Moyra Caldecott (10 page)

Tondbert did not like the arrangement Anna offered, but he agreed as long as the terms were not made public. The betrothal vows were taken at Christmas and the bride-price paid. He returned to his own country laden with gifts of armour and chests of silver and gold.

In early spring he returned for his bride.

Etheldreda was paler and thinner than when he had seen her last. The winter had been severe and she had spent much of the time on her knees in the cold little wooden chapel, trying to come to terms with the strange stirring of her heart for the religious life, while the court was joyfully preparing for her life as the wife of Prince Tondbert. Heregyth had been no help at all. The only flaw she could see in the prospect was that Tondbert was old and ugly. She was overjoyed that her mistress was to be married and that they were both to be rescued from the boring prospect of life in a monastery where all the talk was of God and art and books, and never of clothes and sex and food. She did not think ahead to the years of separation from her friends and relations, her isolation among people strange to her in custom and tradition. She enjoyed the immediate bustle of trying on clothes, ordering delicious foods, handling priceless gifts.

Etheldreda wanted to be married in a simple smock of white with no adornments, but a dress was prepared for her of eastern silk in blue and gold, with a cloak that shone like the sun. Her mother’s coronet of garnet and pearl set in gold would hold the fine white veil to her head. King Anna was determined to make an impression with the wedding. Penda must be left in no doubt that Tondbert’s support was now firmly committed to the royal house of the Wuffingas.

As the days went by and the wedding day approached, people began to wonder if the princess were ill. Heregyth reported hearing people saying that it was a shame she was to be married to such an old man, but that surely she would take a lover as soon as she was established in her new home.

Horrified to hear this she made an effort to appear more cheerful and instructed Heregyth to spread the word that she was well pleased with her father’s choice for her.

A few days before the wedding feast was to begin, her sister Saxberga arrived from Kent with her husband and children, Bishop Honorius and two young men from Northumbria who had broken their journey to Rome in order to study a while with him.

On hearing her sister had arrived, Etheldreda rushed out of her bower, her hair undressed, her clothes ungirdled, and ran barefoot across the much trampled mud of the forecourt to fling herself upon her sister, covering her with kisses, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. Here at last was someone she could talk to. Someone who would understand.

A tall, handsome youth on a well-accoutred horse, directly behind that of the Kentish queen, saw her beautiful, expressive face almost at his knee, her flying golden hair brushing his hand.

‘Who is it?’ he asked his Northumbrian companion, King Oswy’s ex-thegn, Biscop Baducing, when the two women had walked off arms around each other.

King Eorconbert smilingly interrupted: ‘It is the Princess Etheldreda whose wedding you have come to celebrate, my lord Wilfrid,’ he said. The young monk’s expression of admiration had not escaped his eyes.

Wilfrid acknowledged the king’s words with a rueful bow. ‘It is as well it is her wedding, my lord, as I have vows to keep!’

They all laughed, but Eorconbert wondered how well the young man was going to fit into the monastic life.

Etheldreda told her sister about her vow of chastity and her arrangement with Tondbert. Saxberga listened gravely.

‘There are ways of serving God as wife and mother,’ she said at last. ‘You must not think it impossible.’

‘For me it would be,’ Etheldreda said firmly.

‘Why?’

‘I know my nature. If I give that powerful form of energy to a man I will forget God.’

‘I know your nature too… It is full of warmth and love. A life of chastity will be hard and cruel for you.’

‘It is the only way for me.’

Saxberga frowned, remembering something Heregyth had told her.

‘Is it because of Oswin’s death?’ she asked bluntly.

Etheldreda flushed. ‘No,’ she said sharply. Then, hesitatingly, ‘Not in the way you mean. At his death I turned away from God completely because I had longed for Oswin more than I longed for eternal life. But when I was in the depths of darkness, having forsaken all hope, all sense of meaning in my life, I suddenly had my faith restored a thousand times stronger than it had been before. I know now without any shadow of doubt that this physical life here is as insignificant to the life we are to lead in the spirit, as the little flittering mayfly in our fields is to the king who rules a kingdom.’

Saxberga was silent, thoughtful.

‘It is a question of love, you see,’ Etheldreda continued passionately. ‘Whether you love with your eternal spirit or just with that part of you that is mortal. If I want to live in the spirit as the angels live, close to God, I must cast away the part of me that is of the flesh, that makes me female and not spirit.’

‘But if God finds flesh so alien to His plans, why does He insist that we all pass through it on our way to Him? And I have heard you a dozen times saying that the beauty of this world is an expression of His love for us!’

Etheldreda stopped pacing for a moment, a frown between her eyes.

‘Do you reject His gift?’ Saxberga demanded triumphantly.

‘I have not rejected his gift,’ Etheldreda replied patiently, sad that her sister couldn’t see what was so apparent to her. ‘It is just that I have now seen that He has given me a special gift, and that there is more to this gift than I had at first dreamed of. There is fire that burns on the hearth and there is the invisible fire that burns in the love of God. Just as the ordinary fire needs fuel so that it may burn – the invisible fire needs the souls of dedicated people through which it can manifest. Knowing the weakness of my own nature and how easily it can be distracted from eternal matters, I have chosen to strengthen my resolution with a vow, and seal it with a sacrifice.’

Saxberga sighed. She acknowledged the strength in her younger sister with a bow of her head, and said no more.

Prince Tondbert arrived a few days before the ceremony with his entourage of noisy, bearded companions. King Anna’s thegn looked at them askance as they strode through the stockade gate, singing a ribald song. When Etheldreda walked out to meet them, greeting her betrothed with a curtsey, they crowded round her laughing loudly and shouting to each other in their barbarous guttural dialect.

Prince Tondbert let them say what they had to say and then took her hand and led her away from them. They fell back at once and turned their attention good-naturedly to finding food and drink.

The fields around the palace enclosure were crowded with tents of many colours, some small and unpretentious, others grand and spacious. The travelling tent of Bishop Honorius was the grandest of all. He had learnt in Rome that bishops should impress with splendour if they wanted to convert, and his way of living was very different from the simple life of the Celtic missionaries from Ireland, Iona and Lindisfarne. The great Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne would have scorned to sleep in anything but the lowliest peasant hut. Even at his death the canopy that was drawn over his ailing body was of the very roughest kind.

Wilfrid and Biscop attended the Kentish bishop wherever he went. They admired him greatly and were eager to learn all there was to learn from him while they were with him.

Biscop was twenty-five years of age and had recently left the service as thegn to King Oswy of Bernicia, to join the Church. He had been greatly shaken by Oswy’s ruthless murder of Oswin and had begun to question the violence of secular life, and the immorality of earthly power, without wishing to go the whole way literally into the poverty and humility of the Celtic Church. Rome seemed much more to his taste, and so to Rome he decided to go.

Wilfrid too had lived under the protection of King Oswy, since his mother died and his father had taken to wife a woman who mistreated him. He had served at court as a child, and had been sent by Queen Eanfleda to Lindisfarne for education. He had learnt much and had been treated well, but he was impatient with the simple life of the monks. The monastery at Lindisfarne was cut off from the mainland at every high tide. It lay low in the sea, almost invisible from the Northumbrian shore. Sometimes Wilfrid felt they had been cut adrift from the world and were floating far beyond the reach of everything he longed for. He was intelligent and learned fast all the monks had to teach, the library of precious manuscripts his constant joy. But he had begun to hate the feel of homespun on his skin and long for a bright sword at his side and an embroidered cloak to fling over his shoulder. The chance to travel to countries beyond his own became his constant dream.

When it was known that Biscop Baducing was to go to Rome, Wilfrid had asked to share his journey. Biscop was by no means loath to take the youth, for although only seventeen, he was tall and strong, and the pilgrim route to Rome was a dangerous one, robbers being well aware that many pilgrims took treasures to buy their peace in St Peter’s city.

In Kent they decided to break their journey with Bishop Honorius, and it was as his guests that they came to be at the princess Etheldreda’s wedding.

The wedding festivities lasted several days. In all that time the bride and groom, not yet united, walked amongst the guests, listened to heroic poems of other marriages and legendary love affairs, watched dancing, spoke politely to strangers. At night Etheldreda lay in her narrow bed, weary but unsleeping, wondering how it would be to live with the man she had seen so much of the past few days but with whom she had never once been alone.

At the wedding ceremony Bishop Honorius spoke a great deal about marriage being for the procreation of children.

Etheldreda shut her eyes. What if even now she were to say ‘No!’? Would people die because of it?

She opened her eyes and found that she was looking directly into Tondbert’s. He had been kind to her as a child and she had affection for him. But now she was afraid. Would he respect her vow? She could not read his thoughts. The Bishop’s Latin words rolled over them, welding them together, making it impossible for her to change her mind.

As they left her home and rode slowly through the cheering, smiling crowds that lined their route, she caught the eye of the younger of the two men who had come with the Bishop Honorius. It was dark and shrewd and looked boldly into hers. Troubled, she turned away, but she had the sense that she had not seen the last of him.

At sunset Prince Tondbert’s wedding tent was pitched for them and at nightfall they were ushered towards it, his men crowding and jostling, calling out to each other, and sometimes to their prince, their anticipation for the night in terms that made Etheldreda’s cheeks burn.

It was only when the tent flap closed behind them at last that the men settled down with their jars of ale. But it was not long before the ribald songs began. Heregyth complained bitterly about the noise but was powerless to stop it. For the first time she wondered what kind of life she and her mistress were going to have among such uncouth people.

Ovin paced up and down throughout the night, sleep and peace of mind far from him.

Inside the huge tent the lamps flickered and made monstrous shadows of the bride and groom, the only furniture a huge pallet of straw covered with furs. Etheldreda stood beside it, her heart beating painfully, hardly daring to meet her husband’s eyes.

‘My lord…’ she said at last in a small dry voice, but then found that she could not continue. They stood in silence, trapped in the lamplight, aware of each other, aware of what was expected of them by the laughing men outside.

Tondbert moved at last and began to extinguish the lamps one by one. As each one went out a cheer went up from the men outside.

Etheldreda clasped and unclasped her hands.

As he came to the last one he paused and looked at her. The darkness was all around her; the flame of the last lamp dancing on her gold hair and the gold necklace at her throat. A muscle twitched in his cheek uncontrollably, but he said in a voice not much above a whisper: ‘We must go to bed lady – but you needn’t fear, I will honour the conditions of our betrothal though it destroys me.’

As the flame went out, she flung herself upon the bed and sobbed, trying to keep the sound of it from reaching the men outside. Her husband did not touch her, but lay flat on his back at the other side of the pallet staring all night at a small aperture in the tent that let the starlight in.

By dawn most of the men had fallen drunkenly asleep around the dead and dying fires and when Tondbert drew the curtain flap aside and strode out into the pale morning air, beating his fists upon his chest and smiling broadly to show that he had had a good night, not as many of his companions as he would have wished were there to see the act. But when the princess emerged later in her long silk robes, her hair dishevelled and her eyes showing that she had not slept, she was greeted with a cheer and Tondbert had to endure many an over-enthusiastic slap upon the shoulders and the back.

Heregyth was fetched at last and helped her mistress dress.

‘These people are barbarians, lady,’ she complained. ‘You will never believe how they slobber over their food.’

Etheldreda smiled sadly. ‘Their prince is no barbarian Heregyth. I’ve never met a nobler man.’

Heregyth looked at her in surprise.

‘Truly, mistress?’

‘Truly.’

Heregyth shrugged, but she was pleased. ‘Ovin didn’t sleep, my lady. I think he would have liked to beat some heads in to teach them some respect.’

Etheldreda laughed. ‘Thank goodness he didn’t.’

‘Will you see him my lady, and assure him that you are all right. He is in a terrible gloomy mood.’

‘Certainly. Send him to me.’

He came to her and helped her mount her horse. As his hands touched her she felt him tremble and looked at him, but with no understanding of what he was feeling.