Patricia Bracewell - Shadow on the Crown

Then again, Æthelred knew, he might not.

The hubbub in the hall, which had been muffled while the men filled their bellies, rose again as the meal came to a close and the drinking began in earnest. Æthelred motioned to his cupbearer to refill his drinking horn, then eased himself back in his chair and glowered at the men around him from hooded eyes, focusing at last on Ælfhelm of Northumbria. The ealdorman had risen from his bench and stood now in earnest consultation with a knot of nobles and clergy. His face was as craggy as a weathered scarp and just as difficult to read. Æthelred had never been able to decipher the subtle workings of the mind behind that stonelike visage, but he would wager half of Wessex that tonight Ælfhelm was garnering support for his daughter’s marriage to the crown.

And he would find it, certainly. It was customary for England’s king to choose his bride from one of the noble families of the realm. Æthelred’s wife and his mother both had been daughters of northern lords. Their fathers, though, would have been more pliable than Lord Ælfhelm. It seemed to the king that Ælfhelm was not mortal, but carved from granite and stone. Æthelred neither liked nor trusted the man, although he was careful to hide this. And while the king understood that it was wise to bind his enemies close, it seemed to him that the marriage bed might be too close for comfort. Ælfhelm had sons as well as a daughter, sons who, like their father, hungered for the power that came with a royal marriage. That power, combined with the family’s wealth and northern allegiances, could be more trouble than any girl was worth.

As for the girl herself, the last time the king had seen Elgiva she had been all of thirteen summers old. She had looked far older though, her body full and womanly, her mouth as red and voluptuous as ripe fruit. She was a woman born for bedding, and had she been older he might have forgotten himself and obliged her. But her youth had stopped him. That and her obvious awareness of the power she had over men, which had chilled his ardour somewhat. Now, at sixteen, wealthy and beautiful, with powerful kin and with family lands that rivalled his own, if he did not marry her himself he should have to watch her carefully. Whatever man she did marry must have no pretensions to the throne, or Æthelred might find his very crown at risk.

The king took another long pull at his cup. As for the unmarried sisters of Richard of Normandy, there were two of them, and that was all he knew about them. He knew something of Richard, though – a pretentious upstart sprung from Danish raiders who had decimated the northern territories of the Frankish kingdom, and then settled there to breed horses and brats. Richard’s pedigree was nothing like Æthelred’s noble ancestry, and although Richard himself was a Christian and styled himself ‘duke’, he was little more than a Danish pirate. In his youth he had even gone a-viking, raiding the Irish coast for gold and slaves, and he had ever welcomed the dragon ships to his harbours. Even now, rumour had it, there were Danish longships, their holds filled with English plunder, sheltering along Normandy’s coast. So to wed one of Richard’s sisters and plant a babe in her belly might be wise. It might give the Norman duke a more personal interest in the security of England’s shores.

Æthelred frowned. To take a Norman bride would offend his northern lords and bind them more strongly to each other – and against him. To wed Ælfhelm’s daughter instead of the Norman girl would be to throw away perhaps his only opportunity to quell the Viking threat to his kingdom. There was peril whichever way he turned, north or south. Taking any wife at all would be a devil’s bargain, and if it were up to him, he would not do it. He was the king. He wanted no woman in his hall.

He drank again, deeply, from the gold-rimmed horn, but the sweet mead that should have sent fire racing through his blood did not warm him. Instead, a chill, cold as the mouth of a grave, snaked along his arms and grazed an icy finger up his spine. A heaviness oppressed him, an inescapable black dread, and he whispered a curse against the sending that he knew was come upon him and that he could not escape. His vision blurred to haze, the sounds of feasting stilled, and from every dark corner, shadows streamed towards him until they reached the dais and formed a pulsing darkness before him. From its murky heart, his dead brother’s face, eyes glowing and malignant, stared into his.

He tried to pray, to curse, but he could make no sound except the formless, silent howl that was the voice of nightmare. The drinking horn slipped from his hand, yet he did not hear it fall. He heard only a low keening, like the sound of the wind hurtling against white cliffs above a pounding sea. It grew until it filled his brain, and again he tried to cry out, clutching his head in his hands as other hands grasped him, and the black phantom before him rippled and then faded at last.

Alarmed voices rang in his ears, and someone held a cup to his mouth, urging him to drink, but he dashed the cup away and shook off the hands that would tend him. Desperate to distract them, he called for music and was rewarded by the strum of the harp and the chanting of his scop .

His men scattered back to their places, but as Æthelred cast a furtive glance around the room, the eyes that met his were guarded and troubled. What did they think they had seen? A king besotted and drowned in his cups? A man overcome with grief at the death of his wife?

Better that than a king haunted by his brother’s ghost.

Three times now the thing that had been his brother had appeared thus before him, staring with glistening eyes. He had seen it first a month ago, hovering like some monstrous bird above his mother as she lay dying. Three days later, when he followed the dowager queen’s body to its resting place at Wherwell Abbey, he had glimpsed Edward’s face glaring at him, a darker shade among the chapel shadows. And tonight it had come again to torment him. Was it to be his wyrd , his fate, to be visited for ever by his dead brother now that he alone remained alive of those who had seen Edward die?

What was it that drew the dead forth to walk among the living? And what would it take to send the thing back into its grave?

His thoughts flew to his dead wife, Ælfgifu, lying cold and still upon her bier. Tomorrow he would take her body by ship to its resting place at Minster Abbey. Would the spectre of his brother be waiting there for him, as it had waited at Wherwell? He shuddered at the thought of it. Tonight he would pray for redemption, beseech forgiveness and mercy from God for the death of his brother. He would even plead for the repose of his mother’s soul, although he had no doubt that she was tasting the torments of hell.

Elgiva of Northampton – great-granddaughter of Wulfsige the Black, granddaughter of the Lady Wulfrun of Tamworth, and only daughter of Ælfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria – stood at her chamber window and saw with satisfaction that a heavy snow was once more piling up against her father’s manor walls. The massive drifts would keep the men indoors for several days, and that suited her purpose exactly.

She sat down upon a stool and gestured to a servant to latch the wooden shutter against the cold. Pulling her thick woollen shawl closer about her, she tried to control her impatience as her old nurse stood behind her and used deft fingers to tame her mass of dark curls. She must look her best at tonight’s Yule feast. There were royal visitors awaiting her in the hall, and if events played out as she intended, she would soon be sharing her bed with the eldest son of the king. After that it would be a simple enough matter for her father to negotiate whatever details were necessary to arrange a royal marriage.