Daughter of the Wolf (30 page)

‘What?'

He looked to right and left and beckoned her closer. Frowning, she took another step towards him.

‘What is it?'

He put a warning finger to his lips. ‘Can you keep a secret?'

‘Of course I can.'

His face was still stern but his eyes were laughing. ‘The archbishop's a worse sinner than I am myself.'

She recoiled as though he had slapped her. ‘You disgust me.' Elfrun turned on her heel. Her intent was to march away, but he caught her by the shoulder and hauled her round, thumb and fingers digging in hard enough around her collarbone to make her catch her breath. This time he wasn't smiling.

‘Elfrun, I've been very patient with you. I have fought battles for you about which you know nothing.'

She stared at him, startled by the force of his grip, speechless.

‘But I will not tolerate this. Not from you, not from my mother, not from that damned meddling Frank she's imported who has the cheek to suggest he should be my confessor. My soul and the sorry, spotted state of it is between me' – he gave her a shake – ‘and my God. Do you hear me?'

She was too stunned to reply.

‘Do you?'

She nodded mutely, and Ingeld let go at last. She rubbed her shoulder, and at once he looked concerned. ‘Did I hurt you?'

She shook her head, fighting tears.

‘I'm glad.' But still he wasn't smiling. ‘Remember what I say, Elfrun. My conscience is my business.'

She managed another nod, still too shocked to trust her voice.

‘I'll see you at vespers, no doubt.' That mocking edge was back in his voice at last, and suddenly she couldn't bear it any more. She turned, eyes filling, and walked rapidly downhill and away from the Donmouth tents, wading through the tangles where the new spring grass was coming up fast through the withered and rotted remains of last year's weeds. She didn't really care where she was going, and had blundered a couple of hundred yards in a randomly chosen direction, close to another pitch of tents, when a voice shouted a warning. Without realizing the cry was addressed to her she took another furious step in her new shoes and went sprawling headlong over a hidden guy-rope.

The ground met her with more force than she would have thought possible, and her cheekbone and temple had struck something hard. She lay half-stunned and winded for a long moment before managing to ease herself up on to one elbow and assess the damage. Her ankle was agony, and she had flung out a hand as she fell and scraped it on something hidden in the grass. She tried to catch her breath but it wouldn't come easily. She pressed her hand against the bone of her right eye-socket and then looked at her fingers curiously. They had come away red, and warm, and wet.

‘Stay where you are. Don't try to move. You half-witted fool!' A long moment and then she realized the voice was no longer addressing her. ‘I told you not to put the pegs in the long grass before we'd had a chance to cut it back.'

Another figure joined the first. Her head was clearing a little, and she could see that one was thick-set, with a craftsman's leather apron. He had a mallet and more pegs in his hands.

‘I know you,' she said to the tall one who had spoken first. ‘But you were covered in blood.'

‘You're the one covered in blood.'

It was true. Now she could feel the warm liquid trickling down her right cheekbone.

He was still talking. ‘Can you stand? Or do you want me to carry you?' He held out a hand and pulled her to her feet. Her ankle crumpled beneath her.

‘Sorry. I need to lean on you,' she said between gritted teeth.

‘I'm going to take you to my mother.'

A dozen paces, no more, with her clutching like ivy around an oak, and a pudgy, sweet-faced woman, unveiled in the decent privacy of the tent and her black curls falling about her face, was drawing the tent door-curtain closed. A familiar woman, but from where? Now she was calling for bowls of warm water, untangling Elfrun from the folds of her cloak.

Stuffy, dim, airless. A straw pallet.

‘I'm going to be sick.'

And a bucket was there at her side. She reached for it gratefully, ignoring the murmur of voices behind her.

‘You're shaking.' The doughy-faced woman, kneeling beside her and holding her hair away from the bucket. ‘And no surprise. From what Thancrad tells me that was a nasty tumble, and a great big lump of rock in the grass. Thancrad says he told Hadd not to put the ropes up without cutting the grass back first, but that lazy good-for-nothing never lifts a finger unless you stand over him with a switch.' She was dabbing at Elfrun's temple with a warm damp cloth. ‘Just a tiny little three-cornered tear, right on the eyebrow. Bruising fast, but that will sort itself out in a few days. You're young. The good God willing it'll heal right up and no one will know.' Elfrun opened her mouth, but the torrent of words swept on. ‘Let me have a look at your ankle. Thancrad said you couldn't put any weight on it, but with a little bit of luck and the angels and saints on our side it'll only be sprained.' The woman was assessing her, head to toe. ‘There's hardly any weight to you as it is.'

Switha, that was it. Thancrad's mother. Thancrad, covered with blood at the whale-drive, that was the image that had been nagging at her. She was in the Illingham tent.

Trouble. Avoid them.

But Radmer hadn't seen this coming. Why couldn't she have been more careful? Elfrun could feel the wretched shoe being eased off and warm, powerful hands flexing her foot. A throb of pain shot up her shin to the knee, but she bit her lip.

The door-curtain was pushed aside, and she winced away from the sudden glare.

‘Yes, I know who she is. Radmer's daughter.' A man who blocked the whole of the sunlight. An ox of a man. ‘I want a better look at her.'

Elfrun propped herself up on her elbows, feeling foolish, her head still swimming.

‘Time and enough for that. Will you two get out of here and stop crowding the poor thing?' Thancrad's mother moved between her and the light. ‘Go and get that mallet off Hadd and do the job yourselves, before I find myself tending any more of his victims.'

Elfrun tried once more to sit up. ‘I'm sorry, I—'

But the black-eyed woman was using a softer voice now, turning back to her, and the tent had gone dark and quiet. ‘Don't you listen to a word. I just wanted them out of here. Try bending your foot again.' A dark bristle sprouted in the corner of her mouth, and Elfrun wondered why the woman didn't tweeze it out.

‘I'll go as soon as—'

‘You're not going anywhere until I give you leave. Put your head back. If you were up as early as we were then you'll be worn out even without this silly falling-over.' She was frowning now, and her tongue darted out to make contact with the bristle and in again, fast and furtive as some half-glimpsed barn rodent. ‘Look at you. Aren't you sweet? I've always wanted a daughter. No more children after Thancrad though; I had him too young, they say. I was only twelve. It spoiled me...'

Another cushion was being tucked in behind her head. Elfrun lay back and despite all the pain in her head and ankle, the vile taste in her mouth and the lingering nausea she felt a sense of deep calm. It occurred to her, in a distant, dreamy kind of way, that no one had looked after her like this for – how long – not since her father had left? Longer. Much longer. Not since her mother had fallen ill.

Why was Illingham tenting there? That bit of ground had been the prerogative of Howden, time out of mind...

Someone was wrapping her cloak around her, tucking in the edges. Elfrun gave a profound sigh, shivered violently and fell into a doze.

Somewhere in the drowsy dimness there were low urgent voices, but no one spoke her name, so she paid them no heed. Darkness took her.

When Elfrun came slowly back to wakefulness, the light through the tent walls had changed. Much of the day must have passed. There was a gentle hand on her shoulder. Switha. Kind Switha.

‘Your uncle's here. Can you walk?'

Elfrun watched Tilmon of Illingham with all the greater fascination now that she had been a guest in his tent. Hard to see him as Thancrad's father, though they were both so tall. Where Thancrad was angular his father was a solid wall of shoulder and paunch, and if Tilmon's slab of a face had ever been adorned with those striking cheekbones they had long since been swallowed by the surrounding flesh.

Her eyes flickered sideways to where Thancrad was standing, stiffly upright, arms folded, mouth hard. Had he decided at some point that this was the appropriate public stance in which to present himself? He looked uncomfortable, even disapproving, but she was coming to suspect that that was the habitual set of his strong-boned face. Certainly there was nothing she could see for him to disapprove of in the little ritual that was being enacted between Tilmon and the king. The lord of Illingham was kneeling on the dais, bowing his head to rest his brow on the king's knee, offering the king his great red-knuckled hands and being sworn in as the lay abbot of Howden.

Which explained why they were tenting in Howden's stead.

This should have been old news to her. It would have been unimaginable to her father that a grant of this magnitude should be given without his knowledge, without his advice, his endorsement. Especially to a man with Tilmon's past.

Well, whatever that past, he was embedded in royal favour now. The king was smiling, rising from his stool to pull Tilmon lumbering to his feet, embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks, slapping the man on the shoulder and turning him to face the assembled thanes and abbots. Sun glinted off silver cloak tags and bullion-embroidered cuffs as the chief men of southern Northumbria roared their approbation.

A mellow murmur in her ear. ‘Watch the king.'

Ingeld. She had had to forgive him for yesterday, he had treated her with such affection after her fall, fending off Athulf and his malicious comments: her clumsiness; how ugly she was with her bruised face; how she had only done it to catch Thancrad's attention. Ingeld had batted Athulf away, and examined her twisted foot and her cut face with real concern; and she had loved him for it.

Ingeld wasn't looking at her now though. His gaze was focused on the dais, where Osberht was now stepping back to allow the archbishop forward, and Tilmon to kneel again and take his second oath. And Ingeld was right. The king's face had slipped out of that enforced joviality as soon as he thought men's eyes were off him. He was concentrating on Tilmon and the archbishop as a cat might watch at a rat's hole, his fair-skinned, neat-featured face quiet behind his greying beard, his eyes never leaving them.

There were few other women present. Elfrun had already had to endure probing enquiries from Eadburh of Aberford. Only a few years older than Elfrun and widowed when her husband had broken his neck hunting in the first year of her marriage, their son still unborn, Eadburh had been holding her land in her little son's name for so long, and with such fire-forged determination, that Elfrun wondered whether, when the lad came of age in four or five years, he would find himself strong enough to prise his heritage from his mother's grip. In all their encounters the older woman had spoken to Elfrun as though she were a child – and a particularly simple and ignorant child too.

If the world was ever to treat her as an adult, she would have to behave like one. She could hear Abarhild's voice in her mind, scratchy but loud and clear for all that.

Men's eyes were coming away from Illingham now. While this new grant to Tilmon would be the subject of discussion and debate around the hearths for months to come, Illingham had had its moment.

Now it was Donmouth's turn.

She turned to Ingeld, expectantly. He was smiling at her, his left eyebrow lifted. ‘What?'

‘Hall first, then minster.' Surely he didn't need her to tell him what to do?

‘Yes. I know.' He was still smiling. ‘Let's hear you.'

She stared at him, hoping against hope that she had misunderstood his meaning. He jerked his head. ‘Come on.'

‘I can't! I don't know what to say, and it's not proper—'

‘It's perfectly
proper
. Look at Eadburh.'

‘Her!'

‘You are lord of Donmouth. You were happy enough to behave like it when you gave me that lecture yesterday, Elfrun. So do your duty now.'

‘You're punishing me.'

‘I'm helping you. Supporting you in your lordship. Get moving, or people will think we've got something to hide.' He had his hand on her shoulder blade and he was steering her through the throng, bowing and smiling. ‘Look, all friendly faces. Familiar faces.'

Yes. Thancrad of Illingham, eyes shadowed, mouth a straight line. Eadburh of Aberford, smiling in cosy, cloying, feigned sisterhood. Athulf gurning away at her through a gap in the crowd. Abarhild next to him, gimlet eyes in a frame of neat, gold-tricked white veils. Elfrun was never quite sure how she hobbled her way up on to the dais. What had happened since last September, anyway? What on earth was she going to say?

The whales.

Tilmon had said nothing about the whales, although the men of both estates had joined together to send the king his share. She could tell that story and by mentioning how the men of Illingham had been made welcome on their side of the estuary she could appear generous, a good neighbour and a good subject.

She stepped forward at the king's beckoning. The boards creaked under her unsteady feet. He was smiling at her, eyes creased in skin sun-weathered even after the long months of winter. Her mind went on scrabbling after Donmouth's news.

Things bade fair for a good lambing.

The dogs – but they were Ingeld's news not hers.

Cudda, falling into the fire. No need to mention Fredegar's role in that disaster. And perhaps to say that they needed a lad to work the forge? Perhaps someone here would have a likely lad he could both command and spare. Or would that be an admission of weakness? No, best say nothing that her father would later regret.