Emma had not been sorry to go. Forkbeard had greeted her with cold, fiercely calculating eyes and a silent nod. His brooding gaze seemed to weigh her, as if she were not a woman but a commodity that could be bought and sold—a trinket that he might purchase in the market at Rouen. She had colored beneath his fixed, brutal stare, and had wanted to take to her heels to escape it. But she had forced herself to walk slowly from the hall, chin held high, acutely aware of the shipmen all around her who raked her with merciless eyes.
These were men who made their living by murder and rape, men who had been baptized to Christ but whose souls still belonged to heathen gods, or so she had heard. Their grim, weather-scarred faces had haunted her dreams that night, and like her brothers, she wished that Forkbeard and his shipmen had never come to Fécamp. Today, though, the palace was emptied of Danes.
“The shipmen have gone to the harbor to inspect their vessels for storm damage. They will likely not return until dark. I will be back long before that, and I promise I will keep you company then until we put out the candles.” With that she slipped from the room before Mathilde could think of any other objections.
The courtyard was deserted as she made her way toward the stables, and the air was so frigid that it hurt to breathe. She followed the wall, grasping at its stones with one hand as she navigated the slippery mud and slush that had been churned up by men and horses. Emma’s snow-white mare, Ange, whickered a greeting, and Emma nuzzled the horse’s neck, warming her face against its thick winter coat. A moment later, though, she heard a commotion in the stable yard that worried her.
Could the men have returned so soon? Surely not all of them. They would have made a great deal more clamor.
Using Ange as a screen, Emma peered toward the wide doorway and saw Richard and Swein Forkbeard leading their mounts toward the stable. She had always thought her brother quite tall, but the Danish king bested him by half a head. They were the same age—both of them very old by her reckoning, for Richard had been born more than twenty years before Emma. But the king of the Danes, with his white hair and long white beard, worn forked and braided, looked far older. There was a sternness about Swein Forkbeard’s countenance, a hard-eyed ruthlessness that frightened her. He even frightened Richard, she was certain, although he masked it with courtesy.
She had no wish to greet the Danish king again, or to face her brother’s wrath at finding her here, so she shied behind her horse to wait for them to go away. They seemed in no hurry, in spite of the cold. Richard, in halting Danish, was relating the pedigree of the king’s mount and doing his best to explain what he looked for in breeding his horse stock.
She smiled at her brother’s clumsy efforts with Swein’s tongue. Like all of the Duchess Gunnora’s children, he had learned Danish at his mother’s knee. And like most of his siblings, he had abandoned it at an early age. Emma had been the only one to embrace it, and she could speak as fluently in Danish as she could in Frankish or Breton or Latin. She had even learned some of the English used by prelates who sometimes visited her brother from across the Narrow Sea.
Neither Richard nor her brother Robert, the archbishop, knew of Emma’s gift of tongues, as her mother called it. Gunnora had advised Emma to keep this remarkable skill a secret. Use it to listen, she had said, rather than to speak. You will be surprised at what you will learn.
Emma listened now and realized, with a start, that the conversation between her brother and the Danish king had moved from the breeding of horses to the breeding of children.
“A marriage alliance would be in both our interests,” Swein Forkbeard said. “I have two sons who need wives. One of your sisters might do, and you would gain much from such a marriage, I promise you. Of course, were you to reject it, you could lose a great deal.” There was silence for a moment, and then the king said, his voice speculative, taunting, “How much, I wonder, are you prepared to lose?”
Emma covered her mouth with her hand, shocked by the clear threat in Forkbeard’s words. What would he do? Send shipmen to ravage Normandy unless Richard sent one of his sisters to Denmark to wed one of Forkbeard’s sons?
She held her breath, waiting for Richard’s reply.
“My sisters are overly young to wed.” Her brother’s fumbled words were so casual that Emma wondered if he had understood all that the Danish king had said.
“Age matters little,” Forkbeard replied, his tone amiable now. “My youngest son has seen only ten winters, but like his elder brother, he is already a skilled shipman and warrior. As for your sisters,” he paused, and Emma twisted her fingers nervously in Ange’s mane as she waited for him to go on, “you must not be too tender in your care of them. The Lady Emma seems ripe for bedding. You would do well to breed her now, for a good price, or you might find that you have left it too late.”
Emma felt the blood rise to her face, humiliation and anger warring with shock and fear. Surely Richard would not agree to sell her to Denmark! It was a harsh, brutal place, barely Christian. Her family could trace their bloodline back to the northern lands, but that was in the past. Surely it was not part of their future. Denmark was a land of fierce men ruled by a ruthless king. Swein Forkbeard had not inherited his crown but had won it in a battle to the death waged against his own father. Richard could not allow her to marry into a family such as that!
Her blood pounded in her ears, and she had to strain to hear her brother’s response to Forkbeard’s words.
“Your proposal does my family great honor,” Richard said. “You will understand, of course,” he went on, his voice smoothly persuasive in spite of his broken Danish, “that a betrothal is too delicate a matter to be settled quickly. There are many things to consider and to weigh, and as you know, I have two sisters. You have yet to meet the elder, who, by tradition, should naturally be the first to wed.”
She did not hear the Danish king’s reply, for the men’s voices faded, replaced by the clink of bridles as grooms led the horses to their stalls. Emma remained rooted to the spot where she stood, her face buried in Ange’s neck, her thoughts in turmoil over what she had heard.
Swein Forkbeard’s proposal must carry great weight with her brother. Richard was a realist. He would consider the sacrifice of a younger sister a small price to pay for Norman peace with Denmark. It would be terrible for the bride, though—banished to a hostile, distant land. Mathilde would hate it, even as Emma would. She felt her throat constrict at the very thought of it.
No, her brother could not do such a thing to either of his sisters. He would not send them so far away. He had wed their elder sisters to great lords in Brittany and Frankia, securing his borders and adding considerably to his treasure. Surely he would use Mathilde and herself in a similar manner, for Normandy’s border was long and Richard had need of allies.
But Richard was ambitious. A royal marriage, even to a son of the barbarous Swein Forkbeard, would enhance her brother’s prestige throughout Europe. Forkbeard may be a Viking warlord rather than a godly Christian king, but all of Europe feared him, and that made him a valuable ally. She could easily imagine Richard succumbing to that argument, and she feared what he might be plotting with the Danish king in his private chamber.
She whispered a few endearments into Ange’s ear, then, afraid that Forkbeard’s men might arrive hard upon his heels, she hurried back toward the palace. She would say nothing of what she had heard to Mathilde. Their mother, surely, would have some say in the matter, yet Emma was frightened for her elder sister.
A slender needle of anxiety began to prick her insides. She did not trust Richard.
Chapter Two
December 25, 1001
Rochester, Kent
In England that December the fierce snowstorm blinded and buried countless travelers caught on the high chalk downs of Wessex, even within a few short steps of shelter. Near Durham in Northumbria the snow piled so high on the thatc
hed roof of Lord Thorkeld’s great hall that it collapsed of its own weight, burying the lord and his family and retainers, twenty folk in all. On the Isle of Wight a storm surge swept an entire village into the sea. In Devon the once prosperous towns of Pin-hoo and Clyst, their houses, workshops, and storerooms razed to the ground during the previous summer’s Danish raids, were buried beneath fifteen feet of snow, as if they had never existed.
In the king’s hall at Rochester, Æthelred II of England and his councilors sat at table for the winter feast swathed in furs against the bitter cold. Their mood would have been dour even had the weather been more moderate. They drank their Christmas ale with grim determination rather than pleasure, their company unleavened by the presence of any women. The king’s mother, a force at court for nearly twenty-five years, had gone to God some five weeks before, in November, on the Feast of St. Hilda. The king’s lady wife, brought to childbed on Christmas Eve for the eleventh and final time, had breathed her last on Christmas morning. Her cold body lay beneath the vaulted wooden ceiling of the king’s chapel, mourned by her attendants. The child, born too soon and perhaps sensing his loss, found no comfort in the arms of his wet nurse. Whenever the roaring of the wind and the desultory muttering of men momentarily abated, his feeble cry wafted through the hall like the wail of a soul wandering between heaven and earth. The women tending the babe shook their heads, lips pursed. The child was not long for this world, they deemed, for he would not suck.
The men who kept company with the king at the high table gave little thought to the infant and his prospects, for Æthelred had sons a-plenty, several of them fully grown. What he lacked now was a wife, and they were determined to find him one, whether he would or no. They disagreed, however, on where to look for her.
King Æthelred, a man haunted by his past and troubled about his future, sat among them, his tall frame hunched over his silver plate and his right hand clenching a gilded drinking horn. Twenty-three years on the throne had seared creases into his face that were unusual for a man who had not yet seen forty winters. Telltale streaks of gray in his tawny hair testified to the hardship of rule, and the bent angle of his head beneath the thick, gold crown suggested that it was more burden than ornament.
The king, regarding his advisers with watery blue eyes, was well aware of the line of division among them with regard to his marital prospects. The men with lands in the north, led by Ælfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, would urge him to wed Ælfhelm’s daughter Elgiva—a beautiful witch of a girl as ambitious, he suspected, as her father. A marriage there would strengthen the bond between the king and the northern lords, whose allegiances to Ælfhelm and to each other were somewhat stronger, Æthelred knew, than their fealty to him.
The men with lands in the south would urge him to look beyond the Narrow Sea to Normandy for a bride. Wed the duke’s sister, they would tell him, and persuade her brother to side with Æthelred against the Danes who pillaged English towns and abbeys. Æthelred suspected that it might take a great deal of persuading. The Vikings paid Duke Richard well to harbor their ships on his coast and to trade their spoils in his great market in Rouen. If Æthelred should marry one of the duke’s sisters—and if he sealed the alliance with enough gold—Richard might be willing to bar the Danes from his ports, and so stop the Viking rape of English coasts.
Then again, Æthelred knew, he might not.
The hubbub in the hall, which had been muffled while the men filled their bellies, rose again as the meal came to a close and the drinking began in earnest. Æthelred motioned to his cupbearer to refill his drinking horn, then eased himself back in his chair and glowered at the men around him from hooded eyes, focusing at last on Ælfhelm of Northumbria. The ealdorman had risen from his bench and stood now in earnest consultation with a knot of nobles and clergy. His face was as craggy as a weathered scarp and just as difficult to read. Æthelred had never been able to decipher the subtle workings of the mind behind that stonelike visage, but he would wager half of Wessex that tonight Ælfhelm was garnering support for his daughter’s marriage to the crown.
And he would find it, certainly. It was customary for England’s king to choose his bride from one of the noble families of the realm. Æthelred’s wife and his mother both had been daughters of northern lords. Their fathers, though, would have been more pliable than Lord Ælfhelm. It seemed to the king that Ælfhelm was not mortal, but carved from granite and stone. Æthelred neither liked nor trusted the man, although he was careful to hide this. And while the king understood that it was wise to bind his enemies close, it seemed to him that the marriage bed might be too close for comfort. Ælfhelm had sons as well as a daughter, sons who, like their father, hungered for the power that came with a royal marriage. That power, combined with the family’s wealth and northern allegiances, could be more trouble than any girl was worth.
As for the girl herself, the last time the king had seen Elgiva she had been all of thirteen summers old. She had looked far older though, her body full and womanly, her mouth as red and voluptuous as ripe fruit. She was a woman born for bedding, and had she been older he might have forgotten himself and obliged her. But her youth had stopped him. That and her obvious awareness of the power she had over men, which had chilled his ardor somewhat. Now, at sixteen, wealthy and beautiful, with powerful kin and with family lands that rivaled his own, if he did not marry her himself he should have to watch her carefully. Whatever man she did marry must have no pretensions to the throne, or Æthelred might find his very crown at risk.
The king took another long pull at his cup. As for the unmarried sisters of Richard of Normandy, there were two of them, and that was all he knew about them. He knew something of Richard, though—a pretentious upstart sprung from Danish raiders who had decimated the northern territories of the Frankish kingdom, and then settled there to breed horses and brats. Richard’s pedigree was nothing like Æthelred’s noble ancestry, and although Richard himself was a Christian and styled himself “duke,” he was little more than a Danish pirate. In his youth he had even gone a-viking, raiding the Irish coast for gold and slaves, and he had ever welcomed the dragon ships to his harbors. Even now, rumor had it, there were Danish longships, their holds filled with English plunder, sheltering along Normandy’s coast. So to wed one of Richard’s sisters and plant a babe in her belly might be wise. It might give the Norman duke a more personal interest in the security of England’s shores.
Æthelred frowned. To take a Norman bride would offend his northern lords and bind them more strongly to each other—and against him. To wed Ælfhelm’s daughter instead of the Norman girl would be to throw away perhaps his only opportunity to quell the Viking threat to his kingdom. There was peril whichever way he turned, north or south. Taking any wife at all would be a devil’s bargain, and if it were up to him, he would not do it. He was the king. He wanted no woman in his hall.
He drank again, deeply, from the gold-rimmed horn, but the sweet mead that should have sent fire racing through his blood did not warm him. Instead, a chill, cold as the mouth of a grave, snaked along his arms and grazed an icy finger up his spine. A heaviness oppressed him, an inescapable black dread, and he whispered a curse against the sending that he knew was come upon him and that he could not escape. His vision blurred to haze, the sounds of feasting stilled, and from every dark corner, shadows streamed toward him until they reached the dais and formed a pulsing darkness before him. From its murky heart, his dead brother’s face, eyes glowing and malignant, stared into his.
He tried to pray, to curse, but he could make no sound except the formless, silent howl that was the voice of nightmare. The drinking horn slipped from his hand, yet he did not hear it fall. He heard only a low keening, like the sound of the wind hurtling against white cliffs above a pounding sea. It grew until it filled his brain, and again he tried to cry out, clutching his head in his hands as other hands grasped him, and the black phantom before him rippled and then fade
d at last.
Alarmed voices rang in his ears, and someone held a cup to his mouth, urging him to drink, but he dashed the cup away and shook off the hands that would tend him. Desperate to distract them, he called for music and was rewarded by the strum of the harp and the chanting of his scop.
His men scattered back to their places, but as Æthelred cast a furtive glance around the room, the eyes that met his were guarded and troubled. What did they think they had seen? A king besotted and drowned in his cups? A man overcome with grief at the death of his wife?
Better that than a king haunted by his brother’s ghost.
Three times now the thing that had been his brother had appeared thus before him, staring with glistening eyes. He had seen it first a month ago, hovering like some monstrous bird above his mother as she lay dying. Three days later, when he followed the dowager queen’s body to its resting place at Wherwell Abbey, he had glimpsed Edward’s face glaring at him, a darker shade among the chapel shadows. And tonight it had come again to torment him. Was it to be his wyrd, his fate, to be visited forever by his dead brother now that he alone remained alive of those who had seen Edward die?
What was it that drew the dead forth to walk among the living? And what would it take to send the thing back into its grave?
His thoughts flew to his dead wife, Ælfgifu, lying cold and still upon her bier. Tomorrow he would take her body by ship to its resting place at Minster Abbey. Would the specter of his brother be waiting there for him, as it had waited at Wherwell? He shuddered at the thought of it. Tonight he would pray for redemption, beseech forgiveness and mercy from God for the death of his brother. He would even plead for the repose of his mother’s soul, although he had no doubt that she was tasting the torments of hell.
Chapter Three
December 25, 1001
(2013) Shadow on the Crown Page 2
