Owain knew as precisely as Catherine. There was no need for either of them to guess. Christine had spelled out the misery of widowhood so precisely that nothing was left to the imagination: how from the moment you became a widow you also became suddenly invisible to all your former friends … and the only people who still seemed able to see you were those taking advantage of your defencelessness by making up claims that you owed them something. ‘Problems sprang at me from everywhere; lawsuits and trials surrounded me as if this were the natural fate of widows,’ Christine had written. ‘The leech of Fortune did not stop sucking my blood for fourteen years, so that if one misfortune ceased, another ordeal happened, in so many different ways that it would be too long to tell even half of it. And the leech did not stop sucking my blood until I had nothing left.’
Catherine, who knew so little about England, and who was so accustomed to the respect and deference of everyone she encountered, probably had no idea yet how pliable and willing to adapt she’d have to become to survive and prosper. Owain, who knew all about adapting and bending, masking his Welshness or brazening it out, could be sure of that … She’d be helpless, all right, without her husband’s protection. There’d be no one to knock all those headstrong dukes’ heads together for years.
Without intending it at all, Owain felt the pity seep into him, and with it he began to sense a new possibility. His desire might be a sin, a crime that needed to be punished, but his anger, his repentance, should be directed at himself, not at Catherine. She would have enough to contend with already.
He should direct his efforts at helping the needy. His punishment should fit his crime.
Owain would never have recognised his cousin. They were about the same age, which must mean that he’d last have seen Glynd?r’s one surviving son, oh, fifteen years ago, maybe; back in that time of smoke in the eyes and loyalty and hope and exhausting night rides, when everything still seemed real in a way it never had since. They’d been half children still, somewhere between five and ten, Owain thought vaguely – messengers at best, running or riding occasionally between men, then boasting about their errand to the other children for months afterwards, but usually only frightened observers of the fighting around them. There was nothing left now of the bright, brave boy Owain remembered his cousin having been in the grown-up Maredudd ap Owain Glynd?r he saw here at this Southwark inn, nursing his tankard of ale and his grudge. This grown-up man who’d come slipping into the Bishop’s house on a tired old nag this afternoon, asking for Owain Tudor – and lucky to have found him just hours after he got back from France – was small and rat-like, with none of his father’s lordly charisma. Maredudd had watchful eyes and resentful lines branding his forehead and face, which were half hidden by an enormous, misshapen, provincial hat. He looked far older than twenty-two.
‘But why are you here?’ Owain asked again, trying not to let his disappointment show.
Maredudd and his father had vanished into the hills thirteen years before, after the fall of Harlech. The English had never caught them, although there was always an enormous bounty on Owain Glynd?r’s head. What had become of Glynd?r had, formally, remained a mystery. Owain chose to believe the story that most often circulated – that father and son had taken shelter with Maredudd’s sister Alys, over the border in English Herefordshire, and that she and her English husband had sheltered the rebels from her family with the connivance of almost everyone else in the border region. The story had it that Owain Glynd?r had ‘become’ the confessor of Alys’ family by marriage, the Scudamores of Monnington Stradel – pretended to be a Franciscan called Siôn Cent, who’d become known far and wide as a trickster as wily as any in the old Welsh tales. Owain Glynd?r’s son was always said to be masquerading as a lesser friar. The great charm of the story was that Alys Scudamore’s husband John was the Sheriff of Herefordshire, appointed by Henry of England himself. For Owain, a still greater charm was that Henry himself knew the story that his old enemy might have gone on living right under the nose of the English crown’s man on the Welsh Marches, and had been confident enough of his generous handling of Wales never to have tested the truth of it with searches and arrests.
Who could say? It could be true. Owain Tudor, who hadn’t quite managed to rip every shred of secret sympathy for his Welsh brethren out of his heart, had always quietly hoped it might be true. That story was the last flicker of hope for a Welshman, after all. All those other relatives imprisoned in the Tower – the Mortimer womenfolk and Maredudd’s elder brother, Gruffydd ap Owain Glynd?r – they were all dead now, long before their time. And Owain’s own direct family, all the children of his grandfather Tudur, were as doomed as the Owain Glynd?rs; with the children and the children’s children of that part of the clan also paying the price of their forebears’ rebellion against the English crown. Even though they were still alive, and living in what was left of their lands, it was clear that Owain’s immediate family would never have their old powers again. And he, Owain, wouldn’t be seeing those faces again, or those lands either. He was banned for all eternity from Wales. He was banned from owning land in England too, or claiming rents from Englishmen. He lived modestly on the grant of £20 a year that the young King Henry V had made him when he was still a boy: enough to keep a squire in horses and armour and gentleman’s clothes, just. Anything above that he had to earn. And, as a Welshman, it would always be almost impossible for him to do that. That was his poisonous legacy; that was what his blood had brought him. Since he was cut off from his homeland by the King’s orders, and cut off from making his fortune at war by his own choice, and cut off from marriage by the English government’s stipulation that he seek official permission before taking a wife, as well as by the cruel disobedience of his own heart, he’d realised that if he wanted to avoid the poison of resentment – which he did – he could only thank God that he had an aptitude for learning that would eventually help him flourish in the Church. He’d found a path.
Still, anyone would dream sometimes; it would be too hard not to allow yourself a daydream from time to time. So Owain had spent years thinking – idly, mostly – that one day the Glynd?r family might come marching out of the hills again: that there would be another time of riding like the wind for freedom and a future. But for that to be possible, Glynd?r himself would have to have survived, or cousin Maredudd be as much a hero as his father, able to lead his people through their wilderness to their Israel. But this little man – short, dark and wiry, in shoddy, old-fashioned clothes, with that bitter yet calculating look – seemed anything but a hero. There was nothing to hope for from Maredudd.
‘He died,’ Maredudd said. ‘Father. We buried him.’ There was a little glint of truculence in his grin; a ‘and-don’t-ask-me-where’, ‘you-didn’t-suffer-with-us-so-you-can’t-know-our-secrets’ sort of look. He added, ‘And then I thought, what now for me?’
Maredudd was muttering, looking down, throwing him those bright little birdlike glances only every now and then, when he raised his nose from his pitcher. But Owain was very aware of people around them listening, of heads turning furtively towards them, then turning away. This was Southwark, after all. These rough South London tradesmen might think nothing of a burst of Sicilian or Flemish or French – but Welsh? It was still banned; still the language of danger.
‘God rest his soul,’ Owain said in English, a bit louder to appease the silent listeners; feeling to his horror almost sympathetic to them. His cousin seemed so … foreign.
Maredudd, with the recklessness born of not knowing what it was to be a Welshman in London, repeated a little louder in Welsh: ‘And then I thought, what now for me?’
Sighing, Owain inclined his head. If Maredudd would only go back to muttering.
‘So I’ve decided: I’m going to take the pardon.’
Owain stared. Years before, King Henry had offered Maredudd a pardon, hoping to tempt the Glynd?r son out into the open and separate him from his father. There’d never been anything but silence in repl
y. But now – surely Maredudd hadn’t rushed straight to London from his father’s grave to take up that ancient offer?
‘What?’ he said dully, shaking his head. ‘Is that why …? But …’
Maredudd was ready to argue. He was boiling over with guilty resentment; seething with it. His words came rushing and hissing out. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t. Do you think it’s easy being the son of a rebel?’ he said, very fast, very angrily. ‘No way forward, no way out – do you think I’ve enjoyed hiding out in robes pretending to be something I’m not, and afraid all the time?’ In his agitation he’d knocked the strange hat off his head. Owain saw (with secret satisfaction) that a tonsure was growing out. So, he thought, it was true: you were dressing up as a pair of Franciscans. But there was no point asking Maredudd, who was whining in a thin, hungry voice: ‘I want to be a man again. Hold my head up. A wife, children; some land. To go out on my horse without fearing they’ll be along any second to hunt me down. I want a normal life.’
Gently, wonderingly, Owain shook his head. Maredudd clearly had no idea about the anti-Welsh laws in force here if he thought it could be that easy to remake himself. He didn’t yet know that his blood was tainted; his family ruined and himself doomed, whatever he did. Owain could already begin to see how this evening would develop. He’d buy his cousin many tankards of ale, and listen as Maredudd sank further into self-pity, then carry the Welshman home. He’d promise to put his cousin up for a few days and arrange him an audience with the Bishop. It would only be later, after that, and after the excitement of the pardon, that the miserable truth would begin to sink in for Maredudd. Owain thought: I could have done without this, after all that’s happened.
Maredudd had hardly mentioned the passing of the King. He didn’t even seem to be worried that Henry’s death might affect the old offer of a pardon. He certainly didn’t ask whether Owain was saddened to lose his master. He didn’t seem to be aware of Owain’s fatigue.
‘It’s not much to ask, is it?’ Maredudd was saying. ‘A marriage and a bit of land? Of course I accept that I’ll never get a title, because of being Welsh. Nothing we can do about that. Look at you – plaything of the English half your life.’ Owain winced, but his cousin only shook his head and slurred, ‘Don’t take offence now. Figure of speech. Though it’s true enough. Still, I’ve been following what’s happened to you since you’ve been in England. You were good in the war. In France. They say you captured the Duke of Orleans at Azincourt, with your own hands?’
Embarrassed, Owain nodded. He didn’t tell anyone that story; he knew there’d been no great bravery in what he’d done. But Maredudd shook his head with grim pleasure; his prejudice confirmed. ‘And you weren’t even knighted. Even for that. You see, as a Welshman you haven’t got a hope. Even if you’re the best, transcendently much better than the rest, you still haven’t got a hope. They’ll pass you over all your life.’
So Maredudd did have some idea of a few of the problems of being Welsh then, Owain thought, feeling suddenly sorry for him, knowing how many more unpleasant discoveries there would be for him in the weeks and months to come.
Maredudd leaned forward, grinning as if the thought of being cut off from the normal life of a man of honour gave him a perverse kind of pleasure, and clapping Owain on the shoulder.
‘So what you and I need, cousin, are good marriages. No hope for us as things are. They’ll trip us up at every turn. “Bloody Welsh savages.” All that. But a good English wife each … eh? A girl with a family to look up to, and a dowry. That’s what will set us straight. Put a generation between my father and a decent future. Give us children who can hope.’
He didn’t even seem to have looked at his London cousin carefully enough to see that under his black cloak Owain was wearing friar’s black. The realisation irritated Owain. Had Maredudd spent so long assuming robes were something you dressed up in for pretence that he didn’t notice them at all any more, or at least couldn’t see them as a sign of a genuine wish to be considered a man of God? Was the man utterly self-absorbed?
Worse still, Maredudd had started talking loudly. Too loudly. He looked triumphantly around, then he did a tipsy doubletake. The Southwark tavern folk had given up turning away their eyes. A dozen faces were turned towards him, giving him assessing stares that seemed to mean trouble.
‘Welsh, eh?’ the tavern keeper said.
There was a murmur from his mates; an edging and a tightening of bodies. They didn’t like Welsh, their bodies were saying.
Maredudd’s eyes rolled. He eyed them, seeming to be wondering whether he could take on this whole crowd and quite relishing the prospect. But you couldn’t spend your life brawling in taverns for the honour of a Wales that no longer existed. Peaceably, Owain replied, ‘No, no. Brittany. Saint Malo. Breton.’ Breton sounded just like Welsh; he’d made himself understood, more or less, in Brittany. They’d have to believe him. He looked the tavern keeper straight in the eye, baring his teeth in a determinedly naive smile that he felt probably looked foolish, but did the trick of easing the man’s anger, then passed him a coin. ‘Here,’ he added, knowing this would calm any last suspicions the minimob were being made fools of. ‘Let us buy our friends from London a drink.’
The men turned away, thronging round the tavern keeper with a quiet hubbub in which Owain sensed embarrassment, watchfulness and excitement at getting something for nothing. It wearied him, the whole shameful business of living in the world he found himself in. There was so much of this: of small lies and evasions in the inglorious name of peace and quiet.
‘Come on,’ he muttered, and Maredudd, looking shocked, followed him out. They didn’t talk as they hurried back to the Bishop of Winchester’s palace. Owain could sense Maredudd weighing up a future in which you often had to pretend to be Breton to avoid being roughed up by a Southwark ruffian.
Suddenly, in the darkness, with the whiff of whale tallow coming from the barrel down the street, the pity Owain felt for Maredudd overwhelmed him, and he put an arm out and laid it over his cousin’s shoulder. Poor Maredudd, who was probably doing the right thing by making his peace with the English lords, but who would hate so much of the adjustments that would be forced on him along the way. Maredudd, who still didn’t understand that he would never have the life of an English lord that he hoped for. Maredudd, who might just about manage to wangle a marriage of sorts, but certainly not the glorious sort he wanted. Maredudd, who hadn’t understood yet that if you truly wanted to find peace, as a son of defeat, you had to step back altogether from the world and give up the notion of fathering children who’d only have to go on paying the price of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ crimes against England.
Owain could feel the uncertainty, the hurt, and the awareness of worse to come in the other man’s tense shoulders. But, for the first time, he also felt peace in his own heart at the knowledge that he’d accepted that his blood was tainted; that now all he had to do was live, and trust in God.
‘I’ve chosen my way, and it isn’t marriage,’ he muttered. They were safe enough talking Welsh in the quiet of the night street, going at this pace. The chastened Maredudd nodded him on, listening properly for the first time. Owain nodded down at his robes and saw his cousin take in the cut of them and their meaning. ‘I’m choosing the world of beauty and meditation; not this. In due course, I’ll join the Augustinians at St Mary’s in Oxford,’ he went on. ‘There’s a place for me; it’s all arranged. But I have to wait seven years. I’d do it before then, to get away from all this faster, if there wasn’t one last task tying me to this world.’
Maredudd turned to give him a closer look.
‘I promised to look after the son of my King while he’s an infant,’ Owain said, still walking but uncomfortably aware of that turned head beside him, the slow eyes. He pushed himself on to add, in the most neutral voice possible, ‘… and the widow. I’m going to work in her household.’
Maredudd didn’t look away. It was Owain’s turn to fe
el uneasy. He didn’t know why he felt rattled enough that he added: ‘It was the King who wanted me to. His last wish.’ He knew he was telling a lie.
‘Why not go to Oxford now? What is the King of England’s last wish to you?’ Maredudd said, and there was no offence in the hard words, just a kind of astonishment – as if Maredudd was wondering what had happened to the brave young Welsh cousin he remembered.
Owain shook his head, thinking of Henry; lost in admiration he couldn’t put into words. The rage of the road slipped away, leaving only the fatigue. He felt his eyes soften and moisten. ‘He was …’
His voice cracked. They both stopped walking.
‘A kindness. Seven years,’ Owain said when his voice came back. ‘It will slip past in no time.’
FIVE
Two months later, with the first snow in the iron air of November, Catherine sat before Duke Humphrey and listened warily to the statement he’d prepared about her future life.
It didn’t matter what the ginger Duke said really, she told herself, keeping her breathing steady and the polite little smile on her face. Nothing mattered now she had Harry back; a Harry who, at eleven months old, could walk properly and cheerfully yell ‘No!’ at anyone who crossed him. And a Harry who’d remembered his mother. As soon as he’d seen her for the first time since the summer he had said ‘Mama’ with such treble reverence that it had wrung her heart and brought tears to her eyes, even before they’d run into each other’s arms and she’d swung him round and round until they were both dizzy and laughing and crying and chattering at once.
For the past two weeks, between solemn Masses and funeral rites, Catherine and her son had been inseparable – however much Mistress Ryman still clung on, hissing and clicking her teeth, and muttering disapprovingly that the King had been used to doing this or that or the other thing at this hour, and that the routines she’d established were important for the child’s wellbeing, and upsetting them would only be damaging.
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