The Forever Queen

by Helen Hollick

  “There are things I could say that you already know—I am the son of my father; my blood is Anglo-Danish, not tainted with Norman watering; and the crown is mine by right—but none of those would answer your question.”

  Leofric shook his head. No, they would not.

  “You will support me,” Harold said, leaning forward, bringing his face close, so that Leofric could see for himself the conviction behind the words, “because I intend to be King, and I require the experience of a man I can trust to be my second in command.”A slow, calculating smile crept over Leofric’s face. He stood, regarded Harold eye to eye, then knelt before him and bent his head in submission.

  4

  20 November 1035—Winchester

  Aghast, Emma glowered at Godwine. “You are not seriously suggesting I am to comply with this treasonous outrage?”

  That was exactly what Godwine was suggesting.

  “Your Earl of Wessex has the sense to realise there is very little he can do to prevent me,” Leofric drawled, irritated that Emma had not given him permission to sit and had been standing for the entire hour of interview.

  “The Earl of Wessex,” Godwine snapped back, “is fully aware there is much I can do! I have a value for the lives of men who remain loyal, that is all.”

  Leofric shrugged. “I am in agreement; why waste blood when there is an alternative? A pity your loyalty is misguided, though, Godwine. The King will be grieved to hear of it.”

  “So he shall!” Emma hissed, furious with both of them, the one for his audacity, the other for his indiscretion. She would never have believed it of Godwine—that he could turn his back so quickly and easily on both her and his King. “I assure you I shall repeat every word you have vomited from your mouth to my son, Leofric.”

  “I am sure you will, ma’am,” the Earl of Mercia answered as he swept her a low, mocking bow, “but when will he be in England to learn of it? Soon? Or does the rumour that Harthacnut may not answer your summons have credence?”

  The public hall at Emma’s Winchester house was crowded, mostly with Leofric’s men, who had entered the city fully armed against no offered resistance. Again, Godwine’s acceptance had flown in the face of Emma’s indignation.

  “It is pointless to fight,” Godwine had said, as exasperated as Emma and equally as determined to have his way. “All it will achieve is the death of good men, and for what? A loss of public dignity? Without Harthacnut here in England, we are like a holed ship. Provided we stay in shallow waters, we will not sink, but once the tide floods, unless we can haul her higher up the shore, she will be gone.”

  Emma’s housecarls had stood helpless as Leofric had, taken temporary command of Winchester. “If the North unites,” Godwine had said, “then Wessex will burn as easily as a torch set to a summer-dried meadow. Without your son we can do nothing except appear to submit.”

  That one word had alerted Emma to Godwine’s intention. Appear. Sitting in what had been Cnut’s throne—Harthacnut’s now—Emma regarded Leofric with cool hatred. Godwine had never liked the man; she had been ambivalent towards him, for Cnut had thought of him as a reliable Earl who took the responsibility of Mercia as a personal and valued achievement. Under Cnut, however, Leofric’s loyalty had never been tested.

  “Harthacnut is King of England,” she said, “not Harold. He has no say over the treasury.”

  “Once he is crowned he shall,” Leofric tossed back. “And that, I assure you, shall happen inside a week. With or without your cooperation. You either give what we want voluntarily, or Harold will come to Winchester and take it for himself. It is your choice, ma’am. I doubt the people of Winchester will thank you for making the wrong one.”

  And that was why, she realised now, Godwine had urged her to comply with this outrage. If they had been permitted an opportunity to discuss tactics and strategy, to plan and collude, she would have understood Godwine’s thinking from the outset, but Leofric’s arrival had come as a surprise. Mercia had caught them with their guard down. What was it Godwine had said in those few moments of quick decision between barring the gates and allowing him entry? “When caught in a trap, it was no use digging deeper, best to sit quiet and think of a sensible way to climb out.”

  What Emma wanted to do was take out Leofric’s eyes, remove his tongue, his heart. Burn his entrails, hang him from the rafters of this very hall, take an axe to his head—oh, she could think of a hundred unpleasant deaths! She did not want to capitulate to these humiliating demands, but then neither did she want harm to come to Winchester.

  “Very well,” she reluctantly agreed, “you may have the revenue from the North; not all the annual tax has been gathered from Northumbria. If Bernicia will surrender it, you may keep it.” That in itself would busily employ these upstarts. The North was notorious for refusing to pay due taxation; it would be a small loss for Wessex to do without. “For the rest, Harold may hold it until Harthacnut comes to reclaim it. But mark my word, Leofric, on your head rests the King’s wrath.”

  Leofric’s smile was sardonic. This had been an easier task than he had expected. “That fact I am already aware of. It just depends on which King we are referring to, does it not?”

  Godwine felt a wave of relief wash through him. Thank God Emma had seen his ploy for what it was, a ruse to give them time. If war was to begin—and it would, sooner rather than later—he did not want it to break out here within the confines of Winchester. And not without Harthacnut to coordinate a retaliation and put this bastard, Leofric, in his place. Six feet deep in the earth.

  “You may encamp your army five miles from Winchester’s walls,” Emma offered. “Your usurper’s share of the treasury shall be delivered by tomorrow noon.”

  “Dawn, madam, would be the more practical,” Leofric countered. “We can be marching towards London and King Harold by sunup.”

  “Then break camp and be ready to move out,” Emma tossed back. “The pack ponies can fall into column at sunrise.”

  Leofric knew when to cease negotiation. “Sunrise it is, then, and you will be sure to include the crown and the royal sceptre in the load, of course? The King shall be requiring them for his coronation.”

  Emma folded her hands, linking the fingers, her rings flashing in the reflection of the candle and rush light. “If Harold wishes to use a crown, he will need find one of his own. He will not be using my son’s.” She smiled sweetly and flicked her right hand. “As for the sceptre, it is in the safekeeping of my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Surely, Earl Leofric, you know such a holy item is held within the sanctity of God, not among the chests of the treasury?”

  As bluff, it was a master stroke. Leofric was certain Emma lied, but if what she said were true, how much of the fool would he be?

  “Sunrise,” he said with a curt bow as he turned to make his withdrawal. “I expect delivery at sunrise.”

  “Expect as much as you want,” Emma muttered through furious clenched teeth, “but I do not guarantee you will get it.”

  ***

  “The sceptre is with Archbishop Athelnoth?” Godwine queried, one eyebrow raised, when the hall had emptied of intruders. “That is the first I have heard of it!”

  Emma lightly shrugged one shoulder. “Cnut insisted upon sending it there. I would not be surprised to discover his crown is with it also.” Her smile was coquettish, some small triumph over Leofric and the wretched boy he represented. “At least if these things are not with the Archbishop at this precise moment, they soon shall be.”

  She rose, walked unhurried to the stairs that led to her private upper chamber. “You will help me decide what trinkets I can send this coxcomb and his bitch mother, Godwine,” she said, “and you had best come up with an acceptable explanation for what almost bordered on treason.”

  There was anger in Godwine’s retort; had she not understood after all? “Do you not trust my judgement? If you do not, what hope is there for Wessex and England? I can answer you immediately, without necessity to think of excuses. I
t is not treasonous to send an enemy away, having made him believe he has won a skirmish but leaving yourself the opportunity to win the battle.”

  She should have realised that for herself. “We need my son,” she said anxiously, by way of apology.

  Godwine surrendered his anger. He had been as humiliated. To bend to Leofric, of all people? God, how that stuck in his throat!

  5

  25 November 1035—Saint Paul’s, London

  Archbishop Athelnoth, called “The Good” for his devotion to Christ, was not best pleased to be summoned in all haste to London from Canterbury. Nor was he pleased to be ordered to perform a holy ceremony that went against the grain of legality in the eyes of the kingdom and of God. To be consecrated as a King was to be chosen by the Almighty, but first, when there was more than one contestant for the title, men had the deciding of the thing.

  “I cannot crown a King without the express will of the Witan of all England,” the Archbishop said forcibly before the altar of the Cathedral of Saint Paul. It was a wooden building built in the form of a square crucifix, with a high tower perched over the central transept, which dominated the crest of Ludgate Hill, the sprawled city of London, and the flat marshlands of the Thames.

  Ælfgifu found herself impotent to make redress, her fury seething beneath the surface as she was forced to sit quiet and silent on a bench. She had never relied on others before and found the experience both frustrating and humiliating. By God, even Cnut had listened to her! Now, because she was a woman, she had to sit, biting back the words that foamed in her mouth, while Earl Leofric and her son argued their case.

  “Without a crowned King, England is open and vulnerable to attack. To riot and wilful breaking of the law,” Harold stated passionately, convinced of his opinion.

  “Without a crowned King, the very sight of God is obliterated,” Earl Leofric added, not as hopefully as Harold, for he could recognise the stubbornness in this holy man’s face.

  God, thus far, Harold thought, has done little for me. “Despite Queen Emma’s efforts to stop me, Archbishop, I will be King of England.”

  “Very possibly you will,” Athelnoth responded graciously, “but not until the good and noble men of the Witan have agreed it so.”

  “Men either back me or go against me, Archbishop.”

  The threat was subtle, but meant. Athelnoth did not miss its intensity. “For the reasons I have stated, I refuse to crown anyone. The royal sceptre and crown are placed upon this sacred altar behind me, and there, within the sight of God, they remain until judgement has been made.”

  “Or trial by strength prevails.”

  The Archbishop innocently spread his hands. “Then that would also be God’s judgement, would it not?”

  Athelnoth had no care for Harold, nor for his mother. In the sight of God her union with Cnut had been sinful, their children base-born. That one of them should have the effrontery to stand before this altar and lay claim to the rite of sacred consecration angered him to his very soul. And as for the woman, blood clung to her hands. She had made no attempt at penitence for the sin of murder. Had she shown remorse, been more charitable, as was Earl Leofric, or had the humility to take the veil, then the clergy might have looked more favourably on her son, but not a single chapel had benefited from her amassed wealth, not one nunnery or lepers’ hospice had been grateful for her generosity. Generosity? Did the woman know the existence of the word?

  “Then if there is no other way, we shall call together the council,” Harold declared, exasperated. Leofric had said they would have to do so sooner rather than later, but his mother, stamping to her feet, unable to remain silent any longer, would hear none of it.

  “We secure the crown, then go to council,” she insisted, ignoring the Archbishop’s frown of reprimand.

  “The Witan is already summoned,” Athelnoth declared, patient and politely hiding a triumphant smile. “The Queen has sent word to meet at Oxford for the Nativity.” Gleefully added, “Were you at home in your estates, my Lord Leofric, you would have known of this, for the messenger went to your manor, I believe, and found you not there.”

  Leofric made no comment. An Earl could be stripped of title and lands and outlawed if he were not where he was expected to be, or if he ignored, without good reason, a royal command.

  “Do not fret, Archbishop,” Harold leered, “I will be there, with all who follow and support me. Be sure to bring my crown and sceptre to Oxford with you, old man, for we will be requiring them.”

  “As the Queen and Harthacnut shall also be there,” Athelnoth countered.

  Ælfgifu rushed forward, her mouth twisting with aggression. “I will see both that woman and you burn in Hell if you do not consecrate my son!”

  The Archbishop smiled. “For that to be literally so, you will need be there with me.”

  Ignoring the man’s pedantic sarcasm, Ælfgifu stalked from the cathedral, announcing as she went, “Crown my son, Archbishop, or face the consequences. I will not give way to that hag in Winchester, to you, or to God.”

  6

  25 December 1035—Oxford

  Opinion was equally divided. The North wanted Harold; the South, Harthacnut. An impasse, where shouting, coercion, and bargaining were not making any headway, and civilised debate was on the edge of being abandoned.

  The two women, Emma and Ælfgifu, were equally adamant to have their say, and all niceties of femininity had long since been dispensed with.

  “Give me a berserk warrior over a belligerent woman any day,” Leofric confided to the Earl of Deira, Siward, seated beside him on the eastern side of Oxford’s Moot Hall. Siward nodded, amused at the exchange that was in full spate between the Queen Emma and the whore. For all their outward respect of her, there was not a man present who did not think of Ælfgifu as anything less than a whore.

  “And God preserve us from ambitious mothers,” Siward agreed.

  Godwine, sitting opposite, was tired, hungry, and his head throbbed with the incessant talk that had so far got them nowhere. There must, surely, he thought, be an easier way to crown a King?

  “My husband made no mention of a son to me,” Emma insisted, sitting rigid and proud in her place on the dais, although Ælfgifu had objected at the outset at the automatic assumption of seniority. Emma had scathingly set her straight: “I am wearing the crown. My forehead bears the symbol of the crucifix traced there in holy Chrism. Unless there is another in this room who carries the same absolute blessing to call herself a Queen, I shall remain where I am.” An end to that particular argument.

  “My son is the eldest surviving child of Cnut. As his mother I have the right of respect.”

  “Then I suggest you stop behaving like a harbour-side strumpet screaming aloud what she is trying to sell.”

  Despite himself, even the weary Leofric smiled, hiding the reaction quickly behind a covering hand. Emma was no easy woman to argue with, nor, for that matter, was Ælfgifu, but Emma delivered her pert answers without degenerating into obscenities.

  “I take it you have proof my husband was the father of your bastard son?” Emma asked. She was dressed simply, in a dark green gown over an under-gown of dark red, a white veil, minimal jewels, only her betrothal and consecrational rings on her fingers, and a brooch of emeralds and rubies on her shoulder. The only other adornment was her crown. By contrast, Ælfgifu, bedecked in her finest, appeared gaudy.

  “I was wife to Cnut. A wife does not require proof,” Ælfgifu retaliated, irritated that Emma was getting the better of her.

  “You were not wed in the sight of God. Cnut was not in England when you birthed the boy Harold, was, very probably, not in England when you conceived him.”

  As regent in Cnut’s place, she had sat in judgement over many a law trial, listening to the impassioned pleas of men and women brought to stand trial by the majority verdict of a jury of twelve appointed “doomsmen,” Thegns who were duty bound to present suspected evildoers to submit to a court of law. Trial by ordeal
usually sealed the fate of those who could not be satisfactorily judged by other means.

  “And how would you be knowing?” Ælfgifu thundered back, her strident voice booming up into the rafters. “You had scuttled off to Normandy with your pathetic first husband. You abandoned England for the sake of preserving your skin.”

  “As Cnut abandoned you when Æthelred returned. Had you been an acceptable wife to him, would he not have taken you with him? Especially if he suspected you to be carrying his child?”

  Ælfgifu turned to the northern Lords, although few of them were the same men as two and twenty years ago. “I did not know I was with child. Cnut, with his father, had released the north from the oppressive rule of Wessex, yet those freed men dismissed him in favour of Æthelred, to the consequential disaster of England. I faced the fear of death, for had he discovered I carried Cnut’s son, we would both have been murdered.”

  There were difficulties in parrying some of the arguments, Emma found—how strange that after all these years of contentment, Æthelred’s presence should once again be haunting her? She had to be careful in what she said, could not dwell on Æthelred, lest anyone remember there were two other sons who could claim the title Ætheling. And neither woman would be wanting to remind these men that Cnut had taken England by force and was, technically, a foreign usurper.

  “Yet Cnut thought so much of you he took another woman, Ragnhild, as a lawful wife,” Emma said with scorn, directing attention back to Cnut’s abandoning Ælfgifu.

  “He took a second woman, as he did not expect to return to England,” Ælfgifu retorted.

  “He had every intention of returning,” Emma countered, seizing her chance to amplify this other woman’s ignorance. She smiled, so irritatingly sweetly. “He abandoned you, dear, not England.”

  Many of the southern men laughed. The northerners remained stone-faced.