Shadow on the Crown. Patricia Bracewell

lay down again, on his side, his back to the other body in the bed.

      He owed this girl nothing. He would use her for his pleasure because her nakedness aroused him. He would fill her belly with a child and would order his Mass priest to beseech heaven for a daughter. Beyond that he would give her no more than what the terms of the marriage contract required of him. Her title of queen would have to satisfy her, for that and a child were all that she would get from him.

      

       April 1002

       Canterbury, Kent

      On Easter Monday over one hundred women crowded into the great hall of the archbishop’s palace to greet Æthelred’s bride. Elgiva arrived late, with Groa in her wake. As she tried to make her way towards the dais, a fat matron stinking of cloves pressed hard against her, and the sharply sweet smell of the spice was almost Elgiva’s undoing. In an instant she was a child again, hiding in her mother’s clothes coffer – unable to move, scarce able to breathe, too weak to free herself, and enveloped by darkness, the scent of cloves, and a mindless panic.

      That same panic clawed at her now, and she began to whimper as she tried to twist away from the stench of the spice and from the crowd that engulfed her. Sickened and faint, she pulled her own cloak against her face, but it did little to block the pungent smell of cloves. She felt her gorge rise and she thought she would be sick, but Groa took her hand and squeezed it to steady her.

      ‘Let us make for the wall,’ Groa said urgently. ‘You will be able to breathe there.’

      Frantic and dizzy, she blindly followed Groa as the old woman doggedly elbowed her way past a score of protesting noblewomen. She felt herself growing more and more faint, but she clung to Groa’s hand, and at last they reached the wall. The next thing she knew Groa had cleared a bench of gawkers and helped her up. A blast of frigid air from a narrow window scored her face, and she drew in a long breath that was deliciously free of the stink of cloves and wet wool.

      Slowly her light-headedness began to dissipate, and she rested her now throbbing head against the wall as Groa joined her on the bench to watch the proceedings taking place at the top of the room. When Elgiva saw the new queen, though, her gorge rose again. Emma, flanked by guards and attendants, sat enthroned beneath a golden canopy. Regally swathed in a deep blue mantle, her blond hair braided into two long plaits, she wore upon her head the same golden circlet that the archbishop had placed there yesterday.

      ‘It should have been you,’ Groa said softly.

      And that was the truth of it. That bland, pasty-faced Norman witch had cheated her out of her destiny. Who would have imagined that Æthelred would take a foreign bride, and then make her a queen? It should never have happened. The king had made the wrong choice, and her father was not the only one who said so. By now even the king must realize his error. She had not missed the way his eyes had lingered on her face yesterday when she stood with his sons below the royal table. If he did not already regret his choice of bride, he surely would in time.

      An endless parade of women made obeisance before the queen, presented their gifts and received tokens from the queen in return – a pin or a brooch, and always of silver. The queen, it seemed, knew how to purchase affection. Well, Emma would not purchase Elgiva’s affection, no matter how precious the gift.

      Dear God! How long would she be forced to live in the queen’s household? Months, certainly. Maybe even years.

      She felt ill again at the thought of having to scrape and bow before Emma, but even that, she supposed, was better than mouldering away in Northamptonshire. This queen, at least, was young – not like Æthelred’s last wife, who had been older, even, than the king.

      And like it or not, she would be one of the queen’s household. Her father had made that clear when they broke their fast together this morning.

      ‘You must be my eyes and my ears at court,’ he had said, ‘for I journey north at week’s end until the witan gathers again in summer. I want you to make every effort to gain the trust of the queen. She is little more than a hostage for her brother’s good behaviour now, but if she gives the king a son, there is no telling what power she might wield.’

      ‘God forbid,’ Elgiva had murmured, ‘that she should give Æthelred a son.’

      Her father had merely shrugged and left her. She had dawdled over her food, pondering her father’s words and wondering if she might eventually manoeuvre herself into Athelstan’s bed, and if not his, mayhap the king’s. She was toying with that possibility again as Groa touched her arm.

      ‘You had best go forward, my lady,’ Groa urged, ‘if you wish to make your obeisance before the queen. I will lead you through the crowd.’ She held out the gift that Elgiva would present to the bride.

      Elgiva took another long gulp of air and allowed Groa to help her from her perch. She cared not what her father wanted. She would not smile and fawn before this queen like the other fools here. She had heard their talk yesterday – the whispers about the beautiful young queen and her noble lineage. Emma, they said, had been named after her mother, the Frankish king’s sister, who had wed Emma’s father when the two were little more than children.

      That was nothing but a skald’s tale, invented out of sunbeams and moondust and probably spread abroad by the king himself to enhance his bride’s prestige. Groa had nosed out the truth of it, and Elgiva intended to make sure that the women of the court learned the queen’s secret.

      When she finally reached the canopied throne, and the steward had announced her name and titles, she made her obligatory courtesy before Emma, but she did not smile. She would not simper for this queen, although she had chosen the bridal gift with great care. She rose from her obeisance and held up the small, intricately carved ivory casket. On its lid a fierce dragon ship sailed upon an ivory sea, and along the casket’s back and sides a monster of the deep twisted and writhed.

      ‘I bring you a treasure from Jorvik, the capital of my father’s vast district of Northumbria,’ she said, pitching her voice so that the women all around her would be able to hear. ‘It is of Danish workmanship, and therefore a fitting tribute for our Danish queen. Your mother, I am told, is a Dane. Is this not so?’

      The words echoed in the room, and Emma felt a tremor in their wake, like the tingling in the air just before a lightning bolt strikes. There was little love for the Danes in Æthelred’s England, and Emma suspected that her Danish mother had probably been kept a royal secret – until now. Few outside of Normandy would concern themselves with the marriage practices of the Norman duke who had had two wives at the same time – one a Danish heiress who brought him lands and children and the other a barren Frankish princess whom he had not wanted.

      Emma looked into the dark, triumphant eyes of the girl who stood before her and saw there the same contempt that she had read in Ealdorman Ælfhelm’s face the night before. Like father, like daughter, then. She had yet to discover the source of their enmity, but she would have to begin to deal with it this very moment.

      ‘It is true, Lady Elgiva, that my mother was born a Dane. I, however, was born a Norman,’ she emphasized the last word, and now she stood up so that she could be seen easily, directing her next words to all the women in the hall. ‘Yesterday, when I wed your king, I was born anew before God and all the world as an English woman and an English queen.’ The room erupted in riotous applause, and Emma acknowledged it with a smile before she turned solemn eyes upon the Lady Elgiva. ‘I thank you, lady, for your gift. It symbolizes, I trust, your allegiance to me and to my husband. In token of my acknowledgement of your honoured position among my attendants, I bid you accept this ring.’

      Emma slipped a gold ring from her finger and placed it in Elgiva’s palm. She doubted that the gesture would win the young woman’s friendship, never