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

climbed up to her attic room. Mark had been right. There was something – someone – clinging to Emma and it had to be sorted without frightening the girl. It had gone for now, but she had seen the shadow, wound tightly around the girl’s torso, covering her heart and her solar plexus. They had given her Anna’s room next to their own and Mark had prayed for her outside the door after she had disappeared inside.

And now it was Bea’s turn to pray. ‘Please don’t let it be Eadburh.’ Her prayer was fervent. ‘Or Cynefryth, Eadburh’s mother.’ Emma was obsessed with Ethelbert’s murder, but she doubted if Cynefryth had ever been to Offa’s Ridge, whereas Eadburh was still there, obsessed, yearning, unshriven and vengeful. Neither woman appeared to balk at killing anyone who got in their way; presumably neither would hesitate to possess an unguarded spirit now.

Bea could feel the residues all around her in the attic. She searched her jars of dried herbs for mugwort and vervain and added some dried rowan berries. With the protective herbs smoking in the small dish, she walked slowly round the room, blowing the smoke into each corner and murmuring a blessing, and suddenly she wondered if she would need Mark up here too. Whoever was here was evil and she – for it was a she – was powerful and she was a dealer in death.

And intuitively she knew for certain now. It was Eadburh.

She left the dish of burning herbs on the table and went out, making a sign of the cross on the door as she closed it to seal whatever it was inside. She was confident that it, she, could be contained and that Emma would be safe at least for now.

Mark was still asleep and she hadn’t the heart to wake him. He was so tired even the gently drifting smoke from the burning herbs hadn’t reached him. Bea tiptoed downstairs and silently she opened the back door.

Letting herself out she went to stand by their little fountain, listening to the gentle trickle of the water. Contained within the high stone walls, the smell of spring flowers and grass was all around her. She let it seep into her bones, comforting, gentle. This garden, she was sure, in the shadow of the cathedral as it was, had been used before as a place for prayer and her prayer would be heard. ‘Please, help me to be strong enough to deal with this and please help me to keep Emma safe.’ She almost expected to see her chantry priest out here, praying in the dark, but if he was here she couldn’t see him. It was a long time before, shivering, she went back indoors, bolted the back door and climbed the stairs then crawled into bed.

In his sleep, Mark shifted and groaned as she brought the chill of the garden with her under the duvet.

Hilde knelt before the priest on the cold floor of the stone church in the valley and confessed to him and through him to God that she had killed a man. The penance was harsh. She was ordered to give up the rest of her life to God and to serve for the rest of her days here in this small community as a sister under the rule of the abbess. She bowed her head and accepted the judgement without complaint, and when she asked that Eadburh’s letter be delivered to King Cadell by someone else, gave it trustingly into the hands of the priest. The small packet in her hem she took out into the gardens at dead of night and buried deep in the ground. The priest took the letter and gave it to the abbess. She threw it on the fire in the kitchen without reading it. It was never mentioned again.

‘I must warn her.’ In her sleep, Bea stirred anxiously. Eadburh would never know that her letter was lost. She was still there in Wessex, alone in so many ways, immersed in her own misery and fury and disgust at what she had seen, and she was holding on to that one slender thread. That Hilde would return with the news that Elisedd’s death had been avenged. And now that would never happen. Bea, and Bea alone, knew it. Unless Nesta –’ Before the question was fully formed Bea had slipped once more back into her dreams.

Eadburh had fled from the king’s chamber, through the mead hall, across the courtyard and into the queen’s bower and threw herself full length upon her bed, wracked with angry sobs. Her women clustered round anxiously and like fire through dried summer grass the word spread of what had happened. They had known, the women had all known, of the king’s preferences. They could not believe that the queen did not know too. But no one had told her.

Slowly Bea crept towards the bed. Without knowing why they did it, the women moved aside to let her pass and without seeing her, closed ranks again behind her. She was there now, standing beside the sobbing queen, looking down at the disordered coverlets, the woven blankets, the sheet torn to shreds between the queen’s clutching fingers. And as she watched, Bea saw the first stains of blood seeping from beneath the woman’s hips.

The queen’s attendants noticed at last as her first cramps began and sent for Nesta. The herb-wife immediately sent servants scurrying to boil water for tisanes, to remove the queen’s gown and change the sheets, and did her best to soothe the distraught woman. And all the time the women scurrying to and fro across the room and around the queen’s bed avoided the space where Bea stood, frozen with horror, watching. Only when Nesta glanced her way did Bea realise that the woman knew she was there.

At dawn when it was clear that nothing could be done to save the baby, the midwife came. Issuing reassurances that there would soon be