Shadow on the Crown. Patricia Bracewell

to wed one of Forkbeard’s sons?

      She held her breath, waiting for Richard’s reply.

      ‘My sisters are overly young to wed.’ Her brother’s fumbled words were so casual that Emma wondered if he had understood all that the Danish king had said.

      ‘Age matters little,’ Forkbeard replied, his tone amiable now. ‘My youngest son has seen only ten winters, but like his elder brother, he is already a skilled shipman and warrior. As for your sisters,’ he paused, and Emma twisted her fingers nervously in Ange’s mane as she waited for him to go on, ‘you must not be too tender in your care of them. The Lady Emma seems ripe for bedding. You would do well to breed her now, for a good price, or you might find that you have left it too late.’

      Emma felt the blood rise to her face, humiliation and anger warring with shock and fear. Surely Richard would not agree to sell her to Denmark! It was a harsh, brutal place, barely Christian. Her family could trace their bloodline back to the northern lands, but that was in the past. Surely it was not part of their future. Denmark was a land of fierce men ruled by a ruthless king. Swein Forkbeard had not inherited his crown but had won it in a battle to the death waged against his own father. Richard could not allow her to marry into a family such as that!

      Her blood pounded in her ears, and she had to strain to hear her brother’s response to Forkbeard’s words.

      ‘Your proposal does my family great honour,’ Richard said. ‘You will understand, of course,’ he went on, his voice smoothly persuasive in spite of his broken Danish, ‘that a betrothal is too delicate a matter to be settled quickly. There are many things to consider and to weigh, and as you know, I have two sisters. You have yet to meet the elder, who, by tradition, should naturally be the first to wed.’

      She did not hear the Danish king’s reply, for the men’s voices faded, replaced by the clink of bridles as grooms led the horses to their stalls. Emma remained rooted to the spot where she stood, her face buried in Ange’s neck, her thoughts in turmoil over what she had heard.

      Swein Forkbeard’s proposal must carry great weight with her brother. Richard was a realist. He would consider the sacrifice of a younger sister a small price to pay for Norman peace with Denmark. It would be terrible for the bride, though – banished to a hostile, distant land. Mathilde would hate it, even as Emma would. She felt her throat constrict at the very thought of it.

      No, her brother could not do such a thing to either of his sisters. He would not send them so far away. He had wed their elder sisters to great lords in Brittany and Frankia, securing his borders and adding considerably to his treasure. Surely he would use Mathilde and herself in a similar manner, for Normandy’s border was long and Richard had need of allies.

      But Richard was ambitious. A royal marriage, even to a son of the barbarous Swein Forkbeard, would enhance her brother’s prestige throughout Europe. Forkbeard may be a Viking warlord rather than a godly Christian king, but all of Europe feared him, and that made him a valuable ally. She could easily imagine Richard succumbing to that argument, and she feared what he might be plotting with the Danish king in his private chamber.

      She whispered a few endearments into Ange’s ear, then, afraid that Forkbeard’s men might arrive hard upon his heels, she hurried back towards the palace. She would say nothing of what she had heard to Mathilde. Their mother, surely, would have some say in the matter, yet Emma was frightened for her elder sister.

      A slender needle of anxiety began to prick her insides. She did not trust Richard.

      

       25th December 1001

       Rochester, Kent

      In England that December the fierce snowstorm blinded and buried countless travellers caught on the high chalk downs of Wessex, even within a few short steps of shelter. Near Durham in Northumbria the snow piled so high on the thatched roof of Lord Thorkeld’s great hall that it collapsed of its own weight, burying the lord and his family and retainers, twenty folk in all. On the Isle of Wight a storm surge swept an entire village into the sea. In Devon the once prosperous towns of Pin-hoo and Clyst, their houses, workshops, and storerooms razed to the ground during the previous summer’s Danish raids, were buried beneath fifteen feet of snow, as if they had never existed.

      In the king’s hall at Rochester, Æthelred II of England and his councillors sat at table for the winter feast swathed in furs against the bitter cold. Their mood would have been dour even had the weather been more moderate. They drank their Christmas ale with grim determination rather than pleasure, their company unleavened by the presence of any women. The king’s mother, a force at court for nearly twenty-five years, had gone to God some five weeks before, in November, on the Feast of St Hilda. The king’s lady wife, brought to childbed on Christmas Eve for the eleventh and final time, had breathed her last on Christmas morning. Her cold body lay beneath the vaulted wooden ceiling of the king’s chapel, mourned by her attendants. The child, born too soon and perhaps sensing his loss, found no comfort in the arms of his wet nurse. Whenever the roaring of the wind and the desultory muttering of men momentarily abated, his feeble cry wafted through the hall like the wail of a soul wandering between heaven and earth. The women tending the babe shook their heads, lips pursed. The child was not long for this world, they deemed, for he would not suck.

      The men who kept company with the king at the high table gave little thought to the infant and his prospects, for Æthelred had sons a-plenty, several of them fully grown. What he lacked now was a wife, and they were determined to find him one, whether he would or no. They disagreed, however, on where to look for her.

      King Æthelred, a man haunted by his past and troubled about his future, sat among them, his tall frame hunched over his silver plate and his right hand clenching a gilded drinking horn. Twenty-three years on the throne had seared creases into his face that were unusual for a man who had not yet seen forty winters. Telltale streaks of grey in his tawny hair testified to the hardship of rule, and the bent angle of his head beneath the thick, gold crown suggested that it was more burden than ornament.

      The king, regarding his advisers with watery blue eyes, was well aware of the line of division among them with regard to his marital prospects. The men with lands in the north, led by Ælfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, would urge him to wed Ælfhelm’s daughter Elgiva – a beautiful witch of a girl as ambitious, he suspected, as her father. A marriage there would strengthen the bond between the king and the northern lords, whose allegiances to Ælfhelm and to each other were somewhat stronger, Æthelred knew, than their fealty to him.

      The men with lands in the south would urge him to look beyond the Narrow Sea to Normandy for a bride. Wed the duke’s sister, they would tell him, and persuade her brother to side with Æthelred against the Danes who pillaged English towns and abbeys. Æthelred suspected that it might take a great deal of persuading. The Vikings paid Duke Richard well to harbour their ships on his coast and to trade their spoils in his great market in Rouen. If Æthelred should marry one of the duke’s sisters – and if he sealed the alliance with enough gold – Richard might be willing to bar the Danes from his ports, and so stop the Viking rape of English coasts.

      Then again, Æthelred knew, he might not.

      The hubbub in the hall, which had been muffled while the men filled their bellies, rose again as the meal came to a close and the drinking began in earnest. Æthelred motioned to his cupbearer to refill his drinking horn, then eased himself back in his chair and glowered at the men around him from hooded eyes, focusing at last on Ælfhelm of Northumbria. The ealdorman had risen from his bench and stood now in earnest consultation with a knot of nobles and clergy. His face was as craggy as a weathered scarp and just as difficult to read. Æthelred had never been able to decipher the subtle workings of the mind behind that stonelike visage, but he would wager half of Wessex that tonight Ælfhelm was garnering support for his daughter’s marriage