An Audience with an Elephant Read Online Free Page B

Llywelyn was dead, killed in battle in December 1282, his severed head whitening on a pole above the Tower of London where it became a landmark (men could still see it fifteen years later from the pubs at the Tower’s foot). With him had collapsed a Welsh nation state in its shaky beginnings, and a dynasty dating back to the Roman Empire which made the King’s own family tree a thing of whimsy. But it is the private detail of the fall of the House of Gwynedd that is so overwhelrning. Gwenllian’s mother was dead, giving birth to her the previous June; her uncle’s family had been hunted down. She was just seventeen months old when she was brought to the place of lost children.
    You come on their names in footnotes for they are of little interest to historians. They did nothing, they went nowhere; once those doors closed on them in childhood they were the dead. ‘Three marks to be yearly laid aside to make good the wall and ditch to shut off the nuns, that no person may go in or have the least sight of them. No presents or messages to be delivered to or from the nuns. The windows through which anything is delivered to have wheels that turn so the sisters may not see anyone, or anyone see the sisters.’ The rules at Sempringham of England’s one monastic order, founded by the little hunchback Gilbert, were strict.
    The children had committed one crime, that of being born. Even Stalin didn’t hold that against the children of his victims, for eventually these were allowed to emerge from their orphanages. But not Gwenllian or her little girl cousins who turned up the following year before being dispersed to other nunneries; had they stayed together they might have shared some memory of the past, and to the English this was Year Zero. The little boys of Gwynedd did not come, they had disappeared into perpetual imprisonment. The children of disgraced English barons came, one or two to be retrieved when a deal was struck in later years. But the Welsh children were already history and for them Sempringham was the dustbin of a broken dynasty. But where is Sempringham?
    Find Grantham on the map. Forget the alderman and his grocer’s shop: follow the A52 eastwards until after about 9 miles you see a B road turning south to Billingborough and Bourne. Two miles after Billingborough you will find Sempringham, a place where Mrs Thatcher has probably never been.
    Sempringham is a locked church at the end of an earth track, out in the fields with no houses near it. You will have no problem finding the church, for you will already have seen it from miles around; there is no landscape here, only sky. But once there was something which would have pushed up that sky. What survives is a church which was there when Gilbert came, but 350 yards to the south of this he built his Priory, the nave of which was 55 feet longer than Ripon Cathedral and 25 feet wider than Lichfield. When archaeologists excavated here before the last war it was this width which stunned them and the enormous buttresses which flanked it; together they suggested a towering loftiness which would have been one of the wonders of the Middle Ages. The local newspaper was suitably impressed: ‘Excavations at Sempringham. Remains of a big church discovered.’
    Of this there is now no trace for at the Dissolution it became a quarry, the bumps still visible in the field being those of the mansion built from of its stones. Daniel Defoe saw that mansion when he came through, and the tactful old hack recorded its plasterwork was the equivalent of that in the Royal Palace of Nonesuch. There is no trace of any of the graves, so hers is as lost as those of the rest of her dynasty (though her great grandfather’s stone coffin lies empty in Llanrwst church); the English saw to it that there were to be no shrines, and two generations on were hiring an assassin in France to kill the last male member of the family. They had forgotten about him.
    She would have seen the church, though