mind assessing the need and the means, as though he had been Welsh himself.
“We’re in time,” said Julian, satisfied. “Watch, and when next the door opens, you’ll see that a shadow slips through the light. A man. I’ve counted four. There are still two to come. One boatload must be already on its way.”
They were in the trees now, and almost opposite the distant cottage. “Hush!” she said, stiffening into stillness and holding him still by the hand, which had grown to her hand like body to soul. Somewhere close, they heard a horse blow placidly through distended nostrils, and the shifting of hooves on solid soil, muted and soft, felt rather than heard. But there was another sound also, the faint ripple of water in regular rhythm, sliding along muffled oars.
She drew him on again, glad and content. There were horses hobbled among the trees, he counted six, but thought there were more. And suddenly out of the shadows before them a man started, and stood in their path, plucking a long dagger half out of its sheath. The darkness hid the weapon, but the ready gesture they both knew. Julian stretched an imperious arm across Hotspur’s body and drew him close behind her, holding him there between her hands.
Nothing stranger had ever happened to him. It caused the breath to halt in him for a moment, though not with fear, and not with shame. He felt the laughter of astonishment and joy and admiration rising in him like a tide, and would have picked her up bodily and lifted her aside out of harm’s way, but that she was his captain here, and he had no such right. She knew what she was doing; it was for him to obey her.
“Brother John!” she said softly. “You know me. I am Julian Parry. Where is Iago? We have letters for him.”
There was little of the Franciscan left about Brother John Caldwell, after a month of rest and convalescence and labour here on Walter Hanner’s farm. His grey hair was cropped, his beard shaven, he moved firmly upon those once crippled feet, and wore the homespun tunic and chausses of the peasant cultivator as if he had grown up and grown old in them. She was lucky to have encountered here on watch a man who remembered her with gratitude as his hostess and guide; a stranger might have struck first and asked afterwards.
“Is it you, mistress? Who’s that with you?”
“A friend—Iago knows him well. He has letters for the Lord Owen. Where is Iago?”
“Down there by the water. Go down to him.” And he came a part of the way after them, to be sure of the import of that meeting. Well as he knew her, he watched narrowly; women, even men, could be duped into treason.
Between the trees the water gleamed, shaken by the motion of the boat as it came quietly in to shore. Three men in it, and a fourth to take the boat back for the remaining three. It seemed a light load, until they saw the bundled, straw-wrapped pikes being lifted ashore, and leather rolls the length of a cloth-yard arrow. They slid down the last grass-slope into the gravel, and the men who had jumped ashore saw them and clapped hands to daggers, looming about them suddenly and ominously, in black silence.
“I am Julian Parry,” said Julian, spreading her empty hands to view, and putting back the hood of her cloak, but never moving from within touch of Hotspur, and never ceasing to interpose her body between him and the hesitant steel. He was ready at the first move to swing her into cover at his back, but he would not have had her know it for anything in the world. “Do you think,” she said scornfully, “that Brother John would have let us pass if he had had any doubts. We want Iago Vaughan. We have letters for him.”
He came round a curve of the bank from where the pack-ponies stamped and grazed, dropping with the lightness and aplomb of a deer to the waterside. “I heard my name. Who wants me?”
Then he saw her, and even in the dimness, familiar now and no trouble to him, and quickened by the lambent light from the water, he knew the man she had brought with her. For an instant he stood stock-still, taking into swift reckoning every consideration for which he was accountable; and every man present froze with him. And Julian smiled, though no one saw the smile clearly, and only Hotspur knew, from the touch of her hand and the ease of her body close to him, how sure she was of the outcome. Because Iago knew him so well, and trusted him so unquestioningly? Or because she had power over Iago, whether she knew it consciously or not, and defied him to meddle with anything she did?
“Very well met, my lord!” said Iago, breaking out of the ice that had cased him, and starting all his men alive in the act. He looked about him sharply, and they bent to work with the bundled arms. The boat had already touched at the far shore, and was on its silent way back again, laden low with five men aboard. “What brings you out here looking for me?” he said, and held out his hand like a prince upon his own ground.
“You recommended me to Julian,” said Hotspur, “and now she must recommend me to you. I came tonight asking her for a means of getting urgent letters to the Lord Owen, and at my entreaty and under my bond she has brought me here. Tomorrow would have been too late, you would have been somewhere in Wales. And we had no means of knowing how long it would be before we could hope to see you here again.”
“She did well,” said Iago. “I’ll take your letters gladly.”
The boat touched again, a faint, hissing ripple running before it into the gravel. Four more shadowy shapes came up laden from the shore to hem them in, and the fourth was Rhodri Parry, girded for action in a short woollen tunic, and booted to the knee, with a dagger at his belt, half a world away from the wealthy merchant in his long, furred gown, with his barred and locked treasury and his carved chair by the solar fire.
He stood and looked upon them steadily and long, calculating; but he said nothing above an undertone, for sounds carry in a still night, and by his own estimate he was a timid man.
The scroll that Hotspur took from the lining of his cloak was thick and closely sealed.
“It is superscribed to the Lord Owen. But there is a second letter enclosed, for Sir Edmund Mortimer. The covering one is to ask the Lord Owen’s courtesy in delivering it to his prisoner.”
“He shall have it. And say he does so deliver it, and Sir Edmund desires and is allowed to reply—where shall I find you?”
“So he reads and heeds what I’ve written,” said Hotspur, “the reply is not urgent. Leave the answer for me with Mistress Parry or her father here, and I will enquire for it when I ride north from this parliament.”
Rhodri heard and did not demur. The letter vanished into the breast of Iago’s cotte. “I will do so,” he said.
It was done; the act contemplated had become an act committed, the first rustle of an avalanche, though as yet hardly a grain of the ground on which he stood was in motion. Nor was there any course recommended to Edmund in the letter, and yet he felt that he had loosed an arrow that could not be called back, even if he would.
“It is plain,” he had written, the bald facts having been recounted, “that the king will neither move to ransom you himself, nor listen to any proposal to that end from another, nor, if he can prevent, will he even allow your friends and kin to ransom you themselves at their own expense. I am forced to the knowledge that he is set against you, and against all your house, and since you have always done him honourable service, it can only be for a reason which is not far to seek. No other family in this realm stands legally between him and the crown, as yours does. So far as I can see, this sick disposition in him cannot mend, but must worsen. I can only advise you, therefore, not to place any trust in his goodwill, or ever allow yourself to be kept too close to him or too much hemmed in by his power or his officers, when you shall be at liberty again, but to stay within the safe borders of your own estates, where you are at the advantage, and to have loyal persons always close to you. In this pass, dear Edmund, it is for you to take thought where your best interests lie, and to do everything to ensure them. On the affections of your kin, and most of my Elizabeth and myself, you know you can rely. And should there be any further happening of which you ought to know, I will get word to you by the same hand. For Roger’s children, I would I might withdraw them out of his hold, but the means to that end is not yet in sight.”
And so with family news and the greetings that pass between brothers, to the end. It would have been treason to Edmund not to write as much.
“There are horses across the water,” said Rhodri, gruffly offering what hospitality he could here. “If you care to cross, you can ride back to Shrewsbury, but it means waiting until the gate opens in the morning.”
“I thank you, but no, I’d liefer not meddle in your moves more than I have already, and I can be at the abbey before light, without, I’m told, entering the town.”
“I am coming with you,” said Julian, “to show you the way.”
“No need, I shall find it, and I’ve tired you out enough. You can return in safety with your father.”
“No, for I must be ready to pass through the gate as soon as the bridge is lowered at dawn. The fewer who know I’ve been out of the house, the better.”
She had her way. They walked back together.
* * *
“And he has been doing this now for a year and more?” he asked wonderingly, as they walked through grass now heavy with dew.
The Welshmen by the waterside had ceased their loading of the horses and stood silent to gaze after them until they vanished, their eyes suspicious though their tongues made no complaint. After they were gone perhaps there had been complaints, too, questions, doubts, even blame. But she had no doubts; she answered all such queries without hesitation, letting him into intricacies he need not have shared. And suddenly he trembled for her and for himself, as though everything they did and said together was driving them softly but certainly into some action they would not, in the end, be able to avoid.
“Yes, before ever I knew you. But I was not in all his secrets then, and I did not know what risks he was taking. He always used to claim that he was a timorous man,” she said, and laughed.
“Faith, with a few thousand such timorous men I could win a kingdom, and so may Owen yet.”
He was an officer of the king, and he was in possession of knowledge of the king’s enemies, and fully intended to withhold that knowledge, to make no use of it, not even to disrupt the traffic itself without penalty to those involved. A private promise counted for more than his oath of allegiance, and a private affection than his duty to the crown. The paradox baffled him. And yet he was a man not accustomed to question the promptings of his blood, or to lose any sleep over things done and never to be undone.
They walked at ease, for they had time enough, all the rest of the night to employ before he could well go in at the abbey gate and retrieve his horse, and she pass in by the English gate of the town and slip unnoticed, if possible, back into her own home. It was late October, but mild and still, several warm days past, and a few yet to follow before the season turned unkind again. And they were lightened in heart at having done what they had set out to do, and at peace now in the night, their eyes gifted with sight, and their ears sensitive even to the rare nocturnal stirrings of bird and beast.
“Julian—it’s a rare name. She’s one of your patron saints in Shrewsbury, I think?”
“They give it to their daughters sometimes in St. Julian’s parish,” she said. “She was a virgin martyr. The Romans killed her. She was eighteen years old—I’ve already outlived her.”
“You? You have a whole life before you yet.”
“Certain it is,” she said, “that until this year I have nothing resembling a life behind me.”
“Then there’s all still to come, and you are blessed.”
“It is truth,” said Julian, exultant, “so I am!” For walking thus beside him in the night, speaking with him, being silent with him and still companionable and close, touching him for guidance where the way was complex, once lifted between his hands across a brook that came down to the river: conscious of all this, and having achieved with him some prodigy not yet fully understood, which neither of them could have done alone, and which bound them lifelong in this rare union for which no name or comparison existed, she would not have changed places with any creature on earth.
The way back was longer, since they had to skirt round half the town, keeping to the high ground on the western side of the river. But the miles passed merrily, pensively, tranquilly, without any thought of haste or ending, the dawn being so far away. It was as though they had set out together on a walk that would continue thus confidently and single-heartedly to the farthest reach of their vision, to his life’s end or hers.
10
As suddenly as Sir Henry Percy had left his house in Bishopsgate Street, he was back again; and almost before he was missed
in parliament or in the king’s council, he was there once more in his place.
His reappearance was so calmly managed and so clearly to be taken for granted that those who had rumoured storms behind his back felt themselves on very insecure ground, and moderated their predictions of a rift with the crown. True, the king did not, so far, admit him to intimate speech or include him in his personal invitations, nor had Hotspur himself sought any audience of the king. But they met, watched by every eye, in the sessions of parliament and the meetings of council, they exchanged decorous and unremarkable words upon those topics on which Hotspur might be expected to have special knowledge, they brushed sleeves at court and treated each other with restraint and reserve, but with every proper consideration.
“You took too great a risk,” said Worcester in private, but without any note of blame. “The boy had brought him to send for you and p
atch up the dissension, and you were gone. It was the wrong moment to vanish out of his reach, and there are those who have made use of it.”
“I doubt not,” said Hotspur, unmoved. “I have come back, have I not, and behaved myself very seemly, and so I’ll continue to do. But don’t ask more of me.”
“Or of him?” said Worcester, and smiled. “He has not let the prince work on him again. And as well, or he’d have had the thankless task of working on you, also. No, I don’t ask more of you, Harry. God knows I could not stomach it myself to suggest that you should come to heel and make offers to him of what you first denied. But that he’ll never ask of you again, for fear of a further shame. No, all we need of you is that you shall carry yourself thus quiet and serviceable and without reproach, and leave it to others to plant the idea in him that you will yet come round out of your anger and offence to be his loyal and loving vassal as before.”
“And am I not?” said Hotspur, with lifted brow and curling lips.
“That, you best know, Harry,” said Worcester softly, and so left him.
The prince came, also, and that was difficult, painful and endearing, for the boy all but apologised for failing in a mission in which he could not possibly have succeeded; and if there was anything in the world that could have brought Hotspur to a reconciliation, it would have been the prospect of assuaging Hal’s distress and rewarding his heroic efforts. But he was spared that, for it seemed the king would have none of it now. He wanted no open break, he wanted no break at all, short of desperation, but neither would he bend his own neck again and admit his own vulnerability so far as to make the first approach. It suited him better that the clash should be smoothed over by day-to-day contacts and a measure of restraint on both sides, until all interest in it died.
“As it will,” said the prince eagerly. “You see he means to pretend, even to himself, that nothing has happened. In a while he will even believe it. He thinks of nothing now but the duchess’s coming to England to join him. You know he hopes to bring her over from Brittany for Christmas, if he can, or very soon afterwards.”
A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 21
