The Emma of Normandy 2-book Collection: Shadow on the Crown and The Price of Blood. Patricia Bracewell

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       February 1003

       Wherwell Abbey, Hampshire

      Emma, wrapped in a warm, sable-lined woollen mantle and attended by Wymarc and Margot, walked slowly along one of the gravel paths of the abbey garden at Wherwell. This was her first venture out of doors for many weeks, and after covering only a short distance, Emma had to admit defeat. She was tired. She was always tired now. Her body, even her mind, was sluggish. Every movement, every thought, took enormous effort, as if her body and her brain fought against a buffeting gale. In the hushed darkness of the abbey chapel she had prayed for relief from this weariness of soul and of limb, but her prayers had gone unanswered.

      She was grateful for the ministrations of the good sisters, and for the care that Wymarc and Margot had lavished upon her ever since the night they had found her as the king had left her – bloodied, bruised, and violated. They had tended to her physical hurts until she was well enough to leave Winchester, transported to Wherwell in a curtained litter, her ravaged face hidden behind a dark veil. The physical marks were gone now. Only this soul-numbing lethargy remained, so enervating that she could not remember how long it had been since she had come here. She had arrived well before Christmas, so it must be two months, she reckoned, at least. Time seemed to stand still, here within the abbey walls, but she knew that the little peace she had found here could not last. She could not continue to hide from the world like a frightened child, not least because the king had insisted that she make an appearance at the Easter court – for the sake of policy.

      And so, for the sake of policy, she must return to Winchester. That disagreeable duty, however, still lay some weeks ahead of her. Ash Wednesday had come and gone, but Easter was yet weeks away. The garden around her, still winter bare, showed no promise of spring. The time of earth’s renewal hovered in the future like a distant dream.

      She came to a bench beneath a tree whose naked branches splayed like skeletal fingers against a blue sky. Shafts of sunlight sifted through the boughs, and Emma sat down and turned her face up to their gentle warmth. She nodded to her companions to join her, and for a few moments they sat in silence, until Emma, turning to Margot, reluctantly picked up the thread of conversation she had abandoned only a little while before.

      ‘Tell me,’ Emma said, ‘how you can be so certain.’

      ‘The signs, my lady, are all there,’ Margot said gently. ‘One has but to read them.’

      Emma closed her eyes. She had thought that she might be slowly dying of some wasting disease, some insidious enemy that robbed her of strength and would not let her eat. For a time she had even hoped that it might be so. But in the same way that she knew of the existence of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy clouds, she had known the truth of what ailed her: she carried the king’s child within her at last – the fruit of his cruelty and of her humiliation.

      Opening her eyes, she looked steadily into Margot’s seamed and worried face.

      ‘I do not want this child,’ she said in a whisper, searching the old woman’s eyes for understanding. ‘I fear that I will hate it, that every time I see it I will remember how it was begotten.’ There were ways to end it, she knew. Margot would know what to do.

      The old woman returned her gaze, and her brown eyes did not waver for an instant.

      ‘I know what you would ask of me, child,’ she said. ‘I also know that if you truly believed that I would grant your desire, you would not ask it.’

      Emma shut her eyes again. She was not certain that Margot was right. Nevertheless, she had her answer. She would have to carry this thing, bring it into the world and find some way to endure its existence. Others could tend it and rear it. She had but to bear it, yet that task would be onerous enough. Love it, she never could.

      ‘Emma.’ Wymarc’s voice, rough as broken glass, slashed across Emma’s brooding thoughts. Emma felt her friend clutch at her hand, as if she would rescue her from drowning in a sullen, black sea. ‘The child is not the father. The child is a miracle and the answer to your prayers. You have grown to love the king’s other children. Will you not love your own babe even more? Think of little Mathilda, if you doubt it.’

      The image of a sunny, blue-eyed imp flashed into Emma’s mind. Mathilda, the royal daughter who had been dedicated to Wherwell at the age of two, had been Emma’s nearly constant companion from the moment that she arrived at the abbey. Fascinated by the brilliant newcomers who had entered her convent world, the child had attached herself to Emma with the loyalty and trust of an adoring puppy. Emma had done nothing to encourage her, but the girl’s devotion had been impossible to resist. Now they were all but inseparable, and Æthelred’s tiny daughter had been the only ray of light in the darkness that was Emma’s life.

      And yet, she thought, folding her arms tightly beneath her cloak and rocking back and forth in her despair, she did not trust herself to love the child growing within her. The babe had been purchased at far too great a cost. She despised the brutal act that had planted the seed in her womb, despised the man who had perpetrated it, despised herself for submitting to it. How could she not despise the child who would result from it?

      She placed her fingers against her closed eyelids, remembering the days of her girlhood in Normandy, wishing that she could return to that simpler time. Her mother’s image rose in her mind, but she banished it. It was Gunnora’s fault that she was here now, saddled with grief, fear, and an unwanted child. She would forever hate her mother for sentencing her to this wretched fate.

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