“So we’ll have to pole the raft back without your help!” Erman said indignantly.
“It won’t cost you much effort,” Edgar said patiently. “It’s downstream. All you’ll have to do is keep the raft away from the banks.”
The three of them pushed the raft into the water, still tied up, then loaded it with the stones. Edgar insisted on an interlocking pile, so that the cargo would not shift in transit, but in fact the river was so calm that it was not really necessary.
“You’d better unload before you drag the raft across the shallows,” Edgar said. “Otherwise you might get stuck.”
“Then reload again—that’s a lot of work,” Erman grumbled.
Eadbald said: “And we’ll have to unload the stones again at the other end!”
“You’d damn well better—you’re being paid to.”
“All right, all right.”
Edgar untied the raft and the three boarded. “Pole across and drop me on the opposite bank,” Edgar said.
They crossed the river. Edgar got off in the shallows. His brothers returned the vessel to midstream, and slowly the current caught it and took it away.
Edgar watched it out of sight, then set off on the road to Shiring.
The town was busy. The farriers were shoeing horses; the saddlers were sold out of tack; two men with rotating grindstones were sharpening every blade; and the fletchers were selling arrows as fast as they could make them. Edgar soon discovered the reason: Ealdorman Wilwulf was about to harry the Welsh.
The wild men of the west had raided into Wilf’s territory in the autumn, but he had been busy with his wedding and had not retaliated. However, he had not forgotten, and now he was mustering a small army to punish them.
An English attack would be devastating to the Welsh. It would disrupt the agricultural cycle. Men and women would be killed, so there would be fewer to plough and sow. Adolescent boys and girls would be captured and sold as slaves, making money for the ealdorman and his men-at-arms, and leaving fewer fecund couples, and therefore in the long term fewer Welsh raiders, theoretically.
Harrying was meant to discourage raids, but since the Welsh generally raided only when they were starving, the punishment was a feeble deterrent, in Edgar’s opinion. Revenge was the real motive, he thought.
He made his way to the abbey, where he planned to spend the night. It was a pale stone monument of peace in the middle of a town preparing for war. Aldred seemed pleased to see Edgar. The monks were about to go in procession to the church forthe midafternoon services of Nones, but Aldred was allowed to skip it.
Edgar had had a long walk in the February cold, and Aldred said: “You need to warm up. There’s a fire in Osmund’s room—let’s sit there.” Edgar accepted gratefully.
All the other monks had left, and the monastery was silent. Edgar felt a moment of unease: Aldred’s affection for him was a little too intense. He hoped this was not going to be the scene of an embarrassing interaction. He did not want to offend Aldred, but nor did he want to be embraced by him.
He need not have worried. Aldred had other things on his mind. “It turns out that Ragna did not know about Wilf’s first wife, Inge,” he said.
Edgar remembered a conversation with Agnes the seamstress. “They thought she was dead,” he recalled.
“Until after they were married, and most of Ragna’s servants had gone back to Cherbourg; then Wilf moved Inge back into the compound, along with their son, Garulf.”
Dread settled like a weight in the pit of Edgar’s stomach. “How is she?”
“Distraught.”
He felt desperately sorry for her, a stranger far from home and family, cruelly tricked by the English. “Poor girl,” he said, but the phrase felt inadequate.
Aldred said: “But that’s not why I’m so keen to talk to you. It’s about Dreng’s Ferry.”
Edgar wrenched his thoughts away from Ragna.
Aldred went on: “After I saw the state of the minster, I proposed that it should be taken over by monks, and the archbishop agreed.But Wynstan kicked up a huge fuss, and Abbot Osmund backed down.”
Edgar frowned. “Why did Wynstan care so much?”
“That’s the question. It’s not a rich church, and Degbert is no more than a distant relation to him.”
“Why would Wynstan quarrel with his archbishop over something so minor?”
