Child of the Phoenix. Barbara Erskine

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-at-arms 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.