Court of Foxes (32 page)

She looked at him like a petted, wilful child, still struggling, rebellious, though she knew she had been conquered. ‘I won’t have the child christened here. He shall be christened in Wales, where—’

‘Where your heart is,’ he said, quietly.

She looked at him like a petted, wilful child, still struggling, eyes. ‘Is that what you believe?’

‘It’s what I’m afraid of,’ he said.

She came to him, came close, put her lovely arms about his neck. ‘No, dearest, no: there you’re wrong, utterly. I love you and only you. For him I had — something; I hardly know myself what it was. But he’s gone; and with him, all but memories. With him I was free. Here, it’s true that I feel cribbed and cabined-in; but it’s because others intervene.’ And she tried to explain: ‘All my life I’ve been used to love; only to love — to laughing and petting and loving without question…’ Of the family of devoted brothers and sister he knew nothing, of the laughing, fond old mother, as young at heart as they. If the spectre of the supposed ancient, doting husband rose for a moment between them, that he put aside — he knew that no thoughts of life in Italy ever troubled her nowadays (as well they might not, since she had never seen stick nor stone of that country.) He said: “You’ve never been loved, Gilda, as you’re loved now. But to love isn’t just foolishly to indulge. The child will be christened in London and my mother will be present and Dio y Diawl shall not.” ’ He confirmed: ‘And we are to call him Gereth, after my brother?’

‘Or Gareth — after your other brother,’ she said.

He bowed his head for a moment, with closed eyes as though he prayed for patience; gave a small thump with his fisted right hand to the marble mantel-shelf. But his voice remained steady. ‘That was a private quirk — a private joke, perhaps — of my father’s. To name his first born, though out of wedlock, by the family name, with only the difference of one letter.’

‘What was good enough for your father—’

‘We shall call the child Gereth,’ he said, shortly. ‘You may spell it which way — in your heart — you will. When you write it for the world, you will write it as the world will: Gereth, Viscount Llandovery.’ But his stern mouth relaxed, he took her into his arms and held her close against his breast. ‘Gilda, try to forget him! Try to forget!’

T
HE CHILD WAS CHRISTENED
in the church of St George in Hanover Square as David had said it should be; and with his mother and sister present as he had said they should be, with the Prince of Wales instead of Dio the Devil of the Court of Foxes, standing god-father — she remembered again the brazen impudence with which that other had claimed that this ‘intimate friend’ would be disappointed at not being able to stand as witness at a great society wedding, the subtlety with which she had been led forward until it was she who pleaded for the secret marriage which must somehow be contrived — and a spurt of laughter welled up in her, she felt, for the first time in many long days, her heart leap up and dance… Leap and dance — and remember; and die.

And now Gereth, the small Viscount Llandovery was to be taken down to be shown to his people and the tenantry in the great, all-embracing estates in Carmarthenshire… (But a few short months, she thought, since I rode there and cried Stand and deliver! to just such folks as nowadays I myself shall be…)

A promise was extracted from her. ‘No traffic, Gilda, with the Cwrt. That’s understood?’

‘I don’t want to see them anyway,’ she said drearily. ‘They remind me of too much.’

But she wrote to them nevertheless, at his bidding, in the care of the corn chandler of Caio, giving times and dates, to ask for safe conduct through the Cothi valley. ‘I know you will grant me this for old times’ sake. And you’ll never guess who rides in convoy with me,’ she wrote, ‘sheltering behind my petticoats — the Earl of Trove no less and my precious Lady Blanche Handley, going to their estates in Cardiganshire! They have waited for us; nowadays not daring to travel alone.’ And she asked wistfully: ‘I wonder how you fare? Is Dio y Diawl your leader now? I asked for him as god-father to my son, but you won’t be astonished to learn that this was refused me. We had the Prince of Wales instead! Times have indeed changed, you perceive, for Madam Vixen and I confide, for your ears alone, that it’s all very dull and sometimes I would feign be with you again.’ She received a reply in due course, ill-scrawled upon the back of a reckoning for corn supplied (but not to the gang). ‘Will give yr. messge to Y Diawl. Have no feer to come.’ Signed by Dai Thomas whose comings and goings as a messenger she remembered of old. ‘We are promised,’ she reported to David, ‘and your precious Blanche may come too; providing only for my part, that she stay in her own coach and sleep at separate inns on the way.’ No doubt, she added contemptuously, they would be half a week upon the journey.

‘My mother can’t travel two hundred miles in a day.’

‘She travelled it swiftly enough that other time — when…’ When I held up her coach, she had been going to say, but halted it. His mother had been hastening then because her first-born had been shot and killed upon that very road; and by herself, by Madam Vixen who was now Countess of Tregaron and her daughter-in-law.

They spent the second night in fact at Monmouth; but the roads were bad from recent rains and it was early evening before they drove, rattling and jingling, down the steep hill towards the Aberbranddu farm, with only the long rise through the hanging forests of scrub oak, between themselves and the chapel and smithy of Cwrt y Cadno; and then one more climb up and then all the way downwards to home. They must all now spend the night at Castell Cothi but tomorrow the old woman might be despatched to her new residence in the Dower House, the Earl of Trove could take his daughter and continue to Cardiganshire. And I, thought Gilda, I can settle down to the company of sheep and cows, as long ago we dreaded that I should have to. She had given her promise faithfully, to go no more to the Fox’s lair. ‘In any event, now adays it is but the Devil’s Den. What is it to me without
him
?’

‘Gilda, he’s dead. I myself saw him nailed into his coffin, I myself saw him decently buried,’ he lied. Thrown with two others, and the rest uncoffined, into a common grave, he did not say; but ended always with the old despairing plea: ‘Try to forget!’

It was late summer; all about them the trees were in full leaf washed to a shining green by the soft Welsh rain; along the rough roads, foxglove and ragwort were in rampant bloom and the spreading white flowers they call Queen Anne’s Lace; and dandelions and king-cups to outmatch her own marigold hair in their satiny gold. And up and over the bare mountains the gorse spread everywhere its heavily scented sweetness through an evening of sunshine now that the rain had passed. Its perfume brought back to her, almost more even than the sight of the mountain which now was all that hid the lair from her vision, the memory of those old days. For the gorse was with them always. Kissing’s out of season, they said in Wales, when the gorse is not in bloom. At the Court of Foxes the gorse had been always in season: and the kissing too.

The Dowager travelled in the coach with them, Anne being in the second coach with Blanche and her father. The nurse sat opposite, the child in her lap, its blue eyes looking up, wondering, at the hanging lantern, unlit, swaying with each lurch of the wheels. ‘We’re coming down towards Aberbranddu,’ said Gilda. ‘It was here I always told them… It was there that she had taught them they should conduct their hold-ups, with room for the ponies to manoeuvre, not as had been their custom, among the scrub oak trees, further up the hill — and proved to them time after time, how right she had been.

The Dowager Countess of Tregaron had been travelling this road before Madam Vixen had been born or thought of. ‘I think we’re sufficiently aware of the points of interest on our way,’ she could not forbear to say sharply. Including, she did not dare to add, a tree overhanging the road a little further on, where their first acquaintance had been made — the present countess having upon that occasion, however, been upside-down. ‘Do you recall,’ she said to David, deliberately excluding Gilda from the conversation, ‘how when you were a child we still had to ford the river here? Now that the bridge is built, it’s safer; but then with the coaches brought to a halt when the water was deep, it was a dangerous place for — for…’ Her voice faltered.

‘For hold-ups?’ said Gilda. ‘And could be now, may I remind your ladyship. When you turn your back and address your civilities exclusively to others, recollect that but for me you wouldn’t be riding here so free to exchange your reminiscences unmolested.’ David shook his head at her warningly, his mother glanced anxiously at the nurse — dozing, however, with the baby on her knee. ‘Oh, pish!’ said Gilda. ‘What do I care? Not a doubt but she knows all about it, they all do. All I say is that only through my good offices do you ride here without anxiety — you and your precious friends who must all come cap in hand to me, every time you would set foot outside your own gates—’

And a man’s voice shouted from the box and there was a clatter of hooves and the rattle and jingle of harness as the coach jolted to a halt; and outside the windows movement, confusion, a swarm of riders breaking cover and galloping on the small, rough, sure-footed ponies that so well she knew, across the river bank towards them, surrounding them. The nurse awoke with a shrill squeal of terror and clutched the baby to her breast, the old woman shot out a fat, mottled hand to catch at David’s arm; from the coach behind came the familiar high note of a woman beginning to scream. ‘Pouff, what a fuss! — it’s nothing to be afraid of,’ said Gilda, contemptuously. ‘We’re promised safety. They come but to pay their respects to me.’ She stood up to lean far out of the window and cried out for Dio, for Huw, for Willie-bach and Hal the Hop and Dai. But from behind her David said in a small, cold voice: ‘Gilda!’ and she turned her head.

A blotting out of the light from the opposite window; and a darkness there that revealed itself as a tall figure, cloaked in black with a black mask through which two eyes glittered, steely blue. ‘Well, Madam Vixen — so we meet again! And this time it’s
my
turn.’

The Black Toby.

He was her friend of course — of course! Had he not been good to her, truly good, looking for no reward, in those days of Gareth’s imprisonment? But now… She said sharply, subsiding into her place, looking up at him, trying to hold fast to her waning self-confidence: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I believed myself to be holding up a coach,’ he said, mockingly assuming doubt.

‘This coach has been promised safe conduct,’ said David angrily.

‘Not by me. And if you’re groping for a weapon, my lord, pray desist from it. I’ve taken the precaution to have mine more readily to hand.’

Did the old woman, even in her extremity, find heart for one glance of triumph at her daughter-in-law? ‘You’re teasing me,’ said Gilda, not too certainly however. ‘These men with you are of Y Cadno’s gang.’

‘Who however lies four feet below the Oxford Road.’

‘Do you mean that
you
—? But you’re one that hunts with no pack,’ protested Gilda. ‘You’re one that rides alone.’

‘As you have good reason to remember, Madam Vixen,’ he assented, laughing. ‘A leopard may change his spots, however. I told you I had a fondness for this part of Wales; and so, since I was under an obligation — whose price you will recall? — not to ride in opposition to Y Cadno’s pack, why, what was there to do but to join them?’

‘And to lead them?’

‘I am like you,’ he said. ‘Not one to trot behind another less able than myself.’

She was defeated. And yet — not quite defeated, never quite defeated while she held still that old power over men which had won him before and might yet win again. For such gold as they carried, for a few jewels, she cared nothing; but to have the old besom crow over her unsuccess in protecting them, to have Madame Blanche toss that corn-coloured nob of hers and smile her cool smile at the failure of her rival — that she would not endure. ‘What is it you want?’ she said at last: deliberately.

‘What is it you offer, Madam Vixen?’ he said — and laughed again.

If David caught a hint of the meaning in her voice, he stifled his awareness; there was no mistaking however the undertones of the reply. He said as though to end the matter: ‘We carry little that is of value. Take what there is and let us go.’

‘On the contrary you carry a great deal that is of value — to me at any rate.’ The barrel of a pistol appeared in the window, a steady hand gestured with it briefly. ‘Come Madam Vixen — out!’

David made an effort to launch himself forward but he was helpless, penned in between the women, struggling to get at a weapon which, since they had entered the Cothi valley he had, under promise of safe conduct, kept not easily within his reach. Gilda implored: ‘Keep still, don’t make matters worse!’ And she swore: ‘I know this man, he makes a grim joke of it but he’s a friend. You saw him, David, in the inn at Newgate. Was he not then our friend?’

‘Well said,’ said the Black Toby. He pulled off the mask, showing clearly in the evening light the keen, dark face and the brilliant eyes. ‘I am everybody’s friend. What is he afraid of?’

‘That you may become a little too friendly,’ said Gilda, coolly. ‘In short that you may carry off his wife and ravish her, which no doubt is in fact your intention.’

He went off into roars of laughter and she thought guiltily that for months she had not heard such laughter — huge, free, untrammelled by the politenesses of society manners and mannerisms; a laughter that was against her and yet with her, affectionately indulgent and yet promising no particular indulgence if she came to resist him — a man’s laughter at the expense of a woman whom he could not help but admire and — a little — love. (So had that other one laughed in days when freedom and laughter had been commonplace.) ‘Why, Madam Vixen, what ideas you have! And yet, what good ones!’ The steely eyes peered into the interior of the coach. ‘Who have we here? Why, my lady the Dowager, no doubt? — your good mother-in-law. Come now, Madame Dowager, yours shall be the choice. Will you buy your safety and your son’s and that of your friends in the coach behind — at the expense of Lady Tregaron’s virtue?’