Patricia Bracewell - Shadow on the Crown

Watching from within their abbey walls, the monks of Jumièges and of Saint-Wandrille contemplated the loss of their apple crop, bowed their heads, and prayed for acceptance of God’s will. Peasant farmers, huddling together for warmth in frail, wooden cottages and fearing that the end of the world was come, prayed for deliverance. In the newly built ducal palace at Fécamp, where Duke Richard and his family had gathered to celebrate the season of Christ’s Mass, the duke’s fifteen-year-old sister, Emma, quietly pulled heavy boots over her thick woollen leggings and prayed that she would not waken her sleeping sister – to no avail.

‘What are you doing?’ Mathilde’s voice, raw and resonating with elder sister disapproval, emerged from a thick nest of bedclothes.

Emma continued to tug at a boot.

‘I am going down to the stables,’ she said.

She threw her sister a sidelong glance, trying to gauge her mood. Mathilde’s thin brown hair was pulled into a tight braid that gave her face a drawn, pinched look and added to the severity of the frown that she cast upon her younger sister.

‘You cannot go out in this storm,’ Mathilde protested. ‘You will catch your death.’ She started to say more but was racked by a sudden, cruel fit of coughing.

Emma went to her, snatched up the cup of watered wine from a table beside the bed, and held it for her sister to drink.

‘The snow has stopped,’ she said, as Mathilde sipped from the cup. ‘I will be fine.’

And unlike Mathilde, Emma thought to herself, she rarely took sick. Poor Mathilde. It was her misfortune to be the only small, dark-haired, sickly child in her mother’s brood of blond, vigorous giants – eight brothers and sisters, all told.

When her sister had drunk her fill, Emma snatched up a shawl from the foot of the bed and threw it over her thick, bright hair.

‘You are going to check on your wretched horse, I suppose.’ Mathilde’s voice was little more than a throaty growl. ‘I do not see why. God knows all of those creatures are tended with as much care as if they were children. It is mean of you to leave me here all alone.’

Emma, who loved the outdoors, who loved horses, dogs, and hunting, and who was happiest when she was riding along the Norman shore beneath high chalk cliffs, knew better than to try to explain her errand to Mathilde, who detested all of those things. Emma was sorry that Mathilde was ill and bored, but she would go mad if she could not breathe some fresh air and be alone for just a little while. The two of them had been pent up together within doors for three full days.

She lifted a heavy, fur-lined black cloak from its peg on the wall and threw it over her shoulders.

‘I will not be gone long,’ she said.

Mathilde, though, had thought of another objection.

‘What if the shipmen return while you are down there?’ she demanded. ‘You cannot trust those Danish brutes not to molest you if they come upon you alone and unprotected.’

Emma fastened her cloak beneath her chin, pondering this warning.

The Danish king, Swein Forkbeard, had petitioned her brother for winter harbour along Normandy’s northern coast, and Duke Richard, unwilling to offend the fierce warrior king, had granted it. To Richard’s fury, though, Forkbeard’s own ship and a dozen more had sailed into Fécamp’s harbour two days ago, forcing her brother out of courtesy to invite the king to join his family at the palace.

The king had accepted swiftly and had settled into her brother’s great hall with a score of his companions – rough, hard-faced warriors with only the thinnest gloss of civilization about them in spite of the wealth of gold that they flaunted on their wrists and arms. Mathilde, sick with the ague, had kept to her bed. Richard’s wife, Judith, only a few weeks out of childbed, had done the same. So it was Emma’s mother, Dowager Duchess Gunnora, with only her youngest daughter at her side, who had offered the king the welcome cup upon his arrival in the hall. The duchess, proud of her Danish heritage and her blood ties to the Danish throne, nevertheless had no illusions about Swein Forkbeard. She presented Emma to him with formal courtesy, then banished her daughter to the private quarters with all of the other young women.

Emma had not been sorry to go. Forkbeard had greeted her with cold, fiercely calculating eyes and a silent nod. His brooding gaze seemed to weigh her, as if she were not a woman but a commodity that could be bought and sold – a trinket that he might purchase in the market at Rouen. She had coloured beneath his fixed, brutal stare, and had wanted to take to her heels to escape it. But she had forced herself to walk slowly from the hall, chin held high, acutely aware of the shipmen all around her who raked her with merciless eyes.

These were men who made their living by murder and rape, men who had been baptized to Christ but whose souls still belonged to heathen gods, or so she had heard. Their grim, weather-scarred faces had haunted her dreams that night, and like her brothers, she wished that Forkbeard and his shipmen had never come to Fécamp. Today, though, the palace was emptied of Danes.

‘The shipmen have gone to the harbour to inspect their vessels for storm damage. They will likely not return until dark. I will be back long before that, and I promise I will keep you company then until we put out the candles.’ With that she slipped from the room before Mathilde could think of any other objections.

The courtyard was deserted as she made her way towards the stables, and the air was so frigid that it hurt to breathe. She followed the wall, grasping at its stones with one hand as she navigated the slippery mud and slush that had been churned up by men and horses. Emma’s snow-white mare, Ange, whickered a greeting, and Emma nuzzled the horse’s neck, warming her face against its thick winter coat. A moment later, though, she heard a commotion in the stable yard that worried her.

Could the men have returned so soon? Surely not all of them. They would have made a great deal more clamour.

Using Ange as a screen, Emma peered towards the wide doorway and saw Richard and Swein Forkbeard leading their mounts towards the stable. She had always thought her brother quite tall, but the Danish king bested him by half a head. They were the same age – both of them very old by her reckoning, for Richard had been born more than twenty years before Emma. But the king of the Danes, with his white hair and long white beard, worn forked and braided, looked far older. There was a sternness about Swein Forkbeard’s countenance, a hard-eyed ruthlessness that frightened her. He even frightened Richard, she was certain, although he masked it with courtesy.

She had no wish to greet the Danish king again, or to face her brother’s wrath at finding her here, so she shied behind her horse to wait for them to go away. They seemed in no hurry, in spite of the cold. Richard, in halting Danish, was relating the pedigree of the king’s mount and doing his best to explain what he looked for in breeding his horse stock.

She smiled at her brother’s clumsy efforts with Swein’s tongue. Like all of the Duchess Gunnora’s children, he had learned Danish at his mother’s knee. And like most of his siblings, he had abandoned it at an early age. Emma had been the only one to embrace it, and she could speak as fluently in Danish as she could in Frankish or Breton or Latin. She had even learned some of the English used by prelates who sometimes visited her brother from across the Narrow Sea.

Neither Richard nor her brother Robert, the archbishop, knew of Emma’s gift of tongues, as her mother called it. Gunnora had advised Emma to keep this remarkable skill a secret. Use it to listen, she had said, rather than to speak. You will be surprised at what you will learn.