Child of the Phoenix

by Barbara Erskine

  She nodded sheepishly, catching up a cloak and wrapping it around herself.

  ‘Here.’ He held out his silver goblet. ‘Rinse your mouth with this. You’ll feel better.’

  She did as he bid, spitting ferociously into the ewer in the corner. Then she began to brush her hair.

  ‘That’ll teach you to mix your wine with mead!’ His teasing voice was just behind her. She jumped. His hands were on her shoulders, peeling away the cloak. ‘Come back to bed now and get warm.’ He was naked too and she found she was trembling with excitement as they went back to the bed and scrambled in.

  She liked his kisses. And she liked his hands upon her breasts. She lay passively, feeling strangely guilty that she should so enjoy the sensations of her body. Her mother had told her with a certain grim satisfaction that it would hurt, but this, this was ecstasy and her Dafydd gentle and kind. She opened her eyes sleepily and reached up her lips for another kiss.

  They made love three times that night; the first time it did hurt and there was blood, but skilfully he kept her excitement at fever pitch and the second time was better. The third, when she was sated and sleepy, heavy with contentment, was as the first rays of the sun crept across the strewn rose petals on the floor and played across their sprawled bodies. Isabella, the wife of Dafydd ap Llywelyn, was very, very happy.

  II

  FOTHERINGHAY CASTLE ❖ August 1231

  The fever had deepened. Eleyne lay tossing uneasily on her bed. In her delirium she was walking in a valley filled with flowers. With her there was a man with red-gold hair, who took her hand and kissed it and smiled at her with eyes so full of love she found she was crying, her tears warm and wet on her cheeks. Then she woke up, and Rhonwen was sponging her face with rose water and the man had gone and left her alone and she cried again. She barely recognised her husband when he rose from his own sickbed to visit hers.

  The castle was hushed, the household concerned for their small countess, of whom most of them were very fond. The pinched face and huge unhappy eyes when she had first arrived had touched many a heart, as had her rare smiles, her concern for others, her careful attention to learning how to oversee them, her occasional irrepressible laughter and her wild uncontrollable rides from which she would return tired but with her spirit refreshed, just such a ride as had, this time, laid her so low.

  Working silently in the stillroom, Rhonwen pounded the dried herbs in her mortar, searching her memory for a formula which would break the fever. She had to be so careful. The earl still did not know she had returned; he did not know it was she who had provided the physic which had made him so much better before the king’s doctor had come. He did not know that Eleyne had thrown out the doctor’s medicines, quietly replacing them with Rhonwen’s; that Eleyne had smiled and nodded as the old man took the credit for the earl’s improved health. Now it was happening again, but with Luned and Marared now carrying the potions to the countess’s bedchamber. It was only at night when the castle slept that Rhonwen dared visit the child and smooth back her hair and bathe her wrists and temples with flower water.

  She weighed the dried, powdered herbs carefully in her hand scale and poured boiling water over them. Their scent filled the small stillroom, already permeated with the smell of decades of dried herbs and flowers. As soon as the infusion was made she would take it to Eleyne herself. The bell for compline had rung from the nunnery beyond the walls a long time earlier. It would be safe to visit her charge.

  Eleyne was asleep, her brow still damp with fever, her hair tangled on the pillow when Rhonwen tiptoed in. Beside her a single lamp burned. Ethil watched over her, dozing in the chair near her bed. She jumped to her feet as Rhonwen appeared. Rhonwen put her finger to her lips. Setting down the flask of liquid, she went to the bed and laid a cool hand on Eleyne’s forehead.

  ‘The fever is down, Lady Rhonwen,’ Ethil smiled. ‘The earl’s physician says she is getting better at last.’

  Rhonwen sniffed. ‘If she is, it is none of his doing. See she gets this four times a day and give her nothing he prescribes. Nothing. Do you understand?’ She stroked Eleyne’s cheek gently. ‘There, cariad. You’ll soon be better –’ She broke off as the door behind them opened.

  The Earl of Huntingdon stared at Rhonwen for several seconds without speaking, his eyes hard. Then he stepped into the room. ‘So my informant was right. You have sneaked back. What do you think you are doing here, madam?’ He moved towards the bed and looked down at his wife as she murmured restlessly in her sleep.

  ‘I am taking care of my child!’ Rhonwen took a step back. Her heart was pounding with fear. ‘Please, my lord, let me stay. You can’t send me away, not now, not while she’s ill.’ She dodged back towards Eleyne and stood protectively over her. ‘I’m the one who is curing her. Not your pompous old doctor. He knows nothing. Nothing!’ She grabbed Eleyne’s hand and clutched it to her. ‘Who do you think made you better? Who do you think saved your life? It was me!’

  John shook his head. His face was dark with anger. ‘Enough! You disobeyed me, woman. I sent you away. I will not have you near my wife!’

  ‘You can’t make me go …’ Rhonwen clutched Eleyne’s hand more tightly.

  ‘Oh, indeed I can.’ John turned to Ethil. ‘Call the guard.’

  Ethil hesitated. ‘Do as I say, woman!’ His voice hardened. ‘Call the guard. Now.’

  Eleyne had awakened. She stared uncomprehendingly at the man and woman who stood over her arguing. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her face flushed in the candlelight.

  ‘John –’ Her whisper was hoarse.

  He looked at her and his face softened. ‘Hush, my darling. Go back to sleep.’ To Rhonwen he said, ‘I mean it, madam. My physicians are perfectly able to take care of my wife. She does not need your care. You are the reason she is ill! If you had brought her up properly she would not have had this need to ride at all hours of the night! But for you she would have forgotten these nightmares and visions which torment her.’ He swung around as two men-atarms appeared in the doorway. ‘Take this woman away. I want her off my lands by noon tomorrow.’ He glanced at Rhonwen. ‘Go back to Wales. You are not wanted here. If I see you near my wife again it will not go well for you.’

  He watched, arms folded, as the two men advanced on Rhonwen. One of them took her arm and she spat at him, her eyes blazing. ‘I shall never forget this, John of Scotland,’ she hissed as she was pulled away from the bedside. ‘Never! One day you will die for this!’

  III

  August 1231

  ‘So. Are you better at last?’ The familiar gentle face of her husband swam into focus as Eleyne awoke. She moved painfully on the bed beneath the silk sheet as he put his hand on her forehead. ‘The fever has finally broken.’

  Beyond him the room was shadowy. The curtains of the bed were drawn back, the heavy bedcovers gone.

  ‘Have I been ill a long time?’ She stared round weakly.

  ‘Indeed you have. You were caught in the storm, do you remember? Cenydd brought you back wet through and before we knew it, it was me visiting you, instead of the other way round.’ After Rhonwen had gone the fever had worsened again and she had grown delirious. He himself had totally recovered. The long summer days and the prolonged rest ordered by the doctor had brought some colour to his cheeks. He was coughing less and, his appetite recovered, had put on weight. Each day he had been riding farther, determined, though he did not admit it even to himself, that when his wife recovered, he would no longer be put to shame in the saddle.

  He eyed her slight frame, so painfully thin, with the newly appeared small breasts barely visible mounds beneath the sheet.

  He had been frantic with worry as the fever had raged, watching in an agony of helplessness as Ethil and Marared nursed her, holding to her dry burning lips a succession of evil-tasting tinctures and decoctions of herbs which the physician had prescribed for her. And like them, he had listened to her delirious descriptions of the burning of the castle she had witnessed on
her ride.

  Cenydd, summoned to the earl, had reluctantly told him what had happened.

  ‘She was sitting on the horse, staring, staring into the darkness, and her eyes were all over the place, watching, watching something I couldn’t see. She was crying and complaining that the smoke was in her eyes and begging me to help. She said there were soldiers stopping the bucket men getting near the river …’ His voice trailed away. ‘But there was nothing there, nothing …’

  John had rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. ‘Have you seen her do this before?’

  Cenydd shook his head. ‘Luned knows about her visions, my lord,’ he said slowly. For the child’s sake it was better if it were all out in the open.

  Luned was white-faced: ‘It was a fantasy. The storm; the lightning. What she saw was the lightning strike a tree – ’

  ‘She saw a castle burning, child! You and I have heard her describe it again and again in her illness. She saw men and she saw a river. This was no ordinary dream.’ He paced up and down the floor. ‘She was warning us. Warning us of some attack. But where? Here?’ He swung round and paced back towards the empty hearth. He was cursing himself roundly. He believed it! He, a man of education and sense, believed she was seeing the future and he was worried about it! He was as gullible as the lye-spattered women in the wash-houses beyond the walls. He turned back to Luned. ‘I don’t want anyone to hear about this,’ he said repressively. ‘No word, no word must get out, do you understand? If the servants heard her talk, it was her delirium speaking, that is all. And now, thank the Blessed Virgin, she is better and there will be no more talk of burning castles!’

  Eleyne looked around the room. ‘Where’s Rhonwen?’ she asked.

  John sat down on the bed and took her hands in his. ‘I’ve sent her back to Wales, my darling. I couldn’t let her stay. She’s all right. She’s gone back to her own people.’

  He saw her eyes fill with tears and he cursed silently. ‘Luned and Marared and Ethil are still here to keep you company. And me.’ He smiled. ‘And Isabel is coming to stay and bringing young Robert. You have to get better soon so you can ride with him. You’ll enjoy that.’ He reached for the physic the doctor had left and helping her sit up held it to her lips. ‘And your sister Margaret has sent you a gift from Sussex. She wants you to go and see her when you’re better. She’s sent you a beautiful necklace of pearls.’

  Eleyne had grown while she was ill. He was astonished to find her now, thin as a reed, up to his shoulder. Her head still ached sometimes, so he would read to her in the evenings if there were no travelling minstrels or storytellers or guests. And he would talk to her of the future.

  ‘Would you like to be a queen, little one?’

  ‘In Scotland?’

  He nodded. Great-grandson of King David I of Scotland, John, the only son of the elder John of Huntingdon and Maud, heiress to the Earl of Chester, was heir presumptive to the as yet childless King Alexander II.

  Her eyes shone. ‘What is Scotland like?’

  ‘Beautiful. It has mountains bigger even than your great Snowdon, and lochs, great lochs as deep as the sea. One day soon we’ll go there. Your mother’s sister, Joanna, is married to my cousin the king, so we are both near the throne.’ He saw her frown. ‘Your mother is well, Eleyne. Sad in her prison, but well. You must not go on blaming yourself for her imprisonment. It was she who sinned.’ He looked at her. ‘No more bad dreams, I hope?’

  She shook her head. The man with the auburn hair was forgotten again, part of the whirling blackness of her fever.

  ‘And no more burning castles.’ He smiled. ‘I keep wondering whether to stand to a bucket chain in case.’ The violence of her descriptions was still in the forefront of his mind.

  ‘It wasn’t any of your castles,’ she said, anxious to reassure him.

  ‘Then where was it?’ he asked softly.

  ‘It was Sir William’s castle. At Hay.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I understand Hubert de Burgh, the king’s justiciar, has custody of Hay Castle,’ he said at last. ‘It must have been the past you saw, sweetheart. Your grandfather, King John, burned Hay after he destroyed Sir William’s grandmother and grandfather twenty years ago.’

  He saw her knuckles whiten.

  ‘It’s all over now. And best forgotten, Eleyne.’

  ‘I know.’ It was a whisper.

  IV

  The visitor did not realise the importance of the news he brought. He had been given fresh water to wash and food and wine in the great hall and then, as courtesy demanded, he repaid the hospitality with news of the country through which he had ridden. He had been in Hereford when he had heard of the sack of Hay Castle and the latest round of battles which raged in Wales.

  ‘I hear they were still rebuilding the castle from the last time when the attack came. The women tried to hide in the church with their children, but that was burned too. The whole place has been razed to the ground, so I heard.’

  John stared at him. Beside him Eleyne was as white as a sheet.

  ‘Who has done such a thing?’ John put out his hand and rested it over his wife’s on the table.

  ‘The Prince of Aberffraw. Your father, my lady. He burned Hay Castle.’

  Letters came some time later from Llywelyn to John. He had done it, he said, to reduce the de Burgh influence in the march, and to remind the King of England not to encroach too far into Wales.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Eleyne said huskily, the letter in her hand. ‘He burned Hay for revenge. Because Sir William loved it there.’ She took a deep unsteady breath, fighting back her tears. ‘Poor Isabella. I wonder how she is enjoying life at Aber.’

  She had written three times to her friend; there had been no reply.

  ‘She’ll be fine.’ John tried to comfort her. ‘Your brother Dafydd is a good man. He’ll look after her.’

  He did not mention the fire again and neither did she. She could not have saved Hay Castle from her father any more than she could have saved Sir William from the noose. She realised now, their destinies had been written in the stars. But how had she been allowed to see the future? And why?

  V

  The Earl and Countess of Huntingdon were summoned to Westminster within weeks of the burning of Hay Castle. John guessed that Llywelyn’s motive must be of great importance to the king, and he warned Eleyne that the king would ask her about it.

  ‘You won’t tell him that I saw it all?’ She looked at him anxiously.

  ‘Of course not. Do you think I want the whole world knowing that my wife has visions of the future?’

  She sat down at the great oak table where he had been writing, and picked up one of his quills. ‘I do not do it on purpose.’

  ‘I know.’ Contrite, he squeezed her shoulder. ‘But we cannot – must not – let it happen again. It’s dangerous. And it makes you unhappy. The king will ask you about your father’s motives. All you have to say is that you don’t know. Tell him all your father’s letters are addressed to me.’ This was true.

  King Henry III stood facing his niece, a quizzical smile on his face. ‘Your father is thumbing his nose at me again, I think, my lady.’

  Eleyne felt her face colouring. ‘No, sire, that is not true.’

  ‘My wife feels sure that the burning of Hay, at least, was a personal grudge, your grace.’ John put a protective hand on her arm. ‘A last gesture against the de Braoses.’

  ‘Ah, the lustful Sir William who managed to win my half-sister’s heart.’ Henry smiled. ‘The man must have been either a fool or so mad for love it made him so.’ He looked around for approval for his joke.

  At twenty-four Henry Plantagenet was an elegant, handsome young man with an artistic eye, amply demonstrated in his love of clothes and luxurious furnishings and in the extravagant plans he was drawing up for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey. As yet unmarried, he was a pious, shrewd and sometimes obstinate man.

  For a long moment he eyed Eleyne, then he turned away.
She was still a child. Later, when she had more influence with her husband, would be the time to make use of her.

  VI

  The Huntingdons were at home in their house in the Strand, a sprawling new suburb between London and Westminster, when news came that the Prince of Aberffraw had finally taken pity on his erring wife and forgiven her. After two years of imprisonment she had at last been allowed to return to her husband’s side and was reinstated in his favour. Eleyne gave the messenger a silver penny, overjoyed with the news, and went to find her husband.

  ‘I can go home! If papa has forgiven her, he will have forgiven me, won’t he, my lord? Oh, please. Can I go home?’ Not once in the last two years had they gone to the west.

  John looked at her in astonishment and took the letter. It was the first she had ever received from Aber, and it came from Rhonwen.

  ‘Home? To Gwynedd you mean?’

  She nodded in excitement. ‘Please?’ Noticing his expression she stopped uncomfortably. ‘I know I am your wife, I know I must come back to you when I am fourteen, but until then I could go home to Rhonwen. Back to Wales. Back to see Isabella –’ Her voice died away. They stood looking at each other for a long moment, and slowly her face fell.

  ‘I am sorry, sweetheart.’ John shook his head. ‘You must stay with me. Your home is with me now.’

  ‘My home is in Gwynedd.’ It was almost a sob.

  ‘Not now, Eleyne. You are the Countess of Huntingdon. Wales is no longer your home. It never will be again.’

  ‘But it must be!’ Huge tears welled up in her eyes. ‘It will always be my home. I love Wales. I hate it here!’ The angry sweep of her arm encompassed not only the heavily oak-beamed room of the house with the endless rattle of carts and wagons outside and the hot, fetid smell of the crowded streets of London so close, but the whole of eastern England and her husband’s domains.

  ‘Then you must learn to like it, Eleyne.’ His voice was unusually stern. He had not realised she still expected to go back to her father. He had thought she was happy with him. The wild ride of the night of the storm had not been repeated, and even before it she had appeared content to spend more and more time at his side, learning the intricate, sometimes tedious task of running the huge and complex administration. ‘There is no question of going back.’