She herself had no interest in the halls of paradise. She was much more interested in what was happening in Æthelred’s hall now that the Danish threat had passed.
“What news of the queen?” she asked her father. “Has she asked for me?”
“She was pleased enough to learn of your escape from Exeter,” he said. “She thought you were dead.” He turned hard, assessing eyes on Wulf. “I would learn more about what happened that day,” he said, “and I expect you to give me a full accounting.”
There was a chill in his voice, and Elgiva did not envy her brother. He would have to confess that he had been delayed in rescuing her from the burh at Exeter because he had been dallying with his whore. That, however, was his problem.
“Has the queen sent me a summons?” she begged her father. “Am I to return to the court?” She longed to be in Winchester and away from the stifling boredom of her father’s manor. She would swear that the hall itself was shrinking daily, little by little.
“The queen did not summon you,” he said. “Indeed, you would find little there to amuse you. The Lady Emma is in mourning for those who were lost at Exeter. She has very few women in attendance upon her, for she cannot afford it. Her income has been greatly reduced because so many of her properties in Exeter were plundered and burned by Swein’s army. Rumor has it that she has applied to her brother Richard for funds. What’s more, she has lost favor with the king. He treats her with cold civility and continues to bar her from his councils.”
Elgiva toyed thoughtfully with the salt spoon. If Æthelred had tired of Emma again, it was even more imperative that she return to court. She could influence the king in ways that her father never could. Besides, the æthelings would be there, and she still hoped to beguile her way into Ecbert’s bed.
She folded her hands on the table before her, leaning urgently toward her father.
“I am weary of living so far away from the court,” she said. “If the queen can find no place for me among her retinue, my brother’s house in Winchester will suit me very well. Surely you will join the king for the Yule celebration, and then I could—”
“I shall not join the king’s court for the Yule,” her father interrupted her. “He would have me there, to be sure. He wants all his ealdormen close by his side, but I have danced attendance upon him through the summer and I see no reason to court him through the winter season as well. He pays no heed to my words, and I’ll not waste my time.”
“All the more reason then,” she urged, “that I return to Winchester. The king has favored me in the past and I may be—”
“You, my girl,” her father snarled, reaching across the board to grab her wrist so tightly that the pain and shock made her cry out, “will be less generous with your favors henceforth. I know well enough how the king has favored you, and that you welcomed him like a bitch in heat. I looked the other way while I thought it might be profitable, but it has brought us nothing, and now it will stop. I will see to that! Your old nurse is not here to pander for you, and you will not find it so easy to cozen me.”
He thrust her away from him, and Elgiva scowled, rubbing the sting from her wrist. She sat in stony silence as he took a long pull from his ale cup and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“The king will not dally with you, in any case,” he said with a belch. “The bishops have got their claws into him and have persuaded him that a chaste ruler is most likely to win God’s favor. The queen is the only woman to visit the king’s chamber now.”
“I thought you said he treated her coldly,” Elgiva grumbled.
“He does,” her father growled, “but that need not stop him from swiving her. He hated his first wife, yet he got a dozen children on her. God forbid this one should be so fruitful,” he muttered.
“The king cannot live forever,” Wulf said. “We should be currying the favor of his sons.”
Elgiva thought this an excellent idea, but she knew better than to voice her opinion now. Her father was drunk, past the point where she could persuade him with honeyed words and smiles. She could do nothing but sit here and listen—and hope that she learned something to her benefit.
“The king has looped his purse strings about the necks of his eldest sons,” her father said, slurring his words and staring dully into his ale cup. “He has taken control of their estates and their income and, what is more, he has set spies upon them. They cannot so much as take a piss without the king knowing about it.”
“He suspects them of some treachery, then?” Ufegeat asked in surprise.
Her father gave a shout of laughter. “Whom does he not suspect?” he asked. “For the time being,” he said, spearing another haunch of meat with his knife, “we will be patient. We will watch and wait and listen. You,” he pointed his knife at Ufegeat, “will go to Jorvik for the Yule. There are some matters there that need attending. You,” he pointed his knife at Wulf, “will stay here with me, and together we shall guard our family’s greatest asset. And you,” Elgiva saw the knife aimed at her, “will resign yourself to a life of quiet solitude. Be thankful that you do not have to count your pennies like Æthelred’s queen. And if I catch you cocking your eye at any man, no matter who he is I will shave your head and dress you in sackcloth with my own hands.”
She gaped at him in horror.
“What have I done to deserve such a fate?” she cried.
“It is what you are destined to do that concerns me,” her father said, “and I will not have you making any move that might foul my plans. Now get you to your chamber. I have matters to discuss with my sons.”
He waved his knife drunkenly toward the door, but Elgiva did not move. She could feel the storm of blood surging to her head like an angry red tide, and it swept her past all caution.
“Nay, father. I have some matters to discuss with you,” she said, leaning across the board to hiss at him. “I would know what use you made of the news I fed you about the queen’s doings on that wretched journey across Wessex. I would know what my brother was about when I saw him speaking to a Danish thug in Exeter’s backstreets. And most of all, I would know what plans you have made for me without my leave.”
Her father froze, mouth agape, while the juice from his meat dripped down his chin and into his beard. But it was her brother Ufegeat who responded by striking her a hard blow across the face. While she was still too dazed to move, he grabbed her arm and dragged her from the bench.
“You have ever made too free with your tongue, girl,” he snarled, “and your cunt.” He shook her so that she grew dizzy. “This time you have gone too far. You will shut your mouth, keep your legs together, and do as you are bid. Get out!”
He thrust her away from him so that she fell off the dais and onto the hard slate floor. She lay there for a moment, waiting for the room to stop spinning, assessing the damage. Her hip and her elbow hurt where she had landed, and she tasted blood in her mouth. She saw Wulf glance at her, but he made no move to aid her. He was too much of a coward to defy his elder brother.
Her father did not even look at her, and Ufegeat had already dismissed her. Slowly she drew herself to her feet and limped toward the door, cradling her arm.
Ufegeat would never have touched her if Groa were still alive. They, all of them, had feared the old woman, wary of her knowledge of herbs, knowing that Groa would take her revenge should anyone injure her darling.
Well, she may not have Groa’s knowledge or her skill, but she would find a way to make them pay. She did not know how to do it, nor how long it would take her, but one day she would make them repent their treatment of her. Let them have their plans and secrets. Let them try to mew her up like a kenneled hound. Their prize bitch had a vicious streak, and someday they would discover, to their sorrow, that she could bite.
October 1003
Winchester, Hampshire
It seemed to
Emma that the king’s icy attitude toward her had seeped into the very walls of the palace. She had few friends among the nobility, and even the servants treated her with a brittle courtesy that she found difficult to bear.
Like the king, they held her as somehow responsible for the Danish raid, as if, like the pull of the tides, she had inexorably drawn the invaders to England’s shores. It was whispered about that her Norman reeve, Hugh, had with his own hand opened Exeter’s gates to the Danish shipmen, and so the destruction of the city was laid squarely upon Emma’s shoulders. The massacre of St. Brice’s Day the year before, set in motion by the king’s command, had been forgotten. Instead it was the foreign queen who was to blame for all.
As a result she lived like a stranger among them. The king never sought her out, rarely even addressed her—not even when she made her nightly visits to his chamber to gratify his sexual demands. She knew, as she carried out that particularly odious function, that she was doing her duty as wife and queen, yet she felt sullied by the act, for there was no affection or warmth conveyed by it in either direction. It seemed to her that they were little better than animals trapped in the same pen for the sole purpose of copulation.
In spite of Æthelred’s coldness, however, she saw much of him, for she refused to form a second court, as she had in the first year of her marriage. Sensing that the king would be only too happy if she hid herself away in her quarters, she took advantage of every opportunity to accompany Æthelred wherever he might go. She attended him at Mass and she hunted with him daily. She sat beside him at his board and rarely left before the king himself sought his chamber. She met his icy disdain with stoic patience, steeling herself against him like a fine-edged sword. She bore ever in her mind the recognition that she was a Norman duke’s daughter and an English queen, and she used that knowledge as a whetstone to sharpen her will against the king.
She saw much of Athelstan as well, but she took care that they were never alone. A single glance from him still had the power to stop her heart, but she had grown adept at disguising her thoughts and her emotions. The king’s warning about his son still rang in her ears, and she would give him no reason to suspect that she held any special regard for Athelstan, for the ætheling’s sake as much as her own. She cultivated, instead, the few friends that she had at court—the ealdorman Ælfric and Bishop Alfheah among them. They were her allies, and they imparted to her the news of events occurring within the realm that her husband, in his cold silence, withheld from her. With their assistance she was able to keep her finger upon the pulse of the kingdom, from Canterbury to Jorvik, from London to Exeter.
Nevertheless, it was a dreary existence, and in late September Emma looked forward with eagerness to the return of the king’s children from their sojourn in Oxfordshire. She was not foolish enough to hope that their presence would somehow thaw the mood of the king and the court toward her, but at least the children would distract her. And so it proved.
The little party arrived late one afternoon. Emma, in her chamber with Wymarc, Margot, and Father Martin, had been dictating letters that would go to her brother in Rouen. The churches and abbeys in and around Exeter were desperate for money in order to begin repairs and, more important, to provide food and shelter for so many who had suffered at the hands of the Danes. They looked to her for help, and she had little to give.
As she pondered how best to frame her request to Richard, she heard a commotion outside the chamber door. A moment later it was flung open, and Æthelred’s children swooped on her like a flock of starlings. Four-year-old Wulfa immediately demanded to be lifted into Emma’s lap, while her two elder sisters insisted that she settle a dispute over which of them had grown the most over the summer. She had just pronounced that Ælfa did indeed appear to be a little bit taller than her elder sister when Edgar, now ten and accordingly bloodthirsty, held his new knife under her nose for inspection. He offered to demonstrate its edge by slicing off one of Ælfa’s golden curls. This resulted in tears and a howl of protest from his victim, who sought safety behind Emma’s chair.
“Put your knife back in its sheath, Edgar,” Emma exclaimed, while Wymarc distracted Ælfa and Edyth with a coffer filled with silken ribbons. “Now,” Emma said to Edgar, as she shifted Wulfa on her knee, “show me the hilt of your dagger. What is the design on it?”
“It is a dragon,” he said eagerly, unbuckling the belt and holding the sheathed knife so that Emma could admire it. “Look how its body wraps all the way around the grip. And see, there is flame coming out of its mouth. I call it Firedrake.”
“It is beautiful,” she said, tracing with her fingertip the delicate silver inlay that formed the dragon. “Where did you get this princely gift?”
“Edward gave it to me before we left Headington palace,” he said. “The smith there has boxes and boxes of weapons stored away in a special room, things that once belonged to my uncle and my grandsire. He gave this knife to Edward as soon as we arrived, but Edward said that he had no use for a dagger, and so he gave it to me. I have a shield, too. I can show it to you. Shall I get it?”
“I will look at it tomorrow,” Emma said, vaguely apprehensive at hearing Edgar’s description of his brother’s generosity. When did a boy ever not have use for a dagger, especially one as beautiful and prized as this? “But where is Edward? Has he gone to find your older brothers?”
“No,” Edgar said with a scowl. “Nurse took him straight to his bed. He is always tired now. He never plays with me anymore.” Then his face brightened. “But he said that I am to be the king’s cupbearer now, because it is too hard for him to stand up for so long.”
Alarmed, Emma thought back to when she had last seen Edward. It had been June, and he had not yet fully recovered from the illness that had felled him in the spring. Had he not improved over the summer months? She glanced at Margot who, understanding, nodded and slipped away. Margot would check on the boy, and Emma was confident that the old nurse would find some remedy for whatever it was that ailed him.
But it quickly became apparent that Margot had no potion that could restore the health of the young ætheling. As Emma sat with him later that day, his hand in hers, she was filled with foreboding. It was as if some vital spark within him had dimmed, and she sensed that before long it would be extinguished altogether.
Chapter Thirty-six
April 1004
Winchester, Hampshire
All through the winter and into the spring Margot searched for a cure for Edward’s illness. She rubbed his chest with an ointment of rue and aloe seethed in oil that seemed to give him brief respite from the pain in his chest. A cream of wormwood and bishopwort boiled in butter eased the aches in his knees and fingers. An ale laced with parsnip was meant to strengthen him and dispatch his blinding headache, but it did little more than help him sleep.
The leech sent for by the king insisted on bleeding the boy, and this remedy seemed to do more harm than good. Edward, who had been able to walk around his chamber for a little while each day, could not even sit up for two weeks after the cupping, and he never regained the strength to leave his bed. All through the autumn and the yuletide he kept to his chamber, tended by the queen and her attendants.
Emma spent an hour with him every day, regaling him with stories that she remembered from her childhood. Sometimes she brought her harp and sang to him, telling him afterward what the words meant, although often the music lulled him to sleep. Slowly, what little strength the boy had faded away, and she watched his slow decline with a heavy heart.
The king rarely ventured into Edward’s sickroom, and this indifference toward the boy angered Emma. She complained bitterly of it to Margot and to Wymarc one afternoon in late spring, as a dull rain thrummed upon the roof thatch. That morning, in a voice that was little more than a whisper, Edward had confided to her that he knew his father disliked him, because his visits were so infrequent.
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��I told him that he must never doubt that his father loves him. A king, I said, must care for every single person in the land, and for that reason he is prevented from spending his time the way he might wish.” She stood up and went over to the window. Its thick, greenish pane gave a lurid light to the unrelenting April rain. It had been many days since they had seen the sun, and she had begun to think that, like her own spirits, the clouds would never lift. “I do not understand,” she said softly, “how the king can be so cold to the boy. Does he not realize that the child is dying? Athelstan visits his brother nearly every day, yet the boy’s own father cannot sit with him for even a few brief moments in a week. It is heartbreaking to see how much Edward longs for his father.”
She turned away from the greenish light and saw Wymarc, heavy with child, look up suddenly from her embroidery, her brows shrouded with grief. Emma bit her lip and wished that she could take back her words. Wymarc’s child would have no father. They had all come to accept now that Hugh must be dead, slain by some Danish hand. And even if he had somehow managed to escape that fate, he would not likely make his way back to England ever again.
“I think,” Margot said, “that in this instance you do the king an injustice.” She was sorting through a pile of gowns that had belonged to Edyth, looking for those that could be cut down for the king’s younger daughters.
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