Shadow on the Crown by Patricia Bracewell Page A

Often Emma lay awake in the cold watches of the night thinking about those burdens, her heart filled with dread for her sister, knowing that beside her Mathilde, too, lay awake in the dark. Yet each sister kept her own counsel.
    And so the weeks passed until, late one February afternoon, the dowager duchess returned from St. Ann’s, and Emma was summoned to wait upon her. She found her mother alone in her chamber, circlet and headrail cast aside and the long gray braid of her hair coiled atop her head. She was warming her hands at the brazier, and the light from below accentuated fine creases around her mouth and eyes. She nodded to Emma, then turned her gaze back to the glowing coals, and for a time was silent. Emma saw an unfamiliar weariness in her face, and a resemblance to Mathilde that she had never before noticed in the sharpness of her nose and the thin line of her mouth.
    Finally her mother spoke, almost as if to herself. “Events have overtaken us, and I cannot wait for your brothers’ return to set things in motion.” She glanced at Emma and nodded toward a nearby stool. “You had best sit down, Emma, for I have a great deal to say to you.”
    Emma’s heart clouded with dread. She sat upon the stool and waited for whatever hammer stroke was to come.
    “As you have no doubt guessed,” Gunnora said, “the king of England has sued for your sister’s hand in marriage.” She glanced at Emma, then began to pace the room. “King Æthelred wants something in return, of course—something more than a nubile young bride to grace his bed. And so, in recompense for the great honor that he bestows upon us in taking a Norman wife, he will expect your brother to close his harbors to the Danes. His emissaries have not said as much directly. They have danced around the issue like virgins round a maypole, but it is clear what they want, and your brother has given them every reason to believe that he will grant it.”
    Emma leaned forward in her chair, her eyes on her mother, her mind racing. She had been so preoccupied with the challenges that this marriage presented for her sister that she had forgotten the peril that her brother risked by agreeing to it. Æthelred of England was the mortal enemy of King Swein of Denmark. With Mathilde’s marriage to Æthelred, Richard, too, became an enemy of the infamous Swein Forkbeard, making Normandy a target for Danish raiders.
    “In fact,” Gunnora went on, “your brother cannot deny the Danes access to our harbors and our markets. If he should do so, Swein Forkbeard would turn his shipmen upon us like starving dogs on a wounded stag. He would harry our coasts for plunder, and then barter it quite happily in Hamburg or Bremen. The English king could not come to our aid, for he has no fleet. The French king would merely rejoice in our misfortune. It would be a catastrophe for every Norman settlement that lies within reach of Danish longships. And so,” she stopped her pacing and stood before Emma, “it will not happen. Your brother will never close his harbors to the Danes. Nevertheless, he will agree to do so, and his sister will be given in marriage as his bond.”
    Emma stared at her mother as the wretchedness of her sister’s fate struck her. Mathilde would be little more than a royal hostage, sent to guarantee her brother’s submission to the will of the English king. And if Richard broke his pledge and defied the king, Mathilde would be defenseless in a foreign land, with no means of protecting herself from whatever retribution her royal husband might choose to inflict.
    “He cannot do it,” Emma whispered, her mouth gone dry with horror. Her brother could not sacrifice Mathilde this way, could not place her at the mercy of the English king.
    “So I told your brother,” Gunnora said, and now Emma could hear the weariness in her voice. “But Richard is a ruler and a man, and the life of a young girl, even that of his own sister, weighs little when balanced against