The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

across to take her sister’s hand. Suddenly she was smiling with excitement. ‘Let’s make a list of all the eligible men in neighbouring kingdoms we know are seeking wives, then we can choose one each and we can begin to work on Papa.’

‘And no one from the British kingdoms of the west,’ Eadburh said firmly.

‘No, no one from the kingdoms of the west.’

Later that night Eadburh lay awake for a long time, unable to sleep. Alfrida had recruited Ethelfled to help them with their list, and the piece of parchment lay on the table in the centre of the chamber with the inkpot and quill. There were several names on it now, and would be more. The girls had giggled long and delightedly as each new name was produced. The men were familiar to them from the discussions and meetings of their father, though not all had been viewed personally. It didn’t matter. What they were evaluating was wealth and power. No one could compete with the son of King Charles of the Franks for Ethelfled, but there were other kings and princes to consider, all of whom, they laughed confidently, would be more than delighted to claim a daughter of the great Offa as bride.

The fire had died low and the lamp in the corner was flickering when Eadburh climbed out of her bed and, snatching a rug to wind round her shoulders, tiptoed to the hearth to throw on more logs. Sitting on a stool close beside it, she watched the flames flare and the shadows race across the walls. From the shadows, the breathing of her sisters and the women on the truckle beds along the far wall formed a gentle backdrop to the crackle of the logs. Her gaze lingered on the parchment on the table. Alfrida had painstakingly copied out the names in her neatest hand, one name beneath the other down the page. All three girls had attended convent schools attached to one or other of her father’s palaces. They read and wrote fluently in their own language and in Latin, and were as well read as any. The King of the Franks was insistent, so they had heard, on the women of his family being literate and educated and capable of ruling any province in which they found themselves, should the need arise, and Offa wanted no less for his daughters. His own wife had learned to read and write from her mother and from an abbess of her mother’s kin.

Leaning across to the table, Eadburh reached for the parchment, staring at the list of names in the firelight. There were kings and princes there of East Anglia and Northumberland, of Sussex and Wessex and Kent, two were scions of kingdoms far north beyond the great wall of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but there were none from the west of her father’s dyke. Rerolling the parchment, she stared into the fire for a long time before letting it slip through her fingers into the ashes. She watched it crumble and slowly disappear, then, straightening her back and pulling her rug more closely round her shoulders, she turned to face the doorway. She was, Bea realised, looking straight at her.

8

With a cry of fear, Bea dropped the stone. She scrambled to her feet. She had been there in the palace of the king, in the bedchamber with his daughters, an invisible eavesdropper, blatantly watching, as though this was some kind of a film, there but not there. It had never occurred to her that Eadburh or her sisters might be able to see her. With the rattle of the stone on the floor it had all gone, vanished, leaving her disorientated and reeling with shock.

For a while she stood still, deep in thought. Slowly her heartbeat steadied and her fear subsided. Of course it couldn’t have been a two-way contact. She may have thought Eadburh was looking straight at her, but nothing had happened. The girl hadn’t reacted. Her gaze had been dreamy, preoccupied, thinking about her future and what lay there.

Nevertheless, this had been a warning. Simon had told her the quest was over. She had settled whatever restless spirit there had been in the cottage. She knew better than to persist in an enquiry that was finished. The door was closed. She must leave it at that.

She picked the stone up off the floor and put it on the top of the bookcase, then ran down the two flights of stairs, grabbed her jacket from the pegs in the hall and, opening the front door, let herself out of the gate in the low wrought-iron railings that bordered their narrow strip of front garden and walked out into the Close. It was busy with mid-morning crowds strolling the paths and sitting in the sun on the benches under the trees. It was nice out there. Normal.

She had grown very fond of the cathedral, with its walls and great tower of mottled pinky-brown sandstone. Unlike its soaring Gothic cousins elsewhere in England, it had kept its smaller and more compact shape as an echo of its early Norman origins, reflected inside by the vast squat Norman pillars in the nave. It was crowded today. There were two parties of tourists making their way round, one standing at the back near the modern memorial window to the SAS, staring up at the stunning area of blue glass, and the other between the choir stalls, looking up at the vaulted roof.

‘Beatrice!’ One of the volunteers who worked there as a part-time guide was standing by the donation box near the north entrance and spotted her at once. There was little that went on in the cathedral that Sandra Bedford missed. ‘Have you come to find Mark?’ The woman was tall and stick-thin with neat hair and clear brown eyes behind her wire-framed spectacles. Wearing her identifying lanyard and the blue cassock of an official guide, she peered at Bea intently,