Child of the Phoenix (22 page)

She crept into the oratory, Robert close at her heels. The tiny chapel was very dark. Both children held their breath as they stared round.

‘Can you smell anything strange?’ Eleyne whispered, her mouth very close to Robert’s ear.

He swallowed nervously and gave a cautious sniff. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Incense,’ she murmured. ‘When she came there was a smell of incense.’

Robert felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck; he wished they had gone riding instead. ‘I can’t smell anything.’ His eyes swivelled round in his skull as he tried not to move his head. ‘There’s nothing here. Let’s go.’

‘No. Wait.’ Eleyne could smell it. The rich exotic fragrance drifted imperceptibly in the still air of the oratory. ‘She’s here,’ she breathed.

Robert stepped back and felt the rough stones of the wall cold through his tunic. His mouth had gone dry. Nervously, he turned his head so that he could see through the arch towards the window. There was nothing there. He frowned, staring harder, following her gaze, his hands wet with perspiration.

‘Can you see her?’ Eleyne asked softly. There was nothing there and the scent such as it was had gone. She glanced at him. He was shaking his head, his eyes screwed up with the effort of trying to see. His face was pasty.

‘It’s not the lady of Fotheringhay,’ she said very quietly. ‘Do you see? It’s huge. And ugly. So ugly!’

Robert’s face went whiter. He was pressing hard against the wall, wishing the stones would swallow him up.

‘I can’t see anything,’ he gulped. ‘I can’t see anything at all.’ He looked at her in mute appeal, then he stared. Her face had lit with suppressed laughter and she was giggling. ‘If you could see your face, Nephew Robert,’ she scolded.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said slowly. The fear and awe on his face vanished. ‘There’s nothing there at all! You’ve been teasing me! Why you – ’

With a little shriek of laughter she dived past him. She raced across the empty bedchamber and pelted down the long spiral stairs, round and round and round, with Robert hot on her heels, bursting into the shadowy lower chamber just as John’s steward appeared at an inner doorway. He stared at Eleyne as she stopped in her tracks, noticing with amused approval the flushed face and rumpled veil. ‘Good day, my lady,’ he said with a bow. ‘His lordship was looking for you in the great hall.’ His gaze strayed to the boy behind her and he hid a smile. ‘It’s good to see you again, Master Robert.’

Robert grinned impudently: ‘And you, Master Steward.’ He turned to Eleyne and bowed in turn. ‘We mustn’t keep Uncle John waiting, Aunt Eleyne,’ he said severely. Then he winked. ‘I’ll race you!’

Eleyne hesitated for only a second, but already he was across the floor, scattering the scented woodruff which covered it, and out through the main door and out of sight.

XVI

The Earl and Countess of Huntingdon left the castle two months after Isabel and Robert had departed for Scotland. Eleyne had missed them enormously – after their ghost-hunting escapade they had become firm friends and he had kept the secret of her forbidden vision. Only the promise of another visit soon had consoled Eleyne as they rode away.

In her renewed loneliness she had turned to John more and more for company. She missed Rhonwen very much, but she also found it a relief not to have her constant supervision, and it was a pleasant surprise to find she no longer felt guilty enjoying her husband’s company when they set off on a tour of his estates.

The lands which comprised the Honour of Huntingdon were for the most part flat. They stretched for miles, bisected by the black, slow-moving Nene, from the fens where they flew their hawks to the great forests of central England.

Eleyne was ill at ease in the flatness of the landscape and, try as she might to please John, she could not pretend to like the cities they visited. She did not like Cambridge or Huntingdon or Northampton, as they journeyed slowly from castle to castle; and most of all she did not like London, where he kept a town house. Instinctively she distrusted the slow-speaking, cold, suspicious easterners and she longed for the mountains and the wild seas; she longed for the quick-tongued, nimble-footed, warm-hearted people of Gwynedd where tempers might be quick to flare, but where vivacity and warmth and hospitality were second nature to the people. Twice John promised her that they would make the long ride to Chester and that from there she could, if her father agreed, visit Aber, but twice she was disappointed as John succumbed to the debilitating bouts of fever which returned again and again to plague him.

It was as the next long summer’s heat settled over the flat lands of eastern England and they found themselves once more at Fotheringhay that he fell ill again and this time more seriously than before.

XVII
NORTHAMPTON
May 1231

Rhonwen paused to move her basket of shopping from one arm to the other as she walked slowly back from the market to the house where she had found employment. Her new mistress was the wife of a wealthy wool merchant who had cheerfully given Rhonwen a place in the household as nurse to her brood of noisy children. Twice Rhonwen had despatched carefully worded messages to Luned to tell them where she was, but she had received no answer. She could not bring herself to return to Wales. She had to stay near Eleyne, and she had to find her way back.

Two men were leaning idly against the wall of the church on the corner of the street. One of them wore on his surcoat the arms of Huntingdon. Her mouth went dry. Had the earl found out where she was? Not that he had any jurisdiction over her here, she reminded herself sternly. She was a free citizen, honestly employed, within the city bounds.

She hesitated, then driven by her desperate need to have news of the earl’s household she approached the men.

They stared at her with casual insolence. ‘Well, my beauty. Can’t resist us, eh?’ The taller one had noticed her watching them.

‘Don’t be impertinent!’ Rhonwen drew herself up. ‘You are one of Lord Huntingdon’s men?’

The man nodded, then he winked. ‘But not for long the way things are going.’ He lounged back against the wall, picking one of his teeth with his forefinger. ‘The earl is near death. I’ve come to Northampton to fetch a physician.’

‘Near death?’ Rhonwen echoed, her eyes fixed with such intensity on his face he shrank back. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

He shrugged. ‘Fever,’ he said non-committally. ‘Who knows and who cares? It’s his steward who pays me.’ Reaching into his scrip he produced a silver penny and flicked it into the air. From the chink of coins between his fingers when he replaced it in the leather purse, there were plenty more.

‘And where is he? Are they back at Fotheringhay?’ Rhonwen asked.

He nodded. ‘So. What about helping me spend some money while I’m waiting –’ He stopped short. In a swirl of skirts, she had vanished into the crowds.

XVIII
FOTHERINGHAY

John’s illness terrified Eleyne. It had begun without warning and she was devastated to see him so weak and helpless. Watching over him made her realise how fond she had grown of him, and she was very afraid that he would die. It had been her idea to send for the king’s physician while he was at Northampton.

She was sitting at John’s bedside, stroking his forehead, when Rhonwen found her. For a moment she stared incredulously at the woman, unable to move, then she hurled herself into Rhonwen’s arms. But if Rhonwen had hoped to sit with Eleyne and watch John of Chester die, she was disappointed. It was obvious that Eleyne would do anything to save her husband’s life; she wept and begged Rhonwen to help, and Rhonwen, unable to deny her beloved child, found herself setting aside her antagonism and resentment and, working harder than she had ever worked, she strove to keep him alive.

It was Rhonwen who made the decoctions of herbs which brought down John’s fever; Rhonwen who spent hours in the stillroom making up soothing syrups for his cough. The physician was away, the messenger reported when at last he returned to Fotheringhay, but as soon as he returned to Northampton would be brought to Lord Huntingdon’s bedside.

Eleyne was nervous John would find out Rhonwen was back. After that first visit to his sickroom when he was too delirious to recognise her, she was kept well away in the stillroom and in Eleyne’s rooms in the tower on the far side of the courtyard. Eleyne brought the medicines in her own hands and watched with fearful eager hope as, slowly, he seemed to grow better.

When at last the king’s physician arrived Rhonwen’s medicines were swept scornfully away. The stout, white-haired man, with his huge bushy eyebrows and long black gown, bent over the earl and reached for his pulse, but the earl was already on the mend.

XIX
August 1231

The bedchamber was shady in the dusk. In the distance there was a rumble of thunder. Eleyne raised her hand and Luned stopped brushing her hair. There was no fire in the hearth and Eleyne had given orders for the lamps to be doused. Dearly though she loved her, it was a relief to be away from Rhonwen, who followed her everywhere when she was not with John. Rhonwen was with Marared, sitting in the bower where a travelling minstrel from Aquitaine was entertaining the ladies with songs and roundelays redolent of the hot fragrant south. Pleading a headache, Eleyne had left with Luned, seeking the cooler silence of her rooms overlooking the river. For once, Rhonwen had not followed her.

On the far side of the courtyard, above the gatehouse, John was tossing in his bed, still tended by the physician. Eleyne had visited him before supper, putting her hand a little shyly in his and feeling the dry papery skin like fire against her own, then the doctor had peremptorily sent her away.

She frowned at the recollection: there had to be some other way of helping John. She was sure that under Rhonwen’s care he had improved. For a long time that morning she had watched the physician carefully applying leeches to her husband’s frail body, attaching the creatures with meticulous care to his chest and arms and waiting until they dropped, gorged with his blood, into the silver dish waiting for them. John had smiled at her calmly and asked her to read to him for a while. She had done it gladly, but every now and then her eyes left the crabbed black manuscript of the vellum pages and strayed to his face. He was too pale. He did not have enough red blood. Surely it must be wrong to drain even more. She found herself longing again for her father’s court, with the wise men of the hills who attended it. Men like Einion, who might be a heretic and evil and wrong, as John so often told her, but it was he, so Rhonwen had said, who had taught her all she knew of healing, and that was much.

‘That’s enough,’ she said sharply as Luned resumed her brushing. She stood up restlessly and walked over to the window, stepping into the embrasure so she could see out of the deep recess towards the west. Over there, beneath the moonlight, many miles away, lay the giant sleeping peaks of Yr Wyddfa.

‘Go to bed, Luned.’ Her mind was made up. ‘Go to bed, I’m going down to the stables.’

It was months since she had done it; months since she had visited the horses in the dark. John had been adamant. The Countess of Huntingdon did not curl up in the straw like a stable boy – not now that she was a woman. She slept between silken sheets every night. The Countess of Huntingdon was not expected to seek out the shadows or explore the castle alone or gallop at the head of her men or disappear into the heaths when out hawking with her pretty merlin on her fist. She must be demure and ladylike and behave with propriety at all times.

‘My lady.’ The soft voice at her elbow stopped her as she reached the door into the courtyard.

‘Cenydd?’ She suspected he slept across her threshold once the castle was quiet at night.

‘Shall I call for torches, my lady?’ The big man was smiling down at her, his shoulders broad in his heavy leather jerkin. She became conscious of her hair, hanging loose down her back, free of the neat cap or head-dress she should be wearing.

‘No, no torches.’ She stepped out on to the wooden staircase which led down from the only door in the keep to the courtyard below.

‘You should not go out alone, lady.’ The gentle voice was persistent.

‘I am not alone if you are there!’ she retorted. Swishing her skirts in irritation, she ran down the staircase. At the bottom she stopped and turned. ‘You may come with me if you wish. If not, you may return to the great hall and pretend you haven’t seen me. I intend to ride Invictus.’