The Chosen Queen

by Joanna Courtney

  William snarled under his breath and then smiled, a slow, triumphant smile.

  ‘Maybe not, but victory in the field does and victory, I believe, is mine.’

  There was no more to say. Edyth dipped her head.

  ‘May we search for his body – Sire?’

  ‘We? You and his eastern whore?’

  Edyth’s head shot straight back up again.

  ‘The Lady Svana is no whore.’

  ‘No? Sweet. Let us settle on bigamist then, shall we? How very pagan of you all. No wonder God gave the victory to me; someone needs to bring virtue to this land.’

  Only Svana’s hand, still tight on Edyth’s back, gave her the strength to ignore his jibes.

  ‘May we search for his body?’ she repeated.

  ‘You may.’ Thankfully Edyth threw a curtsey and turned. ‘And when you have found it you may bring it to me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘To me. I’m having no shrines, no made-up miracles around the tomb of an upstart pretender.’

  Edyth’s blood foamed. She spun back to retaliate but Svana placed a gentle finger on her lips and faced William in her stead.

  ‘We will do as you ask,’ she said, ‘but know this – whatever else he may have been, Harold was no pretender. All he did was open and honest. He was King of England at the request of his predecessor and as the choice of his people, and even if you wipe him from their records you will never wipe him from their hearts. Good day.’

  They fled, trembling. Edyth was certain William was going to send men to clap them into irons but he just sat and watched them go. She could feel his eyes driving into her back and held tight to Svana’s hand as they moved out into the mutilated mass of bodies littering the grass of Hastings field. She glanced at her old friend and a thousand words passed between them – waste, greed, senselessness, madness – but they did not speak them aloud. There was no need; to them both they were as obvious as the scent of fresh blood was to the carrion crows scrapping noisily over the corpses at their feet.

  There were few other women for Harold’s brave soldiers had marched from all over England and many of their wives would not even yet have news of their loss. All around Norman foot soldiers were carefully retrieving their own dead and carrying them to be laid out in honourable ceremony, but most of the poor English would have to trust to their home soil to take them bit by putrefying bit to their final rest. Not Harold though, not whilst they lived to save him that ignominy.

  They paced the field, seeking the clutch of armoured corpses that would signify the king’s last stand but the robbers had been out in force. Already many were stripped of anything of value and all men looked the same naked before their Lord. Time and again they had to turn bodies over to look into the face of some other woman’s loss or, worse, into faces too cut up for anyone to know who they were lost to. They moved fast, facing down nausea at the slashed and torn mess that battle had wreaked on Harold’s people in their quest for his dear body.

  ‘We will know him,’ Svana muttered, over and over.

  At first Edyth had believed her but now, with blood seeping up her gown and flesh beneath her nails and glassy eyes following her every frantic turn, her foolish confidence was draining away. They were where he had died, she was sure of it. The concentration of corpses was greatest here, to the east of William’s fluttering canopy, and the bodies, even hacked apart, were clearly those of full-time soldiers – broad and hard. She turned one over and fell to her knees.

  ‘Garth!’

  He had an arrow deep in his neck and a single line of blood had congealed all the way down to his heart. His body had been slashed but his face was hardly scathed. Edyth stared into it and felt the truth of Hastings strike her full on, not a dull ache, not twists or knots, but a harsh, searing, battering agony.

  ‘No,’ she wailed, cradling him against her.

  The Norman lords looked curiously over. They were eating and a sickening odour of elegantly cooked meat was threading itself carelessly amongst the stench of death below the barbaric new king, but they paused now, regarding the two women like some sort of jesters. Edyth looked nervously to Svana and pulled her grief inside. Surely where Garth lay, his brother would not be far away?

  Laying him gently down, they moved on but the Normans who had cracked this last noble stand of England’s finest commanders had cracked it with vicious ferocity. Limbs were mingled, eyeholes gaped, hair was matted with blood. What did it matter, Edyth thought bitterly, whose blood was royal when it ran into the ground?

  Tears blinded her, making her task even more hopeless, and as they sifted uselessly through the gruesome pile she felt she might be best just to lie down amongst them and die too. Then Svana whispered, ‘He is here.’

  She peeled back a body and reached out to the one beneath. It lay, one arm flung high, the fingers hacked away by blades hungry to feed on his poor face. A great wound gaped across one cheek. The nose was cut away and one eye was gouged out. The lips were ripped but curved up in a tiny, secret smile and the one remaining eye, though swollen, seemed to look deep into the very heavens.

  ‘It is him,’ Svana said, running a soft finger down the line of his shattered jaw.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Edyth whispered fearfully.

  ‘His eyes are ringed with amber – see.’

  She pointed and, sure enough, Edyth saw the palest ring of sunshine around the dark blue iris.

  ‘Ringed with gold,’ she corrected.

  ‘With gold too precious for me to keep,’ Svana said and sat back. ‘I suspected the very first time I looked into them that he would not be mine for long but it was too late for that to matter, I had already fallen under his spell.’

  ‘It was not you, then, who bewitched him?’

  ‘Nay – quite the other way round.’

  ‘And now you have lost him.’

  ‘As have you, but, Edie, we cannot let the bastard duke claim him. We cannot!’

  Her voice squeaked with grief and Edyth glanced over to the Norman camp. William had risen and was moving their way.

  ‘We will not let him,’ she said fiercely. ‘This one is a woman’s battle, Svana, and we will not lose it. Here.’

  She tugged Harold’s mangled body out of Svana’s arms and pushed another into its place, then let her hair drop over it, weeping noisily.

  ‘You have found him,’ came Duke William’s voice above them. ‘Excellent. I will not have a martyr born of this insolent field.’

  Edyth leaped to her feet.

  ‘You cannot have him.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can. I killed him after all. Stand aside.’

  William pushed Edyth roughly out of the way and she stumbled to keep her footing as Svana stared up, her grey eyes awash. Edyth watched her nervously but Svana faced him unflinching.

  ‘You have England,’ she snapped, ‘you do not need Harold.’

  ‘But I will have him. Men!’

  Two burly guards leaped forward. One wrenched the mangled body from Svana, the other clasped the women’s arms.

  ‘You bastard,’ Edyth spat out, but William just laughed.

  ‘How did you know him?’ he demanded of Svana, seizing her chin and yanking it up. ‘How?’

  She pointed, slim fingers trembling.

  ‘By the mole on his shoulder.’

  William looked suspiciously down at the dark mark on the torn skin. He traced the tip of his eating knife around it and then, in one sharp, dry motion, slashed it straight across. A memory spun across Edyth’s mind – herself walking into Harold’s pavilion to find his steward, stripped to the waist to wash, his skin white in the gloom. She had been struck by the dark mole on Avery’s muscular shoulder, a tiny personal dot on a man she had known only as Harold’s servant. Now it seemed a gift from God but William still hesitated so she pulled forward, yanking her surprised guards with her.

  ‘How dare you desecrate my husband further?’ she demanded. ‘You have his crown – is that not enough for you? T
hat was my mole. I used to kiss it.’

  William half-smiled. Svana glanced at Edyth and then she, too, sprang.

  ‘I kissed it first,’ she spat at her. ‘You have no right to him.’

  It was as much an act as her own, Edyth knew, but still she crumpled and William leaped forward, a predator sensing weakness.

  ‘Ladies, really!’ he cackled. ‘Little use fighting over a dead man.’ He nodded to the guard holding the body. ‘Bury the traitor on the cliffs so he can ever look across to Normandy where he swore to uphold me as king. And let these cats go – we need them no longer.’

  The men shook Edyth and Svana to the ground and William looked down on them.

  ‘I will expect you, Lady Edyth, to pay homage at my coronation. I can send men to accompany you if you wish it?’

  Edyth shook her head.

  ‘I will be there, my lor— Sire.’

  ‘See you are.’

  A trumpet sounded up the hill and William looked over. A richly cloaked rider was dismounting before his table and he smiled in thin approval.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he threw at Edyth and Svana. ‘I have important guests to attend to and can waste no more time on women’s business. You will not linger, will you?’

  Then, with an amused sneer, he stalked off, dismissing them out of hand. The two women lay frozen until he was gone and then Svana reached out for Edyth’s hand.

  ‘We beat him,’ Edyth said, though she was shaking with the emotion of the confrontation.

  ‘We beat him,’ Svana agreed softly, adding, ‘you know I did not mean that you had no right to Harold, Edie? I had to make them believe it was him, that was all.’

  ‘You succeeded,’ Edyth said, forcing a smile. ‘And I know you did not mean it, but I know also that it is true.’

  ‘It is true indeed, for no one has the “right” to anyone. Harold loved me, Edyth, and Harold also loved you. Now he is gone let us please, at least, love each other.’

  Edyth smiled.

  ‘You have been such a friend to me, Svana.’

  ‘And you to me but this friendship has only just begun. We will need it, I fear, in the years to come.’

  She looked to the wiry body of Duke William, pointing arrogantly after the guard who had what he believed to be Harold’s body slung carelessly over his shoulder.

  ‘That was Avery,’ Edyth whispered.

  ‘He would be glad to do this final service for his lord.’

  ‘He would.’

  Quietly Svana waved over a cartman waiting keenly for a deathly fare. The two women loaded Harold in, laying Garth beside him and covering the two noble brothers with the tangled remains of their housecarls.

  ‘We will take them to Waltham Abbey,’ Svana said. ‘Harold will be at peace there.’

  Edyth nodded.

  ‘And then? I will not go to his coronation, you know, Svana. I will not see him crowned in Harold’s place; I could not bear it.’

  ‘Nor I. Come to Nazeing, Edyth.’

  ‘To Nazeing?’ Pictures of the soft, faerie meadowlands flashed across Edyth’s bruised mind like a flicker of hope. ‘Could I?’

  ‘Of course – your children too. We will be safe there, for a little time at least.’

  She looked so earnest, but Edyth felt her innocent words like a new knife wound.

  ‘My children?’ Her voice rasped and her hand crept to her belly. ‘You will not want me with my children, Svana.’

  Svana, however, simply reached out and placed her own hand over Edyth’s.

  ‘You are carrying his babe?’ Edyth nodded miserably. ‘But that is wonderful, Edie.’ It was so much an echo of Harold’s response that Edyth dared to look up. Svana smiled. ‘It is a blessing – a babe to replace the one I lost; a babe for us to raise together.’

  ‘You want me, truly?’

  ‘Truly. You were his wife for me, Edyth.’

  Edyth thought of a hillside wedding years ago. She had only been a child but already she’d had the wisdom to know, however much Svana denied it, that she had witnessed magic between two people.

  ‘No, Svana,’ she said. ‘You were his wife. I was just a girl who chased the sparks of your union.’

  Svana sighed softly then reached out.

  ‘He loved you too, Edie, truly – but neither of us need chase now. Come.’

  Edyth took the proffered hand and together the two women followed the grunting cartman through the carnage of England’s desperate last stand and up the barren road north.

  EPILOGUE

  Sometimes when she closes her eyes and pictures that night, Edyth cannot tell where memories end and dreams begin. She wonders if she was enchanted. She was only eight after all, her mind still shifting in and out of made-up worlds, but something about that night, played out in firelight beneath a million stars, still feels so solid, so very real as if, rather than being befuddled by it, her mind became truly clear for the first time.

  He looked like a king that day, Harold. Even in a simple bridegroom’s tunic of darkest green he looked like royalty as he stepped up to take the Lady Svana’s hand. There was no gold in sight, just flowers; no parade of bishops, just a smiling monk in a sack-robe and bare feet. There was no betrothal contract, no formal prayers, no exchange of lands or elaborate gifts, just the linking of hands, joining two people for a year and a day.

  ‘No longer?’ Edyth had asked. Marriage was forever, everyone knew that – grumbled about it, jested about it, accepted it.

  ‘Only if we wish it,’ Lady Svana had told her. ‘Ours is a marriage of hearts, not of laws. If we cease to love, it ends.’ Edyth must have looked shocked because Svana had laughed and said, ‘Fear not, this union will last to the grave – love prefers to be free.’

  All love prefers to be free.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  What fascinates me about history is the gaps between the dates – what the people, including the kings and queens, did on the non-headline days. In researching the rich and exciting Anglo-Saxon period I have often found far more gaps than dates and whilst for the earnest historian in me that is a frustration, for the cheeky novelist it is a joy to fill those gaps with my own imaginings.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our core primary source for this period, can happily cover a whole year of events in a single paragraph. In between the monks’ carefully and sometimes rather randomly selected events, however, were hundreds of men, women and children, getting up every single day – feeling warm or cold, eating, drinking, going to the loo, arguing with each other, falling in love, and getting every bit as shy, embarrassed, excited and nervous as we do today. In the evolution of mankind a thousand years is a tiny length of time and although social customs and day-to-day experiences were certainly different back in 1055, I refuse to believe that core feelings have changed much and it is that connection to the people of the past – to their minute-by-minute existences – that I wish to capture in my novels.

  In every instance I have tried my best to stay within the boundaries of the known facts but it is not my intention here to create a history as much as an interpretation. I am certainly not saying that this version of Edyth’s life did happen, but I hope I have researched deeply and carefully enough to able to assert that it could have happened. There are several points in my story, however, that people might wonder about, so here are a few more details on some of the key historical customs, moments, people and places.

  Customs and Terminology

  Handfast marriages

  Handfasting was the pagan way of cementing a marriage and involved a simple ceremony in which the bride’s and groom’s hands were literally bound with ribbons to symbolise their union. It remained popular in the Danelaw (Eastern England) into the eleventh century because, as the name suggests, this area was governed by Danish law. The Danes remained pagan into the 950s and even once they had converted to Christianity, they perpetuated old ways and customs for longer than central and southern England.

  Handfasting was legally binding, ac
cepted as such (if reluctantly) by ecclesiastic law, and remained so for a long time after the Roman church ceremony was introduced to England. Indeed, Shakespeare’s signature stands as witness to a hand-fasting in 1604 and it wasn’t actually until the 1753 Marriage Act that the need for an officiating priest or magistrate was made compulsory for a legally valid marriage.

  The Normans stamped on the practice of bigamy but before 1066 having two wives was politically useful to prominent figures needing heirs and a number of northern European leaders in the Anglo-Saxon/Viking era, including King Cnut, Harold of Wessex and Harald Hardrada had both a handfast and a ‘Roman’ wife.

  Crownwearings

  The formalising of this practice – literally a gathering at which the monarch wore his crown to be seen by all – is sometimes attributed to William the Conqueror but actually seems to have originated with King Edward to establish a core routine for his itinerant royal court. The Crownwearings marked the key points in the church’s calendar and served to gather all the important people of England together three times a year. Except in unusual circumstances – Edward’s own failing health at the turn of 1066 being one – these Crownwearings were always held at Gloucester for Christ’s mass, Winchester for Easter and Westminster for Whitsun.

  Pavilions

  Royal and noble compounds were built to house a permanent household that was relatively small – approximately one hundred people. So whenever the full court gathered at Crownwearings or for big occasions such as weddings, families brought their own waxed-linen pavilions to house themselves. They did this all year round, including for Christ’s mass when England must often have been deep in snow, so furs and blankets must have been vital to keep warm.

  Yuletide

  Eagle-eyed readers may have noted reference to the English bringing trees into their halls to celebrate Christmas and wondered at the anachronism, given that Queen Victoria’s German husband Albert is widely credited with introducing the practice to our country. In truth, however, this was an ancient Scandinavian/Germanic practice which was lost to England across time and not so much introduced as re-introduced by Prince Albert.