Page 67 of The Evening and the Morning
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 andcargo 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.
Suddenly Ragna longed for the feeling of firm ground beneath her feet.
The ship was taken into shallow water, then Ragna was carriedthrough the shallows to a pebble beach. With her maids and bodyguards she climbed the slope to the waterfront village and went into an alehouse. Ragna was hoping for a roaring fire and a hot breakfast, but it was early in the day. The fire was low and the hostess was tousled and grumpy, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she tossed sticks onto a feeble flame.
Ragna sat shivering, waiting for her luggage to be unloaded so that she could put on dry clothing. The hostess brought stale bread and weak ale. “Welcome to England,” she said.
Ragna’s self-confidence was rocked. In her whole life she had never been so frightened for so long. When Captain Guy said they should wait until the weather changed and then sail west along the English coast to Combe, she refused firmly. She wished never to step on board a ship again. There might be more rude shocks ahead for her, and if so she wanted to meet them on dry land.
Three days later she was not sure that had been the right decision. The rain had not stopped. Every road was a swamp. Wading through the mud exhausted the horses, and being perpetually cold and wet made everyone bad-tempered. The alehouses where they stopped for refreshment were dark and dismal, offering scant respite from the discomfort outdoors, and people hearing her foreign accent would shout at her, as if that would make it easier for her to understand their language. One night the group was welcomed into the comfortable home of a minor nobleman, Thurstan of Lordsborough, but on the other two they stayed overnight at monasteries, clean but cold and cheerless.
On the road Ragna huddled in her cloak, swaying as Astridtrudged wearily on, and reminded herself that waiting at the end of her journey was the most wonderful man in the world.
On the afternoon of the third day a baggage pony slipped on a slope. It fell to its knees, and its load slid to one side. It tried to rise, but the lopsided burden caused it to overbalance again. It skidded down a mudslide, neighing frantically, and fell into a stream. Ragna cried: “Oh, the poor beast! Save it, you men!”
Several men-at-arms jumped into the water, which was about three feet deep. But they could not get the animal onto its feet. Ragna said: “You’ll have to take the bags off its back!”
That worked. One man held the horse’s head in an attempt to stop it thrashing around, and two others undid the straps. They grabbed the bags and chests and passed them to others waiting. When the pony was unloaded it came upright without help.
Looking at the baggage stacked beside the stream, Ragna said: “Where’s the little box with Wilwulf’s present?”
Everyone looked around but no one could see it.
Ragna was dismayed. “We can’t have lost it—it’s his wedding gift!” English jewelry was famous, and Wilwulf probably had high standards, so Ragna had had the buckle and strap end made by the best jeweler in Rouen.
The men who had got wet rescuing the pony now went back into the water and scrabbled around the bottom of the stream, searching for the package. But it was sharp-eyed Cat who spotted it. “There!” she cried, pointing.
Ragna saw the box a hundred yards away, floating downstream.
Suddenly a figure appeared from the bushes. Ragna had a glimpse of a head wearing some kind of helmet as the man took one step into the water and snatched up the box. “Oh, well done!” Ragna called.
For a split second he turned and looked at her, and she got a full view of a rusty old battle helmet with holes for the eyes and mouth, then the man bounded back to dry land and vanished into the vegetation.
Ragna realized she had been robbed.
