Child of the Phoenix

  ‘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

  It 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?

  She did not say how ill she was, nor did she mention her sister.

  ‘When will she come?’ Marjorie asked eagerly. Scrambling to her feet, she came and leaned against her mother’s knees and picking up the letter, she began to spell out some of the words. ‘How old is she? Her writing is difficult to read. Or did she use a clerk?’ The girl smiled. Her own writing had been condemned as execrable by the boys’ tutor who had remained at Kildrummy after his charges had gone so that twice a week he could give the girls a lesson in reading and writing.

  ‘She is grown up, my darling. I don’t know when she’ll come or if she’ll be able to travel so far,’ Eleyne said. ‘It may be that I shall ride south to see her.’

  ‘Then we won’t meet her!’ Isabella scowled. ‘I know! You can take us to see Cousin Llywelyn in Wales. We’ll meet her there and we can see Aber. Can we?’

  It was a tempting idea. ‘We’ll see. I’ll speak to your father. I would like to go to Aber again.’ She sighed wistfully and stood up and stretched. Aber and Joanna. That would be perfect.

  III

  The heatwave which followed the rain broke in a massive storm. Lightning flashed across the mountains, turning heather and rock to blinding silver as the thunder reverberated over the moors and echoed around the corries.

  Eleyne surveyed the women in her solar. They were restless, made uneasy by the thunder. At the table Isabella and Marjorie were squabbling quietly over a game of pick-a-sticks.

  Eleyne went to stand in the window embrasure, flinching as a flash seemed to angle directly through the eighteen-foot-thick walls.

  Donald and his father had still not returned to Mar. There had been no further word from them, and she was unsettled. Something was wrong. She closed her eyes; her head was throbbing dully and, in spite of the heat of the chamber, there was a strange coldness across her shoulders.

  Eleyne …

  She caught her breath. The whisper had been in her head, inside her brain.

  Her eyes flew open and she looked across the room. In spite of the heat, they had had to light candles to sew by. She could see the perspiration on the faces of the women, the dampness of the clinging wimples, dark stains spreading on thin silk. The rankness of their bodies was beginning to fill the room, overpowering the floral scents they used and the sweetness of the beeswax candles.

  Eleyne spun around. A dozen faces turned towards her, then turned back to their work.

  Eleyne …

  There it was again. Clearer this time, stronger.

  She couldn’t breathe. ‘Blessed Virgin. Holy Mother of God.’ Soundlessly her lips framed the words. Another lightning flash illuminated the room and she saw Isabella flinch, her hand across her eyes. The child looked near to tears.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Her voice sounded distant and disembodied above the muted gabble of conversation. ‘It will pass over soon. Bethoc, where is your lute? Play for us. It will take our minds off the storm.’

  She went back to the table, feeling the drag of her skirts intolerably hot and heavy against her legs, and she put her hand on Isabella’s for a moment as it hovered over the pile of cut rushes they were using for their game.

  ‘Mama!’ Marjorie’s protest was anguished. ‘Now you’ve spoiled it – ’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to.’ Eleyne smiled at her youngest daughter contritely.

  He was there near her; unbelievably, he was there. The women, seated in groups around the candles or at the heavy oak trestle, had sensed nothing. The deep window embrasure was empty and yet she could feel him. For the first time in years she could feel him.

  ‘Why? Why have you come back?’ She mouthed the words silently over her daughters’ bent heads but she knew the answer.

  She hadn’t called him, it was the phoenix.

  Someone had found the phoenix.

  IV

  Eleyne put the idea of a visit to Wales to Donald as soon as he came home with his father two weeks later. It was the only way to escape, to be sure that Alexander would not follow.

  ‘That would give you real pleasure? To go back to Wales?’

  ‘You know it would.’

  She was trying to hide her anxiety, her terror that Alexander had come back for her at last. She had to get away from Scotland and in Wales surely he couldn’t reach her.

  ‘I want to see Llywelyn again. And Aber. I’m getting old, Donald. Soon I won’t be able to contemplate the idea of such a long journey.’

  He laughed. ‘You old? Never!’

  At sixty-three she was as upright and slim as ever and as full of energy. She could still outride him, still sit up all night with a foaling mare, not trusting his horse masters, and be as alert at breakfast as the children. And she was still as desirable as ever. There were times – when she returned from her long lonely rides in the hills with only her two dogs, Lucy and Saer, the latest in the long line of Donnet’s descendants to guard her – when he wondered what magic she practised in secret beneath the moon. There was a glow to her skin and a gleam in her eye, a strange glamour over her, which bewitched him as strongly as when he had first met her.

  He frowned. Out of nowhere the fear had returned, the suspicion, the secret dread, that on those lonely trips she met with Alexander’s ghost.

  V

  August 1281

  William summoned Eleyne to his bedside soon after he and Donald returned. His face had thinned to the point of gauntness and his voice had weakened, but he had lost none of his acerbity when addressing his daughter-in-law.

  ‘I bring greetings from the king. He thanks you for your messages of condolence.’ Alexander’s second son, David, had died in June.

  He groaned as he eased the pain in his joints. ‘You’ve heard no doubt that I was too ill to attend the finalising of the marriage settlement between young Margaret and the King of Norway. Donald was there, though. He’ll be a valuable adviser to the king when I’m gone, if you let him.’ He frowned through his bushy eyebrows. ‘You’re a powerful woman, Eleyne, and you still have my son exactly where you want him. Don’t stand in his way.’

  Eleyne eyed him coolly. ‘I have never stood in his way.’

  ‘Oh yes you have. You keep him dangling here at Kildrummy when he should be with the king; you keep him on a leash like one of your damn dogs. And it’s not good for him. Let him go, woman.’ He shot his neck forward and glared at her. ‘I’ll be dead soon and he’ll be the earl. You’ve given him three sons and all credit to you for that.’ He paused thoughtfully, visibly wondering how she had done it. ‘You stay here and look after the earldom. You’re a good administrator. And let Donald go to court.’ He coughed feebly. ‘Are you afraid he’ll find himself another woman now you’re old?’ The glance he gave her out of the corner of his eye was pure malice.

  She smiled. ‘No, I’m not afraid of that.’ She wasn’t, not any more.

  ‘Nor should you be.’ Grudgingly he smiled. ‘You’ve the looks of a woman half your age still, though, Blessed Margaret, I don’t know how you do it. One last point.’ His cough grew harsher. ‘I’m sending men from Mar as part of the army, keeping the peace in Wales. Wait –!’ He raised his hand as she opened her mouth to speak. ‘This is my duty, according to the agreements made between England and Scotland, and I abide by it, as Donald will be expected to do. You will not try to interfere. The politics of Wales are no longer your concern even if the king permits you to visit Llywelyn as you’ve asked. If there are Scotsmen helping Edward of England keep the peace, it is because your nephew was unable to do so himself. He lost the best part of Wales through his own weakness. N
ow, with Edward building castles all around him, he’ll be forced to abide by English rules, and there’s nothing you can do about it!’

  Eleyne grimaced. He was right, but it hurt to think of foreign soldiers on Welsh soil.

  So much had happened in Wales since she had been there last. Ever since Edward’s accession to the English throne, the working relationship which had existed between his father and Llywelyn had deteriorated, until in the face of Llywelyn’s persistent refusal to submit to his new English overlord, Edward had invaded Wales, accompanied by Llywelyn’s ever-rebellious and still jealous younger brother, Dafydd.

  The combination of king and brother had inflicted a resounding defeat on Llywelyn, reducing the prince’s territory to the northern part of Gwynedd and forcing him to release his and Dafydd’s elder brother, Owain, whom Llywelyn, in his anxiety to keep him away from the centre of power, had kept so long a prisoner.

  Edward had compromised in the interests of peace. He did not take away Llywelyn’s title of Prince of Wales and he had allowed him at long last to marry Eleanor, the daughter of Simon de Montfort, to whom he had been betrothed for so long, in a wonderful ceremony in Worcester Cathedral. That had been the last time Eleyne had seen her nephew. She and Donald had ridden south to attend the wedding, and she had been overjoyed to think that at last Wales would find some kind of peace.

  The peace, however, had been an uneasy one.

  Lord Mar shook his head grimly. ‘There was a time when I thought Wales and Scotland would unite to keep English ambition in check. It’s sad for Wales that that did not happen, for Edward is a very different man from his father.’ He fell silent, staring grumpily at his gnarled hands.

  Eleyne took a deep breath. She was too old a hand at sparring with William to rise to most of the challenges he had flung at her. ‘Are you confident that Edward will not challenge Scottish supremacy one day?’ she asked mildly. She had never trusted Edward, from that day when as a boy he had stared at her with such hostile eyes at Woodstock. And she had sensed something in him – a cold-bloodedness – which set him apart even from his father.