The Handfasted Wife

by Carol McGrath

  Elditha turned to her daughter. ‘Never mind, Thea. There is a tapestry to be worked. Your father will greet us later.’ She guided Thea to a side door that led from the great hall to the women’s building, with a servant scurrying in front of them to move back the tapestry and usher them through. Outside, they crossed the snowy yard, winding around drifts and abandoned storage wagons to the bower hall which lay peacefully under its glittering white covering. As they were shaking snow from their cloaks inside the doorway, Thea clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, Mother, I nearly forgot. Grandmother Gytha says that she needs to talk to you.’

  ‘I see.’ Elditha surveyed the long room. Candles burned and spluttered in their sconces. An enormous log hissed and glowed in the central hearth, but otherwise the hall was quiet today, the large tapestry frame deserted and the stools before it empty. The northern women had absented themselves and only a few women from their own lands of Wessex were talking quietly in corners as they spun wool. She nodded to them, sat Thea down to sort threads into colours and, when the girl was settled, she asked quietly, ‘And why is that? Does your grandmother need to speak about you, Thea?’

  Thea must not upset Gytha. None of them must: not Thea, not her either, nor any of her other children – especially her three boys all older and, hopefully, gaining sense. She sighed. For how long would they remain a family? The boys would soon be off to King Dairmaid’s court in Dublinia, but Thea was to go to her grandmother’s household to learn responsibility from Grandmother Gytha and to prepare for marriage. Her grandmother would train her to be a wife and mother, to learn other ways of running a household: brewing, understanding herbs, making cheese, churning butter, organising maids. ‘Thea, if you upset your grandmother you will be spending the feast of St Stephen here sorting those threads and without company except for your maid. Do you understand?’ She pointed at the box of threads.

  Thea bowed her head. ‘I do not think that Grandmother Gytha is angry with me. She just said that she must find time to speak with you.’ Thea looked down at the box of threads on her knee.

  ‘Well, then, behave and you will enjoy Christmas after all.’

  Young Gytha, known to them all as Thea, since Harold’s mother possessed the same name, was developing into a provocative girl of 14 who dwelled in a world of new gowns and ribbons, gazing into her silver mirror and preening. Yet for all Thea’s faults, Elditha loved her beautiful elder daughter’s spirit, and she would miss her terribly. In a year’s time her child would be married.

  She sighed. Any talk with the family matriarch could be daunting. Gytha had wasted no time in putting Elditha firmly in her place as a wife and mother. When she had been a new wife – Thea’s age, young and inexperienced – it was Gytha who had befriended, protected and guided her, but when she had confided worries about Harold’s fidelity to her, Gytha told her, ‘A soldier needs comfort at night when a wife is not there to provide it.’ Elditha had bristled at those words and from that day on she could not help wondering which ladies had slept with her husband, even though Gytha had meant soldiers’ women, never noblewomen.

  Gradually the bower hall filled up and, as the afternoon light grew into twilight, there was the comforting hum of female conversation. The ladies ate dinner in the bower so that their husbands could discuss the King’s illness. With great thumps the servant boy turned the sand clock over and over as the afternoon passed. Elditha longed to see Harold but he did not attend the evening service either. Perhaps he was waiting for her to come to their chamber. She said her goodnights to the other women early, returned to their apartment, her three women trailing behind in case they were needed, but she sent her ladies away to her children and sat alone sewing by candlelight.

  Towards midnight, just as she began to think he would not come to her, he swept into their antechamber. Wearily, he pulled off his mantle. ‘I am sorry to make you wait, Elditha, my love, but it bodes ill. King Edward is weak. Edith says he won’t eat. Now he only wants clergymen by his bed. We can do nothing more for him.’

  She set aside her embroidery, rose and took his mantle, folded it and laid it neatly over the wide arms of her sewing chair with a comforting and familiar gesture.

  ‘So, then, husband, which will it be: Christmas banquet or a funeral feast?’

  ‘Edith says that he wants us to carry on without him and the physicians tell us that he may yet recover. Who knows? We can do nothing more but wait and pray. It’s in God’s hands now.’ He caught her waist and drew her close to him. ‘But I am sorry, my love. How have you passed your time here? Come here and tell me.’

  His presence filled the room. She adored him and she knew he still loved her too. ‘Well, we are mostly with your mother, our own cousins and our women. Thea adores her grandmother. But Gytha wants to speak to me about something. I wonder if it is about Thea.’

  ‘Probably the arrangements for Thea to be in her household, and that is good, don’t you think?’ He reached up and pulled her veil away and tossed it onto the cloak.

  Elditha kissed him and, anticipating what was coming now, began to loosen her thick plait’s binding. ‘Well then, your mother has set up a tapestry for us to embroider, a hanging depicting the Garden of Eden. It is for the new cathedral. Thea avoids it when she can. I am working on Eve. And appropriately enough Gytha is embroidering the apple.’

  ‘Ah, I suppose you have left the serpent for my sister? Here let me. I love to loosen this.’ He was undoing her pale hair and shaking it out. She was aware of it dropping in thick swathes about her shoulders.

  She composed her face into a picture of serenity. ‘Of course not, though she can be domineering. We never see Edith these days. There are so many ladies working on the tapestry. We move around it. It keeps us occupied. We talk together.’

  Now he was untying the laces of her overgown. His hands moved over her body and to her it felt as good as it had always felt. Nothing had changed, nothing; and as usual she was beginning to soften at his touch. ‘Ah, so what do you talk about?’ he asked in a teasing tone as her overgown slid to the floor.

  She drew back, took a deep breath, exhaled and said, ‘Harold, everyone speculates about everything, about the King, about us. There is whispering in corners. What will happen if he dies?’ She clasped his arms but he gently removed her hands, pulled her back and continued to unlace her gown. ‘Who will be king?’ she said.

  ‘Let us not think of that now, my love. Tell me about Thea and the others.’ Her gown slid to the floor and she was in her linen undergown. He turned her round and parted her loose hair and began to kiss the back of her neck. ‘No one can ever hold a candle to you, my Edith.’ He whispered the words into her hair. ‘Don’t ever forget it.’

  She kissed him passionately, seeking out his tongue with her own, before breaking away to say, ‘The boys are well, of course. Ulf is very, very mischievous and Gunnhild is serious.’ She sank down on a stool and tugged off her deerskin boots, fondling them for a moment before setting them neatly by the bed. ‘Thea is growing up quickly. Betrothal is all she can think of. She teases Earl Waltheof, but then she tells your mother that he is not good enough for her. Our Thea wants a prince.’

  Harold raised his head and said sharply, ‘She’ll take who she is given. None of us can choose.’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘We were fortunate. We have love,’ he said but there was, she noticed, a momentary pause. He took her in his arms again and laid his chin on her head.

  It was an old familiar gesture, but she twisted out of his grasp and studied his face. ‘When you are by my side, yes, we have love. When you are not … The women here, they talk among themselves about you and other women … I cannot help but hear them …’

  He put a finger to her lips. ‘Enough, Elditha, they are of no consequence.’ He drew her close again. He smelled of the sea, of the earth and, slightly, of the musk oil with which he sometimes anointed his hair. He was her husband and she had loved him since she was 15 years old and he had so gently ta
ken her maidenhead. She loved him still. He buried his face in her hair. ‘Not now,’ he murmured. ‘Come with me. How I have missed you. Perhaps we can ride tomorrow.’ He led her to the bed and they tumbled onto the goose-feathered mattress and he loved her until she made herself forgive him all his passing infidelities.

  Snow fell heavily during the night and that made riding impossible. The women passed the following day closed inside Queen Edith’s bower hall. Servants carried great pitchers of hippocras and plates of honey cakes into the bower and, as she nibbled on cakes and sipped the sweet wine, and tried to keep warm, Elditha would glance over at the northern widow who sat with her frosty relatives. Sometimes she caught Aldgyth watching her too. She had noticed how Harold greeted the brothers Morcar and Edwin in such a friendly manner, how he had turned to Aldgyth, their sister – once a lady of Mercia and a queen of Wales – when they had been in the hall that morning, for a moment giving her his full attention, his grey eyes seeking hers. Aldgyth had modestly looked down, but when he moved on around the great hearth talking to others, Elditha had noticed how her eyes had followed him.

  All morning the women worked on Gytha’s tapestry. They talked about the King’s illness. Would he die or would he recover? In the afternoon they sewed gifts for each other, purses and belts, and as they stitched they tried to pretend that everything was normal, though nothing was. Everything creaked. A chill wind rocked the timbers of the wooden hall; the dark skeleton branches of trees outside bent under great plops of snowfall; conversations in the bower hall became in turn knife-edged or dreary. Elditha wished now that she had remained at Nazeing this Christmas, where she would not have had to see the northern women who gathered about the ex-queen of Wales, as though she were a queen bee in the hive. Aldgyth sat close by her, quietly stitching on a length of fine white linen. It seemed to be a man’s new shirt with extravagant gold and silver embroidery creeping around the neck opening. Elditha wondered who it could possibly be for. She tipped a pitcher and poured wine into a cup for Gytha and said in a low voice, hoping that Aldgyth could not overhear, ‘Thea mentioned that you wished to speak to me?’

  Gytha leaned forward in her chair and lowered her voice to match Elditha’s own. ‘Elditha, if King Edward dies there will be an election and they could decide that Harold must rule. It’s a pity that King Edward and Edith have no children of their own.’

  Elditha pricked her finger. A drop of blood showed crimson on her embroidery. And I could be queen, she mused. She sucked the blood away.

  ‘What about Edgar?’ she said. ‘He may not be his son, but he is the nearest living relative and it was Harold who brought the family back from Hungary. Do you not think, Gytha, that now his father has died, Edgar will be king when Edward dies?’

  Gytha gave a low laugh. ‘The country needs more than a boy to save it from the scavengers, my dear.’

  ‘Duke William?’

  ‘Others too. Harald of Norway and Sweyn of Denmark.’ Gytha sniffed, lifted her long sleeve and wiped her nose on it. She nursed her hippocras for a moment, slowly turned the cup and then sipped from it. ‘Still, we all know that that William, the bastard son of a washer-woman, is the worst of the locust princes. Edward’s mother always wanted Duke William to be England’s heir.’ She sat her cup down and glanced over at Aldgyth. Elditha followed Gytha’s sharp eyes. Aldgyth immediately raised her head from the shirt she was stitching. Gytha placed a finger on her lips and lifted up a linen fillet that she was embroidering with tiny blue flowers. ‘I think Thea will like this,’ she remarked. She paused then added, ‘Blue will go with the red hair.’ She snipped a pale blue thread with her scissors and rethreaded her needle. In and out her needle slipped, making tiny stitches, her eyesight very keen for a woman who had three score years.

  Aldgyth of Mercia, the widowed Queen of Wales, bent her head again and seemed absorbed in a section of work about the shirt collar. ‘It’s not surprising, of course, that Edward’s mother wanted William to be the heir; he is her own nephew,’ Elditha said in a whisper.

  ‘Emma was a schemer. King Edward hated his mother for abandoning him and marrying Canute. After all, Canute killed the father and married the mother. What do you expect? That woman hated us Godwins too, but she couldn’t do without us in those days.’

  ‘Emma is long dead, Gytha.’

  ‘But now, Elditha, that bastard William wants England’s throne when her son is dead. What about that claim he made about Harold’s promise to him?’ Gytha’s lips pursed.

  ‘It will certainly cause trouble that both Edgar and William consider that they have a claim.’

  ‘Even so, my dear, the earls won’t have either of them. The boy is too young and the bastard’s a foreigner, a liar and a thief.’

  ‘Duke William claims …’

  ‘… that Harold promised to uphold his claim over relics gathered from all over in churches in Normandy. Well, he told me that those reliquary boxes were empty. Some trick.’

  Aldgyth stood up, came closer and lifted the warm pitcher and a cup from the hearth. Elditha bent her head over her embroidery. Harold had told her another version of that story. He had confessed to her in bed that he’d been given a choice of becoming William’s vassal or of remaining William’s hostage. He had made the only choice he could; but when he’d made his oath of fealty to William in the church at Bonneville-sur-Touques, his hand had been firmly placed on reliquaries.

  ‘It’s different, you see,’ he had whispered into her ear, ‘all fealty means is that I will help the Duke if he is in difficulty. I owe him that loyalty at least: he saved me from the pirates when I’d been shipwrecked when I went over there to get our family hostages from him. I never swore that I would be a kingmaker. I, Harold, Earl of Wessex, will never support any claim by William of Normandy to the throne of England. And so I got my nephew back from him.’

  Frowning, Elditha pulled the gold thread through the linen on her lap. ‘The earls will declare for the Atheling,’ she heard herself saying.

  ‘No, they will not,’ Gytha said. ‘Edgar’s father, had he lived, would have been a fine king, but it won’t be that young boy who follows his uncle nor the bastard – nor will it be any other prince who has been elf-shot with greed. It will be an English earl. And what I have wanted to say to you, Elditha, is that Thea will have greater prospects than young Earl Waltheof. Now, where is my thimble?’

  Elditha pulled a thimble from the purse hanging from her girdle and dropped it into Gytha’s lap. She spoke her thoughts aloud. ‘Edward will not choose a Godwin. He will want Alfred’s descendants …’ Before she had a chance to say anything else, the bower door creaked open, blowing a flurry of snow inside and Queen Edith herself swept into the hall with four of her ladies following. Now, Elditha thought grimly as she dropped her sewing, there really will be an end to any Christmas festivities.

  All the women seated in the hall rose and bowed their heads. The children stopped playing. Aldgyth was nearest to the door rummaging in the silks basket for a fresh thread. She sank onto her knees. But, to Elditha’s surprise, Edith just smiled and gestured to them all to sit again. She raised Aldgyth to her feet and shooed her back to her embroidery with a thin smile. Then she approached Gytha, bent over and kissed her mother’s cheek in greeting. Turning to her women, she sent them off to work on the tapestry frame saying, ‘I wish to speak to my mother.’

  The queen’s dark-cloaked women scurried off to the Adam and Eve embroidery, seeking empty stools. The others made room for them and threaded needles for them. Sitting opposite each other in pairs, they began to stitch the flowered border, talking in hushed voices. Elditha rose again, thinking to join them but Edith said, ‘No, Elditha, stay. You may listen to this too.’

  Edith sat by Gytha on a cushioned chair and arranged the heavy folds of her blue cloak. ‘Edward may yet recover,’ she said, smiling her thin smile. ‘We must hold the Christmas feast as usual. Nothing must appear amiss. The King will attend.’

  ‘And if there is a r
elapse?’ Gytha’s face was anxious.

  ‘There will be no relapse, Mother. The King must show the world that he is recovering. If we all pray for him, God may spare His most faithful son.’ She paused, looked round at the other Godwin women who were listening and raised her tone. ‘So, since you are all listening, I come to say that we women, all of us, and the families, must attend a nightly vigil in the new AbbeyChurch, asking God to spare our king.’

  ‘The children, Edith,’ Elditha said, dismayed. ‘Should they attend the services? Some of them are so young.’ She looked over to where the nurse, Margaret, was playing a game with Ulf and the other young children, thinking how harsh her sister-in-law could be, but surely she would not insist on the younger children observing the vigil?

  ‘As you wish, sister; but they ought to understand the value of humility and the importance of such prayer. The King is, after all, their uncle.’

  ‘Of course my children will pray too, Edith,’ Elditha said quickly, not wishing to cause offence. How would her four-year-old Ulf stay awake?

  Nightly, as the moon hung above the abbey, the women and children joined the monks for the midnight vigil. On the fourth evening, when Elditha picked up her cloak, Harold said impatiently, as if this had been her idea and not his sister’s, ‘Not again. Not the children as well. Not my mother.’

  ‘Edith has insisted. We should all pray for his recovery – you too.’

  ‘But not my mother; she is so old. Her nightly vigil must stop.’

  ‘She will not stop.’

  ‘Let us hope her prayers are answered. By the by, I am told that you are crowning young Edgar Atheling king already, Elditha.’ She could hear the gathering chill in his voice.

  ‘I was not wishing the King’s death, my lord.’

  ‘That is not what I have heard.’

  ‘From Gytha?’