“In the morning we will take falcons, and hunt,” Hrald was telling him.
Some other young women had now come up to Ashild, come from the tables at which they sat with their own families, and he saw they were admiring her gown. Ceric turned his eyes and thoughts to Hrald.
“There are doves aplenty in the skies,” Hrald went on, “and we will bring back enough to have a pie made with what they take.”
A pie I would like to eat from a single salver, shared by Ashild, thought Ceric.
Four rode out with hawks upon their gloved left wrists in the morning: Hrald, Ceric, Worr, and Ashild. Raedwulf had been asked but had declined; he had spent enough time in the saddle, and bid the younger folk joy of their morning’s sport.
The falcon house at Four Stones had three adult, trained birds in its mews, and they took all three with them, as well as a young female. Their path took them out along the palisade beyond the kitchen yard end of Four Stones, where the rivulet that ran at the tail of the yard passed under the wall and gradually flattened into a stream. Wild grasses grew plentifully there, though it was a short ride away; a horseman cannot comfortably ride one-handed, his other uplifted to hold a hunting bird, for long. They used no dogs, just flushed the doves by riding into the tall grasses in which the birds dipped and pecked at fallen seeds.
Before they set off Ceric and Worr acquainted themselves with the falcons by holding them and throwing out a lure tied to a leathern thong for them to pounce upon. When the bird returned to the wrist with it, they were given a morsel of fowl. In this way the birds learnt their voice and whistle. Ceric and Worr were given the most experienced birds, so that they might have the best hunting, but Hrald handed the young female to his sister.
“She is steadier with Ashild than with any one,” he told his guests. The female, though young, was as large as the lone male they took with them. Her brown-feathered head swiveled over her folded wings, and her yellow eyes looked unblinkingly out at those looking back at her.
“We understand each other,” Ashild said, checking the light tether at the falcon’s feathered leg. “I have made what she wants, to be what I want. So we are both happy.”
She was speaking to the others, but looking all the time at the young falcon on her wrist.
Yet the bird was flighty, and took to spreading her wings in protest if Ceric drew too near. He had a bird on his own wrist, and need attend to it.
At morning’s end they had brought down six doves between them, and a wood-cock as well. The older birds would let their handlers take the downed prey from them, and were content to be allowed to rip into and devour what they wanted from the final birds they had snatched from the sky. But the female Ashild flew she allowed the entire wood-cock to. It was the only bird she had knocked out of the air, despite flying at two others.
“But she has taken the biggest prey of all,” Ashild pointed out, as they watched the falcon rip the feathers from the wood-cock’s plump body. “She will have her reward for setting her sights so high.”
Each of the riders had a small woven basket of wicker-work at their saddle, and into it they dropped the gain from the morning’s outing, Ashild’s only remaining empty.
Riding back, Ceric moved his horse in alongside that of Ashild. Her falcon, having eaten, made no protest, though he could hear Ashild soothing it with her voice. Hrald and Worr were behind them. Ceric would at last have a moment to speak to her.
She looked over her bird at him. Her expression suggested she expected him to make some comment of the hunt just completed. When he did not speak, she smiled in a way that made him feel awkward, almost foolish. Her lips were pressed together, and curled to suggest she was holding back laughter.
She moved her gaze from his face to the walls ahead. He looked at the line of her face. Away from her, he had thought of her as being pretty. Now he saw she was not, or that it was the wrong word for her. Yet she was far from plain. There was something else she presented to the eye, at least to his.
Her face had not the narrowness of her mother’s, nor Hrald’s; her brow was broader, the chin not pointed, rather it was strong and round. Her nose was well-shaped, but neither very straight nor small, with the slightest of bumps up high at the bridge; nothing distinctive about it. The mouth too was mid-size, bowed as a woman’s should be, but not, he knew, one to be overly remarked upon. The eyes of grey-blue were large enough, the lashes fringing them thick enough. Her eyebrows were a shade darker than her hair, which he still thought of as the colour of old oak, a warm light brown in which glints of pale gold shone. In form she was womanly, neither as tall nor as slight as her mother. He remembered as a boy thinking of her as sturdy, and she looked that, still.
Peering at her profile, he tried to guess of himself where his attraction lay. Her eyes, he thought; and yes, her lips. Those deep grey-blue eyes were active and searching, betraying the quickness of her brain. The expression of her mouth was ever-changing, and capable of conveying much without uttering a sound.
And although they looked nothing alike, parts of her reminded him of Hrald. Her thoughtfulness, for instance, though she could pierce that in an instant with a flare of temper, which Hrald never did. As a child, her demands to be included in their play amused and sometimes irked Ceric. As a maid there was much she was forbidden to do, but would do anyway, and most certainly if she saw Hrald and Ceric do so. She was older than Hrald, why had he freedoms she had not? She had been pulled away from their shared adventures many times the Summer he had spent here with them as a boy, pulled away by her mother or Burginde and punished. That the punishment was no greater than being forced to return to her spindle or yarn-winding made him brush it off. Such was woman’s work, and she must learn it early, just as weapon-play with wooden swords and staffs had been his task, and that of Hrald, priming them for the day they took up true weapons.
She had still managed to become a good rider, and had as much ease about the falcon mews and in the field with the birds as her brother. For a moment he thought of his Aunt Edgyth, and the contrast between her quiet and learned self, and Ashild, riding next him, a falcon on her wrist. He hoped his uncle’s widow would welcome her. Modwynn, he felt, would surely do so.
“Of what do you think?” she asked of a sudden.
The steady rhythm of their horses’ pace, and his own thoughts, had lulled him. He saw she was watching him; the mouth he had been considering had curved into a slight smile.
He took an intake of breath. He could not tell her he had been judging her person, deciding her to be not pretty after all, and yet imagining the day he returned with her to his home and presented her to the ladies of Kilton.
“Of your gown,” he lied, grasping at one of first things he had noted when he had seen her yesterday. “You dress as a woman of the Danes.”
She was in fact again wearing the two-part dress of the Danish women of the place, with the same thick and round silver pins she wore yesterday holding her shoulder straps. That over-gown had been red; this one was blue, upon another long shift of white linen.
She gave the slightest of laughs, as if of surprise at his answer. “It is practical. If my over-gown soils, I can quickly change it for one clean.”
He took this in with a nod.
“Last night,” he said abruptly. “You looked – lovely.”
It was her turn to take a breath. “I have not yet today thanked you for the splendid gown.”
She paused, and Ceric thought she was about to say more about it, but did not.
“I must have surprised you,” was what she did say.
He did not quite understand, and after a moment longer said so. “Surprised me?”
She had turned her lower lip in, and her white upper teeth now chewed it. “I do not know. Yes, I do. To those who know my mother, I am a surprise. Or worse.”
“How so?”
“She is lovely. I am – not lovely. Despite what you said.”
Ceric had done
no courting, but knew enough that maids did not reject a given compliment. To attempt to refute her words, when he had had the same thought himself, was a disservice to them both. He told the truth.
“You are better than lovely. You are Ashild.”
But he had missed his mark.
“Pretty words,” she returned. “But at Kilton you must excel at them.”
He was taken aback. What did she wish to hear; he could neither praise her nor share with her his thoughts about her attractions. And it was rude.
“Do I deserve that? Does Kilton?”
She pondered a moment.
“Kilton I do not know,” she conceded.
“But me you do,” he prodded.
She smiled now, and nodded her head, her tone much the milder. “Yes. Since we were babes together, as mother and Burginde keep reminding me.”
She took a breath, began anew.
“Thank you for the gown, Ceric. It is wonderful, as I said when you gave it.”
“I am glad you think so,” he answered, gladder still at the warmth in her voice. “It was my mother’s,” he added.
She paused at this. “And my mother’s, before that.”
It struck him. Yes, he knew that. He had been told the silk gowns at Kilton, both those worn by Modwynn on feast days, and those laid by for him of his mother’s, had been Ælfwyn’s gift, hurriedly bundled and stuffed into the packs his mother had taken when she rode off with his injured father.
“How strange that one has returned here, to Four Stones,” she mused aloud.
One day all four will be reunited at Kilton, he thought. And Modwynn is sure to leave hers to you in her will; you shall have all four, as once your own mother did…
They were now riding along the palisade wall, and would soon turn in through the opened gate.
The falcon between them moved restlessly on Ashild’s wrist. It raised its tail and let loose a short stream of white fluid from its nether regions. The breeze blew a light spatter of it back onto Ashild’s blue gown.
“Practical. As you see,” she ended with a smile.
Ælfwyn sat in the yellow Sun of her garden. The line of beech trees she had planted years ago as saplings had grown, shielding the small space from the stable yard and busy workings of the hall yard. Shorter, shrubbier growth of white-flowered bedstraw formed a hedge low enough for those exiting the hall’s side door to see one standing or seated within her enclosure. Yet it was still a private place for her and her daughters and sisters, laid out by her own hand, the flowers and herbs tended to by herself and her youngest sister Eanflad. No one else entered there unbidden, and even Hrald only came in when asked by his mother or sisters to do so. It was a woman’s space, a haven of spicily sweet red roses, nodding bluebells, and the deep pink blossoms of corncockle, the seeds of which she had collected from the meadows, and sown.
She lifted her eyes from the small Psalter and let them fall on these last pink and reaching flowers. Charming they were, yet their charm was short-lived; she was looking now at several empty stems which yesterday had spread their tender and open-petalled faces to the Sun. It was like a lesson from the psalms she had just been reading, on the awe-full brevity of youth and beauty and life itself. But look, she reminded herself: new blossoms, of a fresher pink, had opened in their stead.
The thickness of the beeches prevented her from seeing her son and daughter with their guests ride in, hunting hawks in hand, and they did not see her. She could hear the drifting noise of the hall’s various work yards, but clearer to her ears was the droning of honeybees rising from the red roses edging the walkway nearest to her table.
Someone had been invited to join her there, and until he arrived she would delight in the little volume. On every third or fourth page the text was enlivened with painted scenes set in scrolling flowered borders. Within these borders lived shepherds, their flocks resting at their feet; and men holding spears looking at the setting Sun. Purple hills arose over fanciful buildings, and springs bubbled up in dry fields. She wondered over these, and the mastery of brain and hand it took to conceive and paint them. The psalms pleased her just as much, neat rows of rounded writing, small, artful in their own way, symbols bearing to those who could read them the words of God and the ancient King, David.
Surely the gift of writing was one of the greatest God had ever bestowed. Even in the faith of the Old Gods, it was All-Father, Woden, who suffered for the skill of writing, and then gave that gift to man. It was Ceric’s mother who had first taught her to write, and after that she had spent years improving her hand under the tutelage of both her priest Wilgot and Abbess Sigewif. But nothing she could ever do with quill and ink could approach the artfulness of the Psalter. Mindful of scratching the silver covers, she had brought a small cushion from her bower house on which it lay perched. She again bent her head over the lines of lettering, tiny but crisply formed.
She glanced up to see Raedwulf approaching on the path from the hall’s side door. She rose slightly, and with lifted hand, beckoning him in.
“My lady,” he greeted her. He held in his right hand a narrow sleeve of linen, no wider than two finger’s width, and in length slightly longer than his hand.
“The second portion of Ælfred’s gift to you.” He was smiling down at her as he presented it, which deepened the slight cleft in his chin. “May it add to the usefulness of the first.”
She gestured him to the bench at her side, a smile of anticipation on her lips. Her fingers found the opening flap of the linen tube, and slid the contents out into her other hand.
It was a wand of gold, fine and narrow. Attached to it at one end was a gemmed piece, almost like a brooch, but without any pin. The frame of it was gold, and upon its face, in enamel-work, was the image of a flower, like unto a white lily on a dark blue background. She turned it in her hand. The back was plain, but not unworked, for tiny balls of gold, no larger than the head of a pin, had been set all over in minute but riotous interlacing. She gasped, without meaning to, at the sheer beauty of the thing, and at the skill lavished thereon.
“It is a pointer, an æstal, to help point out the words of your Psalter. Or of any book,” he added.
“Of books this is our first,” she told him once more. “I have had letters, and charters sent to me, and now thanks to Ælfred we have a book. And this precious thing. An – æstal.”
He made a slight movement with his own hand, suggesting she should use it. Holding the golden wand by the gemmed end, she moved the point of it across the lines of David’s song her book lay open to.
“I see – I see how useful this will be,” she told him, her excitement in her voice.
“It stops the eye long enough at any word so that the reader can grasp it, before going on to the next,” he offered.
“Yes, that exactly. It will help the children with their reading. And me as well.”
Her fingertip had caught the feel of something beneath its pad. She took the æstal in both hands and raised the edge of the round end to her face. “There is writing here,” she told him.
“The King’s own mark. It says ‘Ælfred ordered me to be made’.
“Made for you,” he ended.
Her eyes shone, making them a richer blue. “How can I thank him. How can I thank you?”
A moment passed as he regarded her. “Telling him of your happiness will be thanks enough.”
“It is a great happiness. Ceric coming, and now these rich gifts –” she moved the pointer over the row of letters again.
They sat a while in silence, him watching her delight as she turned the pages and sometimes lowered the æstal to any words which caught her eye. She felt almost a child, exulting in a gift, and watched by those older who took gentle pleasure in her joy.
“Raedwulf,” she said at length, placing the æstal down, and seeing how well the slender rod served to mark her place, “you mentioned last night that the King meant to thank me for Oundle, and so sen
t you with these gifts. And your daughter is wed to Worr, and now lives at Kilton, which ties you too to that place. Ælfred is Ceric’s god-father. I know these things. But – is there more?
“I ask because – because Ceric has eighteen years, and Ashild is nearing that.” She could not say any more than this, and in fact surprised herself by saying as much. It had been Ashild’s prompting, her fears about Ceric’s own gift to her, that led her to say this.
She was looking at him, her eyes wide and blue, her lips upturned in question. He let his gaze rest on her a moment before he answered.
“Lady, of Ælfred’s gifts to you, I do not know.”
He gave a slow exhalation of breath, as if he himself had considered just this question. He seemed sincere in his uncertainty, and she could not help but believe him.
“Ælfred has given many rich gifts, this I think you know. Besides St Peter’s Pence, that gift of treasure he has sent nearly every year to Rome to our Holy Father, he has ordered made such gifts as he has sent to you. Bishops, and other great benefactors have received them.”
“Bishops,” she echoed, not deigning to consider herself near their rank in importance. She scarce thought of herself as a great benefactor, but Raedwulf had insisted last night that she was. And Abbess Sigewif had herself called her that, she must admit.
“About the young people,” Raedwulf went on, “I cannot say. I do not know Ceric of Kilton well, and he has not confided in me his plans for his future. Nor do I think has he to Worr, who would I think, tell me something of such import.”
Ælfwyn felt she must say the next, as difficult as it was to broach. Here, and in private, was the only way it could be said. She drew a quiet breath, and spoke as slowly as she could, fearful the words might tumble out and sound even worse.
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