Moyra Caldecott (7 page)

At first the queen was in such pain she didn’t notice their presence, but when Bishop Felix arrived and put his hand gently but firmly upon her heaving body, she seemed to become calmer and, although still very ill, could look at them with recognition. She turned her thin face, and her dark eyes sought her husband’s. She could not speak but the relief in her expression at finding him at her side was beautiful to see.

Another contraction racked her frail form and she screamed. Etheldreda put her hands to her mouth and bit her knuckles until they bled.

‘Pray for your mother,’ whispered the bishop urgently. ‘She is dying and we cannot hold her back, but we can ease her pain and ask for her acceptance into God’s heavenly Kingdom.’

Etheldreda wept but could not pray for her mother’s entry into the heavenly Kingdom. She could only think of how much she wanted her mother to stay alive.

‘Take courage,’ said Felix, ‘angels are present.’

‘I don’t want her to go!’ sobbed Etheldreda. ‘I need her!’

The bishop pushed her gently away from her mother.

‘Stay and help – or leave,’ he said brusquely.

The queen gave one last desperate push and a squalling bundle of blood and flesh poured from her. Her eyes were suddenly clear and she looked directly into her daughter’s face.

‘Do not leave him. He needs you now,’ she cried, and then fell back in death.

Etheldreda stared at her, but she was no longer there. There was a strange heap of something on the bed, but it was not her mother. Her mother had left.

Stunned, the girl suffered herself to be moved back as the women busied themselves with laying out the queen’s deserted body, and washing the newborn infant.

Bishop Felix was praying and her father was weeping. Etheldreda put her arms around his shoulders.

‘I’ll not leave you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll look after you.’

The baby was another daughter for Anna, christened Withberga.

Over the next few months Etheldreda and Heregyth were busy. They found a wet nurse for the baby, but Etheldreda insisted on doing almost everything for her infant sister apart from the actual feeding. She was also concerned with keeping her father from total despair, and helping him to rule his kingdom. Since his wife’s death he seemed to care about nothing and if it were not for Etheldreda’s insistence and constant inspiration he would have abandoned most of his responsibilities. The sharp words of the man she admired so greatly, Bishop Felix, had roused her to action. ‘Help – or leave.’

King Oswin had returned to his kingdom before she had a chance to see him again.

Chapter 6

The hostage

‘I will not let him go!’ Eanfleda almost shrieked. Tears were streaming from her eyes and she was clasping her infant son to her breast with such fury and despair that she all but stopped his breathing.

Prince Egfrid added his voice to hers and howled disconsolately. He had no idea of the negotiations that had gone on between King Penda and his father King Oswy, the negotiations which had been at last settled and sealed with the agreement that he, Prince Egfrid, second son of Oswy and Eanfleda, would be given as hostage to King Penda as sign of Oswy’s good faith, but he did know that he was extremely uncomfortable crushed so fiercely in his mother’s arms.

Oswy looked at his pale thin wife, her eyes full of outrage, and his own face flushed with anger.

‘Will not, lady? Will not?’ he roared.

Eanfleda was afraid of him but she held her ground.

‘I will kill him and myself rather than let him go to that barbarous monster!’ she screamed.

‘You do that lady and you will kill us all. We live only at Penda’s pleasure and Penda’s pleasure is to have the child. He will have him! And you will give him up!’

‘Never!’

King Oswy nodded at two of his men who were close behind the queen and before she realised what was happening she was roughly seized and the child ripped shrieking from her arms.

She tried to bite and kick and pull the child back, but the one man held him high above his head and stepped back out of reach as the other held her down. The men looked over her head for guidance from the king who nodded his approval and gestured for the man who held the child to hand it to Penda’s two thegns waiting in the shadows.

As soon as they had the prince in their grasp they left the chamber, the queen’s curses ringing in their ears.

The king let Eanfleda scream and cry and struggle for a while, but when he was sure that Penda’s men had mounted and ridden off, he commanded that she be released. Sobbing hopelessly she fell to the floor and beat her fists against it. The king stood looking at her, the angry flush dying down, his eyes showing for the first time something of his own suffering, his own pity.

Suddenly a young boy who had been watching the whole scene from the corner of the room came forward and knelt beside her.

‘My lady,’ he whispered. ‘Lady, do not weep. It’ll only be for a little while. My lord the king will soon have Penda’s head on a stake and your son will be restored to you.’

Tearfully she looked up at him, and allowed herself to be helped to her feet. Her face was ugly and red with weeping, but she knew that there was nothing she could now do to bring her son back. She was drained of all passion, numb with despair.

‘Spoken like a man, Wilfrid,’ said King Oswy with satisfaction. ‘And you will help me put it there.’

‘No,’ said the queen with one last flicker of strength. ‘I promised his dying mother that he would be a scholar and a priest, and I will not break that promise. He goes to Lindisfarne.’

The king shrugged. He felt it was a waste to send Wilfrid to a monastery and would have liked him for his shield bearer, but he did not want to cross his wife again so soon.

‘He goes to Lindisfarne,’ he said placatingly, and left the room.

Queen Eanfleda sat down on the chair Wilfrid solicitously brought forward for her. Her legs felt weak.

‘Wilfrid,’ she said sadly. ‘You are young and much that is sorrowful and hard has already happened to you. But it is nothing to what may still happen. If I let you be my lord’s shield bearer you will have nothing in your life but killing and being killed. If you go to Lindisfarne, what you will learn there will be of more lasting value than putting Penda’s head on a stake. You will learn ways of changing the hearts of men so that they can live together without this perpetual violence and hatred. You will learn how men can trust one another so that they will not have to take a woman’s child from her to hold as hostage.’ Her eyes were dry now, but there was still a touch of bitterness in her expression.

He was silent. He liked the idea of being a scholar and confounding them all with his knowledge, but he was not sure that he would take to the bare, uncomfortable life of the brothers at Lindisfarne. He came of noble family and was used to being rich and comfortable.

‘Leave me now,’ she said, ‘but send Romanus my priest to me. I need to pray and have not the strength to do it alone.’

Penda’s queen, Cynewise, stared at the angry red-faced child and sighed. Another hostage. Her household was already complicated enough.

‘It is obvious he needs feeding,’ she said coldly to the thegn who held the child. ‘Take him to the kitchens. When he is fed and cleaned, bring him back to me.’

Chapter 7

Hilda AD 647

In the autumn the house of Anna had a visit from Hilda, a princess of the royal Deiran house, a kinswoman of King Oswin. She was on her way to France, to the monastery of Chelles near Paris, to lead the holy life like her sister Hereswith, widow of Anna’s brother Egric. King Anna, sensing the restlessness in Etheldreda and fearing it, asked Hilda to winter with them.

She was a handsome woman of thirty-two who had had many suitors but found none to her taste, and had succeeded in keeping a fierce, proud independence, while running a well appointed household in Deira, the focus of travellers and scholars, priests and princes.

‘What makes you head for France?’ King Anna asked his guest after an evening of lively talk around the fire. ‘Deira will be the poorer without you.’

She laughed.

‘I will be the poorer if I stay in Deira,’ she said. ‘I seek my fortune in France, riches without price.’

‘I heard you gave your land away, your house and all its contents,’ King Anna said. ‘Was that wise?’

‘Very wise,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘The land was not mine, but God’s, and what do I want with a house made of wood that can be burned by fire, and robes that the moth can gnaw. I am looking for more permanent possessions and I expect to find them.’

Etheldreda’s eyes shone at the older woman’s brave words, and Anna, seeing it, wondered if Hilda would exert quite the influence he wanted over his daughter.

‘You are lucky you have no responsibilities,’ he said pointedly. ‘Some of us have people dependent upon us.’

‘One must serve God in the best way one can,’ Hilda said. ‘Of course it is not right for everyone to leave for a monastery, but only those who are called.’

‘How were you called?’ Etheldreda asked curiously.

Hilda sighed and shook her head. ‘It is almost impossible to explain,’ she said.

‘Did you have a vision?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘A dream?’

Hilda hesitated. ‘No,’ she answered at last. ‘It was more like… more like “knowing” than anything else. I cannot explain it better than that.’

Etheldreda sighed. She had a ‘knowing’ too, but it was not consistent. Sometimes she had doubts. Sometimes she thought of King Oswin of Deira and prayed to God that her ‘calling’ would be to be his wife. At other times she ‘knew’ that her way was not the way of the flesh, but the hard, bright way of spirit, and that the only way to it was through self-denial.

Heregyth had found her crying in the night more than once, but the princess would never tell her what she was crying about.

The winter deepened.

The winds off the marshes were sweeping and bitter. Snow flurried through the grey air and lay on the hard icy ground.

Etheldreda told Hilda about an Irish monk called Fursey who had visited them when she was a child and how he had such control over his body that he no longer felt pain or cold.
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Hilda was intrigued and at once suggested that they should start training their bodies in the same way. They started by leaving their fur capes off when they went for brisk walks across the crackling snow fields, and gradually reduced their garments and their comforts until they were sleeping on the hard floor of their bed chambers with barely a covering on the wildest nights. By Christmas they were both ill with the coughing fever and unable to take their place in chapel or hall.

When King Anna heard from Heregyth what they had been doing he was very angry. He stormed in to see Etheldreda and strode up and down her small room almost too angry to speak.

She felt terrible. Her eyes were streaming, her throat was so sore she could barely swallow, and her chest was burning and aching. She was sure she was about to die. She told herself that she ought to be glad that she would soon be in God’s beautiful kingdom untrammelled by physical limitations, but she found herself longing to stay alive; there were so many things she still wanted to do, so many places she still wanted to see. Memory of the spring with its flowers and its bees haunted her.

Bishop Felix, himself not well, made the journey through blizzard and storm to spend Christmas with the king, and to see the two princesses.

‘If you are going to follow Fursey,’ he said as he sat beside Etheldreda’s bed, ‘it will take you much longer than one winter. It is not just a matter of leaving off robes and exposing yourself to the elements. Fursey trained himself day and night with rigorous disciplines for years – but even then it was the strength of his spirit that gave him control.’

Etheldreda sighed. Was there no easy way?

Bishop Felix laid his hand upon her aching head.

‘Sleep my child. You always were one to try to go too fast.’ He thought back on the years when she was at his school, and how she had insisted on learning everything as fast as she could. More than once he had given in to her wish to join a class that was beyond her, because of her eagerness. He had loved her for her enthusiasm and joy, and he blamed himself that he had allowed himself to be so charmed by it that he had neglected to teach her enough self-discipline.

He shut his own eyes, still resting his hand on her feverish head. Suddenly he had a strange sensation, as though he were touching a ball of light instead of a head of bone and flesh. He took his hand away quickly and opened his eyes.

There was no ball of light, but the impression had been so strong he crossed himself and, before he left, he knelt down on the dusty floor beside her in all his grand robes, and put his own head against her hand.

She looked at him with surprise, and then drifted peacefully off to sleep, the fever gone.

In the spring when Hilda was making her final preparations to go to France she received a letter from Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne.

He wrote most persuasively that Hilda should not go to France, but return to her own country to take her vows there and to found a little community of companions on the north bank of the River Wear. He spoke of the need for such communities in Britain and regretted that so many sons and daughters sought the holy life in other countries, neglecting their own.

‘Sometimes it is more difficult to work amongst those we know, but sometimes it is necessary. If all who feel the call of Christ go abroad, how will we keep His word alive amongst ourselves? I feel you have a calling to establish places in this country which will become the jewels of our time, their light shining in a dark century, their spiritual riches sustaining an impoverished people.’

He reminded her that at the time of her birth her mother, in exile at the court of the British King Cerdic, had had a dream that must surely have been prophetic. She had dreamed that her husband Hereric, Edwin’s nephew, was suddenly taken away from her, and, although she searched everywhere, she could find no trace of him. When all her efforts failed, she discovered a most valuable jewel under her garments, and as she looked closely, it emitted such a brilliant light that all Britain was lit by its splendour. Soon after this her husband was treacherously poisoned and her daughter Hilda was born.
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