Gods Concubine (2 page)

Robert Mannyng of Brunne,
Chronicle
, 1303,
translation by Sara Douglass

London, March 1939

J
ack Skelton woke just before dawn. He lay in the cold grey light, staring at the just discernible shape of his uniform hanging on the back of the door. Violet Bentley had put him in the tiny spare bedroom on the first floor of her and Frank’s cramped terrace house in Highbury. It was a child’s bedroom, really, kitted out with what was probably either Frank’s or Violet’s own childhood single bed that was far too short for Skelton’s tall frame, and with a garishly bright hooked rug on the floor, a plywood closet, a ladderbacked wooden chair, and floral cotton curtains that were, if the roll of heavy black twill behind the chair was any indication, soon to be replaced with blackout curtains.

Skelton thought he’d never been in a more depressing room, not in any of his lives. Its melancholy lay not in the cheap hand-me-down furniture, nor in its austerity, but in the sad attempt to make it homely. If Violet had just managed to resist the rug then the room might have managed some dignity.

If only.

But then, was not life full of “if onlys”?

If only he’d not corrupted his entire life
(lives)
with the murder of his father, Silvius.

If only he’d been a better husband to Cornelia in both of the lives she’d been his wife.

If only he’d recognised her for what she truly was.

If only he’d been able to reach her before Asterion’s hate-fuelled fire had…

Jack lay still, barely breathing, dragging his mind away from the fire. He thought about his walk through London last night, remembered Genvissa—Stella Wentworth now—and her stunning beauty, and the way she had turned away from him when he had asked after Cornelia. He remembered Loth, Walter Herne, who had tormented him with questions.

And Asterion, haunting his footsteps as he had haunted them for three thousand years.

“Cornelia?” Skelton whispered into the sorry grey dawn light.

Then, after a long moment: “Eaving?”

O
NE

Wessex, England
Winter 1050

T
he timber hall was fully eighty feet end to end and twenty broad. Doors leading to the outside pierced both of the long walls midway down their length, allowing people exit to the latrines, or to the kitchens for more food, while trapdoors in the sixty-foot-high beamed roof allowed the smoke egress when weather permitted: otherwise, the fumes from the four heating pits in the floor drifted about the hall until they escaped whenever someone opened an outer door. Many of the hall’s upright timbers were painted red and gold in interweaving Celtic designs; the heights were hung with almost one hundred shields.

Tonight both painted designs and shields were barely visible. The hall was full of smoke, heat, and raucous, good-humoured noise. Men and women, warriors and monks, earls, thegns, wives and maidens, sat at the trestle tables which ran the length of the hall while thralls, children and dogs scampered about, either serving wine, cider or ale, or nosing out the scraps of meat that had fallen to the rush-covered floor. The wedding feast had been in progress for some three hours. Most of the boiled and roasted meats had been consumed, the cheeses were all gone, the sweet, spiced omelettes were little more than congealed yolky fragments on platters, and the scores of loaves of crusty bread had been reduced to the odd crumb that further marred the food- and alcohol-stained table linens and fed the mice in the rushes darting among the booted feet of the revellers.

At the head of the hall stood a dais. Before the dais a juggler sat on a three-legged stool, so drunk that his occasional attempts to tumble his woollen balls and his sharp-edged knives achieved little else save than to further bloody his fingers.

A group of musicians—still sober, although they desperately wished otherwise—played bagpipes and flutes from one side of the dais, their music lost within the shouting and singing of the revellers, the thumping of tables by those demanding their wine cups be refilled without delay, and the shrieks and barks of children and dogs writhing hither and thither under the tables and between the legs of the feasters.

In contrast to the wild enthusiasm of the hundreds of guests within the body of the hall, most of the fifteen or so people who sat at the table on the dais were noticeably restrained.

At the centre of the table sat a man of some forty or forty-one years, although his long, almost white-blond hair, his scraggly greying beard, his thin, ascetic face and the almost perpetually downturned corners of his tight mouth made him appear much older. He wore a long, red and blue, richly-textured linen tunic, embroidered about its neck, sleeves and hem with silken threads and semi-precious stones, and girdled with gold and silver. His right hand, idly toying with his golden, jewelled wine cup, was broad and strong, the hand of a swordsman, although its begemmed fingers were soft and pale: it had been many years since that hand had held anything but a pen or a wine cup.

His eyes were of the palest blue: flinty enough to make any miscreant appearing before him blurt out a confession without thought; cold enough to make any woman think twice before attempting to use the arts of Eve upon him. Currently, his eyes flitted about the hall marking every crude remark, every groping hand, every mouth stained red with wine.

And with every movement of his eyes, every sin noted, his mouth crimped just that little bit more until it appeared that he had eaten something so foul his body would insist on spewing it forth at any moment.

On his head rested a golden crown, as thickly encrusted with jewels as his fingers.

He was Edward, King of England, and he was sitting in the hall of the man he regarded as his greatest enemy: Godwine, the Earl of Wessex.

Godwine sat on Edward’s left hand, booming with cheer and laughter where Edward sat quiet and still. The earl was a large man, thickly muscled after almost forty-five years spent on the battlefield,
his
begemmed hands, where they lifted his wine cup to his mouth, sinewy and tanned, his eyes as watchful as Edward’s, but without the judgement.

The reason for Godwine’s cheer and Edward’s bilious silence, as for the entire tumultuous celebration, sat on Edward’s right, her eyes downcast to her hands folded demurely in her lap, her food sitting largely untouched on the platter before her.

She was Eadyth, commonly called Caela, Godwine’s cherished thirteen-year-old daughter, and now Edward’s wife and Queen of England.

The marriage had been a compromise, hateful to Edward, triumphant for Godwine. If Edward married the earl’s daughter, then Godwine would continue to support his throne. If not…well then, Godwine would ensure that Edward spend the last half of his life in exile, much as he had spent the first half (staying as far away from his murderous stepfather, King Cnut, as possible). If Edward wanted to keep the throne then he needed Godwine’s support, and Godwine’s support came only at the price of wedding his daughter.

She was a pretty girl, her attractiveness resting more in her extraordinary stillness than in any extravagant feature. Her glossy dark brown hair, on this occasion tightly braided and hidden under a silken ivory veil (held in place by a golden circlet of some weight, which may have partly explained why Caela kept her eyes downward-facing for so much of the feast), was one of her best features, as were her sooty-lashed deep blue eyes and her flawlessly smooth white skin. Her features were otherwise regular, her teeth small and evenly spaced, her hands dainty, their every movement considered. Caela was dressed almost as richly as her new husband: a heavily-embroidered blue surcoat over a long, crisp, snowy-white linen under-tunic embroidered with silver threads about its hem and the cuffs of its slim-fitted sleeves. Unlike her husband and her father, however, Caela wore little in the way of adornment, save for a gold circlet of rank on her brow and a sparkling emerald ring on the heart finger of her left hand.

Edward had shoved it there not four hours earlier, during the nuptial mass held in her father’s chapel. Now, that nuptial ring’s large square-cut stone hid a painful bruise on Caela’s finger.

Caela’s eyes rarely moved from the hands in her lap—someone who did not know her well might have thought she sat admiring that great, cold emerald—and she spoke only monosyllabic replies to any who addressed her.

That was rare enough. Edward had not said a word to her, and the only other person who addressed Caela (apart from the occasional shouted enthusiasm from her gloating father) was the man who sat on her right side.

This man, unhappy looking where Edward was sullen and Godwine buoyant, was considerably younger than either of the other two men. In his early twenties, Harold Godwineson was the earl’s eldest surviving son and thus heir to all that Godwine controlled (lands, estates, offices and riches, as well as the English throne, which meant that Edward loathed Harold as much as he did Godwine).

Like his father, Harold was a warrior, blooded and proved in a score of savage, death-ridden battles, but, unlike Godwine, a man who also had the sensitive soul of a bard. That sensibility showed itself in Harold’s face and his dark eyes, in the manner of his movements and his engaging ability to give any who spoke to him his full and undivided attention. His hair was a dark blond, already stranded with grey, which he kept warrior short, as he did the faint stubble of his darker beard. He was a serious man who rarely laughed, but who, when he smiled, could lighten the heart of whomever that smile graced.

Harold was not so richly accoutred as his father and his new brother-in-law, although well dressed and jewelled enough as befitted his status of one of the most powerful men in England. Like Edward, Harold toyed with his wine cup, rarely bringing it to his lips.

Unlike Edward, Harold spent a great deal of time watching his sister, occasionally reaching out to touch her with a reassuring hand, or to lean close and whisper something that sometimes,
almost
, made the girl’s mouth twitch upwards. Harold had adored Caela from birth, had watched over her, had spent an inordinate amount of time with her, and had argued fiercely with Godwine when their father proposed the match with Edward.

Some people had rumoured that it was not so much the match that Harold raged about, but that the girl was to be wedded and bedded at all. In recent years, as Caela approached her womanhood, Harold’s attachment to his sister had attracted much sniggering comment. There was more than one person in the hall this night who, under the influence of unwatered wine or rich cider, and who thought themselves far enough distant from the dais to dare the whisper, had proposed that Godwine’s flamboyant happiness this eve was due more to his relief that he’d managed to get his daughter a virgin to Edward’s bed than at the marriage itself, as advantageous as that might be.

If one were to guess, one might think that Harold’s wife, sitting on his other side, if not the instigator, had been party to many of these whispers. Swanne (also an Eadyth, but known far and wide as Swanne for her beautiful, long white neck and elegant head carriage) sat almost as still as Caela, but with her head held high on her lovely neck, her almond-shaped black eyes watching both her husband and his sister with much private amusement.

Swanne was a stunningly beautiful woman. Of an age with Harold, or perhaps a year or two older, she had curly, black hair that, when unveiled and unbound, snapped and twisted down her back in wild abandon. Her skin was as pale as Caela’s, but drawn over a face more finely wrought and framing lips far plumper and redder than her much younger sister-in-law’s.

And her eyes…a man could sink and drown in those eyes. They were as black as a witch-night; great pools of mystery that entrapped men and savaged their souls.

When combined with her tall, lithe body…ah, most men in this hall envied Harold even as they whispered about him (the envy, of course, fuelling many of the whispers). Even now, leaning back in her chair so that her swollen five-months’ pregnant belly strained at the fabric of her white surcoat, most men lusted after Swanne as they had lusted after little else in their lives. She was a woman bred to trigger every man’s wildest sexual fantasy, and she was the reason why over a score of men already had dragged female thralls outside to be pushed against a wall and savagely assaulted in a vain attempt to assuage their lust for the Lady Swanne.

On those occasions Swanne did not watch her husband or his sister, her black eyes trailed languidly over the hall, her mouth lifted in a knowing smile as she saw men staring at her, lowering frantic hands below the table to grab at the lust straining their trousers. Swanne was a woman who enjoyed every moment of her dominance, yet loathed those who succumbed to her spell.

Among the other members of the wedding party on the dais sat Harold’s younger brother, Tostig, a bright-eyed, lively-faced youth, and sundry other noblemen, earls or thegns closely allied with Godwine. King Edward had a few supporters also: two Norman noblemen who had remained at Edward’s side since he returned from his twenty-year exile in Normandy at the young duke’s court, and the rising young Norman cleric, Aldred. Aldred had come to England with the returning Edward’s retinue, and now he enjoyed a powerful position in the king’s court. Indeed, he had performed the nuptial mass, although most had not failed to note that Aldred spent more time watching Swanne than either his benefactor or the tender bride. Aldred was a thickset man who, having cleaned his own platter, was now leaning over the table to lift uneaten portions of food from the platters of other diners. A trail of spiced wine thickened his unshaven chin, and had stained the front of his clerical robe.