The Bone Thief (5 page)

She closed her eyes, and, lifting her head under its weight of gold-worked veil, she breathed in.

‘Leave us,’ she said, eyes still closed.

Her two attendant women rustled to the door, where Wulfgar was also turning to obey.

‘Not you, Wulfgar.’

Wulfgar still hesitated, clutching the will and the rent returns to his breast.

When she spoke again, there was a bitter edge to her voice.

‘Oh, give those documents to his Lordship of Worcester, if his need of them is so great.’

Wulfgar bit his tongue, bowed, and did as he was told.

‘The wine,’ she said.

He slid past the Lady to the small table and picked up the heavy glass jug. His hands shook as he poured.

‘Godfather.’ Her voice was small but steady, her eyes still closed. ‘Please. Don’t be angry with me, not now.’

The Bishop was holding the documents close to his good eye.

‘That land belongs to Worcester diocese. I have plans for it.’ He stared over them at the Lady. ‘Don’t meddle with things you know nothing about.’

She stared back, her jaw set, and Wulfgar found himself fuming on her behalf, his fist clenching around the jug’s handle. He forced himself to relax, hesitating for a long heartbeat before he dared to take the brimming cup of wine over to the Bishop, half-expecting the shell of fragile green glass to be dashed in his face. But he had under-estimated the old man. The Bishop sketched a cross over the cup, downed the wine in one swallow and handed it back.

‘I have sent for my cousin Seiriol,’ the Lady said. Her gaze was still fixed to the Bishop’s face. ‘He is with my Lord.’

‘Your dying Lord.’

‘He is
not
dying.’

A rap sounded on the outer door.

‘Come in.’ She looked up, her expression strained and eager.

Wulfgar’s own heart also lifted as the door swung open to admit a familiar figure, a dark-haired, bright-eyed man in his thirties, with rain beading his hair and glinting on the silver of his sword and belt-knife. Athelwald Seiriol, the senior atheling of the West Saxon royal house, the Lady’s cousin and oldest ally, and someone else, Wulfgar thought happily, who had no cause to love the new King of Wessex.

The Atheling spoke to the Lady first. ‘My dearest cousin!’ Taking both her hands in his, he kissed her warmly on the cheek. ‘Your husband lives,’ he assured her. ‘No better, but at least no worse. The healer is with him.’ Then, over his shoulder, ‘Excitement expected in the court tonight, my Lord Bishop?’ He turned, dropping the Lady’s hands to give the Bishop his easy smile. ‘Everyone out there –’ he jerked his head towards the hall ‘– is wondering how you might keep the men of Sodbury loyal.’ Then, ‘Wulfgar!’

‘My Lord?’

‘Good to see you here! How are you settling in? I had a word with your uncle before I left Winchester. He wants you to know his lungs are bad again.’

Wulfgar, delighted and astonished to be noticed, bowed deeply.

‘Thank you, my Lord.’ He hesitated. ‘My Lord Atheling.’ Was Seiriol still allowed to claim that title, that status so close to the throne, now that his younger cousin Edward was King?

The Atheling, still smiling, acknowledged the title with a nod.

‘And your brother Wystan’s had a son,’ the Atheling said, ‘but that must have been before you left Winchester? All’s well at Meon, they tell me.’

Wulfgar mumbled his gratitude again. He thought, oh, I’ve no worries on that account. Wystan will be all right under Edward’s dispensation. Him, and his son and heir, his sheep, and his rolling acres of wheat, they won’t care one way or the other that there’s a new King in Winchester. But, he couldn’t help wondering, what about my father’s other son? What about Garmund, the Polecat? I don’t need to ask, he thought bitterly. He’ll be all right, too, damn it. More than all right. This will be his big opportunity.

The Bishop looked from face to face. ‘Have you quite finished?’ he said. ‘This is no time for your petty Winchester gossip. We face disaster. This lethal blow, at the holiest time of the whole year. Why?’

‘These things have no sense of season,’ the Atheling said.

‘You’re wrong there,’ the Bishop snapped. ‘Our advocates in the court of Heaven have turned against us.’

‘Save it for Sunday, Bishop. The Old Boar’s not dead, not yet.’

The Bishop leaned back in the chair and squinted up at him.

‘This isn’t pulpit rhetoric, Seiriol. Mercia is being punished.’

The Lady, eyes closed, massaging her temples.

‘Wulfgar, unpin my veils, will you?’

Me
? But her women had been dismissed, and she could scarcely expect the Atheling or the Bishop to do it. His hands trembling a little at the intimacy of the task, he slid the gilt pins out of the fine gold-spangled linen and laid them on the table with the jug. She pushed at the veils and he lifted them away from her head, startled by their weight. Her corn-coloured hair was coiled in sleek plaits around the back of her head. ‘That’s better. That’ll do. Thank you.’ She looked up at him with a weary smile. ‘Don’t start counting the grey hairs.’

‘It’s as golden as it was on your wedding day, Fleda,’ the Atheling said, smiling down at her.

‘Flatterer. How would you remember? It’s so long ago.’

‘Forget the day you left Wessex? The day Edward was named as your father’s heir?’ He had stopped smiling.

‘The Atheling is right, my lady,’ Wulfgar heard himself say, filling the awkward silence. His face grew even warmer, remembering. Her wedding day had been the worst day of his young life, for so many reasons.

‘You surely don’t remember my wedding, do you, Wulfgar?’

Still blushing, he nodded.

‘But you were only a little boy.’

Not so little, he thought. Nine years old, and I loved you already. He realised he hadn’t once seen her bare-headed since her wedding, not until now. And there were indeed silver-grey hairs threading through the fair plaits. He felt disloyal even noticing them, to acknowledge even in his secret heart that she could be anything less than perfect. I was nine, he thought, and you were fifteen when the Boar of Mercia took you away.

You weren’t the lofty Lady of the Mercians then. I just called you Fleda, like everyone else. From the day I arrived in Winchester to be fostered by my uncle, you took me under your wing, you and – he glanced at the Atheling – Seiriol. The two of you always seemed to be together in those days. For two winters, you protected me from Edward and Garmund and their little gang of bullies when the adults turned a blind eye. I loved you both then with an adoration verging on idolatry. And then you went away.

The old Bishop’s gaze had been ranging around the room, as though looking for someone who wasn’t there. Now he said, ‘Listen to you gabble! West Saxons, every one of you. What do
you
care for Mercia, any of you? All my friends are dead.’ He paused. ‘Or dying.’

‘He’s
not
dying,’ the Lady said passionately.

The Atheling shifted restlessly.

‘Common enemies make unlikely bedfellows, Bishop, and have done these thirty years and more.’

The Lady turned to Wulfgar.

‘Close the shutters, please. And feed the braziers.’

Glad to have something to do, he hurried to obey, pulling the shutters closed and drawing the curtains across with a rattle of rings, stoking the charcoal in the braziers and lighting more of the small oil lamps. The light glittered and danced across the Lady and the Bishop, but the Atheling was almost as dully dressed as Wulfgar, and the shadows drew him in.

Wulfgar busied himself with the lamps.

‘Think of the great shrines of Mercia,’ the Bishop suggested. ‘Crowland, Ely, Bardney, Repton, Lichfield – what do they have in common?’

Lost, Wulfgar thought. Burned and ruined and looted and lost.

He must have spoken aloud, because the Bishop was nodding.

‘All of them,
all of them
, destroyed by the Danes. Whom do we have left?’ His hands were quiet now, but their knuckles were white, gripping his great cross and its tangle of gold chain. ‘Petty saints unknown outside their impoverished minsters. The landlocked rump of our kingdom. And this new treaty with your brother shows you can’t even be trusted with that.’

The Lady closed her eyes.

‘Oxford and London are Mercian and always will be. Ceding them to Wessex is inconceivable,’ the Bishop went on, remorseless.

The Lady lifted her chin.

‘My husband knows what he’s about. He knows my brother is our friend, just as my father was. Like it or not, Mercia needs the protection of Wessex.’ Her voice was tight. ‘And we need to keep the love of the Mercians who are still, somehow, loyal. Men like Ednoth of Sodbury.’ She gestured at the discarded will on the matting.

The Atheling roamed around the little room, fingering a hanging, lifting and replacing a cup. He turned.

‘If you have a point, Bishop, come to it. My cousin is tired.’

‘The point, young man, is this: I can smell fidelity shifting direction out there.’ He jerked his head at the white-plastered wall, the inner door and the hall beyond, through which the shuffle and rumble of the gathering court could be heard. ‘Mercia could be lost without a battle, this time. Every hour your Lord lies ill, another dozen thanes will leave him to take their allegiance south to Wessex – or north, to the Danes. We need to remind them that they are Mercians, and Christians, and proud of it. We need a new leader.’

A sudden intake of breath.

A faint hiss and crackle from the braziers.

‘What’s your game, Bishop?’ The lamp-flames glittered in the Atheling’s eyes.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘NO GAME, SEIRIOL.
I want to bring one of our lost saints home.’

There was a sudden, convulsive movement from the Atheling. He turned away, seemingly fascinated of a sudden by the elaborate coiled birds in a woven hanging.

Wulfgar could see his fingers clenching, his shoulders rising and falling with the long, slow breaths he was forcing himself to take.

‘We have suffered enough,’ the Bishop said. ‘It’s time to act. I want a new soul for Mercia. A new shrine. Pilgrims from all Christendom coming to Worcester.’

‘Not Worcester,’ the Lady said. ‘Gloucester.’

‘Worcester.’

‘Gloucester. Not the old minster, either. Our new church.’ There was a mulish look to her which Wulfgar remembered all too well.

So, it appeared, did the Atheling. Turning round, he shouted with harsh laughter. ‘You’ll not move her, Bishop.’ He took the Lady’s hand. ‘Any particular saint in mind?’ He echoed the question Wulfgar’s own lips had been silently forming.

The Bishop closed his eyes and bowed his head over his hands, still clutching his gold cross. Wulfgar wondered if he was making them wait on purpose.

When he lifted his head again, the Bishop said, ‘Oswald, King and Martyr.’

The Lady choked on her wine.

Wulfgar, even with no wine to choke on, found a lump in his throat. He stood very still, unwilling even to breathe in case he missed anything. The glory of the Bishop’s ambition dazzled him.

The Lady wiped her mouth and regained her composure.

After a moment, she said flatly, ‘You can’t. Bardney was sacked thirty years ago. St Oswald is only a name.’

‘Ah, but what greater name?’ The Bishop paused for a moment, as though still unsure how far he could trust this rabble of West Saxons. He came to a decision. ‘His bones still lie at Bardney. I had word in the winter.’

Wulfgar could feel his eyes widening almost to the point of pain. Was this what the Bishop had been hinting at earlier? Someone who can ride, he had said, and speak Danish …

‘A raiding party, then?’ The Atheling narrowed his eyes.

‘Out of the question. A raid might lead to open war, and we can’t risk that, not now. This must be secret. One man could do it, if he’s the right man.’

And another man, Wulfgar thought, to organise the welcome of the saint to Gloucester. His heart galloped. Surely he himself was the obvious candidate? They would need the very finest silk vestments, bronze thuribles for incense, embroidered banners, processional crosses, all at very short notice. What did the Bishop have stowed away in the Worcester sacristy? Would he be able to track down some Greek incense?

‘A trusted man,’ the Lady said.

‘A churchman,’ added the Bishop.

The Atheling sounded thoughtful.

‘Someone whom no one would suspect.’

Another prolonged silence.

Wulfgar’s fingers were itching to get his ideas down in wax before he could forget them. We could have singing boys outside the church, on a high scaffold. I wonder if I could borrow some proper choristers from Winchester …

‘Wulfgar?’

It was the Atheling’s voice.

Wulfgar came to his senses, blinking. Someone had spoken to him, but he had missed the import of what had been said.

The Atheling smiled at him.

‘I said, what about you?’