Moyra Caldecott by Etheldreda Read Free Book Online

hesitated, looking at Etheldreda.
    ‘I heard that he is a hard man to his enemies, that’s for sure.’ The queen frowned. Whoever became king of Northumbria affected them all. If Penda kept what he had won they would suffer most. Separate, the seven kingdoms kept a kind of balance, but if Northumbria and Mercia were united it would not be long before they were all absorbed. But if Oswy was as they hinted… what then?

Chapter 4
    The school at Dunwich: Oswy and Eanfleda
    While Prince Oswy of Bernicia was fighting to regain his brother’s throne from Penda and hold it against others of his country who wished to wrest it from him, Etheldreda was growing up. Heregyth, a girl a few years older than herself, the daughter of one of Egric’s thegns who had died defending Rendilsham, was assigned to be her special maid and companion and in her company Etheldreda was sent to Dunwich to study at the famous school that had been founded by Bishop Felix during the reign of King Sigbert.
    The princess at once took to the life of study, eagerly learning everything she could as fast as she could, finding in scholarship and the long hours of work the pleasure that others might find in the playful company of friends and the noisy evenings of entertainment at court. She found that by learning to read she now had a direct door into the Gospels through which she could go whenever she wished, finding things there that the priests, on whose interpretations she had been dependent before, had never shown her.
    Each day had its excitement and at night when she returned to her small bare chamber, where Heregyth was waiting to comb her hair, she poured out her enthusiasms to the girl. Heregyth, who could neither read nor write, nor had any wish to do so, longed to return to Rendilsham. She had been enrolled in the embroidery school and although the work they did there was famous throughout Europe, even the Bishop of Rome wearing a cope that had been designed and worked at Dunwich, she found each day longer than the last.
    Just before Michaelmas Etheldreda was allowed to start work in the scriptorium and every evening when she and Heregyth were together she talked enthusiastically about her work. The bemused girl heard about the difficulties of applying gold leaf when the resin underlying it dried too quickly or too slowly because of changeable weather, and the preciousness of ultramarine, which was one of the few pigments they could not grind themselves, but had to have sent from Rome.
    ‘Even in Rome,’ the princess told Heregyth, ‘they don’t know how it is made and have to import it from the East. They know its base is lapis lazuli but not one has been able to find out just what else they use. The others are easy. We use orpiment for yellow when we can’t get the gold, verdigris from copper for green, woad for blue, white and red lead, ox-gall for brown, and then it is just a matter of knowing how much to mix with the egg, the gum or the vinegar.’
    Heregyth combed Etheldreda’s hair so that it floated out around her and became a haze of fine gold threads in the lamplight, and then she put away the comb and folded back the rugs on the bed.
    ‘I’d be frightened that I’d make a mistake and ruin a whole page,’ she said.
    Etheldreda smiled.
    ‘Even experienced scribes make mistakes. We think nothing of it,’ she said airily. ‘We just turn the mistake into a little animal or a flower or something. My pages are usually full of extra figures!’ She laughed, and then she looked serious. ‘But one day,’ she said, ‘one day I will write the perfect page.’

    Being a school attached to a monastery there were not many hours of the day and night that were not accounted for in duties. But sometimes Etheldreda felt the need to be by herself and she would rise before dawn and, instead of going to the chapel where the monks and nuns would already be gathered, she would slip away to the sea and walk along the beach, watching for the