Child of the Phoenix (129 page)

‘Nonsense.’ Donald looked over the top of her head into the darkness. ‘He’d have to fight me for you.’ The hair on his forearms was standing on end. He could feel an eerie coldness around them as he strained his eyes into the shadows. ‘Tell him, tell him I’m not letting you go. Tell him to go away.’

‘I have, I’ve begged him.’ Her voice rose hysterically and Bethoc stirred and sat up.

‘My lady?’ she queried sleepily.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Donald commanded.

Gently pushing Eleyne from him he stood up and reached for the dagger which lay on the coffer beside him. Unsheathing it, he raised it before him, hilt uppermost, the thought of his all-night vigil in the royal chapel on the night before his knighthood still fresh in his mind. ‘In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of Our Blessed Lady, I command you to leave my wife alone. Go back to wherever you came from. Leave her in peace. Tell him.’ He pressed the dirk into Eleyne’s hand. ‘Tell him this is what you want.’

‘Please, Alexander, please go.’ Eleyne raised the dirk in front of her, holding it in both hands. ‘I loved you. I still love you, but I’m not ready to come to you, not yet. I want to stay with Donald and with my children as long as they need me. Please leave me. I’ll watch over your son, I’ll show him the danger, I’ll keep him safe from the storm.’

In her bed Bethoc realised she had stopped breathing. Clutching her blankets under her chin, she watched the bed curtains, her heart thundering with fright. She could see the shadow again, quite clearly, standing over Eleyne.

Eleyne looked up as though she too could see it. ‘Please,’ she whispered brokenly, ‘if you love me, go.’

He was fading now. Bethoc lost the shape amongst the shadows.

Eleyne felt him drawing away, his sadness tangible. ‘Bless you, my love,’ she whispered. ‘God keep you. One day I’ll come to you, I promise. One day, when they don’t need me any more.’

‘No!’ Donald cried, anguished. ‘Never!’

Eleyne laid down the dirk on the bed and put her arms around Donald’s neck. ‘Oh, my love, don’t grudge him that. If I die before you, then you will marry again. Of course you will. Then I shall be with him.’

‘Has he gone?’ Donald stared over her head.

‘Yes, he’s gone.’ She smiled faintly.

‘And he won’t come back?’

‘No.’ There were only empty shadows where the darker shadow had been. ‘No. Now he knows that one day I shall be his, I don’t think he’ll come back. Not until I die.’

BOOK FIVE

1281–1302

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I

I
t had rained for several weeks; torrential, cold, swelling the rivers and burns, lying in the great sodden mosses of the moors, cascading from the mountains in falls and leaps of white water. When the sun appeared at last it was balm upon the land.

The old man went regularly to the sacred well. He would hang a torn strip of cloth from a branch of thorn or leave a broken piece of bannock and once, in despair, he tossed a penny, a whole day’s pay, into the spring before he dipped a jug of the pure, ice-cold water to take back to the high shielings where his wife lay ill with fever in their makeshift bothy.

The rain had deepened the pool. The trickle which usually bubbled gently from the rock had become a torrent. He could see where the shingle had been washed out of the pool by the force of the floodwater. It lay on the bank amongst the thin scattering of bog orchids and purple-black cornel like the sea strand. Something caught his eye, gleaming amongst the stones. He bent and picked it up. Trailing with soft, feathery moss, the phoenix lay in his palm and it seemed to him that it vibrated like a captive dragonfly. For a long time he looked at it, debating whether he should throw it back into the pool. Someone had left it as an offering, and it would be the worst of luck to take it. On the other hand, he could see the jewel was worth a king’s ransom.

II

KILDRUMMY CASTLE
July 1281

On the hills behind Kildrummy Castle the heather was beginning to turn to purple beneath the summer sun. Eleyne sat in her favourite room in the Snow Tower watching Marjorie and Isabella sew whilst she told them the stories of old Wales. Agnes brought in a pouch of letters which had just arrived from the south.

She had grown to dread the arrival of these letters. Too often, as the years passed, they contained bad news. The first had come four years before. A letter, out of the blue, from Alice Goodsire, Luned’s eldest daughter.

It was very quick. Mama did not suffer at all. A seizure, the doctor said.
She had a happy life and she remembered you always in her prayers
.

Luned had left a doting husband, five children and sixteen grandchildren to mourn her.

Her death shook Eleyne terribly. Her foster sister, her maid and her oldest friend, Luned had been her closest companion for so many years it did not seem possible that she could be dead, that she would never see her again …

Then five months ago the next blow had come, word of her sister Gwenllian’s death, followed only three months later by news that her beloved Margaret had succumbed to a congestion of the lungs and died at last, giving orders that her heart be buried in her beloved husband Walter’s coffin at Aconbury in the rolling hills of the border march.

So, they were all gone now. Luned, Gruffydd and Senena, Dafydd and Isabella, Gwladus, Angharad, Gwenllian and Margaret. She was the only one left of the brood of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Joan the daughter of John of England.

She frowned, lost in thought, the pouch dangling from her finger-tips. Henry of England had also died, nine years ago now; her Uncle Henry, the man who had declared her dead. In his eyes, in the eyes of England she had been dead for nearly thirty years! She had felt little sorrow when he had gone, he who had treated her as a pawn, to be handed without a second thought to a man like Robert de Quincy. She shivered. Even after all these years the thought of Robert could still make her skin crawl. The power of a king was frightening – a power of life and death; a power to treat his subjects like so many possessions. The great charter her grandfather had been forced to sign had changed little in the long run. And now another king ruled England: her cousin Edward. Unofficially he recognised her existence; he knew she was there and the thought filled her with unease. For a long time she had known that Edward regarded her as an enemy.

She gazed thoughtfully at the bag of letters.

Donald and his father were at Roxburgh with the Scots court. The letters were undoubtedly from them, full of last-minute instructions to do a thousand things on the estates which she had probably done two weeks ago. Her face cleared; smiling fondly, she picked up one sealed with Donald’s seal.

The letter did indeed contain news. As Donald’s father was still unwell Donald had been called to act as a witness to the marriage agreement between little Princess Margaret, King Alexander’s youngest child, and Eric, King of Norway. The earl was, he said, travelling back to Kildrummy in easy stages. William, who had always been such a robust and energetic man, had been growing old visibly over the past few months, his decline speeded by Muriel’s sudden death of congestion of the lungs. Eleyne put the letter down. Next to it on the pile was a letter in a hand she didn’t recognise. It bore the seal of de Bohun; her heart began to thump uncomfortably.

‘Mama! the story!’ Isabella prompted. At twelve she was tall and slim as a sapling but showing at last the signs of great beauty to come. ‘Please.’

‘In a minute, my love.’ Eleyne turned the letter over and over in her hands, then finally she broke the seal. When she looked up at last, there were tears in her eyes.

‘Mama! Mama, what is it?’ Isabella dropped her work and ran to put her thin arms around her mother’s neck.

Eleyne smiled, barely able to speak for emotion. ‘It’s from your sister.’

‘My sister?’ Isabella looked uncertainly at Marjorie – at eleven, still a chubby tomboy.

‘No, not your little sister, your big sister.’ Eleyne drew her daughter down on to the seat near her. ‘Long before you were born, I lived in England and I had two little girls, much like you and Marjorie. But when I came to live in Scotland with Macduff ’s father, I had to leave them behind.’

‘You wouldn’t leave me behind, would you?’ Marjorie, sitting plumply on a stool of her own, sounded only half confident as she too put down her sewing ready for the new story.

‘No, darling, I wouldn’t leave you behind.’ Eleyne smiled, hiding the terrible sadness those memories still brought back.

‘What is she called. Our sister?’ Isabella asked, eyeing the letter clutched in her mother’s hands.

‘She is called Joanna, and her sister is Hawisa.’

‘What does she say?’ Marjorie interrupted. ‘Is she coming to see us?’

‘She wants to see us, but she hasn’t been very well,’ Eleyne said slowly.

Forgive me my churlish behaviour in the past. I could not forgive you for
leaving us and it is only lately, as I find myself increasingly a pawn of
King Edward’s marriage plans for me, that I realise how helpless we
women are when men have decided our fate. Only my recurrent illness
stopped his father remarrying me to someone else after Humphrey’s death.
Now I fear my illness will remove me from this world and from the
marriage game sooner rather than later. I should so like to see you before
I die. Please, mother, if you can forgive me, can we meet?