Shadow on the Crown (37 page)

As a result she lived like a stranger among them. The king never sought her out, rarely even addressed her—not even when she made her nightly visits to his chamber to gratify his sexual demands. She knew, as she carried out that particularly odious function, that she was doing her duty as wife and queen, yet she felt sullied by the act, for there was no affection or warmth conveyed by it in either direction. It seemed to her that they were little better than animals trapped in the same pen for the sole purpose of copulation.

In spite of Æthelred’s coldness, however, she saw much of him, for she refused to form a second court, as she had in the first year of her marriage. Sensing that the king would be only too happy if she hid herself away in her quarters, she took advantage of every opportunity to accompany Æthelred wherever he might go. She attended him at Mass and she hunted with him daily. She sat beside him at his board and rarely left before the king himself sought his chamber. She met his icy disdain with stoic patience, steeling herself against him like a fine-edged sword. She bore ever in her mind the recognition that she was a Norman duke’s daughter and an English queen, and she used that knowledge as a whetstone to sharpen her will against the king.

She saw much of Athelstan as well, but she took care that they were never alone. A single glance from him still had the power to stop her heart, but she had grown adept at disguising her thoughts and her emotions. The king’s warning about his son still rang in her ears, and she would give him no reason to suspect that she held any special regard for Athelstan, for the ætheling’s sake as much as her own. She cultivated, instead, the few friends that she had at court—the ealdorman Ælfric and Bishop Alfheah among them. They were her allies, and they imparted to her the news of events occurring within the realm that her husband, in his cold silence, withheld from her. With their assistance she was able to keep her finger upon the pulse of the kingdom, from Canterbury to Jorvik, from London to Exeter.

Nevertheless, it was a dreary existence, and in late September Emma looked forward with eagerness to the return of the king’s children from their sojourn in Oxfordshire. She was not foolish enough to hope that their presence would somehow thaw the mood of the king and the court toward her, but at least the children would distract her. And so it proved.

The little party arrived late one afternoon. Emma, in her chamber with Wymarc, Margot, and Father Martin, had been dictating letters that would go to her brother in Rouen. The churches and abbeys in and around Exeter were desperate for money in order to begin repairs and, more important, to provide food and shelter for so many who had suffered at the hands of the Danes. They looked to her for help, and she had little to give.

As she pondered how best to frame her request to Richard, she heard a commotion outside the chamber door. A moment later it was flung open, and Æthelred’s children swooped on her like a flock of starlings. Four-year-old Wulfa immediately demanded to be lifted into Emma’s lap, while her two elder sisters insisted that she settle a dispute over which of them had grown the most over the summer. She had just pronounced that Ælfa did indeed appear to be a little bit taller than her elder sister when Edgar, now ten and accordingly bloodthirsty, held his new knife under her nose for inspection. He offered to demonstrate its edge by slicing off one of Ælfa’s golden curls. This resulted in tears and a howl of protest from his victim, who sought safety behind Emma’s chair.

“Put your knife back in its sheath, Edgar,” Emma exclaimed, while Wymarc distracted Ælfa and Edyth with a coffer filled with silken ribbons. “Now,” Emma said to Edgar, as she shifted Wulfa on her knee, “show me the hilt of your dagger. What is the design on it?”

“It is a dragon,” he said eagerly, unbuckling the belt and holding the sheathed knife so that Emma could admire it. “Look how its body wraps all the way around the grip. And see, there is flame coming out of its mouth. I call it Firedrake.”

“It is beautiful,” she said, tracing with her fingertip the delicate silver inlay that formed the dragon. “Where did you get this princely gift?”

“Edward gave it to me before we left Headington palace,” he said. “The smith there has boxes and boxes of weapons stored away in a special room, things that once belonged to my uncle and my grandsire. He gave this knife to Edward as soon as we arrived, but Edward said that he had no use for a dagger, and so he gave it to me. I have a shield, too. I can show it to you. Shall I get it?”

“I will look at it tomorrow,” Emma said, vaguely apprehensive at hearing Edgar’s description of his brother’s generosity. When did a boy ever not have use for a dagger, especially one as beautiful and prized as this? “But where is Edward? Has he gone to find your older brothers?”

“No,” Edgar said with a scowl. “Nurse took him straight to his bed. He is always tired now. He never plays with me anymore.” Then his face brightened. “But he said that I am to be the king’s cupbearer now, because it is too hard for him to stand up for so long.”

Alarmed, Emma thought back to when she had last seen Edward. It had been June, and he had not yet fully recovered from the illness that had felled him in the spring. Had he not improved over the summer months? She glanced at Margot who, understanding, nodded and slipped away. Margot would check on the boy, and Emma was confident that the old nurse would find some remedy for whatever it was that ailed him.

But it quickly became apparent that Margot had no potion that could restore the health of the young ætheling. As Emma sat with him later that day, his hand in hers, she was filled with foreboding. It was as if some vital spark within him had dimmed, and she sensed that before long it would be extinguished altogether.

Chapter Thirty-six

April 1004

Winchester, Hampshire

A
ll through the winter and into the spring Margot searched for a cure for Edward’s illness. She rubbed his chest with an ointment of rue and aloe seethed in oil that seemed to give him brief respite from the pain in his chest. A cream of wormwood and bishopwort boiled in butter eased the aches in his knees and fingers. An ale laced with parsnip was meant to strengthen him and dispatch his blinding headache, but it did little more than help him sleep.

The leech sent for by the king insisted on bleeding the boy, and this remedy seemed to do more harm than good. Edward, who had been able to walk around his chamber for a little while each day, could not even sit up for two weeks after the cupping, and he never regained the strength to leave his bed. All through the autumn and the yuletide he kept to his chamber, tended by the queen and her attendants.

Emma spent an hour with him every day, regaling him with stories that she remembered from her childhood. Sometimes she brought her harp and sang to him, telling him afterward what the words meant, although often the music lulled him to sleep. Slowly, what little strength the boy had faded away, and she watched his slow decline with a heavy heart.

The king rarely ventured into Edward’s sickroom, and this indifference toward the boy angered Emma. She complained bitterly of it to Margot and to Wymarc one afternoon in late spring, as a dull rain thrummed upon the roof thatch. That morning, in a voice that was little more than a whisper, Edward had confided to her that he knew his father disliked him, because his visits were so infrequent.

“I told him that he must never doubt that his father loves him. A king, I said, must care for every single person in the land, and for that reason he is prevented from spending his time the way he might wish.” She stood up and went over to the window. Its thick, greenish pane gave a lurid light to the unrelenting April rain. It had been many days since they had seen the sun, and she had begun to think that, like her own spirits, the clouds would never lift. “I do not understand,” she said softly, “how the king can be so cold to the boy. Does he not realize that the child is dying? Athelstan visits his brother nearly every day, yet the boy’s own father cannot sit with him for even a few brief moments in a week. It is heartbreaking to see how much Edward longs for his father.”

She turned away from the greenish light and saw Wymarc, heavy with child, look up suddenly from her embroidery, her brows shrouded with grief. Emma bit her lip and wished that she could take back her words. Wymarc’s child would have no father. They had all come to accept now that Hugh must be dead, slain by some Danish hand. And even if he had somehow managed to escape that fate, he would not likely make his way back to England ever again.

“I think,” Margot said, “that in this instance you do the king an injustice.” She was sorting through a pile of gowns that had belonged to Edyth, looking for those that could be cut down for the king’s younger daughters.

“What do you mean?” Emma asked.

Margot paused in her task and gazed thoughtfully at Emma.

“I do not say that I agree with the king’s manner of dealing with Edward’s illness,” she said at last. “It would not be my way of addressing the death of a child. But I think, my lady, that it is not unusual. The king is protecting himself from the pain of parting from Edward by drawing away from him. I think that he cannot bear to watch this lingering death that weakens the boy day by day. Tending the sick does not come naturally to a man, and if they have never been taught, they do not know how to act in the face of it.”

“No one asks him to tend the boy,” Emma said bitterly, “merely to treat him with a father’s affection.”

“And what,” Margot replied, “does he know of that? His own father died when Æthelred was but a child.”

This gave Emma pause, for there was some truth to Margot’s words. King Edgar had died when Æthelred was very young, only six or seven years old. What could the man remember now of his father’s love? And yet she could not help but compare again the actions of the king with those of his eldest son, and she found the king lacking. Showing affection for a child was not a trait that one learned. Like compassion and tenderness, it dwelt in the heart and soul of a man. Whatever seeds of such emotions may have been planted once in her husband’s breast, she guessed that instead of being nurtured, they had withered and died.

She placed a hand upon her belly where a babe had once more taken root. She hoped to present the king with a child early next year, but she had no expectation that it was a gift he would contemplate with much favor. He was not likely to show her child any more affection than he showed his other children; perhaps he would show this one even less, because of his disdain for the mother.

The thought sent a chill through her, and she stepped away from the window, and, pacing, pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders.

And what of her? Would she love this child less because its sire was Æthelred and not Athelstan? She remembered, with a sudden pang, her anguish at the loss of the half-formed babe that had been wrung from her little more than a year ago. The pain of that was still sharp, and she knew with a certainty that the father of the child made no difference. The babe would be hers, and she would lavish it with all the love her heart could give.

In the end it was Emma who watched alone at Edward’s bedside one morning in late June as the boy took his last, shallow breath. She had come to Edward’s chamber the night before, sleepless after being wakened by the mewling of Wymarc’s week-old infant son, and she had found Edward in a heavy sleep. When at daybreak she could not awaken him, she had summoned Father Martin to anoint the child with the blessed chrism, and had sent word to the king that Edward was close to death. Then she held his small hand in hers until it turned cold in her grasp.

She wished, for Edward’s sake, that the king had been there to bid his son good-bye. But he had gone with the three eldest æthelings to the port at South Hampton to greet the newly appointed archbishop, Wulfstan, upon his return from his consecration at Rome. She hoped that Wulfstan would not come back with them—not yet. The archbishop, whose shock of white hair and fierce expression perfectly matched his fiery sermons, would likely have little in the way of consolation to offer the grieving family. And although it would not matter to Edward, whose lifeless body lay in the Old Minster now, hands folded over his breast, with candles burning at his head and feet, Wulfstan’s overbearing presence was more than she thought she could bear.

She kept watch near the bier with Margot and Hilde while a flock of sisters from Nunnaminster chanted the prayers for the dead in one of the side chapels. Earlier, as she had washed the wasted legs and arms that had once been so agile, she had wept for the boy who had been her first friend at court. Edward had embraced her as an older sister, if not a mother, and her tears were for herself as much as for him. Now, listening to the sibilant voices of the nuns, Emma’s eyes were dry. Watching Edward suffer had been the difficult part. At least, for him, the worst was over.

As she prayed, the minster’s massive wooden door opened, and she turned to see the king, who walked down the length of the nave, his cloaked figure silhouetted in the light from the doorway. He came unescorted, and she guessed that he had ordered the others to wait so that he might have some moments alone with his son. Believing that he would wish her away as well, she motioned to her attendants to leave. Before she could slip away, though, Æthelred called her name. Surprised, she went over to him and saw that his eyes were glazed with tears as he looked upon the body of his son. She touched his arm in mute sympathy. Whatever differences lay between them, they were united in their grief at the death of this child.

For some time they stood together in silence while the Latin chanting of the nuns echoed softly in the great church. Finally the king spoke.

“I owe you a debt, my lady,” he said, looking not at her but at the face of Edward, as white and still as if it had been carved of marble, “for your tender care of my son.”

Listening to these words she could not help but reflect on his own coldness toward the boy, and his unwillingness to reach out to Edward when the child had such a need for some sign of affection from his father. What good now was this display of sorrow, when the boy could not know it? But she held her tongue. Even to Æthelred she could not be so cruel.

“He had need of a mother’s care,” she said, more stiffly than she intended, “and his sisters were not old enough to provide that office. I did it willingly, for Edward seemed to me like the younger brother that I never had.”

Still he did not look at her but turned his gaze meditatively on a dark corner at the side of the altar. She followed his glance but could see nothing there except shadows that grew and shrank in the flickering light of the candles.

“Yet it is not every woman,” he said, his eyes still on the shadowy darkness, “who has a heart that is large enough to embrace a child who is not her own.”

Emma studied his face, and she saw that his eyes were dark with emotions that she could not name. She wished that she could see into his mind, could read the memories that clustered there. Was he speaking of his mother, who had ordered the murder of that other Edward, Æthelred’s half brother, to claim a crown for her own son?

Emma shivered, as if cold steel had brushed the back of her neck. As yet she had no child of her own to place in her heart above the children of her husband. Would she, one day, be capable of plotting the death of one of the king’s sons for the advancement of her own? That she might even imagine such a thing terrified her. She could not contemplate bloodying her soul for the gift of a crown.

Then another, more frightening thought slipped into her mind on the heels of the last. Might not the children of Æthelred see her own child as a threat to their power? If she were forced to raise her hand against the king’s children in order to protect her own, would she do so?

Dear God
, she prayed silently,
never let me be put to such a terrible test
.

The king’s voice called her back to the present.

“It speaks well of you, lady,” he said, following his own train of thought, “that you showed such compassion for this child. God grant that you will have a child of your own one day.”

Emma hesitated. Was this the time, when he was grieving for Edward, to tell him that she was, indeed, with child? And yet, what better time? For the moment, at least, they were in accord.

“My lord,” she said, feeling as if she were standing at the edge of some dark abyss, “I am with child even now. Indeed, I hope to bear you a son before winter’s end.”

She waited for his response, still unsure if she had picked the right moment to tell him. His face registered neither surprise, nor joy, nor satisfaction. He did not even look at her.

“If it is a boy,” he said, “we will call him Edward.” He turned his gaze once more toward the flickering shadows. “Leave me now. I would be alone.”

She watched him for a moment, astonished at the ease with which this man could replace one son with another. She turned to leave but stopped when she saw that Athelstan stood just within the doorway, watching her, stony faced. She read in his eyes that he had heard his father’s promise to bestow Edward’s name upon the child in her womb, and that the knowledge had created a gulf between them that neither one could ever cross. His eyes glittered coldly at her before he looked away.

She swept quickly past him, pressing her hand against her heart, keenly aware that she might be carrying Athelstan’s rival for the crown of England.

Æthelred contemplated the pallid face of his dead child and wondered if this was God’s retribution—the sins of the father visited upon the son. Or was it merely Edward’s
wyrd
to leave this life so soon?

As father and king he had done all that he could to protect his children from perils that they might suffer at the hands of his enemies. But there were other dangers in the world that men could neither explain nor comprehend. Edward had wasted away before his eyes and he had been powerless to prevent it, king though he was.