The Bone Thief

by V. M. Whitworth

  Even in the half-light, Wulfgar could see Kenelm’s pale blue eyes turn icy.

  ‘You’re a cleric in my uncle’s diocese. Therefore, you answer to him, even if you do manage to wriggle out of most of your obligations.’ Kenelm’s lips tightened. ‘You think you’re so special, don’t you?’

  Wulfgar closed his eyes. His wrist was hurting in Kenelm’s bony grip, and he could feel the soft April rain beginning to soak through to his scalp. He sighed with frustration. He had no idea what the Bishop might want, and he could only hope that it wouldn’t take long. He knew exactly where to find the documents the Lady needed; he could see them in his mind’s eye all neatly piled and docketed on his desk. ‘Very well then.’

  ‘I think I’d better escort you.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘I think there is.’

  Wulfgar had to suffer the indignity of being steered back the way he had just come, but towards the Bishop’s private bower now rather than the royal apartments.

  ‘Ah, Wulfgar. Good.’ The Bishop looked up, and noticed Kenelm smirking at Wulfgar’s side. ‘You can go now, nephew.’ He waved Kenelm away with an impatient hand. ‘Wulfgar, come in. Don’t hover in the doorway.’

  Wulfgar, who had been hoping to leave as quickly as he had arrived, reluctantly stepped over the threshold and, at the Bishop’s bidding, he swung the heavy door closed behind him.

  ‘My Lord.’

  ‘What’s going on? Why was the healer summoned?’

  Wulfgar could think of no reply that would not betray his Lady’s confidence. He felt uncomfortable returning the Bishop’s dour one-eyed stare, and concentrated instead on the ancient gold pectoral cross the old man wore round his neck.

  ‘Pay attention, boy! Look me in the eye. Try and behave less like a cornered leveret, and give me an answer!’ The Bishop knuckled his empty eye-socket with a ring-heavy hand. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘Not the Lady,’ Wulfgar said, prevaricating. ‘Not ill, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t tell me she’s with child at last?’

  He shuffled his feet, embarrassed.

  ‘Not – not as far as I know, my Lord.’

  The Bishop squinted at him.

  ‘Does that trouble you? She’s a flesh and blood woman, like any other. Don’t confuse her with a painted saint.’ He sighed then. ‘So, it must be my old friend who needs the leech. Is he dead?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Say something, boy.’

  ‘I think the Lord of the Mercians has been struck down,’ Wulfgar said unwillingly. Speaking the words aloud seemed to give them some awful power. ‘By sickness, I mean. Or something.’ The Devil, he thought. That’s what some would certainly say. And surely it would indeed require some malign power to turn the Boar of Mercia into that dribbling wreck. Wulfgar shivered. Demons. Elves. Or a human hand, as diabolical as any unseen power. Had the Lady thought of poison? Witchcraft? ‘He can’t speak, and he can’t swallow, and he can’t get out of bed,’ Wulfgar admitted at last.

  The Bishop sat very still for a long moment.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said at last. ‘This is the end.’

  ‘The end, my Lord?’

  The Bishop sat with his head bowed over his folded hands.

  Wulfgar wondered if he were praying. It seemed inappropriate to interrupt, but after a few moments, wondering whether he might be excused, he ventured, ‘My Lord—’

  Without looking up, the Bishop said, ‘When I was a boy, Mercia was the undisputed overlord. We ruled from the Humber to the Thames. From the Wash to the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. Every king in the British Isles paid us tribute.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord. I know, my Lord.’ And he did know. He had spent the last five months immersing himself in Mercian history, Mercian charters, Mercian law …

  The Bishop lifted his head.

  ‘You smug little West Saxon brat. Crowing over the humiliation of Mercia, are you? You today, and King Edward tomorrow?’

  And, quite suddenly, Wulfgar had had enough. I’m not a brat, he thought. I’m four and twenty, and I’m a subdeacon of the Church, and I’m sick and tired of this.

  ‘My Lord, why does Mercia hate Wessex so much? Surely we’re on the same side? The people you should really hate are the Danes. They’re the ones who’ve stolen half your country. Not us.’

  There, he thought, I’ve said it. I’ve been thinking it for ages, and now I’ve said it. What’s the worst that can happen? He can’t eat me, can he? But remembering some of the stories he had heard as a child, Wulfgar had to wonder.

  The first time he had ever seen the Bishop of Worcester, he had been no more than nine years old. The Lady’s wedding feast, he remembered with sudden clarity. The bigger boys – that unholy pair of Edward, heir to the West Saxon throne, and Garmund, Wulfgar’s own slave-born half-brother – frightening him witless with ever more gruesome tales of how the Bishop had lost his left eye. Wulfgar had still never learned the truth of the story.

  He shuddered at the memory, returning to the present moment to find the Bishop staring at him, disconcertingly owl-like, with that one remaining eye blazing out from below its overhang of grey eyebrow. Then, to Wulfgar’s astonishment, the old man laughed. There was no merriment in it, but at least it was a laugh.

  ‘A good answer, boy. You’ve more spirit in you than I thought.’ He gestured at a low stool.

  Wulfgar drew it up reluctantly and sat at the Bishop’s feet. It was cold in the little room, although the Bishop, swathed in his silk-trimmed lambswool, didn’t seem to notice. His attention appeared to be entirely elsewhere. Wulfgar tried to see what it was on his desk that he was staring at. I need to get out of here, he thought. The Lady is waiting for me.

  As though reading his mind, the Bishop said, ‘Who’s going to hold the court?’

  Wulfgar stiffened. But he wasn’t expected to reply.

  ‘I’ll have to do it by myself,’ the Bishop said. ‘Never mind the conflict of interest in the first case. We’ll get over that somehow.’ He drummed his fingers on his writing slope, then stood and took two or three paces across the room before turning and coming back. ‘Wulfgar—’ He stopped.

  ‘My Lord?’

  ‘You speak some Danish, don’t you?’

  His eyes widened. How did the Bishop know that?

  ‘A little, my Lord. Why? Is there a Danish plaintiff—?’

  The Bishop cut him off with an abrupt gesture.

  ‘And have you ever been north or east of the line? Anywhere in the Dane-lands?’

  ‘Never, my Lord. I’ve been to London, though.’

  ‘London – hah!’ The Bishop snorted. ‘Can you ride?’

  He blinked.

  ‘I – a little, my Lord.’ Greatly daring, he asked, ‘Why?’

  The Bishop’s craggy face was closed and remote. Then he looked down at his hands, holding his gold cross. His lips moved. Wulfgar had the impression the old prelate was counting something. Was he trying to keep his temper?

  Abruptly, the Bishop said, ‘There’s a task I need done. But I need someone – a churchman, for preference – who can ride, and knows some Danish, and who can leave Worcester for several days.’

  Not me, then, Wulfgar thought with a wave of relief.

  ‘Is that all, my Lord?’ he asked. ‘I’ll let you know if I think of anybody. The Lady needs me now.’

  He got to his feet, half-expecting a furious command to sit down again, but the Bishop’s thoughts were elsewhere.

  ‘I need a loyal Mercian. Not you, with your heart still south across the border.’

  The Bishop turned away with a brusque, dismissive gesture, as if forestalling any further protest, and Wulfgar was able to retreat at last. At the threshold, however, he was called back.

  ‘Wulfgar, the documents for the first case this evening. Fetch them here, to me.’ He slapped his hand on his writing desk.

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts.’

  The Bishop�
��s voice was flat and final.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BUT I CAN’T!

  He hadn’t said it, though. He had nodded, and bowed, and backed out of the bower. I simply can’t, he thought again, really hurrying now through the damp dusk, praying for no more ambushes. The Lady had requested those documents first. And he didn’t care what Kenelm had said; his allegiance was to the Lady, not the Bishop.

  What did he mean, ‘Can you ride?’ Wulfgar thought, I can sit on a horse while it follows the horse in front. But I don’t suppose that’s what he had in mind.

  Pushing the Bishop and his mysteries out of his mind, he lifted the latch on the door of the muniments room, going straight to the desk where he had stored the wills and charters and writs needed over the coming days. The opening of the court was tonight, and then half a dozen more cases were due to be heard tomorrow, and then there would be a three-day hiatus for the commemoration of Good Friday and the celebration of Easter. The cathedral clergy would be busy tomorrow with the Maundy Thursday liturgy, but most of his own time had already been commandeered by the Lord of the Mercians, to attend him in the court …

  Wulfgar paused in his rummaging, his eyes suddenly blinded with tears. It was only yesterday that the Lord had been in here with him, listening to Wulfgar explain the details of one tangled bequest after another. He had heard him out, that blunt, grizzled, warrior’s face giving nothing away. And then, at the end, the approving slap on the shoulder, the gruff commendation that had had him blushing with pleasure. ‘Good man. An eye for detail as well as a sense of the bigger picture. You’ll do well here, Wulfgar.’ A bluff, jovial man, the Lord of the Mercians. Not unlike Wulfgar’s own father. But, he thought, my father – God rest him – never bothered to say anything like that to me.

  The documents weren’t where he’d left them. It’s really only that will, he thought, and the rent returns – but the will’s the important one; oh, this is exasperating – I know I left them here.

  When he found them at last, they were right at the bottom of the iron-bound chest, folded inside a completely irrelevant sheaf of manumissions. He gritted his teeth against a curse. Kenelm, he thought, though it could equally have been any of the others. What made them so petty? Wulfgar was only just beginning to learn his way around the politics of Worcester’s cathedral community, and he found the atmosphere devious at best, and all too often riddled with spite (although he admitted, if only to himself, that Winchester had sometimes been just as bad). Too many celibate, ambitious, well-born men who’d given up hopes of family and marriage and land. Men with their avid eyes fixed on the few wealthy abbacies and bishoprics left now after the English Church had been shattered by the Danes. Every year in Winchester, he had witnessed one or two of the cathedral clergy falling by the wayside, exchanging their soaring visions for the life of a village priest or a canon at a small, poor, rural minster – an ordinary cleric who could marry and farm and raise his family away from the perilous world of bishops and kings.

  Wulfgar’s lips tightened. If only Kenelm would do as much.

  Never mind. He had those documents now and he would take them to his beloved Lady, Kenelm and the Bishop be damned. He couldn’t repress a small, triumphant smile. He pulled his cloak from its peg and, wrapping it over his choir robe, he went back into the dusk and the blowing rain.

  At the door of the little antechamber to the great hall, though, his lingering smile vanished. At first glance the little room looked so enticing, with its woven hangings, its painted beams, the friendly glow of the charcoal in its braziers. But the air fizzed as though a lightning storm were brewing. He stopped at the threshold, clutching his sheets of vellum to his breast.

  ‘Wulfgar. Good.’ The Lady never took her eyes from the Bishop. ‘A cup of wine for his lordship of Worcester.’

  ‘This is my palace, Fleda. I give the orders.’ The Bishop held out an imperious hand. ‘Wulfgar, thank you.’

  ‘But it’s my kingdom,’ she said.

  ‘Your kingdom?’ The Bishop creaked with mirthless laughter. ‘Wessex has a King. Mercia doesn’t, not any more. Don’t try pulling rank on me, girl.’ He looked at Wulfgar for the first time. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘My Lord,’ he stuttered. ‘My Lady—’

  She closed her eyes, and, lifting her head under its weight of gold-worked veil, she breathed in.

  ‘Leave us,’ she said, eyes still closed.

  Her two attendant women rustled to the door, where Wulfgar was also turning to obey.

  ‘Not you, Wulfgar.’

  Wulfgar still hesitated, clutching the will and the rent returns to his breast.

  When she spoke again, there was a bitter edge to her voice.

  ‘Oh, give those documents to his Lordship of Worcester, if his need of them is so great.’

  Wulfgar bit his tongue, bowed, and did as he was told.

  ‘The wine,’ she said.

  He slid past the Lady to the small table and picked up the heavy glass jug. His hands shook as he poured.

  ‘Godfather.’ Her voice was small but steady, her eyes still closed. ‘Please. Don’t be angry with me, not now.’

  The Bishop was holding the documents close to his good eye.

  ‘That land belongs to Worcester diocese. I have plans for it.’ He stared over them at the Lady. ‘Don’t meddle with things you know nothing about.’

  She stared back, her jaw set, and Wulfgar found himself fuming on her behalf, his fist clenching around the jug’s handle. He forced himself to relax, hesitating for a long heartbeat before he dared to take the brimming cup of wine over to the Bishop, half-expecting the shell of fragile green glass to be dashed in his face. But he had under-estimated the old man. The Bishop sketched a cross over the cup, downed the wine in one swallow and handed it back.

  ‘I have sent for my cousin Seiriol,’ the Lady said. Her gaze was still fixed to the Bishop’s face. ‘He is with my Lord.’

  ‘Your dying Lord.’

  ‘He is not dying.’

  A rap sounded on the outer door.

  ‘Come in.’ She looked up, her expression strained and eager.

  Wulfgar’s own heart also lifted as the door swung open to admit a familiar figure, a dark-haired, bright-eyed man in his thirties, with rain beading his hair and glinting on the silver of his sword and belt-knife. Athelwald Seiriol, the senior atheling of the West Saxon royal house, the Lady’s cousin and oldest ally, and someone else, Wulfgar thought happily, who had no cause to love the new King of Wessex.

  The Atheling spoke to the Lady first. ‘My dearest cousin!’ Taking both her hands in his, he kissed her warmly on the cheek. ‘Your husband lives,’ he assured her. ‘No better, but at least no worse. The healer is with him.’ Then, over his shoulder, ‘Excitement expected in the court tonight, my Lord Bishop?’ He turned, dropping the Lady’s hands to give the Bishop his easy smile. ‘Everyone out there –’ he jerked his head towards the hall ‘– is wondering how you might keep the men of Sodbury loyal.’ Then, ‘Wulfgar!’

  ‘My Lord?’

  ‘Good to see you here! How are you settling in? I had a word with your uncle before I left Winchester. He wants you to know his lungs are bad again.’

  Wulfgar, delighted and astonished to be noticed, bowed deeply.

  ‘Thank you, my Lord.’ He hesitated. ‘My Lord Atheling.’ Was Seiriol still allowed to claim that title, that status so close to the throne, now that his younger cousin Edward was King?

  The Atheling, still smiling, acknowledged the title with a nod.

  ‘And your brother Wystan’s had a son,’ the Atheling said, ‘but that must have been before you left Winchester? All’s well at Meon, they tell me.’

  Wulfgar mumbled his gratitude again. He thought, oh, I’ve no worries on that account. Wystan will be all right under Edward’s dispensation. Him, and his son and heir, his sheep, and his rolling acres of wheat, they won’t care one way or the other that there’s a new King in Winchester. But, he couldn’t help wonder
ing, what about my father’s other son? What about Garmund, the Polecat? I don’t need to ask, he thought bitterly. He’ll be all right, too, damn it. More than all right. This will be his big opportunity.

  The Bishop looked from face to face. ‘Have you quite finished?’ he said. ‘This is no time for your petty Winchester gossip. We face disaster. This lethal blow, at the holiest time of the whole year. Why?’

  ‘These things have no sense of season,’ the Atheling said.

  ‘You’re wrong there,’ the Bishop snapped. ‘Our advocates in the court of Heaven have turned against us.’

  ‘Save it for Sunday, Bishop. The Old Boar’s not dead, not yet.’

  The Bishop leaned back in the chair and squinted up at him.

  ‘This isn’t pulpit rhetoric, Seiriol. Mercia is being punished.’

  The Lady, eyes closed, massaging her temples.

  ‘Wulfgar, unpin my veils, will you?’

  Me? But her women had been dismissed, and she could scarcely expect the Atheling or the Bishop to do it. His hands trembling a little at the intimacy of the task, he slid the gilt pins out of the fine gold-spangled linen and laid them on the table with the jug. She pushed at the veils and he lifted them away from her head, startled by their weight. Her corn-coloured hair was coiled in sleek plaits around the back of her head. ‘That’s better. That’ll do. Thank you.’ She looked up at him with a weary smile. ‘Don’t start counting the grey hairs.’

  ‘It’s as golden as it was on your wedding day, Fleda,’ the Atheling said, smiling down at her.

  ‘Flatterer. How would you remember? It’s so long ago.’

  ‘Forget the day you left Wessex? The day Edward was named as your father’s heir?’ He had stopped smiling.

  ‘The Atheling is right, my lady,’ Wulfgar heard himself say, filling the awkward silence. His face grew even warmer, remembering. Her wedding day had been the worst day of his young life, for so many reasons.

  ‘You surely don’t remember my wedding, do you, Wulfgar?’

  Still blushing, he nodded.