‘Oh sweet Virgin, look at those burns!’ His wife stared down in anguish. ‘Oh poor lady!’
‘Get something to put on them – quickly.’
‘Buttermilk, I’ll get some buttermilk.’ The woman scurried back towards the stairs as, gently, her husband began to pull away the burned remnants of Eleyne’s veil and hair. They still had not seen her hands.
IX
As Rhonwen fought the enveloping wet sackcloth, her fingers became entangled in the loosened seam at the side of the sack. Her lungs were bursting; red stars shot through her head and exploded in her brain. Her struggles were growing weaker. Any second she was going to have to take a breath, to inhale the soft black water which would fill her lungs and seep into her arteries and draw her to itself forever. With one last desperate effort she tore at the seam and felt it part. She pushed her arm through the gaping hole in the clinging wet hessian and then her head. The water was thick with reeds. Her fingers grasped them but they slid away, slippery and tough as wet leather. Then, as her bursting lungs drew in that final lethal breath of water, her fingers broke the surface and clawing towards the stars locked on to a half-submerged tree stump.
X
‘Her lovely hair; oh Andrew, her lovely hair.’ Janet was soothing the buttermilk over Eleyne’s face and head with a pad of soft lambswool.
‘Aye.’ His face was grim; the woman would be terribly scarred. ‘Is the bairn all right?’
Janet shrugged. Wiping her fingers on her apron she put her hand on Eleyne’s stomach. ‘I can feel it moving, but who knows… I wish Lady Rhonwen were here.’ Her eyes were round with fear. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Her soft plump face, reddened and weathered by the winter winds, was crumpled with misery and she started crying.
‘You’re doing fine, woman, just fine.’ He sounded more confident than he felt. Slowly, wearily, he picked up the remnants of Eleyne’s burned head-dress and the charred scraps of her hair. After wondering what to do with them, he dropped them with a shrug on to the fire, which hissed and shrivelled them into ash.
Janet worked slowly over the woman lying unconscious on the bed – her face, parts of her scalp, her hands and forearms and shoulder. Painstakingly, she smeared on the cooling buttermilk, tearing away the burned fabric of Eleyne’s clothes, binding her hands with strips of cloth she had torn from her own shift. ‘It’s not all her hair, the Lord be praised,’ she murmured to her husband as she worked. ‘It’s just the one side here, but her face – oh, the poor, poor lass.’ She blinked away her tears.
‘Just pray she doesn’t wake up yet awhile.’ He turned away to hide his own emotion. ‘It’s maybe she won’t want to go on living after this.’
XI
Her hands were like claws, clamped on to the wet trunk, her body humped over the body of the tree, her face hanging inches from the water. Her last convulsive heave before she lost consciousness had half dragged her into a position where her head hung down, her mouth open. The loch water drained out of her, leaving her suspended like a bag of old rags. It was raining hard. She could feel the cold sweeping down her neck. Perhaps it was that new, colder cold which had awakened her.
It was just growing light. With a tremendous effort, Rhonwen raised her head and looked around. As far as she could see, water surrounded her. She could see the luminous glow of it in the receding darkness, smell its cold dankness, see the bright trails in the distance where the sunrise was beginning to send pale gold across the Lomond Hills. Cautiously she heaved herself up higher on the log and felt it roll slightly under her weight. She lay still, her eyes closed, her heart banging with fear. She could not feel her feet; the rope still bound them and the hideous wet sacking clung around her waist, turning her into a travesty of a mermaid.
Too tired to move, she lay there a long time, watching it grow light, too cold now to feel cold, letting herself drift into unconsciousness as the first crimson sun path across the water rippled towards her trailing feet.
XII
Eleyne lay staring at the ceiling as the girl rebound the bandages around her hands. She was a small thin young woman, scarcely more than a child, her clothes ragged, her unkempt hair loose around her thin intense face.
‘Who are you?’ Eleyne could barely whisper; her blistered lips were very sore.
‘Annie, my lady, I am the cook here.’ She seemed well aware of the ironic grandeur of the title she claimed and amused at her self-mockery.
‘And where, Annie, did you learn to care for people with such kindness?’
Annie shrugged. ‘I used to go with the boat sometimes to St Serf ’s Island and watch the infirmarian at the priory there. He taught me which herbs to use. When the prior found out, I was forbidden to go there again. But I remembered what he showed me.’
‘That’s lucky for me.’ Eleyne paused. ‘Is my face very bad?’ There were no mirrors in the castle and she was too ill to bend over a bowl of water looking for her reflection.
‘Aye, it is now, but it will get better.’ Finishing at last, Annie straightened and tucked the sheet back around her patient. ‘I’ve bathed all the burns with lavender and put on flaxseed poultices; most of them will heal cleanly without a mark. Luckily your scalp wasn’t burned. The ash on your face saved you.’ She frowned. ‘But you have to eat to get better, my lady, and for the baby. Shall I bring you something now, before you sleep?’
Eleyne shook her head. She lifted her hand towards the girl as if to detain her, and then let it fall, flinching at the pain.
‘Rhonwen -’ she whispered.
Annie looked at the floor and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, my lady – ’
‘Robert took her?’
Annie nodded. Everyone in the castle had watched the struggling, heaving sack being carried down to the boat, knowing they could do nothing to help against de Quincy’s thugs.
‘She’s dead then.’ Eleyne’s voice was despairing.
‘We don’t know for sure.’
‘We do. He wanted her dead for so long.’ Eleyne turned her face away as the tears began to ooze from beneath her swollen eyelids.
XIII
When Rhonwen next awoke it was full daylight. She lifted her head and looked around. In front of her the water was green with reeds and water plants and about fifty yards away she could see the shoreline rising towards some trees. Cautiously she pulled herself higher on the log. It twisted beneath her but she could see now that it was firmly held by a tangle of branches. If she could just free her feet…
It took a long time. The rope was sodden and matted into the sacking and her feet had swollen at the ankles but in the end she managed to unknot it and kicked away the sack. She lay for a long time after that trying to regain
