(2013) Shadow on the Crown

by Patricia Bracewell

  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.

  Emma scooped up the leather ball, took aim at Edgar, and threw, but the lithe nine-year-old easily dodged her poorly aimed missile.

  His brother Edward taunted her cheerfully from his position next to her in the circle. “You throw like a girl.”

  Emma laughed. “I did not have any brothers to teach me how to throw.”

  “But you have a brother, do you not?” Edward asked, deftly using his foot to stop the ball that skipped toward him. “Is he not the king of Normandy?” He hurled the ball at Edgar, but he, too, missed.

  “He is the duke,” Emma corrected him. “Normandy is a part of France, and so my brother’s overlord is France’s king.” Not that her brother ever took much notice of the opinions of the French king. “But my brother, like your father, rules a great land filled with many people, very much like a king. He is much older than I am, though. When I was a girl he was already a grown man and had no time to teach me to throw a ball. I am very good on a horse,” she said, hoping to impress Edward, who was regarding her skeptically. “I learned to ride when I was quite, quite small,” she said, catching the ball that Wymarc, in the center of the circle, had nimbly sidestepped.

  “Then we must go riding this afternoon,” Edward urged, his face lighting with enthusiasm. “It is much better than playing with a ball.”

  Emma frowned, wondering if she should attempt it. She longed to ride, but every time she had even approached the stables here, which lay just outside the palace compound, her guards had turned her aside. They were courteous enough, but they had their orders, and she could guess what they were. The queen must not be allowed outside the palisade—for her own safety, of course.

  If she attempted to visit the stables with Æthelred’s children and was turned away, they would quickly realize that she was a prisoner, and from that deduce that she was an enemy. The bonds between them—so fragile, so carefully forged during their time together in Canterbury—would melt like ice in the sun.

  “Perhaps we can go tomorrow,” she hedged, “if the weather remains fine.” She would have to try, once again, to speak to the king. If she were in the company of the children, their attendants, and a score of guards, perhaps he would let her go.

  She reached to her left to catch the ball that the boys’ tutor had hurled from the other side of the circle, but it bounced against her hand and went off at an angle. Emma turned to retrieve it but drew up abruptly at the sight of the young man who captured the ball with easy grace.

  “My lord,” she said, unsettled by the steady gaze of Æthelred’s eldest son.

  “I advise you to take advantage of the sunshine, my lady,” he said. “You cannot count on fine weather for the morrow. I, for one, wish to try one of the excellent mounts that accompanied you from Normandy.” He tossed the ball to his brother. “What do you say, Edward? Shall we take the queen for a ride?”

  “Yes!” Edward said, the ball game forgotten. “Edgar must come, too. We do not have to bring the girls.” His tone became suddenly imperious. “They are too little. They would only slow us down.”

  He smirked at his sister Edyth, who wrinkled her nose at him and stuck out her tongue.

  “We don’t like horses, anyway,” she said. “They smell. And boys smell even worse. We’re going to play with the kittens.”

  She marched off to her nurse, nose decidedly out of joint, her sister Ælfgifu in tow. It appeared that the ball game was over.

  Emma turned back to Athelstan, who, with a quick jerk of his head, sent his two younger brothers pelting for the stables. The sun lit his tawny hair with golden highlights, but that was the only thing warm about him. He did not smile, merely waited politely for her reply.

  She did not know what to make of him, or of his invitation.

  “The guards,” she said, hesitating, “will not allow me to—”

  “I will take responsibility for your safety,” he said.

  She understood then. She would still be a prisoner, escorted by the ætheling and his men rather than her Norman hearth troops. Nevertheless, she would be outside the city walls for a time, on her own mount, in the sun and the gentle summer air. It might not be freedom, but it was as close as she was likely to get.

  “Do not leave without me,” she said. “I will be with you directly.” She beckoned to Wymarc and made for the passage that led to her apartment.

  As she hastened to her chamber, her mind was busy. What had prompted the ætheling’s generosity? On the few occasions that she had attempted to converse with Athelstan, he had been civil but hardly warm. She had given up trying to placate any of them—the king’s grown sons, the ladies of the court, the king himself. She felt like a pariah at the table and in the hall, for the king ignored her, and everyone else followed suit. What, then, had prompted Athelstan to seek the company of his father’s reviled queen?

  She could not guess, yet she was certain that he had some hidden motive. Every word, every act, every gesture made at court was laced with cryptic intent. The very walls held secrets. And the king’s eldest son had reason to mislike and mistrust her, for she might one day bear a son to supplant him. She wished that it were not so, that she could ride today with a carefree heart. But she knew better. She would have to be wary.

  Soon the cluster of riders was making its way past the mill, stringing
out in smaller groups when they turned south to follow the path of the River Itchen. Emma found herself at Athelstan’s side, with Wymarc and Hugh—summoned by Emma because she wanted at least one of her Norman hearth guards with her—immediately behind them. Edward and Edgar, their rambunctious spirits kept in moderate check by two grooms, rode some way ahead, while the ætheling’s well-armed outriders trailed at a discreet distance.

  As she rode Emma studied the young man beside her, looking for traces of his father. Their coloring was the same—hair as golden as ripe wheat, although Athelstan, like most English youth, wore his cropped roughly about his ears, in contrast to his father’s longer, perfectly groomed locks. They had the same high forehead as well, but there the similarity ended. Athelstan’s dark brows, broad nose, and full, sensuous lips bore no resemblance to his father’s thinner, more sharply sculpted features.

  She studied his mouth and tried to recall if she had ever seen him smile. Not at her, certainly, which made her question again why he was riding beside her at this moment.

  “I am grateful for your kindness, my lord,” she said. “The palace garden is quite beautiful, but I have longed to explore the countryside.”

  “My mother, who designed the garden,” he said, “did not ride. She had a contemplative nature, and the garden seemed to satisfy all her needs.”

  Emma considered what little she knew of his mother. The king’s first wife, it seemed, had lived like a nun, except for the very secular task of conceiving and bearing eleven children. Her personality seemed to have had all the impact on the king’s court of a finger drawn through water. Had she truly been content to live such a cloistered life, or had she been forced into it by the king? Emma could imagine that well enough. But perhaps the woman had never known any other kind of existence. Perhaps she had been raised in such a sheltered environment that she found the world beyond the garden walls terrifying and forbidding.

  “Your mother came from the north, I believe,” she said. “You lived there for some little time, did you not? Does it look very different? Are the people different?”

  “The land,” he said, “the people—even the language is different. They speak an odd mixture of English and Danish there, with occasional Norse thrown into the mix just for flavor. It is a harsher land, though, than this.” He nodded toward the rolling green hills of the downs. “Not as rich. There are jagged peaks in the north, rising sheer sided, as if they’d been thrust up out of the bowels of the earth. To the west the land is gentler. That is the district of the lakes—God knows how many. They are cradled in green valleys, and when the sun shines they are as blue as sapphires. Toward the eastern coast, near Jorvik, the land is different yet again, for it is flat, but not without its own kind of wild beauty. In the spring it is a tapestry of flowers.”

  Emma, astonished at this sudden spate of near poetry from one who had barely spoken a word to her until now, said, “Your eloquence, my lord, makes me long to see for myself these northern vistas. Perhaps the king’s progress will take me there some day.”

  Athelstan shook his head. “My father went that far north only once, and then he had an army at his back. It is a dangerous place. The folk there are often restive under the rule of Wessex. Our strongholds, our history, lie here in the south.”

  She recalled that Elgiva’s father was ealdorman of the northern lands. A dangerous place, Athelstan had said. And dangerous men and women were bred there, it seemed.

  “Is Elgiva a northerner?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said hesitantly, “and no. Elgiva’s family owns half of Mercia, most of their lands lying in the area below the Northumbrian border. It’s what we call the Midlands, but the very northern edge of it. Mercia once had its own kings before it was conquered by Wessex, but that was in the distant past. Elgiva, though, often forgets that Mercia is no longer a kingdom, and that she is not a king’s daughter.”

  Or a king’s wife, Emma thought. But if Elgiva’s family was so powerful, it would go some way to explaining why Æthelred singled her out for his favor.

  “What are the Northumbrians like, then?” she asked. “The folk farther north?”

  He frowned.

  “Fifty years ago there was a northman named Eric Bloodaxe who ruled Northumbria and called it the Kingdom of Jorvik. He was driven out, but the folk there still maintain strong ties to the lands across the Northern Sea.” He was not looking at her but kept his eyes firmly planted on the path ahead, so that his next words seemed casually offhand. “You have ties there as well, I think—of family and trade.”

  Sensing danger in spite of his apparent disinterest, Emma replied flatly, “My mother’s people came from Denmark,” she said, “but she grew up in Normandy.”

  They were treading perilously close to a conversational landscape where she had no wish to venture. She believed that the king’s mistrust of her was rooted in her Danish forebears as well as in her brother’s lucrative trade with Viking shipmen. Had the king confided his suspicions to Athelstan? If so, then she had just given them credence by showing such an avid interest in the north. She wished that she had kept silent.

  “It is no secret,” he said slowly, “that the Danish king, Forkbeard, has been entertained at the ducal palace in Normandy. I have never seen him, although I have heard a great deal about him. Were you there when your brother greeted him? Did you see the king?”

  He looked at her now with steady blue eyes, but she saw no guile there, only curiosity. Still, she hesitated, uncertain what to say. She had no wish to emphasize her brother’s connection to Swein Forkbeard, but if Athelstan already knew that Swein had been in Normandy at Christmas, it would be foolish of her to lie.

  “I saw him last Yuletide,” she said, “but only briefly. My mother kept all the women of her household well away from the king and his shipmen.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yet he and his men were there at your brother’s invitation.”

  She looked at him, irritated by his smug assumption that he understood her brother’s motives.

  “Indeed, my lord,” she said. “And what would you do if an armed host, vastly outnumbering all your hearth troops and with a reputation for taking by force anything they wanted, appeared at your door demanding shelter?”

  It was his turn to stare now, brows raised in surprise. Then he smiled.

  “I would invite them in,” he said.

  So she had made him smile at last. It lit his entire face and softened the hard edges of that square jaw. She had told him more than she would have wished, but, all in all, she thought that the result was worth the risk.

  The conversation became less pointed after that. Emma questioned him about his brothers, eager to know more of Edmund and Ecbert in particular, whom she had had little opportunity to observe. He asked about her own brothers and sisters, and was curious about the training that her brother Richard had devised for his horses.

  It seemed to Emma that the time passed all too quickly, and she was sorry when they halted before the king’s great hall.

  “Perhaps,” Athelstan said, as he helped her to dismount, “we might ride together again. I would learn more of Normandy, if you would be willing to instruct me.”

  He stood facing her, his hands still at her waist exerting a gentle pressure to steady her. Only his touch did not steady her. It did the opposite, and when she looked into his eyes, far bluer than the sky, she felt dizzy, as if she were falling from some great height.

  “I do not know if the king would give me leave,” she answered, backing away from him, seeking solid ground.

  “I will speak to him. He should have no objection, so long as he is assured that you will be safe.”

  Safe? Was there anywhere in this realm where she could be truly safe? It was a world peopled with men and women scheming for power and preferment, and her marriage had bred resentment toward her that could one day t
urn to enmity, and against which she had little defense.

  As she watched him lead the horses toward the stable, she pondered the wisdom of riding out with him again. She still did not know why he had made this overture toward her, but, dear God, she longed to escape the suffocating world within the palace walls. Why should she not attend him, if the king allowed it? She needed to forge alliances within the court. Perhaps this was a beginning.

  Or perhaps, she argued with herself, it was a trap of some kind, devised to destroy her already precarious relationship with the king. How was she to tell?

  She turned to follow Wymarc, who was shepherding the younger boys into the private apartments. There was no one at court, she reminded herself, whom she could truly trust, except her own people. She must remember that.

  But as she made her way up the stairs, slowly, for her legs ached from their unaccustomed exercise, she was troubled by a too vivid memory of piercing blue eyes and the sudden shifting of the earth beneath her feet.

  Chapter Thirteen

  October 1002

  Winchester, Hampshire

  When the evening meal had been cleared away, and the king’s household, to ward off the autumn chill, had settled themselves around the central fire, Elgiva, with Groa beside her, contemplated the gathering from an unobtrusive alcove. Normally she would have claimed a place at the king’s side to listen as his scop recited some thrilling tale. Tonight, though, because of her father’s imperious demands, she had to forgo her treasured seat beside the king.

  She was still seething from the tongue lashing her father’s messenger had delivered earlier in the day. The thick, swaggering, self-important churl had rebuked her in her father’s name for not attending to the task he had set her.

  “You were meant to be his eyes and ears,” the oaf had said, “but to judge from the news you’ve sent him, you’ve gone blind and deaf. My lord wishes to know if you’ve gone softheaded, as well.”