The Forever Queen (56 page)

“But?”

He shrugged.

Emma answered for him. “But now you are wed to me, and we have a daughter born, and you did not think I would approve of having a child of a different woman within my household?”

He shrugged again. Ja, he had thought that.

“The two brats dropped from the whore in the north, no, I would not allow within spitting distance, but Ragnhilda is different.” A daughter could not be a threat. “Send for her. Bring her to court.”

It took a while for Cnut to swallow the lump that had hurried into his throat, to blink back stupid tears and look at his wife. What did this intelligent, proud, clever woman see in him?

“One day soon, not too far into the future, I will have to sail to Denmark to sort matters there. When I return to England I shall personally collect her, if you are certain you do not object.”

“Why should I object? She will be company for this little one.”

Cnut laughed suddenly, wrinkled his nose. “She may only be a small bundle, this second daughter of mine, but the smell she produces can outshine a barn full of swine!”

29 March 1019—Winchester

After years of waiting, Emma had visited her estates of Exeter in Devon and was relieved to find the memories of old friends were no longer raw. Cnut’s primary intention had been to consolidate the southwestern counties, but there was opportunity too for him to enjoy the delights of family life with his wife and baby daughter, particularly during the Nativity, which they spent together at Buckfast Abbey. The deer were plentiful on the moorland regions of Exmoor and Dartmoor, and although Emma did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the chase, she found the scenery as enchanting as Pallig had once described it to be. She had told Cnut about Pallig, forgetting he had known the man, for Gunnhilda had been Cnut’s aunt.

“I grieved for them for so long,” she had confided to him one night as they lay close together after making love. “They were the only people to be kind to me when first I came to England as a shy and frightened girl. My only friends.”

Cnut had laughed. “You? Shy and frightened? Pull the other oar!”

She had laughed with him, but inside the memory had rekindled those fearful, lonely months of emptiness. It was a sorry thing not to have a friend, and now she had found one to cherish, she was not going to let Cnut go. Prayed God would grant them long years of happiness together.

Devon had not entirely been hunting and holiday, for there were duties to attend, judgements of law to make, charters to grant, but the winter months had passed pleasantly with only a few minor falls of snow hindering them for no more than a handful of days. An enjoyable experience, but Emma was delighted to be back in Winchester, for her house was almost completed. At last, her own private residence.

They had arrived, weary and saddle-sore, the previous evening, Gunnhild red-cheeked and irritable. Emma had thrown herself into bed with barely the energy to remove her travel-grimed clothing, had fallen instantly asleep. When Cnut joined her, she had woken, briefly, to feel his shivering body against hers, but had slept on. Come morning he was gone, with only a dent in the pillow and his own scatter of muddied clothing to show for his being there.

By midday, Cnut felt as if he were drowning in the demand of duties of government and called a halt to the tedium. “I am a man born of a wind-rippled fjord and the open toss of the sea,” he said, rubbing at his aching temples. “I need fresh air to fill my lungs, or I swear I shall suffocate.” By way of added excuse, he offered to accompany his wife to inspect her new manor.

“They are so stubbornly pedantic, these sombre-faced clerics,” he confided to her as they walked, arm linked through arm, along the wide stretch of the High Street with their escort of four stalwart housecarls, two making way ahead and two trudging discreetly behind. “Have they no sense of humour? I swear these clerics would argue with Saint Peter at the very gates of Heaven over some triviality of written legislation!”

Emma laughed and squeezed his arm affectionately. “They fall over their feet in an attempt to impress you, to show how competent and efficient they are.”

“Ah, so that is what they are doing. I wondered.”

The eastern end of the High Street was broad and flat, for here it was low ground and often flooded from an overspill of the three brooks that provided a living for several families. Constant running water was essential for so many trades; in this instance the brooks made income for a fuller and several leather workers. On hot days Winchester stank from the debris and waste-strewn stagnant water, and the obnoxious stench of the fuller’s yard. The High Street was a busy, cluttered thoroughfare, even on days such as this, when there were no market stalls set along the cobbled street. The Saint Swithin’s Priory, the Old Minster, was a much patronised place, and Winchester itself, with its royal importance, a focus for trade and legal jurisdiction.

The two housecarls ahead cleared a pathway through the crowd, their shields and spears allowing no one to linger or push by, the few grumbles at their casual roughness lost among the general hubbub made by so many busy people. Footsteps, talk, laughter; the occasional angry exchange. A donkey’s stubborn braying, a dog’s anxious barking. Traders, craftsmen, housewives, servants, slaves, children, monks; they were all here in Winchester, and most were used to the presence of royalty walking up their main street. A crippled beggar chanced his luck for a tossed penny, but received only a scowl and the threatening end of a spear from one of the housecarls. A child playing football with three other boys almost collided into Cnut, but chuckling, he kicked the pig’s bladder aside, sending it rolling and bumping back down the hill, the boys whooping with delight in pursuit. Cnut was the King, Emma his Queen, and Winchester loved the both of them.

With the High Street beginning to climb, Emma slowed their brisk pace to an amble. She was a fit woman who enjoyed walking, but she so rarely found the chance to have her husband to herself that she took the opportunity to stretch the stolen hour into something longer.

Ahead, the archway and squat tower of the west gate dominated the final rise of the hill, and the street split into two, one way sweeping out underneath the gateway, the other arm swinging to the right into the gold-lenders’ street, the Jewish quarter, where several Jews were settled in a small community. Emma had no care for them and shared the common feeling that one or two would, before long, encourage the coining of many. But Winchester, as with any trading town, was a centre for the business of buying and selling, and where you had merchants you had money. And that attracted the Jewish moneyers. They were taxed high and brought considerable revenue, so they were tolerated. Ever it was so; money gave way to prejudice.

The manor was before the right-hand turn, the high wall, higher than a man on horseback, giving it both protection and privacy. The gateway stood open, and, dramatically, Cnut paused at its threshold and bowed.

“Should I carry you across as if you were a new-come bride?” He did not wait for reply, but bent and swooped her into his arms, strode purposefully under the arch, and set her down again, with her giggling like a virgin maid, in the courtyard beyond.

Builders’ scaffolding was in place along two of the main hall walls, and despite the workmen, the place seemed oddly hollow. Standing, looking around, her arms folded critically, Emma took a while to realise why. There were no servants, no dogs nosing for food, no chickens scratching and squawking at a midden heap or crooning to themselves on hidden nests. No horses looking, prick-eared, from the stables. No smoke or smell of baking bread or roasting meat drifted from the kitchens. It was an empty building, soulless and lifeless—just a house, not a home.

Seeing their arrival, the master mason climbed down the cross-tied beams of scaffolding, his feet sure and confident as he swung along the narrow slippery rungs of the ladders and, wiping his roughened hands on his leather apron, forced a smile onto his harassed face and bowed.

“You are welcome, master, mistress. Had I known you were coming I would have had the place tidied.” His voice trailed off as he looked, mournfully at the mess that builders invariably left behind: a coil of frayed rope, a broken pulley wheel, piles of rubble, stone dust, wood shavings.

Emma waved his concern aside. “I would have been more displeased to find my hall abandoned and neglected.” She smiled reassuringly. “Here I can see for myself that work is in progress. Is there much more to do?”

Pleased to be able to impart good news, the mason grinned. “Another four or five days, madam, that is all.”

Like Emma, the master mason was Norman; he had worked on several of her brother’s castles and, in part, on the cathedral at Rouen. This, Emma’s house, to the best of his knowledge, was the first stone building, outside of a religious complex, to be built in England. Given free rein and a full purse, Emma had been set on rivalling the Norman Duke for grandeur and comfort. The style of her house was large in design but modest in size, a two-storeyed building, with stone walls and vaulting on the ground floor of the public hall, the more traditional timber, daub, and wattle for the upper private chambers.

With pride open on his bearded face, the mason pointed to the red-tiled roof. “The tiles are all laid, most of the construction finished. The chimneys I am especially pleased with.”

With curiosity, Cnut strolled over to one of the two high-reaching stone stacks that protruded from the outer long wall, patted its solidity. They were firm structures of mortared block stone, stretching up, square and solid, towards the sky. A new conception, one totally alien to Cnut, who doubted their usefulness. He shrugged, held his counsel until he had chance to inspect them more thoroughly.

Emma was already entering through the doorway, the inside smelt of sawdust and chiselled stone, of tarred rope and slopped water, of toil and sweat. The walls were bare, the floor dusty with a weird, patterned dance of interwoven footsteps. Swept, tidied, with embroidered tapestries and furs on the walls, benches and tables, fresh rushes, flickering lamps, and tallow candles, it would soon be transformed into a living place where a heart did beat and a voice did speak. At the far end a staircase, the wood new, pale, and unscuffed. Gathering her gown she climbed, pushed open the doorway at the top, and entered what would become her solar, her private sitting room. Her breath came in a gasp, held in her throat, and tears of excited joy prickled behind her eyes. The room, although devoid of any homeliness, was flooded with light from the three small-paned glass windows. Crude glass, thick and not very opaque, but windows were not for looking through, only for keeping out the elements and letting in the light. Glass was so much better than thin sheets of stiff, oiled parchment. Wooden shutters, folded back to each side, would shut out the night and the worst storms.

Cnut strolled across to the chimney—the second would be in the chamber beyond. He stepped inside the huge, cold, and empty hearth and peered upwards into the square of sky above. Personally, he could not see the point. If the hearth-place was not central to the room, how could you sit around it to talk, or laugh, or argue?

“How much rain and wind will sweep downwards?” he asked the mason. “Given some of our English downpours, I should think a fire would be washed away before it throws out any heat.”

Emma saved the man from embarrassment by answering for him. “I am assuming work on them is not quite finished, my lover, hence the scaffolding and our master mason being grieved at the distraction from his task.” She moved across the room to peer up the shaft herself, shuddered at the height that felt as if it were about to fall down upon her. “Are tiles not placed at specific angles across the sky hole to channel away the rain but allow the escape of smoke?”

The mason smiled, could not have put it better himself. Even so, Cnut was eventually proved right; there was often no sufficient draught to draw the smoke upwards, and on days when the wind blew particularly malevolently, more of it tended to blow into the room than drift up. But then what hall was never smoke-filled?

From the solar, a second room—Emma’s bedchamber, with a private chapel on one corner and on the far end an oak door leading to a small, windowless room. Cnut peeped in, nodded satisfaction. This was for the holding of the treasury, the chests of valuables he owned; a sensible way of doing things, for a King must be ready to face his enemies at any time and not have need to pause for the securing of his wealth. The fact that a Queen was responsible for its keeping was the source of her power, of course. Cnut wondered what would happen if one day, after he had been away—fighting in Denmark, for instance—Emma should refuse to give it back. The anomaly had never arisen before. There had been a Queen, Alfred’s daughter, who had held the treasury of Mercia and ruled in her own name, but then that had been during the war years when the Danes and the English had first been at each other’s throats. Her own brother had soon put a stop to a woman’s bid for ultimate power. Since then, the only capable women had been Æthelred’s dominating mother and Emma. What would Emma do if she had sole control of the treasury? Cnut had an uncomfortable feeling she would become as formidable as a fire-breathing, gold-guarding dragon creature.

Finished with his squinting into the darkness, he asked, “I assume the floor is solid? Chests weigh heavy.”

Emma entered the windowless room, jumped up and down, her outdoor boots thudding on the timber floor. “The floor is oak, double-planked, on sturdy beams.”

“And, of course, your great weight is ten times that of my gold.”

They laughed together, Cnut sliding his arm around Emma’s slender waist, for she was still slender, despite having given birth to four children. He bent his head, put his lips to hers, enjoying the taste of her mouth against his. “It will be good,” he said, “when you have a bed in your chamber and the master mason has the sense to turn his sour gaze in the opposite direction.”

Giggling, Emma put her hand to his chest, pushing him slightly away. “Then I suggest we leave him to his work. The quicker he is finished, the quicker I can see about furnishings and making this into a home we can enjoy.”