Child of the Phoenix. Barbara Erskine
than Eleyne and they were all married; Margaret to another de Braose, Reginald’s nephew, John, who lived far away in Sussex; Gwenllian to William de Lacy, and Angharad to Maelgwn Fychan, a prince of South Wales.
‘Gwladus would be angry if she knew where we were,’ Isabella commented anxiously. She resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder.
‘But not half as furious as your mother.’ Eleyne had good reason to regret the occasions she had aroused Eva de Braose’s fury on this short visit. Unfortunately, it had happened with regrettable frequency. She paused, realising she had not given Isabella any reassurance about her brother. ‘You’ll like Dafydd. He’s nice.’
Isabella laughed. ‘You think everyone’s nice.’
‘Do I?’ Eleyne pondered. ‘Well, most people are.’
‘They’re not, you know.’ Isabella sounded wise beyond her years. ‘You wait till you want to do something they don’t want you to do. Then you’ll find out.’
Eleyne frowned. There was one person she didn’t like. But that was her secret, and one that filled her with shame and guilt. ‘Perhaps. Anyway at the moment all I want is for you to be my sister. We all want that, including our fathers. We’ll have so much fun when you come to Aber!’ She linked her arm through Isabella’s. ‘How soon do you think they’ll settle everything?’
Isabella shrugged. ‘They always take ages to work it out because of all the dowries and lands and treaties about this and that. Come on, I’m cold.’ Once again she began to edge off the window ledge on to the slippery scaffolding.
For a moment, lost in her dreams, Eleyne didn’t move, then reluctantly she began to follow, feeling the wet stone cold beneath her bare buttocks as the wool of her gown caught on the rough window ledge.
It did not take them long to regain the ground. Once she was heading for safety, Isabella recovered her confidence and shinned down as agilely as her friend. At the bottom they looked at each other in the darkness and once more burst into smothered laughter.
‘No one saw.’ Eleyne was triumphant.
‘You can’t be sure.’ Releasing her skirts so they swung down to warm her legs, Isabella shivered ostentatiously. ‘I want to go to bed.’
‘Not yet.’ Eleyne kicked out at a pile of shaped stones, left at the foot of the wall. ‘Let’s go and see the horses.’
‘No, Elly, I’m tired and cold. I want to go to bed.’
‘Go then.’ Suddenly Eleyne was impatient. ‘But watch the Lady doesn’t get you!’ She issued her warning in a sing-song voice, dancing out from the shelter of the scaffolding into the teeming rain.
Isabella paled. For days Eleyne had been regaling the de Braose sisters with gruesome stories of the phantom lady she claimed to have seen on the walls of the castle.
‘I don’t believe in her. You only say that to frighten me.’
Nearby, a door opened and three laughing servants ran across the courtyard, diving through a door in the lean-to kitchens at the far side. They took no notice of the little girls standing near the ruined tower.
When Eleyne looked back for her friend she had gone. ‘Bella?’ she called. There was no answer.
Eleyne peered into the rain nervously. Suddenly she did not feel quite so brave. The night was cold and the large courtyard once again deserted. The guards were there, of course, on the curtain walls, staring out into the night; and the horses in their stables against the walls. And something else. Someone else. Always there. Watching. She glanced around.
‘Are you there?’ she whispered.
There was no answer but the howling of the wind.
II
Inside the solar the fire was blazing and a dozen candles were lit against the darkness.
‘I think it’s time I took Eleyne home to Gwynedd, my lady.’
Rhonwen had cornered Gwladus, Eleyne’s eldest sister, second wife of Reginald de Braose, the Lord of Hay, in the newly finished west tower of the castle. ‘She and Isabella are bad for each other.’
Rhonwen, unusually tall for a woman, with a beautiful, aquiline face and fair hair – visible only in the colouring of her eyebrows as her head was meticulously covered by a white veil – was at nearly thirty strikingly good-looking. But she was not attractive. Gwladus glanced at her surreptitiously. There was a coldness there, an aloofness, which antagonised people. Only with Eleyne, her special charge, did she ever show any warmth or human emotion.
Gwladus was a complete contrast to Rhonwen. She was a tall, tempestuous, handsome woman with black hair, a sallow complexion and dark flashing eyes beneath heavy eyebrows: colouring which had earned her the soubriquet of Gwladus Ddu. Looking haughtily at Rhonwen, she raised an eyebrow.
‘If you mean Eleyne is bad for Isabella, I agree. However, it’s too soon. I haven’t completed my letters for father, and the emissaries who came with you are still talking with Reginald and William about the marriage agreement.’
She sat down on an elaborately carved chair near the fire and gestured Rhonwen to a stool nearby. ‘You do know why you’re here? It’s not so the girls can be playmates. My father wants Isabella as a wife for my brother. Why?’
‘Why, my lady?’ Rhonwen shifted uncomfortably on the stool. ‘Surely it would be a good match for Dafydd bach. Isabella is young and strong, and pretty as a picture.’ She allowed herself a tight smile. ‘And she’s your husband’s grand-daughter. The de Braose alliance is still very important to Prince Llywelyn.’
The de Braose family had been brought low by King John eighteen years before, but Reginald and his brother, Giles, Bishop of Hereford, co-heirs to the estates of their dead parents, had managed to reclaim them before the king’s death in 1215, and the family was once again powerful in the Welsh borders.
‘Exactly.’ Gwladus pursed her lips. ‘That was why he married me to Reginald, after Gracia died. What I want to know is, why does he need another marriage between the families?’
Rhonwen looked down at her hands. Did the woman want an honest answer? Could she not see that her husband was dying? She shrugged diplomatically. ‘I am merely Eleyne’s nurse and teacher, Lady Gwladus. Your father does not include me in his confidences.’
‘No?’ The dark eyes beneath the heavy black brows were piercing. ‘How strange. I felt sure he would have.’
There was a long silence. Gwladus stood up restlessly and swept across to the window with a shiver. ‘I hate this place! I keep begging Reginald to let us live somewhere else. She’s still here, you know. His mother. She haunts the castle. She haunts the whole family!’ She crossed herself and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘If you are here merely as Eleyne’s companion you’d better go and look after her. And stop her upsetting Isabella!’
III
The children were not in their bedchamber. Rhonwen set her lips grimly.
‘Well?’ She shook one of the nursemaids who had been sleeping just inside the door. ‘Where are they?’
The frightened girl stared at the empty bed in the light of Rhonwen’s streaming candle. ‘I don’t know. They were here when we went to sleep.’
Both servants were awake now, scrambling from their straw pallets to gaze round the room with frightened eyes. They were much in awe of the tall Welsh guardian of the little girl who was the wife of a prince of Scotland and the daughter of a prince of Wales. Secretly, they sympathised with her; the girl was a tomboy, uncontrollable according to the Lady Eva, Gwladus’s daughter-in-law, constantly getting herself and her companion into scrapes.
Rhonwen strode