Moyra Caldecott (4 page)

He suddenly flung himself on the ground and kissed the hem of her skirt.

‘I ask to stay and serve the Princess Etheldreda as a free man,’ he said, with a catch in his voice.

She cried out with delight and would have flung her arms around him, had her father not pulled her sharply back.

‘My daughter is very young and has not yet learned fully the constrictions of her place in life. You too will find your new role confusing. If I give you permission to serve her, have I your oath that you will not abuse my trust?’ He looked hard at the lad.

Ovin stood up and met his gaze, eye to eye as a free man would, then he bowed his head as a free man bows.

‘You have, my lord,’ he said quietly.

Not long after this, Saxberga was called into her father’s presence. The message was so formal Saxberga was alarmed, and insisted that Etheldreda accompany her.

But when they arrived they found him sitting in his favourite chair with his wife upon his knee, his head resting on her hair. They looked so happy together the two girls hesitated to draw attention to their arrival and thought to turn around and creep out. But Anna noticed them and held out a hand to draw them close to him, encompassing all three with his arms. Tears came to Etheldreda’s eyes to think that they were all together again, and the nightmare of war was over.

After a while he pushed them gently away from him and they could see that it was time to speak of the reason he had sent for Saxberga. They stood patiently in front of him, Saxberga beginning to feel a little uneasy as he gazed long and thoughtfully at her. She looked questioningly at her mother and was met with eyes half full of tears.

‘What is it?’ she cried, suddenly frightened.

Anna raised his hand soothingly. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘I have good news for you. I hesitate only because I know at first it might seem a little…’ His voice trailed away.

‘What is it?’ she demanded.

Anna looked appealingly at his wife and she stepped forward and took Saxberga’s hands.

‘My dove, your father has arranged for you to go to Kent to meet King Eorconbert,’ she said.

Saxberga looked at her father suspiciously.

‘Why?’

‘Because he is a good man, a great man, king of the most powerful country in southern Britain, and his help in times of trouble would be invaluable.’

‘What are you saying?’ Saxberga almost screamed the words, knowing very well what he was saying.

‘Hush, my dear. It is a great honour,’ her mother said.

‘What? What is a great honour? What is going on?’ cried Etheldreda, bewildered.

‘What is going on,’ said Saxberga to her little sister, ‘is that I am to be married off to a total stranger for the good of the country!’

Anna stood up. His face was no longer soft and loving, but stern.

‘You are a woman and you know you must marry soon. You are a princess and you know you cannot marry whom you choose. Our country is in danger. You have seen with your own eyes what that means. Why do you pretend to protest? You know what must be, must be. The king of Kent is a fine man. You will marry him from necessity, but you will grow to love him. I promise you. There is no more to be said.’ He looked at his wife and she hurried them out, Etheldreda bubbling with excited questions, Saxberga bitterly silent, her face red and angry.

They went to their special place in the woods, where they knew they could be alone. They talked for hours. In the end Saxberga was reconciled to the idea. Their own parents had not met before the betrothal vows. At least King Eorconbert was a young man, not much older than Saxberga herself. His country, Kent, had been the first of the kingdoms in the new land to be converted to Christianity. Under his grandfather’s long rule it had become a strong and peaceful country, where people could travel and not be in continual fear of their lives, where the crafts that made for gracious living flourished, and the songs that were sung around the hearths were of love more often than of war. It was a fertile land, farmed intelligently according to the Frankish system, each field yielding more than an equivalent field in their own country.

The work of the Kentish weavers and of the goldsmiths was famous. When they returned home their mother showed the girls the presents Anna had brought from Kent. They held the fine cloth and pretended that it was already fashioned into clothes. Etheldreda fastened several necklaces at a time to her shoulders.

‘Look! Look!’ she cried, standing upon a wooden stool so that the cloth flowed down around her to the ground and she looked as tall as any grown woman. On her head she had placed a circlet of gold. ‘I am to be a queen too! I am to marry a king!’

Their mother looked at them as they played at being queens, and tears came to her eyes. If only it were just a matter of wearing fine clothes! She knew that, as Anna’s queen, her own days of peace and happiness with her family were over. From now on she would be continually with other people, on her guard, watching to protect her husband’s interests, diplomatically helping him to keep the power he had against jealous contenders, helping him to carry out unpopular but necessary laws, smiling, talking, charming powerful foreigners to enlist their help, entertaining strangers who would be useful to her husband as friends and deadly as enemies, cultivating people because she needed them, and not because she enjoyed their company.

She sighed. The Mercian attack, and the years of Egric’s indecisive reign before that, would make Anna’s job more difficult.

In Kent her daughter would not have an easy time either. The peace and plenty of the reign of the great Bretwalda Ethelbert had been almost destroyed by his easy-going son Eadbald. From the moment of his father’s death when he had taken his mistress, his father’s second wife, to be his own wife, things had gone wrong. Heathenism, which in spite of thirty years of Christian rule was still not far from the surface, had welled up and almost overwhelmed the church Augustine had founded. Eventually Eadbald had paid lip-service to the new religion, but had never really understood it. He put away his step-mother, and married Emma, a Frankish princess, after the Archbishop of Canterbury had shown him the miraculous scourge marks received on his own back, he said, at the hands of Saint Peter for allowing the king to love so grossly and so sinfully. The child of that new union, Prince Eorconbert, grew up at a court that was unruly and licentious, watching his father and his father’s friends drunk and boasting, taking women as they pleased, sometimes upon the very tables of the mead hall.

He watched, because he could not stop himself, but he secretly vowed that things would be very different when he was king.

Saxberga had agreed to the marriage as her parents knew she must, with one stipulation, and that was that her sister Etheldreda should come with her and stay with her for the first few months. Her mother agreed gladly and Etheldreda was delighted with the prospect of her first sea voyage and her first visit to another kingdom. Their home had not been the same since Anna had become king. He and their mother seemed always to be too busy for them, and even their aunt Hereswith, King Egric’s widow, who used to be so fond of Etheldreda, had left to go to France, taking with her their eldest sister Ethelberga, both to become nuns at the monastery of Faremoutier at Brie. Hereswith left her infant son, Aldwulf, born after Egric’s death, for Anna’s family to raise.

In Kent the days before the wedding passed very quickly for the two princesses.

King Eorconbert’s Gallic mother, Emma, was dead, but his aunt Ethelberga, once Queen of Northumbria, widow of the great Bretwalder Edwin, was there to take her place. She was a woman in her late forties, beautiful and elegant, her hair already silver-white from the sorrows she had endured.

It was her request that Paulinus, now Bishop of Rochester, should speak at the wedding ceremony after Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury. She had been through much with him since he first accompanied her, a nervous young girl, to Northumbria to marry King Edwin. It was he who had finally persuaded her pagan husband to baptism, and it was he who had protected her and her children in their flight after Edwin’s defeat and death.

Paulinus was now very old and he reminded Etheldreda in some ways of a bird of prey. He was tall and very thin, his shoulders stooping, his eyes like dark and burning coals. He was originally from the Mediterranean and had a sallow complexion that contrasted very strikingly with the fairness of the young couple. Etheldreda scarcely heard a word he said though he spoke a long time. She was watching her sister who had so recently fought against the necessity of the marriage, already smiling up into the handsome young king’s eyes and twining her fingers lovingly in his. She suddenly felt very much alone.

At the end of the sermon Etheldreda felt a touch on her arm and beside her she found the exiled Northumbrian princess, Eanfleda, the only surviving child of Queen Ethelberga and King Edwin. She was a girl of fourteen, so slight of build that she did not seem much older than Etheldreda, though her face had the weariness and the bitterness of a much older person.

‘My mother says that we should go together to the wedding feast,’ she said without enthusiasm. ‘Shall we go now?’

Etheldreda was glad to leave the crowd that thronged around her sister. She looked at Eanfleda. She too looked lonely. Her face was set and worn, as though she had been weeping.

‘What’s the matter?’ Etheldreda asked, touching her arm.

Eanfleda shook her head, and turned to move away.

Etheldreda took her hand and walked beside her.

‘Tell me why you’re so sad,’ she insisted.

Again Eanfleda shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. She longed to speak to someone, but Etheldreda was too young.

‘I understand more than people think,’ Etheldreda said.

Tears began to form in Eanfleda’s blue eyes and well over to fall down her pale cheeks.

‘I am ashamed to tell,’ she whispered.

They were away from the crowds now, hidden from the other wedding guests by the trunk of a huge old tree.

Etheldreda squeezed her arm and looked at her with such compassion that Eanfleda broke down.

‘I had hoped,’ she said with a sob, ‘that my cousin Eorconbert… and I…’ Her voice faded away.

‘You wanted to be his bride?’

‘Hush, not so loud. I should not have said it.’

‘Your cousin is most handsome, most brave. I am not surprised that you love him.’

Eanfleda sobbed freely now, the relief she felt for having told half her guilt encouraging her to blurt out the rest.

‘Do you know what I have done?’ she whispered, clutching Etheldreda’s arm and staring wildly at her. Etheldreda shook her head, beginning to feel very uneasy at the intensity of the older girl’s expression.

‘I went to the witch woman of the pagans,’ Eanfleda whispered. ‘I asked for a love potion to make him come to me.’

Etheldreda gasped.

‘You must tell no one. I shall be cursed as long as I live.’ The Northumbrian princess gripped Etheldreda’s arms tighter with her thin fingers.

Etheldreda shook her head dumbly.

‘Vow,’ hissed Eanfleda.

Etheldreda could not bring the words out. She continued to stare at Eanfleda, not so much shocked at what she said, but at the expression on the girl’s face.

‘Vow,’ sobbed Eanfleda, starting to shake her, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Chapter 3

The attack on Oswald AD 641

‘Are you not satisfied, my lord, with the blood that you’ve already shed?’ Cynewise, the Mercian queen, was looking angrily at the fighting men gathering, the horses riding in from the hills, the wagons being loaded.

Penda was standing with arms crossed on his broad chest, his eyes gleaming. This was more like it! No country would stand against this force. He had killed Edwin and purged his country of the false faith of the Nazarene god, but in his place had come another cursed Christian, Oswald of the Bernician royal line, brought up on Iona, an island of monks. There was surely not a good swordsman or axeman among them to have taught the prince how to fight. Northumbria was practically his.

Penda took a deep breath, almost smelling the wild places of the hills and the heather wind sweeping across the high moors. His men were happier with this type of terrain, no sticky marshland and narrow bottle-necks guarded by dykes. Wide open spaces and rocks to hide behind, heights to reach and hold.

‘Did you hear me, lord?’ Cynewise persisted, long years of marriage and the bearing of five children having given her confidence to speak her mind.

‘I heard you woman. I heard you,’ he muttered, then raised his voice and pointed with one stubby fierce finger at some boys who were struggling to load a wagon with some huge barrels.

‘Take it from the other side, fools! Do you want your fathers to sleep thirsty after a day of fighting?’

He moved away and Cynewise was left alone, to be joined by her second eldest son, Wulfhere, a moment later.

‘Can I go with him this time, mother? Can I?’

She looked down at his thin, fine face, eager for adventure.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not this time.’ Not this time, her heart echoed, but soon there would be a time when she would have to let him go.

‘Peada goes.’

‘Peada is blooded. He has years on you, my son.’

‘I am strong and my horse is faster than Peada’s. His is made of lead.’

‘You are needed here. If all the men go, who will guard the women?’

Wulfhere’s face wrinkled with disgust and he moved away, but he was glad she had called him a man. When all the men were mustering it was frustrating to be a child. A king’s son could not afford to waste his time on childhood.

Cynewise returned to the stockade and the royal house. Penda was busy and would not return until late in the night. He would be drunk and full of fierce lusts as always before he started on one of his raids. She would need strength. She made sure no one would disturb her and told her women that she was going to sleep. Then she drew the heavy cloth over the windows of her chamber and lit a tiny iron lamp. She listened for a moment to make sure that there was no one moving in the other chamber and then pulled out from under the wooden bed that she and Penda shared, a small plain box. With trembling hands she fumbled to open it, knowing that if Penda caught her now she would be dead, though she bore him a hundred sons. The lid came away at last and inside, wrapped in silk, was a tiny golden crucifix set with pearls given to her by her father Cynegils on her last visit home to Wessex.