Shadow on the Crown

April 1002

Canterbury, Kent

On Easter Monday over one hundred women crowded into the great hall of the archbishop’s palace to greet Æthelred’s bride. Elgiva arrived late, with Groa in her wake. As she tried to make her way towards the dais, a fat matron stinking of cloves pressed hard against her, and the sharply sweet smell of the spice was almost Elgiva’s undoing. In an instant she was a child again, hiding in her mother’s clothes coffer – unable to move, scarce able to breathe, too weak to free herself, and enveloped by darkness, the scent of cloves, and a mindless panic.

That same panic clawed at her now, and she began to whimper as she tried to twist away from the stench of the spice and from the crowd that engulfed her. Sickened and faint, she pulled her own cloak against her face, but it did little to block the pungent smell of cloves. She felt her gorge rise and she thought she would be sick, but Groa took her hand and squeezed it to steady her.

‘Let us make for the wall,’ Groa said urgently. ‘You will be able to breathe there.’

Frantic and dizzy, she blindly followed Groa as the old woman doggedly elbowed her way past a score of protesting noblewomen. She felt herself growing more and more faint, but she clung to Groa’s hand, and at last they reached the wall. The next thing she knew Groa had cleared a bench of gawkers and helped her up. A blast of frigid air from a narrow window scored her face, and she drew in a long breath that was deliciously free of the stink of cloves and wet wool.

Slowly her light-headedness began to dissipate, and she rested her now throbbing head against the wall as Groa joined her on the bench to watch the proceedings taking place at the top of the room. When Elgiva saw the new queen, though, her gorge rose again. Emma, flanked by guards and attendants, sat enthroned beneath a golden canopy. Regally swathed in a deep blue mantle, her blond hair braided into two long plaits, she wore upon her head the same golden circlet that the archbishop had placed there yesterday.

‘It should have been you,’ Groa said softly.

And that was the truth of it. That bland, pasty-faced Norman witch had cheated her out of her destiny. Who would have imagined that Æthelred would take a foreign bride, and then make her a queen? It should never have happened. The king had made the wrong choice, and her father was not the only one who said so. By now even the king must realize his error. She had not missed the way his eyes had lingered on her face yesterday when she stood with his sons below the royal table. If he did not already regret his choice of bride, he surely would in time.

An endless parade of women made obeisance before the queen, presented their gifts and received tokens from the queen in return – a pin or a brooch, and always of silver. The queen, it seemed, knew how to purchase affection. Well, Emma would not purchase Elgiva’s affection, no matter how precious the gift.

Dear God! How long would she be forced to live in the queen’s household? Months, certainly. Maybe even years.

She felt ill again at the thought of having to scrape and bow before Emma, but even that, she supposed, was better than mouldering away in Northamptonshire. This queen, at least, was young – not like Æthelred’s last wife, who had been older, even, than the king.

And like it or not, she would be one of the queen’s household. Her father had made that clear when they broke their fast together this morning.

‘You must be my eyes and my ears at court,’ he had said, ‘for I journey north at week’s end until the witan gathers again in summer. I want you to make every effort to gain the trust of the queen. She is little more than a hostage for her brother’s good behaviour now, but if she gives the king a son, there is no telling what power she might wield.’

‘God forbid,’ Elgiva had murmured, ‘that she should give Æthelred a son.’

Her father had merely shrugged and left her. She had dawdled over her food, pondering her father’s words and wondering if she might eventually manoeuvre herself into Athelstan’s bed, and if not his, mayhap the king’s. She was toying with that possibility again as Groa touched her arm.

‘You had best go forward, my lady,’ Groa urged, ‘if you wish to make your obeisance before the queen. I will lead you through the crowd.’ She held out the gift that Elgiva would present to the bride.

Elgiva took another long gulp of air and allowed Groa to help her from her perch. She cared not what her father wanted. She would not smile and fawn before this queen like the other fools here. She had heard their talk yesterday – the whispers about the beautiful young queen and her noble lineage. Emma, they said, had been named after her mother, the Frankish king’s sister, who had wed Emma’s father when the two were little more than children.

That was nothing but a skald’s tale, invented out of sunbeams and moondust and probably spread abroad by the king himself to enhance his bride’s prestige. Groa had nosed out the truth of it, and Elgiva intended to make sure that the women of the court learned the queen’s secret.

When she finally reached the canopied throne, and the steward had announced her name and titles, she made her obligatory courtesy before Emma, but she did not smile. She would not simper for this queen, although she had chosen the bridal gift with great care. She rose from her obeisance and held up the small, intricately carved ivory casket. On its lid a fierce dragon ship sailed upon an ivory sea, and along the casket’s back and sides a monster of the deep twisted and writhed.

‘I bring you a treasure from Jorvik, the capital of my father’s vast district of Northumbria,’ she said, pitching her voice so that the women all around her would be able to hear. ‘It is of Danish workmanship, and therefore a fitting tribute for our Danish queen. Your mother, I am told, is a Dane. Is this not so?’

The words echoed in the room, and Emma felt a tremor in their wake, like the tingling in the air just before a lightning bolt strikes. There was little love for the Danes in Æthelred’s England, and Emma suspected that her Danish mother had probably been kept a royal secret – until now. Few outside of Normandy would concern themselves with the marriage practices of the Norman duke who had had two wives at the same time – one a Danish heiress who brought him lands and children and the other a barren Frankish princess whom he had not wanted.

Emma looked into the dark, triumphant eyes of the girl who stood before her and saw there the same contempt that she had read in Ealdorman Ælfhelm’s face the night before. Like father, like daughter, then. She had yet to discover the source of their enmity, but she would have to begin to deal with it this very moment.

‘It is true, Lady Elgiva, that my mother was born a Dane. I, however, was born a Norman,’ she emphasized the last word, and now she stood up so that she could be seen easily, directing her next words to all the women in the hall. ‘Yesterday, when I wed your king, I was born anew before God and all the world as an English woman and an English queen.’ The room erupted in riotous applause, and Emma acknowledged it with a smile before she turned solemn eyes upon the Lady Elgiva. ‘I thank you, lady, for your gift. It symbolizes, I trust, your allegiance to me and to my husband. In token of my acknowledgement of your honoured position among my attendants, I bid you accept this ring.’

Emma slipped a gold ring from her finger and placed it in Elgiva’s palm. She doubted that the gesture would win the young woman’s friendship, never mind her allegiance. Nevertheless, she had to make the effort, for Elgiva was to be part of her retinue, and live in the queen’s quarters. It would be, she feared, akin to living with a beautiful bird that had an unfortunate tendency to bite.

Æthelred let his three eldest sons stew for several days before summoning them to his private chamber. As they had been in no hurry to attend his nuptials, he would let them wait upon his pleasure to question them about it.

He knew that they resented his queen, fearing that any son Emma might bear would have a stronger claim to the throne than their own.

Nevertheless, he was still the one wearing the crown, still the one his sons needed to placate, not the other way round. Apparently they needed to be reminded of that.

Eyeing them as they came into the room, he said not a word. Let them sweat a little while longer. Athelstan met his gaze unblinkingly, but there was an uneasy question in his eyes. Edmund, the dark one, did not dare to even lift his head. Ecbert smiled sheepishly until Æthelred’s glare wiped the idiotic grin from his face.

‘What is it that you would say to me?’ Æthelred growled, addressing Athelstan, whose uncanny resemblance to the dead Edward continued to gall him, like a constant reproach.

‘Why did you give her a crown?’ Athelstan demanded.

Edmund flinched, and well he might. The question was far too raw. Æthelred kept his temper, but only just.

‘Is it thus that you question the policy of your king, as if you were my equal? Who in Christ’s name do you think you are to do so?’

‘I am your heir,’ Athelstan replied, bristling like a hedgehog. ‘I have every right to ask such a question. You have taken a Norman bride to your bed and made her your queen. What do you expect me to do, wish you happiness? Shall I pretend that my own interests are not at stake?’

‘You have no interests beyond those that I give you,’ Æthelred thundered back at him. ‘You have no monies nor estates nor powers other than those that have been granted by me. Christ! You are too young to even have a thought in your head that does not agree with my wishes.’

‘You are wrong there, my lord. Indeed, I have many thoughts, and almost none of them, I expect, agree with your wishes.’

‘Then it should have come as no surprise to you,’ Æthelred spat, ‘that I did not seek your counsel before I made my decision to wed.’

His son flushed, his expression wounded. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘it did surprise me. It surprised all of us. For weeks we waited for a summons from you, my lord, requesting us to attend your council. Yet it did not come. Tell me then: whose counsel did you seek? Which of your brilliant advisers encouraged you to grant a crown to a foreign bride? I warrant it was not Ealdorman Ælfhelm. He makes no secret of his belief that you are either mad or a fool.’

So, here it was. Here was what he had suspected all along. Ælfhelm had turned even his own sons against him.

‘Has Ælfhelm persuaded you, then, to his point of view?’ he demanded. ‘All of you?’ He raked them all with his glance, but no one would answer that query. Even Athelstan looked somewhat taken aback now, by his own audacious words. ‘I knew when I placed you under Ælfhelm’s leadership that he would try to twist your minds against me, but I had hoped that my sons would show more fealty to their father and king. It seems that my trust was misplaced.’

‘My lord,’ Athelstan’s tone was placating now. ‘I did not mean to—’

‘I know exactly what you meant. By word and deed you have declared yourself. Since you hold my marriage and my queen in such low esteem, you are banished from my presence and from my court. Get you to St Albans, all three of you, until I send for you again. Lord Ælfhelm has taught you to question your king. Let us see if the good brothers at the abbey can teach you patience and humility. Now get out.’

Outside the king’s chamber Athelstan halted, stunned by his own temerity and what it had wrought. He felt his brothers’ accusing eyes on him, and he dreaded the censure that he knew was coming.

‘That went well,’ Ecbert said. ‘Banished to St Albans until God knows when. Thank you for that, brother.’

‘Only a fool,’ Edmund volunteered, ‘calls the king a fool.’

‘I did not call him a fool,’ Athelstan protested.

‘No,’ Edmund replied, ‘you called him a fool and a madman. Even better! Whatever possessed you to speak to him in such a way?’

‘He bid me speak my mind, and I did. Yes, all right, I made an error. I believed that he truly wanted to know what I thought.’

‘Jesu, Athelstan! He had no need to ask for that. It has been writ on your face for days.’

‘What would you have had me do? Kiss his hand and bid him be happy between the legs of his new queen? He would see it for a lie.’

‘Could you not have found some middle ground?’ Edmund persisted. ‘You undermine your own cause by being so blunt! Your wish is to have some influence upon the king’s decisions, yet how are we to do that if we are banished from the court?’

‘It could be worse,’ Ecbert said brightly. ‘He could have sent us to Glastonbury, where we’d have to spend the summer in the bog lands fighting the midges. At least St Albans is on solid ground and easily within a day’s ride of London, with plenty of inns and alehouses along the way.’

‘Shut up, Ecbert,’ Athelstan snapped. ‘The king still thinks of us as children, and as long as he does, we will never be able to influence him.’

‘His bride is the same age as you are,’ Edmund replied. ‘Clearly he does not think her a child. We had better hope, though, that she has no more influence upon him than we do.’

That, in particular, made Athelstan wince. They would be spending the next weeks or months at St Albans while the new queen would be spending them in his father’s bed. If she gave him a son, then what? The prophecy of the seeress still rang like a warning bell in his head, and he could see no way to explain it, unless his father’s Norman bride should persuade the king to disinherit his elder sons.

July 1002

Near Winchester, Hampshire

Emma, tucked into the royal wain with Wymarc and Margot, surveyed the sun-dappled Hampshire countryside – a vista framed by draperies that had been tied back to let in light and air. The view was the only thing pleasant about this leg of the journey, for the thick cushions lining the seat beneath her did little to absorb the shock of the wagon’s jolting passage along the deeply rutted road. She could not decide which was more uncomfortable – travel aboard a heaving longship or inside a teeth-jarring wheeled box. The box, at any rate, was always dry, but the heavy, cumbersome vehicle moved so slowly behind its plodding oxen that Emma was convinced it would have been faster to walk.

She was relieved that this long trek to the royal seat of Winchester was nearly over. They would spend tonight in an abbey, and tomorrow, escorted by a delegation of clergy and prominent citizens, she would enter the city that was to be her new home. Father Martin knew Winchester well, and he had described it as a beautiful walled town set amid folds of forest, field, and pasture in the king’s heartland of Wessex. Yet, as she looked out at all the different shades of green below a wide blue-and-white sky, she felt a pang of longing for the sea. Here there would be no shore where she could ride with the salt spray upon her face, no white cliffs, not even the call of seabirds that had sometimes filled the skies above Canterbury.

Just then the road curved, and for a few moments she could see Æthelred mounted on the horse that had been her wedding gift to him – a dappled grey stallion that Richard had helped her choose. She had begged to be allowed to ride with the king today but had been refused for a host of reasons that his steward had tediously itemized for her. And so it was the king’s favourite, Elgiva, who rode beside him, her skirts pulled up across her knees to reveal shapely legs that her thin hose did little to hide.

It did not surprise Emma to learn that it was Æthelred’s custom to have favourites among the ladies of the court. It was something her brother had warned might happen, and he had told her that she would be foolish to show any displeasure because of it. It was a king’s prerogative, he had said.

Emma would have found her husband’s prerogative far easier to live with if he had chosen someone other than Elgiva for his attentions. She had learned very quickly the root cause of Elgiva’s thinly disguised contempt: the Lady of Northampton had herself hoped to wed the king and as she could not punish Æthelred for spurning her, she chose to turn her malice upon Emma, the usurper.

There were a thousand ways to sow discord among a household of women, and Elgiva seemed determined to utilize every one. Haughty glances, unkind remarks, baseless rumours, and spiteful tales had led to a clear divide between Emma’s English and Norman attendants, and she despaired of ever finding a way to repair it. Elgiva’s blatant efforts to attract the king’s eye did not help.

Even beyond that, though, there was something about Elgiva’s nature that troubled Emma. She could not make out if it was the careless cruelty of a spoiled child or if something darker lay concealed beneath the fair skin and fine eyes. She wondered that the king did not see it. Or perhaps he did, and that was what intrigued him the most – darkness drawn to darkness.

For although she still knew very little about Æthelred as a man, she knew that across his soul lay a shadow that she could not fathom. He was very much afraid, this king. She had seen it at their wedding feast, and in the three months that she had shared his bed, he had been troubled by dark dreams. She had sometimes wakened in the night to find the bedchamber bright with candles and the king slowly pacing, murmuring to himself – whether prayers or curses she could not say.

She wondered what he saw there, in the long watches of the night, but she did not have the courage to attempt to probe the dark visions in his mind – whether shadows of memory or of things yet to be. Æthelred had barred her from his private thoughts, and even from his presence, as surely as if he had built a wall between them – or built a wall around her, for she was more prisoner than wife or queen.

She saw him only in the formal feasting in the hall or in the strained, cold silence of their bed. In Canterbury she had not been allowed to ride or hunt with him – for fear of her safety, she had been told. She was no more than a foreign hostage – mistrusted by her lord. She was watched constantly by the women who served her, and every missive she sent or received from Normandy passed first through the hands of the king.

She woke each day dreading that some ill tidings would reach the king about her brother or about some monstrous Viking raid that could be laid to Richard’s account. And what, she wondered, would Æthelred do to his hostage then? Up to now those fears had been groundless, but the sea lanes would be open for many weeks yet, and until winter storms kept the dragon ships from venturing onto England’s shores, she, like the king, would not rest easily at night.

She gazed out at the green land that was so beautiful and told herself that she must not despair. Yet she doubted that she would ever feel that she belonged in this place, or that she could ever care for the dark king who ruled it.

The road curved again, and again she saw Æthelred with Elgiva beside him, her black hair tangling in the breeze.

‘I wonder,’ she said aloud, ‘if the king confides in Elgiva, and if she is truly fond of him.’

Wymarc’s mouth twisted in an uncharacteristic scowl.

‘Elgiva is fond of no one but herself,’ she said. ‘Come to that, the only person who loves her more than she loves herself is that old witch Groa. I expect she thinks that Elgiva pisses holy water.’

Margot shot her a reproachful glance. ‘That will do,’ she said.

‘But it is true,’ Wymarc insisted. ‘Groa worships the girl. Can you not see it? I think Elgiva must have cast a spell on the woman, and on the king as well, come to that.’

‘Do not judge Groa too severely,’ Margot reproved her. ‘If she loves the girl overmuch it is hardly to be wondered at. Elgiva has been the only bright thing in that poor woman’s life.’

Wymarc looked, astonished, at Margot.

‘Why do you say that? What do you know about Groa that we do not?’

Margot pursed her lips, glanced from Wymarc to Emma, and then heaved a little sigh.

‘When Groa was a young woman she was taken in a raid from her home somewhere in the far north. Her captor was one of Ælfhelm’s thegns, and he kept Groa as his concubine. She bore him six children, all of whom died before they were a year old. Her man died, too, while Groa was pregnant with her last child, and when that babe died at her breast she was given Elgiva to suckle.’ She sighed again. ‘Since then the girl has been her all in all.’

Poor Groa, Emma thought. She was a grim-faced creature, as hard, cold, and sharp as a sword to all but Elgiva. Did bitterness and loss truly do that to a woman? Must she become hard when misfortune struck, so that she did not break?

Wymarc, too, seemed subdued by this glimpse into the life of Elgiva’s old nurse, for she was silent for some time, gazing out at the passing fields of new grain.

‘I grant you that she has suffered,’ Wymarc muttered, ‘but Groa does her mistress no service by defending her even when she knows Elgiva is in the wrong. I’ll warrant that Elgiva does what she pleases because she has always been allowed to do so. Look at her now, riding next to the king with her skirt hitched up almost to her waist. It is not seemly.’

‘If the king bids Elgiva ride with him,’ Emma murmured, ‘she cannot easily refuse him.’

And if the king were to command even more from Elgiva – what then? Emma did not believe that Ealdorman Ælfhelm would sanction an illicit relationship between his daughter and the king. Elgiva was much too valuable in the marriage market to waste. But Ælfhelm had gone to his lands in the north, and if the king wished to bed Elgiva, there was no one to stop him.

Almost unconsciously, her hand pressed against the belt cinched tightly at her waist. Her womb had not yet quickened with the king’s child, and it had been three months. She could not help but think of her own family history. Her mother had borne six children while she was the unwed consort of a duke whose Frankish wife had died young, childless, and brokenhearted. If Elgiva were to seduce Æthelred from Emma’s bed, it might be Emma’s lot to remain childless. And without a son to protect her, she would be at the mercy of the king and his sons.

She had tried to befriend them – the three eldest – after their return from their eight-week exile at St Albans. The eldest, Athelstan, had treated her efforts with a frosty disdain that occasionally warmed into chilly courtesy. Sometimes in the hall he would not bother to disguise his dislike. He would stare coldly at her, as if she were some outlandish creature from another world – which, in some ways, she supposed she was.

His brother Ecbert, a year younger than she was, did not seem to know what to do whenever he found himself confronted with her. He was a genial fellow by nature, his normal expression a lopsided grin. Whenever he was in her presence, though, he took care to rearrange his face into a frown. He could not maintain it for long, though, and she sometimes caught him observing her with shy interest.

It was Edmund who seemed to resent her the most. He was fourteen summers old, but a dour lad who seemed far older. He never greeted her with anything but a scowl, and he never spoke to her if he could help it – and then only in monosyllables.

She had far better luck with Æthelred’s youngest children. To her surprise and relief they seemed to accept her with dispassion, if not enthusiasm, looking to her as if she were just another one of the many functionaries who oversaw their schooling and daily care. She thought that they could not have been very close to their mother, for they never spoke of her, and even the girls did not seem to miss her.