by Joan Wolf
“Wait until Cyneburg finds out what a bad influence you are upon her young,” Alfred said. He laughed. Then, with mock severity: “What cheat did you show him? Do I know it?”
She smiled complacently. “Play me a game and we shall find out.”
“You are an unprincipled brat,” he said. “Did you show him how to fix the cards?”
She reached out and pulled his headband down over his eyebrows. “No.” A dog whined at the door, wanting to be let out, and Elswyth jumped up, “Wait and see,” she said over her shoulder, and went to open the door for the impatient hound.
Two days after Christmas, Alfred took her to the sea. The morning dawned very cold and very windy and he first suggested waiting for the morrow. But Elswyth’s face grew so woebegone when he spoke that he changed his mind and said they would go if she wished. He would not take his dogs, however. His wife was one thing, he said, his dogs another.
The way to the coast led along yet another road left from the days of the Romans. As they rode south, Alfred told Elswyth about how, centuries ago, the legions had docked their ships in the bay near to Dorchester. Then the heights of Maiden Castle loomed before them.
“That is one of the old hill forts of the Britons,” Alfred said in response to her question. Then, pointing, “See those earthworks? They were once the banks of a huge defense system that went round the whole hill.” His tawny hair blew in the wind as he contemplated the ancient fort before them. “It did not stand against the Romans,” he added.
A little silence fell as they sat their horses side by side, each imagining the bitter battle that must have occurred at this site all those long centuries ago. Then Alfred said, “If you climb around the hill you can even see the overlapping walls at the entrances.”
“I want to do that,” she said instantly.
At that he grinned. “Why did I know you were going to say that? Not today, though, Elswyth; not if we are going to ride to the coast.”
“Will you take me some other day?”
“Certainly.”
“When?”
“When I am able.” He looked at her in mock exasperation. “Elswyth, sometimes you are worse than Ethelhelm.”
“If someone makes me a promise, I like it to be clear.” And she stuck her haughty, aristocratic nose in the air.
“You like it written in blood and witnessed by three ealdormen,” he answered.
Her lips curled. “I had not thought of that.”
“We will go when I can find the time,” he answered, and prudently she let the subject drop.
“I can smell the sea!” she said instead, sniffing energetically.
“The way this wind is blowing, you can probably smell the sea in Mercia,” he replied with rueful humor. Even with his headband to hold it, his hair was whipping across his cheeks. Elswyth’s nose and cheeks were scarlet.
“Let’s canter,” she suggested. “That will warm us up.”
The two horses, tall chestnut and small gray, moved off together with alacrity. The horses seemed also to smell the sea.
Alfred took his wife to a pretty bay, sheltered from the southwest gale and safely rimmed with sand. Elswyth was wild with delight. In her boy’s cross-gartered trousers, with her cloak and her braids flying out behind her, she raced up and down the sands like a wild young creature drunk on its first taste of freedom.
“Come,” she cried, stopping for a moment by Alfred’s side and catching his hand. “Let’s play tag with the tide!”
The water shone brilliantly in the cold winter sun, the wind here was chill but not unbearable, and the sand was hard under their feet. Alfred laughed and let her pull him into her game.
They sat in the shelter of a rock to eat their bread and cheese. Wisps of hair had come loose from Elswyth’s braids and hung down her back in an untidy tangle. Alfred reached out and took an ebony strand between his fingers. It felt like heavy silk to the touch,
“It will take Tordis hours to get a comb through it,” Elswyth said through a mouthful of bread.
“Your hair is beautiful.” He rubbed the shining blue-black strand between his fingers. “You shouldn’t tie it up in braids all the time.”
“I won’t if you don’t like it.” She flashed her white teeth. “Perhaps I ought to wear a headband.”
He laughed. “A headband would look a little odd on you, Elswyth.”
“All the rest of your companions wear one.”
“You are not one of my companions.”
She sighed. “I know.” Then: “Would you like some more cheese?” He accepted the piece she held out to him. “Was it here that the Danes first landed?” she asked.
“It was a little way further along the coast.”
She drew up her knees and propped her chin on them. Her untidy braids framed a face that was suddenly sober. “The abbeys and monasteries we passed on the way south … I could see how they have suffered. So many new buildings hastily thrown up to replace those that were burned.
Such a destruction of libraries. We have been more fortunate in Mercia. I think that is why we don’t realize as well as you here in Wessex just how dangerous is the Danish threat to our way of life.”
“We have had a period of peace here in Wessex as well, while the Danes were busy in France,” Alfred answered. “And in our last few encounters with them, the victory has gone to us. I think Wessex also is too complacent, Elswyth. I think my countrymen do not yet realize that this time we are not confronting a company of raiders. It is an army that sits there in York, an army that has no plan of returning home to Denmark.”
She shivered, as she had not shivered in the cold. “We shall withstand them,” she said.
His long firm mouth set into a line. “I pray we shall.”
“We shall,” she said. “We shall because we must. The alternative is unthinkable.”
There was a little silence as he stared at her face. She put a hand up to brush a wisp of hair off her cheek, and he said, his voice sounding strange, “For a little girl, you often make a great deal of sense.”
Her eyes, which were so much darker a blue than the deep winter sky, sparked with indignation. “Little girl! I am no little girl, Alfred!”
His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Are you not?” He rose to his feet and held out a hand. “Come, we must be starting back to Dorchester.”
When Elswyth appeared for dinner that evening, her hair was dressed differently. Instead of the usual braids, she wore it drawn back from her face, caught high with combs, and then coiled smoothly in a knot at the back of her small shapely head. It was a style similar to the one Cyneburg affected, and it was suitable to Cyneburg’s soft prettiness. It was also suitable to Elswyth, though in a different way. Uncluttered by the childish braids, the hard, delicate bones of her face were clearly revealed, as was the slender, graceful length of her neck.
Alfred stared at his wife when she first appeared, and kept staring at her throughout supper. He had never before realized how much younger the braids made her look. Her whole face seemed changed, he thought in wonder. It was no longer round and childish-looking; the high cheekbones, narrow temples, and expressive, faintly disdainful mouth had suddenly turned into the features of a woman.
“Do you like my hair?” she had asked him as soon as they met. “You said not to wear the braids any longer.”
“Yes.” He could not stop staring at her. “It is very pretty this way, Elswyth.”
She wrinkled her elegant nose. “It took forever to do. But if you like it …” She smiled and slipped her hand into his. “Too bad it is Friday. I am so tired of fish after eating it for all of Advent.”
He made her some sort of an answer and they took their places at Ethelred’s supper board.
Alfred was not the only one to notice the change the new hairstyle made in Elswyth. Both Cyneburg and Ethelred commented favorably on her looks, and she was forced to find a polite reply. Elswyth did not care for compliments, and after an hour of being stared at she was
beginning to be sorry she had given up her braids. Even Brand stared at her out of strangely green eyes and told her hesitatingly that he thought she looked beautiful. Elswyth liked Brand, so she smiled and thanked him, but she was heartily glad when supper ended and she could go hide herself and her hair in her bedchamber.
She wore the hair up again the following day, however. Alfred had said he liked it and Elswyth reasoned that everyone’s surprise would have worn off overnight and no one was likely to notice her hair one way or the other anymore. After breakfast it began to rain, a cold hard rain that looked to keep up for the entire day. Alfred and his thanes and Elswyth and her few ladies were forced to keep within doors in the princes’ hall. The ladies spun wool. The men played at drafts and listened to Brand strum on the lyre. The dogs slept in front of the fire. Elswyth got out the checkered playboard and challenged Alfred to a game of boar and hound.
He accepted and they sat together before the fire, the dogs sleeping at their feet. Outside the rain soon changed to sleet, and the chill air creeping in from beneath the doors stirred the rushes on the floor. Elswyth tucked her feet under her for warmth, and frowned thoughtfully at the board. The flickering light from the fire cast a rosy glow on the pearly curve of the skin over her high cheekbones. Her long, lowered lashes were black as soot, She carefully moved a carved hound to another square, looked up with a brilliant flash of blue, and grinned wickedly.
“I’ve won!” she crowed.
Alfred made himself look at the board. “Yes, so you have.” Even to himself, his voice sounded odd.
“And I did not even cheat.” She tilted her head in the way she had that managed to be both arrogant and charming at the same time. “You were distracted. I’ll play you again.” She was generous in her victory.
“No.” He stood up. “I must go to see Ethelred.”
The amazing blue eyes widened in surprise. “It’s sleeting outside,” she said.
He shrugged. “No matter.” He began to back away, signaling for his cloak.
She watched him, and trouble began to crease her brow. “Are you all right, Alfred?”
“I am fine,” he replied hastily. “I just thought of something I must discuss with Ethelred.” He took his cloak from Brand, who had seen him gesture for it, and headed for the door of the hall.
Outside the wind tore his cloak and the sleet beat against his face. He made it to the safety of his brother’s hall, and spent the remainder of the afternoon playing drafts with Ethelred.
That night he lay awake in his solitary bed and thought of his wife. The storm had gathered strength and tore and howled and shook at the shuttered window and caused the tapestried hangings on the wall to billow inward.
He lay there starkly awake, shaken by an emotion that was as intense and as turbulent as the storm without.
Elswyth. For how long, he wondered, had he loved her? For that was the emotion that was rendering him sleepless this night, he had no doubt of that. Love. And desire.
He had loved her, he thought, for a long time. Whatever it was in the mixture of her personality that attracted him so strongly, it had worked its spell right from the start. He would never have agreed to marry any other girl he found weeping her heart out in a barn.
Elswyth would be quick to point out to him that she had not been weeping.
He smiled a little painfully and stared above his head into the dark. It was Elswyth, he thought, who had drawn him back to Lambourn; Elswyth who had made his last encounter with Roswitha so strangely unsatisfying. And it was his joy in his wife’s companionship, mixed with the frustration of his incomplete marriage, that had rendered his return to Lambourn so difficult.
She was so close to him this night. Only on the other side of a thin wooden wall, He could see her in his mind’s eye perfectly clearly: the line of her beautiful cheekbones; the cleft in her small determined chin; the curling, ironic, tantalizing mouth. She would be sound asleep on this wild and stormy night, wrapped in her beautiful hair, completely unaware that aught could be wrong between them.
For she loved him too. He did not doubt that. There was an understanding they had together that he did not think many people were fortunate enough to find. They were different in many ways; yet in the great and important things of life, somehow they were alike. They understood each other’s feelings.
She understood him in all but this one great thing.
She was fifteen and no longer a child. He remembered, far too vividly, the feel of her body against his when he had lifted her down from her saddle at Lambourn. But because he too understood her, he understood that in this one thing she was not yet a woman. “Thank you, Alfred!” she had said when he promised her an unconsummated marriage. He remembered her radiant smile, remembered her words about Edred: “But I shall have to sleep in his bed.”
He could not betray her trust. He could not ask something of her she was not yet ready to give. He would simply have to go on waiting.
Alfred did not fall asleep until the dawn was breaking. When he entered the hall the following morning, heavy-eyed and short-tempered, he saw Elswyth and knew his only hope of peace was to keep away from her. The weather was vile, but he took his thanes and went out hunting. Nor would he let Elswyth accompany him.
When the Christmas celebration was over, he thought, he would send Elswyth back to Wantage and he would begin to travel the country, checking on the readiness of the shire defenses. He had only to get through Christmas. Surely he could manage that.
Elswyth sensed the change in Alfred instantly, but was at a loss to account for it. All she knew was that he no longer seemed to want her near him. He spent his days hunting with the men, and never once did he find the time to take her back to Maiden Castle.
Then he started to get headaches: one the day before the New Year and another one two days after.
He would not let her come near him. It was Cyneburg who brought the cold cloths for his head, and Ethelred who kept the door barred against intruders.
At first Elswyth was hurt. Bitterly so. And then she began to grow afraid. Perhaps there was something wrong with Alfred that he was trying to keep from her. This quick succession of headaches was not usual; Ethelred unbent enough to tell her that. And Elswyth could see how tightly strung Alfred was, even when he was not in pain.
Something was wrong with him. What if he was seriously ill? What if he was going to die?
Never in her life had Elswyth been afraid as she was afraid those days at Dorchester, Never had she felt so alone. What would she do should something happen to Alfred?
It never once occurred to her that she was the problem, that he wanted her, and felt bound by the promise he had given her, and was thus driving himself into a state of extreme nervous tension that would inevitably result in headaches.
Alfred had rightly understood that Elswyth’s thoughts were far from sex. But it was not immaturity that kept her ignorant; it was innocence. She knew she loved Alfred. She knew she would die of loneliness if ever she lost him. She, who had ever sought only solitude, now found that another person was as necessary to her as the air she breathed or the water she drank.
She knew nothing of the necessities of sex, knew nothing of its pleasures. Elswyth had never in her life sat with other women and gossiped about such matters. It never once occurred to her that Alfred’s problem could be so simple. She had always assumed that when he wanted to consummate their marriage, he would. It never crossed her mind that she was the one who must make the first move.
“Consummate this marriage!” Ethelred said to Alfred two days after the second headache. “You are making yourself ill. The girl is old enough, Alfred. And she worships you. All can see that. What are you waiting for?”
“I do not want to discuss this, Ethelred.” Alfred’s voice was cold and final. “Do I ask you about your relationship with Cyneburg?”
“There is nothing wrong with my relationship with Cyneburg,” Ethelred was beginning to answer, when Alfred turned his back and p
recipitately left the room.
“Send him to Southampton, my lord,” recommended Ethelred’s seneschal, Odo, an old thane who had served Ethelwulf years before. “Anything is better than another headache.”
“I really do not think the girl has any idea of what it is that is distressing Alfred,” Cyneburg said to her husband when he reported Odo’s recommendation to her.
“If that is true, then perhaps Alfred is right,” Ethelred said heavily. “Perhaps she is still too much a child.”
“No.” Cyneburg shook her head. “She loves him. That is clear enough. She is just … unawakened. Elswyth had a very strange upbringing, Ethelred. From what Alfred says, she was put under her brother’s care and simply allowed to run wild. Her mother utterly neglected her. Poor child, no wonder she is so backward. She had no woman to guide or teach her.”
“I don’t think Elswyth and her mother liked each other very much,” Ethelred said.
Cyneburg made a soft sound of distress.
Ethelred smiled. “Not all mothers are as tender as you, my dear. Nor all children as malleable as ours.”
“Nevertheless,” said Cyneburg, “Alfred could teach her to love him well enough, if only he had the sense to try.”
“I fear Alfred is not thinking very sensibly just now,” Ethelred said dryly. “And it is impossible to discuss the subject with him.”
“Then it had better be discussed with Elswyth,” said Cyneburg.
Ethelred looked troubled. “I do not know …”
“What is the alternative?” His wife stared at him with gentle exasperation. “Will you send him to Southampton?”
“No.” Ethelred’s mouth set. “I cannot play so carelessly with the health of his soul.”
“Just so.” Cyneburg’s pretty face looked amazingly resolute. “It is time someone talked to Elswyth. And it seems the someone,” she concluded, “must be me.”