of the cross. ‘The pagans are everywhere, lord, and no one is safe. Bishop Swithwulf begs your help.’
But I could not help the bishop. I needed men to guard Lundene, not Cent, and I needed men to guard my family too for, a week after the city’s fall, Gisela, Stiorra and a half-dozen maids arrived. I had sent Finan and thirty men to escort them safely down the river and the house by the Temes seemed to grow warmer with the echoes of women’s laughter. ‘You might have swept the house,’ Gisela chided me.
‘I did!’
‘Ha!’ she pointed to a ceiling, ‘what are those?’
‘Cobwebs,’ I said, ‘they’re holding the beams in place.’
The cobwebs were swept away and the kitchen fires were lit. In the courtyard, under a corner where the tiled arcade roofs met, there was an old stone urn that was choked with rubbish. Gisela cleaned the filth out, then she and two maids scrubbed the outside of the urn to reveal white marble carved with delicate women who appeared to be chasing each other and waving harps. Gisela loved those carvings. She crouched beside them, tracing a finger over the hair of the Roman women, and then she and the maids tried to copy the hairstyle. She loved the house too, and even endured the river’s stench to sit on the terrace in the evening and watch the water slide by. ‘He beats her,’ she told me one evening.
I knew of whom she spoke and said nothing.
‘She’s bruised,’ Gisela said, ‘and she’s pregnant, and he beats her.’
‘She’s what?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Æthelflaed,’ Gisela said patiently, ‘is pregnant.’ Almost every day Gisela went to the palace and spent time with Æthelflaed, though Æthelflaed was never allowed to visit our house.
I was surprised by Gisela’s news of Æthelflaed’s pregnancy. I do not know why I should have been surprised, but I was. I suppose I still thought of Æthelflaed as a child. ‘And he hits her?’ I asked.
‘Because he thinks she loves other men,’ Gisela said.
‘Does she?’
‘No, of course she doesn’t, but he fears she does.’ Gisela paused to gather more wool that she was spinning onto a distaff. ‘He thinks she loves you.’
I thought of Æthelred’s sudden anger on Lundene’s bridge. ‘He’s mad!’ I said.
‘No, he’s jealous,’ Gisela said, laying a hand on my arm. ‘And I know he has nothing to be jealous about.’ She smiled at me, then went back to gathering her wool. ‘It’s a strange way to show love, isn’t it?’
Æthelflaed had come to the city the day after it fell. She travelled by boat to the Saxon town, and from there an ox cart had carried her across the Fleot and so up to her husband’s new palace. Men lined the route waving leafy green boughs, a priest walked ahead of the oxen scattering holy water while a choir of women followed the cart, which, like the oxen’s horns, was hung with spring flowers. Æthelflaed, clutching the cart’s side to steady herself, had looked uncomfortable, but she had given me a wan smile as the oxen dragged her over the uneven stones inside the gate.
Æthelflaed’s arrival was celebrated by a feast in the palace. I am certain Æthelred had not wanted to invite me, but my rank had given him little choice and a grudging message had arrived on the afternoon before the celebration. The feast had been nothing special, though the ale was plentiful enough. A dozen priests shared the top table with Æthelred and Æthelflaed, and I was given a stool at the end of that long board. Æthelred glowered at me, the priests ignored me, and I left early, pleading that I had to walk the walls and make certain the sentries were awake. I remember my cousin had looked pale that night, but it was soon after his vomiting fit. I had asked after his health and he had waved the question away as though it were irrelevant.
Gisela and Æthelflaed became friends in Lundene. I repaired the wall and Æthelred hunted while his men plundered the city for his palace’s furnishings. I went home one day to find six of his followers in the courtyard of my house. Egbert, the man who had given me the troops on the eve of the attack, was one of the six and his face showed no expression as I came into the courtyard. He just watched me. ‘What do you want?’ I asked the six men. Five were in mail and had swords, the sixth wore a finely embroidered jerkin that showed hounds chasing deer. That sixth man also wore a silver chain, a sign of noble rank. It was Aldhelm, my cousin’s friend and the commander of his household troops.
‘This,’ Aldhelm answered. He was standing by the urn that Gisela had cleaned. It served now to catch rainwater that fell from the roof, and that water was sweet and clean-tasting, a rarity in any city.
‘Two hundred silver shillings,’ I told Aldhelm, ‘and it’s yours.’
He sneered at that. The price was outrageous. The four younger men had succeeded in tipping the urn so that its water had flowed out and now they were struggling to right it again, though they had stopped their efforts when I appeared.
Gisela came from the main house and smiled at me. ‘I told them they couldn’t have it,’ she said.
‘Lord Æthelred wants it,’ Aldhelm insisted.
‘You’re called Aldhelm,’ I said, ‘just Aldhelm, and I am Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, and you call me “Lord”.’
‘Not this one,’ Gisela spoke silkily. ‘He called me an interfering bitch.’
My men, there were four of them, moved to my side and put hands on sword hilts. I gestured for them to step back and unbuckled my own sword belt. ‘Did you call my wife a bitch?’ I asked Aldhelm.
‘My lord requires this statue,’ he said, ignoring my question.
‘You will apologise to my wife,’ I told him, ‘and then to me.’ I laid the belt with its two heavy swords on the flagstones.
He pointedly turned away from me. ‘Leave it on its side,’ he told the four men, ‘and roll it out to the street.’
‘I want two apologies,’ I said.
He heard the menace in my voice and turned back to me, alarmed now. ‘This house,’ Aldhelm explained, ‘belongs to the Lord Æthelred. If you live here it is by his gracious permission.’ He became even more alarmed as I drew closer. ‘Egbert!’ he said loudly, but Egbert’s only response was a calming motion with his right hand, a signal that his men should keep their swords scabbarded. Egbert knew that if a single blade left its long scabbard there would be a fight between his men and mine, and he had the sense to avoid that slaughter, but Aldhelm had no such sense. ‘You impertinent bastard,’ he said, and snatched a knife from a sheath at his waist and lunged it at my belly.
I broke Aldhelm’s jaw, his nose, both his hands and maybe a couple of his ribs before Egbert hauled me away. When Aldhelm apologised to Gisela he did so while spitting teeth through bubbling blood, and the urn stayed in our courtyard. I gave his knife to the girls who worked in the kitchen, where it proved useful for cutting onions.
And the next day, Alfred came.
The king came silently, his ship arriving at a wharf upstream of the broken bridge. The Haligast waited for a river trader to pull away, then ghosted in on short, efficient oar strokes. Alfred, accompanied by a score of priests and monks, and guarded by six mailed men, came ashore unheralded
