The Betrothed Sister (39 page)

‘Why?' Thea said. She carefully threaded her needle with a deep blue silken thread as she thought about the suggestion. She liked it, but was not quite ready to admit it. She slipped her needle into her linen tapestry and looked up at him quizzically.

‘I want you and the boys to be safe if there is a rebellion in Kiev. Prince Iziaslav and his son, Sviatopolk, are returning to the city.'

‘I heard something of the sort.' She made another dainty stitch. She was stitching a new length for her rushnyk, adding the birth of her second child in blue cross-stitching. Looking up again from her needlework, she enquired, ‘Do the boyars agree he should come back here?'

Vladimir shook back his long black hair and frowned. ‘It is a solution. If my father remains to advise him, yes; there will be conditions attached to his return.'

‘Such as?'

‘Really, Thea, must you concern yourself with politics?'

‘Yes,' she said firmly. ‘I must.'

‘Well then, if you must. If there are threats from the Steppe tribes, Prince Iziaslav must grant the boyars arms and freedom to protect the city. He must safeguard the merchant ships travelling north through the trade route from Chernigov and south through Pereiaslavl to Byzantium.' He took a breath. ‘Now you know.'

‘I see,' she said thoughtfully. ‘There need not be any ceremony because thanks to your father's negotiations Prince Iziaslav will simply quietly return from exile. I don't have to stay in Kiev, nor do I have to go north to Smolensk or Novgorod again because our interests lie in keeping Pereiaslavl safe.' She felt herself smiling at her deliberate use of the second person.

He was quick to respond. ‘
Our interests
? Let us be clear,
only
through
me
do your interests matter, but to me those interests are always important, and to be truthful I do value your intelligence and advice, well, sometimes.' He opened his hands in a supplicant's gesture. His eyes, those brown velvet eyes, his soft smiling mouth would win her when he let go of his masculine haughtiness. She raised her eyebrow into a curve and gave him her firmest glare. She was not quite ready to acquiesce. ‘Look,' he went on, ‘Thea, I know you prefer the estate in Pereiaslavl to the fortress in Novgorod.' He touched her stomach which was still flat. ‘Are you with child again, my love?'

‘I am not.'

‘It is just that you seem so irritable. Well, hopefully you might be soon. I know you want more children and we cannot get them if we continue this quarrel. Our third child might be born in Pereiaslavl. We can have time together and share things we used to share, stories, music, hunting, picnics in the woods.'

‘Another child will not be so easy if I am in Pereiaslavl and you are here. How can we share our lives if you must be here?' She considered for a heartbeat. ‘Yet, I would be very happy to be in the country for the summer.' She laid her sewing aside. ‘I shall bring Gudrun with me. Padar will be in Constantinople buying silks and spices. Katya's father will be trading. He could return by Pereiaslavl. The arrangement is perfect.' She did not mention Earl Connor who was trading north and whom she hoped would see that her mother received a letter from her. She thought again. ‘And if Anya wanted to come too …'

‘She might prefer to remain in Kiev for now, but later my stepmother would perhaps appreciate the country air. I shall speak with my father.'

‘We would be such a company of women.'

‘You would, except that I intend coming too, at least until the summer. I have a desire for a season of hunting, and this way I can oversee the Steppe borderlands.' He kissed her ear. ‘We shall be together and you can bring your falcons. As for a complicated terem with its rumours and politics, since that hardly exists in such a small country palace, we can sleep together every night without comment.' She felt desire creep up through her body. She could never resist him.

‘But what about Smolensk?' she asked, turning to face him.

‘There is a governor in place until we send one of the junior princes there.' He leaned over, caught her arms and kissed her mouth. For a moment their tongues flicked together. She felt the old desire rise again.

‘You mean Boris, Gleb or Oleg,' she said after he drew back.

He frowned, his forehead crumpling into a rippling sea of worry lines. ‘Indeed, we should separate my cousins. They have been together in Chernigov for too long.' He thoughtfully stroked his recently grown moustache. He asked brightly, ‘Sleigh or ship? You have a travel choice.'

She found herself longing to glide over the snow-filled tracks that stretched south of Kiev. ‘Sleigh because the children will love to fly over the snow. And it is only a short distance. But we must leave soon before there is a thaw.'

‘Sleigh it is. We shall leave within a week. Can you get us packed within a space of three days?'

‘I shall start to pack now, this very moment,' she said joyfully, anticipating the adventure they would share.

‘No, not just yet,' he said, covering her face with fluttering little kisses. They tickled. She laughed and touched his moustaches. He kissed her again. ‘Why don't we spend the rest of this afternoon under that wolfskin of yours?'

‘It is a holy day. And it
is
the afternoon.'

‘I think God will look the other way.' He grinned wickedly at her and his dark eyes filled with mischief. He learned down and whispered, ‘Send your women away.'

‘They will criticise us. It is scandalous,' she said with a tease in her voice.

‘Nonsense. I shall send them to the sewing room if you will not.' He cast a mischievous glance over at Thea's ladies who were gathered around a brazier stitching shirts for the poor. ‘Ladies, perhaps you could retire,' he called down the antechamber to them. They glanced up from the embroidery they were working with a glint of amusement in their eyes. ‘Your lady and I want a little privacy this afternoon,' he added. ‘Take the children with you.'

Lady Sabrina, who had joined Thea's household, nodded, and as her senior lady replied, ‘My lord, we shall retire to the workroom at once.'

Katya tugged Harold by the hand. A nursemaid lifted a protesting little Iziaslav into her arms. A second lifted up his cradle and the women trooped out with Lady Sabrina leading them, the nursemaids glancing back with amused glances.

Vladimir called after his elder son, ‘I shall see you later, young Harold, after your nap. Behave for Katya or the whip will come out. If I get a report that you are a good little boy, you can have ginger cakes instead.'

‘Ginger cakes now,' Harold insisted as Katya hurried him from the room.

‘You should not scare him,' Thea said to her husband after they had gone and she could hear them climbing the staircase to the work rooms above.

‘Nonsense, I promised him ginger cakes. You saw how his eyes opened at the suggestion of them.' He took her hands in his own and tugged her up from the bench. She tried to pull away but he said, ‘Now you … shall I take my riding whip to you, my lady, for your daring to question me or shall we …?'

He slipped her veil away and pushed his hands into her hair, loosening its rich abundance. Pins fell to the floor. Her hair floated in a golden-red cloud around her face. He drew her into his arms and began to untie the laces at the sides of her outer gown. It dropped in a pile of soft sage-coloured wool to her feet. ‘I think I would prefer the wolfskin to the whip,' she murmured as she stepped out of her second gown.

After her second gown was discarded, she found herself pulling him through the curtain that separated her two chambers, untying the silk laces of his shirt, kissing the curling hair on his chest, falling against him, tempted into a frenzy of desire.

He pulled off her plain linen undergown and swept her from the floor as if she were a feather. He swirled her around, her red hair fanning out as he carried her to their bed. Not bothering to mount the steps up to her bed, he tossed her onto the covers. She was wearing her shift, the final garment of four. While she had been kissing him, she had managed to remove his two garments. They made a trail across the tiles of her antechamber and through the rich curtain that separated bedchamber from antechamber. As he tossed her onto the bed, her embroidered silken slippers dropped from her feet to be lost in the bedcovers.

‘I adore you,' he told her as he climbed up after her and stretched her out on the silvery wolfskin. Gently he removed her very last shift and delicately laid kisses on her breasts.

‘And I thee, my beautiful prince,' she whispered back, her previous irritation forgotten in the midst of their lovemaking. Though when she did remember she felt she had won the siege if not the battle. He had come to her contrite, well almost so.

Snow blew up in clouds as they travelled in sleighs pulled by strong little horses over tracks that snaked back and forth, narrowed, came near to a river and curved back again. Through skeletal trees of pine, birch, beech and oak, Thea caught glimpses of the frozen river. The ice floating on the water reflected the woods and the sky in a revolving blur of blues, browns and green. She thought it perfect.

She snuggled in deep below thick furs beside Gudrun. Harold nestled between them. Iziaslav was wrapped in a sack of marten fur and for most of the journey remained fast asleep in his wet nurse's arms except when he was hungry.

The grown children were all wrapped so warmly against the winter cold that only their noses showed. Gudrun's trio of little girls travelled with Katya and their maids in the second sleigh. Vladimir rode his horse at the head of their guards, often doubling back over the hardened snow track checking along the column of six long horse-driven sleighs to ensure their safety.

The sun shone in the middle of the day causing the snow to glisten. Vladimir's sword hilt reflected the sunlight, and his black hair, which fell long onto his shoulders, appeared like a raven's glossy coat. Thea found herself filled with admiration and her heart filled with joy at the thought of the romantic days that stretched before them in their small, remote country retreat. Her heart sang because they were journeying through a wooded landscape that belonged to fairy tales and today she felt that she belonged within it.

They stopped at a boyar's modest estate on the first night. The nobleman and his wife had given up the best bed, a curtained box bed in the hall close to the hearth, for the prince and his lady. Their two small boys slept with them, Iziaslav in his cradle and Harold snuggled in the bed between his parents. Vladimir looked down on her, smiling through the glow of a stumpy candle, as she cuddled tiny Iziaslav.

‘Sleep?' he whispered as the child seemed to sleep.

‘Yes, pinch the candle, my lord.'

Leaning across Vladimir, she slipped the sleeping baby into his cradle close to his nurse's pallet.

The room grew peaceful. All about them, throughout the old-fashioned hall she could hear others snoring. It was a comforting sound that reminded her of the halls she had known in her childhood. As she began to fall into a half-sleep, she dwelled on the past and sleepily wondered how her mother, Elditha, fared and how her sister Gunnhild lived now. She must find a secret channel by which they could communicate and recently she had wondered if Katya's father could help her again.

Some time ago Thea heard a rumour from Edmund who had got it from Denmark. After Dowager Queen Edith, her aunt, had died a year before at Wilton, Thea's sister, Gunnhild, had run away with the same wicked Breton count who had courted their mother. Thea started out of her half-sleep.
What, by the virgin, was Gunnhild doing with that man?

Thea could remember with clarity how the flame-headed knight, Alain of Brittany, watched her when she was only fifteen in Countess Gytha's palace in Exeter, before the women of Exeter had gone into exile on Flatholm.
He wanted one of us.
That knight wanted us for my mother's lands, first, my mother, then me, and now Gunnhild.

For a short while her mind pushed sleep away. She listened to Harold breathing beside her and to Vladimir, who was beginning to snore in company with the other men in the hall. She wondered what Gunnhild looked like now she was grown up. Was she fair and slender like their mother, tall like Elditha, tall like me?
I have not seen my little sister since she was eight years old and I had only thirteen summers, so long ago, long before all our lives were turned inside out by war, but Lady Fortune smiles on me. I have a prince, kinder than many others.

She whispered a prayer into the darkness,
St Theodosia, protect my sister and watch over my mother
. Then she touched the Godwin ring on the middle finger of her left hand and added a special plea,
Grandmother, wherever you may be, and may it be beyond St Peter's gate, ask my saint to intercede with the King of Heaven for us all.

That night, Thea dreamed her father was seated on a noble brown stallion. He was wearing a chain mail overshirt that was so heavy only he could lift it. His great blond moustaches were drooping below his nose plate. She saw his eyes, so blue and clear that when he fixed them on anyone, servant or thane, or his sons and daughters, none dared ever to lie to him. In her sleep she felt little Harold shift a little beside her. Her ghost father looked at her through his piercing eyes, and then they travelled down to rest upon her sleeping son. Staring at her with tears misting over his eyes, he said, ‘Gytha, my daughter, remember that you are our future. Remember it well.'

She sighed in her sleep. It was a message filled with both defeat and promise. If she were to believe it, Godwin's was a lost cause. Edmund had followed the best course possible by becoming a merchant trader sailing with Earl Connor, trading north to Iceland and south to Constantinople. She opened her eyes wide for a moment and this time saw the night cloaking her family safely together. At last she fell into a second deeper, dreamless sleep.