is only one lady you must give your hand to today.’
She had seen the heavy doors opening in the wall of the keep at the top of the stairs. A group of people appeared in the archway. ‘Go to her, my lord.’ She remained in her saddle, watching as the king turned and ran two at a time up the stairs.
‘Are you pleased with yourself now?’ Donald’s voice at her elbow was light and teasing. She realised suddenly how mud-splashed they all were, and found she was laughing. Donald shook his head in despair and vaulting from his horse came to help her down.
At the top of the stairs, the king was gazing at his bride. Tall and slim, fair-skinned, with large grey eyes and a wide, humorous mouth, Yolande de Dreux curtseyed to her future husband, taking in his muddy finery, the glow of the wind-swept cheeks and the fiery hair. By the time he took her hand and kissed it she had decided she would find it easy to fall in love with her Scottish king.
‘Nel? I said, shall I help you?’ Donald was standing with his hand on the bridle of Eleyne’s horse, and he saw his wife’s face. She was staring at the king and his bride with a strangely troubled expression.
‘What is it? Don’t you like her?’ Donald had found the bride attractive enough.
‘She’s very beautiful.’ Eleyne sounded abstracted. A strange chill had settled over her.
‘And the wedding tomorrow will be a grand affair,’ Donald said cheerfully. He put his hands over her cold wet fists as they rested, still clutching her gilded reins, on the horse’s wet mane. ‘Come on, let’s find our quarters and get you dry.’ He squeezed her hands gently. ‘Nel?’
‘There’s something wrong.’
Inside the castle courtyard all was bustle and noise as fifty horses milled about and their riders dismounted and began to sort themselves out. But outside the walls, beyond the small teeming burgh with its lovely abbey, the hills and moors were dreich beneath the rain and the wind howled mournfully like an animal prowling before the coming darkness. Donald resisted the urge to make the sign against the evil eye and took the reins firmly from her chilled fingers. ‘Rubbish, you’re cold and wet and chilled. When you’ve had a mug of mulled wine and got your feet by the hearth you’ll feel better.’
However, even in the warm curtained bed in the brightly painted roof chamber which they had been allocated and with her husband’s arms around her, Eleyne could not shake off her feeling of dread. It lingered all next day until the wedding and the feast which followed it.
IX
Eleyne was sitting at the king’s left hand. She eyed him surreptitiously. After the years of procrastination over this wedding, he appeared at last to have put every reservation aside and thrown himself totally into the joy of his new marriage. Yolande sat close to him, her face glowing with happiness, her hand straying often at the same time as his to the dish they shared so that their fingers touched in the sensuous warmth and scent of sauces and gravies and sweet creams and junkets.
Below the dais, in the crowded heat of the hall, the noise of talk and laughter had risen to a deafening pitch which drowned the playing of the minstrels in the space between the tables. Course after course of food continued to arrive, and with it a positive river of rich Gascon wine.
In one of the rare moments when he took his eyes off his wife, Alexander turned to Eleyne and was astounded. How had he ever imagined that Eleyne of Mar looked old? She was radiant. Her trained velvet gown was an exquisite deep green trimmed with gold, her girdle heavy with gilt, her mantle of russet silk trimmed with fox fur, but it was her eyes which caught his attention. They were as green as emeralds in the golden candlelight, large and lustrous. And full of laughter.
Outside, the thunder rumbled gently around the hills. He laughed and touched her arm. ‘Thank you.’
He mouthed the words above the noise and she smiled. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for – for helping sway him finally into remarriage, perhaps; perhaps for caring; for having loved the father he could barely remember but who came to him sometimes in his dreams.
He frowned, aware suddenly that there was someone standing behind them, between his great chair and Eleyne’s smaller one. He saw her look over her shoulder and her face paled, all the animation dying before his eyes.
He swung around, angry at the interruption, and caught his breath. There was no one there. Yet he felt it, felt it as clearly as she obviously had. Someone had been there, his shadow cutting off the light from the huge candelabra which burned on the dais behind them.
Eleyne closed her eyes, aware of the sudden cold in the heat of the great hall.
‘No.’ She didn’t realise that she had spoken out loud. ‘No, please.’
She felt Donald’s arm around her shoulders. ‘What is it, Nel?’
Her knife had fallen on the table. Gravy from the roast peacock had soaked into the linen cloth. Her hand went unconsciously to her throat, to the silver pendant she wore there, Donald’s pendant. The phoenix lay within a circle of power, imprisoned beneath the floor in the chapel of Kildrummy, sealed under the tiles with rough lime mortar.
It was Alexander. She had known that at once. But he had not come to Jedburgh to see her: he had come to be with his son.
The candles flickered and she was aware suddenly that a strange hush was falling over the great hall as table by table the hundreds of guests fell silent. Beside her the king had half turned in his seat and was staring into the wildly flickering candlelight, his normally ruddy complexion grey.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ She heard his whispered gasp. ‘Who are you?’
She could see something now, a shadow, tall and indistinct, hovering over the king, feel the anguish around them.
Below the high table every face had turned to stare. The new queen was as white as a sheet as she too saw the tossing shadows.
Eleyne heard the words in the howling wind.
Alexander swallowed, and Eleyne realised that his hand had gone automatically to the ornamental jewelled dirk he wore at his girdle. She saw his knuckles white around the cruciform hilt.
In the quiet one could have heard a pin drop, then from the shadowy body of the hall a woman screamed. The sound tore through the silence, echoing up into the carved roof beams as she pointed towards the high table. It was a signal for total panic. Screams and the crash of overturning tables and benches almost drowned the words.
He was fading.
The wind in the chimneys reached a crescendo and showers of sparks and ashes blew back into the hall from the two hearths.
Only a scant handful of people actually saw the ghost at the wedding feast of King Alexander III and Yolande of Dreux, but within days the story had spread around Scotland and beyond the border, south. Only three of them – Alexander himself, and Eleyne and Donald – knew who he was, but two whole nations knew that such a spectre was an omen of doom.
X
‘It’s all right. Please, my dear, calm yourself.’ Eleyne cradled the hysterical queen’s head in her arms. ‘There’s
