“From one moment to the next, the world ended, Meg. It’s only because of our young Bohun that I live.”
“Prince Edward was behind this,” Goronwy said.
“Edward!” I said.
Goronwy heaved a sigh and lowered himself to a bench near the fire. “He’s spreading his wings. This was only the beginning of his plans for Wales, and he made it clear that nothing—no treaty, no sense of honor, no right—will hinder him.”
Llywelyn leaned heavily on me and we walked together to sit beside Goronwy. “Are you injured?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “My pride is bruised. A paltry thing, considering the number of men I lost because I expected better of Clare. He took me completely by surprise.”
I looked down, not answering. He glanced at me. “Yes, I know you expected it, because of Cilmeri. But that was a rare thing, you know. How could any treaty ever be signed if the men coming to the meeting feared for their lives? It is a terrible precedent that Edward sets.”
“He doesn’t care,” I said. “He feels that he is a law unto himself.”
“He wears the right of God like a crown,” Goronwy agreed. “We face much danger from him in the coming years. Maybe he’ll be killed by the Saracens during his Crusade and we’ll be saved from facing him again.”
“No,” Llywelyn said. “Wales has never been that lucky.”
* * * * *
Some days later we lay side by side in bed, our hands clasped beneath the blanket. Then Llywelyn rolled over and put a hand on my belly. “I spoke of luck,” he said, “and our lack thereof.”
“Yes.”
“But you are more than lucky for me. You give me the hope that God has seen our plight and seeks to aid us in our time of need.”
I put my hand on his. “I hope so, Llywelyn, but I’m scared.”
“Of the birth?”
“Of everything,” I said. “I’m scared of loving you so much and not deserving that love. I’m scared of losing you. It was a near thing today. How many more chances do you get?”
“Fourteen years you gave me, Meg. I plan to use every single one of them.”
“Did you think of that, there on the hill?”
“No,” he said. “I was so damn scared that all I could think about was dying and leaving you and our son unprotected, with only Dafydd standing between Wales and England—Dafydd and his loathsome designs on you.”
“But you want to name our baby Dafydd, if it’s a boy?” We’d talked about names over the last months, and he’d always come back to that one.
“It was my uncle’s name, and the name of the patron saint of Wales. What name could I give him that wasn’t that of an enemy or one who has betrayed me? Owain? Gruffydd? Rhys? I think not.”
“Okay,” I said, laughing at his predicament. “But your brother is going to think he’s named for him.”
“Let him think that,” Llywelyn said. “We know the truth.” He rolled onto his back and soon was breathing gently, easing into sleep. I was glad and gently rubbed the top of his shoulder. He was going to need his sleep, because I was feeling an ache in my back that meant baby, and soon! It’s early though, if my dates are right.
I awoke some time later to a cry from the next room. Feeling the need to use the guarderobe, I swung my legs over the bed, heaved myself to my feet, and walked to the curtain that separated our room from Anna’s. I pulled it back and found Anna sitting up in bed, but no nurse beside her.
“Where’s Maud, sweetie?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I need to pee.”
“Okay,” I said and held out my hand. Anna clambered out of bed and toddled toward me, staggering slightly on sleepy feet. I eased open the latch to the door, not wanting to wake Llywelyn, and left it ajar. Anna and I walked down the hall to the toilet. I opened the door and stuck in my head. The room was empty, and the smell wasn’t too bad. Llywelyn had ordered the toilet cleaned daily because I had a tendency to lose my lunch if the stench got too bad.
I hiked up Anna’s nightgown and lifted her onto the seat. She leaned forward into my belly, clearly very sleepy, and I crouched in front of her so she could rest her head on my shoulder. As I shifted to find a more comfortable position, the room shifted with me.
Pop!
I clutched Anna to me. She gasped, and I gasped, and then we were gone.
* * * * *
The blackness took me. It was an abyss opening before my feet and I choked as we fell into it. Then my feet hit the ground and I fell over, my arms still wrapped around Anna. My mouth was open in a scream but nothing was coming out.
“Mammy!” Anna found her voice. “Look!”
I lifted my head and stared at the lights on the house in front of me. Electric lights. I sat up, supporting myself on one hand, and Anna stood next to me, her hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t think. My brain whirred but processed no thoughts. Then the front door slammed and a woman came out the door, wiping her hands on her flowered dress. She trotted down the front steps toward us, slowed, then stopped, her breath coming in gasps.
“Mam,” I said. I reached for her. She fell to her knees in front of me, touched a trembling hand to my face, and we both began to sob.
“Meg, my darling Meg,” she said, wrapping her arms around me, the wetness on her cheeks mixing with my own tears.
“Gramma, Gramma, Gramma,” Anna said, bouncing up and down. In the back of my head, I was surprised that Anna remembered her, and then I realized that she was saying ‘Gramma’ in Welsh: “Mam-gu.”
“The baby’s coming, Mam,” I said, breathless. “Now.”
“Let’s get you into the house,” she said, wiping at the tears on her cheeks with the backs of her hands and not asking me any questions I couldn’t answer.
I stumbled with her to the front door, clutching her hand. I was bent over in pain from the child that was coming but still lost in the thirteenth century. I found myself crying in relief at being home, and at the same time for Llywelyn, for the man who’d died in every version of history we knew, on that snowy hill at Cilmeri.
Mam kept repeating cariad over and over again, which only made me sob all the more. “We’ll get you to the hospital, Meg,” she said, helping me up the steps. “How long have you been contracting?”
“Days,” I said. “But it’s too early. The baby’s not due yet, or so I thought.”
“I’ll get the ambulance,” she said. “You sit.”
While she made the phone call, Mam put me on the couch next to the door, the very same couch I’d sat on with Anna the day we’d driven to Wales. Anna climbed onto the couch and snuggled beside me. The contractions were coming strongly by the time the ambulance came, and then the hours blurred together in a midst of pain and anxiety, and finally joy.
Llywelyn and I had a son.
* * * * *
I stared out the window, David in my arms, watching the lights come on as evening progressed. I marveled at the brightness and color, but couldn’t help missing, missing, missing my life in Wales. Until time do us part, Llywelyn had feared, and he’d been right to. We would probably never know what had caused me to come to him after Trev died—at the very spot where he died. Or why. Only that I did.
“Can you tell me, cariad?” Mam said the next morning. “I missed you.”
I shifted my head to get a better view of her in the chair beside the bed, and adjusted David on my breast. “I’m sorry, Mam,” I said. “I spent the last nine months explaining where I’m from, and now I must explain to you where I’ve been, and you aren’t going to believe me any more than they did.”
“Meg,” Mam said. “I’m your mother. What won’t I believe?”
“That I traveled to thirteenth century Wales. That David’s father is Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales.”
I held Mam’s eyes, though her face showed no expression, but then she smiled. She stood, came to sit on the side of the bed, and took my hand. “I know,” she said.
“You know? I said.
“How do you know?
“Anna,” she said. “She’s told me all about her Papa, and horses, and a man named Goronwy who made her laugh. She spoke in Welsh. You’ve done wonderful things with her, Meg.”
“You believe me!”
“You are my darling daughter,” Mam said. “There’s nothing you could tell me that I wouldn’t believe, if you believed it to be true.”
When David grew old enough to travel, we flew to Wales—against my mother’s better judgment. I begged her for help, for I didn’t want to go alone, and eventually she consented to come with me.
“He’s not there, cariad,” she said, even as she booked the tickets and then paid for them. “The castles are gone or empty shells. It will be nothing like you remember them. Keep your dreams. Cold reality will only dash them.”
Mam was right, and yet she wasn’t.
We went first to Criccieth, since it was there that I’d started—we’d started—though I’d only stayed there for a day. It was as I remembered, a mighty fortress built on rock on a promontory in the sea. But the walls had mostly crumbled, and I confused the lady at the visitor center who speculated on its successive construction, postulating that it was Edward who had built the outer curtain wall. I think not!
I stood on the edge of the cliff, as the battlements were gone, and looked out over the sea. Then I turned to the town below. The mountain loomed behind it, as it always had, but the village had spread along the seashore, thriving and modern, having long since filled in the marsh in which my car lay buried. Power poles lined the beach instead of trees, but if I closed my eyes and breathed, it smelled the same. It was my Wales, but still, without Llywelyn in it.
Everywhere we went, I collected stories about Llywelyn. He lived here. He fought there. Two different abbeys claimed his body as his final resting place, but none could produce his grave. Throughout, I restrained myself from pointing to the baby in my arms and saying: “Look! This is his son! The true Prince of Wales! Open your eyes and see!”
We reached Brecon in the driving rain. Anna had held Mam’s hand as we walked across the parking lot, but she stopped as soon as she saw the castle and refused to go any further. I could understand, for it shocked me too. The castle had a giant, white house attached to it.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It says on the information sheet, ‘Brecon Castle Hotel’,” Mam said. “That’s where we’re supposed to be staying.”
“What have they done to it?” I breathed.
Mam scooped up Anna and we walked across the castle grounds, or what had been the castle grounds and into the front entrance of the house. Mam checked us in as I blindly wandered the reception room, following my nose, until I reached the garden and the last standing stones of the old castle. Mam and Anna followed me outside and we stood in the center of what had been the outer courtyard.
“Papa’s not here, is he?” Anna said.
“No, honey.” My eyes filled with tears. “He’s not.”
That was the last of the Welsh castle tours. We visited Roman ruins and the massive and well-preserved English castles that Edward had built to subjugate Wales, but I didn’t want Anna to wonder where Llywelyn was when she was too young to understand my grief or cope with her own.
I did go without them, just once, with only David in his sling, to Cilmeri, a small town just a few miles west of Builth Wells. A farmer had put up a memorial stone—really just a big, jagged piece of granite—to mark the spot where Llywelyn died. Every year on the 11th of December, patriots held a ceremony to mark the day and the spot where he fell. I couldn’t bear the thought of that, and was glad that it was March and I was alone with only the flowers people who still thought of him had left. I read the death poems and songs to his memory with which people littered the meadow, and knew that I wouldn’t come back.
The fire in his hearth has gone out,
Its light lost in the murk of the hall.
No one is left to tend it.
A great warrior, a king, our Prince of Wales
Llywelyn
Has fallen in the snow.
He is quiet now, asleep under the mantle of peace.
The peace he reached for all his life,
But could never find and we could not give him,
Is his at last.
The fire in his heart has gone out.
His heat can no longer warm us.
But still we dream, we live
The morning sun wakes us.
In our hearts, he stays with us,
Dreams with us,
And will rise to walk in better days.
Mam and Anna had understood what I hadn’t. Llywelyn wasn’t there.
* * * * *
“I hear you’re leaving us?” My professor leaned across his desk and passed me the final paper that completed my senior requirements for graduation. “What did they offer you out there in Oregon that we didn’t?”
I looked down at my paper. It was called The Mythologization of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd: An Historical Perspective.
“Space,” I said. I knew my professor well enough to tell him the truth.
“Ah,” Dr. Bill said, folding his hands and putting his fingers to his lips. “A Ph.D. is a long row to hoe, but that paper is a good start. Just make sure you don’t stray too far into the realm of speculation. Then you’ll have something that should be in the literature department, instead of history.”
“I think I can handle it,” I said, “though I confess there were times while writing this that I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.”
“If we didn’t love history so much, none of us would be here. We all get our heads so far into the past that sometimes we forget where we are. Don’t let graduate school take over your life. Don’t forget that you live in the here and now.”
“Yes, Dr. Bill,” I said.
Could he read my mind or what? It was four years since I’d returned to the twentieth century: four years of love and tears, and an enormous amount of work. Mam had pushed me towards getting back in school. That first quarter, I signed up at the local community college to continue those classes I’d started on before we’d driven to Wales. I’d found evening classes, early morning classes, independent study classes, and ones that coincided with the kids’ naps. Over the years we’d bumped along pretty well, and with David in preschool and Anna in second grade, this last semester at the university had been a much more stable proposition for me.
If only Elisa could have been part of it too. My sister had been more stubborn than either Mam or I had thought possible. She flat-out refused to accept that I’d been to Wales, and that David was not Trev’s child. That she’d been distracted and harassed preparing for her own marriage during Christmas break four years ago, I could understand, but as the years had passed, we’d slid into a mutual non-discussion pact. I didn’t mention Wales, and she didn’t close her ears to my voice. And I’d sworn on a stack of Bibles never to mention it to Ted, her husband.
But the reason I was leaving Pennsylvania was that I no longer could live so close to the place where Wales started. At first, I drove to the spot every day, maybe multiple times a day, as long as I had both Anna and David in the car with me. Yet, in snow, rain, or sun, the road never became what it had been. Often, I’d park beside the road, get out of the car, and walk all over the hill, poking into the dirt and sometimes even shouting Llywelyn’s name. But he never answered, and the road never opened for me into that black abyss that had brought us to Wales in the first place.
What I could never come to terms with was why it had happened. If I was meant, as Llywelyn thought, to come to Wales, to save his life and bear his child, why was I back in Pennsylvania? If I was meant to save Llywelyn’s life and his dynasty, why did he still die on that snowy hillside in 1282? None of it made sense.
Except for the very real existence of David, I wouldn’t have believed it had happened at all—as if it was a year-long dream which I only awoke from in my mother’s garden. I
hoped that by leaving Pennsylvania, Llywelyn would haunt me less. I intended to continue my research on Wales, to become an historian, but I needed to stop living in the past. I needed to get away to an entirely different place, and face the fact that this was the only life I was going to get.
As I watched David grow, I could see his father in him. Even at four, he was a driven child, a perfectionist, always wanting to climb higher, run faster—push himself harder than any child I knew—and most adults, for that matter. And maybe that’s where the answer lay—maybe I needed to raise my son to be the man he needed to be, and hope that who he was would transcend space and time, if that time ever came.
But I couldn’t tell David who his father was. It wouldn’t do to raise a boy who thought he was the Prince of Wales. In the twentieth century, that job belonged to another man, in another country, a world and a lifetime away. Even Anna appeared to have no memory of Wales at all. Now that she was in school, she refused to speak a word of Welsh, as if punishing me for taking her away from all that she loved.
No. It’s best that we leave.
And yet, I still lay in bed at night, and wept for him. Wales lost him, I lost him, at the very point when his triumph was within his grasp. Still, I heard the hope under the despair, and dreamed of what might have been and what could still be. Someday. Hope for me; hope for him.
Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance Page 24
