The Forever Queen (4 page)

Poor lass, he thought as he escorted Emma back to her chair on the high dais. The less well-off thought it must be wonderful to be born of the nobility, to be the daughter or sister of a Duke. To be wedded to a King. Aye, well, that depended on the King, didn’t it?

The men entering Emma’s bedchamber were drunk with wine, cider, ale and laughter. It was a small room, perched above the eastern end of the hall, reached by a narrow wooden stair, and seemed smaller with the great bulk of lewd-minded men crowding in. Furnished simply, it held two chests, one for bed linen, one for garments; two stools; and a table, on which stood a pewter bowl of dried fruit, a jug of wine with two attendant goblets, Emma’s jewel casket, and her personal toilet equipment, combs, and hairpins.

The wooden box bed, with its goose-feather mattress, linen sheets, and piled animal furs was draped by heavy blue woollen curtains to provide privacy and to keep out the cold and draughts. Tomorrow or someday soon, Emma intended to set about making the room more homely, hang on the walls some of the large embroideries that were becoming fashionable in France. Tapestries they were commonly called, though they were not woven, but stitched by hand. She would find some suitable skins to place on the floor too. Bear was best, as it was thick and hard-wearing. Perhaps a clay pot to put some spring flowers in? Add her modest collection of precious books and the rest of her personal possessions to the few that her women had already unpacked—with imagination and skill, she could make this a pleasant place for herself. A royal bower, where her command ruled, and solitude, should she require it, could be paramount. For tonight, though, command stood for naught and solitude was as far from her reach as were the stars in the sky. She would be obliged to share this bare place with her husband on most nights during the customary honey-mead moon-month of celebration. He was as raucously drunk as the dozen men who had escorted him here.

This was the way of things, Emma knew, for her sisters had been put publicly to bed with their new husbands on their wedding nights. But, stupidly, she had thought that being a crowned Queen and wed to a King, she would be exempt from the humiliation of it all. Sitting hunched and naked in the bed, her arms clutched around her knees, with the bed furs pulled up to her chin as much for warmth as modesty, she chided herself for being so naive. Being a Queen would make it more necessary to be seen bedded with her husband. She had to provide him with legitimate sons, had to be seen to become Æthelred’s consummated wife.

Emma blinked aside tears. Her headache had worsened and her stomach was feeling queasy again; she bit her lip as Lady Godegifa, appointed as her lady-in-waiting, stretched forward and, with a flick of her hand, exposed Emma’s nakedness. “Show yourself, girl. Let your husband see what he is getting.”

Lady Godegifa, wife to Alfhelm, one of Æthelred’s Ealdormen, made no attempt to conceal her dislike of this Norman-born girl. Able to speak both Danish and French, she had agreed to do her duty to the best of her ability, but refused to step any further. She disapproved of this marriage and, in her arrogance, cared not who knew it, for her daughter, not this foreign incomer, ought to have become Æthelred’s wife and Queen.

Embarrassed, Emma wanted to cry out, to curl herself tight and hide from the men lasciviously inspecting her breasts and body. It took courage for her to stare straight ahead, to straighten her legs and bring her arms away from covering herself. More courage to stop the cry of dismay from reaching her throat when her wretched brother, as drunk as the rest of them, said scornfully, “Her teats are as flat as unleavened bread, but they should swell once her belly bloats with child.”

His words stung. In this vulnerable situation, could he not have offered her support? Tears welled in her eyes. Her one comfort, Æthelred and his Lords would not have understood him.

“By God, there’s nothing of her!” Æthelred declared, spreading his hands in dismay. “I will be spending half the night trying to find her.”

Someone, answering with a great bellow of wit, indicated Æthelred’s already rising manhood. “Just point your pizzle in the right direction; it has the sense to find its way into harbour!”

With more laughter and tawdry advice they put Æthelred into the bed beside Emma, tucking the furs around them as if they were babes needing swaddling. Æthelred’s priest, the only man who had stayed mute in the background, sprinkled holy water over them both and muttered a few liturgies about fruitfulness and the duties of marriage. Then her women were snuffing out the candles and chivvying the men from the chamber, the laughter and the increasing lewd advice to aid Æthelred’s performance diminishing in volume as the door closed. Not that they went away. From the noise, it sounded as though all of them were huddled on the landing beyond the door, although, with the night guard, there could be no room for more than three.

“My other wife was barely older than you when I bedded her,” Æthelred said, stretching out his hand to tuck a strand of hair behind Emma’s ear, “but she knew of the world, knew already how to pleasure a man.” He snorted. “Once I took her into my bed, she remained loyal to me, so it mattered not.” He did not add his private thought, that it was a simple thing to ensure: keep a woman busy with a child at her breast or in her belly, and she would not have the chance to stray. He sighed. This girl was so young; what was he to do with her? More to the point, what could she do for him?

His hand dropped to cup Emma’s breast. This had to be done; for the child’s sake he would get it over and finished as soon as possible.

Emma closed her eyes, and whether it was the ale or her fear, both perhaps, she found her conscious self drifting into a mist of unreality, a waking dream, as if the discomfort was happening to someone else. Vaguely, she was aware of the stink of his breath, his weight on top of her, and that it hurt as he pushed himself in, but otherwise it was as if her whole being had become numbed. Pleasure sated, he rolled from her, turned away, and was instantly asleep.

She lay still, aware of an uncomfortable soreness between her thighs and the feel of a trickle of wetness. Was that it? Was this what she could expect whenever he came to her bed? She let her breath go, unaware that she had been holding it in.

“Tears are to be kept private,” her mother had said. What of pain and despair? Were they also to be shut away out of sight like soiled linen? How was she to endure this night after night?

Only one candle burnt, flickering as a draught toyed with the flame. Emma turned her head, watched the yellow glow flutter dark shadows along the walls. From down in the hall, the noise of celebration rumbled up through the floor. Some of the men had joined the women, resuming the dancing and pleasures of earlier in the evening. A crash; the shriek of a woman’s drunken laughter; the deeper bellow of a man’s voice. Had a trestle table been knocked over? From the clatter of pottery and metal it sounded as if it had.

The wick untrimmed, the candle began to smoke, then gutted out, the only light coming from the strip beneath the doorway.

“Do not shed tears in public,” Mama had instructed. Well, she was not in public; there was no one here to see her weep.

Beside her, Æthelred began to snore.

Pallig undressed quietly, not wishing to disturb the woman in the bed or the child sleeping like an innocent angel in her cot. All the same, he could not resist a peep at the girl, her thumb stuffed into her mouth, fair hair framing her cherubic face. No doubt she had led her nurse in a merry dance before settling to sleep. The little imp always did. He touched a kiss to his fingers, placed them tenderly on her forehead, then, snuffing out the candle stub, climbed into bed beside his wife.

Gunnhilda stirred, disturbed by the ice coldness of his feet. “Was it a good feasting?” she asked, her honey voice drowsy with sleep.

“Very good, but would have been all the better had you been there.”

She snuggled closer to him, her arms wrapping around the solidity of his muscled body. “But you were too busy with your other woman to have noticed or cared about me.”

Her husband did not rise to her teasing. Gunnhilda was proud that her man had become Queen’s captain. There were few men who could outshine Pallig, despite the ugly rumours still rumbling concerning that awkward incident in Devon-Shire last summer.

He had set eyes on her eight years past. A girl of five and ten years and royal born, half-sister to Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark. Swein had brought her to England to find her a husband, but had not quite foreseen the one she managed to find for herself. Pallig had been one of Æthelred’s Thegns taking the raised tribute to pay the Danes to go away and leave England alone.

King Swein’s plan, in 994, had been to ally with one of the northern Lords, find himself a toehold for the next year’s raiding, and, if fortune smiled the year after, that year’s also. Had reckoned his scheme without the unexpected passion of young love.

It had been instant, their liking for each other. Pallig’s gaze had met Gunnhilda’s as she had served the cup of welcome to her brother’s guests, and when Pallig rode away the following morning, she had ridden with him, perched behind his saddle, her arms tightly woven about his waist. Swein had bellowed his disapproval, raged, ranted, pleaded, and cajoled, but Gunnhilda had listened to none of it. Even the threat that he would think of her as dead were she to make the fool of herself with this Englishman had held no sway.

“How are you feeling?” Pallig asked, smoothing his hand over her forehead to see if it was cool, brushing back the corn-gold hair that his daughter, asleep in her cradle, had inherited.

“I am well,” his wife answered, her own hand caressing his chest. “Tired, that is all. I intend to start going about my normal life in a few days.”

“You most certainly will not! I forbid it!”

Gunnhilda batted her hand at him. “Oh, don’t fuss! The bleeding and the pains have not been with me these last five days. I cannot lie abed for the rest of this pregnancy! October is too many months ahead for so much idleness.”

“But you nearly lost the child!” Pallig’s protest was silenced by Gunnhilda touching her fingers to his lips.

She pulled him down into the warmth of the bed. “My breath smells sweet, and my urine is clear. I have rested, and I am well. So is the child.”

Grinning into the darkness, Pallig kissed her forehead and settled himself comfortable. After a long silence he said, “I feel for her, you know.”

Gunnhilda was almost asleep. “Mm? Who do you feel for?”

“Our little Queen.”

After all this while of marriage, of bearing the three-year-old daughter who slept in the cot and losing two others before they saw more than four months of life, Gunnhilda thought she knew Pallig’s moods. If nothing else, she knew when to guess something was mithering at him and he would not sleep until he had talked whatever it was through to its end.

“What is she like, then, this Emma of Normandy?”

“Fair-haired, fair-faced. Eyes that sparkle in a certain light, eyes that will one day, I am thinking, have the ability to look into a man’s soul.”

“You liked her?”

Pallig answered slowly, uncertain. He felt pity for the lass, without question he would serve her with loyalty and honour, but did he like her? “Aye,” he at last said, “I do. She’s lonely and apprehensive at the moment, more naive than ever my sisters were, but”—he rubbed his hand over the bristles of his chin—“there’s something about her that has alerted my interest.” He paused, thinking. “It is like looking at a tight-curled bud on a tree. You know it will blossom when the sun warms it through, but will it flower as pink or white? Will it develop into a succulent fruit or wither away, get burnt by the frost or parched by a lack of rain?” He shifted his arm, grimacing as cramp niggled the muscles. “Or the bud can be broken before it blooms, brushed aside by a clumsy beast to die unnoticed by the wayside. It will be a great pity—and a loss for England, I am thinking—if this particular little bud is not nurtured into fruition.”

“And you do not consider Æthelred to be the right man to do so?”

Pallig snorted. “Do you?”

Gunnhilda made no answer. Her husband knew well her contemptuous opinion of Æthelred. “I would have liked to have been there to greet her,” she said, after a while. “Do you think she would give me audience on the morrow?”

Alarmed, Pallig said too quickly, “When you are stronger!”

“So you do not want me to make a friendship with this shy bud who may turn into a plump fruit worth the plucking? Why is that, I wonder?”

As hastily he answered, “It is not that I do not want you to meet her, elskede, my beloved; just not yet, that’s all. Later, when you are not so likely to tire yourself.”

“I see.” Gunnhilda half turned from her husband, folded her arms across her breasts.

“Oh, woman!” Pallig locked his hands around her wrists, tried to force her defensive arms apart, relented, and kissed her with a husband’s passionate feeling of love. He wanted her. Rolling aside, he lay quiet, breathing evenly and deeply, willing the need to subside. He welcomed the coming of this child, hoping for it to be a son, but missed the intimacies of lovemaking.

“I am worried you might do too much too soon,” he said. “You nearly lost our child; you must take care. This new Queen of ours will be here for some long years, trust to God. There is no great urgency for you to meet her.”

“It would not be that you wish to keep me from her because you fancy plucking her for yourself, then?”

“No, it would not!” The answer came hot and indignant. “How could you suggest such a thing?”

Gunnhilda chuckled, her voice like the merry trickle of a mountain stream. “I suggest it because you are hot for a woman, and I have a suspicion you are besotted with her!”

On the edge of denying that also, Pallig realised she was jesting.

“It is the other side round,” he admitted. “The lass has taken a shine to me.” He laughed. “Poor, misguided little whelp.”

Gunnhilda touched her lips to his, her taste cool and sensuous. If the truth were known, she wanted her husband as much as he wanted her, but dared not risk the safety of the child.