Bernard Cornwell - Death of Kings

Steapa had tears on his cheeks. Some of the priests kneeling about the coffin were openly weeping. ‘They’ll make a grave for him tonight,’ Steapa said, pointing towards the high altar that was heaped with the glittering reliquaries that Alfred had loved.

‘They’re burying him in here?’ I asked.

‘There’s a vault,’ he said, ‘but it has to be opened. Once the new church is finished he’ll be taken there.’

‘And the funeral is tomorrow?’

‘Maybe a week. They need time so folk can travel here.’

We stayed a long time in the church, greeting men who came to mourn, and at midday the new king arrived with a group of nobles. Edward was tall, long-faced, thin-lipped and had very black hair that he wore brushed back. He looked so young to me. He wore a blue robe that was belted with a gold-panelled strip of leather, and over it a black cape that hung to the floor. He wore no crown, for he was not yet crowned, but had a bronze circlet about his skull.

I recognised most of the ealdormen who accompanied him, Æthelnoth, Wilfrith and, of course, Edward’s future father-in-law, Æthelhelm, who walked beside Father Coenwulf who was Edward’s confessor and guardian. There was a half-dozen younger men I did not know, and then I saw my cousin, Æthelred, and he saw me at the same moment and checked. Edward, walking towards his father’s coffin, beckoned him on. Steapa and I both went down on one knee and stayed there as Edward knelt at the foot of his father’s coffin and put his hands together in prayer. His guard all knelt. No one spoke. The choir was chanting interminably as incense smoke drifted in the sun-shafted air.

Æthelred’s eyes were closed in pretend prayer. The look on his face was bitter and strangely aged, perhaps because he had been ill and was, as Alfred his father-in-law had been, prone to bouts of sickness. I watched him, wondering. He must have hoped that Alfred’s death would loosen the leash that tied Mercia to Wessex. He must have been hoping that there would be two coronations, one in Wessex and another in Mercia, and he must have known that Edward knew all that. What stood in his way was his wife, who was beloved in Mercia, and who he had tried to make powerless by immuring her in Saint Hedda’s convent, and the other obstacle was his wife’s lover.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Edward had opened his eyes, though his hands were still clasped in prayer.

‘Lord?’ I asked.

‘You will stay for the burial?’

‘If you wish, lord.’

‘I do wish,’ he said.

‘And then you must go to your estate in Fagranforda,’ he went on. ‘I am sure you have much to do there.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The Lord Æthelred,’ Edward spoke firmly and loudly, ‘will stay to counsel me for a few weeks. I have need of wise counsel and I can think of none more able to deliver it.’

That was a lie. A spavined idiot could give better counsel than Æthelred, but of course Edward did not want my cousin’s advice. He wanted Æthelred where he could see him, where it would be difficult for Æthelred to foment unrest, and he was sending me to Mercia because he trusted me to keep Mercia on the West Saxon leash. And because he knew that if I went to Mercia so would his sister. I kept a very straight face.

A sparrow flew in the high church roof and its dropping, wet and white, fell on Alfred’s dead face, spattering messily from his nose to his left cheek.

An omen so bad, so terrible, that every man about the coffin held his breath.

And just then one of Steapa’s guards came into the church and hurried up the long nave, but did not kneel. Instead he looked from Edward to Æthelred, and from Æthelred to me, and he seemed not to know what to say until Steapa growled at him to speak.

‘The Lady Æthelflaed,’ the man said.

‘What of her?’ Edward asked.

‘The Lord Æthelwold took her by force, lord, from the convent. Took her, lord. And they’ve gone.’

So the struggle for Wessex had begun.

Æthelred laughed. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction, but in that old church the sound echoed mockingly from the lower walls that were made of stone. When the sound died away all I could hear was water dripping onto the floor from the rain-soaked thatch.

Edward looked at me, then at Æthelred, finally at Æthelhelm. He appeared confused.

‘Where did Lord Æthelwold go?’ Steapa asked usefully.

‘The nuns said he was going to Tweoxnam,’ the messenger said.

‘But he gave me his oath!’ Edward protested.

‘He was always a lying bastard,’ I said. I looked at the man who had brought the news. ‘He told the nuns he was going to Tweoxnam?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘He said the same to me,’ I said.

Edward gathered himself. ‘I want every man armed and mounted,’ he told Steapa, ‘and ready to ride to Tweoxnam.’

‘Is that his only estate, lord King?’ I asked.

‘He owns Wimburnan,’ Edward said, ‘why?’

‘Isn’t his father buried at Wimburnan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s where he’s gone,’ I said. ‘He told us Tweoxnam because he wants to confuse us. If you abduct someone you don’t tell your pursuers where you’re taking them.’

‘Why abduct Æthelflaed?’ Edward was looking lost again.

‘Because he wants Mercia on his side,’ I said. ‘Is she friendly to him?’

‘Friendly? We all tried to be,’ Edward said. ‘He’s our cousin.’

‘He thinks he can persuade her to bring Mercia to his cause,’ I suggested, and did not add that it would not just be Mercia. If Æthelflaed declared for her cousin then many in Wessex would be persuaded to support him.’

‘We go to Tweoxnam?’ Steapa asked uncertainly.

Edward hesitated, then shook his head and looked to me. ‘The two places are very close,’ he said, still hesitant, but then remembered he was a king and made up his mind. ‘We ride to Wimburnan,’ he said.

‘And I go with you, lord King,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Æthelred blurted the question before he had the sense or time to think what he was asking. The king and the ealdormen looked embarrassed.

I let the question hang till its echo had faded, then smiled. ‘To protect the honour of the king’s sister, of course,’ I said, and I was still laughing when we rode out.

It took time, it always takes time. Horses had to be saddled, mail donned and banners fetched, and while the royal housecarls readied themselves I went with Osferth to Saint Hedda’s where Abbess Hildegyth was in tears. ‘He said she was wanted at the church,’ she explained to me, ‘that the family was praying together for her father’s soul.’

‘You did nothing wrong,’ I told her.

‘But he’s taken her!’

‘He won’t hurt her,’ I reassured her.

‘But…’ her voice faded, and I knew she was remembering the shame of being raped by the Danes so many years before.

‘She’s Alfred’s daughter,’ I said, ‘and he wants her help, not her enmity. Her support gives him legitimacy.’

‘She’s still a hostage,’ Hild said.

‘Yes, but we’ll get her back.’

‘How?’

I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, showing Hild the silver cross embedded in the pommel, a cross she had given me so long ago. ‘With this,’ I said, meaning the sword, not the cross.

‘You shouldn’t wear a sword in a nunnery,’ she said with mock sternness.

‘There are many things I shouldn’t do in a nunnery,’ I told her, ‘but I did most of them anyway.’

She sighed. ‘What does Æthelwold hope to gain?’

Osferth answered. ‘He hopes to persuade her that he should be the king. And he hopes she will persuade Lord Uhtred to support him.’ He glanced at me and, at that moment, looked astonishingly like his father. ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he went on drily, ‘he’ll offer to make it possible for the Lord Uhtred and the Lady Æthelflaed to marry, and will probably hold out the throne of Mercia as an enticement. He doesn’t just want the Lady Æthelflaed’s support, he wants Lord Uhtred’s too.’