There were ten of King Henry’s men-at-arms quartered on Rhodri Parry, in the spacious and comfortable lofts above the store-rooms; but they were not there when the mob reached the house of the Fleece. There was no one within-doors but Rhodri and Julian, and the old woman Joanna, deaf but not ill-informed, and shrewd enough to slip out by the side door and attach herself quickly and compliantly to the rear ranks of the mob as soon as she grasped what was happening. Even the servant of a Welsh household might be suspected unless she cried out as loudly and venomously as the neighbours.
Supper was over when the mob reached the house. It was six o’clock, and Julian had cleared away the dishes and trenchers, and was at the foot of the stairs, on her way back to the solar. She heard the first thunderous battering of fists against the cart-door, and froze where she stood, one foot on a higher stair, one hand on the baluster, listening too intently even to turn her head. She knew that the gate was bolted and barred, and strong enough to withstand fists and feet and shoulders, if they stopped at that. But the wall, though high, was not too high to be climbed, if they brought up a cart, or some giant lent himself as a ladder.
It was no great surprise to her; in a sense she had been expecting something of the kind ever since the war in Wales had flared into violence. But to hear the shuffling pressure of many feet outside in the alley, and the mindless muttering that broke suddenly in shouts and rattling blows against the solid wood, chilled her heart with a revulsion which was more than mere fear. Quickly she turned back the few paces to the door of the undercroft, and secured it with the three great beams which were seldom used; one more barrier against unreasoning hate. All the ground-floor shutters were kept closed and fastened, but there were second shutters within, and these, also, she made fast before she climbed the stairs.
By then she knew that this was no mere malice of street-boys, for the blows that thundered at the gate and along the timber of the walls were heavy and strong, and the voices were not those of children, but adult and malignant, howling now in the echoing lane: “Welsh traitors…Welsh traitors! Come out! Fetch them out of their holes! Get rid of the Welsh!” There were women among them, too, shrill and vindictive: “Welsh witch, Welsh witch! Traitors—they want to betray the town!”
She went quickly and quietly up the stairs, and Rhodri was standing in the open doorway of the solar, listening. For years she had not seen him look as he looked now, younger, taller, all the lines of his face sharpened into fierce, concentrated attention.
“lf we keep quiet within,” she said, “they may tire of it and go, thinking there’s no one here.”
“I doubt,” he said, as one making a detached estimate, not at all as a timorous man overtaken by a devil he had provoked. “If they conclude there’s no one within, they’ll be all the more eager to break a way in and pillage the house.”
“The door below is bolted, and all the windows fast. Perhaps I should go and warn Joanna,” she said. “So deaf as she is, she may not have heard, and if they feel as it seems about us, even she may not be safe. If it’s too late to slip out by the back window from the cart-house, at least she could take refuge with Nicholas and hope to pass unnoticed.”
But when she had climbed the little ladder-stair to the attic rooms in the roof, she found them empty. Joanna had removed not only herself, but also the meagre bundle of her belongings. Julian accepted the omen, and went quickly downstairs again and across the yard. The thunder at the cart-door was more than fists now; they had brought the yoke-pole of an ox-cart, or something like it, and were using it as a ram, and she heard the scrabble of toes against the wood, as someone tried to climb high enough to reach the top of the wall. In the store-rooms there was no one, in the loft above, where the journeymen slept, no one. The elder man had been pressed into service loading and unloading for the soldiers, but the younger one had left even the half of his clothes behind, and climbed out by the back window, and down into the narrow lane at the rear. She knew the manner of his going because he had left the shutters standing wide open. She secured them, and went back to her father.
“We’re deserted. They’ve gone to their own, the old woman and Nicholas, too.”
“So much the better,” he said. “At least there’s no one to let
them in.”
“As they’re howling that we intend to let Prince Owen and his Welshmen in,” she said. A pity, a great pity! What had possessed a slow-moving king to move so fast on this occasion? Only a few more hours, and Hotspur’s army would have been masters of the town. And now where were they, and what could they do, against double their numbers, until Prince Owen came? Nicholas had brought home the rumour that the rebel army was at the gates, intending to invest the town until their reinforcements arrived. There was no one here for the Welsh inhabitants to count on; the soldiers would not interfere with the townspeople’s amusements unless they became dangerous to more than the hated Welsh. She was both sorry and glad that Iago Vaughan had slipped away to rejoin his lord three days ago, and could not be expected here again until the prince came in arms; she would have found some bleak comfort in his presence now, but it would have been a pity for him to make one more sacrifice, and all for nothing.
“You’d better give me a dagger,” she said, hearing the first splintering of wood below at the gate, and the great roar of triumph, and the heaving and struggling of men as they dragged their ram out of the timber and hauled it back to strike again.
He had been methodically clearing the last personal papers from the press in a corner of the solar, and he turned then and looked at her somewhat strangely, with a look she remembered afterwards, though at this moment it seemed to her detached and grudging
as always.
“You’ll need no dagger. Here, take these—the last. The rest is all piled there in my private closet—everything that could betray us.
I began to burn them. Go and finish the work for me.”
“And you?” she said steadily. The noise of the door being gradually battered to pieces tore at her nerves, but physically rather than in any other way. What complaint had she, after all? She had gone into this conflict with her eyes open, and it had given her the first intense purpose of her life, and the one immense joy. If they killed her for a traitress, that was a possibility she had accepted long ago. One man’s patriot is another man’s traitor.
“Do as I tell you,” he said, not petulantly, as once he might have said it, but with an authority she did not even desire to question. “Hurry, get rid of them!”
There was a small withdrawing-room behind the narrow door in the panelling, and beyond that, and opening from it behind one more tapestry-hung door even smaller than the first, the closet where he did his most private work and kept his most perilous records, both of trade and of his activities as an auxiliary of war. And he kept few, to make the whole transaction disposable at short notice. Though she did not think, as she carried his seal and papers into the little room and knelt at the stone hearth with them, that the absence of all proof would save them. But it might buy half an hour, even an hour, long enough for the soldiers quartered on the house to come back from their shift of duty at the wall and the foregate, and intervene in the interests of their own comfort. What use would a sacked or roofless house be to them?
The embers glowed in whitening ash, and there was still flame enough to catch the next fragment she fed into the heat. She worked devoutly, for the first time in her life, perhaps, intent on doing his bidding as quickly and cleanly as she could. As though he had been her general in battle, and she his reliable officer. How strange, to respect and love him whole-heartedly only now, when they were at the last extreme! She fed the flames neatly, quickly, so intent that she felt little. But she heard the sudden terrifying swell of roaring voices and rushing feet as the gate gave way and the mob came hurtling over the creaking fragments into the yard, and across it to thud and hammer at the door of the house. Voices drunken upon fear and anger and hatred, screaming: “Welsh dogs! Welsh d
ogs! Traitors!” And some screaming without need of words at all, a frightful sound, belling, pursuing, scenting a kill. She had a glimpse of how the hind feels at the end of her strength, with the pack not many yards behind her labouring silver heels.
The house door was strong, but the very weight with which the foremost attackers were hurled into it made the hinges creak and the beams complain. Julian fed her fire, thrust such fragments as rolled aside deeper into the heat, and watched the last traces of her father’s activities burn gradually out to black. It was barely over when she heard the door below splinter out of its frame and crash upon the floor of the undercroft, and the shriek of a woman fallen and trampled in the rush for the stair. One more barrier was torn from between her ears and the sound of murder, of ordinary people turned to extraordinary beasts, their cries magnified into a discordant babel by the lofty roof above the staircase.
Now she knew that whoever came to intervene would come
too late. They meant killing. If one grovelled, they might spare, out of pleasure and vanity. But who was to grovel here? Not she, and not her father! How had she ever, even for a moment, believed in him as in a narrow, fearful man? She pushed the last shred of parchment into the embers, sprang up from her knees, and ran to the door, to join him where she knew he must be, there at the head of the staircase.
She wrenched at the handle of the door, and it would not give to her. He had locked her in! She had never heard him cross the outer room on her heels, but so he must have done. The door was fast; she wrestled with it, and it resisted all her force. And there was yet one more door between herself and the solar, and both screened with woven hangings. She could not remember that the outer one had any lock or key, but what comfort was there in that, when she could not get through this inner one to reach it? He was alone there, against this half-demented mob.
In her rage and grief she cried out against him, cursing him for making her of less honour than a son, a son whom he would surely have acknowledged beside him, flank to flank, each keeping the other’s side and back against all comers. And then she cried out to him in entreaty, begging him to let her through to him for pity’s sake, because he was her sire, and she his dear daughter, and his fortune was her fortune, and his death her death. But neither he nor any other heard her. What was one voice against so many?
She tore at the coiled braids of her hair, dragged down all that weight of pale bronze about her shoulders, and plucked out one of her long hair-pins to attack the lock of the door, but still it defied her. And all the while she worked in frantic quietness, she heard what went on beyond two doors, out of her reach.
He was there at the head of the staircase when the door gave way below, and they rushed in over the splintered timbers and over their fallen fellows to mount the first few steps. She heard them check there, suddenly confronted and instantly daunted, except that they were so many, and he was one.
They came on, of course. They could do no other, the pressure behind them being so great; they were thrust upwards whether they would or no. Even in her anguish, she felt their fright and desperation as they were hoisted within Rhodri’s reach, and her heart swelled in a kind of wild exultation. Then she heard them shriek in a new way, hewn and hacked, the outcry of men dying.
She dropped the useless hair-pin, and battered on the door with her fists, and called until her voice failed her, but no one heard. Not even Rhodri, who in any case would not have heeded, but now heard nothing but the thunder in his ears, and some distant, triumphant echoes of old harping, and the clamour of his enemies. He stood with his long gown kilted into his belt, and his thick legs straddled across the landing at the head of the staircase, his grizzled hair and beard on end, as if some supernatural lightning had drawn every hair erect; and with great swings of his bull-shoulders he drew vast semicircles before him with the two-handed sword that had belonged to his great-grandsire, a modest captain in the following of Llewelyn ap Griffith, the last of the great princes of Wales before the Lord Owen came. As often as the mob, thrusting senselessly forward, heaved their leaders within his reach, he cut them down, and swept the highest steps of the stair clean again, between his ranging blows, with thrusts of a booted foot, hurling the fallen back into the arms of those below. And as he fought he cried his defiance against them and against all the English in the name and the tongue of Wales, in a great voice that presently fell into a rhythm and measure like a religious chant, and after that into full, roaring song. For there had been bards among his free kin, as well as warriors, and at this hour he was all of them.
Julian forsook her senseless clamour, and darted back to the sunken cupboards in the wall of her father’s closet, and there swept everything from the shelves and dragged everything from the chest, to find something with which she might hope to lift the catch of the lock. Pewter cups and dishes, hooks, reliquaries, woollen cloths, tapestry hangings, gowns—at the bottom of the chest there was a long, thin dagger in a figured leather sheath. She fell upon it joyfully, and drew it out; almost a foot long, and very narrow and finely ground. The crevice between door and jamb would admit several inches of it, more than enough.
She worked the point in delicately, felt for the barrier that halted it, and tilted with terrible patience at the hilt, groping her way with eyes closed and fingers quivering with nervous sensitivity. And she heard the great, resplendent voice without, that she hardly recognised for the grudging, grumbling complaint of her father, roaring forth the two-hundred-year-old declaration of Gwalchmai, son of Meilyr, the bard of another Owen, Owen Gwynedd, long ago:
“‘…my name is Gwalchmai, the enemy of all things English…
Bright is my sword, dazzlingly fashioned,
Deadly in the day of battle. Golden my shield flashes,
Multitudes sing my praises that never saw my face.
My name goes before me…I am the anger of Wales…’”
From the invaders there arose suddenly a shrill, savage cry, soaring even above their fear and venom and pain, and she knew that they had overrun him, though how it happened she never knew. It had been inevitable from the first. One man cannot hold off hundreds even of his inferiors for ever. Someone had clawed him down, someone had had the sheer luck to slide under the stroke of his broadsword and grip him by the garments and pull him down into the whirlpool. And then their weight overpowered him, pinning hands and feet and sword, and there was nothing but a frenzied, animal keening and howling, at once exultant and frightened, jubilant and anguished, and the last subsiding paeans of Gwalchmai’s hymn to his own prowess, broken, spasmodic, strangled in blood, until the hacking, battering, ululating voice of the mob triumphant silenced it totally at last.
She crouched trembling and sick against the door, her hands still questing, probing, hoping, feeling iron and steel grate together, but never fruitfully engage. She was hardly aware when the note of the outcry on the staircase changed, when fear and awe, and the panic desire to be held clear of fault, overcame even triumph. Those behind had grasped at last how far those before had gone, and were drawing off, quietly and furtively, to put themselves elsewhere and blameless while there was time. And those before felt themselves deserted, and looked round uneasily for reassurance, and finding none, also thought well to remove themselves from this place of death.
The heavy lock gave at last. The door swung open before her weight, and she fell forward and lay for a moment face-down over the threshold, drawing breath deeply, her eyes closed. Only then did she realise that there was silence all about her, unbroken by any movement or word. They had frightened themselves out of the house, perhaps to slink away home from venturing any more such assaults, perhaps to turn their attention to some easier victim. Numbly she gathered herself up from the floor, and dragged herself across to the door into the solar. It was not locked or barred. Nor had a single one of the attackers got past Rhodri to set foot in either room. Alive, he had held the staircase single-handed in arms, and dead, he had so awed them with fear of the consequences
that they had not stayed even to loot.
He lay sprawled over the topmost step of the stairs, his head dangling as he had fallen forward, his body slashed and trampled, and oozing from a dozen wounds. Knives and bludgeons and boots had been used on him at the last in frantic vindictiveness, the fruit of pain and fear. There was no breath in his mouth and no lustre in his eyes. She turned up his face to her between her hands, and it was bloody but not broken, though his head was pulp. The hilt of the great broadsword was still gripped in his hand.
Rhodri Parry was dead, like his forefathers, with his slain heaped before him. There were three of them tumbled like sacks against the wall, and by the smears of blood that trailed away out of the house door more than one wounded man had dragged himself away to end or mend elsewhere. Above them the incredible quietness hung like a spell, causing Julian, too, to hold her breath and move on tiptoe about this house she hardly recognised, and in which she would never live again.
There was nothing for her to do here, and nowhere for her to go in this town. To stay here with her dead might mean her own death, at the hands of the townspeople or the soldiers, did it matter which? And whether her life was of any moment or not, it had a value now for her because her father had covered it deliberately with his own body, and bequeathed it to her as his last legacy. She was, in any case, a lover of life, and hungry still, and she was the only creature left here, until Iago returned, who was in Rhodri’s secrets, and knew his plans, the routes he used, where to find his agents, everything that might still be useful to the Lord Owen and to Hotspur.
A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 28
