Read Online Shadow on the Crown by Patricia Bracewell - Free Book Online

slowly. “Only you, Emma, of all my daughters, have the gifts for that.”
    Many hours later, as Emma lay sleepless at her mother’s side, Gunnora’s words echoed endlessly in her mind. She had no illusions about the fate that awaited her. That much her mother had made perfectly clear. As Norman bride and English queen she would walk a fine line between the interests of two rulers—her brother and her lord. Both men would demand her fealty. One, at least, would exact a heavy price if she were to prove disloyal. That was what her mother feared, and what she had been willing to reveal.
    But there was something else that her mother would not say, and Emma felt certain that it had to do with the English king. She sensed that Gunnora knew something about Æthelred of England that she did not want Emma to know, at least not yet. It was that unshared knowledge about the man she would wed that frightened her most of all.
    In the streets of Fécamp and Rouen, in Caen and Évreux, the populace hailed Emma as the flower of Normandy, the bride who would become England’s queen. Within the ducal palace, though, where the duke’s sisters once shared a bedchamber, the news of Emma’s betrothal was no cause for rejoicing. Mathilde, bitter and angry that a royal marriage had been contracted for Emma instead of for her, took to her bed, refusing to speak to her sister in spite of Emma’s tearful entreaties and Gunnora’s measured reproofs. Finally, Gunnora sent her to Rouen, where Mathilde would not be daily bombarded by the frenzied preparations for her sister’s marriage.
    Emma wept at Mathilde’s departure, but Gunnora did not let her grieve for long. There was much that Emma had to learn before the ships would carry her across the Narrow Sea.
    She spent long hours with the ealdorman, Ælfric, who schooled her in the finer points of the English language and the traditions of the court. He was an able tutor who treated her with grave courtesy, and she came to like him well. Not a young man by any means, his genial face was framed by thick gray locks that hung to near his shoulders. His beard, too, was gray, and his dark eyes gleamed beneath bushy gray brows. The fist-sized golden broach that clasped his cloak at one shoulder and the jeweled rings adorning his fingers bespoke wealth and influence, and she wondered how close he was to the king.
    Ælfric told her of the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, and of the great King Alfred, who began the task of binding the separate kingdoms into one—a task completed at last by King Edgar, Æthelred’s father. That king, he told her, had died at an early age, leaving his throne to a young son. Ælfric’s face had darkened then, as if some memory from that distant past had suddenly cast a shadow over the present. He would not say what troubled him, though, and Emma’s suspicion grew that there was something about her betrothed husband that was being kept from her.
    During this time she received guidance from her family as well. Richard advised her regarding the estates for which she would be responsible, reminding her to pay close attention to income and expenditures, to rents and to yields.
    Archbishop Robert counseled her regarding God’s expectations of her as queen, particularly her duties to the Church and the men and women who served it.
    Judith helped her choose the attendants who would accompany her to England and assisted with the packing of all her belongings: clothes, furniture, bedding, supplies for the journey, gifts for the family and for the nobles who awaited her. It was no insignificant task. It would take three longships to transport Emma, her retainers, and her goods to Canterbury. Two more ships would carry a dozen horses bred in the Norman stables—Emma’s own gifts to the members of her new family.
    It was Gunnora who, summoning her daughter to her chamber, raised the matter of the marriage bed and of Emma’s role as bedmate of a