‘A bit more to do than usual,’ Eve said, hugging the lady who, although English, wore a Danish woman’s costume. Her hair, still dark, showed many streaks of silver in the thick knot of plaits behind her head and, although her bronzed skin was lined with age, the beauty remained in the high cheekbones and black-lashed eyes, the wide mouth and full lips. She had once been a beauty and now, standing before her, was a replica of the younger woman she would once have been. Neither of them had been...could ever have been...prepared for this moment, assuming that the intervening years and distance were the same as death, though even that dreadful thought had not stopped them from imagining how each would look.
Both of them gasped as recognition filtered into their memories, the shape, the scent, the greater height that was Clodagh, the womanliness that was Fearn, the hands that reached out, faltered, then went up to cover mouths distorting with anguish and mews of disbelief mingling with certainty. It must be...yes...no..it must be her. Surely. ‘Can it be?’ Fearn whispered. ‘Mother?’
That was the one word Clodagh had convinced herself she would never hear again. The room was silent. Even the children were still, watching the miracle, watching the tears spring to the eyes of mother and daughter, watching the hands reach out to touch, then to grasp, pulling gently with trembling fingers. ‘Fearn...my... Fearn?’ Clodagh whispered, her voice breaking with emotion. ‘Is it really...my little girl?’
‘Yes, Mother. It’s me. Yes...look, we have found each other.’
The beginning of a wail started in Clodagh’s throat before she was clasped in her daughter’s tender embrace and, for a time, no recognisable words were spoken, only fingers tracing delicately over features, the same but different, their eyes taking in every detail to make up for lost years of heartache. Tears coursed down their cheeks and dripped off their chins. ‘A miracle,’ said Clodagh. ‘I never ceased to pray for it, lassie. Even now I can scarce believe it. I worked His will here to atone for my sins, but I never thought...oh...dearest, dearest child.’ Now came the rush of words, the release of emotion, the torrent of guilt that made little sense to Fearn, who had to ask twice about her father before the answer came. ‘Your father? Oslac? Yes, he’s here somewhere. He helps me here. There would have been little point in coming all this way to sit around looking miserable, would there? But what of you, child? They said the Jarl had returned with a woman. Was that you? The Jarl’s woman?’
Turning her hand over inside her mother’s grasp, Fearn showed her the gold ring on her little finger, too small to fit any other. ‘I came with him, yes. But look here, Mother. I’ve worn this since we parted. Shall we go outside and talk a while? There is so much I need to know. Will you tell me what happened to break us apart?’
Palming away her tears, Clodagh nodded. ‘The ring. Yes. It’s all I was allowed to give you. And to leave you behind was the greatest punishment of all, my darling.’ They went outside to sit on cushioned logs in sight of the busy merchants’ stalls and Clodagh, wife of the once-powerful Earl Oslac of Northumbria, wept while she explained that what to Fearn had seemed a simple matter of banishment had been nothing of the kind. ‘Yes,’ she said, holding Fearn’s hand on her lap, ‘your father was banished because it was felt he was allowing his duties to the new church to come before his duty to the King. The Archbishop of York supported him, but that wasn’t enough. Thored was his chief thegn and he was told by the King to take over from Oslac and to send us away out of Northumbria so as not to cause trouble. As if we would,’ she said, dabbing her eyes.
‘But Oslac is not my father, is he?’ Fearn said gently. ‘Earl Thored is my father. So what happened there? Why could someone not have told me? Is this the sin you mentioned just now? Adultery?’ In spite of her gentle tone, she could not keep out a hint of censure. Clodagh had always been a devout Christian to whom the sin of adultery would be the last thing on her mind. Or so Fearn had thought.
‘You were much too young to understand, love,’ said Clodagh.
‘I was not too young to understand that you left me,’ Fearn said, reproachfully. ‘I cried myself to sleep every night for years.’
‘Was Thored not kind to you?’
‘As much as a man like him can be kind. He was not kind to his wife Hilda, was he? And she was not kind to me. Since I learned that Thored was my natural father, I’ve been able to understand her resentment, but too late for it to make any difference.’
‘You deserve an explanation, Fearn. I never thought I’d be given the chance to explain, but my prayers have been answered. It was never my desire to leave you behind, Fearn, my dearest. It broke my heart, but...’
‘But Thored insisted? Because he fathered me? Because he wanted to take me from Oslac? Were those the reasons?’
Clodagh shook her head, her beautiful sorrowing face expressing profound guilt as well as grief. ‘No, love. It was Oslac who insisted on leaving you behind, not Thored.’
‘What? My...? Why? He loved me, didn’t he?’
‘Try to understand our predicament, Fearn. Oslac and I were a childless couple for many years. We desperately wanted a family, but nothing happened. Oslac knew that Thored was attracted to me and it was he who suggested that Thored should try to father a child on me. It was a risk. It might have been my problem, rather than Oslac’s, but we were desperate and Thored needed no encouragement to do what was needed. Oslac truly believed that, as long as it produced a child, it was the right thing to do. He really intended to adopt Thored’s child as his own.’
‘Mother...that was a terrible risk to take.’
‘Too risky, as it happened. Thored was handsome and strong, and a good lover, and it was no particular hardship to either of us, only to Oslac. Then I found that I was expecting you and we thought then that everything had turned out for the best, that Oslac would accept you as his own kin. He tried. He tried hard, poor man. But he could not put aside the fact that he had failed and Thored had succeeded. You know what men are like with their pride. He turned to the church for help and there were those who grumbled at his priorities, looking more and more to Thored for leadership. So when we were told to leave Northumbria for good, Oslac decided he could not take you with us. He saw all the affection I lavished on you as being a substitute for Thored. No, of course it was not true, but that’s how he saw it. He wanted us to go back to the beginning as a childless couple and to go somewhere well away from England.’
‘But you loved Thored?’
Clodagh’s voice became a whisper. ‘Yes, love. I did. I couldn’t help myself. But I also owed a duty to Oslac and I had to obey him. It tore me in half, but I had to leave both my beloved child and the man I loved. After five years of watching you grow like a beautiful flower, I had to...oh, Fearn, my dearest.’ Burying her face in her hands, Clodagh sobbed as she remembered the pain of separation, her daughter’s distress and total inability to understand what was happening except that her world was being turned upside down. ‘Can you ever forgive me, Fearn? Can you try to see how it happened?’
There was no easy answer to any of this while it was still so new to her, and so very unexpected, as well as being contrary in almost every detail to the explanation Fearn herself had applied to a set of circumstances no one could have imagined. Once more, love had played havoc with all their clever plans and left a tangle of rights and wrongs that would take years to unravel.
* * *
For several more hours, the two of them sat close together to exchange years of information of which both had been starved, healing the wounds caused by enforced ignorance, false supposition and the small stale crumbs of hazy memories. Fearn told her mother about her life, about Aric’s visit to Jorvik and the reason for her being here at Lindholm. She told her about Kean, the product of Thored’s liaison with Aric’s widowed sister, now dead. She told her of the meeting with Queen Aelfgyfu and the moment when Fearn’s relationship to her was revealed, and how
Haesel had predicted some events, including the care of sick people along the same lines as Mother Bridget in Jorvik.
‘We buy any slaves who are brought here,’ Clodagh told her. ‘Many of the women are pregnant by the time they arrive, abused by the traders, so we have a place where they can give birth and recover their strength. Then we teach them our cloth-making skills, although most of them already have some knowledge, even if it’s only the wool spinning. The Irish are always good at making linen. We have good embroiderers, too, and men skilled in making the gold thread. We try to show them better ways to live. We have a priest and a deacon, and we’ve converted dozens of pagans over the years. Ah...here comes our little Meld.’
Returning from the jetties where she had been to look for Oslac, a very small blonde child was being held by each hand, Eve on one side and Haesel on the other, her inward-twisting foot making progress slow and rather lop-sided, though her beaming smile and sparkling blue eyes gave no indication of pain. The elderly Clodagh and little Meld, a shortened form of Raegenmeld, ran towards each other with arms ready to catch, swinging the child up into her embrace just as Fearn had been when she was five. ‘She’s our little God-gift,’ Clodagh said, nuzzling the laughing face. ‘Eve found her one night and brought her here, and she’s been with us ever since. These pagans have the strangest ways of treating human life,’ she said. ‘It’s no wonder so many of them are interested in our beliefs, but we still have quite a problem explaining why one thing is right and another thing is wrong. Of course, we don’t always get it right ourselves, do we, when we want something very much?’
Walking more slowly a little way behind was the shrunken but wiry old man whom Fearn barely recognised as Oslac, his brown arms ornamented with pure gold bracelets and, round his neck to show off his status, a flat collar of beaten gold that flashed in the sun and reflected light on to his white beard and hollowed cheeks. One look at Fearn brought a choking sob to his throat and hands that held hers, fiercely tight, followed by a plea for forgiveness that wrung her heart with pity, for he was a modest man, and full of remorse. White-haired, he still retained some of the authority that had once been his as Northumbria’s senior statesman, and while he admitted that he had no right whatever to offer Fearn his fatherly advice, it was clear that he would be glad to offer it, as she would be only too happy to ask.
There was, however, a limit to the time the three young women could spend there, though there was still so much more to be said. But as they left, more tears of joy flowed, with promises to return and discuss the future, leaving Fearn with the euphoric sensation that, on that momentous day, a miracle had happened to lift her spirits from a very low place. For Haesel, the day’s events had been a personal triumph although, exercising her right to choose which parts of her ‘seeings’ to divulge, she saw little point, this time, in telling Fearn about having seen Eve in the cemetery five years ago when she had now seen for herself that Wenda’s child lived happily with her adopted family. There had been more than enough for Fearn to assimilate that day without adding her own small miracle. As it happened, Haesel had judged correctly when she observed how the discovery of Clodagh and Oslac affected Fearn so deeply that she was unable to respond to any attempt at discussion, as if the miracle was still working its power in her consciousness. For so many years, the problem had occupied every corner of Fearn’s mind, waking and sleeping. Now, not only had they found each other at last, but the complex machinations behind the separation were almost too bizarre to take in immediately, for what had happened was well beyond the understanding of a five-year-old, even in the smallest degree.
But Fearn’s emotional development had come a long way in the intervening years, some would say too far for a young woman of twenty-three winters, and what her mother had told her about falling in love with Thored seemed to echo around her own recent experiences with Aric. Since that day one week ago when he had exposed her feelings for him, she had stopped denying them so vehemently, even though she was convinced of the folly of it. Aric’s plans for his own future did not include her. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Only the discovery of her long-lost parents would make the year remotely bearable. That, and the infrequent occasions when she would be allowed to share more of that amazing loving in the arms of her abductor, the man she had tried, and failed, to hate.
A glimmer of hope had appeared that day, nevertheless, when Oslac had told Fearn of his connections with merchants, most of them amicable, and of the ease by which he and Clodagh could send messages back to England. They had even sent slaves back to their homes and as messengers and ambassadors to other Christian communities, to make essential contact. As to why, then, no word had ever been sent to Thored to tell him where they were so that he could put Fearn’s mind at rest, Oslac admitted that he had not allowed it. What would be the use, he’d said, of telling the man who had usurped his place where he could be found? What use would it have been to keep alive the child’s hope of being able to see her mother again? In Oslac’s jealous mind, Fearn belonged with the new Earl of Northumbria, her natural father, who would be able to arrange a good marriage for her. He had failed to see what both Fearn and Clodagh could see quite clearly: that the bond between mother and daughter was stronger than time or distance or the plans of men, or that hope and love were not so easily banished.
Though the possibility had not been discussed at the time, Fearn stored this information in her mind for consideration as a way of shortening her one-year stay in Lindholm. So one of the first things she did on reaching the longhouse was to make use of her newly made ink and quill pens to write to her half-sister Elf in Londenburh on the parchment sheets she had supplied. She was still writing it when darkness fell and the lamps were lit.
* * *
Fearn had been asleep for several hours when she felt the soft feather mattress dip and the linen sheet move over her skin. ‘Haesel?’ she murmured, sleepily. But instead of Haesel’s whisper of reassurance, an arm was laid heavily along the sumptuous curve of her hip and thigh, the hand already smoothing a pathway into the secret hollows that were now more easily accessible than the first time when clothing had come between them. She felt his warm nakedness against her own, the exciting length of his legs, the hard power of bare arms easing her carefully towards him, then the soft kiss not meant to wake her too suddenly from dream to reality. In her half-sleep, something reminded her to resist, then just as quickly faded as the sensations began to flood her body, floating her mind towards an even better experience than before, skin coming alive against skin.
Urgently, his fingers unplaited her thick hair and tousled it wildly upon the pillow while his own hair, now freed from the usual plait, fell in a soft silky sheet over her face as they kissed under its deliciously sensuous canopy. The softness of it draped her breasts as his hand held the fullness to his mouth, making her arch and moan at the blissful pulling of his lips and teeth, creating a sensation of exquisite tenderness instead of the pain inflicted by a brutish mate. There were other first times in store for her, too, made possible by the perfect conditions as well as by her hazy willingness. Now, in the dark warm peace of her chamber, she found a new freedom to explore him as she herself was being explored with no words of instruction, her delight in having his fine muscular body beneath her fingers drawing from him sounds that said more than words about his enjoyment.
More confident than before about her abilities, she allowed her hands to wander over him and to bring new sensations to her fingertips, the soft silken crevices, the harder undulations, the smooth expanses of chest and shoulder, and the tiny buds of his nipples that had no other purpose than to give pleasure. This time, their loving moved into phase after phase of ecstasy until, when his explorations took him close to the source of her aching desire, disturbing her beyond bearing, she wrapped his slender hips within her legs to feel his hardness throbbing with the want of her. She held her breath, savouring the moment of dilation that once
she had dreaded, letting out a long sigh of delight at his slow plunge that sent ripples of undiluted pleasure through her body.
He had no need to fear hurting her this time, for her sighs told him how much this pleasured her and her whispered words, ‘Don’t stop...’, were her only spoken instructions. Then time waited upon them in a rapturous anticipation of an ending both of them tried, and failed, to delay. It came upon them in a blaze of sensation, engulfing them, suspending their breathing, whirling them into a void of perfect bliss before sliding them back down to earth, dizzy and overwhelmed. And although Fearn was no surer than before why this was happening when revenge had already been exacted, except that its pleasures were too great to ignore, she was too tired and filled with wonder to make any bitter remarks about the event, especially when Aric had already exposed her defensive untruthfulness. So she snuggled easily into his arms, accepting that what had just happened was even better than the first time and that this peaceful conclusion was more satisfactory in every way than the snarling she had initiated.
* * *
Next morning, she was realistic enough not to expect anything more from Aric in the way of tenderness than in previous days. It was as if, she thought, their coming together in silence was merely intended to satisfy a powerful urge that both knew could not be disregarded. And although she did not, and would not, speak of love to him, she knew that what she felt was more than a physical desire, but something unique and all-consuming, and that what he felt was an ordinary male lust and a reasonably good excuse to indulge himself without the effort of a lasting relationship. It was only for a year, she told herself. For that time, she would have to bear the pain and keep herself occupied, as Mother Bridget had advised.
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