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

so few signs of emotion or genuine fondness for any other human being. Elisedd had been the one exception. It was as though her passion for him had sucked her dry. And yet in the last months she had grown fond of Cwen, and Theo and now of Freda, and more than all of them she loved her dog.

The pilgrimage to Canterbury accomplished, she joined another group of travellers heading west, who were happy to give her a lift on the back of their ox-cart until she found herself at last in Wareham, the final resting place of her murdered husband, Beorhtric.

For a whole day she hesitated outside the abbey, overwhelmed with unexpected remorse, then at last, wrapping her face in her veil, she went to kneel before his tomb. He had been generous to her in his way and allowed her to become his queen. She had not intended to kill him. Once more a man had died because of her. Once more she needed to do penance for his soul. Spending two days in prayer beside his stone-built catafalque, she walked at last with downcast eyes out of the abbey and resumed her journey with Theo and Ava, north now, through a landscape she still carried in her head from the days she had progressed around the kingdom of Wessex as its queen, heading towards Mercia.

It was on the road to Hereford that she found herself with a band of men and women, many of them blind, heading towards the shrine of St Ethelbert. Healing springs had sprung up, she learned, in the places where his head had rested on its way to his tomb. This time her prayers were heartfelt. She knelt and prayed with the others for the miracle of sight, that in exchange for the punishment she had exacted on the martyr’s murderer she might be permitted to see again the man she loved.

That night one of their number let out a cry of joy as he found suddenly that he could see, and that same night as she lay in the dark, an anonymous, penitent, guest in the hostel at St Guthlac’s Priory, she fell asleep at last and dreamed of Elisedd.

Elisedd, maimed and delirious, had lain for a long time between life and death in a priory, deep in the heart of the mountains and forests of the Ardennes. He was brought back to life and hope by the ministrations of the almoner and his medical knowledge, and of the prior with his deep compassion. Emperor Charlemagne, it appeared, had after all spared his life if not his manhood, aware perhaps in some part of himself that it would have been hard for any human man to resist the wiles of Eadburh, the witch Queen of Wessex.

Elisedd blamed himself for what had happened. If he had stayed at home she would not have been tempted away from her vows, she would have been still abbess of a rich and beautiful monastic estate and she would have been content if not happy without him. He vowed to spend the rest of his life in penance for his weakness in giving in to his lust, and for his inability to save her. What had become of her he didn’t know, but he doubted she still lived.

He heard once from a gossiping lay brother a rumour that she had survived the first winter that had almost killed him and that she had been seen far away in the kingdom of Lombardy somewhere south of a great range of snow-capped mountains; she had been in great distress and poverty, he was told, but after weeks of intense hope the prior’s enquiries confirmed that she had died there at last of starvation and despair. And so the legend of Eadburh’s fate was reinforced as it moved from mouth to mouth and telling to telling.

He spent the following winter in prayer for her soul and in studying the books that Charlemagne had donated to the monastic library. When spring came, Elisedd set off to return to his own land in Powys where, he vowed, he would retire to his clas at Meifod and spend the rest of his life in prayer.

Opening her front door, Sandra found Heather standing on the step.

‘You can’t keep away, can you,’ she said nastily. ‘What do you want now?’

Heather pushed past her. She walked straight through into the living room and stood looking down at the table, strewn with Tarot cards. There was a book on Anglo-Saxon magic lying open beside them and she spun round. ‘You have to stop this!’

‘What I do is none of your business, Heather. None at all.’

‘It is when it is my friends you’re hurting.’

‘Friends!’ Sandra’s voice shot up an octave. ‘Not the kind of friends I would like to have. But, if you must know, I’m trying to help them. To do that I had to find out who or what was possessing them.’

Heather stared at her. She was fervently wishing she hadn’t come. ‘And did you find out?’ she hazarded cautiously.

‘Oh yes.’ Sandra clenched her teeth. ‘It’s a woman called Eadburh. She’s some kind of uber-powerful witch.’

She was, she had to admit, still traumatised by the vicious fury of the woman who had confronted her, knife in hand. She shuddered. It had taken all her resolve to throw a protective shield between her and the virago who had turned on her when she held out her hand to Emma, silly little Emma. She glared at Heather, who was staring down at the Tarot cards with a look of extreme disgust.

‘Please stop doing this,’ Heather repeated firmly. ‘It’s dangerous.’

‘No chance. It’s not dangerous; it’s interesting. I’m not stopping. No one believed me when I warned them what was happening. They probably “prayed” for me,’ her voice assumed a note of sarcasm as she uttered the word, ‘which obviously had no effect whatsoever. I am going my own way now and I realise that is the real me. I