Monday began like any other weekday. Blod went for water and Ethel made porridge. As Edgar was sitting down to his inadequate breakfast, Cwenburg came storming in, indignant and furious. Pointing an accusing finger at Edgar, she said: “Your mother is an old witch!”

Edgar had a feeling this was going to be welcome news. “I’ve often thought so myself,” he said good-humoredly. “But what has she done to you?”

“She wants to starve me to death! She says I can have only one bowl of porridge!”

Edgar guessed where this was going, and he smothered a grin.

Dreng spoke in the confident tones of the powerful. “She can’t do that to my daughter.”

“She just did!”

“Did she give any reason for it?”

“She said she’s not going to feed me any more than you feed Edgar.”

Dreng was startled. Clearly he had not anticipated anything like this. He looked baffled and said nothing for a moment. Then he turned on Edgar. “So you went crying to your mother, did you?” he sneered.

It was a feeble attack, and Edgar was untroubled. “That’s what mothers are for, isn’t it?”

“Right, that’s it, I’ve heard enough,” said Dreng. “You’re out of here, go home.”

But Cwenburg was not having that. “You can’t send him back to us,” she said to Dreng. “He’s another mouth, and there’s hardly enough to eat as it is.”

“Then you’ll come here.” Dreng was pretending to be in full control, but he was looking a bit desperate.

“No,” said Cwenburg. “I’m married, and I like it. And my baby needs a father.”

Dreng realized he was cornered, and he looked livid.

Cwenburg said: “You have to give Edgar more to eat, that’s all. You can afford it.”

Dreng turned to Edgar with a look loaded with malevolence. “You’re a sly little rat, aren’t you?”

“This wasn’t my idea,” Edgar said. “Sometimes I wish I were as clever as my mother.”

“You’re going to regret your mother’s cleverness, I promise you that.”

Cwenburg said: “I like something nice in my porridge.” She opened the chest where Ethel kept foodstuffs and took out a jar of butter. Using her belt knife she took a generous scoop and put it in Edgar’s bowl.

Dreng looked on helplessly.

“Tell your mother I did that,” Cwenburg said to Edgar.

“All right,” Edgar said.

He ate the buttered porridge fast, before anyone could stop him. It made him feel good. But Dreng’s sentence echoed in his mind: You’re going to regret your mother’s cleverness, I promise you that.

It was probably true.

CHAPTER 9

    Mid?September 997

agna set off from Cherbourg with a heart full of happy anticipation. She had triumphed over her parents, and she was going to England to marry the man she loved.

The whole town came to the waterfront to cheer her off. Her ship, the Angel, had a single mast with a large multicolored sail, plus sixteen pairs of oars. The figurehead was a carved angel blowing a trumpet, and at the stern a long tail curved up and forward to terminate in a lion’s head. Its captain was a wiry graybeard called Guy who had crossed the Channel to England many times before.

Ragna had sailed in a ship only once: three years ago she had gone with her father to Fécamp, ninety miles across the Bay of Seine, never far from land. The weather had been good, the sea had been calm, and the sailors had been charmed to have a beautiful young noblewoman aboard. The trip had been pleasantly uneventful.

So she had been looking forward eagerly to this voyage, the first of many new adventures. She knew, in theory, that any sea voyage was hazardous, but she could not help feeling exhilarated: it was her nature. You could spoil anything by worrying too much.

She was accompanied by her maid, Cat; Agnes, her best seamstress; three other maids; plus Bern the Giant and six more men-at-arms to protect her. She and Bern had horses—hers was her favorite, Astrid—and they took four ponies to carry the baggage. Ragna had packed four new dresses and six new pairs of shoes. She also had a small personal wedding gift for Wilwulf, a belt of soft leather with a silver buckle and strap end, packed in its own special box.

The horses were tethered on board with straw underfoot, for a measure of cushioning in case the motion of the sea should cause them to fall. With a crew of twenty the ship was crowded.

Genevieve cried when the ship raised its anchor.

They set off in warm sunshine, with a brisk southwesterly wind that promised to take them to Combe in a couple of days. Now for the first time Ragna became anxious. Wilwulf loved her, but he might have changed. She was eager to make friends with his family and his subjects, but would they like her? Would she be able to win their affection? Or would they disdain her foreign ways, and even resent her wealth and beauty? Would she like England?

To banish such worries, Ragna and her maids practiced speaking Anglo-Saxon. Ragna had been taking lessons every day from an Englishwoman married to a Cherbourg man. Now she made the others giggle by telling them the words for the different male and female parts of the body.

Then, with hardly any warning, the summer breeze turned into an autumn storm, and cold rain whipped the ship and all its passengers.

There was no shelter. Ragna had once seen a gaily painted river barge with a canopy to shade noble ladies from the heat of the sun, but apart from that she had never come across a ship with any kind of cabin or protective roof. When it rained, passengers and crew and cargo alike all got wet. Ragna and her maids huddled together, pulling the hoods of their cloaks over their heads, trying to keep their feet out of the pools that gathered in the bottom.

But that was only the beginning. They stopped smiling as the wind turned into a gale. Captain Guy seemed calm, but he lowered the sail for fear of capsizing. Now the ship went where the weather took it. The stars were hidden behind clouds, and even the crew did not know which way they were heading. Ragna began to be scared.

The crew dropped a sea anchor off the stern. This was a big sack that filled with water and acted as a drag on the ship, moderating its motion and keeping the stern to the wind. But the swells grew. The ship pitched violently: the angel blew his trumpet up at the black sky then, a second later, down into the roiling deeps. The horses could not keep their footing and fell to their knees, neighing in terror. The men-at-arms tried to calm them, without success. Water slopped over the sides. Some of the crew began to say prayers.

Ragna began to think she would never get to England. Perhaps she was not destined to marry Wilwulf and have his children. She might die and go to hell to be punished for the sin she had committed in making love to him before they were husband and wife.

She made the mistake of picturing what it would be like to drown. She recalled a childhood game of holding her breath to see how long she could keep it up, and she felt the panic that had come over her after a minute or two. She imagined the terror of being so desperate to breathe that she inhaled lungfuls of water. How long did it take to die? The thought made her feel ill, and she threw up the dinner she had enjoyed in sunshine only a couple of hours earlier. Vomiting failed to quiet her stomach, but nausea took away her fear, for now she hardly cared whether she lived or died.

She felt as if it would go on forever. When she could no longer see the rain falling she realized it was night. The temperature dropped and she shivered in her sodden clothing.

She had no idea how long the storm had continued when, at last, it eased. The downpour became a drizzle and the wind dropped. The ship drifted in the dark: it carried lamps and a jar of oil in a waterproof chest, but there was no fire with which to light them. Captain Guy said he might have raised the sail if he had known for sure that they were far from land, but with no knowledge of the ship’s position and no light by which to see signs that land was near, it was too dangerous. They had to wait for day to restore their vision.

When dawn came Ragna saw that his caution had been wise: they were within sight of cliffs. The sky was clouded, but the clouds were brighter in one direction, which must therefore be east. The land to the north of them was England.

The crew went quickly to work despite the continuing rain: first they raised the sail, then they gave out cider and bread for breakfast, then they baled the water from the bottom of the ship.

Ragna was amazed that they could simply resume their duties. They had all nearly died: how could they act normally? She could hardly think of anything but the fact that she was still, miraculously, alive.

They sailed along the coast until they saw a small harbor with a few boats. The captain did not know the place, but he guessed they might be forty or fifty miles east of Combe. He turned the ship landward and sailed into the harbor.