Authors: Etheldreda
They had talked long into the night about his conversion to Christianity and, although she had refused baptism for fear of her husband, she had taken the cross, well hidden in her robes, to be kept secret in this box ever since. From time to time she came to it and pondered over the strange religion that it symbolised. That a god could be invisible and only show himself when he chose was not strange to her, but that he commanded that they did not slay their enemies (the Northumbrians, the East Anglians, the Celts) but only the desires in their own hearts, the secret roots of hatred deep in their own minds, was new to her. ‘Fight only against yourself,’ he said, ‘prepare
yourself
as a temple for your god instead of building one of stone and wood. Have no blood feuds… pay no wergild… forgive all men for what they do…’ She shivered. There was so much she did not understand.
Again she listened and when she heard no sound she knelt before the little cross now propped up on her clothes-chest.
‘God of my father Cynegils,’ she whispered, her heart pounding nervously, ‘protect my sister Cyneberga and her husband King Oswald of Bernicia. Soften my lord’s heart and let him be content with his own country, with his own people.’ She stopped, opening her eyes a crack to see if there was anyone or anything changed in the room, but nothing had that she could see.
She rose from her knees, wrapped the cross in the silk, and returned it to its box and thence to its hiding place. She then bowed low before the small wooden statue of Thunor that stood in an alcove.
She took off her ring and laid it at his feet.
‘Lord of Storm, wild warrior and defender of the gods,’ she said softly, ‘watch over my lord and bring him safely home.’
King Anna and his family only heard of Oswald’s defeat and death at the battle of Maserfield more than a week after it had occurred.
News of Penda’s army on the move had reached them earlier, and Anna had breathed a sigh of relief that it was northward bound this time and not towards his own country. His spies in Northumbria were many, but the savagery of the fighting that followed Penda’s invasion was such that none could leave until, defeated, many of the Bernicians and Deirans fled, and refugees came straggling south.
The queen and Etheldreda were so moved by the stories of the suffering of the refugees that they insisted on travelling north to see what they could do to help.
Tondbert, prince of the marshlands, gave them a lodge on the island of Ely in which to rest and ordered his men to help the women in any way they required. He himself took Etheldreda in his light reed boat ahead of the main party, impressing her with his skill at manoeuvring the craft through the reeds, finding the waterways, and avoiding the mud-banks, the water snakes and the fen demons. He was a grizzled old man in his fifties, tough and brown-skinned from continual exposure to the weather, rough in manner, having learned no courtly graces in ruling such a wild and independent bunch of fowlers and fishermen, but Etheldreda liked him. He treated her with gruff respect as though she were an equal instead of still a child.
Ovin was in the boat that closely followed them and it was he who lifted her out onto the bank when at last they reached firm land. The excitement of the journey through the marshes had brought high colour to her cheeks and her eyes were sparkling. For the moment she had forgotten the reason for their mission, but it soon came back to her as they came upon the refugee encampment. The sights that she had tried so hard to forget from Penda’s attack on her own country came welling back and she turned to Ovin with a sob.
Tentatively, remembering her father’s words, he put his arms about her. ‘Don’t cry, lady,’ he said softly against her hair. ‘These people need our help, not our tears.’
She tried to pull herself together at this and look at the children with thin bones and dark-ringed eyes, the women with dirty, blood-soaked bandages, the pathetic collection of bits and pieces they had brought from their homes. She wiped her tears on his tunic, drew away from him and walked firmly towards the ragged crowd. Within minutes she was completely in control of herself and, child as she still was in body if not in spirit, she took command and with grace and dignity organised the distribution of the food that they had brought with them and the administering of herbal potions. She dressed wounds and listened with a pale but calm face to women telling of what they had seen.
But, all the time, at the back of her mind, a voice kept saying over and over again with the insistence of a drum beat: ‘This is not all there is. Remember – this is not all there is.’
And then, almost as confirmation of what she was thinking, one of the refugees told her about the death of King Oswald.
‘With his very last breath he prayed for the souls of his enemies. All who were near saw a light hover over the place where he fell and, as they looked at it, they felt no pain over his death nor our defeat.’
Etheldreda watched and listened intently, beginning to grasp the importance of what was being said. In realising that his enemies were, like his friends, all the sons of God, all eternal souls, she understood he had gained something more valuable than the life and lands Penda took away from him. He had won the only victory worth winning.
There were tears in her eyes as she turned suddenly to Ovin, her friend, her comforter, her rock.
‘You see, there is something more,’ she whispered.
He nodded, smiling broadly.
And then there was no more time to be thinking of these wonders. One of the pack-horses started to slip on the slimy mud of the riverbank and everyone had to rush to his assistance.
At the end, laughing and covered in mud, they collapsed exhausted – the immediate distracting them from the eternal. But, behind the horse’s desperate floundering and their clumsy but energetic attempts to rescue it, the eternal was still there.
On the way back they rested again at Ely and Etheldreda, tired as she was, insisted on walking round the island.
‘I love this place,’ she said to Prince Tondbert. ‘I feel at home here.’ He could see that the cares of her recent experience were almost gone from her face.
He smiled at her. ‘It’s yours, my lady.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t tease me, my lord.’
He opened his mouth to confirm his gift, but was interrupted by the arrival of Etheldreda’s mother and one of Oswald’s men. They were talking of what would become of Northumbria now that Oswald was dead.
‘His brother Oswy should by rights be king,’ the man was saying, ‘but he’ll have to win his kingdom back from Penda, and there are many in his own country who hate him and wouldn’t like to see him king.’
‘Why is that?’ the queen asked mildly. ‘Wasn’t he brought up by the monks of Iona in the same way as his brother Oswald?’
‘Aye… but…’ The man hesitated, looking at Etheldreda.
‘I heard that he is a hard man to his enemies, that’s for sure.’ The queen frowned. Whoever became king of Northumbria affected them all. If Penda kept what he had won they would suffer most. Separate, the seven kingdoms kept a kind of balance, but if Northumbria and Mercia were united it would not be long before they were all absorbed. But if Oswy was as they hinted… what then?
The school at Dunwich: Oswy and Eanfleda
While Prince Oswy of Bernicia was fighting to regain his brother’s throne from Penda and hold it against others of his country who wished to wrest it from him, Etheldreda was growing up. Heregyth, a girl a few years older than herself, the daughter of one of Egric’s thegns who had died defending Rendilsham, was assigned to be her special maid and companion and in her company Etheldreda was sent to Dunwich to study at the famous school that had been founded by Bishop Felix during the reign of King Sigbert.
The princess at once took to the life of study, eagerly learning everything she could as fast as she could, finding in scholarship and the long hours of work the pleasure that others might find in the playful company of friends and the noisy evenings of entertainment at court. She found that by learning to read she now had a direct door into the Gospels through which she could go whenever she wished, finding things there that the priests, on whose interpretations she had been dependent before, had never shown her.
Each day had its excitement and at night when she returned to her small bare chamber, where Heregyth was waiting to comb her hair, she poured out her enthusiasms to the girl. Heregyth, who could neither read nor write, nor had any wish to do so, longed to return to Rendilsham. She had been enrolled in the embroidery school and although the work they did there was famous throughout Europe, even the Bishop of Rome wearing a cope that had been designed and worked at Dunwich, she found each day longer than the last.
Just before Michaelmas Etheldreda was allowed to start work in the scriptorium and every evening when she and Heregyth were together she talked enthusiastically about her work. The bemused girl heard about the difficulties of applying gold leaf when the resin underlying it dried too quickly or too slowly because of changeable weather, and the preciousness of ultramarine, which was one of the few pigments they could not grind themselves, but had to have sent from Rome.
‘Even in Rome,’ the princess told Heregyth, ‘they don’t know how it is made and have to import it from the East. They know its base is lapis lazuli but not one has been able to find out just what else they use. The others are easy. We use orpiment for yellow when we can’t get the gold, verdigris from copper for green, woad for blue, white and red lead, ox-gall for brown, and then it is just a matter of knowing how much to mix with the egg, the gum or the vinegar.’
Heregyth combed Etheldreda’s hair so that it floated out around her and became a haze of fine gold threads in the lamplight, and then she put away the comb and folded back the rugs on the bed.
‘I’d be frightened that I’d make a mistake and ruin a whole page,’ she said.
Etheldreda smiled.
‘Even experienced scribes make mistakes. We think nothing of it,’ she said airily. ‘We just turn the mistake into a little animal or a flower or something. My pages are usually full of extra figures!’ She laughed, and then she looked serious. ‘But one day,’ she said, ‘one day I will write the perfect page.’
Being a school attached to a monastery there were not many hours of the day and night that were not accounted for in duties. But sometimes Etheldreda felt the need to be by herself and she would rise before dawn and, instead of going to the chapel where the monks and nuns would already be gathered, she would slip away to the sea and walk along the beach, watching for the sunrise. The air would be fresh and clear as though newly washed, the long beach curving to the distant headland pure and deserted. She would stand right at the water’s edge, her sandals abandoned further up the beach, her shift gathered up and held above her knees, the waves washing over her feet, tugging at the pebbles.
At last the sun would rise, filaments and veils of light falling from it and floating away; she at the centre.
When Oswy had finally established himself on the throne he sent to Kent for the young princess Eanfleda. The marriage would serve a double purpose. The fact that her mother was of the Kentish royal house would help to extend his influence far to the south, but more importantly, as the last remaining offspring of the great Bretwalder Edwin, who had so effectively welded the Deiran and Bernician kingdoms together, her place on the throne beside him would strengthen his own case for doing the same. For the moment he ruled only Bernicia. Oswin, descended from Edwin’s cousin, held Deira.
Eanfleda left for Bernicia with her chaplain Romanus, as though she were going to prison instead of to marriage.
Her mother watched the brave train of thegns and women companions that accompanied her, the chests of treasure and the gifts of fine horses and Frankish weaponry, and thought of the time she too had set off for the north to marry a man she had never met. Edwin at that time was a pagan, a warrior prince who had won his kingdom fiercely and mercilessly. She had had no way of knowing then that as the years of their marriage passed she would grow to love him and that he would eventually embrace the Christian faith. Their child Eanfleda had been baptised by her priest Paulinus, as pledge that the king and all his people would accept baptism if the God of his wife would give him victory over the West Saxons.
But Oswy was a very different man.
Tears came to her eyes to think of what Eanfleda might have to face. Oswy was officially a Christian, but from the tales told of him the teachings of the Saviour had not sunk very deep. He was a man in his thirties, twice married, known to be hard natured and a womaniser, the son of her father’s enemy, Ethelfrid, who had been king of Northumbria before Edwin.
Her daughter looked frail and young as she sat her horse, her cheeks pale as chalk, her eyes looking into her mother’s with such desperation that Ethelberga could hardly bear to meet them. She might indeed have given in at this moment, had not Eorconbert joined her and said with calm satisfaction:
‘Do not worry, lady, with this marriage we will all sleep easier in our beds. Besides – it is only fitting that she should take back her father’s kingdom. It is rightfully hers.’
Ethelberga bit her lip. He was right. Eanfleda’s sacrifice would win years of peace for them. She turned back to her daughter with a speech about duty ready on her lips when she was startled to intercept a look in the girl’s eyes as she gazed at Eorconbert that could only be interpreted in one way. Sharply she looked back at Eorconbert, wondering if the same emotion would be expressed in his. But he had turned away from them and was shouting orders for the train to start moving. The mother saw Eanfleda’s expression turn to bitterness as he rode off.
Ethelberga crossed herself and thanked God that her daughter after all was going far away from Kent.
‘May guardian angels go with her and protect her in all that she has to face,’ she whispered. ‘From within and from without. Amen.’
Saxberga rode up on her chestnut horse and embraced the girl.