surcoat mud-spattered and torn, his tunic stained with sweat.
‘Indeed not.’ She tried to keep her voice neutral.
‘What? No pyromancy to tell your fortune in the flames?’ He was speaking deliberately loudly, ensuring silence in the hall.
Eleyne heard the priest next to her draw in his breath sharply and she clenched her fists. ‘What is it you have to tell me?’
Robert laughed. ‘So, you don’t know! How strange. You’re happy, yet in a few minutes you’re going to be devastated.’ He looked at her almost clinically, with total detachment. ‘I’m about to break your heart!’
Eleyne could feel the fear building inside her. ‘Do you intend to make a public spectacle of this announcement?’ she asked coldly. ‘If so, you should hurry before the horn sounds for supper.’
But she knew. She had known for a whole week. And her heart was already breaking.
Robert was giggling now, quietly. He stepped towards the dais, missed his footing and decided to sit on the edge of the step instead. So he was facing down the great hall when at last he spoke, tears of laughter running down his face.
‘He’s dead, sweetheart. Your king is dead! I was with King Henry when the messengers brought the news from Scotland. We thought it only seemly to bring you the news at once…’
His voice had faded into a mist. It swirled and eddied around her, muffling her ears, enveloping her head, blinding her eyes. She took a step forward, and felt an arm around her. Rhonwen’s. Her back was straight; she was not crying. With Rhonwen at her side, she stepped slowly off the dais past her giggling husband and walked the length of the hall to the door.
She went into the chapel and knelt on the ornate tiles before the altar, aware that Rhonwen had waited at the door. Beeswax candles glowed before a statue of the Virgin; she did not see them. She saw nothing. Her mind was a spinning emptiness; a whirl of nameless pain.
Robert came for her a long time later. He had eaten and drunk more, but now he was steadier on his feet. He strode into the chapel and found her still on her knees, her eyes closed, her face transparent with exhaustion and unhappiness.
He pulled her to her feet. ‘Enough of prayer! Now perhaps you will pay some attention to your husband.’
Wearily she looked at him. ‘I do not have a husband who merits my attention.’
‘No?’ His lips twisted into a sneer. ‘Then perhaps this will encourage it.’ The blow from his ringed hand tore open her cheek and the blood trickled like warm tears down her face.
‘You hit me in the presence of Our Lady?’ Eleyne backed towards the niche with its candlelit statue. Neither of them noticed that the door had banged shut. The air around them was full of anger.
‘I shall hit you where I please!’
She could not fight him and no one in the household would stand against him as he dragged her across the inner courtyard up the steep steps into the gatehouse, past crowds of openly staring men and women and on up towards the bedchambers. She did not sleep in the lord’s chamber, the room which had been John’s, but that was where he took her now. The great bed stood without hangings in the darkness, the deep feather mattress musty and full of mice, the flagstone floor swept bare of strewing herbs.
She did not even try to fight him. She submitted as he dragged off her clothes and tied her hands; she knelt like a frozen statue as he swaggered towards her and commanded that she open her mouth and later as she lay back painfully on her bound hands on the bare mattress, and let him thrust again and again inside her, her mind shut off entirely from the degradation of her body and allowed her to drift away.
Her wrists were still bound when Rhonwen found her at daybreak. Robert had slept for a few hours, sprawled across her inert body, then he had woken and staggered off in search of more wine. He had not returned.
‘Do you still forbid me to kill him?’ Tight-lipped, Rhonwen slid the blade of her small knife into the thongs around Eleyne’s wrists.
‘What good would his death achieve now?’ Eleyne’s fingers were white and lifeless and she watched, strangely detached still, as Rhonwen began gently to rub them.
‘It would free you of him for good.’
XII
A week later Eleyne received a letter from Malcolm of Fife. Robert was out riding when the messenger arrived for which she was thankful because the letter made her cry. It was courteous and restrained, and gave her the facts.
Alexander had been struck down by a sudden fever while his fleet was at anchor in Oban Bay. He struggled on, insisting on being rowed ashore to the island of Kerrera to complete their business there and there he had died. His body had been taken for interment to Melrose Abbey, as he had long ago specified in his will. His eight-year-old son had been crowned five days after he died, at Scone, elevated on the sacred stone by Malcolm himself, following the ancient tradition that the Earls of Fife alone had that right. But already, it appeared, there was quarrelling amongst the magnates. The king’s closest henchman, Sir Alan Durward, and Lord Menteith were locked in conflict over who should have power during the young king’s minority. At the end of his letter Malcolm gave her the crumb of comfort she so desperately needed. ‘I am assured, my lady, that in his last delirium the king mentioned your name several times and begged that you pray for his soul’s eternal rest.’ As the tears flooded her eyes, she threw down the letter. It was not until a long time later that she read the closing sentence. ‘Please be assured, my lady, of my lasting devotion and my service, which shall be yours as long as I draw breath.’
XIII
By the beginning of November she knew she was once again with child. Robert had stayed only a few days at Fotheringhay then, bored with tormenting her and afraid, though he would not admit it even to himself, of the cold, considered hatred which seemed to emanate from the very stones of the castle and from the air around him, he had finally obtained the king’s permission to return to court. That same day she had made them take out the bed on which, though she did not yet know it, her child had been conceived and burn it in the outer court.
It seemed strange that life went on as usual once he had gone. She oversaw the stud farm and rode regularly about the manor. She ate and slept and sewed and talked and waited indifferently as her belly began to grow. It would be a girl. Robert would father no sons, of that she was certain.
Her dreams were at an end. Her love was dead; her heart a lead weight inside her. She had no place in history. Her sons would never be kings. Einion had been a charlatan, her own visions the demon-inspired ramblings of a fevered brain. She would not return to Scotland where her godson was now king, firmly tied to his mother’s apron strings whilst Alan Durward governed as justiciar. Scotland was a place of dreams and memories; a place of broken destiny.
The ghostly woman who haunted the deserted rooms of the castle gave her little comfort. Their mutual unhappiness was part of the fabric of history. It entwined and encircled them and held them together in a web of eternity from which neither could break free.
XIV
Hawisa was born on St George’s Da`y 1250, and two weeks after her birth Robert returned. He stared for a
