‘I know what you would ask of me, child,’ she said. ‘I also know that if you truly believed that I would grant your desire, you would not ask it.’
Emma shut her eyes again. She was not certain that Margot was right. Nevertheless, she had her answer. She would have to carry this thing, bring it into the world and find some way to endure its existence. Others could tend it and rear it. She had but to bear it, yet that task would be onerous enough. Love it, she never could.
‘Emma.’ Wymarc’s voice, rough as broken glass, slashed across Emma’s brooding thoughts. Emma felt her friend clutch at her hand, as if she would rescue her from drowning in a sullen, black sea. ‘The child is not the father. The child is a miracle and the answer to your prayers. You have grown to love the king’s other children. Will you not love your own babe even more? Think of little Mathilda, if you doubt it.’
The image of a sunny, blue-eyed imp flashed into Emma’s mind. Mathilda, the royal daughter who had been dedicated to Wherwell at the age of two, had been Emma’s nearly constant companion from the moment that she arrived at the abbey. Fascinated by the brilliant newcomers who had entered her convent world, the child had attached herself to Emma with the loyalty and trust of an adoring puppy. Emma had done nothing to encourage her, but the girl’s devotion had been impossible to resist. Now they were all but inseparable, and Æthelred’s tiny daughter had been the only ray of light in the darkness that was Emma’s life.
And yet, she thought, folding her arms tightly beneath her cloak and rocking back and forth in her despair, she did not trust herself to love the child growing within her. The babe had been purchased at far too great a cost. She despised the brutal act that had planted the seed in her womb, despised the man who had perpetrated it, despised herself for submitting to it. How could she not despise the child who would result from it?
She placed her fingers against her closed eyelids, remembering the days of her girlhood in Normandy, wishing that she could return to that simpler time. Her mother’s image rose in her mind, but she banished it. It was Gunnora’s fault that she was here now, saddled with grief, fear, and an unwanted child. She would forever hate her mother for sentencing her to this wretched fate.
Yet for her own sake, as well as for the sake of those who depended upon her, she had to wrest herself from the black thoughts that engulfed her. The time for weeping was over. She could not change the past, and she could not continue to brood over her pain like a green girl. She must think like a queen now, for if she did not decide what to do and how to act, others would decide for her.
Emma dropped her hands to her lap and took a breath.
‘The king must be told of the child,’ she said slowly, planning her next move as if a battle lay before her, ‘but not yet. This will remain a secret until I can tell him myself.’
Somehow she must find the strength to face him – not as a supplicant but as a queen whose fertility had been proven. She would demand the status to which she was entitled. She would insist upon complete control over her properties and her household. She would claim the freedom to come and go as she pleased.
She would be a queen, and no longer a captive.
Before the week was out Emma had sent a message to Ealdorman Ælfric, asking him to wait upon her. When he arrived he answered all her questions regarding events at court, and he told her of the present concerns of the nobles and the common folk who were the lifeblood of the kingdom.
She learned that the king had settled in Bath for the Lenten season and had marked Athelstan as his heir by presenting him with the Sword of Offa. She learned that Elgiva remained the king’s favoured companion in spite of the guarded disapproval of the prelates who travelled with the court.
‘They fear the Lord’s wrath at this sin,’ Ælfric said. ‘There are many, my lady, who would greet your return to court with rejoicing.’
Emma considered his words carefully, weighing the will of the bishops and abbots against the desires of a wilful king. When Ælfric left he carried with him a message to Æthelred, bidding him to attend her at Wherwell on his return journey to Winchester. In the weeks that followed Emma planned and prayed, gathered her strength, and sought to accept the promise of life that was growing within her but that seemed like a dark burden too heavy to bear.
Holy Week, March 1003
Wherwell Abbey, Hampshire
Elgiva rode on a plodding horse through a steady, drenching rain along a muddy track leading, she supposed, to Wherwell Abbey. She was miserable. It had started to rain at noontide, and now, three hours later, the waxed wool of her fur-lined cloak was sodden. Water dripped from the ends of her soaked hair, from her nose, from her elbows and fingertips. Her wet skirts clung to her legs, and she was bitterly cold. She longed to be tucked up, warm and dry, in a thick feather bed next to a blazing fire, but she had little hope that she would find such respite at the end of today’s journey. She had been to Wherwell once before, and unless things had changed greatly, she would likely be offered nothing more comfortable than a straw pallet in the nuns’ guest dormitory.
At least they would not put her in a cell, she thought with a shudder. She had been afraid of small, dark spaces from the time she was a child – when her brother Wulf had lured her into her mother’s clothes coffer, fastened the lid, and then forgotten about her. It had been hours before she was missed and rescued, and for days after she had been wretched and ill. The very thought of spending even a single hour in a nun’s dark, tiny cell made her stomach heave.
She glanced at Wulf, riding at her side. Where, she wondered, would he sleep tonight? He would probably find himself a pretty girl with a welcoming bed somewhere in the village. The king, riding in front of her with the bishop of Winchester, would sleep in the chamber set aside for royal visitors. Sadly for her, she would not share it, for she was one of the pleasures that the king had forsworn during this last week of Lent.
Elgiva hated the Lenten season. The endless prayers of repentance bored her, and the Lenten rituals of bodily mortification drove her to near madness. She could understand why the priests would encourage it among the common folk. By the time Lent came around most of their winter food stores had been depleted. Urging them to fast for the sake of their souls was merely putting a good face on what they were forced to do in any case. But the king was wealthy enough to set a decent table even in the lean months, so why must his court live on a diet of boiled greens and fish?
Their rations on this journey from Bath to Wherwell seemed to Elgiva to be especially meagre. She was hungry all the time, and the fasting did no more for her humour than did the wretched rain. Thank God that Lent was nearly done.
The past five weeks, however, unpleasant as they had been, were not an utter waste of time. She had spent many hours at the king’s side, distracting him from the worrisome details of governance by telling him stories that she invented out of the thinnest air. She embellished tales that she had heard at her grandmother’s knee, and she made up stories about kings and battles set in strange lands peopled with terrible monsters.
Her favourite story was that of the king whose queen was barren. In it the childless queen begged her husband to allow her to enter a convent so that she could offer prayers for the safety of his kingdom, which was under attack by invaders from the far north. And so, reluctantly, the king agreed. He sent the queen to a convent and took another wife, who fought at his side to save his people.
She had spun this story one evening in Bath as the king sat in the hall with a score of his thegns. When the tale was finished she turned to Æthelred and arched her brows at him.
‘Could