Gods Concubine (3 page)

Aldred was not known for the austerity of his tastes.

He snatched a congealing piece of roast goose from the platter of a Saxon thegn, stuffing the morsel inside his mouth.

All the time his eyes—strange, grey, cool eyes—never left Swanne’s form.

Eventually came that moment when Godwine decided that the wedding was not enough, and that the bedding must now be accomplished.

At his signal (shout, rather), Swanne rose from her husband Harold’s side and, together with several other ladies, took Caela and led her towards the stairs at the rear of the hall which led to the bedchambers above.

The largest and best of the bedchambers had been prepared for the king and his new bride, and once Swanne had Caela inside, she and the other ladies began to strip the girl of her finery.

There were no words spoken, and Swanne’s eyes, when they occasionally met Caela’s, were harsh and cold.

When Caela at last stood naked, Swanne moved back a pace and regarded the girl’s pubescent flesh. Caela’s hips were still narrow, her buttocks scrawny, and her pubic hair thin and sparse. Her waist remained that of a girl: straight and without any of that sweet narrowing that might lead a man’s hands towards those delights both above and below it. Her breasts had barely plumped out from their childish flatness.

Swanne ran her eyes down Caela’s body, then looked the girl in the eye.

Caela had lifted her hands to her breasts, and was now trembling slightly.

“You have not much to tempt a husband’s embraces,” Swanne said. She moved slightly, sensuously, her breasts and hips and belly straining against her robes, and then smiled coldly. “I cannot imagine how any husband could want to part
your
legs, my dear.”

At that Caela blinked, flushing in humiliation.

Swanne sighed extravagantly and the other ladies present smiled, preferring to ally with Swanne rather than this girl who, even now, wedded to the king, promised less prospect of benefaction than did the powerful Lady Swanne.

“But we must do what we can,” said Swanne, and clapped her hands, making Caela start. “The wool, I think, and the posset I prepared earlier.”

One of the ladies handed to Swanne a small pouch of linen and a length of red wool, and Swanne stepped close to Caela once more.

“Now,” Swanne said, both eyes and voice cold with contempt, “do not flinch. This will get you an heir better than anything…save that wild thrusting of a man’s thickened member.”

She put a hand on her own belly as she spoke, rolling her eyes prettily, and the ladies burst into shrieks of laughter, their hands to their cheeks.

Caela flushed an even darker red.

Swanne bent gracefully to her knees before Caela and, first tying the length of wool about the small linen pouch, then tied the pouch to Caela’s inner thigh. “This contains the seeds of henbane and coriander, my dear. So long as it doesn’t confuse Edward’s member too greatly, it will surely drive him to those exertions needed to put a child in that…” she paused, her eyes running over Caela’s flat abdomen, “
child’s
belly of yours.”

Again the ladies standing about giggled, but then came the sound of footsteps approaching up the stairs, and the rumble of men’s voices and laughter.

“In the bed, I suppose,” said Swanne. “He’s bound to remember why she’s there once he climbs in.”

With that the women bustled Caela to the bed, drew back the coverlets over the rich, snowy whiteness of the bridal linens, and bade Caela slide in.

“We hope to see the red and cream flowers of love spread all over that linen in the morning, my love,” said Swanne, pulling the coverlets up to hide Caela’s nakedness just as the group of men accompanying Edward entered the chamber.

As Swanne and her ladies had done, so now these men, numbering among them Godwine and his sons Harold and Tostig, attended to Edward, divesting him of his jewels and apparel, and stripping him as naked as Caela.

Then Godwine drew back the coverlets on Edward’s side of the bed, and the king, his genitals pitifully white and shrivelled in the coldness of the room, clambered into the bed and sat stiffly alongside Caela.

Once he was in bed, one of the men handed him a goblet filled with spiced wine and the raw, sliced genitals of a hare.

“Drink,” said Godwine, “and my daughter will soon breed you a fine son.”

Edward looked at the goblet, very slowly and reluctantly raised it to his mouth, made a show of sipping it, then placed the goblet on a chest at the side of the bed.

Harold looked at Caela, caught her eyes, and tried to smile for her.

Across the room Swanne laughed, rich and throaty. She pulled her shoulders back, aware that the eyes of most were on her, and splayed her hands over the rich roundness of her belly. “I wish you well, my lord,” she said to Edward. “I hope your screams of pleasure, as those of your bride, keep us awake throughout the long hours of this wedding night.”

Tostig giggled, and Swanne shot her young brother-in-law an amused glance even as Harold hissed at him to be silent.

As Tostig subsided Aldred stepped forward, staggering a little drunkenly on his feet, and raised his hand for a mumbled blessing. Then Godwine said something coarse, everyone laughed (save Harold, who watched Caela with eyes filled with sorrow), and Swanne began to direct people out of the room.

“Our king’s member can never rise with this many witnesses,” she murmured, to more good-humoured laughter.

Swanne was the final person to leave. She stood in the doorway to the chamber, her hand on the latch, and regarded the two stiff people in the bed with a gleam in her wondrous dark eyes.

“Queen at last, Caela,” she said. “You must be so pleased.”

And then she was gone.

They sat, stiff, silent, cold, staring at the closed door.

Finally, Caela, summoning every piece of courage she could, took her husband’s chilled hand and placed it on her breast.

He snatched it away.

“I find you most displeasing,” he said, then slid down the bed, rolled over so his back faced Caela, and stayed like that the entire night.

In the morning, when Swanne and the rest of the (largely still drunken) attendants pulled back the covers from the naked pair, there was a moment’s silence as their eyes took in the unsullied bleached linens.

Swanne’s eyes slowly travelled to Caela’s white face, and then she smiled in slow, malicious triumph before she turned her back and left the chamber.

T
WO

Rouen, Normandy

O
n the same night that Caela, Queen of England, lay sleepless beside her new husband, Edward, so also the Duke of Normandy, William, lay sleepless beside his new wife.

But where Edward and Caela’s wedding night remained coldly chaste, William and Matilda’s night had been filled with loving and laughter. Theirs was a marriage that
they
had made, and they’d had to combat the combined disapproval of most of the princes of Europe, as well as the Holy Father in Rome, to achieve it.

William lay on his side, his head resting on his hand, his black eyes gentle as he regarded the sleeping Matilda.
Gods, he’d had to fight so hard for her!
They had first met just over three years ago at the court of Matilda’s father, Baldwin, the Count of Flanders. Matilda had been fourteen, small and dark and vivacious, and half the princes and dukes of Europe had sought her hand—and the considerable dowry and alliances that would come with it. William had gone to Baldwin’s court, not to woo Matilda, but to woo her father, from whom William hoped to gain much-needed financial and military aid in his constant struggle to repel rival claimants to his dukedom.

William had been fighting to retain Normandy ever since he’d assumed the dukedom at the age of seven. Not only was his age against him, but also the fact that William was the bastard get of the duke, his father, on a tannery wench. In the thirteen years since his ascension and his first sight of Matilda of Flanders, William had spent the greater part of each year on the battlefield. No one had expected a bastard son, let along one of such tender age, to hold out thirteen years, but during his early vulnerable times William had enjoyed the support of a number of powerful allies, notable among them the King of France. By the time William was fifteen he both led his armies and devised his strategies himself—almost as if he had been a great leader of men and armies before.

As if, it was rumoured, he somehow managed to draw on the experience of a past life as a victorious king instead of a few meagre years as the son of a tannery wench.

Thirteen years he’d struggled, and then William had met Matilda. On that fateful day, William’s only thought as he strode towards the count’s dais had been of Baldwin and what the count could do for him, but then his eyes had fallen on the tiny form of Baldwin’s daughter standing by her father’s throne. William had muttered a cursory greeting to Baldwin, and had then turned to Matilda, took her hand, smiled down into her eyes, and said, “You were made for me.”

At that remark there were several audible gasps and one hastily swallowed giggle from among the members of Baldwin’s court. Their shocked humour was not simply at William’s audacity. At fourteen, Matilda was a mere four feet tall and would grow only another inch throughout the rest of her life.

William was six and a half feet—an amazing height in an age when most men were grateful to achieve five and a half—with broad shoulders and heavy, tight muscles. Combined with his dark, exotic looks (some questioned the tannery wench maternity, and opined that the previous duke had got his son on some lost Greek princess) and bold demeanour and bearing, William cut an imposing figure.

He certainly looked too large to wed the dainty Matilda without causing her serious bodily damage.

Matilda had not cared about William’s bastardy, nor worried about his larger-than-life physicality. She wanted him the instant his mouth grazed her hand and he spoke those words:
You were made for me
.

Europe objected. Frustrated princely suitors petitioned the pope, who refused to permit the couple to wed on the grounds such a marriage would violate the Church’s laws on consanguinity. William and Matilda shared a distant ancestor, Rollo the Viking, who had founded Normandy, and (as he sat counting out the enormous bribes he’d accepted from a number of disappointed suitors) the pope muttered darkly about the evils of allowing such “close” blood-kin to wed. Their union, the pope declared, would offend God to such an extent that doubtless He would smite Christendom with numerous plagues, floods and boils in the nastiest of places. Matilda stormed and William argued. Gradually the protests waned, the bribes dried up, the pope lost interest, the ban was rescinded (by a lowly clerk within Rome who was sick of the quantity of the determined duke’s protests he’d had to field over the years), and Matilda and William finally wed.

William smiled softly as he lay watching his bride sleep. He lifted a hand and pushed a strand of her dark hair back from her forehead. It was tangled, and damp with sweat, and William’s smile grew broader as he remembered the enthusiasm with which both had (
finally!
) consummated their union. Whatever whispers may have rumoured, the physical contrast in their heights and builds had made not a single difference to the ease and joy with which they dispensed with Matilda’s virginity.

He stroked Matilda’s forehead again, his touch less gentle this time, and she sighed, shifted a little in their bed, and opened her eyes.

“I adore you,” she whispered.

He leaned down and kissed her, but did not speak.

“And you?” she said very softly, once his mouth lifted from hers.

William hesitated, remembering that other time (
so long ago
) when he had made (
forced
) another marriage. This time, he determined, he would not start with deception and lies.

“You are my wife, my duchess, and I will honour you before any other woman, but…”

His nerve betrayed him at that moment, and so Matilda did what she had to, in order to found their marriage in such strength it would never fail.

“But I will not be the great love of your life?” she said, propping herself up on one elbow.

“That does not worry you?” he said.

“You and I,” she said, tracing one of her tiny hands through the black curls which scattered across his chest, “will make one of the greatest marriages Christendom has ever known. What more could I ask?”

“That is not what I expected to hear,” he said, laughing softly in wonderment. “That is not what I had learned to expect from wives.” He reached up a hand and cradled her face within its great expanse.

“You have honoured and respected me by telling me,” Matilda said. “I can accept this.” She paused. “You will not dishonour me with her?”

“Never!” William said.

“Romantic love can so often destroy a marriage,” said Matilda, “when what is needed is unity of purpose, and combined strength. I will be the best of wives to you, and you shall be the best of husbands to me, and we will marry our ambitions and strengths, and we will never, never regret the choice that we have made.”

“I wish I had found you earlier,” William said, and Matilda could not have known that by that statement William referred to a time two thousand years past when a former marriage had resulted in such a ruination of dreams and ambitions that a nation had crumbled into chaos and disaster. As Brutus, he had failed with Cornelia; William was determined to make a better marriage with this woman.

They made love once again, and then Matilda slipped back to sleep. Once he was sure that she was lost deep in her dreams, William rose from their bed and walked to stand naked before the dying embers of the fire in the hearth of their bedchamber.

The conversation with Matilda had unsettled him. Firstly, the maturity of Matilda’s response had astounded William, though he well knew that she was a princess such as Cornelia had never been, and made him appreciate even more the woman he’d taken to wife. Secondly, the nature of the conversation had recalled to him Cornelia and Genvissa, and so much of his previous life.