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Child of the Phoenix
Barbara Erskine
Beautiful repackage of this Barbara Erskine classic, the story of a remarkable mediaeval noblewoman whose life shaped the history of three crownsThe child whose hands would hold three crowns is born in fire.In 1218 an extraordinary princess is born. Her mystical powers and unquenchable spirit will alter the course of history.Raised by her fiercely Welsh nurse to support the Celtic cause against the predatory English king, Princess Eleyne is taught to worship the old gods and to look into the future and the past. However, unable to identify time and place in her terrifying visions, she is powerless to avert forthcoming tragedy…Despite impassioned resistance, Eleyne’s world is shaped by powerful men – but her tempestuous life and loves tie her to the destinies of England, Scotland and Wales…
BARBARA ERSKINE
Child of the Phoenix
Copyright (#ueadce9d6-70f8-5697-a50c-38a9098904c1)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992
Copyright © Barbara Erskine 1992
Barbara Erskine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007280797
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007320936 Version: 2017-09-07
CONTENTS
Cover (#u8eb9f364-7938-5535-9745-4ecb952669fa)
Title Page (#ucccf3021-db91-5fbc-80ad-2c44845df611)
Copyright (#ulink_e37d41a0-2d68-50c7-a7c7-53a80ed45a26)
Maps (#uae38641f-1abf-51f8-9054-29eb32af4ad5)
PROLOGUE 1218 (#u9cd2737a-b430-5549-a124-4486dbf0fe1b)
BOOK ONE 1228-1230 (#uf39cfce6-3f05-5310-b494-b6059b4bb488)
BOOK TWO 1230-1241 (#ue3fef9ed-b9cc-51f2-9520-c7f6176bf3ab)
BOOK THREE 1244-1250 (#uf6df691e-f3fe-5863-9bd3-6b47bb696d01)
BOOK FOUR 1253-1270 (#u6b54b30c-8110-5e49-8ed9-dcc5fbf6a041)
BOOK FIVE 1281-1302 (#u71a51e09-5dc4-5483-af7f-e28b3235acf9)
BOOK SIX 1304-1306 (#u8d724058-2c82-5225-8fe5-af9df0d804f8)
Afterword
Author's Note
The Warrior’s Princess Sample Chapter (#u6bf8cea1-6d65-5cdc-bc95-a0a016420972)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Barbara Erskine
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#ueadce9d6-70f8-5697-a50c-38a9098904c1)
LLANFAES, ANGLESEY
1218
The full moon sailed high and cold above the streaming clouds, aloof from the rising tide and the white-whipped waves. At the door of the hall a woman stared out across the water towards the glittering snows which mantled the peaks of Yr Wyddfa. Near her a man stood waiting in the shadows, silent, still, his hands clasped on his staff. Einion Gweledydd was tall, white-haired, austere in his patience. Soon the child would be born; the child whose destiny he had foretold; the child whose hands would hold three crowns; the child he would claim for the ancient gods of Albion. He smiled. The English wife had been in labour for three long days and soon she would die.
Behind the woman, in the hall, the fire had been banked up against the cold. A dozen anxious attendants crowded around the bed with its heaps of fur covers where their princess lay, too tired now even to cry out as the pains tore again and again at her frail body.
The men of the Illys had gone, sent out to allow women’s work to be done.
Rhonwen turned from the door at last and went to stand before the fire. She watched it hiss and spit, contained in its pit in the centre of the hall, the smoke spiralling up towards the hole in the smoky roof beams which led it out and up towards the wind-blown clouds. Dawn was near.
Behind her Princess Joan screamed. Rhonwen stooped and picking up a handful of oak twigs she threw them into the flames where they flared blue and green, salted by the wind off the sea which tortured and twisted every tree on the island’s edge. She watched them for a while, then she turned and went towards the bed.
Behind her a spark flew outward and lodged amongst the dampened rushes which carpeted the floor. It hissed a moment as if undecided whether to die or burn, then caught a frond of greenery and ran crackling along it to the next.
By the bed the women tended their exhausted princess and the tiny girl her body had spewed on to the sheets. In the hall already wreathed with smoke they did not smell the extra bitterness.
The fire ran on across the floor away from them and leaped towards the wooden walls with their embroidered hangings. The rustle of flame turned to a hiss and then a roar. When the women heard it and turned, it had already taken hold, devouring the wall, leaping towards the roof beams, racing back across the floor towards them.
One of them ran to ring a tocsin to summon the men, but they would be too late to save the hall. The others bundled the unconscious princess into her bedding and carried her as fast as they could towards the door. Outside Einion frowned: it seemed the princess would live; yet it was foretold that she would die.
Rhonwen was to be the child’s nurse. She stood for a moment looking down at the baby crying on its sheepskin blanket. So little a mite, the last daughter of the Prince of Aberffraw; the granddaughter of John Plantagenet, King of England.
A burning beam crashed across the floor near the bed. Rhonwen smiled. The fire was a sign. Bride, lady of the moon, was a goddess of fire. This child was thrice blessed and touched by destiny. She would inherit Bride’s special care. Stooping, she gathered the baby into her arms, then she turned and ran amongst a shower of falling timbers for the door.
As the wind sucked the flames higher Einion Gweledydd raised his face to the east and his eyes widened in shock. The heavens too were aflame. The racing clouds flared orange and crimson and gold; where the wind had whipped the waves into towering castles they were purple and scarlet and gilded with sparks. The howl of the wind and water mingled with the greedy roar of the fire and the crash of thunder overhead. Before his awed gaze the clouds ran together and coalesced, their borders streaming flame as they reared up overhead. He saw the form of a great bird slowly spreading across the sky, its wings outstretched from the fire-tipped peaks of Eryri to the gold of the western sea.
The sun eagle. Eryr euraid. No! Not an eagle, a phoenix! His lips framed the word soundlessly. The bird of fire on its pyre as the sun was born in the east; as the last child of Llywelyn Fawr was carried from the burning hall; the child of Bride; the child of the fire; the child of the phoenix.
BOOK ONE (#ueadce9d6-70f8-5697-a50c-38a9098904c1)
1228–1230
CHAPTER ONE (#ueadce9d6-70f8-5697-a50c-38a9098904c1)
I
HAY-ON-WYE
April 1228
‘Don’t look down!’ Balanced precariously on the wooden walkway at the top of the scaffolding which nestled against the high wall, the child turned and peered into the darkness. ‘Tuck your skirts up in your girdle,’ she called imperiously. ‘No one’s going to see your bottom in the dark!’ Her giggle was lost in the wail of the wind. ‘We’re nearly there. Come on!’
Far below the dangerous perch the courtyard of Hay Castle lay in darkness. A fine mist of rain had driven in across the Black Mountains and slicked the wooden scaffold poles and the newly dressed stone. Beneath their leather slippers the planks grew slippery.
Isabella de Braose let out a whimper of fear. ‘I want to go back.’
‘No, look! Three more paces and we’re there.’ Eleyne, the youngest daughter of Llywelyn, Prince of Aberffraw, and his wife, the Princess Joan, was ten, a year her friend’s junior. By a strange quirk of marriage and remarriage she was also Isabella’s step-great-aunt, a fact which caused the girls renewed giggles whenever they thought about it.
Eleyne gripped Isabella firmly by the wrist and coaxed her forward step by step. They were aiming for the gaping window of the gutted tower to which the new wall abutted. In another week or so the masons would be starting work on renovating it so that it could once again become the focal point of the castle, but as yet it was a deserted, mysterious place, the doors at the bottom boarded up to stop anyone going in amongst the tumbled masonry and charred beams.
‘Why do you want to see it?’ Isabella wailed. She was clinging to the flimsy handrail, her fingers cold and slippery with rain.
‘Because they don’t want us to see what is in there,’ Eleyne replied. ‘Besides, I think there’s a raven’s nest inside the walls.’ Letting go of the other girl’s wrist, she ran along the last few feet of planking and reached the wall of the old tower. Exhilarated by the wind and by the sting of the cold rain on her face, she could hardly contain her excitement. She felt no fear of heights. It had not crossed her mind that she might fall.
‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Peering over her shoulder she narrowed her eyes against the rain. Below, the roofs of Hay huddled around the castle, with here and there a wisp of rain-flattened blue smoke swirling in the darkness. She was very conscious suddenly of the brooding silence beyond the town where the great mass of black mountains stretched on either side of the broad Wye Valley into the heartland of Wales.
‘I can’t do it.’
‘Of course you can. Here.’ Forgetting the mountains, Eleyne ran back to her. ‘I’ll help you. Hold my hand. See. It’s easy.’
When they were at last perched side by side in the broad stone window embrasure, both girls were silent for a moment, catching their breath. They peered into the black interior of the tower. The ground, four storeys below, was lost in the dark.
‘It must have been an incredible fire,’ Eleyne murmured, awed, her eyes picking out, cat-like, the blackened stumps of beam ends in the wall. ‘Were you here when it happened?’
Isabella swallowed and shook her head. ‘It was before I was born. Let’s go back, Elly. I don’t like it.’
‘There was a fire when I was born,’ Eleyne went on dreamily. ‘Rhonwen told me. It destroyed the hall at Llanfaes. There was nothing but ash by morning when my father came.’
‘This was burned by King John.’ Isabella glanced down into the darkness, closed her eyes hastily and shuddered. ‘There’s no nest here, Elly. Please, let’s go.’
Eleyne was silent. She frowned: King John. Her mother’s father, descendant, so it was claimed, of Satan himself. In her mind she chalked up another black mark against her mother’s hated family. Hastily she put the unpleasant thought aside and turned back to the problem in hand. ‘The nest must be on a ledge somewhere on the walls inside. I’ve watched them flying in and out.’ She stretched her hands out into the darkness as far as she dared. ‘I’ll have to come back in daylight. Rhonwen says the raven is a sacred bird and I want a feather for luck.’
‘The masons will never let you in.’
‘We could come at dawn, before they start work.’
‘No.’ Determinedly, Isabella started edging back on the sill, feeling with her foot for the wooden planks. ‘I’m going back. If you don’t want to come, you can stay here alone.’
‘Please. Wait.’ Eleyne was reluctant to move. She loved the cold rush of the wind, the darkness, the loneliness of their eyrie. And she was very wide awake. She had no desire to return to the room where they shared a bed, or to face the questions of Isabella’s three sisters as to where they had been. They had left Eleanor, Matilda and Eva in the nursery – supposedly asleep but in reality agog to know where the other two were going. ‘If you stay, I’ll tell you what it’s like to be married.’
‘You’re not really married,’ Isabella retorted scornfully. ‘You’ve never even met your husband.’ Nevertheless she settled back into her corner of the window arch, tucking her cold feet up under her wet skirt.
‘I have.’ Eleyne was indignant. ‘He was at the wedding.’ She laughed. ‘Rhonwen told me. My father carried me, and he handed me to my husband and he went all pink and nearly dropped me!’
‘Men don’t like babies,’ Isabella commented with dogmatic certainty.
Eleyne nodded gloomily. ‘Of course, John was only a boy then. He was sixteen.’ She paused. ‘Shall you like being married to my brother, do you think?’
Isabella was to be married to Dafydd ap Llywelyn once all the formalities had been arranged between the two families.
Isabella shrugged. ‘Is he like you?’
Eleyne thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘I don’t think I’m like either of my brothers; and certainly I’m not like my sisters. Think of Gwladus!’ Both girls giggled. Eleyne’s eldest sister, fifteen years older than she, and married to Isabella’s grandfather, Reginald, was a serious, devout young woman who had assumed assiduously a mantle of age to match her fifty-year-old husband. Her other sisters were also much older 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.’
