The Forever Queen

by Helen Hollick

  Edmund crossed to the door. “So,” he said with contempt, “you are, after all, like Streona? A man who thinks only of himself, with no care for honour or the protection of the innocent. What if Oxford does rebel and take up arms? Queen Emma will be the first one to die—after us—in case she is with child. I am only a boy, but even I know that for a fact.”

  Athelstan blew a snort of derision down his nose. “They will not kill her; she is part Danish herself. They’ll set her inside a nunnery until certain she is barren.”

  Edmund merely stood staring at his brother. If that was what he wanted to believe…

  Athelstan picked up his braes, eased them over his buttocks, tied the lacings. Held his hands up in surrender. “You are right. They will kill her. It was a passing thought. A bad one. I apologise.”

  19

  13 November 1002—Islip, Oxfordshire

  Lady? Lady! Stir yourself!” Emma woke abruptly, confused and disorientated from a heavy and fevered sleep. There was a man in her chamber? Why? To murder her?

  Her heart pounding with fear, only dignity salvaged her composure. If they thought she would plead and beg for mercy, they were wrong. To her relief, she recognised Athelstan—and then a second fear burst into her mind: had he turned against his father?

  “Lady. We must leave at once.” Athelstan was leaning over her, his hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her.

  Thank God! He held no dagger!

  “Leave? But why? I am unwell. I do not wish to go anywhere.” This illness had seen her to bed for four days with an aching body, a blinding headache, and alternating sweats and shivering. She had not eaten and had drunk only honey-sweetened, watered wine. The symptoms were easing but had left her weak and tired.

  Despite being ill, she liked it here in the palace at Islip, a handful of miles north of Oxford. A place clean, warm, and well maintained. Especially, she admired the beech woods, dressed in their splendid autumn finery, that crowded beyond the perimeter fencing. Before falling so ill, she had walked there several times with Saffron, enjoying the delight of kicking at the leaves piled in dishevelled heaps and running, laughing up and down the slopes and banks, the dog joyfully barking at her heels. She peered with bruised, tired eyes into her stepson’s grave face. Her stay was to be a short happiness, then.

  What had possessed Æthelred to command his eldest son to be her escort here she could not imagine. The young man had barely spoken a word to her, confining himself to nods and grunts. She assumed her husband had meant it as a show of trust, a gesture of peace between father and son. Whether Athelstan had accepted it as such, she had no idea; if he had, the peace was likely to be short-lived. The two were always disagreeing, and every argument ended with one of them storming out in a rage. Emma did not mind in the slightest when Athelstan retreated from court to spend isolated weeks in one of his own manors, for his absences were a welcome relief. The Æthelred’s rages were not so easy to endure, particularly if there were other things already itching at him like aggravating bites.

  Reaching for a mantle, Emma asked, “What is wrong?” It was an effort to talk; her throat and neck hurt, making it difficult to swallow, to form the words in her dry mouth.

  “Rebellion, Lady. We do not have the men to defend ourselves should Oxford decide to take up arms with the rest of the Danelaw. We are to join my father at Shaftesbury Abbey.”

  This was not making sense to Emma. “Am I in danger?”

  Athelstan answered with one curt word: “Yes.”

  Her ladies, grasping the situation in a flutter of alarm, started to shoo Athelstan from the chamber, pulling clothing from the hanging poles, urging Emma to rise, get dressed.

  “I do not think I can ride,” Emma protested wearily, swinging her legs from the bed, suppressing a wince of pain from her protesting body. “I do not have the strength to stand.”

  Running his hand through his fair hair, Athelstan stood, perplexed, within the open doorway. Below, in the hall, there came sounds of hasty packing and preparing to leave. Outside, horses being led into the courtyard, chests and bundles being secured to harnessed pack ponies and mules. “I did not want to take the wagons,” he said, “they will slow us down.”

  Damn! This whole thing was becoming a nightmare.

  Emma pushed herself to her feet, tried a smile. “I will do my best not to delay you,” she said. Her face was pale, beads of sweat were scattered on her forehead. “Give me time to dress.”

  Making a decision, Athelstan shook his head. “Get your ladies to wrap you warm and comfortable, then wait here. You shall ride up with me.”

  “Pallig’s widow and children are in Oxford,” Emma stated, already drawing on her woollen stockings, ignoring the presence of a man. “Are they safely away?”

  Athelstan reddened. To his shame, he had not thought of them, but then why should he? It was only the troublemakers Eadric Streona would be going after, not the women and children. “It is you I must get to safety,” he answered. “Please, be as quick as you can.”

  Wanting to argue, Emma opened her mouth to protest, but Athelstan had retreated from the chamber, and she did not have the energy to summon him back.

  Athelstan himself carried Emma down the wooden stairs, his glower silencing any remark from his brother or young Godwine, who were mounted and ready to leave. She weighed no more than a merlin; she would not have been able to ride alone, and a litter would be too slow. Lifting Emma onto his stallion’s withers, Athelstan vaulted into the saddle, his arm supportive around her waist. “Forgive the intimacy,” he murmured. “I can see no other way for you to travel.”

  There was only the one good road south, and it passed close to Oxford. From two miles away they saw the smoke curling into the sky, nearer, heard the cries and screams. Athelstan cursed, urged his horse into a canter. Damn Streona! He had sent orders for him to wait until they were safely away. This was typical of the man, never seeing sense above stark impatience and always blaming the outcome to be someone else’s fault.

  Emma’s eyes were dull, her skin burning. She lifted her head from Athelstan’s shoulder, looked towards the rise of Oxford’s surrounding walls. “What is it?” she asked, frowning, forcing her sluggish mind to concentrate. “Why is the town burning, Athelstan? There is something wrong; we must stop.”

  How he regretted, through the years to come, not heeding her instinctive concern, but what could he have done had he complied? Could he have stopped the killing and the slaughter? Would the lives of the innocent have been saved had he reined in and entered Oxford? Or would more have died on this Saint Brice’s Day had he tried to curb Streona’s vengeance? Who could say that the Æthelings and Emma too might not have fallen among those being savagely massacred? Once the smell of blood had been let loose in the air, the lust of killing always took hold. Regret only came after, when the blood has been washed away.

  Tightening his grip around Emma’s waist, Athelstan dug his spurs into his grey’s flanks and drove him forward into a reckless gallop, bellowing at his small emergency retinue of men to follow close behind, swords drawn.

  Exhausted, light-headed, Emma buried her head in his mantle, shutting out as well as she could the desperate cries of death and the sounds of its making, Athelstan’s own vigorous blasphemy against God and his contempt of his father and Eadric Streona loud in her ears.

  “Gunnhilda is in there,” she whimpered once, knowing that even had he heard, her stepson could do nothing about it.

  Athelstan had liked Pallig. It had been Pallig who had taught him how to use a sword and axe, how to defend himself with a shield; Pallig who had first taken Athelstan, as a young, greenstick lad, whoring. None of this Emma knew, nor, as her husband’s eldest son urged his horse down the road past Oxford’s closed gates, did she realise that tears were streaming from his eyes.

  ***

  Edwine Thursson had done his best, but his best had not been sufficient. He was arrested with the rest of the Danish traders as they fought to protect th
eir women and children. Edwine himself had organised their safety by ushering the vulnerable, the wives, the mothers, the young, the elderly and infirm, into the sanctuary of Oxford’s blessed church of Saint Frideswide. A typical Saxon church, plain but functional: rectangular, virtually windowless, the walls fashioned from split trunks, the roof reed-thatched.

  Streona’s mastiff dogs, bred for killing, attacked any who had not heeded Edwine’s hasty orders to flee, their bloodstained fangs ripping at the throats of terrified women. Children, their small hands slipping from the frantic clutching of their mothers’ fingers, were scooped up by Streona’s men, their heads slammed against stone walls or solid doorposts.

  Eadric Streona had every prisoner hanged, without exception. The last view Edwine Thursson had as the noose was set around his neck was of the burning embers of a church. Charred timbers, piles of ash and rubble. Incongruously, the door lintel stood, soot-blackened but unharmed, the only part of the church that had been built of stone. As the rope tightened and his legs began to kick, the urine and faeces to scour from his body, he recognised what else lay among the red-hot debris of Saint Frideswide. Those weird, twisted items were not part of the church, were not benches or candelabra or decoration. He focused his remaining attention on one clear thing as his tongue swelled and the blood was choked from reaching his brain. It was a woman’s hand, gnarled, black. Burnt.

  He prayed, as the life left him, that those who had died inside there would forgive him for his cowardice. For the fact that his death was so much easier than had been theirs.

  20

  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. “Th
e 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.”