It was well past midday, and the light was fading when Emma saw the priest hesitating in the doorway. She smiled up at him, but her greeting died in her throat when she saw the agitated look on his face.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘News is coming in from all across the land of a great killing,’ he said, his voice taut with shock and his face stricken. ‘A massacre of Danes, at the king’s command.’
‘A massacre?’ Every tongue in the chamber had stilled, and Emma’s words seemed to echo in the silence.
‘Men, women, and children put to the sword,’ the priest said. ‘Merchants dragged from their businesses, farmers and wives taken from their homes, and all of them butchered. A monk from Oxford has brought a wretched tale of folk who sought sanctuary within a church only to have the doors chained shut and the church burned over their heads by a crowd mad with bloodlust. There were over fifty folk killed in Oxford alone, may God grant them rest.’
Beside Emma, Elgiva spoke up even as she continued to pierce the linen with her needle.
‘They were the devil’s spawn,’ she said placidly, ‘and the enemies of the king. They would have murdered us in our beds if given the chance. The king was wise to strike those foes that live amongst us, before they can cause us harm.’
Emma had dropped her needle and clasped her hands as the images of burning mothers and children filled her mind, and now she turned outraged eyes on Elgiva.
‘What is it,’ she asked coldly, ‘that makes them our foes? Rumour? Envy? Strange customs? A different language? What is it that they have done to deserve such a horrible death?’
‘They attacked the king on his feast day,’ Elgiva said. ‘The Dane who was executed yesterday tried to murder the king. It is his confederates who have been put to the sword, to prevent them from bringing an army against us.’
Emma heard again the mad howl that had promised death and destruction. But it had come from the mouth of a single man with a broken, twisted mind, one more to be pitied than feared.
‘There was never any proof of an army,’ she said.
‘The king has no need of proof. You have not lived among us long enough, my lady, to understand the danger that the Danes are to us.’ And now her eyes met Emma’s boldly. ‘We must be wary of them, for they are strangers among us.’
Just as you are a stranger among us. The words remained unspoken, but Emma felt their force and their threat just the same.
She sat up late that night, disturbed by the day’s news and by the lack of Christian compassion that she had witnessed within her own household. She had sent word to the king that she was ill and had taken her supper in her chamber, for she did not think that she could bear to listen to the kind of discourse that was likely to go on at Æthelred’s table. By day’s end the murder of the Danes, even of innocent women and children, was being hailed as a great victory. Any who thought otherwise kept their thoughts to themselves.
She was seated with only Wymarc to attend her when the king strode into the chamber. He had apparently come straight from the feast hall, for he was garbed in a short tunic of rich scarlet wool, belted in gold, and with gold rings on his arms and thick, gold chains about his neck.
‘Leave us,’ he said to Wymarc, who, with a long backwards glance at Emma, left the room.
When they were alone, Æthelred helped himself to a cup of wine. Emma, watching his unsteady hand as he poured, thought that he must have had a great deal to drink already.
‘You are up late, my lady,’ he said.
‘I am unwell and cannot sleep.’
‘Since you are wakeful,’ he said, ‘then it is well that I have come to keep you company, is it not?’
She gazed at him and remained stubbornly silent. She should welcome him to her bed, for that was the duty she owed to her husband, lord, and king. She owed it to herself, for she had a desperate need to bear a child. Yet she could not do it. She could not rid her mind of the images of burning children, and it was all she could do to keep her anger and loathing from showing in her face.
Æthelred studied his lady wife in the candle glow. Seated in her cushioned chair she looked every inch the queen. Even garbed in just her nightdress she carried herself with a regal air in spite of her youth. The soft, thick shawl of fine-spun black wool that she had flung about her shoulders set off the whiteness of her skin. Her hair, loosened from its modest day-time braid, hung about her in soft waves that fell like a milky stream into her lap.
In the six months since their nuptials he had formed no particular fondness for her, but he felt an enormous pride in owning something so exquisitely beautiful.
Emma, though, did not fully appreciate her own good fortune at having been chosen as his queen. There was something lacking in her expression whenever she looked at him. Even now she regarded him with distaste, as if the daughter of an upstart duke considered herself better than an English king. He had thought to bend her allegiance to him by sending her people away, but still she kept herself apart. When she looked at him her glance was cold, with no glint of gratitude or approval. Christ, it galled him.
He tossed back a mouthful of wine and sat down on her vast, curtained bed.
‘It was unwise of you to absent yourself from the hall tonight, lady,’ he said, ‘for it was your duty as queen to be there. Surely you are aware that the Danish tide that would have engulfed us has been checked. God has made me the instrument of His Divine Will, and I have saved all of us, even you, from a terrible danger. Your voice should have been raised with all the others in prayers of thanksgiving. Yet you seem unmoved.’
‘Indeed, my lord, you wrong me,’ she said.
He raised an eyebrow at her, awaiting her excuse.
‘How could one not be moved,’ she went on, ‘by the slaughter of innocents?’
Good Christ. The girl was either mad or a fool to speak so to him.
‘Innocents? Is that how you name them? A barbarous people with no regard for life or property? Folk who burn, pillage, murder, and rape, and who would teach their children to do the same? You would fear them if you had seen the destruction that they have wrought upon our towns and villages.’
Her eyes flashed at him now, and her mouth twisted in scorn.
‘And with this act, have you not unleashed death and destruction upon your people? The church of St Frideswide in Oxford should have been a place of sanctuary, yet it became a funeral pyre for women and children upon your order. If you fear the Danes so much, then you must fear me as well. My mother is a Dane, a barbarian as you say. Do you not tremble that I might slay all your children in their beds? I have heard it said that English princes have some cause to fear their stepmothers.’
As soon as the words left her mouth Emma knew that she had gone too far. The king’s anger towards her had been smouldering from the moment he entered the room, and now she had fanned the flames into fury. She knew, instinctively, that she should run, but she had nowhere to go. In an instant he had dashed his cup to the floor and covered the distance between them with a single step. He slapped her hard across the face, and before she could recover from the blow, he had grasped her roughly and pulled her to her feet.
‘Do you threaten my children, you Norman bitch?’ He shook her, and for the first time in her life she was afraid of what a man might do to her.
‘My lord, I do not!’ she gasped through rattling teeth. ‘I meant only to remind you that you have many folk in your realm, and not all of them are English.’ She tried to calm her voice, to speak with the gravity of a priest or a councillor. ‘If you hold all the Danes in your kingdom responsible for the actions of one man, my lord, then you do them a grave injustice. My blood, too, is Danish,