Soon the cluster of riders was making its way past the mill, stringing out in smaller groups when they turned south to follow the path of the River Itchen. Emma found herself at Athelstan’s side, with Wymarc and Hugh – summoned by Emma because she wanted at least one of her Norman hearth guards with her – immediately behind them. Edward and Edgar, their rambunctious spirits kept in moderate check by two grooms, rode some way ahead, while the ætheling’s well-armed outriders trailed at a discreet distance.
As she rode Emma studied the young man beside her, looking for traces of his father. Their colouring was the same – hair as golden as ripe wheat, although Athelstan, like most English youth, wore his cropped roughly about his ears, in contrast to his father’s longer, perfectly groomed locks. They had the same high forehead as well, but there the similarity ended. Athelstan’s dark brows, broad nose, and full, sensuous lips bore no resemblance to his father’s thinner, more sharply sculpted features.
She studied his mouth and tried to recall if she had ever seen him smile. Not at her, certainly, which made her question again why he was riding beside her at this moment.
‘I am grateful for your kindness, my lord,’ she said. ‘The palace garden is quite beautiful, but I have longed to explore the countryside.’
‘My mother, who designed the garden,’ he said, ‘did not ride. She had a contemplative nature, and the garden seemed to satisfy all her needs.’
Emma considered what little she knew of his mother. The king’s first wife, it seemed, had lived like a nun, except for the very secular task of conceiving and bearing eleven children. Her personality seemed to have had all the impact on the king’s court of a finger drawn through water. Had she truly been content to live such a cloistered life, or had she been forced into it by the king? Emma could imagine that well enough. But perhaps the woman had never known any other kind of existence. Perhaps she had been raised in such a sheltered environment that she found the world beyond the garden walls terrifying and forbidding.
‘Your mother came from the north, I believe,’ she said. ‘You lived there for some little time, did you not? Does it look very different? Are the people different?’
‘The land,’ he said, ‘the people – even the language is different. They speak an odd mixture of English and Danish there, with occasional Norse thrown into the mix just for flavour. It is a harsher land, though, than this.’ He nodded towards the rolling green hills of the downs. ‘Not as rich. There are jagged peaks in the north, rising sheer sided, as if they’d been thrust up out of the bowels of the earth. To the west the land is gentler. That is the district of the lakes – God knows how many. They are cradled in green valleys, and when the sun shines they are as blue as sapphires. Towards the eastern coast, near Jorvik, the land is different yet again, for it is flat, but not without its own kind of wild beauty. In the spring it is a tapestry of flowers.’
Emma, astonished at this sudden spate of near poetry from one who had barely spoken a word to her until now, said, ‘Your eloquence, my lord, makes me long to see for myself these northern vistas. Perhaps the king’s progress will take me there some day.’
Athelstan shook his head. ‘My father went that far north only once, and then he had an army at his back. It is a dangerous place. The folk there are often restive under the rule of Wessex. Our strongholds, our history, lie here in the south.’
She recalled that Elgiva’s father was ealdorman of the northern lands. A dangerous place, Athelstan had said. And dangerous men and women were bred there, it seemed.
‘Is Elgiva a northerner?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said hesitantly, ‘and no. Elgiva’s family owns half of Mercia, most of their lands lying in the area below the Northumbrian border. It’s what we call the Midlands, but the very northern edge of it. Mercia once had its own kings before it was conquered by Wessex, but that was in the distant past. Elgiva, though, often forgets that Mercia is no longer a kingdom, and that she is not a king’s daughter.’
Or a king’s wife, Emma thought. But if Elgiva’s family was so powerful, it would go some way to explaining why Æthelred singled her out for his favour.
‘What are the Northumbrians like, then?’ she asked. ‘The folk further north?’
He frowned.
‘Fifty years ago there was a northman named Eric Bloodaxe who ruled Northumbria and called it the Kingdom of Jorvik. He was driven out, but the folk there still maintain strong ties to the lands across the Northern Sea.’ He was not looking at her but kept his eyes firmly planted on the path ahead, so that his next words seemed casually offhand. ‘You have ties there as well, I think – of family and trade.’
Sensing danger in spite of his apparent disinterest, Emma replied flatly, ‘My mother’s people came from Denmark,’ she said, ‘but she grew up in Normandy.’
They were treading perilously close to a conversational landscape where she had no wish to venture. She believed that the king’s mistrust of her was rooted in her Danish forebears as well as in her brother’s lucrative trade with Viking shipmen. Had the king confided his suspicions to Athelstan? If so, then she had just given them credence by showing such an avid interest in the north. She wished that she had kept silent.
‘It is no secret,’ he said slowly, ‘that the Danish king, Forkbeard, has been entertained at the ducal palace in Normandy. I have never seen him, although I have heard a great deal about him. Were you there when your brother greeted him? Did you see the king?’
He looked at her now with steady blue eyes, but she saw no guile there, only curiosity. Still, she hesitated, uncertain what to say. She had no wish to emphasize her brother’s connection to Swein Forkbeard, but if Athelstan already knew that Swein had been in Normandy at Christmas, it would be foolish of her to lie.
‘I saw him last Yule-tide,’ she said, ‘but only briefly. My mother kept all the women of her household well away from the king and his shipmen.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yet he and his men were there at your brother’s invitation.’
She looked at him, irritated by his smug assumption that he understood her brother’s motives.
‘Indeed, my lord,’ she said. ‘And what would you do if an armed host, vastly outnumbering all your hearth troops and with a reputation for taking by force anything they wanted, appeared at your door demanding shelter?’
It was his turn to stare now, brows raised in surprise. Then he smiled.
‘I would invite them in,’ he said.
So she had made him smile at last. It lit his entire face and softened the hard edges of that square jaw. She had told him more than she would have wished, but, all in all, she thought that the result was worth the risk.
The conversation became less pointed after that. Emma questioned him about his brothers, eager to know more of Edmund and Ecbert in particular, whom she had had little opportunity to observe. He asked about her own brothers and sisters, and was curious about the training that her brother Richard had devised for his horses.
It seemed to Emma that the time passed all too quickly, and she was sorry when they halted before the king’s great hall.
‘Perhaps,’ Athelstan said, as he helped her to dismount, ‘we might ride together again. I would learn more of Normandy, if you would be willing to instruct me.’
He stood facing her, his hands still at her waist exerting a gentle pressure to steady her. Only his touch did not steady her. It did the opposite, and when she looked into his eyes, far bluer than the sky, she felt dizzy, as if she were falling from some great height.
‘I do not know if the king would give me leave,’ she answered,