The Brothers of Gwynedd by Edith Pargeter Page B

window, for this, too, was covered, thick with rime. But as I looked I knew that it was no stone, but a man, humped heavily upon one shoulder and half-buried in the ground, and about him the rope that had broken and let him fall had made serpentine hollows in the snow and then made shift to heal them with its own new growths of hoar-frost. The pool of darkness under and about him I had taken for a shelf of level shale, for it was so fast frozen and sealed over with rime, but it was his blood. And at first I had thought this body was headless, for he had so fallen that his head was flattened and driven into his shoulders.
      The Lord Griffith, ever a big and well-fleshed man, had grown heavier still in his enforced idleness, too heavy for the ancient and treacherous drapings of his bed to sustain him. His hopes and his captivity were alike over. He had escaped out of his prison and out of this world.

CHAPTER III

    There was nothing I or any but God could do for him any longer. All I could do was creep back, shivering, to the living, and tell what I had seen. For when the warders of the Tower discovered it there would be such an outcry that we, shocked and stricken as we were, had no choice but to be prepared for it, and ready and able to meet all that might be said and done. Thus, that I might know the better what I was about, I came to hear the rest of it in haste.
      The rope she had contrived to take in to him, doubtless coiled about her body, for the warders examined all the gifts she carried to the prisoner, had proved too short at the test, and he had eked it out with the furnishings of his chamber. Unhappy for him that he secured this makeshift part of his line to the upper end. If he had trusted only the last few yards to its rotten and deceitful folds he might have fallen without injury, and made his escape. As it was, my mother's husband, shivering in the cold on the outer side of the curtain wall, had waited in vain until there was no hope left, and he must take thought for his own life, for he could not re-enter the Tower gates without condemning himself, if the plot was discovered. So there would be no shrouded travellers riding out at Moorgate with the first light, across the frozen marsh into the forest. Or at the best, only one…
      Somehow the thing passed over us, and we endured it. There was no sense in blaming wife or children, or the servants who served them, in face of a grief that could not now be remedied. We watched out the time, owned to nothing, told nothing we knew. And they took him up, that great, shattered man, and gave him a prince's mourning and burial, for King Henry was as anxious as any to be held blameless, well knowing that there would be those who suspected him in the matter of this death. But I know what I saw, and what was after told to me. Moreover, after our lord himself, there was no man lost more by this disaster than the king, for with Griffith dead he had no hold to restrain David, and no fit weapon to use against him. It was the end of his fine plans, as it was of ours. There was nothing he could do but begin over again, and mend his defences as best he could.
      My mother's husband did not come back, and though he was quickly missed, and certainly hunted, they did not find him. But for more than a month we waited in anxiety, for fear he should be dragged back, for him they would not have spared, having found the line he had secretly secured from a merlon down the outer face of the curtain wall in a secluded corner, for his lord's escape. It seems to me that all had been very well done, but for that too-short rope, for late though he must have left his own flight, yet he got clean away with both the horses he had provided, for they made enquiry everywhere after good riding horses stabled for pay and abandoned, and none were ever reported. Though truly the coper who had such a beast dropped into his hands masterless and gratis might well hold his peace about