King Hereafter (27 page)

Behind her, penetrating the cloth over her ears was the loudest laugh she
ever remembered. The owner’s hand closed on her shoulder, and his other arm went round her husband’s neck. ‘Guess who?’ said Alfgar of Mercia.

Beside her, Earl Thorfinn spun round with his hands up, and Alfgar’s fingers slid from her shoulder as he jumped back, squaring up. There was an exchange of buffets, after which Alfgar, still laughing, dropped to a stool and lay back, his hands trailing the floor. ‘You’ve grown another three feet. What’s all this about siring a son?’

He was twenty-three, and had filled out in the three years since Tullich. Well-muscled and compact, with rough, fair hair and a young, uncut beard, he had the air, now, of an only son of a royal Mercian house. Eight years ago, someone had told her, Duncan’s grandfather had seen fit to make Alfgar his hostage, and Earl Thorfinn had rescued him. If it was true, they must both have been children. Earl Thorfinn said, ‘What’s all this about marrying a wife?’

‘That’s her,’ said Alfgar, pointing negligently. ‘She’s pregnant. They’re all pregnant. That is, Siward’s wife had her son a month ago: name of Osbern. There’s another sister as well, wife of Ligulf, and she’s pregnant, too.’

‘It’s well seen,’ Earl Thorfinn remarked, ‘that the Earl of Northumbria knows what to do with his daughters. He is, I hope, a generous grandfather.’

‘After paying five dowries?’ said Alfgar. ‘In any case, I would have you know that we all married for love. All that the Earl leaves will go to his brother Eadulf. Including the earldom. Thorfinn, my father and mother are here. Will you go and see them before the enthronement?’

People were coming towards them. ‘Godiva?’ the Earl enquired. ‘For Godiva, I could be ordered out of Paradise to the Pit Bottomless and never notice it. May I bring Sulien?’

‘Never mind Sulien,’ said Alfgar, rising slowly. ‘It has just come to me, looking about, that I have not yet renewed my early acquaintance with the goddess, your countess. You wouldn’t consider an exchange? Mine has many powerful sisters.’

‘Mine has many powerful uncles,’ said Earl Thorfinn, ‘who think that boundary folk don’t always know their own limitations. I shall bring her with me. Look, they are calling us to table.’

‘They are calling you,’ Alfgar said. ‘Will you do homage for Caithness? That is all he wants to find out.’

‘And so he will,’ the Earl Thorfinn said. ‘On the day of his consecration.’

The rest of that day had no particular pleasure about it, unless it were a pleasure to break bread with three plain women when you were less so. There was a hearty-spoken man with a beard called Dubhdaleithe, whom Groa fell into conversation with because he was Abbot of Deer, the Buchan monastery that one day soon, she knew, would supply Lulach with his first teachers.

Against her will, she found the big Irishman did not displease her. Born of a line of abbots of the monastery of Armagh in Ireland; great-nephew of an abbot of Armagh and Kells, he possessed a fund of harmless gossip about most of the churchmen present and some who had not yet arrived, such as the
present Abbot of Raphoe and Kells, who was to preside at the enthronement. He then moved on to her husband’s relatives.

‘You’ll have met the Bishop Malduin. That’s him over there, the pink fellow, with his feathers ruffled because you’ve picked myself, an abbot only, to honour with that lovely face you have. Trained in Ireland and consecrated seven long years ago in York to look after the souls and ordain the new priests in Alba, but you’d be lucky, were you a would-be priest, to find him in daylight anywhere north of Northumbria. He’s for civilised living these days, and not anxious to recall that he was brought up in the Western Isles, and his mother an Orkney earl’s sister. He’s your husband’s full cousin.’

‘I’ve never met him,’ Groa said.

‘Ah, he’d be worried what York and Duncan would say. You’ll be all right now,’ said Abbot Dubhdaleithe cheerfully. ‘You’ll be sitting next to him, I shouldn’t wonder, for all the good it may do you. What is it they say?
These are the three that are hardest to talk to: a king bent on conquest; a Viking in his armour; and a low-horn man protected by patronage
.’

‘I see,’ Groa said. ‘And what are you waiting for me to say? That I have the knack of dealing with all of them?’

‘The thing that is giving me joy,’ said the Abbot Dubhdaleithe of Deer, ‘is that I have no idea what you are going to say next. You’ll set Bishop Malduin to gnawing the fork of his fist out of fear for you.’

She was too wise to answer with more than a smile, but what he said helped when she found herself sitting at table between that same Malduin, Bishop of Alba, and a man with a mild, noble face: the abbot mint-master who was King Duncan’s father.

Terror, naturally, did not manifest itself in the neatly manicured person of her husband’s cousin the Bishop, who appeared to have no more in common with her husband than a robin might have with a hen-harrier. Chatting of minor Irish-born clergy who lived and served the Celtic church throughout Alba, the Bishop’s manner was a model of the kindliest tolerance. From time to time, speaking as man to man, he invited the opinion of my lord Crinan, across her. Later, as they took her measure, they each asked her the same questions, and she parried them, thoughtfully, in different ways.

Several places along the table, she could hear the Earl her husband doing the same, but more skilfully. She was getting used to the sound of his voice: half an octave lower than most men’s, unmistakable whether speaking in Norse or Gaelic or Saxon, and inflected naturally for each. His face, she had learned, never changed either. All you could do was listen to what he said and apply your mind to it. She knew that an alliance between Mercia and Northumbria was a prospect no one in Moray had ever contemplated. Yet he had treated Alfgar like a brother.

To the King his brother at that moment he was saying, ‘… Why not leave serious affairs for serious occasions? When do you mount the Moot Hill?’

‘When Kells and Raphoe condescends to arrive,’ Duncan said splashily, and then repeated the sentence carefully. ‘I told him to stay on in November, but no, he had to set sail. And look what happened.’

‘What happened?’ said Earl Thorfinn obediently. On her other side, Bishop Malduin asked Groa an encouraging question and she delivered the right answer, listening.

‘What happened? Macnia’s boat overturned. The Lector. The Abbot’s brother. Drowned on the spot, and thirty men from Kells with him. Worse, they lost half the relics. They lost Saint Columba’s book, and the canopy, and three of the swearing-relics of Saint Patrick. Grandfather was all right,’ said Duncan bitterly. ‘They let out the two girls who were keeping him warm and put the book on his chest, and he died shriven whiter than snow. But what am I to use for swearing-relics?’

‘The two girls?’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘Did they all drown, or did the Coarb of Columba struggle back to Raphoe and Kells?’

‘I told you,’ Duncan said pettishly. ‘Maelmuire’s boat got there safely. He was told when to come back. He should have come back days ago. If he’s drowned, I shan’t wait. Malduin can do it alone.’

Bishop Malduin, next to Groa, looked up at the sound of his name. ‘It’s all right,’ Groa said. ‘You have just been nominated to conduct the service of consecration if the Abbot of Kells has been shipwrecked. What relics do you use?’

There was a pause. ‘We have St Fergus’s head,’ Bishop Malduin said. ‘At least … Unless King Malcolm sold it.’

‘Send to Emma,’ said Alfgar cheerfully. ‘Winchester is a charnel-house for Emma’s relics: she has one for every day of the week. Who but Emma could cheat the Ascension and show you the milk-tooth of Christ?’

‘Would a milk-tooth do?’ said the Earl Thorfinn, turning to Duncan. ‘It might produce some very small oaths.’

‘What?’ said Duncan.

Later, in their pavilion, the Earl spoke to his wife. ‘Are you tired? It was hard work.’

‘A little,’ said Groa. Her women were waiting to put her to bed, and her body ached.

He said, ‘Crinan talked a great deal. What questions did he ask?’

She found the end of her headdress and began to unwind it. Strands of red hair, in rat’s tails, emerged from underneath. ‘Was Lulach a healthy child, and did you propose to foster him,’ she said. ‘Did I think you would do homage for Caithness. Was the new child a healthy one, and did you propose to foster him. Did I think you would do homage for Caithness. Did my father in Norway favour the marriage, and what was his standing now that King Olaf was canonised. Did I—’

‘—think that I would do homage for Caithness,’ he finished. ‘What did you answer?’

‘I told them the truth,’ Groa said. ‘That I knew nothing of your affairs and, so far as I could see, was going to be blessed with such ignorance to the end of my days. Of my father, I said I had no news to give them, since I had seen none of my people for three years or more. When they asked me if you had other wives, I said I was sure of it.’

‘Did you? Why?’ said the Earl. Her women had come to help with the headdress, and he watched them.

‘It is your children they are afraid of,’ said Groa.

‘Indeed?’ he said.

Her headdress came off, and she jerked her hair free. Her cheeks tingled with risen blood, and then cooled. She said, ‘Who is Godiva?’

‘The Lady of Mercia? She is Alf gar’s mother, the wife of Earl Leofric. Think of every woman you have ever admired.’

‘No. You think of them,’ said Groa. ‘I am tired.’

The thirty-eighth Coarb of Columba and Adamnan, Maelmuire Uah Uchtain, Abbot of Kells and Raphoe, arrived next day, travel-stained and in no very good temper, with a retinue of forty laymen and monks, a book-shrine, and a casket of different relics. The chests of altar-silver and vestments filled a cart drawn by eight oxen and had their own guard of mail-shirted spearmen with crosses marked on all their weapons. It was easy to see how Macnia’s boatload had sunk like a stone.

The ceremony was announced for the following day, and the Earl Thorfinn directed his wife to dress and accompany Sulien and himself to the tent of Earl Leofric of Mercia. She refused.

‘Very well. I am taking Lulach,’ he said. ‘In ten minutes.’

In ten minutes, she was standing, dressed, by the pavilion door. A few minutes later her husband arrived with the boy and Sulien. ‘You will need a child-minder,’ Groa said, ‘while your mind is on other things. What lies do you want me to tell for you today?’

‘Ones that Lulach can’t contradict,’ the Earl said. ‘Lulach?’

The white head came up. ‘I don’t know of this meeting,’ Lulach said.

‘You see? Perfect discretion,’ said Earl Thorfinn to his wife. ‘Now come and help me control Alfgar. And ask
him
, if you have the chance, why he’s married Duncan’s wife’s sister.’

The white head came up.

‘I know,’ said Earl Thorfinn to his stepson. ‘You don’t know about that.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said the child. ‘Although it’s very likely.’

‘I’m glad,’ said the Earl. ‘So, I’m sure, is Alfgar, considering his wife is about to give birth. Lulach? The Chester sign is a boar. You will see it better if you sit on my shoulders. Now. Show us.’ And so, white hair above black, they found the Mercian hall and were led inside to meet the Earl Leofric and his lady.

They were not there for long, and Groa did not even see her hosts at first, because Alfgar rushed at Sulien and knocked him to the floor, and they rolled over, shouting, while her husband in front of her swung her son to the ground. Then she heard a voice speaking Saxon, and saw an erect man in his early forties, in a furred coat, rise from a bench and come forward. Behind him came a lady who was clearly his wife Godiva.

She was everything that Earl Thorfinn had implied. Stately and slender, with a large-boned face of perfect proportions and yellow hair drawn back
and knotted under a light coif of muslin. Her neck, bare like Groa’s own, was a column of marble.

Lulach ran to her. She smiled down at him, ruffling his hair, and then stood him facing outwards, her hands on his shoulders. ‘Now,’ she said to Groa, ‘I am jealous. What fool is telling the world that he married you for your province?’

‘Not this fool,’ said Alfgar from the floor. ‘There, as the saying goes, stands a merry man as he twirls the ladle round in the bowl. He has a son, born within these three weeks.’

‘And of course you are allowing his mother to stand,’ said the Lady Godiva. ‘Get off my adored Sulien and find servants to bring us some cakes and some wine, and then tell them to go. Thorfinn … What do I call you?’

‘Perhaps … Macbeth,’ he said. ‘My wife’s name in Gaelic is Gruoch.’

‘My lord and lady of Moray and Orkney, you are welcome. Come to table. There are two men here for you to meet. Sulien, you as well.’

Gruoch. It was what they called her in Moray. She did not know that he knew it. She followed the rest to the table. Two men rose behind it: one strongly built in his thirties with a white scar of some kind on his clean-shaven jaw. The other was younger and bearded, with bright, narrow eyes and a heavy nose flattened from some early breaking.

‘My lord Crinan brought them,’ said Lady Godiva, ‘from Brittany on some affair to do with Shrewsbury and the Marches, and had them accompany him north. I know their families. Perhaps you met them when you were with the Lady?’

It seemed unlikely. Then Groa recalled the years at Canute’s court, and the time her husband had spent as Emma’s man at Exeter and elsewhere, and the errands he had run, they said, over the sea to her homeland.

He did know one of them at least. Going forward, the Earl of Orkney said, ‘Juhel de Fougères. Indeed, we met at Combour. But your friend from Normandy is a stranger.’

The scarred man smiled. ‘A good guess,’ he said. ‘And half right. My name is Osbern de Eu. I am Norman-born. But Alan of Brittany is my cousin.’

‘He has another cousin,’ said Lady Godiva. ‘In Normandy.’

‘It is a great thing,’ said the scarred man, ‘to be able to boast of a kinsman called William the Bastard. What feat of arms could bring me more fame than my cousinship? Who am I? Cousin to William the Bastard, the eight-year-old lord Duke of Normandy.’