“In that case,” said Cadfael, “you will have to possess your soul in patience and in captivity a while longer.”
“If I must, I can,” agreed Elis, all too cheerfully and continently for one surely not hitherto accomplished at possessing his soul in patience. “But I do trust you may go and return safe,” he said dutifully.
“Behave yourself, while I’m about your affairs,” Cadfael advised resignedly and turned to leave him. “I’ll bear your greetings to your foster-brother Eliud, if I should encounter him, and leave him word you’ve come to no harm.” Elis embraced that offer gladly enough, but crassly failed to add another name that might fittingly have been linked with the same message. And Cadfael refrained from mentioning it in his turn. He was at the door when Elis suddenly called after him: “Brother Cadfael…”
“Yes?” said Cadfael, turning.
“That lady… the one we saw yesterday, the sheriff’s daughter…”
“What of her?”
“Is she spoken for?”
Ah well, thought Cadfael, mounting with his mission well rehearsed in his head, and his knot of light-armed men about him, soon on, soon off, no doubt, and she has never spoken word to him and most likely never will. Once home, he’ll soon forget her. If she had not been so silver, fair, so different from the trim, dark Welsh girls, he would never have noticed her.
Cadfael had answered the enquiry with careful indifference, saying he had no notion what plans the sheriff had for his daughter, and forbore from adding the blunt warning that was on the tip of his tongue. With such a springy lad as this one, to put him off would only put him on the more resolutely. With no great obstacles in the way, he might lose interest. But the girl certainly had an airy beauty, all the more appealing for being touched with innocent gravity and sadness on her father’s account. Only let this mission succeed, and the sooner the better!
They left Shrewsbury by the Welsh bridge, and made good speed over the near reaches of their way, north-west towards Oswestry.
Sybilla, Lady Prestcote, was twenty years younger than her husband, a pretty, ordinary woman of good intentions towards all, and notable chiefly for one thing, that she had done what the sheriff’s first wife could not do, and borne him a son. Young Gilbert was seven years old, the apple of his father’s eye and the core of his mother’s heart. Melicent found herself indulged but neglected, but in affection to a very pretty little brother she felt no resentment. An heir is an heir; an heiress is a much less achievement.
The apartments in the castle tower, when the best had been done to make them comfortable, remained stony, draughty and cold, no place to bring a young family, and it was exceptional indeed for Sybilla and her son to come to Shrewsbury, when they had six far more pleasant manors at their disposal. Hugh would have offered the hospitality of his own town house on this anxious occasion, but the lady had too many servants to find accommodation there, and preferred the austerity of her bleak but spacious dwelling in the tower. Her husband was accustomed to occupying it alone, when his duties compelled him to remain with the garrison. Wanting him and fretting over him, she was content to be in the place which was his by right, however Spartan its appointments.
Melicent loved her little brother, and found no fault with the system which would endow him with all their father’s possessions, and provide her with only a modest dowry. Indeed, she had had serious thoughts of taking the veil, and leaving the Prestcote inheritance as good as whole, having an inclination towards altars, relics and devotional candles, though she had just sense enough to know that what she felt fell far short of a vocation. It had not that quality of overwhelming revelation it should have had.
The shock of wonder, delight and curiosity, for instance, that stopped her, faltering, in her steps when she sailed through the archway into the outer ward and glanced by instinct towards the presence she felt close and intent beside her, and met the startled dark eyes of the stranger, the Welsh prisoner. It was not even his youth and comeliness, but the spellbound stare he fixed on her, that pierced her to the heart.
She had always thought of the Welsh with fear and distrust, as uncouth savages; and suddenly here was this trim and personable young man whose eyes dazzled and whose cheeks flamed at meeting her gaze. She thought of him much. She asked questions about him, careful to dissemble the intensity of her interest. And on the same day that Cadfael set out to hunt for Owain Gwynedd, she saw Elis from an upper window, half-accepted already among the young men of the garrison, stripped to the waist and trying a wrestling bout with one of the best pupils of the master-at-arms in the inner ward. He was no match for the English youth, who had the advantage in weight and reach, and he took a heavy fall that made her catch her breath in distressed sympathy, but he came to his feet laughing and blown, and thumped the victor amiably on the shoulder.
There was nothing in him, no movement, no glance, in which she did not find generosity and grace.
She took her cloak and slipped away down the stone stair, and out to the archway by which he must pass to his lodging in the outer ward. It was beginning to be dusk, they would all be putting away their work and amusement, and making ready for supper in hall. Elis came through the arch limping a little from his new bruises, and whistling, and the same quiver of awareness which had caused her to turn her head now worked the like enchantment upon him.
The tune died on his parted lips. He stood stock-still, holding his breath. Their eyes locked, and could not break free, nor did they try very hard.
“Sir,” she said, having marked the broken rhythm of his walk, “I fear you are hurt.” She saw the quiver that passed through him from head to foot as he breathed again. “No,” he said, hesitant as a man in a dream, “no, never till now. Now I am wounded to death.”
“I think,” she said, shaken and timorous, “you do not yet know me…”
“I do know you,” he said. “You are Melicent. It is your father I must buy back for you—at a price…” At a price, at a disastrous price, at the price of tearing asunder this marriage of eyes that drew them closer until they touched hands, and were lost.
Chapter Three
CADWALADR MIGHT HAVE HAD HIS FROLICS on his way back to his castle at Aberystwyth with his booty and his prisoners, but to the north of his passage Owain Gwynedd had kept a fist clamped down hard upon disorder. Cadfael and his escort had had one or two brushes with trouble, after leaving Oswestry on their right and plunging into Wales, but on the first occasion the three masterless men who had put an arrow across their path thought better of it when they saw what numbers they had challenged, and took themselves off at speed into the brush; and on the second, an unruly patrol of excitable Welsh warmed into affability at Cadfael’s unruffled Welsh greeting, and ended giving them news of the prince’s movements. Cadfael’s numerous kinsfolk, first and second cousins and shared forebears, were warranty enough over much of Clwyd and part of Gwynedd.
Owain, they said, had come east out of his eyrie to keep a weather eye upon Ranulf of Chester, who might be so blown up with his success as to mistake the mettle of the prince of Gwynedd. He was patrolling the fringes of Chester territory, and had reached Corwen on the Dee. So said the first informants. The second, encountered near Rhiwlas, were positive that he had crossed the Berwyns and come down into Glyn Ceiriog, and might at that moment be encamped near Llanarmon, or else with his ally and friend, Tudur ap Rhys, at his maenol at Tregeiriog. Seeing it was winter, however merciful at this moment, and seeing that Owain Gwynedd was considerably saner than most Welshmen, Cadfael chose to make for Tregeiriog. Why camp, when there was a close ally at hand, with a sound roof and a well-stocked larder, in a comparatively snug valley among these bleak central hills?