The Rose at Twilight (32 page)

“It is so barren here,” Alys murmured when they had drawn up to rest the horses. “There is naught to see among these high peaks but tiny pink windflowers hugging brown dirt and those tall, pillarlike stones in the distance. What are they?”

“They are called longstones,” Nicholas said, “or standing stones. Some say the Romans brought them, others that they were thrown here by giants.” He grinned at Hugh. “’Tis most likely the Romans used them to mark ancient trackways, or as monuments to persons of importance. But the Beacons are not always as bare as they look now, lass, and although they seem gentle and mild today, they can be exceedingly dangerous. The fog rolling up from the sea is sometimes so thick that a man cannot see his hand before his face, and there are treacherous cliffs and rush bogs where anyone putting a foot wrong can disappear forever.”

They did not linger, and the stunning change in landscape was reversed when they left the heights to descend into the lush green valley where the rivers Usk, Tarell, and Honddhu met in the town of Brecon. It was a busy town, the center of the Welsh cloth trade, and the women were amused to see, lining the two main streets, row upon row of flannel cloth hung on tenterhooks to dry after processing. Nicholas pointed out the Blackfriars’ school when they passed it, and they spent the night at the Benedictine priory crowning the hill north of town. While Nicholas saw to his men’s needs that evening, the women walked in the peaceful priory garden. But the journey was nearly over, and the next day when they entered the lovely green valley of the Honddhu, Alys saw a dramatic change in her husband’s demeanor.

He had been cheerful enough before, but distant, spending no more time with her than with the other women. Each time they had stopped for a night, even when they accepted the hospitality of a religious order, the women stayed together, and Nicholas slept on the men’s side of the guest house. He was polite, and even found time most evenings for Alys’s lute lessons, but she had hoped for more intimacy. She seemed to have no power to stir him while his men were near, for he maintained strict control over himself.

Hugh frequently rode near them, and he was always willing to chat, but his reception from Jonet was no warmer than before, even when he and Nicholas began pointing out scenes from their respective childhoods, revealing their excitement at being home again. Alys began to commiserate a little with Hugh.

The valley was beautiful. The hawthorns by the river were not yet in bud, but silvery catkins decked red willow branches, and snowdrops and marsh marigolds grew everywhere. There were long-horned, short-legged black cattle on the hillsides, and lots of sheep. Sir Nicholas, grinning now, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, increased the pace, and shortly before noon, when a man came out of a cottage and waved, he waved back and shouted a greeting. The man peered more closely at them, then shouted back and waved both hands with wild abandon. Nicholas ap Dafydd ab Evan had come home.

T
HE FIRST SIGHT ALYS
had of Merion Court, situated near the top of a hill overlooking the west bank of the river, was the great round stone tower near the crest of the hill. Astonished, she cried to Sir Nicholas, “You never said it was a castle!”

“It is only a fortified manor house,” he replied. “There once was a castle, built by a Norman knight, but the keep is all that remains. The house was built early in the last century.”

She could see it now, two stories high and very broad, built of pale gray stone. A narrow roadway led up the hill to a gatehouse, standing sentry near tall iron gates in the high stone wall at the front. The gates were open. Nicholas had sent a small party of men ahead, and they were expected.

The cavalcade passed through the gateway into a cobbled courtyard, where wide, shallow stone steps swept up to a pair of double doors, standing open. Three men hurried down the steps, and Sir Nicholas dismounted and strode to meet them, holding his arms wide. The oldest of the three, a graying man in a knee-length, belted black robe that had been fashionable some years before, was the first to embrace him, and Alys decided he must be Dafydd ab Evan, Nicholas’s father.

She sat patiently, exchanging a look with Madeline when the four men began to talk excitedly to one another in Welsh. But Sir Nicholas soon recalled that he had not come alone, and turned back, laughing, to say in English, “But, by the bones of St. David, I have left her sitting! ’Tis lucky I’ll be if she does not comb my hair with a joint stool. Come you down from there, lass,” he said, reaching to help her, “and meet my father, and my brothers, Rhys and Gwilym.” To the elder of the two other men, he added, “Gwilym, do you go and assist Mistress Fenlord.”

Hugh dismounted to help Jonet, who accepted his aid with haughty disdain while a second man helped Elva. There was little conversation before they were taken inside and across a paneled, rush-strewn hall that rose two stories to the high, beamed roof overhead. They went up more stone stairs, along a timber gallery to the family’s private chambers, where they found Nicholas’s mother, Gwenyth, and his sisters, Bronwyn and Alvyna, two lively damsels of twelve and ten. The welcome from all three was enthusiastic, and Alys took an instant liking to them. The men, however, Alys thought taciturn and distant, for despite their voluble warmth toward Nicholas in the courtyard, they seemed to have little to say to her or to Madeline.

Madeline agreed with her assessment. “’Tis plain to see they are not courtiers,” she said in a low tone to Alys. “That Gwilym is handsome enough but more like one of the tall stones we saw whilst riding through the Beacons. Only look at him standing there by the fire as if he had granite in his veins instead of good warm blood. At least young Master Rhys knows how to smile.”

Having already observed that Master Gwilym, despite having politely helped Madeline to dismount, had seemed to take no other interest in her, Alys decided Nicholas must have thought better of the notion of Madeline as a prospective wife for his brother.

Nicholas’s mother expressed dismay just then at the intended brevity of their visit. “A sennight only!” she exclaimed. “’Tis not to be! You must stay a month, or at least through Easter.”

“We cannot,” Nicholas said with regret. “I am pledged to meet the king at Doncaster, to travel with him to Pontefract and York. There are rumors of unrest in the north, and my men may be needed. We will spend Easter at Burton Abbey if the weather permits, or at Worcester if it does not.”

“But there are always rumors of unrest nowadays,” Gwenyth said, “and certes, you will not take Alys and the other women with you in such a case. You must leave them all here with us until you can return from your duties to fetch them.”

His sisters instantly added their pleas to hers, and for a moment Alys feared he would agree. Determined to stay with him, she opened her mouth to protest but shut it again at once when Nicholas turned his stern gaze upon her.

He said, “I know Alys would like to visit longer, but her home—ours now—is near Doncaster, and in a dismal state when last she saw it. She longs to set it to rights. Moreover,” he added glibly, “I will need her there to show me how to go on.”

Since his family did not know that Alys had spent most of her life in residences other than her own home, and since his sisters’ presence made it plain that fostering daughters was less common in Wales than in England, she had no doubt his explanation would be accepted, and breathed a sigh of relief.

She enjoyed her visit and soon came to agree with Gwenyth that a sennight was too short a time. The days passed swiftly, giving her little time alone with her thoughts; but the hope she had harbored before leaving London, that with Brecknockshire so near Glamorgan she might somehow manage to make contact with Sir James Tyrell, and perhaps even with Richard of York, had already died. The heroic vision of herself as the savior of the Yorkist cause, who would put a more deserving candidate on the throne of England than the man who sat there, had vanished amidst the treacherous Brecon Beacons with her realization that Glamorgan lay beyond them. Even had her imagination amazed her by devising a plan to see her safely deposited in Glamorgan, and able to find Cardiff—let alone Tyrell and the prince—once she arrived there, there was no time to put such a plan into action.

She had become aware soon after their arrival that Nicholas, though delighted to be with his family again, and more properly attentive to his wife than he had been on their journey, was growing restless. He did his best to hide his fidgets from the family, visiting cheerfully with his mother, riding out hunting with his father and brothers, and playing with his little sisters. He found time, too, to continue Alys’s lute lessons. But on Palm Sunday he spent as much time preparing for the next day’s departure as he did in prayers and pleasure with his family, relaxing only at supper, when fig pies and fish graced the menu. In Wales, as in other places far from Rome, the rules of Lenten fare were relaxed, though not so much that mutton was offered, a fact that Nicholas was quick to bemoan.

“Mutton?” Alys said in surprise. “’Tis generally stringy, coarse stuff. If you crave meat, sir, why not beef or chicken?”

“Welsh mutton,
mi geneth,
is tender and tastes of the wild thyme of the Welsh hills. A true son of St. David misses nothing else so much when he is away.”

“In fact,” Bronwyn said, her grin showing a missing front tooth, “we often have chicken and fish. ’Tis only four-legged animals that do not get eaten on fast days or during Lent.”

Once the children had been sent to bed that night, Nicholas insisted that the members of his party must likewise retire, so as to be ready to leave as soon after dawn as possible. His mother repeated her wish that he would linger one or two more days, but he said, “This good weather cannot last, madam, and ’tis two hundred miles to Wolveston, a journey that will take us at least ten days, for we must rest the horses now and again, and we ought not to travel on Easter Sunday.”

“In good faith, sir,” Gwenyth said with a frown, “you ought not to travel at all during Holy Week. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are just as holy as Easter is. Do you not agree, sir?” she demanded of her husband.

“Let the man be, madam,” Dafydd ab Evan replied. “He serves his king well, and that is as it should be now we’ve got a proper Welshman on the throne at last.”

Nicholas shot a look of warning at his wife, and she smiled sweetly back at him. Did he really think, she wondered, that she would join battle with his father? Her sympathies had not changed, but she was no fool. When Dafydd ab Evan continued to expound on the subject, she glanced at Madeline, but that young woman was sitting with her attention fixed upon her stitchery, the very picture of a proper lady of the manor. The pose was not one in which she was often caught, so Alys looked about for the cause but saw only Gwilym, motioning to a servant to stir up the fire. Since he appeared to be paying no heed to Madeline, and since Madeline had continued to assert her indifference to all members of the male sex, Alys told herself she was imagining things and returned her thoughts to her husband.

They had been married more than a fortnight, but she knew him no better than before. She enjoyed her lute lessons, and he shared her bed at Merion, but his attentions seemed more dutiful than passionate, and he did not take the same care that he had taken on their wedding night to fulfill her. Deciding that his attention that night had been unusual and that his thoughts had been with the Tudor since, she had not complained. It was enough to reassure herself that her body still had the power to stir his. With delight she remembered one particular night when she knew she had inspired him to retire early simply by adjusting her jeweled belt beneath her breasts while his eye was upon her.

But even that night, although he had laughed when she teased him about having had to entice him to do his duty, and had kissed and caressed her until she moaned aloud, he had finished more quickly than she had hoped. She recalled now, perversely, that he preferred dark-haired women and, with a twinge of jealousy, wondered if any he knew—and perhaps had been thinking about when he mentioned his preference—lived near Merion Court. But then, remembering that she had heard him tease Ian about his “weakness for women,” she wondered suddenly if Nicholas viewed his interest in her as a weakness, a fault that he must overcome if he was to stand well in the eyes of his men. Or perhaps, she told herself, it was only that the men of Merion were tiresomely dispassionate.

Just then, Alys saw Hugh stoop to pick up a ball of thread Jonet had dropped, and saw, too, how he caught and held her gaze when she looked up from her work. But when Hugh smiled, Jonet turned away abruptly, putting her nose in the air. He grinned.

“Such mild behavior does encourage me, my peevish wee mouse, but ’tis common courtesy to thank a man who does you a kindness.”

Jonet did not deign to reply.

Shaking his head, Hugh went back to the fire. Young Rhys had seen the exchange and, looking up, caught Alys’s eye. When he grinned, dark eyes atwinkle, inviting her to share his amusement, she found her opinion of him shifting and wondered if there might be more to the men of Merion than she had thought.

When she reached the courtyard early the following morning, she discovered that she would get the opportunity to learn a good deal more about one of them, but it was not Rhys. Nicholas’s men had already gathered for the journey, and when they had mounted, Alys saw that Gwilym was with them, riding a glossy black almost as magnificent and well mannered as Black Wyvern—not surprising, since, as Nicholas soon informed her, the two destriers were offspring of the same sire, and Gwilym had trained them both.

“Why is
he
coming with us?” Madeline muttered to Alys, her words barely audible above the din of harness, iron shoes on cobbles, and shouted masculine orders. “Who asked him?”

Before Alys might have responded, Gwilym rode nearer, looked them over briefly, then shouted for a man to come and adjust Madeline’s leathers.

She said, “’Tis kind of you, sir, but I need no adjustment.”