Child of the Phoenix (31 page)

‘Of course I’ve grown, Rhonwen. I’m grown up now!’

‘You are indeed! A countess twice over, with a train of followers bigger than your father’s!’ Rhonwen held her away for a moment surveying her face. If he had taken Eleyne and made her his, she would know. She searched the girl’s eyes. There was something there, but not what she sought. Of that there was no sign. ‘You’ve been unhappy,
cariad
. I can see it in your eyes; see it in the thinness of you. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Eleyne turned from the sharp scrutiny. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. There is always so much to do at Chester, so many people to talk to.’ The dowager had helped, staying on at the castle at Eleyne’s frantic entreaty, but even so she had found herself busy at all hours, even when it was only the business of being entertained. Without John’s support it had been a nightmare of strain and tension. ‘My father, Rhonwen. When will I see him?’

‘Soon,
cariad
.’ Isabella had done her part; Dafydd had persuaded Llywelyn to issue the invitation, but that was as far as it had gone. ‘I have no wish to see your sister,’ he had said to his son firmly, and the day before Eleyne’s arrival he had left Aber with a large contingent of followers to ride south.

Joan was there however, and only an hour after Eleyne’s arrival she summoned her youngest daughter to her solar. Dry-mouthed, Eleyne stood before her, sharply conscious that she was now taller than her mother and far more richly dressed, for Joan was wearing a black gown and cloak – much to her husband’s irritation, her habitual dress since her return from exile. But her eyes were the same, fiercely critical, as she looked her daughter up and down.

‘So. You have become a beauty.’

Taken aback, Eleyne blushed. She still felt antagonistic towards her mother, but her fear had gone – and her respect. But for this woman and her betrayal of her husband, Aber would still be her home and she would still be sure of her father’s love. Her disappointment at not finding him at Aber had been intense.

‘Why have you come?’ The directness of Joan’s question shocked her.

‘My father invited us,’ Eleyne replied. She raised her head defiantly. ‘And I wanted to come. I have missed you all.’

‘Indeed?’ Her mother’s voice was dry. ‘But your husband has not come with you.’

‘He is too busy.’ Eleyne answered too quickly.

‘And you are not too busy,’ her mother echoed quietly. ‘You are not breeding yet, I see.’ Her eye skimmed critically down Eleyne’s slim figure. ‘Your friend Isabella is six months gone.’

‘Is she?’ Eleyne turned away, but not quickly enough to hide her unhappiness from her mother’s sharp eyes. Joan’s expression softened slightly. ‘You and your husband are content, Eleyne?’

‘Yes, mama.’

‘And he has made you his wife?’ She paused. ‘You do know what I mean?’

There was only the slightest hesitation, but it was enough. Joan frowned. Unexpectedly, and for the first time in the child’s life, she felt a wave of tenderness for this wayward, fey daughter of hers. Her own unhappiness and loneliness over the last three years had made her more thoughtful, more understanding. Her attitude to other people had, she realised, changed.

She had been dreading seeing Eleyne again, well aware that it was Eleyne who had seen her that fearful, fateful night, but now, with her daughter sitting on the stool near her, gazing unhappily into the fire, she could feel her loneliness and misery as a tangible cloak around her. She responded to it with an unlooked-for wave of sympathy.

‘Is it his illness?’ she asked, her voice more gentle.

Eleyne shrugged. ‘At first he said I was too young; then he was ill. Then, when I thought he wanted me at last … we quarrelled.’ Her eyes were fixed on the soft swathes of smoke drifting across the fire as the flame licked at the damp logs. The air smelt sweet and spicy from the gnarled, lichen-covered apple.

‘You must make up your quarrel.’ Joan picked up her embroidery frame and selected a new length of silk for her needle. ‘You have been lonely, I think.’

Eleyne nodded.

Joan squinted at the branch of candles, holding her needle up to the light. ‘It was the same for me when I first came here. I was English and a stranger in your father’s court. I was lonely and afraid.’

‘You?’ Eleyne turned to stare at her.

‘Why not?’ Her tone was defensive. ‘I was young – oh not as young as you – and just as vulnerable and without the loving family behind me which you had.’ She paused, unaware that her use of the past tense had brought tears to her daughter’s eyes. ‘I barely knew my father. He and my mother were together such a short time and yet here I was branded –’ her voice grew heavy with bitterness – ‘branded as the bastard daughter of King John. Not a princess, even though I had been declared legitimate, but the child of a woman of the night and a butcher!’

‘Was he really so evil?’ Eleyne’s voice was quiet. Her grandfather had died four years before she was born, but she too had grown up in the shadow of the hate his name still roused.

‘He did some bad things. He was a king,’ Joan went on after a long pause. ‘Kings and princes must sometimes be cruel if they are to rule effectively.’ There was another silence.

Was she thinking of her own imprisonment, Eleyne wondered, and she realised with a shock that she had stopped thinking of her mother with hostility. This, the first real conversation they had ever had, had revealed a vulnerable, sensitive woman beneath the tough, unsentimental exterior, and Eleyne warmed to her.

Her needle threaded at last, Joan put the silver thimble on her finger and began inserting minute stitches into the linen in her frame. ‘Why did he dismiss Rhonwen?’

The question dropped into the silence, then Eleyne shrugged. ‘He doesn’t like her.’

‘Will you take her back with you?’

Again Eleyne shrugged. ‘I love Rhonwen, but I don’t want to make him angry.’

‘Then leave her here. The woman plots and schemes like an alley cat. She will only complicate your life at Chester. You must learn one thing, Eleyne, and that is that there is no one you can rely on in this world but yourself. No one.’

VIII

Isabella could not hide her resentment and Eleyne felt it as soon as she walked into the room. The girl’s look was hard and full of enmity in the streaming light of the torches; her dark eyes were calculating. ‘So, you came back on your own.’

A gale had risen, screaming across the sea from the north-west, pounding the waves against the shore, rattling the window screens in the palace. Isabella clutched her wrap around her bulky body and sat in the chair nearest the hearth. Around her, her ladies, shivering too in the draughty hall, gathered as close as they could to the fire. Eleyne stood alone in the centre of the floor and felt the wave of hostility crest and topple towards her like one of the fat breakers on the beach below. Her heart sank. How could she have thought that she and Isabella could still be friends?

‘My husband was too busy to leave Chester at the moment,’ she said calmly.

‘I heard he couldn’t wait to get rid of you,’ Isabella retorted pertly. ‘Little princess icicle they call you, did you know? One of my ladies said the pages were betting long odds you would still be a virgin when you were twenty!’

Eleyne felt the colour mounting in her cheeks. Not all the sniggers from the listening women had been stifled; in fact, one or two had laughed out loud, their eyes brazen and mocking.

‘I don’t know what you mean!’ She raised her chin.

‘I mean, sister,’ Isabella emphasised the word sarcastically, ‘that if your husband had bedded you, you would have been with child long before this. Besides, it is well known you keep separate rooms!’

Eleyne thought she saw one or two of the women bow their heads, embarrassed by their mistress’s waspishness, and she was comforted by it. Her initial hurt was passing and she felt her own temper rising. She clenched her fists.

‘My private life is none of your business, Bella,’ she retorted. ‘But at least my husband and I live in the same town.’ She closed her mind firmly to the fact that now they did nothing of the sort. ‘My brother, I hear, has taken to putting the breadth of Gwynedd between you and him.’ She turned on her heel, and walked, head high, across the chamber, conscious every step of the way of the staring eyes following her.

‘
Murderer!
’

Eleyne stopped. For a moment she wondered if she had heard aright. Isabella’s whisper carried as clearly as would a shout across the body of the large room. She turned, her face white, her eyes hard.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said “murderer”,’ Isabella repeated defiantly. She eyed Eleyne warily. ‘Why not? It’s what you are. You killed my father.’

The silence was total in the solar. Only the shifting of the fire stirred the breath-held tension. Eleyne was perfectly calm. Her temper ran cold as ice. ‘Your father was a traitor. He seduced my mother and betrayed my father’s friendship,’ she said, her voice completely steady. ‘He betrayed you and he betrayed me without a thought. I didn’t sentence him to die, but it was the fate he deserved. My father,’ she paused, ‘had no choice but to send him to the death for which he had asked.’ Conscious of the eyes fixed on her back, she walked slowly from the room, aware of a strange calm dignity, of the certainty that she was right.

Surprised at her coolness, she paused outside the door and examined her feelings with detachment. It was as if she had walked through an archway which led directly from childhood to adulthood. It was a step from which there was no turning back: yesterday she would have run from the room, shaking with anger, to throw herself upon her bed, pounding the pillows with frustration and fury; today, when she regained her bedchamber it was at a thoughtful walk.

Through the strange osmosis by which news and gossip spread through the palace, Rhonwen had already heard of the altercation. She laughed wryly. ‘You touched a sensitive place there,
cariad
. The child was upset when Dafydd left her. She worships him you know, but now he’s got a baby on her he’s away.’

Eleyne sat down on the bed. ‘Why is she so cruel?’

‘You must try to understand how she feels.’ Rhonwen noticed her calmness and was uneasy. ‘She has to blame someone; and she’s always been jealous of you.’

‘I thought she was my friend.’ Wearily Eleyne drew her legs up beneath her skirts.

‘A fair-weather friend only,’ Rhonwen said gently. ‘And a dangerous enemy,
cariad
. You must watch your back when that young woman is around, indeed.’

It was hard to avoid anyone in the crowded palace over Christmas, confined as they were by the icy winds and the horizontal storms of sleet and soft snow which tore the last clinging dead leaves from the trees over the river, and brought the swirling brown waters down in spate. Eleyne kept as much as possible to her own rooms and to those of her mother, with whom she had several more quiet thoughtful talks.

Her father arrived late one night with an escort of ten men. Their torches spat and hissed in the wind; their fur cloaks were encrusted with frozen snow. Eleyne waited behind her mother, watching as Llywelyn tramped into the hall shouting greetings to his people. He did not see his youngest daughter until he was a few strides from her. For a moment father and daughter stared at each other in silence. Eleyne wanted to throw herself into his arms but she held back, her eyes on his face. He did not smile. A silence fell over the men and women around them. At last it was Joan who spoke. ‘Welcome, my husband. Do you see who is here to spend Christmas with us?’

Eleyne stepped forward and curtseyed low. ‘Papa,’ she said.

Her father put out his hand and took hers. ‘You are welcome here, daughter,’ he said quietly. But he did not hug her and within seconds he had turned away.

It was a week later, after the supper tables had been cleared and the prince had retired to a private room with Ednyfed Fychan, the archdeacon of St Asaph’s and several others among his closest companions and advisers, that the household, led by Princess Joan, settled themselves comfortably to hear a new harper from the land of Cornwall far to the south. Joan beckoned Eleyne to the seat next to her and Eleyne, with a look at Isabella who was scowling as usual, took the place with a smile, watching the grave young man before them lovingly tuning his instrument.

Her eyes wandered over the assembled company, men and women most of whom she had known all her life. There were some strangers, but they were seated in the body of the hall, their faces lost in the light and shadow of the wall sconces with their flaring smoky lights. All were quiet now, replete after their meal and eager to hear the new musician – all loving music, all appreciative, all critical of whatever offering was to come. Her gaze strayed back to the dais where the immediate family sat – all except her father – to Isabella, slumped in her chair, the bloated mound of her belly making it impossible for her to be comfortable. Even as Eleyne watched, she saw the young woman, who had ostentatiously turned her seat away from Eleyne, move awkwardly, obviously in some distress, her hand pressed against her side. Eleyne felt an overwhelming wave of sadness at the sight of her.

The first warm, enticing chords of the music drew her attention back to the performer and she was lost in the magic arpeggios of sound, her spine straight against the carved wooden chairback, her hands resting loosely on its arms, aware of the subtle change in the attention of the audience around her. The first notes had told them that this man was a master, equal to the best of their own harpers. Reassured, the audience sat back to enjoy the evening.