The Forever Queen

by Helen Hollick

  Mary a virgin bore Christ, the barren Elizabeth bore John.

  I charge thee, infant, if thou be male or female,

  by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that thou come forth.

  So far, none of it was working.

  Emma whimpered as another contraction heaved through her trembling body. She would have wept, but did not have the energy for that either. Her hair, long since come unbraided, was tangled; her linen under-shift, soiled with blood, sweat, and urine, was moulded to her drenched skin. Did all women go through this? Or was this torture visited on her because the child had been conceived through violence? That fact Emma could not shift from her mind. Were babes formed from love born with love? As Gunnhilda’s children had been? There had been no love when this child was started. Was this the Holy Mother’s punishment for her not wanting the wretched thing? The conception had been painful, frightening, and humiliating, the nine months between resented, and now she had this agony to endure.

  A few hours ago, during the slow-passing creep of darkness, she had asked, through her cracked lips and dry throat, if Æthelred had been summoned. Had received the answer that he was not expected to arrive until daylight. Would it help to have him there in the hall below? To know he was listening to her pain? She doubted he would come, though he was only a few miles away at Hedingham. The snow would prevent him and his lack of concern. He already had sons and daughters. What did it matter to him if she was suffering to give him one more? If she lost her life because of this child, it would be no more than a nuisance to Æthelred.

  Emma shut her eyes and, throwing her head back and arching her body into the pain, screamed again.

  “We will try once more to move the arm,” the elder midwife said, masking her inner doubts that, as before, it would be no use. “But first I will go down and ask the priest to double his efforts for prayer. We need the aid of Jesu’s good Lady Mother.”

  To the woman’s surprise, there were new arrivals, a party come not more than a few minutes before, their cloaks and hats snow-covered, their hands and faces blue-tinged with cold. They were clustered around the hearth-fire, servants scuttling to fetch broth and warmed wine, their backs to the narrow, dark stairway that led to the chamber above. The midwife assumed them to be the royal party and hurried forward, relieved that Æthelred himself could make a decision about what was best to do for a babe who would not leave its birth bed.

  She had little faith in being able to move the trapped arm. In her own mind there was only one thing left to do: to remove the arm with a sharp blade while it was still in the womb. The child would undoubtedly bleed to death, but it was probably dead already.

  To her disappointment it was not the King. The man who turned to face her approaching footsteps was older, thinner, and taller. He wore the clothing and insignia of a high holy man, and she realised, with elation, that this was someone even better—Archbishop Wulfstan of York!

  She fell to her knees at his feet, grasping the hem of his gown in her fingers and lifting it to her lips. “My Lord, we desperately need your prayers. My lady is suffering greatly; I have reason to fear for her safe deliverance.”

  “It is for women to endure to repay the anguish Eve brought to mankind, but do not fear; I have brought something with me that may be of help.”

  Wulfstan beckoned a servant, no less cold and snow-covered, who, with numbed fingers, brought something forth from a small leather bag.

  “This,” Wulfstan announced, “is the very girdle our Holy Mother wore when she bore Christ.” He took the length of braiding and handed it, with reverence, to the midwife. “Allow the Queen to wear it, and I am certain all will become well, if it be God’s will.”

  Delighted, smiling broadly, she bobbed a reverence and, at a hobbling run, returned upstairs.

  “Look,” she cried, showing the intricately plaited threads of faded blue and red and green to Emma. “See what Wulfstan of York has brought you?” Deftly, she tied the thing around Emma’s waist and indicated to her daughter that with the cessation of the next contraction she was to try to release the babe’s arm.

  Emma shrank from the intrusive hand, the scream shrieking from her, but almost immediately the pain subsided and then eased almost entirely.

  Squatting on her haunches, the younger midwife grinned and, murmuring a prayer of thanks, stated, “I have done it! The way is open for the head to present as it ought!”

  The contractions resumed, quicker, more insistent, but easier to bear—the head was there, wet, dark hair, the shoulders covered in slime and filth, and the child was born. It took its first breath and wailed pitifully. A boy. Emma had given birth to a son. Edward.

  Quite the ugliest, most unpleasant thing she had ever seen.

  26

  August 1005—Thorney Island

  Staring dismally at the fading daylight beyond the window, Emma watched as a heron stalked solemnly through the rushes along the mudbanked Thames. The water was low, despite it being high tide downriver towards London. Thorney, usually an island, was surrounded by dry land, the marshes stretching to either side, a brown, shrivelled expanse of straw-coloured earth. Even the trees, for lack of water, drooped with sad, crinkled, parchment-like leaves. Only the river frontage was green with reed and rush and summer water plants. The river itself, crystal clear, reflected the azure blue of the wide sky.

  Few birds flew, for it was too hot. No breeze stirred; all southern England lay dehydrated, thirsty, and desperate for rain that had not fallen in over ten weeks. The rivers, even this, the grandfather River Thames, were low and shallow; some had dried completely, leaving nothing of their existence except a course of hard-baked, cracked mud. Where water still flowed it had become an ambling, sluggish trickle, where once it had gushed and tumbled.

  All but the deepest wells had run dry, grassland meadows were browned into withered stubble, and the young green crops had died. No grass to feed the cattle, goats, and sheep that were growing thin and calling for water. No milk for calves or churn. No grain for flour, nothing to harvest. Nature had turned her benign bounty into the dust of death.

  In the wake of drought, the evil of plague had crept across Wessex and Kent with its slow, menacing tread, spreading unstoppable through Sussex, Wilt-Shire, and Hamp-Shire. Had leered awhile at London, then drifted onwards, up through the county of Essex, to slither into Suffolk and Norfolk, taking all who fell in its virulent path.

  Emma sat with her hands limp in her lap, her linen gown unlaced at her throat, her head, with her hair plaited into two braids, uncovered. Her palace bedchamber faced east and was, this late in the afternoon, in thankful shade. Death, if only he would come for her, would not be unwelcome. It was not death, nor its manner, that frightened her, but birth. She put her hand, the fingers bone-thin, on her abdomen, could feel nothing, no swelling, no movement, but the new child was there, growing inside her. Her lips barely moving, she counted the dates on those same fingers. February it would be born. Next February, in the year of our Lord 1006.

  Perhaps if she could weep, she would be purged of this weight that lay like a milkmaid’s yoke across her shoulders, but her eyes and her heart were as empty of moisture as the scorched earth.

  Æthelred had claimed his rights as a husband soon after she had been purified by her churching. He had been drunk, foul-breathed, and crude, had not listened to her pleading to be left alone, that she could not face bearing another child so soon, not while the memory of Edward’s birthing remained so vivid.

  What do men know of a woman’s labour? What, beyond the act of begetting, do they care?

  “If you had been there,” she had cried, “you would know the pain I went through.”

  “As we face the pain of the battlefield,” he had retorted, his hands clasped tight, too tight, on her wrists. “We do not flinch when it is our duty to put on armour and take up sword and shield. Nor should you shy from your duty to your husband.”

  The sky, eight miles away toward the northeastern horizon, wher
e the forest of Epping garlanded the hills of the Lea and Roding valleys, was grey and hazy. From heat or gathering clouds? Æthelred was there in the woods, hunting for deer, although his huntsman had thought the creatures had gone further north, following the shaded trails and the scent of water. Æthelred had been angry because she had not wanted to go with him. She would have to tell him, when he returned, that her monthly course had not appeared and she was probably with child. He would expect another son.

  In the courtyard below the window Athelstan was about to mount his stallion. He had the boys with him, Edmund and Godwine. The two lads were more like brothers than friends. Godwine, she had once hoped, would be her loyal friend, too, but her hopes had been swept aside on the day Edward had been born. A son was a threat to Athelstan, and Edmund’s sense of honour gave his loyalty to his brother. Where Edmund led, Godwine followed. For her part, Emma could not see the reasoning behind Athelstan’s fear of the child; all it did was puke, whimper, or scream. If ever Emma steeled her resolve to take up the boy into her arms, it shrilled louder, as if it were being agonisingly put to death. She knew it was a wicked thing to admit, but if plague or famine should take her son, she would not weep for his passing.

  He was fretting now, on the far side of the room, where his wet nurse was attempting to soothe him. His fists were bunched, his puny legs waving, his mouth open in a thin, high wail.

  As a woman, Emma ought not to be concerned at the sight of a girl feeding a babe, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop the rising sense of revulsion. The girl’s breasts repulsed her. She was Emma’s age, no more than six and ten, but already she had borne several children, all of whom, apparently, had not survived beyond the first year of life. The child she had brought into the world a day after Edward’s birthing had been born dead. Emma considered it a cruel torture of nature to deprive a mother of her nine-month child, but to still bring in the flow of milk. On the dexter side of the coin, the girl had been available to nurse the young princeling.

  Steadfastly, Emma watched out of the window opening, observing the sky darkening over the horizon. Was rain to come? If it did, it was too late for the harvest. She could not watch her son, not while the boy fed. Those huge milk-filled breasts were like grotesque cow’s udders, the girl producing first one, then the other with such pride from her unlaced gown and fitting the milk-dripping teat into the babe’s mouth, swamping his face with bulging flesh. Emma shuddered, looked down at her own slender figure. They had bound her breasts tight with linen bands soon after the birth. When her milk had come in, the heat of the need to lactate had been almost as bad as the birthing, but the swollen mammary glands had soon subsided; her belly, too, had rapidly regained its shape, although it would never be as flat as before she had carried a child. Now pregnancy had happened again.

  Lightning flashed a zigzag path in the distant sky, soon after a low, rumbling growl of thunder. Rain. Too much of it, and the little that remained of the summer crops would be washed away.

  She would pray each day, ask for blessings, light candles; her quandary, whether to seek the protection of the Mother Mary during her labour or beg the easier option of asking God to take her to His side. Day by day, death and despair reaped their innocent victims. Could she not, please, be one of them?

  27

  December 1005—Oxford

  Why could they not reside at Woodstock or Islip? Emma hated it here. Why must they stay at Eadric Streona’s Oxford manor, where so many horrendous memories clung with bloodied talons to the city walls? The atmosphere in the town, less than a single mile from the manor’s gate, was as thick as rancid butter. Oh, it might all be rebuilt now, the houses, the church—a new Saint Frideswide, basking in the glory of being reconstructed in stone, but the resentment against Æthelred and his devoted Eadric Streona was there, oozing beneath the surface like pus festering in an ill-healed wound. It made Emma feel sick to see the wretched man. He was pretentious and without conscience, so obsequious, so humble, twisting Æthelred round his finger as if he were a skein of wool. The pair of them oblivious to the sullen mumbling of Oxford’s people. But then the pair of them together had skin thicker than a scabby old boar.

  “I will be pleased when the new year turns and Epiphany has passed. We can then, perhaps, leave here and reside somewhere more congenial,” she remarked to Archbishop Wulfstan, steadfastly ignoring the heated argument Æthelred was conducting with two of his northern Lords, Ealdorman Alfhelm of Deira and Uhtred, the eldest son of the ageing Ealdorman of Bernicia.

  “Is there anywhere congenial?” Wulfstan asked in his dour, serious tone. “It is written in scripture that with the millennium shall come the full sight of God, and I fear He does not like what He is seeing.”

  Shifting to make herself more comfortable in the hard chair, Emma pushed a feather-filled cushion more firmly behind her back. More than seven months pregnant, she was feeling irritable and discontented. Was not in the mood for another of Wulfstan’s doom-laden sermons. Too late; he was already launched into his personal diatribe against the sinners of the world.

  “When God saw that wickedness had entered the Garden of Eden, He evicted Adam and Eve. When he saw that sin was running rife and people had forgotten His name, He sent the flood. As with Sodom and Gomorrah, if we do not bare our souls to His mercy and repent, He shall destroy all, so He may wash the world clean and begin again.”

  Emma listened politely to his preaching. The belief that the end of the world was approaching, one thousand years after Christ’s birth, had run far and fast in the aftermath of famine and plague. So many had died, whole villages in places, with more dying by the day, for although the pestilence had run its course, there had been no harvest, and there was very little to eat, especially for the poor. The one good thing: the Danes had not come this year. It would have been a waste of effort, for there was nothing to plunder.

  On the far side of the room, Æthelred lost his temper and tipped over the trestle table. “I said no, Uhtred! No! Absolutely not! Do not pursue this, for you are trying my patience beyond endurance.” For good measure, Æthelred kicked at a dog then strode from the hall, slamming the door of his private chamber behind him and bellowing for Eadric, as host, to fetch wine. Uhtred stood, running his hand through his thick black hair, puffing his cheeks.

  Alfhelm folded his arms, glowering in his own rage. “I warned you not to go whining, Uhtred, and now you have muddied the water for the both of us! Because of your persistence, neither of us will be receiving aid should we require it—and do not expect help from me. I have enough problems seeing to York’s safety.”

  There was no love lost between Uhtred and Alfhelm.

  “It seems Uhtred has yet again been refused men to swell the fyrd of Bernicia,” Wulfstan said to Emma. “If it be God’s will that Malcolm of the Scots should attack across the border, then there is nothing we can do about it.”

  “Except fight,” Emma promptly retorted, her own patience wearing thin. “Which Uhtred is willing to do, while Alfhelm and my husband will not.”

  Uhtred raised his head, saw Emma looking at him. He stepped over the debris and walked across the hall, made his obedience to her and Archbishop Wulfstan. “I cannot protect the North without men,” he said bluntly. “Malcolm is recent-made King of Scots; he has to prove his strength to the Lords of the Isles or wear his crown for but a short while. When he attacks Durham, I cannot be certain I can hold it.”

  “The cathedral at Durham, where rests our blessed Saint Cuthbert, is stone built. If it be God’s will, then it shall be kept safe,” Wulfstan asserted.

  “With respect,” Uhtred said, barely masking his anger, “the cathedral is stone; the town is not.”

  “And is it not more prudent,” Emma added, “to see to England’s security in the certainty of armed fyrdsmen rather than the contrary whim of God?” It was bold of her to speak out before Wulfstan, but persistently, God had not shown much sympathy towards Emma, and she was growing weary of hearing abo
ut His benevolence. How could God expect dutiful submission when the innocent died by the hundred? When she had to endure Æthelred’s lust and the unwanted result?

  To Uhtred she said, “I acknowledge your concern, for I know however thick the stone of solid-built walls, there are ways of tearing them down. Alas, though, I am only the Queen, and I am not permitted an opinion.”

  “God will show us the way,” Wulfstan insisted. He did not know when annihilation was to be brought upon the sinners of this world, but the signs were there: fire in the sky; flood upon the land; hunger, disease, and death stalking every dwelling place. God’s wrath had been unleashed, and there was nothing they could do against it, except repent and pray.

  28

  February 1006—Winchester

  Winchester was a pleasant town, or perhaps Emma thought so because it was hers? This was her dower land, all revenue came direct to her, be it tenancy rents, market traders’ tax, or import duty from the riverside wharf. Nor was it as foul-smelling as London.

  Squatting in a fold of the Hampshire Downs, its chalky, navigable river, the Itchen, often as crowded as the streets, provided a convenient route into the market that attracted buyers and sellers from local villages and wider trade routes across the seas. A bustling town at the best of times, with pilgrims intent on visiting the holy shrine of Saint Swithin, a Bishop revered as a worker of miracles and a man of humility, the arched gateways echoed almost constantly during daylight hours to the rumble of cartwheels, horseshoes, footsteps, and the lowing of bewildered cattle. Herded into pens of wicker hurdles set ready in Gar Street, the animals, if sold for meat, then passed on to Fleshmonger Street, which some were already beginning to call by its new nickname of “Parchment Street” for the production of the vellum that was prized by the highest monastic scriptoriums. The butchers were tradesmen of efficient skill, who lived and worked on the same premises. Tanners’ Street, in close proximity to the butchers’ stalls, stank almost as much as the fullers’ yards. Raw hides being processed into leather were not a quick or pleasant-smelling business, but Winchester’s Shieldmakers’ Street was an altogether more exciting experience, where craftsmen fashioned their trade by stretching the tanned leather over wickerwork or wooden boards.