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