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Caernarfon Castle
April 1284
Day One (late evening)
Catrin
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“I want the truth, Catrin.” Queen Eleanor of England, being one of the most perceptive and intelligent people Catrin had ever met, was aware of her roiling emotions, even as she tried to mask them in polite smiles. “Don’t pretend with me.”
“Yes, my lady. It is true. They do not reverence you.”
Eleanor eased into the cushions at her back, a pleased smile on her lips. The heavy curtains around the bed were drawn back, and the window was open, letting in the fresh evening air, scented strongly with salt, since Caernarfon Castle was located on the edge of the Irish Sea. Eleanor liked a cool room to sleep in, and she had little patience for anyone who told her it was bad for the baby she was carrying. “They hate us, you mean. I knew I was right about that. But even better, they fear us.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The previous evening, the queen’s party had arrived later than intended, having made the grueling twenty-mile journey from Conwy in a carriage. Eleanor was past eight months pregnant but nonetheless supported her husband’s agenda. What better way to convey the king’s might than to have his latest child born in Wales, in his magnificent stone castle of Caernarfon? The walls were going up at an astounding rate, already rising forty feet above the Gwynedd countryside.
Eleanor wasn’t finished. “You hate me too, of course.”
“My queen—”
“Don’t lie to me, child. Never lie to me.”
At thirty-six years old, Catrin was hardly a child, but Eleanor saw all the Welsh as children in need of instruction. On the whole, that might be better than viewing them as criminals or slaves. If the Welsh were children, their need for rebellion wasn’t their fault and could be forgiven. Eleanor herself was forty-three, about to give birth to her sixteenth child. Having endured the deaths of nine of them, she’d earned the right to call Catrin, who had one grown son, child.
“No, my lady. I won’t, my lady.” But, of course, that too was a lie, if only of omission. Though Catrin could not be openly hostile to the queen and serve her, she never hid the fact that she was Welsh and would do what she could for her people.
Even Catrin didn’t know the lengths she would go to if pressed. She hoped Eleanor didn’t, either.
The queen maintained that slight, enigmatic smile she often wore to hide what was in her mind. “That will do for now. You’re dismissed.”
Catrin curtseyed and backed out of the room.
For the whole of the trip across Gwynedd, the queen and her other ladies had looked out the window of the carriage at the ruggedness of the mountains of Snowdonia and voiced dismay at the coarseness of the country. Nowhere to be seen were the orderly fields and gentle rolling hills of England. The majority of smallholders in Wales weren’t farmers like the English, but herders, driving sheep and cattle up the valleys to mountain pastures and back according to the season. Except for a few instances, they rarely congregated into villages.
And while the carriage had been surrounded by a company of a hundred men, and patrols had swept through the entire area to ensure its safety, the women had still feared that, at any moment, a band of rebels might descend out of the mountains and murder them.
Catrin shared none of that fear because she knew what they didn’t: her people were pragmatists. With their own prince dead, they had no leader, no goals, and no hope. Even for the chance to kill King Edward, they wouldn’t be sacrificing their lives for nothing.
For her part, Catrin had spent the journey basking in the beauty and glory of the scene before her. In the heart of spring, the hills were green and blooming with wildflowers, and the highest peaks still showed a last residue of snow. It was as if she’d been holding her breath for twenty years and hadn’t known it. She was home, and she could breathe again. She felt the joy of it to her very bones.
Not that she could show that either, of course, not really, given the company in which she traveled. Part of her would have preferred not to come home at all if it meant riding through the countryside like a triumphant conqueror. Even though Catrin had known when Prince Llywelyn died at a place called Cilmeri that it was the end of her world as she knew it, she hadn’t truly understood what that meant until yesterday.
King Edward was everyone’s liege lord now. Aided by his brother, Edmund Crouchback, a nickname the prince had earned by participating in the Ninth Crusade, Edward had conquered Wales from stem to stern and everywhere in between, just as he’d sworn to do thirty years earlier after Prince Llywelyn had swept across the Conwy River into eastern Gwynedd and conquered domains Edward believed rightfully belonged to him. At the time a prince of seventeen, Edward had felt derided and humiliated, and neither emotion was one he could or would ever forgive or forget.
As she looked into the eyes of the people they passed on the brand new road leading up to the entrance to the half-finished castle of Caernarfon, Catrin had seen humiliation in their eyes, along with raw hatred, even as their mouths said something different.
Just like hers.
Now in the corridor outside Queen Eleanor’s room, Catrin eyed a servant coming towards her. With every step, he slopped water from the bucket he carried, intended for the maid, who was scrubbing the stone floor of the corridor. Both servants were English, brought to Caernarfon from England because no Welsh people were allowed to serve the king and queen within their private quarters. None except Catrin, that is.
Only a few with special skills were even allowed inside the castle walls. In the last year, the steward had learned the hard way that when Welsh people were conscripted to work, the running of the castle went less smoothly. These particular servants were working so late in the evening because the queen didn’t like to see them cleaning during the day. Only now that she’d retired for the night could the corridor be scrubbed, and the stones would be dry by the time Eleanor rose in the morning.
Catrin’s own conscription into the queen’s retinue had come nearly simultaneously with her son’s eighteenth birthday. As the only native Welsh person in Eleanor’s company, she’d been called upon time and again over the course of the last few weeks to explain what her people were thinking as well as translate their words.
That was the reason she’d been asked to join Eleanor’s retinue in the first place. Catrin’s husband, Robert, had died not quite two years earlier in a battle against the Welsh, led by Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester and one of King Edward’s most trusted companions—as well as Robert’s liege lord. The English army had just sacked one castle and were returning to another when they were set upon by a Welsh army and destroyed. Catrin had mourned appropriately, for her son’s sake more than for her husband’s or her own, and she’d continued to manage his estate near Bristol as she’d done for the whole of her marriage.
Once the war was over, Gilbert de Clare had not only confirmed Justin in his inheritance and knighted him, but arranged for his marriage to the daughter of another local baron. There had been no place for Catrin in the household, not with a new bride who would want to do things her way. Besides which, the queen’s summons had been impossible to turn down.
None could go against the King and Queen of England, least of all Catrin.
Not overtly, anyway.
