Post of the Month

~ February 2008 ~

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Jenet & Gwydion ~ Written by Angela & Rhys. Posted on the HoS Yahoo group November 2006.

Jenet stood at the doorway of her cott and looked out over the village. All was quiet. Pale evening sunlight slanted across her doorway.

She savoured the sweet smell of the hay cut in the far meadow, mingled with the sweet scent of verdant grass. Summer. This was her favourite season, when everything was fruitful, bringing to mind all the memories of summers long past.

She now harked back to the image of Thomas sitting beneath one of the cherry trees in an orchard outside Lincoln, blossom drifting down onto his hair and settling on his clothes as he fondled the hair of the newborn Nesta lying in his lap. The look of content on his face. At last a father.

She had shared his content. At last a mother. Married twelve years, five children stillborn for no outward reason that she could see, and inbetween the stillbirths, the children she had not been able to carry to term. The children that had slipped away before they had scarce been started inside her.

The women of Elsdon had been sympathetic at first to her with each loss. Then slowly, they had grown first wary, then suspicious. Why could she not have children? She was good at healing - why could she not heal herself and successfully bear children?

She had known the whispers that had circulated around the village. She had not known how to answer them. She had had no answers. And as the years in Elsdon had passed, the people here had become less wanting whatever help that she could offer.

Strange that all her children had been born dead in Elsdon, and yet when she and Thomas had left Elsdon after the incident with Gisbourne, the Sheriff and the outlaws to go to Lincoln where they would be safe, she had fallen pregnant yet again and in crowded, noisy, pestilence-ridden Lincoln, she had given birth to a living child...

Jenet turned from the doorway and crossed the cott to where Nesta lay in the bed they shared in the shadowed far corner of the cott. The child lay on her side, fast asleep, one hand up near her face, smooth brow untroubled. She looked like her father.

A sound approaching the cott made her look round, startled out of her thoughts. A shadow in the dying sun fell across the threshold, and then Gwydion ap Bryn stood framed in the doorway. Pieces of hay spiked his clothes - whether from haymaking or having a tumble with the Widow Goldburga, Jenet didn't know. Perhaps both.

She wondered about the Welshman. When Alan had suggested to her that she ask Gwydion to sleep in her doorway at night as protection, she had seen the sense of it, and had passed Alan's suggestion on to Gwydion. He had said little, but that same evening he had come, accepted a bowl of food from her and a blanket, and at dusk he had settled himself down at the door.

She had found herself glad for the sense of security his presence gave. And she did not feel threatened by him. He had an eye for the women, particularly for the widows, that she had quickly noticed, but with her, he was different.

Now Gwydion stood framed in the doorway, watching her in the gloom, waiting for the invitation in. Jenet nodded to him, and only then did he step inside. He moved to the low fire.

"She's asleep, then," he observed quietly, looking across at Jenet where she still leant over Nesta.

"Do you have any children, Gwydion?" Jenet asked, coming across to the fireside.

Gwydion scratched his head. "Never been married, cariad."

Jenet raised an eyebrow as she knelt and poked at the fire. "Doesn't mean to say you don't have children. Or are things that different in Wales?"

"Well now, I think it's two that I have." Gwydion sat on his heels by the fire, staring down at the pot of pottage resting on the embers.

"You only think?"

"By the looks of them and the dates they were born. Married, both their mothers were. To other men, see." Gwydion added a few twigs to the fire. "Long time ago. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago." He grinned at her. "When I was a lad of seventeen. Handsome."

Jenet laughed. She looked at the dark-eyed Welshman with the greying hair and could turn time back and imagine him at seventeen. "Yes, I can believe you were handsome, and with the tongue on you that you have, what woman could resist?"

Gwydion laughed. "That tongue has landed me in trouble a great many times but as yet I've not lost it."

"So," Jenet asked more carefully, stirring the pottage, "what do you have? Sons? Daughters?"

Gwydion accepted the bowl of pottage she spooned out for him. "One of each. A lass and a lad. But grown they are now. Long time ago, like I said."

"They know you're their father?"

"I think so. Nothing ever said. But everything felt. You know how it is." Gwydion began to eat.

Jenet nodded thoughtfully.

Gwydion watched her, then looked across the interior of the cott to the corner where Nesta slept in the rumpled bed. "She your only one?"

"Aye." Where she knelt before the fire, Jenet followed his glance. "And she took a long time to come."

"Where I come from," said Gwydion, "there's a saying that in having children, it's fortunate if it is a girl that comes first."

"My first was a girl." Jenet remained where she knelt, staring into the fire and contemplated the past, seeing again that perfect little face and curled fists - just that brief glimpse before the women of Elsdon had taken the dead child away. "But she was stillborn. Four girls and a boy. All stillborn. They have no names save Child of God. All before Nesta came along."

Gwydion took up the beaker of ale and drank. "So she's special, then."

"I don't want...." Jenet hesitated. "I don't want Nesta placed in any danger." She looked across at Gwydion, suddenly intently serious. "If something happened to me - if there was danger and I was caught in the middle of it, or if I was....taken away, somehow.... I'd want you to get my daughter out of Elsdon. Away from the danger. Take her somewhere safe."

"To the Sherwood outlaws, to Alan?" Gwydion questioned.

Jenet shook her head. "No, not to the outlaws. But Alan would know of somewhere safe to place her."

"He's a good lad," Gwydion acknowledged.

Jenet merely nodded and looked aside, falling silent. Gwydion watched her curiously, trying to judge her mood. She had a length of cloth tied to her girdle and she kept twisting a corner of that cloth around her fingers; a movement that suggested distraction.

"When you said taken away...." he began. "That Gisbourne man..."

"It's happened before," Jenet said quietly.

"Aye, so I heard from the people around here. Keep my ear close to the ground, see. Been in a lot of villages on my travels. Pays to listen to the pulse of a village. Don't speak, just listen."

"You're a wise man, Gwydion ap Bryn," she said wonderingly.

He laughed. "No, not me, cariad. Just travelled a lot. That's all it is."

Jenet shrugged off the memory of encountering the knight in the dim barn. She tried to rid herself of the feeling of his finger tracing her wrist. "Gisbourne wanted me; I refused him." She looked up at Gwydion, whose dark eyes regarded her interestedly over the steaming bowl of pottage he held. "I'm afraid he'll want me again."

"What will you do if he does?" Gwydion asked.

"I'll kill him," Jenet said quietly. She caught Gwydion's startled look down at the small knife that hung from her girdle. "No. Not that way. There are far more subtle ways." She watched Gwydion lift his head and look up at the bunches of herbs and plants that dangled by thread from the rafts of the cott.

"Ways that don't leave a mark," she added softly.

Gwydion regarded her with awe. A small-boned woman with solid determination oozing from her - so strong that he could feel it - almost touch it.

"You're shocked?" Jenet asked, seeing the look on his face.

"No. Impressed," Gwydion replied honestly. "You ever done that before? Done for someone?"

Jenet shook her head. "Never. It is against all I believe in." She looked aside to the fire once more. "But I'll do for him."

"You're like the Welsh women," Gwydion said admiringly.

Jenet turned her head and smiled at him. "Am I?"

"Aye. Fire, spirit and passion. You don't cross them if you've any sense." He grinned at her. "What do you think they're thinking, out there?" he asked with a nod of his head towards the open doorway and the village beyond, sleepy in the dusk. "Me coming here at night."

"Probably the same as what they think when you disappear into Widow Goldburga's cott during the day," Jenet said knowingly.

Gwydion set down his beaker. "Ah, she's a fine woman, I'll not deny. And she's lonely. She's of my age. We know how it is. Don't do no harm....what business is it of anyone's."

Jenet shook her head in understanding. "No-one's business. Yet everyone will make it their business."

"Well, that's the way of the world. Let it be so, if it must." Gwydion placed aside the empty bowl. "I'm grateful for the food."

"It's the least I can do," Jenet replied. "You're good enough to offer your protection of a night."

Gwydion rose to his feet. "I'll be away to sleep in your door."

"There." Jenet nodded at the blanket laying over the bench by the fire.

Gwydion picked the blanket up and then paused, looking down at her. "You'll not find a better man than Alun ap Deniol. He's a good man, you know."

"Aye," Jenet said softly, "aye, I know." She met his eyes with understanding. "Like his father."

Their eyes held for a moment, then he gave a slight smile and without a word turned away to the door of the cott where he settled down across the threshold with a sigh, and then was silent.

Jenet watched him for a moment, then looked up at the myriad bunches of herbs and plants that hung from their threads from the rafts above her. As the smoke from the fire curled up to them and the warm air rose, they moved and spun slightly.

The fire was low. She banked it, and then with a tired sigh she rose from the hearth and moved quietly across to the bed in the corner where her daughter already lay asleep.