The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

Emma cast her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘She’s driving me nuts!’

‘Never mind. Once the exams are over, she’ll let up.’

‘And drag us down to Provence! Doesn’t it occur to her we might not want to go with her?’

‘I don’t think we’ve got an option. You could’ve played your hand better, Em. Then she might have let you go back to Dad for the summer. I’m afraid all that ghost stuff has freaked her out good and proper. Anyway, Provence will be cool.’

Emma glared at him. ‘I thought you’d be on my side.’

‘I am. But I don’t see what I can do about it. Stop flopping about and acting all wounded and dramatic and do some revision like she wants, then she might be in a better mood.’

‘Dramatic!’ Emma echoed, but the sigh she gave as she flounced out of her brother’s bedroom would have done credit to the stage of the Old Vic. She headed for her own room, then at the top of the stairs, she paused, thought for a second and then crept down towards her father’s study.

The room was at the back of the house, looking out onto their small walled garden. It was a room she loved, book-lined, peaceful and still. Very still. He did not encourage his family to come in here, so it managed to avoid the noise and bickering and somehow preserved its atmosphere of scholarly calm. It smelled slightly musty after being shut up for several weeks. She breathed in deeply. She loved the smell of old books. A curtain of pink clematis hung across the window, making the room shadowy, but she was reluctant to turn on the lights. She had always liked it like this. Sometimes when she was smaller, when her father was out she would come and sit in here on her own, feeling close to him. She had that feeling now, though this time the feeling was mixed with guilt. She looked round, then went to stand in front of the wall of bookshelves. There were huge gaps left by books he had taken with him to the cottage but somewhere amongst those that were left was the one he had quoted to Bea. Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the book that mentioned what had happened to Eadburh in the end. When she had asked him about it, she thought he was making excuses not to tell her when he said he had left it behind. It was with his books on Wessex, he said, and so it had been missed out when he had been piling the boxes of books into the back of his car.

The silence of the room was soothing as she stood before the shelves running her eye along each one. The books were well organised now she came to study them. Northumberland took up a whole section. History, geography, maps, a box file labelled tourist leaflets; then she found the books on Wessex. Wiltshire, Sussex, Winchester, her eye scanned the shelves. History, geography, leaflets again. She went back to the history section, more carefully this time, and there it was, a slim black paperback, hard to see between its neighbours on the shelf in the shadowy room. Alfred the Great. No author on the spine. She pulled it out. A Penguin Classic. Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. She clutched it to her chest and turned for the door. Opening it, she listened. There was no sound. Felix had stayed in his room.

Since coming back to London she had had no dreams, perhaps because she had meticulously followed Bea’s instructions for surrounding herself with light and protecting herself before she went to sleep. Somehow, here in Kensington she was more in control, far abler to resist the urge to find out what happened. Perhaps Eadburh’s own dreams were blocked by this place. Quietly shutting her bedroom door, she went to sit at her desk and, switching on the lamp, she checked her bubble of protection was in place and opened the book.

It was easy to find the relevant passage. It was one of the many her father had marked with little yellow stickies.

There was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa.

She read on and turned the page.

There were only two paragraphs covering Eadburh’s life, describing her exile to the court of King Charlemagne, his indignation at her choice of potential husband between him and his son, her banishment to a convent as its abbess, her reckless living, her welcoming of men to her bed, and the king’s discovery of her and her ejection from the convent. She was at the end before she knew it. Too late to backpedal and pretend she hadn’t read it.

… begging every day, she died a miserable death in Pavia.

‘No!’ Emma let out a cry of denial. ‘No. He’s got it wrong. it wasn’t like that!’

Asser made her out to be a horrible person; he implied that she deserved to die in poverty and misery. He had actually met people who saw her begging in Pavia, with only a single slave boy for company. Emma frowned. If she had a slave, surely she can’t have been that poor? And where the hell was Pavia?

Mopping her tears, she switched on her laptop. Northern Italy. On the pilgrim route to Rome. It was a famous place. She ought to know where it was. That was something else she would have to study. Geography.

So how had Eadburh reached Pavia? She went back to the book. A note in the back said no one knew which convent she had been abbess of. Was it in France or Italy, she wondered miserably, or Germany somewhere? She wasn’t sure how big Charlemagne’s empire was. That was something else she ought to know if she was going to study history at uni one day.

By the time Felix had put his head round the door to suggest