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When he saw the Frisian ship, Cerdic smiled. “I thought he’d come,” he remarked to the foreman.

“You were counting on it,” the foreman responded with a grin.

“True.” When Cerdic had bargained for the slaves from the north he had let the merchant think he would have the expense of keeping them all winter, and so had got a much better price. “I never said I couldn’t sell them until the spring,” Cerdic reminded the fellow. “I only said the slave trade usually begins in spring.”

“Of course.” Cerdic never lied.

By mid-afternoon the Frisian had inspected the northern slaves and agreed a good price. He was surprised and delighted when, as a goodwill gesture, Cerdic offered him two more slaves – a man and a woman – at a discounted price. “I just want to get rid of them,” Cerdic explained. “But they won’t give you any trouble.”

“I’ll take them,” the Frisian said, and put them in chains with the rest.

There was a little trouble, though. At sundown, the girl started screaming that she wanted to talk to her mistress. But it seemed that the mistress had no wish to speak to her, so the slave-trader gave her a quick whipping to quieten her down before going to the hall to eat with Cerdic. After a night’s sleep, he would depart on the ebb tide.

In the Anglo-Saxon calendar, the longest night of the year was known as
Modranecht
– mothers’ night.

It had been a long time since Cerdic and his wife had slept together, but now, when they did so, the merchant experienced a sense of homecoming, and as for Elfgiva, it seemed to her in the depths of that long night that something had opened again within her. Something wonderful and mysterious.

The next morning, she awoke with a quiet and special smile.

The boat was ready to leave.

It was a Norse longship with a rising keel, very like the one Offa had unloaded that autumn. Its wide draught would allow the slaves to sit in the central section and stretch out their legs. To ensure they gave no trouble, their ankles would be manacled.

Still Ricola was thinking desperately. All night she had lain in the slave quarters hoping for some reprieve. She had tried to speak to Elfgiva. A few moments with her – that was all she needed – and she could have explained everything. She was sure of it. But ever since Cerdic’s men had come to seize her and Offa the previous morning, it was as though her mistress had disappeared entirely. For Elfgiva and her husband the two slaves had, quite suddenly, ceased to exist. When she had protested, tried to scream her message to the people outside the slave quarters, the Frisian had cruelly whipped her. After that, no one had come to the slave quarters. No one.

Surely somebody would take pity on her. Wistan at least, if not his mother. She guessed that this isolation must be deliberate. Either Elfgiva or her husband had given orders. She and Offa were not to be approached. No contact at all. They wanted the two slaves out of their lives.

And yet if Elfgiva only knew her secret. If she could just let her mistress know that she was pregnant. How could she as a woman fail to sympathize? As dawn at last arrived and she thought she heard people moving about, her hopes grew a little and focused upon a single, vital point. Somehow, between the slave quarters and the Frisian’s boat, she had to get this one message to Elfgiva. No matter how many blows the Frisian rained upon her with his cruel whip, she had to tell her.

An hour passed. The light was stealing under the door. After a while it opened and the Frisian entered. In silence, he fed them barley cakes and water before disappearing. Some time passed, then he reappeared with four of his eight sailors and led them all out into the cold, grey morning.

There were, as she had guessed there would be, a number of people on the bank waiting to see them leave. She saw the stockmen, the foreman, the women with whom she had worked every day. But not one of Cerdic’s family. Not even one of the four sons. If they were watching, they were out of sight.

At the top of the bank she passed close to one of the women. The cook.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered. “Tell the Lady Elfgiva. Quickly!”

“Stop talking,” the Frisian called out curtly.

Ricola looked at the woman beseechingly.

“Don’t you understand?” she cried out softly. “I’m pregnant.”

A second later she felt a searing pain across her shoulders, and then the Frisian’s hand on the back of her neck, pushing her forward. Twisting her head painfully, she managed to look back at the woman. The cook’s broad Saxon face was pale, a little frightened perhaps, but she did not move.

Something distracted the Frisian now. He removed his hand and started to the front of the line. Ricola was passing the foreman now.

“I’m pregnant,” she called to him. “Won’t you just tell the mistress that? I’m pregnant.”

He stared at her as calmly as if she were a piece of livestock. Crack! The whip came hissing down again. Once, twice, catching her on the neck, making her scream with agony.

Now she was beside herself. She had nothing to lose. No dignity left. Never mind the pain.

“I’m pregnant!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Lady Elfgiva! I’m pregnant! Can’t you understand? Pregnant! I’ve got a child!”

The fourth blow cut into the first. Deep. For a second she almost passed out. She felt strong arms dragging her down the bank while she babbled uselessly: “A baby . . . I’m having a baby.” Her whole body was shuddering with the shock and the pain. But still nobody moved.

Some five minutes passed while she sat in the boat, coming back to her senses. The Frisian’s sailors were calmly loading stores. The Frisian himself, directing his men, seemed to have forgotten her. It was as though her outburst had never taken place.

Surely when she had shouted her message it must have echoed all round the trading post. Surely Elfgiva, or at least one of the family, must have heard. She looked at the northern slaves in front of her. Their faces were resigned, almost deadened. They, at least, had no hope. Some distant Frankish farm or Mediterranean port awaited them. They would be worked hard until they grew weak, then, quite possibly, be worked harder still until, having given every ounce of value they had, they dropped. Unless they were very lucky.

And what did they do with a pregnant woman? Did they let her stay with her husband? She thought probably not. And with the child? Whoever bought her might let it live. More likely – she could hardly bear to think of it. More likely, she had heard, they drowned the child as soon as it was born. What use was a baby to a master?

Her eyes caught sight of the boat’s high, curving prow. How cruel it seemed, like some great, cold blade about to strike through the waters. Or the beak, she thought, of some ominous bird of prey. She turned her gaze back to the bank.

Lundenwic. The last place where any of their feet would touch Britain’s soil. Lundenwic, the wharf from which the Anglo-Saxons sold their sons and daughters. Grey, grim Lundenwic. She hated it, and all those faces so calm upon the green bank.

“Doesn’t seem to worry them that we’re going like this, does it?”

She suddenly realized that in her desperation she had not spoken to Offa since the night before. Poor Offa who had stuck a pin in the village elder, who had gone along with her misguided plan. Offa, the father of her baby that was probably to die. She looked at him, but he said nothing.

Now the Frisian was returning. The sailors fore and aft were ready to cast off. It was all over. Shaking her head in defeat, she gazed at the bottom of the boat, and so did not see Elfgiva coming down the grassy bank.

She had heard.

But it was not only Ricola’s cry that had brought her down. It was the cry together with something else – the something that had passed between husband and wife in Cerdic’s hall that mothers’ night, the tiny seed of joy in that long midwinter night. When Elfgiva awoke that morning and stretched, and felt her husband kiss her, and then heard the girl’s cry, it was this new and secret warmth that caused her to take pity on poor Ricola and her husband.

Soon afterwards, therefore, to their great surprise the couple found themselves back in the homestead, standing before their mistress outside the long, thatched hall.

There was little conversation, however. Elfgiva was brief. She silenced them at once when they started trying to explain themselves. She had no wish to hear. “You’re lucky not to be on the slave ship,” she informed them. “And now you may count yourselves luckier still. I am giving you back your freedom. Go where you want, but never show your faces at Lundenwic again.” Imperiously she waved them away.

Soon afterwards, Cerdic, watching them down by the jetty, was tempted to give the girl a present, but thought better of it.

The snow came that afternoon, a steady, soft snowfall that blanketed the riverbank.

Offa and Ricola had not gone far. Down by the ford on the island called Thorney, in the shelter of some bushes, Offa had constructed a crude hut. The snow was a help. Working quickly, he was able to build up snow walls around it, so that by the time darkness set in, he and Ricola were warm enough in a little hovel that was half brushwood and half igloo. In the entrance, he made a fire. They had a little food; the cook had given them barley bread and a packet of meat left over from the feast that would last them for a few days. But soon after nightfall, a hooded figure on horseback approached their little camp and dismounted, and by the firelight they saw the friendly face of young Wistan.

“Here,” he said with a grin, and swung down a heavy object he had been carrying behind his saddle. It was a haunch of venison. “I’ll come tomorrow to make sure you’re all right,” he promised before riding away.

And so the young couple began their new life out in the wild. “Now we can let our hair grow,” Offa reminded Ricola with a smile. “At least we aren’t slaves any more.”

Using fat from the venison, Offa did what he could to make some oil to rub into the welts around her neck and shoulders. She winced as he touched them, but said nothing as he went to work.

They made no mention, then or later, of the night she had spent with the merchant. But when he asked her, “Is it true you’re pregnant?” and she nodded, he felt a sense of both joy and relief. Somehow the merchant’s intrusion into his life seemed marginal now.

“We’ll manage here for a few days,” he said. “Then I’ll think of something.” The river was long. Its valley was lush. The river would look after them.

Another new life also began by the river that midwinter. By the second month of the year, Elfgiva became certain that she had conceived.

“I’m sure it was on
Modranecht
,” she told her husband, to his surprise and delight. She also had a feeling, which she did not share with him, that this child was a girl.

There was only one duty that Elfgiva knew she still had to perform. It was not until the fourth month of the year, when the Anglo-Saxons celebrated the ancient festival of
Eostre
, to welcome the spring, that Bishop Mellitus returned to supervise the construction of the little cathedral church of St Paul’s. Work now proceeded rapidly. Cerdic and the local farmers provided extra labourers and under the supervision of the monks, and using the Roman stones and tiles that lay all around, they built the walls in a modest rectangle with a tiny circular apse at one end. Lacking the skills to attempt anything more sophisticated, they made the roof of wood. Standing near the summit of the western hill, it looked very well.

And it was just before the
Eostre
feast that Elfgiva, watched by her sons, was led by her husband to the little River Fleet, where she knelt by the bank while Bishop Mellitus anointed her head with water in the simple rite of baptism.

“And since your name, Elfgiva, means ‘Gift of the Faeries’,” the bishop remarked with a smile, “I shall baptize you with a new name. Henceforth you shall be called Godiva, which means ‘Gift of God’.”

The same day he preached another sermon to the people of Lundenwic in which he explained to them in more detail the message of the Passion of Christ, and how, after the Crucifixion, this wondrous Frey had risen from the dead. This great feast of the Church calendar was of supreme importance, he told them, and always fell about this time of the year.

Which is why, in the years to follow, the English came to refer to this all-important Christian festival by the pagan name of Easter.

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, and the re-establishment of the old Roman city of Londinium – or Lunden as the Saxons called it – did not continue without interruption.

A little over a decade later, when both the kings of Kent and Essex were dead, their people revolted against the new religion, and the new bishops were forced to flee.

But once the Roman Church had established a hold, it did not give up lightly. Soon afterwards, the bishops were back. Over the next century or so, great missionary bishops like Erkonwald went into the remotest forests, and the Anglo-Saxon Church, with its several notable saints, became one of the brightest lights of the Christian world.

In the centuries that followed, Lundenwic continued to grow into a substantial Saxon port. Only long afterwards, in the time of King Alfred, did the Roman city take over from it again; after which the old trading post a mile to the west was remembered as the old port – the
auld wic
– or Aldwych. But this was far in the future. For several generations after Cerdic, the walled enclosure of Londinium remained a place apart, with only a few religious structures and, perhaps, a modest royal hall. Certainly there were few houses on the western hill when Godiva’s daughter used to wander there as a girl. But she could always remember how she used to see, every month or two, a cheerful fisherman with a white patch of hair on the front of his head cross from the spit of land on the southern bank in a little dugout boat, accompanied by his several children, who would all go wandering about in the ruins, studying the ground.

They were a secretive folk, though. She never found out what it was they could possibly be looking for.