Shadow on the Crown (10 page)

Outside the king’s chamber Athelstan halted, stunned by his own temerity and what it had wrought. He felt his brothers’ accusing eyes on him, and he dreaded the censure that he knew was coming.

“That went well,” Ecbert said. “Banished to St. Albans until God knows when. Thank you for that, brother.”

“Only a fool,” Edmund volunteered, “calls the king a fool.”

“I did not call him a fool,” Athelstan protested.

“No,” Edmund replied, “you called him a fool and a madman. Even better! Whatever possessed you to speak to him in such a way?”

“He bid me speak my mind, and I did. Yes, all right, I made an error. I believed that he truly wanted to know what I thought.”

“Jesu, Athelstan! He had no need to ask for that. It has been writ on your face for days.”

“What would you have had me do? Kiss his hand and bid him be happy between the legs of his new queen? He would see it for a lie.”

“Could you not have found some middle ground?” Edmund persisted. “You undermine your own cause by being so blunt! Your wish is to have some influence upon the king’s decisions, yet how are we to do that if we are banished from the court?”

“It could be worse,” Ecbert said brightly. “He could have sent us to Glastonbury, where we’d have to spend the summer in the bog lands fighting the midges. At least St. Albans is on solid ground and easily within a day’s ride of London, with plenty of inns and alehouses along the way.”

“Shut up, Ecbert,” Athelstan snapped. “The king still thinks of us as children, and as long as he does, we will never be able to influence him.”

“His bride is the same age as you are,” Edmund replied. “Clearly he does not think
her
a child. We had better hope, though, that she has no more influence upon him than we do.”

That, in particular, made Athelstan wince. They would be spending the next weeks or months at St. Albans while the new queen would be spending them in his father’s bed. If she gave him a son, then what? The prophecy of the seeress still rang like a warning bell in his head, and he could see no way to explain it, unless his father’s Norman bride should persuade the king to disinherit his elder sons.

Chapter Eleven

July 1002

Near Winchester, Hampshire

E
mma, tucked into the royal wain with Wymarc and Margot, surveyed the sun-dappled Hampshire countryside—a vista framed by draperies that had been tied back to let in light and air. The view was the only thing pleasant about this leg of the journey, for the thick cushions lining the seat beneath her did little to absorb the shock of the wagon’s jolting passage along the deeply rutted road. She could not decide which was more uncomfortable—travel aboard a heaving longship or inside a teeth-jarring wheeled box. The box, at any rate, was always dry, but the heavy, cumbersome vehicle moved so slowly behind its plodding oxen that Emma was convinced it would have been faster to walk.

She was relieved that this long trek to the royal seat of Winchester was nearly over. They would spend tonight in an abbey, and tomorrow, escorted by a delegation of clergy and prominent citizens, she would enter the city that was to be her new home. Father Martin knew Winchester well, and he had described it as a beautiful walled town set amid folds of forest, field, and pasture in the king’s heartland of Wessex. Yet, as she looked out at all the different shades of green below a wide blue-and-white sky, she felt a pang of longing for the sea. Here there would be no shore where she could ride with the salt spray upon her face, no white cliffs, not even the call of seabirds that had sometimes filled the skies above Canterbury.

Just then the road curved, and for a few moments she could see Æthelred mounted on the horse that had been her wedding gift to him—a dappled gray stallion that Richard had helped her choose. She had begged to be allowed to ride with the king today but had been refused for a host of reasons that his steward had tediously itemized for her. And so it was the king’s favorite, Elgiva, who rode beside him, her skirts pulled up across her knees to reveal shapely legs that her thin hose did little to hide.

It did not surprise Emma to learn that it was Æthelred’s custom to have favorites among the ladies of the court. It was something her brother had warned might happen, and he had told her that she would be foolish to show any displeasure because of it. It was a king’s prerogative, he had said.

Emma would have found her husband’s prerogative far easier to live with if he had chosen someone other than Elgiva for his attentions. She had learned very quickly the root cause of Elgiva’s thinly disguised contempt: The Lady of Northampton had herself hoped to wed the king and as she could not punish Æthelred for spurning her, she chose to turn her malice upon Emma, the usurper.

There were a thousand ways to sow discord among a household of women, and Elgiva seemed determined to utilize every one. Haughty glances, unkind remarks, baseless rumors, and spiteful tales had led to a clear divide between Emma’s English and Norman attendants, and she despaired of ever finding a way to repair it. Elgiva’s blatant efforts to attract the king’s eye did not help.

Even beyond that, though, there was something about Elgiva’s nature that troubled Emma. She could not make out if it was the careless cruelty of a spoiled child or if something darker lay concealed beneath the fair skin and fine eyes. She wondered that the king did not see it. Or perhaps he did, and that was what intrigued him the most—darkness drawn to darkness.

For although she still knew very little about Æthelred as a man, she knew that across his soul lay a shadow that she could not fathom. He was very much afraid, this king. She had seen it at their wedding feast, and in the three months that she had shared his bed, he had been troubled by dark dreams. She had sometimes wakened in the night to find the bedchamber bright with candles and the king slowly pacing, murmuring to himself—whether prayers or curses she could not say.

She wondered what he saw there, in the long watches of the night, but she did not have the courage to attempt to probe the dark visions in his mind—whether shadows of memory or of things yet to be. Æthelred had barred her from his private thoughts, and even from his presence, as surely as if he had built a wall between them—or built a wall around her, for she was more prisoner than wife or queen.

She saw him only in the formal feasting in the hall or in the strained, cold silence of their bed. In Canterbury she had not been allowed to ride or hunt with him—for fear of her safety, she had been told. She was no more than a foreign hostage—mistrusted by her lord. She was watched constantly by the women who served her, and every missive she sent or received from Normandy passed first through the hands of the king.

She woke each day dreading that some ill tidings would reach the king about her brother or about some monstrous Viking raid that could be laid to Richard’s account. And what, she wondered, would Æthelred do to his hostage then? Up to now those fears had been groundless, but the sea lanes would be open for many weeks yet, and until winter storms kept the dragon ships from venturing onto England’s shores, she, like the king, would not rest easily at night.

She gazed out at the green land that was so beautiful and told herself that she must not despair. Yet she doubted that she would ever feel that she belonged in this place, or that she could ever care for the dark king who ruled it.

The road curved again, and again she saw Æthelred with Elgiva beside him, her black hair tangling in the breeze.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, “if the king confides in Elgiva, and if she is truly fond of him.”

Wymarc’s mouth twisted in an uncharacteristic scowl.

“Elgiva is fond of no one but herself,” she said. “Come to that, the only person who loves her more than she loves herself is that old witch Groa. I expect she thinks that Elgiva pisses holy water.”

Margot shot her a reproachful glance. “That will do,” she said.

“But it is true,” Wymarc insisted. “Groa worships the girl. Can you not see it? I think Elgiva must have cast a spell on the woman, and on the king as well, come to that.”

“Do not judge Groa too severely,” Margot reproved her. “If she loves the girl overmuch it is hardly to be wondered at. Elgiva has been the only bright thing in that poor woman’s life.”

Wymarc looked, astonished, at Margot.

“Why do you say that? What do you know about Groa that we do not?”

Margot pursed her lips, glanced from Wymarc to Emma, and then heaved a little sigh.

“When Groa was a young woman she was taken in a raid from her home somewhere in the far north. Her captor was one of Ælfhelm’s thegns, and he kept Groa as his concubine. She bore him six children, all of whom died before they were a year old. Her man died, too, while Groa was pregnant with her last child, and when that babe died at her breast she was given Elgiva to suckle.” She sighed again. “Since then the girl has been her all in all.”

Poor Groa, Emma thought. She was a grim-faced creature, as hard, cold, and sharp as a sword to all but Elgiva. Did bitterness and loss truly do that to a woman? Must she become hard when misfortune struck, so that she did not break?

Wymarc, too, seemed subdued by this glimpse into the life of Elgiva’s old nurse, for she was silent for some time, gazing out at the passing fields of new grain.

“I grant you that she has suffered,” Wymarc muttered, “but Groa does her mistress no service by defending her even when she knows Elgiva is in the wrong. I’ll warrant that Elgiva does what she pleases because she has always been allowed to do so. Look at her now, riding next to the king with her skirt hitched up almost to her waist. It is not seemly.”

“If the king bids Elgiva ride with him,” Emma murmured, “she cannot easily refuse him.”

And if the king were to command even more from Elgiva—what then? Emma did not believe that Ealdorman Ælfhelm would sanction an illicit relationship between his daughter and the king. Elgiva was much too valuable in the marriage market to waste. But Ælfhelm had gone to his lands in the north, and if the king wished to bed Elgiva, there was no one to stop him.

Almost unconsciously, her hand pressed against the belt cinched tightly at her waist. Her womb had not yet quickened with the king’s child, and it had been three months. She could not help but think of her own family history. Her mother had borne six children while she was the unwed consort of a duke whose Frankish wife had died young, childless, and brokenhearted. If Elgiva were to seduce Æthelred from Emma’s bed, it might be Emma’s lot to remain childless. And without a son to protect her, she would be at the mercy of the king and
his
sons.

She had tried to befriend them—the three eldest—after their return from their eight-week exile at St. Albans. The eldest, Athelstan, had treated her efforts with a frosty disdain that occasionally warmed into chilly courtesy. Sometimes in the hall he would not bother to disguise his dislike. He would stare coldly at her, as if she were some outlandish creature from another world—which, in some ways, she supposed she was.

His brother Ecbert, a year younger than she was, did not seem to know what to do whenever he found himself confronted with her. He was a genial fellow by nature, his normal expression a lopsided grin. Whenever he was in her presence, though, he took care to rearrange his face into a frown. He could not maintain it for long, though, and she sometimes caught him observing her with shy interest.

It was Edmund who seemed to resent her the most. He was fourteen summers old, but a dour lad who seemed far older. He never greeted her with anything but a scowl, and he never spoke to her if he could help it—and then only in monosyllables.

She had far better luck with Æthelred’s youngest children. To her surprise and relief they seemed to accept her with dispassion, if not enthusiasm, looking to her as if she were just another one of the many functionaries who oversaw their schooling and daily care. She thought that they could not have been very close to their mother, for they never spoke of her, and even the girls did not seem to miss her.

There was one other child—Mathilda, the youngest and barely two years old—whom she had not met, for the girl had been installed in a convent shortly after her mother died. It was not unusual for the daughters of kings and wealthy magnates to be consecrated to God, but Emma thought it hard that this child would have to live such a circumscribed life from so early an age. She could not imagine giving up a daughter of her own to such a life.

None of Æthelred’s children would be at Winchester just yet. The eldest had left on business of their own, and the youngest had been sent to some estate in the country. The purpose, ostensibly, was to give the king and his bride time alone together, unencumbered by the children of his first wife. Emma had laughed when she heard that, for she liked the king’s younger children far better than she liked the king.

In August, though, the children would return to Winchester. When they did, she must welcome them as a mother and a friend. If she could not give the king a child, then she must befriend her stepchildren, because her own safety—her very life—might one day lie in their hands. She was confident that she could win the affections of the girls and the youngest boys. It was the king’s three eldest sons—Athelstan, Ecbert, and Edmund—who presented the real challenge. Somehow she had to convince them that she was not a threat. How was she to do that, though, when everyone knew that her whole purpose was to give birth to a son who would be their rival for the king’s affection and largesse—and perhaps, one day, for the throne itself?

Chapter Twelve

August 1002

Winchester, Hampshire

Æ
thelred stood beside a light-filled window embrasure in his private chamber and greeted the arrival of his eldest son with a grunt. He half anticipated another outburst of resentment like the one he had had to endure before he’d banished the pup to St. Albans, and he did not relish the prospect.

Christ, he was weary of it all—the restless, sleep-troubled nights, the days of wrangling with councilors and churchmen, and underneath it all the incessant rumor of trouble that he knew was far more than rumor. He had dispatched this recalcitrant son of his to gather information, and now, eyeing Athelstan as he bent the knee with sober regard, Æthelred took heart. Perhaps the whelp was beginning to learn humility. Perhaps he would be of some use after all.

“You followed my instructions?” Æthelred asked, coiling himself into his chair and gesturing for his son to stand.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And do you understand the problem that I face?”

Athelstan inclined his head. “Some years ago you forged an alliance with Viking raiders who were ravaging our lands, you bade them serve you as mercenaries, and rewarded them with gold and properties. Now you have bands of well-trained, well-armed Vikings, most of them Danes, settled throughout your kingdom.”

Æthelred scowled. His son had grasped the situation well enough, if not the policy behind it.

“I had little choice at the time,” he said, “nor am I the first ruler to settle mercenaries in his realm. The Frankish king did it. Even the great Alfred was forced to allow Danes to settle north of the River Humber.”

“But in Alfred’s time,” his son said, his expression carefully bland, “the Danes settled in lands where few of Alfred’s people dwelt. Your mercenaries are in Devonshire, Hampshire, and Oxfordshire—in the very heart of your kingdom.”

His son did not say it, but Æthelred heard the unspoken accusation. He had placed a pack of wolves in the sheepfold.

“I gave them estates,” he growled, “and they gave their oaths that they would not turn against me.”

Yet they had done so, and with a vengeance. After several years of abiding by the pledges they had made to him, the dogs of war had been loosed upon England.

Æthelred, remembering, grimaced, and rubbed at a suddenly painful temple with his fingertips.

One of those dogs, Pallig, was wed to the half sister of Swein Forkbeard, and when Forkbeard had attacked the southern coast last year, Pallig and his men had joined in the assault. They had pillaged and burned all across Wessex, and the English host that rallied against them had failed to stop them.

He’d had no choice but to bribe the lot of them yet again to leave his realm in peace. Forkbeard had taken his gold to his ships and sailed east, but Pallig had merely made new pledges of peace and retreated to his estates. He and others like him were like boils upon the land that would someday erupt to plague him once more. He could not trust them.

“You spoke to Pallig?” he asked.

“I spoke with Pallig and with his wife, Gunhild.”

“Think you he will keep his oaths to me?” He watched his son closely and spotted the hesitation before the answer was given. So the lad, too, saw the threat.

“My lord,” Athelstan said, “Pallig is no farmer. He is a mercenary down to his soul—an adventurer who thrives on danger and excitement. If you do not put him to some use, he will make more mischief in spite of his pledges to you.”

Æthelred waved the suggestion away.

“Once before I set the fox to guarding the chickens and I paid the price. I will not make that mistake again. Pallig may be living on estates that I granted him, but he is Swein’s man at heart. He is like a knife at my throat.”

“No, my lord,” his son objected. Æthelred glared at his presumption but let him have his say. “Pallig is more like a kingdom unto himself,” Athelstan went on, “not bound to any man. He takes whatever he feels is his by right and by force of arms. It is not the having that he loves, it is the getting. If you could but find a way to bend him to your will—”

“Men like Pallig do not bend!” he snarled. “Best you learn that now, boy. If money will not sway him, nothing will.” Good Christ, he had dealt with vermin like Pallig for two decades; he knew them far better than this cub of his, who had not yet seen eighteen summers.

Athelstan frowned at his father, sympathy for the king’s dilemma warring with exasperation. That England was beset by enemies from within as well as from without was the king’s own doing. Granted, the marriage to Emma might stem the tide of Viking raids, but Æthelred had made a devil’s bargain when he had given land to men like Pallig. They were like feral dogs that must be tamed and muzzled. He could think of only one way to do it.

“Pallig has a son, my lord,” he said urgently, “newly born. Take the boy as hostage for his father’s good behavior.” If the boy were raised at court, he would become English and no Dane. Build trust with one child, and others, no doubt, would follow.

“Hostage?” Æthelred almost spat the word. “It is far too late for that now. We might have made it a condition in March, before we made the
gafol
payment, but now we have nothing with which to bargain. Pallig will not willingly hand his son over to me.” He fingered his beard, his face brooding and dark. “He is safe on his own lands, surrounded by his warriors, a law unto himself. Nor is he the only one. There are a dozen more like him, spread across the southern shires. Who is to say what schemes they may be plotting?”

Listening to his father’s groundless suspicions, Athelstan’s exasperation finally overcame his sympathy.

“Who is to say that they are plotting any schemes at all?” he demanded. “What if they are not? What if Pallig merely craves action? He is a shipman! Can you not put together a fleet and charge him with guarding our coast? My lord, what other choice have you?”

His father made no answer, and Athelstan, looking into a face that he suddenly realized was haggard and far too pale, felt a sudden chill along his spine, as if a blade had been drawn through ice and laid against his skin. The king was staring, red-rimmed eyes fixed and frightened, at something behind Athelstan. He whipped around, fearing to see some horror there, yet he saw nothing save a bank of candles whose meager flames trembled in a shadowy corner, where the daylight did not reach.

He turned back to the king, and still his father stared, his face working as he mouthed a soundless cry, knuckles whitening as he clutched the carved dragon heads beneath his hands.

“My lord!” Athelstan cried. Was this some fever of the mind sprung from the cares that beset a king? Some disease that struck suddenly and left nothing but the shell of a man in its wake?

He reached out and clasped his father’s hand, and he was stunned by how cold the taut flesh felt beneath his palm. His own blood seemed to freeze in response, and he felt suddenly afraid that he was watching his father die.

He grasped the king’s shoulders and shook him, not knowing what else to do. In response the watery blue eyes came to rest upon his own, but the king’s distress seemed to become even more acute. His father bent forward, his body rigid as he beat his breast and moaned a wordless cry, tortured by some invisible enemy.

“My lord!” Athelstan cried again, raging at his helplessness. Why did no one hear him, no one come to offer aid?

Yet even as he formed that thought, his father’s body relaxed, and the bent head dropped into the king’s slender hands. Athelstan’s panic eased, and he felt as if he had just wakened from a nightmare.

Slowly his father raised his head, and now his face was creased and gray as the wide eyes fixed purposefully on Athelstan.

“What did you see?” the king demanded in a hoarse, urgent whisper.

Athelstan hesitated, unnerved by the intensity of his father’s gaze, his mind groping desperately for a response that would appease the king.

“I saw shadows, my lord,” he replied at last. “Only shadows.” And I saw a king half mad with fear, he thought. But of that he dared not speak.

His father drew a long breath and released it as he repeated Athelstan’s response.

“Only shadows,” he whispered, and he pressed his hands against his eyes, as if he would banish whatever baleful vision lingered there.

Athelstan roused himself to fetch wine from the nearby table that held cups and a flagon. He watched while his father drank, and a hundred questions formed in his mind.

“Were you in pain?” he asked. “Has this”—he searched for some way to describe it—“affliction struck before?”

His father, much revived, it appeared, by the wine, threw him a dark, almost furtive glance.

“It was but weariness, nothing more,” he murmured. “It has passed now. There are far weightier matters to occupy both my mind and yours. You will forget it.” He left his chair and began to pace, restless and distracted. “There have been signs,” he said heavily, “of trouble to come. I have seen portents—” He flung up an arm as if to sweep away his own words. “Nay, I need no portents to know that Pallig is dangerous. As you say, he is no farmer. Neither are the men who answer to him. They will become restless, and then they will strike.”

The next moment the chamber door opened, and his father’s steward, Hubert, entered carrying a packet of documents. The king raised a hand to forestall whatever Hubert might say and looked gravely at Athelstan.

“Did you see any indications that Pallig was preparing for battle?”

“No, my lord,” he said, mystified both by what he had just witnessed as well as by his father’s apparent determination to ignore it.

The king grimaced, as if that was not the answer he had anticipated. “Then there is nothing more to do, for now.” He brushed past Athelstan as he made for his chair and beckoned to the steward. “Leave me. I have business with Hubert.”

Athelstan stood there for a moment, troubled, unwilling to leave before he had gained a better understanding of what he had just seen. But both men ignored him, and he knew better than to disobey his father’s command. He strode slowly from the chamber and, glancing back, he saw his father’s eyes now fixed hard upon him, and in those eyes was a warning that it would be perilous for him to ignore.

As he made his way through the great hall, something that Bishop Ælfheah had said to him in the spring came back to him: The
king is troubled in his mind.
Had the bishop been witness to a similar occurrence, then? Ælfheah had not explained himself, and Athelstan dared not question him about it now. That threatening glance from his father had commanded his silence. He stepped from the royal apartments into the sunshine of late summer, his mind still wrestling with the king’s strange behavior and his talk of signs and portents.

Yet he, too, had been given a sign by the seeress near Saltford—albeit one he was unwilling to believe. And last winter there had been rumors from the north that men had seen columns of light shimmering in the night sky—fierce angels with swords, it was said, come to punish men for their sins.

Truth to tell, his father was not the only one disturbed by such portents, yet what steps could anyone take to vanquish foreboding or to prevent some cataclysm that was lurking in the future? And then, recalling his interview with the king, he knew with certainty that his father must be planning steps of some kind. Why else had he been sent to speak with Pallig? Yet if his father did have some presentiment of disaster might not his very efforts to avert it bring about the misfortune that he so dreaded?

Try as he might, Athelstan could not penetrate the mysterious workings of the king’s mind any more than he could unravel the dark threads of the future spun for him by the cunning woman beside the standing stones. It was a futile endeavor, and when he heard the shouts of children’s laughter, he willingly relegated his father’s troubling words and actions to the back of his mind. He had forgotten that the children would have returned to Winchester, and he followed the sound of laughter into the queen’s garden. There, the sight of his brothers and sisters playing at dodge the ball seemed innocent and blessedly carefree. He was astonished, though, to see that the queen had joined them in their game. It was not something that their own mother had ever done.

He glanced around the garden, noting the absence of any of the English noblewomen who should have attended the queen. So the rumors that had reached him at Headington were true. There were two courts at Winchester, one made up of the king’s retinue, the other of Emma’s mostly Norman entourage. That, he guessed, was the result of his father’s dissatisfaction with his bride. The king had expected to wed a child who would speak only Norman French, and so could be kept ignorant of the currents of information swirling around the hall and the palace—information that she might impart to her brother and, through him, to the king’s Danish enemies. Emma’s skill at English had astonished them all and must have infuriated his father.

But if the queen could be a conduit for information going from England to Normandy, and thus to Denmark, then she could be a conduit in the other direction as well. His father, so focused on Pallig and the enemies he perceived within his borders, had probably made no effort to learn anything from Emma about Duke Richard—about his ambitions or his allies. But someone ought to do it, and soon—before the king’s misguided animosity toward his bride made her despise all of them.