London - Edward Rutherfurd [58]
All those who knew her husband would have agreed, “She may be brave, but no one gets the better of Cerdic.” Two events – one that had taken place the day before, the other which Cerdic planned for the following morning – would have convinced them: “She doesn’t stand a chance.”
Cerdic rode steadily. Though it was only twenty miles as the crow flies, he might have been a world away, for he was on the other side of the Thames Estuary, riding along the great chalk ridges of the kingdom of Kent.
The contrast between the two sides of the estuary could not have been greater. Whereas the huge tracts of East Anglia were low and flat, the narrower peninsula of Kent was divided by the huge ridges that ran eastwards until they ended abruptly in the tall white cliffs that stared over the sea. Between those ridges lay great valleys and sweeps of country – rolling, open fields in the eastern parts, and in the western, bosky woods, smaller fields and orchards.
If Elfgiva was from the wild, free coast, Cerdic was from ordered Kent. And there was the difference.
His family had been there since the first Saxon and Jutish settlement. Their estate, in the west, was still their true home, but as a young man Cerdic had also set up a second residence at the little trading post of Lundenwic on the River Thames. From there he received and shipped goods and set out with a string of packhorses to visit all parts of the island. It was a trade that had made him rich indeed.
He was a large, bluff man, a Saxon to the core, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a hint of temper about him. Whilst his beard was full, the hair on his head was thinning, and his complexion suggested that, when angry, he could become flushed even to apoplexy. At the same time, his broad, Germanic face had high cheekbones that suggested a measured, even cold strength and authority. “Strong as a bull, but hard as an oak tree,” his men used to say of him. It was also generally agreed that, like his father before him, he would live to be old: “They’re too shrewd to die in a hurry, that family.”
Two other character traits, always strong in his ancestors, were especially noticeable in Cerdic. One was that, once given, he had never been known to break his word. As a trader, this had become a great asset to him. The other, though it was sometimes the subject of wry amusement to his friends, was more often viewed with awe and even fear.
To Cerdic there were only two sides to any issue. Whatever he had to decide – a course of action, a man’s character, a question of guilt or innocence – as far as Cerdic was concerned, there was a right answer and a wrong answer, and nothing in between. Once his mind, which was an intelligent one, was made up, it snapped shut like an iron trap. “Things are only black and white to Cerdic, never grey,” his associates would say.
None of this boded well for his wife. At this moment, Cerdic was on his way back from the court of his traditional lord, good King Ethelbert of Kent, in the city of Canterbury.
Where they were Christians.
In the days when young Offa’s ancestor Julius had forged his coins in Roman Londinium, Christianity had been an unofficial cult, subject to occasional persecution. Then, in the following century, thanks to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, Christianity had become the empire’s official religion, and Rome the Catholic capital. In the province of Britain, as elsewhere, churches were built, often on the site of pagan temples. The British Church was of some consequence. Even decades after the Romans had left the island, British bishops were still attending faraway Church councils. “Though we had to pay their travelling expenses,” the Italian bishops recorded, “because they’re miserably poor.”
But then the Anglo-Saxons came, staunch pagans all. The British Christians struggled, became cut off, and then silent. A century passed, and more.
Not that all was lost. Missionaries arrived. From Ireland, recently converted by St Patrick, came Celtic monks,