The Wind From Hastings Read Free Page B

that’s what you mean. Father may find it charming, but it won’t get you anywhere with me.”
    One of the torches sputtered and spat a flaming particle of pitch to the floor.
    Brothers are intended by God as a sort of plague, like floods and locusts. I tried to keep my temper, congratulating myself on the effort. “Please, just tell me what’s happening!”
    â€œVery. little, really. The servants will scarcely bother to stir themselves from the kitchen and stillroom, Morkere is off somewhere vomiting, and our parents have gone to the buttery to quarrel. So I am left with you, like a boil on my nose.” He cut a great hunk of cheese and stuffed it into his face.
    â€œEdwin, I have to understand this! Why is the Earl outlawed?”
    â€œYou did not hear?” He looked astonished.
    â€œNot all of it. Just the part about the banishment, that I heard. And that we were dispossessed. But why?”
    At that moment the manshell of him cracked, just a little, and I caught a glimpse of the frightened child within. He grew pale and darted nervous glances into the shadow spaces between the sputtering torches. I came as close then as I ever would to loving my elder brother.
    â€œThe charge was treason,” he said hoarsely.
    â€œThat can’t be!”
    â€œThe Witan found him guilty. Of making treasonous statements in public, saying the King is unfit to govern and the Danes insult the English throne by planning to have one of the Godwines crowned when King Edward dies.”

    There was the kernel of the thing, and I began to understand. Since babyhood I had heard my father at table arguing that same point. He and my lady mother were of the old, pure Saxon blood, which had been the nobility in the east before the Danish warriors came to our shores. My grandmother Godiva was of the House of Alfred, called the Great. Bitter was the resentment of the Saxons against the Danish kings who had ruled our country for three generations, until the death of King Hardecnut in 1042.
    Then a Saxon of Alfred’s blood again assumed the throne. But he was no mighty warrior in the old tradition. King Edward was an ascetic, a man who wore hair shirts beneath his royal robe and spent too much time in prayer and pious acts. The real rulers of England were still the Danes, and the Danish-supported Earl Godwine of Wessex raised the most powerful voice at court.
    The Saxons, who had long mistrusted the Earl Godwine and his Danish wife Gytha, went about with their hearts in their hose. My father had become a focal point for their grumblings, and our Great Hall was a place where the deeds of Alfred and Aethelwulf were sung again and again on long winter nights.
    To a child there is enchantment in the telling of old tales, and I secretly enjoyed thinking of myself as a real princess of England. Never, never did I imagine overthrowing the King, nor did I think my father and his friends meant to do such a thing. But how can children know what big folk mean?
    It was not quite as bad as my worst imaginings. True, by sun-come-up most of our servants had vanished, melted away like snow by the heat of our disgrace. But we were not thrown into the marshes to starve. We were allowed to take our clothing and beds, and my lady mother kept some of her jewels and her dower chest. Emma and a few others remained faithful, including the Earl’s grizzled squire Owain. They had been together many years, and the bonds between
them were close. Owain was a Briton from Wales, the mysterious mountains to the west, and when he spoke his native tongue it sounded like water gurgling over stones.
    It was Owain who rode down the coast and arranged a ship for us. He knew of men in Wales, and across the sea in Ireland, who would be inclined to be generous to an enemy of the growing power of the Godwines. My father was determined to resist banishment, and I was glad of it. I heard him question Owain long and long about the fighting ability of