The Chosen Queen

by Joanna Courtney

  ‘No ifs, Harold.’

  ‘Well, let it suffice, then, that I shall treasure this time. I did not think I would ever feel truly a king but here I do. I have a surprise for you.’

  ‘You do?’

  He was smirking like a small boy and now he leaped out of bed and strode to the side table to fetch a small pouch. Edyth turned away. She was used to Harold’s body against hers, inside hers, but still she was shy of looking at it and did not turn back until he was safety beneath the covers once more.

  ‘See.’

  He opened the pouch and drew out a penny, so shiny it had to have come straight from the mint. Edyth stretched out a hand and he placed it into her palm, face up.

  ‘Harold, it’s you.’

  ‘It is but that’s not the best bit. Here.’

  He flipped it over to reveal a single word, stamped confidently into the silver: ‘PAX’.

  ‘Peace,’ Edyth translated. ‘That’s perfect.’

  He smiled awkwardly.

  ‘Sadly writing it on England’s coins does not make it come true but it is a start.’

  ‘Have you heard any more?’

  ‘Nothing from Scandinavia but Duke William is building ships. He will come, Edyth.’

  ‘And we will be ready for him. We have the finest fyrd in Europe, with the finest leader.’

  ‘I hope you are right. I’m told Torr has been turned away by Duke William but I will not believe it until I see it for myself. That Norman is capable of all levels of trickery and Torr is little better. He hates me for choosing your brother over my own and maybe he is right.’

  ‘Hey.’ Edyth took his chin and crawled up to straddle him. ‘That does not sound like a man who feels like a king.’

  He rubbed his fingers across one of her nipples, a thoughtless gesture, almost as if he were polishing one of his new coins, but it sent desire shooting through her. She was as hungry for him as a peasant at harvest time, determined to gorge herself for fear of famine ahead, and now she rolled her hips back, rubbing against him, rousing him.

  ‘God, Edyth, I knew I said this must be a proper marriage, but I had no idea it . . . Edyth?’ She jerked away, her lust collecting into a hard, hateful ball, rattling its way up from the wanton core between her legs and shaking tears from her eyes. ‘Edyth, I’m sorry. Don’t cry.’

  ‘I should not pester you. You are not mine to command.’

  ‘Nonsense. That’s nonsense, Edyth. You are my wife.’

  ‘To everyone else, yes, but we both know that is a lie, don’t we?’

  She scrabbled for covers, pulling them up and around herself. ‘It’s late,’ her head told her. ‘It’s been a long day, an amazing day. Don’t spoil it. Don’t fight him. Don’t annoy him.’ It was no use. Sorrow was rising up, cresting high on a wave of guilt, and she could escape it no longer.

  ‘Do you pretend I’m her?’

  ‘Edyth!’

  ‘Do you? Is that how you bear it?’

  ‘No.’ He grabbed her wrists, yanking her towards him so the covers fell away leaving her naked. ‘It’s different, Edyth. I don’t know how to explain it. When I was in the Ottoman lands years back, I met men with more than one wife. It is their way, their law. I spoke to one of them about it and he said he loved them all equally. I did not understand it at the time but I do now.’

  ‘You love us both.’

  ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘But you love her best – as you should.’

  He shook her gently.

  ‘Best, Edyth? What is best? Which of your children do you love best?’

  ‘None, but that is different, Harold.’

  ‘Is it? Surely it shows the heart can be open? I know this is unusual, Edyth, but the times are unusual and it is we – you and I – who must carry them. Others may not understand but surely, if we are honest with one another, we can? Did you not love Griffin?’

  ‘Yes, but he is dead.’

  ‘And I am alive and so are you – alive and here with me.’

  His hands held her wrists and now his lips found her neck, biting at it, teasing a flare from her body which her mind fought uselessly to resist. He was right. She was here with him and, intangible as that sometimes felt, it was all she had and she must make all of it that she could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Westminster, May 1066

  For what felt like months nothing happened. England busied itself with Easter. Harold and Edyth were cheered around the south and the blossoms opened. The lambs were born and it was possible to believe, if you did not look over your shoulder to the seas, that all was bounty and peace in King Harold’s England.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Sire,’ Avery said one morning as he was helping Harold dress, ‘but it’s Trimilchi next week.’

  ‘So it is.’ Harold turned to Edyth, burrowed into the covers, not yet accustomed to being seen in the royal bed, even by servants. ‘Shall we celebrate the May Day, my queen?’

  Edyth considered. Trimilchi, or May Day as it was becoming known, was an ancient festival with its roots in paganism and it could get a little wild. King Edward had reined festivities back in the pious last years of his life but it was celebrated the length and breadth of the country and it would be an honour to mirror that in Westminster.

  ‘I think we should,’ she said. ‘I shall set plans in motion today.’

  Harold grinned at her.

  ‘You will have to rise then.’

  ‘All in good time,’ she retorted primly. ‘Avery can summon my maids when he is done with you.’

  Avery bowed and backed away and Edyth looked around the sumptuous royal chamber with its richly hung bed, embroidered seats and expensively glassed windows. She might be still shy about being with Harold but, God help her, she was swiftly becoming accustomed to being a queen again. She scrambled up, grabbing her bedrobe, and Harold wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Must you wear that, Edie? You look so much nicer without and is it not, after all, ancient tradition to go naked at Trimilchi?’

  ‘In Wales it was certainly encouraged,’ she agreed lightly and his eyes darkened.

  ‘In Wales, as far as I can see, too much was encouraged.’

  He advanced on her, his eyes flicking to the bed, but she ducked his arms with a smile.

  ‘What’s past is past. Come now, King Harold, we have a feast to prepare.’

  Four days later, on the eve of Trimilchi, Edyth looked out across the Chelsea meadowlands and smiled with pride. Preparations had been frantic but the result was magnificent. The trees were hung with ribbons and coloured pastries. Two great piles of dry wood were set for bonfires and the royal tents stood, sides open to the soft spring air and trestles laden with food and drink to sustain the courtiers through a long night of celebration.

  It looked a rich feast but in truth Edyth and her cooks had been forced to be creative for food was sparse and dry in this lean period before the crops began to yield. The ale, however, was plentiful and Harold’s men had caught a boar in the forest this morning so at least there would be fresh meat. Besides, no one was here for the food. The joy of rekindling the ancient feast-night, designed to ward off spirits sneaking through the loosened boundaries between the living and the dead on the eve of the summer festival, would be enough to sustain them.

  The courtiers were chattering excitedly as they flooded across the meadow. They were all dressed in green – the faeries’ colour – and many, Edyth included, wore ribbons and flowers intertwined into their costumes, at odds with the usual more sombre, tight-lined fashions of the court. Even the adults skipped with the mass of overexcited children as they milled around the great oak that would be the centre of the festivities. They seemed stripped of their usual ranks and restrictive order out here in the open and something about their carefree muddle reminded Edyth of Griffin.

  She had teased Harold about Wales’s traditions but it was true that there Trimilchi had lingered firmly in its wanton Beltane origins. Griffin’s court had paraded statu
es of the Green Man, clad in little more than leaves, and couples had jumped naked, or ‘sky-clad’, over fires for fertility before claiming the sparse shelter of the bushes. Edyth flushed to remember her own husband ‘green-gowning’ her little more than a sapling’s length from other couples welcoming the summer in each other’s arms. It was no coincidence that so many women had gone to their childbed in February and not all of them married either, not that anyone in Wales had concerned themselves with such ‘Roman’ scruples.

  In England, however, things were more civilised, at least in the early part of the celebrations. Already today the court had crammed into Edward’s new abbey to celebrate a mass for Mary, the bearer of Christ and therefore the queen of the May Day celebrations of fecundity and fertility. Her statue had been brought forth to the meadows at the end of the service and sat coyly beneath the great oak but already coloured eggs lay at her feet and love-token ribbons twirled in the branches above her head as the courtiers embraced more earthy traditions.

  As the skies darkened forgivingly, the singing and dancing began and Edyth had little doubt that, even in Westminster, the bushes would not go unexplored once night was fully upon them. She glanced to the trees behind. The woodland was little more than a copse these days, so much had been cut back for housing, and she wondered if the tree she had climbed as an eager girl still stood. She would not recognise it if it did – her eyes had not been on the branches but on the couple beneath. She flushed as she recalled Torr’s lazy sensuality when he’d claimed her as a dance partner and his dark pleasure in her foolish spying the next day. Thank the Lord Harold had been close or the naive episode could have ended very differently.

  ‘Are you well, Edie?’

  His voice spoke through her memories and she looked up at her then saviour, now, by some strange tangle of fate, her husband.

  ‘Very well, Harold.’ She shook the past away. ‘The court is in festive mood.’

  ‘As it should be. We must keep the spirits back with our good cheer tonight.’

  ‘Such superstition, Harry, from the King of England?’

  ‘Even kings are men before God, especially on nights like this.’

  He touched his temporary crown, a simple plait of rowan, and Edyth’s fingers went instinctively to her own. They had been crowned king and queen of the Trimilchi as soon as the party had deposited St Mary beneath the oak and were honorary faeries for the night. Edyth laughed at the thought.

  ‘Come, Harry,’ she teased, ‘a civil man like you cannot believe in witches and sprites?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed and his voice was surprisingly sombre, ‘but there is more to this world, Edyth, than we will ever know. That’s what . . .’

  He caught himself.

  ‘What Svana says?’ Edyth asked and he nodded. She thought for a moment and then said, ‘She would like tonight. Indeed. Harold, if the court were this way all the time she might like it enough to—’

  ‘But it is not.’

  ‘No.’ Edyth pushed away her own ghosts and reached up to kiss his cheek. ‘So we must make the most of it. Shall we dance?’ She pointed to the spiralling figures around the oak, winding long ribbons round the great trunk to bless it and seal its fertility and their own. They were holding hands and laughing, their costumes melding into the green of the grass as the light faded. ‘It looks fun, does it not?’

  ‘It looks fun, Edie,’ he agreed, ‘but if you have not noticed, they are all women.’

  ‘Then they will welcome a man.’

  Harold laughed. He reached for her chin and tipped her face up to his. Someone had set fire to the tinder in the two piles of wood beyond the oak and she could see the first of the flames dancing in his pupils as he smiled down at her.

  ‘Later, Edie. The men will dance later.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that, my lord. I have been green-gowning before, you know.’

  ‘Edyth!’

  ‘Harold? You don’t need to play the innocent with me these days.’

  He huffed.

  ‘I remember a time when you were the innocent one, Edyth Alfgarsdottir.’

  ‘I was thinking on that myself just now but it is a time, thankfully, long past. Torr is gone, praise God.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘For now is enough, Harry, and if you will not dance with me, I will go alone.’

  She took a step towards the dancers but he caught her hand and pulled her back.

  ‘No green-gowning.’

  ‘Only with you.’

  He smiled and bent to brush a light kiss across her lips before letting her go. She ran to join the women who opened up their circle to let her within. The ribbons were wound to the ground now and the court musicians, who had earlier been grumbling about the effect of the night-damp on their precious instruments, seemed to have forgotten their complaints and were stirring up a jig. The notes of their lutes and pipes tripped across the soft air and tickled at the heels of the ladies. Several, Edyth noticed, had already shed their shoes and she was glad she’d remembered to send the steward’s men out across these grazing lands with brooms and rakes.

  She clucked at herself; it was a festival night and she should not be fussing about domestic trivia. She need not be queen now, just a girl in a rowan crown dancing by the firelight. She let her hands be clasped and picked up her feet to the music. The bonfires were burning high, throwing flames skywards as if they sought to be stars. Sparks thrust into the purpling sky and fell to the ground where children, squealing, pounced on them with their hard little boots. Edyth spotted Nesta clasping her Uncle Morcar’s hand, heedlessly keeping back the older ladies vying for attention from the new earl. Ewan and Morgan were with a gang of the court lads playing tag in and out of the trees and she heard their voices calling to their new friends in swift, easy English with barely a whisper of a Welsh lilt.

  ‘Catch me if you can!’

  Their happy calls rippled between the notes of the jig, warming Edyth’s heart. ‘For now’ was indeed enough. Tonight, at least, the enemies over the seas could stay in the shadows with the other evil spirits; the English fires were burning high enough to keep them all away.

  The woman to her left dropped her hand and new fingers clasped her own. They were warm and dry and something about their touch caught at Edyth’s breath. She turned. It was almost dark now and the woman’s face was lit only by the firelight catching in its contours but Edyth would know it anywhere. She gasped and her lips formed the name but the woman stopped her.

  ‘Don’t say it. If you do not say it then I am not here.’

  Edyth stared at her old friend.

  ‘You are a sprite, then?’

  ‘Nay. Nay, not that, Edyth. Never that. I am all too human.’

  Edyth drew Svana in against the rainbowed trunk and the circle of revellers danced on around them.

  ‘I’m so sorry . . .’ she began but again the other woman silenced her.

  ‘No apologies, Edie. Not tonight. Not ever.’

  ‘Then why have you come?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘To see if I am filling my role?’

  ‘Nay! Not to test you, Edyth, truly, just to see you. To . . . know you are still here.’ She looked down. ‘You think me foolish.’

  Edyth relaxed.

  ‘I do not. I have been thinking the same myself, only not so clearly. Even when I was in Wales I never felt so far from you as I have done these last months.’

  ‘It must be that way, Edyth, we both know that, but I thought that tonight, beneath the trees with the solid world in flux, I might creep between the gaps of “must be” for just a while.’

  ‘You creep well. Come, we should find Harold.’

  At that, though, Svana recoiled.

  ‘I could not, Edyth. He is yours now.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘He is yours. Come, my love, the dance is turning without us. We must rejoin the circle.’

  She indicated the women still moving around them and Edyth drew in a dee
p breath. The air was rich with the scent of earth and soot and spiced wine but beneath it all now ran a wisp of meadow flower – summer truly come at last. On an impulse, she grasped one of the myriad ribbons sewn to the waist-clasp of her gown and tugged it loose.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘We must tie it to the tree for friendship.’

  Her old friend pulled a ribbon from her own dress, green too but a far lighter shade, like a new leaf. She handed it to Edyth who twisted the two together and knotted them firmly closed at either end. Grasping a sturdy stem, she threaded the interlinked ribbon over it, looping it back on itself to keep it tight to the tree. It spun giddily as she released the branch and she watched, entranced.

  ‘They look half-crazed.’

  ‘Maybe we do too. Come, Edie, let’s dance while we can.’

  Edyth nodded and together they stepped out of their little space at the centre of the revellers and rejoined the circle. Night had fallen in earnest now and all around people had become their own shadows – shapes against the fire that held back the night. The great Thames rushed past to one side, eddying in pockets of froth like souls dancing in the moonlight, and beyond, torches burned on Thorney Island, illuminating the pale stone of Edward’s beautiful abbey. Edyth half-expected him, too, to materialise on the Chelsea meadow but no such ghost came to seize Harold’s crown, or her own. King Edward was dead but England lived on, strong and proud and certain.

  In the shades of a night half-Christian and half-pagan it no longer seemed to matter who was who. Laughter sounded the same from lord or lowly servant and together the English court celebrated the arrival of another summer. Time became as formless as faces. The moon rose, silver-bright, and couples crept like beetles into the trees. Edyth danced on, entranced, until suddenly an arm caught her waist and she was pulled from the circle.

  ‘There you are, Edie. I thought my queen had been spirited away.’ She blinked up at Harold, then looked nervously around. ‘Edyth?’ His voice tightened. ‘Edyth, where have you been?’