The Forever Queen (17 page)

Emma had awoken yesterday irritable and restless. Her back had ached, her swollen feet and hands had throbbed. She had not been able to lie, sit, or stand comfortably these last few days, was tired and cold. She had eaten a light morning meal of cold chicken, but had brought it all up again. During the morning she had tried concentrating on her embroidery, had thrown the thing, spoilt beyond repair, into the hearth-fire.

Æthelred was not at Islip; he rarely stayed long at the manor, for as Emma had discovered soon into her marriage, he did not like the place that had been his mother’s favoured residence. It suited Emma to be here, though, alone with her books, her ladies, and her personal guard of cnights. She had delighted in making Islip hers, discarding most of what had been Ælfthryth’s and furnishing both hall and her private chamber with expensive care. All the comfort available, however, could not take away the agony that was now tearing her body apart. Her insides were being ripped open; she had sweated and gasped through the onset of labour yesterday afternoon, and had screamed through the long night. The pain had gone on and on, unstoppable and relentless for over eighteen hours. She was too tired to scream now, too tired to do anything.

On the far side of the chamber the two midwives were talking together, deciding between them what was best to do, their voices no more than a whisper.

“The babe is wrong within her, the arm is in the way, the head cannot push through.” The eldest, a thin, elderly woman with white hair and prune-wrinkled skin, shook her head at her daughter. Both experienced birthing women who, between them, had brought most of the children in and around Oxford into the world.

They had already tried most of their knowledge and arts to ease the labour; rubbing Emma’s abdomen and women’s parts with sweet-smelling oils, spooning spiced drinks into her mouth. In her hand, Emma clutched a small stone of jasper for its beneficial powers and, bound beneath her right foot, an unused new wax tablet with the words of a prayer scratched on it:

Mary a virgin bore Christ, the barren Elizabeth bore John.

I charge thee, infant, if thou be male or female,

by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that thou come forth.

So far, none of it was working.

Emma whimpered as another contraction heaved through her trembling body. She would have wept, but did not have the energy for that either. Her hair, long since come unbraided, was tangled; her linen under-shift, soiled with blood, sweat, and urine, was moulded to her drenched skin. Did all women go through this? Or was this torture visited on her because the child had been conceived through violence? That fact Emma could not shift from her mind. Were babes formed from love born with love? As Gunnhilda’s children had been? There had been no love when this child was started. Was this the Holy Mother’s punishment for her not wanting the wretched thing? The conception had been painful, frightening, and humiliating, the nine months between resented, and now she had this agony to endure.

A few hours ago, during the slow-passing creep of darkness, she had asked, through her cracked lips and dry throat, if Æthelred had been summoned. Had received the answer that he was not expected to arrive until daylight. Would it help to have him there in the hall below? To know he was listening to her pain? She doubted he would come, though he was only a few miles away at Hedingham. The snow would prevent him and his lack of concern. He already had sons and daughters. What did it matter to him if she was suffering to give him one more? If she lost her life because of this child, it would be no more than a nuisance to Æthelred.

Emma shut her eyes and, throwing her head back and arching her body into the pain, screamed again.

“We will try once more to move the arm,” the elder midwife said, masking her inner doubts that, as before, it would be no use. “But first I will go down and ask the priest to double his efforts for prayer. We need the aid of Jesu’s good Lady Mother.”

To the woman’s surprise, there were new arrivals, a party come not more than a few minutes before, their cloaks and hats snow-covered, their hands and faces blue-tinged with cold. They were clustered around the hearth-fire, servants scuttling to fetch broth and warmed wine, their backs to the narrow, dark stairway that led to the chamber above. The midwife assumed them to be the royal party and hurried forward, relieved that Æthelred himself could make a decision about what was best to do for a babe who would not leave its birth bed.

She had little faith in being able to move the trapped arm. In her own mind there was only one thing left to do: to remove the arm with a sharp blade while it was still in the womb. The child would undoubtedly bleed to death, but it was probably dead already.

To her disappointment it was not the King. The man who turned to face her approaching footsteps was older, thinner, and taller. He wore the clothing and insignia of a high holy man, and she realised, with elation, that this was someone even better—Archbishop Wulfstan of York!

She fell to her knees at his feet, grasping the hem of his gown in her fingers and lifting it to her lips. “My Lord, we desperately need your prayers. My lady is suffering greatly; I have reason to fear for her safe deliverance.”

“It is for women to endure to repay the anguish Eve brought to mankind, but do not fear; I have brought something with me that may be of help.”

Wulfstan beckoned a servant, no less cold and snow-covered, who, with numbed fingers, brought something forth from a small leather bag.

“This,” Wulfstan announced, “is the very girdle our Holy Mother wore when she bore Christ.” He took the length of braiding and handed it, with reverence, to the midwife. “Allow the Queen to wear it, and I am certain all will become well, if it be God’s will.”

Delighted, smiling broadly, she bobbed a reverence and, at a hobbling run, returned upstairs.

“Look,” she cried, showing the intricately plaited threads of faded blue and red and green to Emma. “See what Wulfstan of York has brought you?” Deftly, she tied the thing around Emma’s waist and indicated to her daughter that with the cessation of the next contraction she was to try to release the babe’s arm.

Emma shrank from the intrusive hand, the scream shrieking from her, but almost immediately the pain subsided and then eased almost entirely.

Squatting on her haunches, the younger midwife grinned and, murmuring a prayer of thanks, stated, “I have done it! The way is open for the head to present as it ought!”

The contractions resumed, quicker, more insistent, but easier to bear—the head was there, wet, dark hair, the shoulders covered in slime and filth, and the child was born. It took its first breath and wailed pitifully. A boy. Emma had given birth to a son. Edward.

Quite the ugliest, most unpleasant thing she had ever seen.

August 1005—Thorney Island

Staring dismally at the fading daylight beyond the window, Emma watched as a heron stalked solemnly through the rushes along the mudbanked Thames. The water was low, despite it being high tide downriver towards London. Thorney, usually an island, was surrounded by dry land, the marshes stretching to either side, a brown, shrivelled expanse of straw-coloured earth. Even the trees, for lack of water, drooped with sad, crinkled, parchment-like leaves. Only the river frontage was green with reed and rush and summer water plants. The river itself, crystal clear, reflected the azure blue of the wide sky.

Few birds flew, for it was too hot. No breeze stirred; all southern England lay dehydrated, thirsty, and desperate for rain that had not fallen in over ten weeks. The rivers, even this, the grandfather River Thames, were low and shallow; some had dried completely, leaving nothing of their existence except a course of hard-baked, cracked mud. Where water still flowed it had become an ambling, sluggish trickle, where once it had gushed and tumbled.

All but the deepest wells had run dry, grassland meadows were browned into withered stubble, and the young green crops had died. No grass to feed the cattle, goats, and sheep that were growing thin and calling for water. No milk for calves or churn. No grain for flour, nothing to harvest. Nature had turned her benign bounty into the dust of death.

In the wake of drought, the evil of plague had crept across Wessex and Kent with its slow, menacing tread, spreading unstoppable through Sussex, Wilt-Shire, and Hamp-Shire. Had leered awhile at London, then drifted onwards, up through the county of Essex, to slither into Suffolk and Norfolk, taking all who fell in its virulent path.

Emma sat with her hands limp in her lap, her linen gown unlaced at her throat, her head, with her hair plaited into two braids, uncovered. Her palace bedchamber faced east and was, this late in the afternoon, in thankful shade. Death, if only he would come for her, would not be unwelcome. It was not death, nor its manner, that frightened her, but birth. She put her hand, the fingers bone-thin, on her abdomen, could feel nothing, no swelling, no movement, but the new child was there, growing inside her. Her lips barely moving, she counted the dates on those same fingers. February it would be born. Next February, in the year of our Lord 1006.

Perhaps if she could weep, she would be purged of this weight that lay like a milkmaid’s yoke across her shoulders, but her eyes and her heart were as empty of moisture as the scorched earth.

Æthelred had claimed his rights as a husband soon after she had been purified by her churching. He had been drunk, foul-breathed, and crude, had not listened to her pleading to be left alone, that she could not face bearing another child so soon, not while the memory of Edward’s birthing remained so vivid.

What do men know of a woman’s labour? What, beyond the act of begetting, do they care?

“If you had been there,” she had cried, “you would know the pain I went through.”

“As we face the pain of the battlefield,” he had retorted, his hands clasped tight, too tight, on her wrists. “We do not flinch when it is our duty to put on armour and take up sword and shield. Nor should you shy from your duty to your husband.”

The sky, eight miles away toward the northeastern horizon, where the forest of Epping garlanded the hills of the Lea and Roding valleys, was grey and hazy. From heat or gathering clouds? Æthelred was there in the woods, hunting for deer, although his huntsman had thought the creatures had gone further north, following the shaded trails and the scent of water. Æthelred had been angry because she had not wanted to go with him. She would have to tell him, when he returned, that her monthly course had not appeared and she was probably with child. He would expect another son.

In the courtyard below the window Athelstan was about to mount his stallion. He had the boys with him, Edmund and Godwine. The two lads were more like brothers than friends. Godwine, she had once hoped, would be her loyal friend, too, but her hopes had been swept aside on the day Edward had been born. A son was a threat to Athelstan, and Edmund’s sense of honour gave his loyalty to his brother. Where Edmund led, Godwine followed. For her part, Emma could not see the reasoning behind Athelstan’s fear of the child; all it did was puke, whimper, or scream. If ever Emma steeled her resolve to take up the boy into her arms, it shrilled louder, as if it were being agonisingly put to death. She knew it was a wicked thing to admit, but if plague or famine should take her son, she would not weep for his passing.

He was fretting now, on the far side of the room, where his wet nurse was attempting to soothe him. His fists were bunched, his puny legs waving, his mouth open in a thin, high wail.

As a woman, Emma ought not to be concerned at the sight of a girl feeding a babe, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop the rising sense of revulsion. The girl’s breasts repulsed her. She was Emma’s age, no more than six and ten, but already she had borne several children, all of whom, apparently, had not survived beyond the first year of life. The child she had brought into the world a day after Edward’s birthing had been born dead. Emma considered it a cruel torture of nature to deprive a mother of her nine-month child, but to still bring in the flow of milk. On the dexter side of the coin, the girl had been available to nurse the young princeling.

Steadfastly, Emma watched out of the window opening, observing the sky darkening over the horizon. Was rain to come? If it did, it was too late for the harvest. She could not watch her son, not while the boy fed. Those huge milk-filled breasts were like grotesque cow’s udders, the girl producing first one, then the other with such pride from her unlaced gown and fitting the milk-dripping teat into the babe’s mouth, swamping his face with bulging flesh. Emma shuddered, looked down at her own slender figure. They had bound her breasts tight with linen bands soon after the birth. When her milk had come in, the heat of the need to lactate had been almost as bad as the birthing, but the swollen mammary glands had soon subsided; her belly, too, had rapidly regained its shape, although it would never be as flat as before she had carried a child. Now pregnancy had happened again.

Lightning flashed a zigzag path in the distant sky, soon after a low, rumbling growl of thunder. Rain. Too much of it, and the little that remained of the summer crops would be washed away.

She would pray each day, ask for blessings, light candles; her quandary, whether to seek the protection of the Mother Mary during her labour or beg the easier option of asking God to take her to His side. Day by day, death and despair reaped their innocent victims. Could she not, please, be one of them?

December 1005—Oxford

Why could they not reside at Woodstock or Islip? Emma hated it here. Why must they stay at Eadric Streona’s Oxford manor, where so many horrendous memories clung with bloodied talons to the city walls? The atmosphere in the town, less than a single mile from the manor’s gate, was as thick as rancid butter. Oh, it might all be rebuilt now, the houses, the church—a new Saint Frideswide, basking in the glory of being reconstructed in stone, but the resentment against Æthelred and his devoted Eadric Streona was there, oozing beneath the surface like pus festering in an ill-healed wound. It made Emma feel sick to see the wretched man. He was pretentious and without conscience, so obsequious, so humble, twisting Æthelred round his finger as if he were a skein of wool. The pair of them oblivious to the sullen mumbling of Oxford’s people. But then the pair of them together had skin thicker than a scabby old boar.