Barbara Erskine - Child of the Phoenix

‘Guards!’ There was no trace now of fatigue in his voice. ‘Guards – ’

‘No. Stop! Please -’ Eleyne catapulted herself from the window seat and threw herself at her brothers. ‘Gruffydd, don’t! Please stop!’

But the guards were already there, leaping up the stairs two at a time, pulling the princes apart, as Llywelyn himself dragged Eleyne away from them. It took three of them to hold Gruffydd and as he struggled furiously to throw them off Dafydd retired to the far side of the room, mopping a cut lip on the sleeve of his tunic.

‘Take him away and lock him up,’ Llywelyn commanded.

‘No, papa, you can’t! Gruffydd is your son!’ Eleyne clung to his arm. ‘Please, he didn’t mean it – ’

‘What is this child doing here?’ Llywelyn shook her off.

‘I gave orders she should be sent away before we got back,’ Joan put in quietly. ‘The Lady Rhonwen has seen fit to disobey me.’

‘She has not!’ Eleyne turned on her furiously. ‘We all knew you had no time for me, so we were leaving this afternoon. You came back too soon.’

‘That is enough, Eleyne! How dare you speak to your mother like that! She loves you, as she loves us all!’ Angry, Llywelyn watched as his guards dragged Gruffydd from the room. They could hear the young man’s curses echoing down the staircase until they were out of earshot. For a moment Llywelyn stood gazing at the empty doorway, then he turned his attention back to Eleyne, looking thoughtfully down at the child with her long untidy hair and her rumpled pale blue gown. His face softened. ‘Go. Go and find Lady Rhonwen and tell her you are to leave at once. Where is she to go?’ He turned to his wife, half regretfully. As a rule he enjoyed the company of his youngest daughter.

‘They can go to Llanfaes. Eleyne needs to concentrate on her lessons. There is no room here at Aber and there are too many distractions.’ Joan sounded irritable.

Llywelyn put his arm round Eleyne and, pulling her to him, dropped a kiss on her unruly curls. ‘So, go to Rhonwen, little one, and tell her you must go now.’

‘Yes, papa.’ Eleyne shot a baleful look at her mother and then at her brother. ‘You won’t hurt Gruffydd – ’

‘Of course I won’t hurt him. He must cool his heels for a while, that’s all.’ Llywelyn smiled gravely. ‘Go now, Eleyne – ’

The prince’s hall of Tindaethwy at Llanfaes had been rebuilt soon after the fire when Eleyne was born. Situated at the south-eastern corner of the island of Anglesey, it faced across the strait towards the great northern shoulder of the Welsh mainland. Rhonwen and Eleyne, with their attendants and guards, rode from Aber that afternoon across the meadows and marshland and over the sands to where the boats waited to take them to the small busy port at Llanfaes. It was a glorious September day, the sun gilding the water, the sands and the mountains as the horses cantered towards the sea.

Eleyne’s cheeks glowed as they always did when she rode. She smiled across at her companion, Luned, who rode at her side. ‘Race you to the boats!’ Already she had kicked her pony into a gallop. Luned rode gamely after her, screwing up her eyes as the muddy sand, rough with worm casts, flew up in clots from the pony’s hooves.

Rhonwen, following more slowly, sighed, thinking of the great war horse on which Eleyne had ridden at Hay. The Princess Joan had decreed that a rough-haired mountain pony was good enough for her youngest daughter. Eleyne, strangely, had accepted the dun pony and hugged it, and had not as far as she knew once gone to her father and asked for something larger or faster or with prettier markings. She had christened the animal Cadi and they had become more or less inseparable.

Now at the edge of the water Eleyne reined Cadi in, laughing, and slipped from the saddle. She looked up at Rhonwen who had followed more sedately. ‘Are we going to spend long at Llanfaes?’

Rhonwen frowned. ‘We must stay as long as your mother commands it.’

‘Or my father. He may call me back.’

‘I’m sure he will – if not at once, then certainly when the court moves to Rhosyr.’ Rhonwen smiled.

Eleyne sighed. That sounded like a typical adult attempt to avoid the truth. She pulled the reins over Cadi’s head and rubbed the pony’s chin. ‘What will happen to Gruffydd?’

Rhonwen frowned. She had made it her business to find that out before they had left Aber. ‘He is being taken under escort to Degannwy. Your father has ordered that he be held in the castle there for a while.’

‘Held there a prisoner?’ Degannwy, a great castle built of stone in the Norman fashion like the newest parts of Aber, stood on the northern bank of the Conwy River on the eastern side of Llywelyn’s lands. Beyond it, behind the mountains, lay the great earldom of Chester and beyond that the hinterland of England.

‘That’s what it sounds like.’

‘So he’ll be out of the way, while Dafydd is at father’s side the whole time?’

Rhonwen nodded.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Life is never fair, cariad. But Gruffydd will find a way to make your father trust him again. You’ll see.’ Rhonwen smiled. ‘Go on. Are you going to lead Cadi on to the boat? If she goes, the others will follow.’

The narrow strait was warm and flat calm. Sitting in the leading boat, Eleyne stared at the receding shore, her eyes following the foothills up towards the distant mountains, hazy in the light of the golden afternoon. Wisps of cloud hung around the invisible shoulders of Yr Wyddfa, drifting into the high cwms where already the shadows were gathering. Her father’s land, the country of her birth – she trembled with suppressed excitement. Eleyne loved the mountains and she loved the sea and here she had both. She leaned over the side of the boat and stared into the glittering water, watching the whirling patterns made by the boatmen’s oars, then she looked at Luned who was sitting beside her and she smiled. Her companion had, as usual, gone slightly green the moment the ferry pushed away from the sand.

Luned had been introduced into Eleyne’s nursery by Rhonwen when the two girls were three years old. In a family where the nearest sister to her in age, Margaret, was ten years her senior, Eleyne would have had a lonely childhood without her. Now the two girls were friends. Later, Luned, an orphan from birth, would become Eleyne’s maid. Both understood and accepted the situation happily. For both the future seemed very far away.

Eleyne turned back towards the far shore, trying to pick out the cluster of stone and wooden buildings low on the hillside which made up the great llys of Aber, but before she could make them out she was distracted by a flotilla of small ships which had appeared on the sea between them and the mainland. She watched, her eyes screwed up against the glare, seeing them wallow in the heavy swell which had developed near the shore.

‘We’re nearly there.’ Luned’s voice at her elbow startled her. ‘I can see Cenydd with the others waiting on the quay!’

Cenydd was Rhonwen’s cousin, the only one of her relatives to have kept in touch with her after the scandal of her mother’s defection from Christianity and the lonely woman’s death. He was seneschal at Llanfaes. Both little girls adored him.

Distracted from the boats, Eleyne studied the low shoreline ahead, where a group of figures stood waiting on one of the busy quays. A shadow had fallen across the glittering sea, and she shivered. The boats had vanished in the glare.

Impatiently Eleyne waited, listening to the laughing cry of the gulls and the shouts of the ferrymen as the horses were unloaded down the long ramps. As soon as Cadi was led on to the quay she ran to her. The horse whickered at her jauntily and within seconds Eleyne had jumped into the saddle.

Rhonwen and Luned watched in astonishment as pony and rider galloped up the track away from the port and along the shore towards the east. Rhonwen frowned and turned to Cenydd who had been waiting for them. ‘You see?’

He smiled, accepting naturally the continuation, as if it had not been interrupted, of a conversation he and Rhonwen had commenced weeks before.

‘She is wild still, certainly – and much loved for it. Shall I go after her?’

‘She is a danger to herself, Cenydd. I am less and less able to control her. And now -’ She broke off abruptly at the sight of Luned’s eager face at her elbow.

‘Now?’ prompted Cenydd. He looked at her curiously. ‘Is it as you feared?’

‘Later.’ Rhonwen glared at her kinsman, irritated at his lack of tact. ‘You take the others up to the manor and settle them in. I shall go after her.’ She mounted her own mare quickly and neatly and, kicking her into a hand canter, set off after Eleyne.

She was relaxed. There was no danger on this rich, gentle island, the heart of Llywelyn’s principality, populated by loyal and true men and women, and yet it was wrong for Eleyne to ride off like that. It looked as if she had deliberately abandoned Luned and thumbed her nose at her escort and her companions. Rhonwen frowned. Almost certainly it hadn’t been like that at all. She suspected that Eleyne had merely forgotten that the others existed. And that was where the problem lay. She should not have forgotten.

Cadi’s hooves had cut deep holes in the sand, and already they were filling with water. At the shore’s edge the oystercatchers and sanderlings, only momentarily disturbed, had returned to their patrolling. Inland from the low hill behind her came the whistling of a curlew.

Long gold streaks stained the tide race now. Ahead, in the distance, the huge hunched shadow of Pen y Gogarth lay, a sleeping giant in the sea. Somewhere on the shadowed lee of its shoulder lay Degannwy where tonight Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the eldest son of the Prince of Aberffraw, would spend his first night as his father’s prisoner.