The Forever Queen (14 page)

April 1003—Shaftesbury Abbey

Easter. A year, an entire year gone full circle. Emma sat at a side table in her chamber, unable to decide which rings to place upon her fingers. She pushed the casket away, not caring for the fine trinkets. She should have shed this melancholia that had plagued her through the dark, endless months of winter. What was there to replace it with, though? What excitement or enthusiasm was there to jolt her from this constant tiredness and the bereft feeling of utter despair?

The fever that had stricken her at Islip had remained virulent for several weeks, worsened, everyone at court agreed, by that dreadful ride south here to the royal hall at Shaftesbury. Not until after the Nativity had she found the strength to rise from her bed, another month before she felt able to appear in public. Oh, they were all kind to her, the women fussing and mothering, the more affable men sending her trinkets and trifles to cheer her, but kindness was not what she wanted. She wanted someone to take away the memory of Oxford and that thirteenth day of November. Someone to remove from her mind the sound and stench of the dying.

She could have done more! She should have insisted that Athelstan halt, put a stop to the slaughter, not buried her head and passed on by. When the crown had been set upon her head, she had avowed to defend her people. Yet she had ridden past the horrors and had done nothing to prevent evil. Nothing to help Gunnhilda. Queen? Oui, Queen of cowards!

She did not know for certain if Gunnhilda and the children had been inside the church, but the probability swung towards the assumption that they had. Emma had sent Leofstan to find out. He would, as Pallig had once said, make a fine captain one day. “I want to know,” she had said, her voice hoarse and frail, “what happened to them.”

He had not been able to discover much. Those who were still alive were reluctant to talk; the others, well, the others had only been able to tell their God. Neither Gunnhilda, her sister-in-law, nor the children were in Edwine’s house-place: it had been looted and was empty of everything. Nor were they with Edwine when he had been herded into the market square and hanged with more than sixty men.

Æthelred had ordered the immediate rebuilding of the burnt church at his own expense, the contrition appeasing his conscience but doing very little for the dead or his wife’s grief.

Later, when word was gathered in, it transpired that only Eadric Streona had been so liberal with interpretation of the given orders. Oxford alone bore a tally of so many dead. At Winchester, London, Norwich, all those places where Danish merchantmen had settled to trade, there had been arrests and a few token hangings, but no town north of the Humber River had complied, shire reeves and Ealdormen claiming they had not received the order. With the unrest stamped into oblivion, Æthelred did not pursue the matter, nor did he investigate why nowhere aside from Oxford had women and children died. What did it matter if a few innocents were caught in the net? They were only Danes.

The winter had blown in from the northeast but had been short and mild; spring had come wandering over the horizon early, bringing an abundance of blossom and hope. If the weather did not deteriorate into a bad summer, the harvest would be good. England would forget the unrest and settle into the routine of existence. Provided Swein Forkbeard did not return. Word on the wind spoke of his having trouble of his own to contend with, difficulties with Sweden and Norway. It was never an easy thing for a King to carve for himself an empire, even harder to keep it intact.

“Madam? Will you not accompany me to dine? They are waiting to break the deprivation of fasting. The Abbess has promised us a fine supper.”

Deep in her reverie, Emma gasped, looked round sharply, startled; she had not heard her husband enter. “I, I am not ready.” She faltered, her face reddening, her fingers again fumbling with her jewellery box.

“No rush,” Æthelred said. He selected an amber and silver ring, slid it onto Emma’s right hand. “I am looking forward to this feast. Fasting for Lent and the holy days of Easter may be easy for monks and nuns to endure, but my belly grumbles with great complaint at the necessity. Thank God our self-denial is to be ended.”

Emma smiled, although it was a halfhearted effort. Fetching her wimple, she called her handmaid to help fasten it. Holding the silver hairpins, she pointed at the small, square window that was unshuttered against the evening dusk. “The sunset was beautiful,” she said, turning to Æthelred. “The whole sky turned gold, as if filled by the glory of angels’ wings. Did you see it?”

“Alas, I have more pressing things to think on than sunsets.” What was he to do with this child? She had been thin when she had arrived from Normandy; there was even less of her after this prolonged illness. Wrong of him, he knew, but he had caught himself, on a few occasions over the long nights of winter, thinking it would be provident for God to take her.

“When I had been a consecrated King for ten years, a wondrous light appeared in the night sky,” he said, suddenly remembering. “A tailed star. Whether it was a new star or one God had purposefully made brighter none could say, not even my holiest men.” Added sarcastically, “Nor my mother, who professed to know everything. It lit up the western sky for three whole months, from dark-fall to cockcrow.”

Emma’s smile widened, spreading from her mouth to her eyes. “I was born in the year of that dragon-tailed star!”

“Mayhap it was a sign for our future union?” A gallant thing to say, marred by a lack of conviction.

Not noticing, Emma shook her head. “Oh, no, sir, such a mighty thing of God’s sending could not have been for a woman such as myself.”

Æthelred was amused. Many another woman would have been flattered to have been so highly praised. If only she would flesh out, she would be a pretty young thing. He resolved to see she ate well during the course of this evening’s special feasting and give her more attention. Guilt occasionally rubbed Æthelred’s conscience. The discomfort rarely lasted long.

***

“My Lady Emma does still not look well,” Alfhelm of Deira remarked to Ælfric of East Wessex, seated beside him. “She ought to be breeding by now. My wife always said she was not strong; these foreign chits are not made of the same stuff as us.”

“Mayhap that is why the Danes come over here to plunder our Saxon women, then?” Ælfric asked, adding, “We will not be able to hold Swein if he returns this year, you know.”

“You speak for yourself!” Alfhelm made a snort of derision. “The fyrdsmen of Deira are well rehearsed. I have ensured they were war-drilled every Sunday throughout winter.”

“But it will not be Deira he will be attacking, will it? He will come for the South, where the wealth is, where Æthelred is. Rumour has it Swein’s blood is up because of Gunnhilda’s killing last November.”

Alfhelm had always thought Ealdorman Ælfric to be a weakling. He had accepted the honour of a title quick enough when offered it, wanting the wealth and comfort the entitlement of office had brought; a different matter when the more disagreeable side of duty lifted its ugly head. Coward, Ælfric had been called when he had failed to lead the fleet into battle. Was it his fault, he had countered, that he had suffered so appallingly from the sickness of the sea?

“And you are privy to Danish rumour, are you?” Alfhelm scoffed. “Does the King know of your information?”

Ælfric beckoned one of the serving women to fill his tankard with ale, aware Alfhelm’s opinion of him was always less than polite. Sourly he retorted, “It is a poor leader who does not listen to the tattle spreading through his taverns and markets.”

Alfhelm had been one of the Ealdormen to oppose the tactic of paying the Viking pirates to leave England in peace. But then with the probability that Forkbeard would only be plundering the riches of the South, not the poorer North, he had good reason to resent the paying of a high tax for something of no benefit to himself. Alfhelm reached into the bowl set before them and selected a fleshy wing of roasted chicken. Already the two fish courses had been devoured, and the meats were being brought in, the fowl and birds first, then the larger joints of beef, lamb, and boar. One thing for Æthelred’s praise, he never stinted for excellence at table.

Grumbling, Ælfric continued, “With Swein Forkbeard ruling virtually all Norway as well as Denmark, he will be needing coin to pay his fighting men. It does not take intelligence to argue he will come again to England to get it. I cannot afford to pay another geld. I have lost almost all I have as it is.”

“So you would prefer to fight him this time, then? I will ensure the King knows of it, shall I?” Alfhelm’s retort was deliberately malicious. “Do not fear, Ælfric. With good fortune, Swein will attack somewhere more convenient for you. East Anglia, perhaps? You will not need to stir from your Hampshire hearth. Thegn Ulfkell of Thetford is a capable man when it comes to warfare, though I think Æthelred is remiss not to elevate him to the rank of Ealdorman. The fyrdsmen in those boggy fenlands can be a temperamental and churlish lot. It is the constant damp, I judge; it addles their brains as much as it knots their joints. We have warned Æthelred there is a danger they may not rally to arm at the word of a mere Thegn, but Streona thinks that to be nonsense, and who are we to know better than he?”

August 1003—Wilton Nunnery

The nuns’ singing was beautiful, the small timber chapel holding their voices like ripened grain cupped in joined hands. The hymn was one of thanksgiving, the words trilling up to the rafters and clinging under the thatch with the drift of candle smoke. Emma sat, relaxed, in her high-backed chair, her eyes closed, allowing the glorious music to surround and penetrate every fibre of her body, her lips moving, soundless, with the words. Wilton was a prestigious place, home to twenty nuns and several daughters of wealthy families, dwelling here for the benefit of their education, which the good Abbess ensured they received with dedicated authority and dutiful obedience.

“It is to the glory of God,” she maintained, “that I send forth my girls as young women who can read, write, and run a household as a household should be run.” And, of course, the better-produced girls, the higher the gifts offered by their grateful fathers. Having Emma herself as a residential guest was the final accolade of respectability.

Surrounded by the grace of tall elm trees and the open swathe of sheep-grazed downs stretching away behind, Wilton was situated in an ideal and serene location. The buildings were simple, nothing elaborate, with the guest chambers comfortably furnished. Æthelred had suggested Emma come here to restore her health rather than traipse after a summer-travelling court. “And perhaps when you are well again,” he had suggested with a parting kiss to her cheek, “we can try for a child? A son will bring you joy and contentment, I am certain.”

Emma had not echoed his belief in the benefits of a child, but he had been right about Wilton. The colour had returned to her cheeks, and a smile came more often to her lips, the dark rings lifting from beneath her eyes and from her troubled soul.

The hymn finished, the nuns knelt in prayer, then filed from the chapel. Emma sat a short while, staring at the one round glass-paned window. The crude thick glass was of expensive coloured panes, reds and blues and greens, and where the sun, darting in and out from behind scudding clouds, shone through, rainbow patches flickered on the stone-flagged floor. Like dancing faeries. Where had she heard that analogy before? Gunnhilda! Gunnhilda had told her of watching patterns on the floor, reflected there by the shine of the silver decoration on the haft of Swein Forkbeard’s axe—or was it his sword? She could not fully remember. Emma felt the tears within her, the great well of grieving sorrow clinging deep in her stomach, but nothing would come into her eyes. She missed Gunnhilda, her first and only friend, missed her so badly that it hurt as if a knife were being twisted within her. Why could she not cry? Why could she not expel this weight of tears and weep?

“Lady? Lady, be you all right?” One of the novices, a young girl who had no cares of the outside world to worry or trouble her, had entered, her sandals soundless on the stone floor.

Emma opened her eyes, smiled reassuredly. “There is nothing wrong. The beauty of the singing caught at my heart, that is all. It was a lovely hymn.”

“There are men arrived from London. They ask to see you.”

The colour drained from Emma’s face. Æthelred wanted her back? Of course he did. A King needed his Queen, needed a son. She stood, took a steadying breath to quell the shaking in her legs and stomach. “My husband?”

“No, I believe it to be his son, Lord Athelstan.”

The relief was intense, replaced immediately by guilt. She ought not feel so pleased that her husband was not here. Smoothing her gown, straight-backed, dignified, she left the chapel.

They had dismounted in the outer courtyard and had walked through the archway to the inner court on foot in respect for the holy place. Athelstan looked similar to his father, the same nose, hair colour, height, and build. He had been kind to her at Oxford, but Emma had not been fooled. The kindness was through duty, nothing more. If ever she was to bear a son, Athelstan would turn further against her. He had made that plain on more than one occasion.

“My Lady.” He bowed, polite. There was no smile, no warmth in his greeting. “I bring bad news.”

Emma’s heart lurched, the guilt rekindled. Was Æthelred dead? The shame ran through her, freezing her blood; she began to shake. How could she have felt so pleased it was not he who had come? God forgive her! “Is it my husband?” she whispered, holding her breath.

“No.” Athelstan’s answer was abrupt. “Why should it be my father? I come because of Exeter, your dower land. Swein Forkbeard landed there several weeks ago.”

Not Æthelred. Emma closed her eyes, sighed her relief, then admitted the lie. Would she have been glad to have heard of his death and regain her freedom? Huh, how did you keep the lie from yourself? She would never be free, not while she was able to birth a child. Her brother would insist on her marrying someone else; there would never be the peace of the nunnery for her, not until she was old and haggard, with a shrivelled womb, and of no more importance as a woman.