I told her then what had been in my own mind, to get word to Cynan that might be sent on to Llewelyn, in reassurance at least that his wife was heart and soul with him in his stand, and desired him to make no concessions for her. But I knew, even without Eleanor's urging, that if the chance offered to get back to him I must take it, all the more as the clouds gathered more ominously.
"One will come to the governor, while the court is still here in Windsor," said Cristin, "with the request to borrow you, as being fluent in Welsh and versed in Welsh law, to copy some documents for David. Oh, never fear, David's seal will be available, and David is so close to Edward, no one will question it. There will be horses waiting for you at a safe place."
"And leave some poor soul to answer for stealing or copying David's seal?" I said, doubtful. "Or bring David himself into suspicion?"
"No need," she said. Tour guide is coming with you. He also is Welsh, and if there is to be fighting, he wills to be home and fighting beside his own people. No one else will come into suspicion."
"No one but you," I said. "You could suffer for me. Who else could have brought me this message?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "You need not fear for me. I am strongly protected, no one will point at me. I wish to God I could ride with you, Samson, as once we rode together to Llewelyn, but I can no more go and leave her now than I could when he brought us to the border, all in innocence, and only then let me see where we were bound. Now we go armed, David and I, enemies bound by a truce. But whatever evil he may have done, he will not let any harm come to me. I am the cross that dangles before his conscience, I am the voice saying: Repent! He cannot do without me, he would be lost."
Her voice was soft and wild, and her low laughter very bitter. I asked her: "Was it he who warned Edward, and had him send pirates to seize our ships at sea? Is that also to his account?"
"No," she said, "that was not David. That word came from Brittany, while you waited for the good winds. Hard to keep secret the passage of such a party, and Edward has his spies everywhere. Do not put down to David more than his due, his load is heavy enough. He can see no end now but destruction for himself or Llewelyn, he feels himself far past forgiveness. Now he wants to bring on the ruin he foresees, to pull down the house over himself or wipe his brother out of the world and try to forget him. Since there's no going back, he is frantic to complete what he has begun. If I left him, there would be no one who knows the truth, no face that has only to appear before him to remind him of the judgement. David needs me even more than she does. It would be hard for me to leave him."
I said again, for her voice was so slow and grievous, and her face so burning with
white despair: "Cristin, something has happened to you! You are ill!"
"No," she said, "I am quite well. Will you go, Samson? Promise, for my sake! I want you free, and far away from here."
I promised, for she clung so to my hand, and her hollow eyes devoured my face with such longing. "Yes, I will go. Whatever you wish I will do, but don't ask me to go from you gladly. And you so changed, so pale and strange! If it is not sickness, it is worse. For God's sake, do not keep it from me! Something terrible has be fallen you…"
She heaved a great, shuddering sigh, and clasped her hands under her breasts. "Yes, something has befallen me indeed. I did not want to own it, I did not want you to know, but it is written in my face, and you'll get no rest now for thinking and dreading. He has found a way at last of avenging himself on you and on me! So simple it was, and yet he never thought of it before! He, who fell into bed beside me and snored the night away dreaming of all his other women, suddenly he grasped what would most surely destroy me, and strike you to the heart. Since we came to England he has never let me alone, night after night after night with his hate and glee and pride in his cleverness."
She stood up abruptly beside me, and spread her arms wide, to show how her girdle was tied high under her bosom, and her body gently swollen under the grey woollen gown.
"Do you not see what God and Godred between them have done to me? I am four months gone with child!"
CHAPTER IX
In this desolate situation I was forced to leave Windsor—my lord threatened, my lady captive, my love pregnant with Godred's monstrous progeny, a dagger, not a child, begotten in hate and despite. Ever since he married her, for policy and establishment like most marriages, he had slighted and misprized her, now he persecuted her with his attentions only to poison and kill both her and me. She said to me before she left me, with a calm more terrible than her desperation: "I will never bear any child but yours!" But I knew, and so did she, that she could not harm the life within her, however she shrank from it in horror. She would bear it and she would care for it, and Godred would gloat as he watched her wither, and the incubus devour her, and savour the thought of me eaten alive in Wales by the same disease. Above all, what cruelty to the child, to create it out of hatred and cherish it out of malice, making it a death before ever it lived, when she could so deeply have loved a child engendered in kindness. And even worse if he came, in his own way, to love and value it for the damage it had done on his behalf.
So judge in what anguish I went to my duty.
I told no one. I was tempted for a while to entrust Eleanor with that whole story, and pray her to stand friend to Cristin if by any means she might, for her heart was great enough to find room for the miseries of others, even when it might well have been full of her own. But I did not do it. There was no possibility of confiding Cristin's secrets, her darkness and her need, to any other soul, so passionately were they hers. So I was compelled to let her carry that burden alone.
Duly they came for me, early in one of the first evenings of May, a young servant in David's livery, bearing a written request with David's seal, begging leave to borrow the services of the Welsh clerk, for some intricate copying that required knowledge of both Welsh and English law, since he had only his immediate household with him on this visit, and had left his own law-men in Shrewsbury. Clearly David's demand, thus proffered, was almost as good as Edward's order, it being assumed without question that he had Edward's sanction and approval for everything he did. And a clerk is no great matter, and hardly likely to risk breaking loose on his own when he can sit comfortably enough, even in a virtual prison, under the protection of his lady's name. So nobody made any bones about asking Eleanor's leave, which she graciously gave, and for the first time since entering Windsor, I passed that iron gate that sealed off the princess's prison.
The last look I had from her, shining and private like a blessing, went with me down through the town beside my guide, and across the river to the house where David was lodged.
There was nothing difficult in our escape, because no one was hunting us. We simply rode out of Windsor towards the north-west, briskly and confidently as though we were on approved business, and were never questioned until we reached Wales, though we pressed hard at first, and rode well into the night, lodging having been prepared for us at a grange near Oxford. There we slept out the rest of the dark hours, and went on with fresh mounts in the dawn.
"We can be easy enough," said my companion contentedly. "No one will have missed you, not yet. The castellan will think you are detained overnight on David's business, and I take it your lady will make no mistakes, know nothing and say nothing?"
I said he might rely on that. He was from Lleyn, and had been homesick, he said, ever since he had been fool enough to cross the English border in David's train, and was main glad now to be going home, where he belonged. If there was to be fighting, as everyone seemed to expect, it was not for Edward of England he wanted to fight.
I asked after Cynan, and whether he had made proper preparation to defend his own innocence if suspicion should fall his way. But my companion did not even know the name, and was surprised at the question. Then who, I asked, were his fellows in my rescue, and who had arranged access, in any case, to David's seal, since that could hardly be Cynan's work.
He looked at me along his shoulder, and considered how much to tell me. "His orders were that you were not to know, but I thought you must have guessed it. The Lord David's seal will have been mislaid somewhere about his household, where anyone—meaning your servant here!—might have got hold of it, and in due time it will be found again, no doubt very convincingly. He wants none of his people implicated, you need not fear. I am the scapegoat, once I'm safe in Wales, and I shall have no objection to that! But as to how it was planned—why, the simplest way possible. Who do you think affixed David's seal to the request for you, if not David?"
It was not the surprise it might have been, once I accepted it. It fitted still with that image I had of him, for ever torn, so that in England, when he had cast in his lot there, half at least of his heart fought for Wales, and in Wales a hundred ties of almost equal potency drew him back towards England, and never, never could he be content anywhere, and never could he be faithful, because faith to one land was treason to the other.
"Then all this is his work? The relay of horses, the night's lodging, all?" I thought of Cristin, who had wanted me away from her, very far away where I could not see her anguish or be a tormented witness of the birth she dreaded, and I could believe that David had had her, too, in mind. For there were some for whom he had always a kindness, and to them, after his fashion, he was faithful.
"All his," said the young man. "Playing one hand against the other for plain wantonness, or wishing himself back where he can never go again—who knows? But if that was it, he'd grudge it to us—and it was he offered me the chance, and only smiled on the wrong side of his face when I jumped at it. He's snug enough there at the king's elbow, and has picked the stronger side, on the face of it. But it's my belief he'd change with you and me if he could."
God knows he may have been right. Certain it is that David had deliberately extracted me from Edward's grip and restored me to Llewelyn, to the old land and the old loyalty, into which he was certain he himself could never enter again.
Llewelyn was at Rhydcastell when we came there after that journey, late in May. We were barely dismounting and leading our jaded horses into the tableyard, when someone must have run to him with the news, where he was newly in himself from riding, and stripped to shirt and chausses, for it was an early summer, and hot there between the hills. He came out in haste, his bared breast russet-brown, and the small lines of thought and frowning graven into his brow in ivory against the sunburned gold, which the bleached brown of his clipped beard did no more than outline in a single shade darker. The marks of the summer were on him, but the marks of the winter, too. Not all Edward's harassment, not all the border malice of the marchers, operating with their master's tacit approval, could have honed down the lines of that bold, bright face to this fine-drawn carving, or put the first traces of grey in his hair, either side the brow. He was fretted for Eleanor, as she for him. Those two had never yet seen each other in the flesh, and they were pared away to spirit and longing for love.
He cried: "Samson!" in a shout of joy, and came to embrace me, and of his gladness I was so glad as to be shaken almost to tears. "I thought I had sent you to your death," he said. "You are whole and free, thank God, you at least! Come in with me and tell me all you have to tell, let me know the best and the worst, for I am starved. No man of mine could get any true word or any comfort in Westminster. I have begged in vain, and thundered in vain, they would tell us nothing but that he has her, and all her company. You, too, Samson! And now you are here! If I can accept a first miracle, so I can believe in a second!"
I told him in a breath what seemed to matter most. "She is well, and unshaken, and sends her true mind by me. I am here with her blessing and at her wish."
He laid his arm about my shoulders, and turned suddenly in revulsion from going within, and haled me away instead into the fields, to a high, grassy knoll that looked down upon the valley, and there we lay in the rich green grass together, in the scent of the little spicy pink flowers of pimpernel and centaury, and the sweet air of freedom. And I was grateful to him for this blessing, that we had no walls about us, no listeners, no echoes. Under that sky it was possible to believe in the victory of truth, and the reunion of divided lovers.
There I told him all that melancholy and angry history, from first to last, dredging up for him out of my memory every look and every word of Eleanor's, and indeed not one was ever forgotten. And it was like the sudden bliss of steady and gentle rain upon a great drought, slaking the thirsty soil, setting the sap flowing in new life, filling the world with a young, green sweetness in which all the flowers of hope burst into bud. He lay with his chin in his hands, and listened, sometimes asking a quick question, perhaps only to imagine again her voice repeating its calm and queenly defiance.
"Whatever he may hold against me," he said, not angrily but heavily, "whatever suspicions he may have of me, it was vile to make her the victim, and viler to try to use her as a weapon. And I tell you, Samson, when first I got word of it, I was in two minds, and if I had been a free man I should have massed all my power in one great thrust, hopeless or not, as much to destroy him as to deliver her. But I am not free to be senselessly brave and throw my life and all away. I hold Wales in my hands, this land I have half-made into a nation, and cannot abandon now. It is hers as well as mine, but most of all it is the hope of the future, of my sons by her, and of other men's sons, every soul who speaks the Welsh tongue has rights in it. I have not had long enough!" he said, drumming his fist tormentedly against the thick grass. "It is not made, but only making! If I had had ten years more, if King Henry had lived ten years longer, this danger need never have been. But I have not had long enough! Not long enough to wipe out all those centuries of disruption."
"You could not have delivered her," I said, "you could only have fallen helpless into Edward's hands, which is what he wants, for if you fall, Wales falls."
"I know it!" said Llewelyn. "It would have been folly to abandon the way of law for the way of war. My envoys are still at the papal court, waiting for a new appointment now Gregory is dead. God rest him, he did his best for us. I have sent further letters. The new pontiff will know from the first of Edward's crime. I had complaints enough before, now this becomes my chief and first complaint, and manifestly just. No, it would have been mad to rush to arms, I should have destroyed my own case, for I take my stand on the treaty, which he wants broken and discarded. If he could goad me into being the one to shatter it, he would have won. But, oh, it was hard not to fight for her!"
I said: "She is of your mind. You cannot yield now, not by a single point. The terms you stand on are just, and you have offered homage according to treaty and custom."
"I have done more," said Llewelyn, half enraged with himself even for that. "I have offered to take the oath of fealty to his envoys, if he will send them to me, to satisfy him until we can agree on a safe place to meet for homage. He has refused. He stands absolutely on my total submission, and my consent to attend wherever he summons me. I stand absolutely on seeing the treaty honoured and reaffirmed, its breaches repaired, and my wife sent to join me, before I will take the oath or lay my hands in his. It is deadlock. This one concession I offered, to break it, and he refuses. I shall make no more. I shall not offer that again."
"She above all," I said, "understands the necessity for standing fast against him. "I could not bear it," she said to me, "if Llewelyn so mistook me as to think I valued my freedom above his honour and dignity. I ask nothing of him," she said, "but to maintain his truth and his right." If you once give back an inch, he will press you back again and again, toe to toe, and give you nothing in return."
"I confess," said Llewelyn, brooding, "I still do not understand him. He was not always so with me. Why this stony enmity now?"
"It is the first touch of resistance," I said, "that turns Edward mad. What does not move at his thrust, even if it mattered nothing to him when first he laid hand on it, becomes to him the total enemy, an
d he cannot rest until he has hurled it out of his path and ground it to powder under his feet."
"He should sooner have practised on Snowdon," said Llewelyn grimly, "than on Eleanor and me."
Afterwards I told him, when what most mattered was done, what I had until then withheld, and he pointedly had not asked, who it was had won me out of Windsor.
"So I supposed," said Llewelyn drily. "He had always a kindness for you, in spite of all the times he used you ill. It is the one thing that still does him honour. As for me, I have been through this to-and-fro of his once too often. David is dead to me."
But concerning Cristin I did not tell him anything, not because I grudged him the half of my load as I would have given him the half of my joy, but for a simpler reason that confounded me more. For when I opened my lips to speak of her, my throat closed, and I had no voice. So I accepted the judgment of God, and held my peace.
In the months that followed Llewelyn manned his borders, fended off the offences that grew with every week, and steadily sent complaints, with details, times, witnesses, in every case that came to his notice. To Rome he sent again to remind the new pope, whose election we awaited with hope and anxiety, of the utterly illegal detention of Eleanor, and all the other, lesser wrongs which defaced the treaty relationship between the two countries. And at the beginning of July we heard, with great joy, which of the candidate cardinals had been elected. He had taken the name of Adrian, as he had been the cardinal of St. Adrian, but we knew him by another name.
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