The daughter of a great earl was a safe and protected person, with servants and clothes and a way of life made comfortable by her father’s power.
But what could happen to the daughter of an outlaw? We would have to leave the fens, leave England itself, flee to some strange and distant place, be poor and humble … It was too horrible!
“Disgraced!” I cried to myself. “Outlawed! How could he do this to me?! It’s time for the May Day, young men will be coming to dance with me, a prince might have offered for me … Oh, Father, how could you do this!”
It was so enormous I could scarce conceive of it. The only scandal in our family, at least the only one I had ever heard about, had been caused by my grandmother. A lady famous for her beauty, she was wed to the great Earl Leofric of Mercia, and was much admired by noble and vassal alike. When Leofric levied an excessively heavy tax on his subjects, my grandmother, the Lady Godiva, took their side. In jest, he told her he would abolish the tax on the day she rode naked through the town.
My grandmother must have been as stubborn as she was beautiful. To the Earl’s dismay, she took his joke as a challenge and announced that she would, indeed, ride naked through Coventry, covered only by the fall of her unbound hair. She insisted that that would be enough protection for a righteous woman, but my realistic grandfather was well aware that even the lightest breeze would lift the red-gold locks and give the townsfolk a view that only he was entitled to enjoy.
So he decreed that all citizens of Coventry should stay inside their cottages that day, with their shut-doors tightly fastened, on penalty of having their eyes put out. Grandmother made her ride, only one or two imprudent souls defied the decree and suffered the consequences, and the Earl Leofric rescinded the tax. But the Lady Godiva was still the subject of whispers in our household, and I could never decide whether to be proud of her or ashamed.
And how should I feel about my own father? To be named in the Witan, the King’s own council, as an outlaw! Why was such a thing done? And how could a mere girl-child ever hope to learn the truth of it? If a man dishonors his family and his name, do his children still owe him allegiance?
The questions were too difficult for me. Emma’s training was to make me a wife and mother, but at whose knee could I learn to be an outcast?
There was no resisting the law of the Witan. They could make kings, by Saxon law, and unmake earls just as certainly. The Witan was the true power at Winchester, for saintly old King Edward was a gentle man who laid too light a hand on the reins of authority. If the Witan had outlawed my father there was no appeal, no escaping the sentence.
Trembling, I lay on my bed and tried to see into the altered future. (How many times since has that happened to me? My whole life is turned around in the wink of an eye, and nothing is as it was before. It is a curse, though Griffith would laugh and call it a challenge.)
At last Emma came in with my candle. Dear Emma, nurse to me when I was small, friend to me when I was tall. Childhood rhymes speak truly. She sat by me and put her hand on my tumbled hair.
“Have they forgotten you, childie? Here you are in the dark, all worn out with crying and without a bite of supper in you! Saints’ blood, has the world gone awry?”
“Oh, Emma!” I wailed. “It has, it has!”
“Childie, you must learn something important, and now is a goodly time to do it. When the world is knocked heels over head, it always rights itself in time. If it is raining on you, there are still places where the sun shines, and it will shine on you again. Never give in to despair, my lady; all you must do is go into the sunshine. Find the place where it is.”
That sounded like a lot of empty cheer to me. “How can I, Emma? My father is outlawed, we are all disgraced forever, all that we have is forfeit to the King!”
“Whatever your father has done may be a disgrace to him childie, but not to you. Only you can disgrace yourself.”
It was all very well for her to talk, but what could a mere servant understand of disgrace or shame? Pah!
Emma was no help at all; she could only talk about things getting better when it was obvious they would only get worse. When I could lie in my chamber no longer without knowing what was happening, I wrapped a cloak about me and went to the hall. A velvet cloak, it was. I remember wondering if it was the last velvet cloak I would ever have.
Edwin sat alone at table, where supper had been served as I hid in my chamber. If my parents had eaten anything there was no sign of it; they were gone and the table was clean in front of their stools. My younger brother was absent as well, so Edwin sat in solitary splendor, gnawing a mutton joint. Disaster had not ruined his appetite.
He glanced at me from beneath the tangled ledge of his brows. “Most of the supper is gone.”
“So I can see. No matter, my stomach’s as hard as a stone. Edwin, how can you eat now?”
His gray eyes were as cold as the fens in winter, and I do not think he was being intentionally amusing when he replied, “But I always eat now. It’s suppertime.”
“Don’t toy with me! You know what I mean!”
Edwin wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You mean to work yourself up to a temper, that’s what you mean. Father may find it charming, but it won’t get you anywhere with me.”
One of the torches sputtered and spat a flaming particle of pitch to the floor.
Brothers are intended by God as a sort of plague, like floods and locusts. I tried to keep my temper, congratulating myself on the effort. “Please, just tell me what’s happening!”
“Very. little, really. The servants will scarcely bother to stir themselves from the kitchen and stillroom, Morkere is off somewhere vomiting, and our parents have gone to the buttery to quarrel. So I am left with you, like a boil on my nose.” He cut a great hunk of cheese and stuffed it into his face.
“Edwin, I have to understand this! Why is the Earl outlawed?”
“You did not hear?” He looked astonished.
“Not all of it. Just the part about the banishment, that I heard. And that we were dispossessed. But why?”
At that moment the manshell of him cracked, just a little, and I caught a glimpse of the frightened child within. He grew pale and darted nervous glances into the shadow spaces between the sputtering torches. I came as close then as I ever would to loving my elder brother.
“The charge was treason,” he said hoarsely.
“That can’t be!”
“The Witan found him guilty. Of making treasonous statements in public, saying the King is unfit to govern and the Danes insult the English throne by planning to have one of the Godwines crowned when King Edward dies.”
There was the kernel of the thing, and I began to understand. Since babyhood I had heard my father at table arguing that same point. He and my lady mother were of the old, pure Saxon blood, which had been the nobility in the east before the Danish warriors came to our shores. My grandmother Godiva was of the House of Alfred, called the Great. Bitter was the resentment of the Saxons against the Danish kings who had ruled our country for three generations, until the death of King Hardecnut in 1042.
Then a Saxon of Alfred’s blood again assumed the throne. But he was no mighty warrior in the old tradition. King Edward was an ascetic, a man who wore hair shirts beneath his royal robe and spent too much time in prayer and pious acts. The real rulers of England were still the Danes, and the Danish-supported Earl Godwine of Wessex raised the most powerful voice at court.
The Saxons, who had long mistrusted the Earl Godwine and his Danish wife Gytha, went about with their hearts in their hose. My father had become a focal point for their grumblings, and our Great Hall was a place where the deeds of Alfred and Aethelwulf were sung again and again on long winter nights.
To a child there is enchantment in the telling of old tales, and I secretly enjoyed thinking of myself as a real princess of England. Never, never did I imagine overthrowing the King, nor did I think my father and his friends meant to do such a thing. But how can chil
dren know what big folk mean?
It was not quite as bad as my worst imaginings. True, by sun-come-up most of our servants had vanished, melted away like snow by the heat of our disgrace. But we were not thrown into the marshes to starve. We were allowed to take our clothing and beds, and my lady mother kept some of her jewels and her dower chest. Emma and a few others remained faithful, including the Earl’s grizzled squire Owain. They had been together many years, and the bonds between them were close. Owain was a Briton from Wales, the mysterious mountains to the west, and when he spoke his native tongue it sounded like water gurgling over stones.
It was Owain who rode down the coast and arranged a ship for us. He knew of men in Wales, and across the sea in Ireland, who would be inclined to be generous to an enemy of the growing power of the Godwines. My father was determined to resist banishment, and I was glad of it. I heard him question Owain long and long about the fighting ability of the Welshmen. A proud, strong man was the Earl Aelfgar; if he had meekly accepted outlawry for all of us, I could never have forgiven him.
Within the week we were boarding a ship to sail to Ireland.
The ship was a merchant vessel, a creaking thing that smelled of wet wood and rotting fish. It gave me such a sea-belly I was afraid I would die, but soon that passed and I was able to stand at the rail with my father. My mother was so shaken as to be no use at all. One moment she raged at him for his foolishness, the next she cried and clung to him and moaned of her losses. (Though in truth she had lost but little. She had her health and her family, even some of her personal treasures. I have seen much more loss than that, since.)
Edwin and Morkere stayed apart from my father as much as they could on the cramped ship. Already they seemed to be drawing away from him, building shells around themselves so they could remain indifferent to the pain of others.
My father planned to leave us with supporters in Ireland while he and Owain traveled to the court of the Welsh Prince. Aelfgar, former Earl of East Anglia, would there do homage to the Welshman in return for men-at-arms.
The thought of my father journeying to that wild land was frightening, but even more so was the idea of his raising an army against the King and the Godwines. Nor could I understand why the Welsh Prince would be willing to join him in such a venture!
“Girls are taught little of history, as it is not necessary for them to know the past,” my father explained. “But the telling of it will help pass the voyage. Your sea-belly is all gone, is it?”
“Oh, yes, sire!” I answered proudly, knowing full well that Edwin and Morkere were still wretchedly ill, somewhere below. Ha!
“Well done. So … first you must understand that the Welsh will never accept English rule, although the King longs to unite them with England.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason that Danish rule is unacceptable to us Saxons. We were here first. The Saxon ruled England before the Dane, but even before the Saxon was the Celt. Once all this land was theirs. They fought against the Roman invasion a thousand years ago.”
This was astonishing news to me! I could not hold in my mind the sum of a hundred years. People who lived, and fought, and died … a thousand years ago? They were farther from me than the moon in the sky!
“What happened to them, those Celts, when the Romans came?”
“They fought bravely, but they had only skins for armor and clubs for weapons. The Romans carried spears and rode fast horses; they drove the Celts from the heart of the land, back into the wildness of the mountains. They settled there and called themselves the Cymry. In the old Celtic tongue that means Sweet Singers. Through all the years they have lived there, in the land we know as Wales.”
I do not like the way men have of talking all around a point. “But why should the Welsh help you now?”
Like my lady mother, he took his own time and would not be hurried. “A great disaster occurred in Rome, a mighty nation very far away, and the Roman soldiers went home. Then the Cymry came down from their mountains, only to meet the first Saxons coming to settle here from Germany and the Low Countries. The Celts and Saxons fought mightily for many years. In the monasteries there are still parchments written in those times by one Gildas, a historian. He tells of the Celtic hero Arthur, who drove the Saxons from England at the Battle of Badon.
“When Arthur died, however, the Saxons returned, and at last conquered through their great numbers. The Cymry returned to their mountains.”
“I’m sure I’m very sorry for them,” I said dutifully, as he seemed to expect. “But that explains nothing!”
My father gave me the kind of look men reserve for ignorant women—when they have kept them ignorant and are annoyed by it. “Of course it does, Edyth! The Cymry—the Welsh—still feel that England is rightfully theirs! They may well be persuaded to join in an overthrow of Edward and the Godwines, in hopes that they will be able to snatch the throne themselves.”
“Oh,” I said. Standing on a storm-tossed ship, looking at a cold black sea and rushing forward into the unknown, I could not be very sympathetic with all these people who plotted to control England. All I could imagine desiring was a bed that stayed still, and a drink of water that did not smell of fish.
IRELAND
IN CRAMPED AND smelly quarters we sailed along the Saxon Shore, around the southern coast of England and westward to that desolate point the sailors call Land’s End.
With good reason, I thought. I stood on the tossing deck, my feet braced against the roll of the ship, and listened to the sailors’ cries and the endless creaking of the sails. For once I was most glad to be a female. The sea life was not for me; I could find nothing about it that I liked except the occasional exhilaration of a spanking salt wind in my face. But everything was so splintery—decks, walls, tables—and the noises of the living ship went on and on.
How do men rest in a world where nothing ever rests?
“Do you like the sea?” I asked Owain once, catching him as he emptied the Earl’s slop jar over the side.
“In Wales we live between the mountains and the sea; if you don’t like one you must learn to care for the other. But I prefer the mountains.” He flipped the slops over the rail with an expert twist of his wrist, stepping aside to avoid the backward spray as the wind caught it.
“Are the mountains quiet, Owain?”
“Tomorrow we’ll turn northward, I think, and soon you’ll see them for yourself, my lady. They are quiet, I suppose, but it is the silence of sleeping giants. Not like this rowdy bitch, the ocean!” He waved his free hand at the dark and tossing water.
I did see Wales, rising out of the sea in a glory of lifted stone. The gentle swells of the marshes had left me unprepared for such sudden, savage beauty. Wales seemed to climb right out of the sea and reach for the heavens, holding up the sky on emerald-topped shoulders.
“It’s beautiful!” I breathed, enraptured, to my lady mother. “Do come and see!”
“It’s a barbarous place,” she moaned, “and we are going to another one. Bring me a cloth for my head!”
We put in and exchanged much cargo at a place called Aberystwyth, on the Bay of Cardigan. Owain tried without success to teach me how to pronounce Aberystwyth, and at last gave up with laughter. “The Cymry do not speak the language so much as they sing it, my lady, and your song is a squawk. I think one must be born in this land to master the tongue.”
“But it sounds so lovely when you say it!”
“Only to some, my lady,” he shook his head sadly. “Only to some.”
The last and most dangerous part of our voyage was straight across the Irish Sea. We were assaulted by huge waves that smashed against our ship in solid walls, until Morkere screamed with fear and even the Earl looked pale. Buffeted hour after hour by water and wind, I thought never to reach Ireland alive.
When even Emma had begun to despair, of a once the water sweetened, and one of the sailors came to tell us we were putting in at the mouth of the River Liffey. Edwin,
my father and I went up on deck for our first look at Ireland.
The River Liffey flows past Dublin town, and the harbor is an exotic place. Voyagers from all over the world must put in there—we saw ships and flags of every description. Edwin was most excited by the tall dragonships of the Vikings, needing only the elaborately carved heads which the warriors fastened to the prow before battle to turn them into monsters from a nurse’s bed-tale.
“Dublin is called ‘Ath Cliath na cloc’—Dublin of the Bells,” the Earl told us, “and it is through the good offices of the Earl Leofric that we have sanctuary here. See that you behave yourselves, both of you, as the children of a noble Saxon house, and always treat our hosts with the utmost courtesy!”
I had no intention of doing otherwise, although with Edwin no one could be too sure. In East Anglia I had begun to be a woman, but in this strange and frightening new place I was glad to go back to being an obedient child again, thankful I had elders to tell me how to behave.
Some sort of official personage came to greet us, and with much bowing to the Earl and excessive reverence all around, he got mother and me into a rather primitively fashioned litter. The rest of our party were mounted on shaggy Norse ponies with very rough gaits; Morkere could be heard whining all the way.
We went through narrow streets, past houses of clay and rude circular huts of wickerwork. The better buildings had windows with shut-doors, but all had roofs of thatch. Some of the houses were washed with white lime; some were painted in shades of blue and yellow and ocher. People along the streets stared at us with open curiosity, as we did them, for there was a great difference in the apparel of a Saxon earl and that of Irish commonfolk.
The women wore a simple dress of wool or linen; the men, short tunics and an odd little skirt. Strangest of all was their hair. Both sexes dressed their hair in thick plaits with metal balls at the ends. I could not help remembering my brief infatuation with the idea of braided hair and a gorgeous plume.
The Wind From Hastings Page 2