Page 256 of The Evening and the Morning
“He could harry Shiring!”
“That’s an extreme measure: raising an army, burning the villages, killing the opposition, making off with the best horses and cattle and jewelry: it’s a king’s ultimate weapon, to be used only in extreme circumstances. Is he going to do that for a foreign widow whose marriage he never sanctioned in the first place?”
“Does her father know that she has disappeared?”
“Possibly. But a rescue operation from Normandy would be an invasion of England, and Count Hubert can’t manage that—especially when his neighbor’s daughter is about to marry the English king. Ethelred’s wedding to Emma of Normandy is set for November.”
“The king has to rule, come what may; and one of his duties is to take care of noble widows.”
“You should put that point to him yourself.”
“All right, I will.”
Aldred had written a letter to King Ethelred.
In response, the king had ordered Wigelm to produce the person of his brother’s widow.
Aldred thought Wigelm would simply ignore the order, as he had ignored royal decrees in the past, but this time it was different: Wigelm had announced that Ragna had gone home to Cherbourg.
If true, that would at least explain why no one had been able to find her in England. And she would naturally have taken her children and her Norman servants with her.
Edgar had made a second visit to Combe and had found no one who could confirm that Ragna had boarded a ship there—but she might have sailed from a different port.
While Aldred was worrying about Edgar, the man himself appeared. He had recovered from the beating he had suffered, except that his nose was slightly twisted now, and he was missing a front tooth. He approached the churchyard in the company of two others whom Aldred recognized. The man with the Norman-style haircut was Odo, and the small blond woman was his wife, Adelaide. They were the couriers from Cherbourg who brought Ragna her rents from Saint-Martin every three months. Close behind were three men-at-arms, their escort. They needed fewer bodyguards since the execution of Ironface.
Aldred greeted them, then Edgar said: “Odo has come to ask a favor, Prior Aldred.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Aldred.
“I would like you to look after Ragna’s money for her,” said Odo in his French accent.
“You can’t find her, of course,” Aldred said.
Odo threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration. “In Shiringthey say she has gone to Outhenham, and at Outhenham they say she is in Combe, but we came via Combe and she was not there.”
Aldred nodded. “No one can find her. Of course I will take care of her money, if that is your wish. But our latest information is that she has gone home to Cherbourg.”
Odo was astonished. “But she is not there! If she were, we would not have come to England!”
“Of course not,” said Aldred.
Edgar said: “Then where on earth is she?”
Ragna and Cat and their children had been grabbed in their house and tied up and gagged by Wigelm and a group of men-at-arms. Under cover of darkness they had been carried out of the compound then bundled onto a four-wheeled cart and covered with blankets.
The children had been terrified, and the worst of it was that Ragna could not speak words of comfort to them.
The cart had jolted along dry-rutted dirt roads for hours. From what Ragna could hear, it had an escort of half a dozen men on horseback. However, they were quiet, speaking as little as possible and doing so in low voices.
The children had cried themselves to sleep.
When the cart stopped and the blankets were removed, it was daylight. Ragna saw that they were in a clearing in the forest. Agnes was with the escort, and that was when Ragna realized that she was a traitor. Agnes must have betrayed Ragna by telling Wynstan of Ragna’s plan to flee with Edgar. All this time the seamstress had been nursing a secret hatred of Ragna for the execution of herhusband, Offa. Ragna cursed the merciful impulse that had led her to reemploy the woman.
She now saw that the children’s cots were on the cart with the prisoners. But everything was covered up. What had this looked like to villagers who saw the group pass by? Certainly not a kidnapping, for the women and children had not been visible. Ragna herself would have assumed, from the armed escort, that the blankets hid a large quantity of silver or other valuables that a wealthy nobleman or clergyman was transferring from one place to another.
Now, with no one around to see, Agnes untied the children and let them pee at the edge of the clearing. They would not run off, of course, for that would mean leaving their mothers behind. They were given bread soaked in milk, then tied up and gagged again. Then the mothers were released, one at a time, and watched carefully by the men as they relieved themselves then ate and drank a little. When all that was done, the prisoners were covered up again and the cart jolted on.
They stopped twice more at intervals of several hours.
