Shadow on the Crown (5 page)

Chapter Six

January 1002

Near Saltford, Oxfordshire

A
thelstan, Ecbert, and Edmund rode at the head of a small company of men along a track that wound through a snow-smothered landscape. Above them thin white clouds driven by a light breeze streaked the sky. For two weeks the æthelings had been awaiting the arrival of Ælfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, at the royal estate near Saltford, the men restive and chafing under the enforced inactivity brought on by repeated bouts of foul weather. In that time the æthelings had received no further word from either the ealdorman or the king, and Athelstan felt as if they had been abandoned, awaiting word of their father’s pleasure. He wondered what was in the king’s mind to keep his eldest sons distant at such a time.

It had not concerned him that news of their mother’s death had reached them only after she had been laid to rest, for he understood that the deadly Christmastime storm had made it impossible for a messenger to make it through any sooner. He and his brothers had mourned her in their own way, yet her loss had touched them almost not at all. Although she had borne eleven children she had tended none of them in their infancy or their youth. Her impact upon her sons and daughters had been of no greater weight than that made by a single snowflake when it touches the earth. She had been but a shadow in their lives, almost invisible in the far larger shadow cast by their father, the king.

Now, though, Athelstan found it worrisome that Ealdorman Ælfhelm and the other great lords of the land remained with the king in Winchester while the eldest æthelings had not been summoned. What matters of moment were being discussed among the king’s counselors?

What secrets was their father keeping from his sons?

“He will marry again,” Edmund had said flatly, when they had discussed it among themselves.

Ecbert had guffawed in disbelief, but Athelstan was inclined to agree with Edmund. Their father was not a young man, but he was vigorous and hale, and his carnal appetites were an open secret among the nobles of his court. The bishops, certainly, would urge him to marry.

Such a step could have momentous consequences for the æthelings, and the fact that Athelstan and his brothers were not privy to their father’s deliberations gnawed like a canker. Even as he turned his face up to the pale light of the winter sun, Athelstan’s thoughts were as cold as the wind that blew at their backs.

He urged his horse up a gentle rise, toward an ancient stone that stood black against the sky. It marked the final leg of this morning’s quest, a journey that had been suggested by Ecbert, half in seriousness and half in jest. He had heard tell of a crone living alone in a fold of the hills, a wisewoman who could read events far in the future.

“We should seek her out,” he had urged last night, as he faced Edmund across the
tafl
board, deliberating his next move. “She might tell us something to our advantage.”

Athelstan and Edmund had both scoffed at their brother’s suggestion, but Ecbert had persisted.

“The local folk swear that she has the Sight,” he insisted. “Even the prior from the abbey hereabouts has been known to visit her cottage.”

“Probably to persuade her to leave her pagan ways,” Athelstan said drily, from where he sat watching their play.

“They say that she knows things,” Ecbert persisted, “that she can decipher men’s hearts.”

“You might want to ask her for advice on how to win at
tafl
,” Edmund said, making a move that captured Ecbert’s king and ended the game. “That is your third loss, man. You are utterly hopeless tonight.”

The normally genial Ecbert threw up his hands in frustration.

“I am bored, Edmund! I am fed up with waiting here like a kenneled dog. If the weather is fine tomorrow, I shall ride out to consult the old woman. Athelstan, will you come with me? Who knows? She may be able to tell us what is in the mind of the king.”

Athelstan thought that unlikely. Nevertheless, the journey, at least, might not be such a bad idea. He glanced around the hall, where men clustered in small groups over games of dice or nodded over cups of ale. They were all of them bored and not a few of them surly. They would be at each other’s throats soon if he did not find something to occupy them.

He nodded briskly to Ecbert.

“It can do no harm,” he said, “and the men and horses will benefit from the exercise, fair weather or no.”

And so they had set out midmorning, following landmarks that a local man pointed out as he led the way—a tree blasted by lightning, an abandoned mill, an ancient mound that the folk thereabouts called the Devil’s Barrow. They had arrived at last at a long, low ridge where the snow lay less thick than it did on the surrounding countryside, and where the standing stone, its edges scored in primitive runes, pointed skyward.

Athelstan checked his horse beside the ancient, lichen-covered stone. Gazing into the shallow vale beyond, he caught his breath at what he saw: a circle of what he guessed must be a hundred standing stones, each one the height of a man or a little more, mushroomed from the valley floor. Like monstrous, deformed fingers, black against the blanket of snow, the stones cast long shadows that speared, ominously, straight at him.

They might not be as massive as the giants on Sarum’s plain, he thought, but there were far more of them, and they had the same menacing power. He did not like it, and he felt his gut begin to churn.

Ecbert and Edmund came up beside him, and he watched their faces as they surveyed the scene before them. From their stricken expressions it was clear that they were having second thoughts about this venture—as was he. There were enough dark things in this world. One needn’t seek them out.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked Ecbert.

“No,” Ecbert muttered, “but it would be stupid to turn back now.” He flicked a glance at Athelstan. “You go first, though.”

Athelstan scowled at him, then peered into the valley again, looking for signs of life. The stone circle was fringed by moss-bearded oaks, and on its far side he could see a small croft sheltering among the trees, its thatching frosted with snow. He realized with a shock that what he had taken for another stone, standing in the gloom near the hut, was a living figure staring back at him.

She had been waiting for them, then. He was certain of it, although he could not say how he knew. There was something else he was certain of as well, and it added to his anxiety. He was meant to go down there. Ecbert was right. There was no turning back now.

He led the way down into the grove, threading his horse through the trees toward the croft, purposely avoiding the clearing and its hulking, glowering stones. As they neared the cottage he saw that the figure waiting there was swathed in layers of coarse, black wool, her head covered by the folds of a shawl so thick that the old woman’s face, if it was a woman, was all but invisible.

“God be with you, my lord,” she called.

The voice was surprisingly deep and harsh—roughened, Athelstan guessed, by wood smoke and disuse. He dismounted and went toward her, Ecbert and Edmund trailing behind him.

“God be with you, mother,” he said. “It must be hard faring for you this winter, living so far from your neighbors as you do. Will you accept a small gift, some supplies to replenish your larder against lean times?” He gestured to one of his men, who placed a large sack filled with cheese, bread, and pulses beside the hut and then hastened back to his mount.

The eyes watching Athelstan showed neither surprise nor gratitude.

“What would you have of me?” she asked. “You have come far from your appointed road, for you are bound north, I think. The
herepath
lies that way.”

She gestured to the west, where the old road built by the Roman legions, the Fosse Way, ran from Exeter in the southwest to Jorvik in the north. Presumably, whenever Ealdorman Ælfhelm arrived to lead them to Northumbria, they would, indeed, follow that same northward road.

Still, Athelstan reassured himself, it did not take second sight to hazard that a group of armed men wearing the badge of the ealdorman of Northumbria would likely be headed that way.

“Perhaps you have already given me what I seek,” he said, “if you can predict nothing more for me than a road that leads north. But it is my brother here,” he motioned to Ecbert, “who wishes to consult you.”

She peered up at him then, and he saw the gleam of shrewd eyes from within the folds of her shawl.

“Nay, lord,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You are the one who has need of guidance. Will you give me your hand?”

He hesitated, brushed by a whisper of foreboding. The knowing eyes fixed on his, though, flashed a challenge that he could not ignore, and he placed his hand within her outstretched palms. Her fingers felt thin and clawlike, as roughened and calloused as his own.

She peered at his palm, and for some time she was silent while Athelstan’s disquiet grew. The standing stone on the ridge, the menacing stone circle, the skeletal touch of the old woman’s hands—all of it was forbidden, pagan magic. He felt a wild urge to flee, but in the next moment she spoke, and in a voice far different from the one with which she had greeted him. Now it was vibrant, full and feminine. The timbre of it pulsed through him in the same way that a tolling bell vibrates through the blood.

“There is great strength in this hand,” she proclaimed, loud enough for all his men to hear, “strength enough to wield even the great Sword of Offa.”

Next to him he felt Edmund give a sudden start of surprise, and he could guess what his brother was thinking, for the words struck him, too, with a force as sharp as a blow. Offa’s Sword, once wielded by that legendary Saxon king, even now hung on the wall behind their father’s chair in the great hall at Winchester. By tradition it was bestowed by the ruling king upon his designated heir. It had not yet been promised to Athelstan, but he expected that one day it would be his.

Yet how had this woman guessed that she spoke to the eldest son of the king? Had word reached her somehow that the æthelings were at Saltford? Possibly. Possibly this was all an act, but if so, to what end?

Now the woman curled his fingers into his palm and leaned close to him.

“Sword you may wield,” she said, so softly that only he could hear her, “yet the scepter will remain beyond your reach.”

It took him a moment to grasp the import of her words, and by then she was already turning away to enter her croft. Quickly he covered the space between them, caught her arm, and held her.

“Who will take the scepter, then, when the time comes?” he hissed softly. “Who will wear the crown?”

She turned, and for a long moment she looked past him, at each of his brothers in turn, until at last she faced Athelstan again and slowly shook her head.

“There is a shadow on the crown, my lord,” she murmured, “and my Sight cannot pierce the darkness. You must be content with the knowledge you have been given, for I can say no more.”

No, of course she would say no more, he thought. She was wily, this one, toying with her supplicants as skillfully as a practiced harlot so that they sought her out again and again. Yet she could have no real power, not unless one granted it to her. And he would not journey down that dark road.

He released her with a curt nod.

“Go with God then, mother.”

She turned away from him, and he followed her with his eyes until the dark maw of her croft swallowed her.

Ecbert had already mounted his horse, but Edmund was waiting for him, studying him with dark, speculative eyes.

“What did she say to you, there at the end?” he asked. “What did she say about us?”

“Nothing of import,” Athelstan replied gruffly. “You did not really expect anything, did you? She is nothing but a fraud, Edmund.”

He mounted his horse and made for the ridge top, but in spite of what he had said to his brother, his thoughts ran on the old woman’s words. Her prediction about Offa’s Sword was no more than he already knew. He had been born the eldest son of one of the richest kings in Christendom, and Offa’s Sword was his due.

As for the rest of it, if there was any truth in the future that she bespoke him—that he would never be England’s king—then he must find a way to change his destiny.

Chapter Seven

February 1002

Fécamp, Normandy

T
he purpose of the English delegation to Normandy became clear as soon as the news spread of the recent death of the consort of the English king. Although Duke Richard maintained a stony silence about what had occurred during that first meeting in the great hall, everyone assumed that the archbishop and the ealdorman had brought a proposal of marriage for Mathilde, and that it would be accepted. A liaison with the English throne would raise Richard’s prestige in all of Christendom. He would be a fool to turn it down, and Richard was no fool.

Nevertheless, the negotiations dragged on for weeks, wreathed in secrecy behind the cloistered walls of nearby Trinity Abbey. Gunnora, who attended each session, returned every night to the palace so grim-faced that neither her daughters nor even the intrepid Judith dared to question her.

When eventually Ealdorman Ælfric was seen to board his ship and set sail with a document that bore the ducal seal, the palace hummed with excitement and anticipation. Emma waited with her sister for word that Mathilde must attend her mother and brothers to be counseled regarding King Æthelred and the role that Mathilde would play, but no summons came. Instead, the web of secrecy that had been cast about the proceedings between the Norman duke and the ministers of the English king remained impenetrable. The dowager duchess went into seclusion at Fécamp’s Priory of St. Ann, while Richard and Robert left Fécamp altogether, riding with the English archbishop to the abbey of Saint-Wandrille to pray for the success of their endeavor.

Judith, who had no more inkling than anyone else about what had taken place in the abbey cloisters, nevertheless followed through on her plan to order new wardrobes for both of Richard’s sisters in preparation for their future nuptials. Fabrics of the finest silk, linen, and wool arrived daily from Rouen. Gowns, chemises, stockings, and headrails spilled from busy fingers until every chamber at Fécamp became a storehouse of wedding finery.

Mathilde, who should have been at the center of all of the preparations, had taken ill again, laid low by headaches that would not let her sleep. Emma spent long hours at her sister’s bedside relaying every scrap of rumor and gossip that she gleaned about the English king and his court, although her own heart was heavy at the coming separation. Mathilde, she guessed, must feel it even more, for she would leave everything familiar behind her. Worse yet, beyond that parting lay the reality of the king, so many years older than his new bride, and in addition to that, the challenges of an English court filled with strangers speaking a foreign tongue.

Much would be expected of the king’s new wife, Emma thought, burdens that she could only begin to imagine. How would Mathilde, who had never been physically strong, cope with the pressures of that new life? Often Emma lay awake in the cold watches of the night thinking about those burdens, her heart filled with dread for her sister, knowing that beside her Mathilde, too, lay awake in the dark. Yet each sister kept her own counsel.

And so the weeks passed until, late one February afternoon, the dowager duchess returned from St. Ann’s, and Emma was summoned to wait upon her. She found her mother alone in her chamber, circlet and headrail cast aside and the long gray braid of her hair coiled atop her head. She was warming her hands at the brazier, and the light from below accentuated fine creases around her mouth and eyes. She nodded to Emma, then turned her gaze back to the glowing coals, and for a time was silent. Emma saw an unfamiliar weariness in her face, and a resemblance to Mathilde that she had never before noticed in the sharpness of her nose and the thin line of her mouth.

Finally her mother spoke, almost as if to herself. “Events have overtaken us, and I cannot wait for your brothers’ return to set things in motion.” She glanced at Emma and nodded toward a nearby stool. “You had best sit down, Emma, for I have a great deal to say to you.”

Emma’s heart clouded with dread. She sat upon the stool and waited for whatever hammer stroke was to come.

“As you have no doubt guessed,” Gunnora said, “the king of England has sued for your sister’s hand in marriage.” She glanced at Emma, then began to pace the room. “King Æthelred wants something in return, of course—something more than a nubile young bride to grace his bed. And so, in recompense for the great honor that he bestows upon us in taking a Norman wife, he will expect your brother to close his harbors to the Danes. His emissaries have not said as much directly. They have danced around the issue like virgins round a maypole, but it is clear what they want, and your brother has given them every reason to believe that he will grant it.”

Emma leaned forward in her chair, her eyes on her mother, her mind racing. She had been so preoccupied with the challenges that this marriage presented for her sister that she had forgotten the peril that her brother risked by agreeing to it. Æthelred of England was the mortal enemy of King Swein of Denmark. With Mathilde’s marriage to Æthelred, Richard, too, became an enemy of the infamous Swein Forkbeard, making Normandy a target for Danish raiders.

“In fact,” Gunnora went on, “your brother cannot deny the Danes access to our harbors and our markets. If he should do so, Swein Forkbeard would turn his shipmen upon us like starving dogs on a wounded stag. He would harry our coasts for plunder, and then barter it quite happily in Hamburg or Bremen. The English king could not come to our aid, for he has no fleet. The French king would merely rejoice in our misfortune. It would be a catastrophe for every Norman settlement that lies within reach of Danish longships. And so,” she stopped her pacing and stood before Emma, “it will not happen. Your brother will never close his harbors to the Danes. Nevertheless, he will agree to do so, and his sister will be given in marriage as his bond.”

Emma stared at her mother as the wretchedness of her sister’s fate struck her. Mathilde would be little more than a royal hostage, sent to guarantee her brother’s submission to the will of the English king. And if Richard broke his pledge and defied the king, Mathilde would be defenseless in a foreign land, with no means of protecting herself from whatever retribution her royal husband might choose to inflict.

“He cannot do it,” Emma whispered, her mouth gone dry with horror. Her brother could not sacrifice Mathilde this way, could not place her at the mercy of the English king.

“So I told your brother,” Gunnora said, and now Emma could hear the weariness in her voice. “But Richard is a ruler and a man, and the life of a young girl, even that of his own sister, weighs little when balanced against the fate of an entire people. I could not sway him from his course.”

Emma felt sick at the thought of Mathilde alone in a foreign land, perhaps a prisoner of the king.

“What will happen to her?”

Gunnora began to pace the room again, her hands twisting one inside the other, and Emma grew more and more frightened by her mother’s obvious distress. When Gunnora spoke at last, she did not answer Emma’s question.

“Richard is not oblivious to the peril that his sister would face in England. It took little effort on my part to persuade him that we must provide her with a weapon that she could use to protect herself should her husband turn against her. The solution was obvious, but we agonized for hours over how it was to be accomplished. In the end, we offered Æthelred my dower lands on the Contentin. It is a princely gift that he could not easily refuse, for it gives him a toehold on this side of the Narrow Sea.” She stopped her pacing and drew in a long breath. “In return, Richard demanded that his sister go to England not as Æthelred’s consort but as his queen.”

She looked at Emma with a kind of triumph in her eyes. “Emma, Ealdorman Ælfric has returned with word that the English king has accepted the contract. Æthelred’s Norman bride will not be a mere consort but will be crowned as his queen. She will have wealth and stature far beyond that of his first wife. She will stand at the king’s side accorded privileges that he cannot easily rescind however much he may be provoked.”

Emma saw at once the wisdom of such a provision, but she also recognized the additional burden that a crown would place upon her sister.

“Does Mathilde know?” she asked.

A shadow crept across Gunnora’s face, and Emma watched, bewildered, as her mother stepped forward and knelt in front of her. Slender fingers clutched Emma’s own, fingers so cold that they seemed to burn against Emma’s skin.

“It is not Mathilde who will go to England, Emma,” her mother said. “It must be you.”

The words flowed over her like water at first, and then they seemed to form into waves that buffeted her until she could no longer pull in even the smallest breath. She did not dare look away from her mother’s solid gaze, because it was the only thing that kept her from drowning in that treacherous sea.

She felt as if the world she knew had suddenly changed from a place of safety and sanctuary to something unknown and terrifying. She did not want to go to England, did not want to wed a king, did not want to bear the weight of a crown. Yet, gazing down into her mother’s stern and unrelenting face, she knew that she would be given no choice.

She slipped from her stool as panic engulfed her. Dropping to her hands and knees she began to retch, burning bile scalding her throat. A basin appeared before her, and her mother’s steadying hand grasped the back of her neck. She closed her eyes, but she could not stop the spinning panic that had her in its grip.

“It is the shock of it,” her mother said, her voice gentle but firm. “You were not prepared for it. But you will receive much worse than this in the years to come, my daughter,” and now the voice seemed to Emma implacable and uncompromising. “You must ever be prepared within yourself to face what trials may await you. Let this be your first lesson: No one else must see you like this, Emma. Do you hear me? However great the provocation, you must never allow anyone to see your fear.”

Emma, crouched upon the floor, her body braced upon her forearms, her stomach churning, squeezed her eyes tight against the tears that threatened.

“Why must I be the one to go?” she demanded. “Mathilde is the eldest. She wants it. It is her right.”

“Your sister has neither the strength nor the will to pit herself against the . . .” Gunnora stopped, as if she regretted her words and would take them back, “. . . against the trials that face a queen,” she finished slowly. “Only you, Emma, of all my daughters, have the gifts for that.”

Many hours later, as Emma lay sleepless at her mother’s side, Gunnora’s words echoed endlessly in her mind. She had no illusions about the fate that awaited her. That much her mother had made perfectly clear. As Norman bride and English queen she would walk a fine line between the interests of two rulers—her brother and her lord. Both men would demand her fealty. One, at least, would exact a heavy price if she were to prove disloyal. That was what her mother feared, and what she had been willing to reveal.

But there was something else that her mother would not say, and Emma felt certain that it had to do with the English king. She sensed that Gunnora knew something about Æthelred of England that she did not want Emma to know, at least not yet. It was that unshared knowledge about the man she would wed that frightened her most of all.

In the streets of Fécamp and Rouen, in Caen and Évreux, the populace hailed Emma as the flower of Normandy, the bride who would become England’s queen. Within the ducal palace, though, where the duke’s sisters once shared a bedchamber, the news of Emma’s betrothal was no cause for rejoicing. Mathilde, bitter and angry that a royal marriage had been contracted for Emma instead of for her, took to her bed, refusing to speak to her sister in spite of Emma’s tearful entreaties and Gunnora’s measured reproofs. Finally, Gunnora sent her to Rouen, where Mathilde would not be daily bombarded by the frenzied preparations for her sister’s marriage.

Emma wept at Mathilde’s departure, but Gunnora did not let her grieve for long. There was much that Emma had to learn before the ships would carry her across the Narrow Sea.

She spent long hours with the ealdorman, Ælfric, who schooled her in the finer points of the English language and the traditions of the court. He was an able tutor who treated her with grave courtesy, and she came to like him well. Not a young man by any means, his genial face was framed by thick gray locks that hung to near his shoulders. His beard, too, was gray, and his dark eyes gleamed beneath bushy gray brows. The fist-sized golden broach that clasped his cloak at one shoulder and the jeweled rings adorning his fingers bespoke wealth and influence, and she wondered how close he was to the king.

Ælfric told her of the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, and of the great King Alfred, who began the task of binding the separate kingdoms into one—a task completed at last by King Edgar, Æthelred’s father. That king, he told her, had died at an early age, leaving his throne to a young son. Ælfric’s face had darkened then, as if some memory from that distant past had suddenly cast a shadow over the present. He would not say what troubled him, though, and Emma’s suspicion grew that there was something about her betrothed husband that was being kept from her.

During this time she received guidance from her family as well. Richard advised her regarding the estates for which she would be responsible, reminding her to pay close attention to income and expenditures, to rents and to yields.

Archbishop Robert counseled her regarding God’s expectations of her as queen, particularly her duties to the Church and the men and women who served it.

Judith helped her choose the attendants who would accompany her to England and assisted with the packing of all her belongings: clothes, furniture, bedding, supplies for the journey, gifts for the family and for the nobles who awaited her. It was no insignificant task. It would take three longships to transport Emma, her retainers, and her goods to Canterbury. Two more ships would carry a dozen horses bred in the Norman stables—Emma’s own gifts to the members of her new family.