Moyra Caldecott (25 page)

Ovin gave her horse a slap and started running beside her with great loping strides. There were not enough horses for all of them and some had to ride two to a horse, plunging through the fields and the woods, seeking the coast road to the south, but skirting the part of it that Egfrid and his men would be using. The horses stumbled over the rough ground and sometimes trees loomed out of the gloom causing them to shy and whinny. The women were shivering with fear and cold, some sobbing openly.

‘It will be better when we are through the woods,’ called Ovin, his breath coming in short bursts, his chest beginning to ache from the cold and the exertion. But the woods seemed to go on forever. There was a track, but it was almost overgrown and brambles caught at their skirts as though to hold them back. Ovin pushed branches away, wishing the light would come and the icy fog that lay so heavily over the lowlying ground, creeping and sliding around the tree trunks, would lift.

Eventually he called a halt, finding a sheltered place under an overhang of rock. He scraped dry leaves out of the crevices under the overhang and tried to make a fire, but there were not enough dry twigs to give it body.

‘We must press on,’ said Etheldreda. ‘See, it is much lighter now and the fog is lifting.’

The fog lifted because a wind arose and blew it in ghostly filaments and threads across the fields towards Coldingham and, as the light grew, the wind grew, cold and fierce, whipping at their faces. The sky that had been clear when they set off soon filled with swirling cloud, keeping the temperature low and the aspect gloomy. They had to pause from time to time for Ovin to rest, and to take their bearings. None of them had been this way before.

At last they saw the sea, but even as they did so they sighted Egfrid and his men at the crest of a hill moving towards them. He was a hunter, with a hunter’s instincts and had found his quarry.

The women wailed.

‘Sssh,’ hushed Etheldreda somewhat impatiently. ‘You are in no danger. The king will not harm us.’

‘I wouldn’t be sure of that, my lady,’ whispered Ovin to her. ‘The messenger who brought the news to Coldingham said that most are Eormenburh’s men, and they lead Egfrid by the nose.’

‘You think that they’d harm us?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘But why? My husband wants me back. He doesn’t want me dead.’

‘
He
doesn’t want you dead my lady,’ one of the women said. ‘But Eormenburh does!’

‘Come, my lady,’ Ovin said. ‘I think we must move on and find somewhere to hide.’

They continued in haste, slipping and slithering down the steep slope to the sea. Before them was a jagged rock promontory reaching out into the water. Ovin suggested they sent the horses on as decoys towards the south while they themselves hid on the rocky sliver of land.

The women at once started clambering over the rocks, the wind howling around them and the waves reaching for their feet. Ovin himself led the horses away, Egfrid’s men out of sight behind the brow of a hill. He took them as far as he dared, giving them a beating to start them careering on their way.

He managed to get back to the women before their pursuers came in sight. They had found shelter from the wind under an overhang that the sea had excavated but which was now well above water-level, lifted out of reach by the ancient restlessness of the earth. The women were clustered together shivering and frightened, trying to get as much comfort from each other as possible. Etheldreda was slightly apart, sitting on a rock, a deep quiet around her as though she were not part of the wild and stormy scene. Ovin stood looking down at her for a moment, his heart filled with anxiety for her, and yet, even as he studied her, her calm began to affect him and he felt confident that no harm would come to them.

He began to look for driftwood and found enough to make a fire if necessary. Perhaps when Egfrid’s men were gone they could rest a while and warm themselves before continuing on their journey.

But Egfrid had not been fooled by the tracks of the horses. He was at this very moment scrambling down the slope towards them. They were trapped.

Ovin gripped a piece of driftwood ready to use it as a club.

‘There’ll be no need for bloodshed,’ Etheldreda said, seeing the expression on his face. ‘If it is God’s Will for Egfrid to take me back I will be taken. If it is not, all the men in the kingdom will not prevail against me.’

Ovin was ashamed that he had doubted. The Etheldreda he had admired so much at Ely had returned. Her face was flushed with the buffeting of the wind, her eyes bright with determination.

The women could hear the men shouting from the rocky beach and thought that they were surely finished, but the wind howled louder and a great wave broke fiercely over the entrance to the promontory. Sleet began to fall, driving its sharp ice needles into the faces of the men who were trying to reach them. The sea rose higher with every gust of wind and roared across the narrow entrance, throwing up columns of spray as high as Bamburgh Castle.

‘God in Heaven!’ exclaimed Ovin, awed.

The women crossed themselves and clung closer to the rock.

There was no chance of anyone getting across the channel between the shore and the promontory. The men could see it and looked for shelter nearby. But there was very little.

They waited all day for the storm to abate, but it did not. It persisted even through the night and at the following dawn it was as fierce as it ever had been. Luckily the women had taken provisions for several days from Coldingham and now, protected by the overhang, they began to laugh at the discomfiture of Egfrid’s men who had neither shelter nor food.

On the third day Egfrid called off his men.

‘This storm is not natural,’ he said, ‘Etheldreda has asked for the Lord’s protection and she has been given it. I can’t fight Him. I’m beaten. He can have her!’

The men who had set off so full of arrogance and high spirits a few days before were soaked and miserable, hungry and exhausted. They were also frightened. What if the Lord God Himself really
did
exist, and really was on Etheldreda’s side! They made their bedraggled way back to Bamburgh and, within a few hours of their leaving, the wind and rain stopped, the sea returned to normal, and the women could cross the neck of the entrance on to the mainland shore.

Etheldreda had now no doubts that what she was doing was God’s Will.

Cautiously, slowly, they made their way through the country, keeping off the main roads, splitting up into groups of two or three, seeking shelter from cottages and churches all the way south to Ely.

It was the mildest winter they had ever known so far north, and although they were cold and hungry and tired more often than not, they suffered no hardship that they could not endure.

When they needed rest or when the weather took a turn for the worse, they settled in a village and became part of its community, sometimes for several weeks at a time. In later years wherever Etheldreda had stayed became a place of pilgrimage. Churches were built, sometimes no more than tiny chapels of wood and reeds, sometimes more substantially of stone.

In all this long journey Etheldreda was coming more and more to terms with her eternal self. It was as though that strange storm had blown her mind clean of all confusions. She knew now with unshakeable conviction that all that struggle for worldly power and glory that she had been part of was as pointless as two straws fighting over which one of them is to be king while a fire is sweeping towards them over a field.

She thought back to the court where jealousies and rivalries occupied the days, where the clothes and jewels worn by a person were what people judged him by. She thought of Wilfrid whom she loved and yet who played the power game with kings. He had left the true Path as surely as she had when she was queen.

Now, walking the road, her shoes worn through, a rough and prickly wool against her skin, no one knowing her as queen but only as a nun walking, she knew that she was nearer to the Path than she had ever been.

She thought of Ely and what she would do there when they reached it.

Something in her longed to be an anchorite, to live alone on her beautiful island with no one but God. But over the years as queen she had learned that she had a natural talent for inspiring, teaching and guiding. She believed that talents must be used, for they were gifts from God and always given for a purpose. Her apprenticeship had been in the world. She would now practise what she had learned exclusively to the glory of God. She would found a community and a school that would bring light to a dark and savage world.

Chapter 22

Death at Ely AD 679

Etheldreda arrived at Ely in the spring of 673. The island had never looked lovelier. The leaves in the wood were the colour of pale green silk. The homesteads were nestling in clouds of apple blossom.

She set about at once to organise her community. Ovin was to be her steward, and the faithful women she had brought from Coldingham were the first to be provided for. Her nephew Aldwulf, King of East Anglia, joyfully visited her, offering to help in any way he could to establish the buildings of her community. Wilfrid, on his way to an important meeting of the Church called by Theodore at Hertford, stopped off and stayed, sending a proxy in his place to a synod that proved to be of a great deal of importance in the future of England’s Church history. He performed the ceremonies that made her Abbess of the new house, and lent her some of his own stonemasons to ensure that the new church she was building would be beautiful and strong.

The year passed busily and pleasantly. She had never been so happy. She was at home at last and at peace with what she was doing.

She managed to run a community that was rapidly growing in an orderly way, treading a careful path between the individualism and the simplicity of the Celtic way which she admired so much, and the more organised and disciplined way of the Roman Church. There were certain rules and regular services, but there were no compromises made to the values of the worldly kingdom.

The poor and needy were tended and whatever was elegant and rich about Ely at that time was produced by the skills of those who lived and worked there. A school was started that became greatly respected, also a scriptorium whose manuscripts were distributed throughout the world like seeds of some rare plant to grow and flower amongst people of many different nationalities and many different times. Ovin started an infirmary and installed famous herb masters and healers. Embroidery done by the nuns became sought after in Rome and Byzantium.

All the skills that Etheldreda had amassed over the years, from the formal scholarship of the school at Dunwich under Bishop Felix, to the tactful guidance of people and the diplomacy learnt at her father’s court and at York and Bamburgh, were put to good use. She lived a life of extreme abstemiousness, regretting the damage she had done to her soul during the years of rich living at court. She demanded no great sacrifices of others but for herself she wore nothing but the simplest, roughest clothes and ate no more than was barely necessary to keep her alive. In order to have time for personal prayer and meditation after a full day with her community, she took to staying up most of the night when the others were asleep. She was determined not to lose that lifeline of communication between herself and the Counsellor that she felt she had lost at Bamburgh.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, the flux and flow of events were continuing.

Her nephew Egbert, King of Kent since his father’s death of the plague in 664, died suddenly, and her younger nephew Hlothere took his place. Their mother, her sister Saxberga, retired from court to found a monastery at Sheppey.

Cuthbert withdrew from active life as a prelate to a wild and lonely island off the coast near Lindisfarne. His brethren tried to dissuade him, as the place was well known as the haunt of demons, with no fresh water and no vegetation. Etheldreda was amused to hear how he, with his customary unshakeable faith in God, took himself to the highest point on the island and there, in a voice of thunder, commanded the demons to be gone.

‘And did they go?’ she asked her informant.

‘None have been seen since,’ he replied, ‘and within days the holy father found water by digging for it. It’s said he has planted some barley seed and some onions, and has built himself a hut with a high wall surrounding it, so that he can see nothing but the sky.’

She sighed.

‘What joy to live so close to the earth, so close to the sky, and above all so close to the God he loves. He must be very happy.’

‘Are you not happy too, my lady?’ one of the nuns asked, seeing the slight shadow that crossed her face.

‘I too am happy, my friend,’ she said, the shadow lifting, the light returning. ‘The happiest I have ever been.’

At Whitby the Abbess Hilda had fallen ill with a fever not long after Etheldreda had last seen her, a fever which was not to leave her for seven years and which eventually would destroy her. In spite of the pain and discomfort she refused to accept that she was ill and continued to rule her house and act as hostess and adviser to any who called upon her.

Etheldreda and she did not see each other again but kept in touch through letters and mutual friends.

The news of Egfrid was that he was building up his force of fighting men and his fleet, an activity watched closely by Wulfhere.

The year after Etheldreda came to Ely, Wulfhere launched the attack on Northumbria that everyone had expected he must make in reply to Egfrid’s growing aggressiveness. The two forces were well matched, but the Mercians were driven back and Wulfhere killed.

The news saddened Etheldreda – the image of the two straws fighting for supremacy in a burning field rose once again to her mind. She prayed for peace and for Egfrid’s restless energy to be channelled towards something more creative, but she accepted that the ruthless rivalry of kings was not her concern now, while the running of her community was. She saw her work as providing a rich and fertile seed-bed from which a burnt and desolate world could regenerate itself. But Wulfhere’s death was a blow. She had admired him and knew that her niece loved him. Egfrid had said on several occasions that Wulfhere was the only true friend he had ever had. What demon drove him to provoke a situation from which there was no way out but through the death of one of them?