Cwenburg said: “Tell her to make her own cord.”
The others were silent, watching.
Edgar was embarrassed, but he stood his ground. “The loan would be a kindness,” he said through gritted teeth. “We will repay it when we get back on our feet.”
“If that ever happens,” Cwenburg said.
Leaf made an impatient noise. She looked about thirty, so she must have been fifteen when she gave birth to Cwenburg. She had once been pretty, Edgar guessed, but now she looked as if she drank too much of her own strong brew. However, she was sober enough to be embarrassed by her daughter’s rudeness. “Don’t be so unneighborly, girl,” she said.
Dreng said angrily: “Leave her alone. She’s all right.”
He was an indulgent father, Edgar noted; that might account for his daughter’s behavior.
Leaf stood up. “Come inside,” she said to Edgar in a kindly tone. “I’ll see what I can find.”
He followed her into the house. She drew a cup of ale from a barrel and handed it to him. “Free of charge,” she said.
“Thank you.” He took a mouthful. It lived up to its reputation: it was tasty, and it instantly lifted his spirits. He drained the cup and said: “That’s very good.”
She smiled.
It crossed Edgar’s mind that Leaf might have the same kind of designs on him as her daughter. He was not vain and did not believe that all women must be attracted to him; but he guessed that in a small place every new man must be of interest to the women.
However, Leaf turned away and rummaged in a chest. A moment later she came up with a yard of string. “Here you are.”
She was just being kind, he realized. “It’s most neighborly of you,” he said.
She took his empty cup. “My best wishes to your mother. She’s a brave woman.”
Edgar went out. Degbert, evidently having been relaxed by what he was drinking, was holding forth. “According to the calendars, we are in the nine hundred and ninety-seventh year of our Lord,” he said. “Jesus is nine hundred and ninety-seven years old. In three years’ time it will be the millennium.”
Edgar understood numbers, and he could not let that pass. “Wasn’t Jesus born in the year one?” he said.
“He was,” said Degbert. He added snootily: “Every educated man knows that.”
“Then he must have had his first birthday in year two.”
Degbert began to look unsure.
Edgar went on: “In year three, he became two years old, and so on. So this year, nine hundred and ninety-seven, he becomes nine hundred and ninety-six.”
Degbert blustered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you arrogant young pup.”
A quiet voice in the back of Edgar’s mind told him not to argue, but the voice was overwhelmed by his wish to correct an arithmetical error. “No, no,” he said. “In fact Jesus’ birthday will be on Christmas Day, so as of now he’s still only nine hundred and ninety-five and a half.”
Leaf, watching from the doorway, grinned and said: “He’s got you there, Degsy.”
Degbert was livid. “How dare you speak like that to a priest?” he said to Edgar. “Who do you think you are? You can’t even read!”
“No, but I can count,” Edgar said stubbornly.
Dreng said: “Take your string and be off with you, and don’t come back until you’ve learned to respect your elders and betters.”
“It’s just numbers,” Edgar said, backtracking when it was too late. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
Degbert said: “Get out of my sight.”
Dreng added: “Go on, get lost.”
Edgar turned and walked away, heading back along the riverbank, despondent. His family needed all the help it could get, but he had now made two enemies.
Why had he opened his fool mouth?
CHAPTER 4
Early July 997
he Lady Ragnhild, daughter of Count Hubert of Cherbourg, was sitting between an English monk and a French priest. Ragna, as she was called, found the monk interesting and the priest pompous—but the priest was the one she was supposed to charm.
It was the time of the midday meal at Cherbourg Castle. The imposing stone fort stood at the top of the hill overlooking the harbor. Ragna’s father was proud of the building. It was innovative and unusual.
Count Hubert was proud of many things. He cherished his warlike Viking heritage, but he was more gratified by the way the Vikings had become Normans, with their own version of the French language. Most of all, he valued the way they had adopted Christianity, restoring the churches and monasteries that had been sacked by their ancestors. In a hundred years the former pirates had created a law-abiding civilization the equal of anything in Europe.
The long trestle table stood in the great hall, on the upstairs floor of the castle. It was covered with white linen cloths that reached to the floor. Ragna’s parents sat at the head. Her mother’s name was Ginnlaug, but she had changed it to the more French-sounding Genevieve to please her husband.
The count and countess and their more important guests ate from bronze bowls, drank from cherrywood cups with silver rims, and held parcel-gilt knives and spoons—costly tableware, though not extravagant.
The English monk, Brother Aldred, was miraculously handsome. He reminded Ragna of an ancient Roman marble sculpture she had seen at Rouen, the head of a man with short curly hair, stained with age and lacking the tip of the nose, but clearly part of what had once been a statue of a god.
Aldred had arrived the previous afternoon, clutching to his chest a box of books he had bought at the great Norman abbey of Jumièges. “It has a scriptorium as good as any in the world!” Aldred enthused. “An army of monks copying and decorating manuscripts for the enlightenment of mankind.” Books, and the wisdom they could bring, clearly constituted Aldred’s great passion.
Ragna had a notion that this passion had taken the place in his life that might otherwise have been held by a kind of romantic love that was forbidden by his faith. He was charming to her, but a different, hungrier expression came over his face when he looked at her brother, Richard, who was a tall boy of fourteen with lips like a girl’s.
Now Aldred was waiting for a favorable wind to take him back across the Channel to England. “I can’t wait to get home to Shiring and show my brethren how the Jumièges monks illuminate their letters,” he said. He spoke French with some Latin and Anglo-Saxon words thrown in. Ragna knew Latin, and she had picked up some Anglo-Saxon from an English nursemaid who had married a Norman sailor and come to live in Cherbourg. “And two of the books I bought are works that I’ve never previously heard of!” Aldred went on.