Uneasy Lies the Crown (43 page)

The rest of the Welsh were deep into the mountains before the English troops ever got near to them. Owain and Maredydd, separated from the others, did not stop riding hard for hours. When they reached a stream, Owain jumped from his saddle and threw his sword into the mists of a shallow pool at the base of a waterfall.

Maredydd retrieved his father’s sword without a word. He did not offer it back. He knew his father would not take it just then—even if the English had fallen upon them that very moment.

Iolo Goch:

Rhys Ddu was granted a trial in London, albeit a mockery of justice, and was swiftly declared guilty of treason. In the same tower where he awaited his trial was the Lady Margaret. When she heard the roar of the crowd outside one day, she asked her guards what it was about. Gloatingly, they told her. She wished, then, that she had not asked.

As Rhys went down on his knees before the block, he glared at the priest who was there to hear his final words and said in a steady voice, “Prince Owain lives and he will never yield to the usurper, Henry. Take my cursed head off, if it gives you English bastards pleasure. But when I die another will take my place. I warn you all, it will go on until there are no Welshmen left for your kind to enslave. And for each one of us that goes down, we will take ten Englishmen with us. Then the Scots will come down and take over the whole bloody island.”

Then he turned his eyes heavenward. “Now forgive me, Father, I have not been to Mass regularly... in years, maybe...”

58

Tower of London, England — 1411

Owain had kept prisoners, although how many and under what conditions, Margaret was never really sure. Mostly, they were kept at Dolbadarn or Aberystwyth, seldom at Harlech, for he regarded that as his home. But it had taken her a long time to share the opinion of Harlech being any sort of home. It was too much a fortress and ever full of diplomats and soldiers flooding through the gatehouse entrance. Only Edmund and Catrin’s children had brought to it any hint of hominess with their perpetual attempts at song. They had been a growing army of bards for Iolo’s tutelage. Lionel, in particular, had shown an interest in the harp and Iolo had sat with him many an evening in infinite patience, first teaching him how to care for the harp and then how to properly pluck the strings. But such trivialities were far too boring for bold little Lionel. He wanted to learn an entire song and his failure to do so at his first sitting nearly killed his ambitions altogether.

The children... ah, the children. What short, undeservedly cruel lives they had suffered. So much different from her own childhood, half at Wrexham, half in London. After Margaret’s surrender of Harlech, Angharad had died on the way to London. The sweet child did not make it as far as Shrewsbury before her lungs filled with fluid, drowning her from the inside. Lionel—she was told soon after they had all been tossed into the Tower of London—had succumbed to ‘natural causes’. But she had not been allowed to see his body and suspected the ‘cause’ was most likely poisoning. Being an heir to Owain and the son of the traitor Sir Edmund, Lionel was better removed than allowed to live and one day incite trouble.

For the first year of their imprisonment, Sion and Mary had shared quarters with their mother, but a fresh bout of the plague had taken Sion from them. He died in his mother’s arms within a day of the fever coming on. Mary survived, but she was taken away and Margaret never heard from her again. Since then, she had asked regularly of Gwladys and Catrin. At first, she was cursed and spat at. As she grew more insistent, her guards became more abusive. But apparently they had been given strict orders not to cause any harm to her person, because the backlashes seldom went further than a brusque shove or a stinging slap. Except for the one time, when one of her guards became particularly perturbed at her request for unspoiled food. A lanky, greasy-haired man with foul breath, he slammed the door shut behind him, pinned her down upon the ‘bed’, yanked her skirt up in one well-practiced motion and as he fumbled to free his manhood and fight off her struggles, another guard entered and knocked the perpetrator clear across the floor by slamming the stool into his head.

“You’ll not hurt the lady,” her liberator said. Then he seized the other guard by the collar and tossed him out into the corridor.

“You all right?” he said in a softer tone to Margaret.

She smoothed her skirts and clamped her knees together, nodding. Then she rolled over on her side to face the wall and sobbed, not out of fear of her captors, but out of misery over her own helplessness.

That was the extent of the kindness she was to receive. The next day the guard who had saved her from harm brought her freshly roasted fowl. The aroma was beyond tantalizing and when she reached for it, he caught her wrist and pulled her tightly to him. He was quite young and if not handsome at least fair smelling and clean-shaven. But there was no doubt about what the payment for decent food was to be. The unspoken proposition brought him a tankard across the jaw and ever after that he treated her just as roughly as the other man had.

How opposite her life was now from that which she had shared with Owain at Sycharth and Harlech. Sycharth had been a golden dream of blissful union, with a fountain of children springing from her yearly like a carefully cultivated crop. All in all, the years at Harlech had not been wholly unhappy times. It had been an exceedingly comfortable existence. And she had been a princess. But what was she now? A companion to rats. A home to lice. A bait with which to tempt her husband into the snare. As long as she was kept alive, Margaret knew, Owain was out there and still giving Henry trouble.

Sitting on her poorly mended stool, Margaret held her thread toward the candlelight. She had to bring the needle a mere hand’s width from her face to try to put the thread through the eye. Her hands were cramped. She used to be able to work on a piece from dawn to dusk, her fingers flying over the cloth like a bee collecting nectar, but it was no longer so. After several failed attempts, she put the needlework back on the small bedside table, one of three pieces of furniture in her tiny, sunless room, permeated with unidentifiable odors. She studied the tray of food that had been left for her. The molded part of the bread could be torn off, but the meat was rancid... if she consumed any of it she would suffer the consequences.

She gathered up her blanket and shook it—a habit developed to rid it of earwigs and spiders. Carefully, she arranged the covering on her bed, if one could call it such, for it was only three planks rough with splinters and so short that her feet hung over the end. Her only pillow was her arm and sometimes, on those days she considered herself lucky, her keepers would throw her fresh straw to soften the surface of her bed. Although she did not relish the dark, she cupped her hand and blew her candle out so that she might save it for some later time. For now, sleep invited and it was the one thing, the only thing, that brought her peace of any kind.

She lay down and pulled her knees up inside her gown for added warmth. The single blanket she had was growing threadbare after three—no, it was going on four winters now that she had been here. All a fog. Days that melted into nights. Minutes like hours. Days like years. Nothing to mark one from the other. Like a constant state of being half asleep and half awake. A lifetime lived in a nightmare.

Hearing no scurry of rodents, Margaret closed her eyes and let her thoughts disappear and the dreams take over. Every day she prayed that she would dream of Owain and better times, but it was almost never so. For when she dreamed, she dreamed of death and dying: maimed soldiers pleading for an end to their suffering, little children screaming in agony, old people frozen to death in their beds, the ghost of Edmund walking Harlech’s battlements.

Some might have feared to sleep at all with such an onslaught of nightmares. But the actuality of death had been her life since the rebellion began. And that she had survived it, even to this wretched existence... that was her victory.

Margaret dreamed of houses burning. She could smell the smoke. Taste the ashes on her tongue. Panic pounding in her chest, she rubbed her eyes and sat up. In the wavering orange glow, she saw a face. The face of a man just entering his prime, with a straight aquiline nose, narrow chin and sharp cheekbones. Below angled eyebrows were wedged a pair of clear, commanding eyes.

She tried to focus. Beneath her blanket she dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand to test whether this was real or a dream. The sting on her flesh confirmed that she was lucid. Her two disagreeable guards flanked the man at either shoulder. They gave up their rushes to the sconces beside the door. With a slight nod, the noble dismissed them.

He studied her in pensive silence, not at all lecherously, but carefully, as if weighing what he would say. As if his words held some importance.

Margaret was intensely aware of her disheveled state. Once a week, a mute girl would come and brush her hair and bring her a bucket of water and a cloth, but undoubtedly it did little to improve her appearance. Why that mattered to her at this moment, she didn’t understand, but for once she was thankful to not have a looking glass. She raked the hair from her face and gazed down at the floor. A roach scampered from the light to disappear in a crack in the wall.

“Who are you?” Margaret asked.

He tilted his head, topped with shining locks of darkest auburn, and gestured to the stool. “May I sit, my lady?”

A simple request, yet put forth with the utmost respect. Margaret nodded and drew the blanket across her chest, as if to hide her dismal attire.

“You will be moved to a more fitting apartment. One with a window. Would you like that?”

His rings glittered so much as he laid his hands across his knees that they awed her. She had never seen such ornamentation on a man, not since King Richard.

Cautiously, Margaret raised her eyes, taking in every detail of his dress. Leather riding boots that buckled on the outside of each leg were snug against his legs up to mid calf. Above his yellow hose, he wore a long purple houppelande, sewn with stripes of velvet and satin. His shoulders were padded, to make him look larger than he was, for he was perhaps shorter than average, and his sleeves were slightly billowed and perfectly gathered at the cuff.

“I don’t know.” Margaret eyed him directly. “I think I would prefer a pig sty, even, to this. Wouldn’t you?”

His gaze dropped. “Yes, that was perhaps one of the most stupid questions I have ever asked. I’ll see that some amends are made.” Then he stood and shifted on his feet, stalling, as if needing but not wanting to say something. “Your son, Gruffydd —”

Margaret shot up from her bed, abandoning the shoddy blanket. She touched him on the hand. “Gruffydd? How is he? May I see him?”

“It is impossible, he —”

“But why?”

“He... I’m sorry. He died, this morning. The plague.”

She pulled back from him. “You’re lying. You all lie.”

“I assure you, my lady, he is dead and if not for the nature of the malady I would take you to see his body.”

“If he
is
dead, then... then you have killed him.”

“No.”

“Then Owain still lives, otherwise you would have either killed me or set me free by now.”

With that accusation, some hole opened up in the noble’s purpose. It was plain in his face.

“Tell me,” Margaret delved, “tell me who you are. Or else I have no reason to believe you. For all I know you are some dog sent by the king to torture my mind.”

He drew his shoulders up to full height. “King’s whelp, perhaps. I am Henry, Prince of Wales. Or as your people would call me plainly, Harry of Monmouth. Or should I say your husband’s people, as you were born very much English?”

Margaret raised her hand to slap him, but he snagged her wrist and wrung it tight. She spat into his eye with remarkable precision.

“Is that the reason you keep me here? Because I married a Welshman?”

Prince Harry released her and wiped at his eye with a sleeve. “I see Sir Owain took as his wife a woman with a will to match his own.”

He could have called for his guards then, Margaret realized, but he simply regarded her with greater caution. She felt like a wild animal kept for amusement.

“To answer you—yes, he lives. Where or how, I know not. But every once in a great while, he emerges from his secret lair to remind us we never completely succeeded in bringing down the dragon.” Prince Harry walked toward the door. He knocked twice. “You will be moved to your new quarters on the morrow, given clean clothes, bathwater and decent fare. You will receive a visitor then, one named Adam of Usk.”

As the door opened, Prince Harry glanced over his shoulder at Margaret. “So you know my intentions—I do not seek to destroy Sir Owain. The time for such squabbles is past. I have other plans, ambitions if you will, than continuing to war on Wales and Scotland. And I would rather have him and his men fighting beside me than against me.”

“He will never agree to that.”

“Sadly, I think you’re right.”

Harry turned away and slipped through the door. It shut with a boom behind his swirl of clothing. She melted to the floor in a puddle, mindless of the filth and stench. An all too familiar itching caused her to rake her fingernails across her scalp. Lice. A spider scampered across the floor, stopped in front of her and retreated. They had forgotten to take the torches away. There would be light, for awhile.

It was not until three days after Prince Harry’s unexpected visit, that Margaret was moved to her new room in the Tower. It had a real bed, a pillow and a down blanket—although none of them delighted her half as much as the window. She bathed in the sunlight more than she did the fresh water that was brought to her. As the hours dragged on while she combed through her hair, the man that the prince had referred to, Adam of Usk, failed to appear.