Читать книгу Child of the Phoenix - Barbara Erskine - Страница 67

The Earl and Countess of Huntingdon left the castle two months after Isabel and Robert had departed for Scotland. Eleyne had missed them enormously – after their ghost-hunting escapade they had become firm friends and he had kept the secret of her forbidden vision. Only the promise of another visit soon had consoled Eleyne as they rode away.

In her renewed loneliness she had turned to John more and more for company. She missed Rhonwen very much, but she also found it a relief not to have her constant supervision, and it was a pleasant surprise to find she no longer felt guilty enjoying her husband’s company when they set off on a tour of his estates.

The lands which comprised the Honour of Huntingdon were for the most part flat. They stretched for miles, bisected by the black, slow-moving Nene, from the fens where they flew their hawks to the great forests of central England.

Eleyne was ill at ease in the flatness of the landscape and, try as she might to please John, she could not pretend to like the cities they visited. She did not like Cambridge or Huntingdon or Northampton, as they journeyed slowly from castle to castle; and most of all she did not like London, where he kept a town house. Instinctively she distrusted the slow-speaking, cold, suspicious easterners and she longed for the mountains and the wild seas; she longed for the quick-tongued, nimble-footed, warm-hearted people of Gwynedd where tempers might be quick to flare, but where vivacity and warmth and hospitality were second nature to the people. Twice John promised her that they would make the long ride to Chester and that from there she could, if her father agreed, visit Aber, but twice she was disappointed as John succumbed to the debilitating bouts of fever which returned again and again to plague him.

It was as the next long summer’s heat settled over the flat lands of eastern England and they found themselves once more at Fotheringhay that he fell ill again and this time more seriously than before.