Page 181 of The Evening and the Morning
Wynstan did not feel comfortable in his mother’s house. She always had sweet wine and strong ale, bowls of plums and pears in season, ham and cheese on a platter, and thick blankets for cold nights, but for all that he was never at ease. “I was a good child,” he protested. “A scholar.”
“Yes, when forced. But if I took my eye off you, you would sneak away from your lessons to play.”
A childhood memory struck Wynstan. “You wouldn’t let me see the bear.”
“What bear?”
“Someone brought a bear on a chain. Everyone went to look at it. But Father Aculf wanted me to finish copying the Ten Commandments first, and you backed him.” Wynstan had sat with a slate and a nail, hearing the other boys laughing and yelling outside. “I kept making mistakes in the Latin, and by the time I got it right the bear had gone.”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”
Wynstan remembered it vividly. “I hated you for it.”
“And yet I did it out of love.”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you did.”
She picked up his doubt. “You had to become a priest. Let peasant brats play.”
“Why were you so sure I should be a priest?”
“Because you’re a second son, and I’m a second wife. Wilwulf was going to inherit your father’s wealth, and probably become ealdorman, and you might have been an unimportant person, only wanted just in case Wilf should die. I was determined not to let that happen to us. The church was your route to power and wealth and high status.”
“And yours.”
“I’m nothing,” she said.
Her modesty was utterly insincere and he ignored it. “After me, you had no offspring for five years. Was that deliberate? Because of my difficult birth?”
“No,” she said indignantly. “A noblewoman does not shirk childbirth.”
“Of course.”
“But I had two miscarriages between you and Wigelm, not to mention a stillbirth later.”
“I remember the arrival of Wigelm,” Wynstan mused. “When I was five years old, I wanted to murder him.”
“An older child often has such feelings. It’s a sign of spirit. He rarely does anything about it, but I kept you away from Wigelm’s cradle just the same.”
“What was his delivery like?”
“Not so bad, though childbirth is rarely easy. The second child is normally less agonizing than the first.” She glanced in the direction of the noise. “Though clearly that’s not so for Ragna. Something may be going wrong.”
“Death in childbirth is a common occurrence,” Wynstan said cheerfully; then he caught a black look from Gytha and realized he had gone too far. She was on his side, whatever he did, but she was still a woman. “Who is attending Ragna?” he asked.
“A Shiring midwife called Hildi.”
“Local woman with heathen remedies, I suppose.”
“Yes. But if Ragna and the newborn were to die, that would still leave Osbert.”
Ragna’s first child was coming up to two years old, a ginger-haired baby Norman, named Osbert after Wilwulf’s father. Osbert was Wilf’s legitimate heir, and would be even if Ragna’s newborn died today. But Wynstan waved a hand dismissively. “A child without a mother is little threat,” he said. A two-year-old was not difficult toget rid of, he was thinking; but he did not say so, remembering Gytha’s black look.
She just nodded.
He studied her face. Thirty years ago that face had terrified him. She was in her middle fifties now, and her hair had been gray for years; but lately her dark eyebrows had grown silver strands, there were new little vertical lines above her upper lip, and her figure was not so much voluptuous as lumpy. But she still had the power to strike fear into his heart.
She was patient and still. Women could do that. Wynstan could not: he tapped his foot, shifted in his seat, and said: “Dear God, how much longer?”
