We returned to the sanctuary.
We waited until the water had cleared the sands and then, as we had tried to do the previous night, we buried the crown. I found the right place; it was easy, for in my heightened emotional state it seemed to me that a soft purplish-blue light was guiding me, as if the crown were sending out a message to let us know without doubt where it wanted to be. Even after five hundred years, some of the magic of Creoda, greatest of all sorcerers, still lingered.
We dug deep, for, without either of us saying so, it seemed that we both felt the need to do the job really well. It took a long time.
At last we were ready.
Sibert took the crown out of its bag one last time. We both stared at it, wanting to imprint its beauty on our eyes for ever. Then Sibert wrapped it up again and, each of us holding one side, we put it in the deep, dark space beneath the tree stump. Painstakingly we filled in the hole, piling on the sand and tamping it down. We left signs of our activity — we couldn’t help it — but we knew we were safe; they would be gone with the next tide, washed clean again so that the crown’s location was secure.
Then for the last time we turned our backs on the sea sanctuary and its precious secret and headed for the shore. I looked up into the soft blue sky of very early morning. There was scarcely a breeze and not a cloud to be seen.
It was going to be a lovely day.
Our return to Aelf Fen went without incident except that I developed a blister on the ball of my foot. What irony, I thought; I walked across red-hot coals without taking hurt and yet a long walk, which was really nothing out of the ordinary for someone like me, gives me a blister that burns like hellfire.
We were both apprehensive as we neared our home; Sibert because he would have to confess to Hrype that he had killed Baudouin and I because I knew that, despite whatever Hrype had cooked up to explain my absence, my parents would have been beside themselves with worry.
As it turned out, neither of us need have been so anxious. Hrype accepted Sibert’s account of how he had slain a man with a brief nod, the suspicion of a proud smile and the calm words, ‘You had no choice, Sibert.’ Sibert told me later that Hrype had also seemed satisfied with how we’d reburied the crown. He had said little, according to Sibert, except a brief and mystifying, ‘Time will tell.’ Nobody I know is nearly as enigmatic as Hrype.
My parents had barely listened to Hrype explaining that I’d gone off with Edild because the morning after Sibert and I slipped out of Aelf Fen on our way to Drakelow, my sister had her baby.
I hurried over to Icklingham as soon as I could to find Goda sitting on the bench by the hearth, Cerdic beside her, with several of her neighbours circling around and satisfying her whims as if she were a queen and they her handmaidens. Honestly, you’d think no woman had ever given birth before! All the same, I had to admire my sister for her sheer cheek and, catching her eye, I gave her a smile that came from the heart.
‘Well done,’ I said, pushing a way through the chattering women to get to her. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the birth and to help you afterwards. Was it. .? Did you. .?’ I felt embarrassed suddenly at the thought of my sister giving birth and I was angry with myself for my foolish prudery. Fine healer I was going to make.
Goda confounded me totally by smiling back. ‘It was all right,’ she said quietly. ‘It hurt but it didn’t take too long.’ Then — for this was the woman who only a short while ago had routinely cursed her husband and thrown clogs at him — she gave the man beside her a loving glance and added, ‘I didn’t need you afterwards. Cerdic’s been looking after me.’
Just at that moment I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Cerdic, perhaps understanding better than anyone, said gently, ‘Go and have a look.’ He pointed.
I stood up, walked to the far corner of the little room and found my mother, pink in the face with delight, nursing her first grandchild.
I looked down into the beautiful little face — the baby was a girl — and her eyes opened and stared back. She did not resemble Cerdic — which wouldn’t have been too bad as he’s a nice-looking man — but, more to the point, she was nothing like Goda.
She looked like Edild.
My mother, watching me study her, smiled. ‘Can you see it too?’ she asked softly, her finger clutched in the baby’s tiny fist.
‘Yes. She looks like Edild.’
My mother laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But she looks far more like someone else. Someone I nursed as a tiny baby, just as I’m nursing Gelges here.’
Gelges. It meant white swan. What a lovely name. .
My mother was still watching me, waiting for me to say something.
I didn’t.
Just then Gelges gave a small sound rather like a tired sigh and it was so sweet, so endearing, that involuntarily I held out my arms and my mother put the soft, solid little bundle into them.
Gelges and I considered each other.
My mother said, ‘She looks just like you.’
My mother and I stayed with Goda and her little family for another couple of days and then we went home to Aelf Fen. As my mother wisely said, before long Goda was going to have to get used to looking after her house, her husband and her baby by herself, just like any other woman, and the sooner she started, the better.
Life settled down again and resumed its usual pattern. Straight away I went back to my regular sessions with Edild and the joy with which I took up her steadily more challenging lessons was an indication of how much I’d missed them — and her — all the time I was looking after Goda.
I waited, at first nervously, to see if anything would happen. I’m not sure what I was expecting: retribution, I suppose, for Sibert and I had stolen the crown and killed a man. Because of us, Romain de la Flèche as well as his uncle both were dead. We had put the crown back, it seemed successfully, and as time went by and no one came to accuse us, I started to wonder if the crown might be protecting us, just as its long-ago maker made it to protect this land. We had stolen it in the first place, but we had returned it, at considerable risk to ourselves — I still had nightmares about Sibert’s drowned body and that awful moment when I tried to gulp air and sniffed in sea water instead — and surely that must count for something.
I kept my eyes and my ears open and in time I learned that many of the great East Anglian lords who had risen against King William had had their lands and their manors restored. I wondered if any one of them had bought his way back into royal favour with anything as extraordinary as the Drakelow crown. I suspected not.
I had no idea what would happen to Drakelow. Baudouin and his heir were both dead and, although he had claimed to be betrothed to his comely heiress, he had not yet wed her or, as far as I knew, impregnated her. No de la Flèche would ever live at Drakelow again.
I pictured the brash, coarse Norman buildings. I made an image in my mind of the long hall that Sibert’s ancestors built. Then I saw the cliff fall away into the sea, taking the hall with it. It did not look as if any of Sibert’s clan would live there again either.
I supposed that, lacking any other claimant, Drakelow remained the property of the king. Well, all of England belonged to him; that was the Norman way. We just had to accept it.
I have found it a fact of life that if something you really dread goes on not happening, in the end it loses its hold over you and finally you forget about it. I threw myself heart and soul into my work with Edild — she seemed to think that now I had risked death and handled a magical crown I was ready to go up a level in my studies — and I loved almost every moment of my time with her in her fragrant little cottage. Quite often Hrype came to join us and I learned from him, too, as he revealed just a very little of the mysterious heart, soul and spirit that made him what he was.