Chapter 17
Every muscle in Steinar’s body tensed when Cwenthryth disappeared through the door.
He could not stop himself from thinking it was a mistake to send her to investigate in his stead.
Neither he nor his father knew this Aldred, they had no idea if he could be trusted or not.
One of them should be in that house right now, not her.
What if there was trouble? How would they know to intervene?
When they had agreed Cwenthryth should be the one to speak to her neighbor, he had imagined the two of them would meet at the market or in the street, somewhere where they could keep an eye on her.
If he’d been told she would end up alone in a house with a man who’d fucked half the women in town he would never have agreed to the scheme.
It was too dangerous. There was no telling how he would behave.
“Calm down, son.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” he snapped. “It wasn’t the plan for her to disappear from view. How would you like it if Mother was the one alone with a man we don’t know right now? A man who we know is not above bedding married women?”
His father’s nostrils flared. Evidently, he was honest enough to admit he would have acted just like Steinar in such a situation.
“Very well. Let us go stand near the house. If anything happens, we’ll be able to hear and intervene. But we need to give Cwenthryth the chance to help you. You know that’s what she wants. I think it will mean a lot to her, and I think you know why.”
Yes, he knew why.
Cwenthryth had feelings for him. If she did not, she would not still be in the village. If she did not, she would not have kissed him with such fire the other day. If she did not, she would not be thinking of a future together.
Could the two of them find happiness? Could he allow himself another chance at love?
Yes, perhaps with her, he could.
Steinar felt an odd tightening in his chest. Against all odds, he felt grateful to Astrid.
He had once thought she might be the woman for him, only to face the fact that he had been mistaken.
But by an odd twist of fate, she had sent him a woman who could give him the life he’d not had in his marriage.
“Yes. I know it means a lot to her,” he told his father, his voice hoarse from emotion. “It means even more to me that she would want to try, to know that she still wants to give me a chance after the way I acted toward her.”
“I know exactly how you feel.” Wolf placed a hand on his shoulder and did not ask what that way might be. “Women are often more generous toward us than we deserve. In return all we can do is try to give them the life they hoped to have.”
Exactly.
In that moment Steinar promised himself he would ask Cwenthryth to marry him once this was over and he was free from the suspicion of murder.
He could not be sure she would accept, at least straight away, but he would not relent until she had accepted.
Some people might argue he was rushing things again, considering that Astrid had only been dead a few weeks but he knew that was not the case.
Their marriage had stopped being a marriage years ago.
Her death had not affected him in the way the loss of a beloved spouse would have.
In his mind he was free, and he felt ready for a second chance, ready to have the intimacy he craved at last, the love he’d hoped to have with his first wife.
Yes, it would seem that by asking Cwenthryth to come to him, Astrid had given him the best parting gift.
“Cwenthryth! This is a surprise.”
Cwenthryth smiled. This meeting was not a surprise to her, of course, but she was delighted by this stroke of luck.
As she’d entered the street from the north end, she’d spotted Aldred walking toward her and they had met in front of his door, as if by accident.
It was the best thing that could have happened.
They didn’t have the sort of relationship that justified her knocking at his door and he might have been suspicious if she had suddenly visited him for no apparent reason.
But he would see nothing odd in a conversation he had started himself in the street. It was perfect, just what they needed.
She had promised herself only the other day that she would never again set foot within the town walls, but she had not hesitated. This was not about her, but about Steinar. She would do everything she could to help him.
“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for a while.”
“I went to visit my cousin by the coast and ended up staying with her longer than I thought,” she improvised.
“I didn’t know you had family there?”
She didn’t, but she had not been able to think of a better explanation for her prolonged absence. Any mention of the Norsemen village was out of the question, as was her miscarriage. A non-existent cousin would do very well.
“We fell out a while ago, that’s probably why.
A stupid argument about who made the best flat cakes.
Then I heard she’d had a child and I decided it was time we put the past behind us.
” Cwenthryth was surprised by the ease with which the lies passed her lips.
But now that she was free of the threat Godfrid represented, she felt like a different woman, lighter, confident, happy.
That woman was fearless. “Anyway, as you can see, I’m back. ”
Another lie, but Aldred was not to know she would never live in the house next door again.
“Well, come on in, surely you have time for a drink? I’m just back from a visit to the harbor and I’m rather thirsty.”
“Thank you.”
A drink—and an interrogation. Resisting the urge to glance back at Steinar, who would most certainly hate seeing her disappear from view, she stepped inside the house.
“There you are, a fresh batch of ale,” Aldred said, placing two wooden cups on the table. The liquid in it was frothing invitingly. She was thirsty as well, she realized. “I opened the cask this morning.”
“It smells good.”
As she drank Cwenthryth looked at the man sitting at the table in front of her.
How on earth had Astrid chosen to take him as a lover when she was married to a man like Steinar?
With brown hair, washed-out gray eyes and a small, pointy chin, he did not begin to compare with the Norseman.
Aldred was unremarkable in every way, not just physically.
He lacked masculine presence, wit and even skill at conversation.
Going to him when you could have bedded Steinar was like choosing to sit indoors when there was a sunset blazing outside, like buying shriveled onions at the market in town when you had the freshest, juiciest vegetables growing in your vegetable patch.
A folly.
“I hear from Osberth the woodturner that your brother has left town,” he told her, placing a plate of sliced meat in front of her.
She selected the smallest sliver she could find, before starting to shred it into ribbons.
Not only did it look distinctively greasy, nothing like Steinar’s smoked lamb, but the mention of Godfrid had put paid to what little appetite she’d had. “Is that true?”
“It is. He’s gone.”
Finally. Permanently.
“Any idea where he went?”
Yes, she knew exactly where he’d gone. To hell. Sent there by the man who was obsessed with it. Not that she could tell Aldred as much. She shook her head. “Godfrid and I were never really close. He was only my half-brother, as you know, and we didn’t grow up together.”
A swig of ale did little to ease the tightening in her throat.
“Pity he left. The two of us got on well. We often went wenching together. He was always more popular than me, but as he didn’t mind sharing his conquests with his friends, I never went without.”
Cwenthryth placed her cup down with more force than she had intended.
Why on earth did the man think that she would want to hear that?
This was more information than any woman would want to have about her brother.
Besides, she had not come to discuss Godfrid, much less to hear his lusty nature being praised.
Unfortunately, she already knew all there was to know about it.
Doing her best to speak in a neutral voice, she did what she had come here to do. The quicker she got out of here, the better. Steinar would be pacing the street up and down by now, waiting for her to reappear. She didn’t want to worry him unduly.
“Do you know if anyone came calling for me while I was away? Eahlswith? Astrid and the boys?” she asked, deciding it was best to pretend she didn’t know about the Norsewoman’s death either.
After all, how would she have found out, being away from town, at her cousin’s?
The purpose of the question was only to introduce the topic of his lover.
Aldred’s brow arched. “You haven’t heard then?”
“Heard what?”
“Astrid is dead.”
Cwenthryth remembered the day Steinar had told her the exact same thing. It had been such a shock. Had only three weeks passed since then? It seemed so long ago.
“Dead!” she gasped, doing her best to appear as if she didn’t know. Getting him to talk, expose what he knew, would be the best way to learn information. “But how? She didn’t appear ill to me the last time I saw her?”
“No, she wouldn’t have, considering.”
“What do you mean?”
Aldred leaned in closer, like a man delighting in imparting shocking information.
Incidentally, Cwenthryth noted that he did not seem devastated by her death, despite what they had shared.
Poor Astrid. From what Steinar had said, her parents had not cared about her when she was alive, and her death had left them cold.
Now her lover appeared unconcerned to have lost her.
The only people who had wanted to love her, her husband and her children, she had chosen to forsake.
Maybe there was a lesson in there somewhere.
“She was poisoned, by all accounts. No wonder she seemed normal when we last saw her.”
This time she didn’t have to pretend to be shocked.
Where had he gotten this information? It was surprising enough that he should have heard of her demise, being only his secret lover and living far from the Norsemen village.
But he seemed to know not only that she was dead, but also the cause of death—and it was not the one everyone thought.
Could he be right? Could Astrid have been poisoned?
It was not what she’d heard at all. But then again, the symptoms she’d been given could easily have been caused by poison, and Steinar had been accused of murder.
They had dismissed the accusation as ridiculous, but perhaps there was more to it than mere slander.
Perhaps Astrid really had been poisoned, and some people genuinely thought her husband was responsible for the crime?
But who? The all-important question remained.
“This is horrible.” It wasn’t hard to sound appalled when she was appalled.
“Yes. By all accounts, her husband killed her when he found out about her…well, when he found out about me and her, shall we say.” Aldred had no reason to keep his affair with Astrid a secret from her.
He knew she was aware of it, having been the one looking after the children while they spent their afternoons in bed.
“The big brute could not bear the humiliation of being bested by a Saxon and so he killed her.”
“No, it can’t be…”
How was she supposed to believe that a “big brute,” in his own words, a jealous husband finding out his wife had a lover, would have poisoned her instead of killing her in a fit of rage?
He would have stabbed, strangled, or at very least hit her before ripping said lover to shreds.
Poison was the weapon of the weak, of cowards who planned their dark deeds with cold calculation.
In other words, people who were the exact opposite of Steinar.
Not that she believed him capable of striking or strangling or stabbing a woman, of course, but no one who knew him would think he had poisoned his wife.
There was only one explanation for Aldred to state it so confidently.
He didn’t just know Steinar had been accused.
He was the one who had accused him. And Astrid hadn’t contracted a mysterious disease which had killed her, she had indeed been murdered.
By her lover, the man sitting in front of Cwenthryth right now, drinking ale as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
As to why he had killed her, she didn’t know and she didn’t care.
All she knew was that she had to get out of here while she could, find Steinar and his father. They would know what to do.
She forced herself not to rush out of the house there and then. She had found out what she needed to know—that Aldred was a dangerous, determined man, not above killing women and accusing innocents of the murder.
A man who might hurt her if he came to suspect why she had come.
“It’s horrid,” she said, not knowing if she could stomach hearing another shocking revelation, not certain how to put an end to the conversation naturally.
What if Aldred started to wonder at her attitude, wonder why she was taking such an interest in Astrid?
Why she had agreed to have a drink with him despite them not being what you’d call friends?
Would he start asking questions about her mysterious cousin?
As she now knew him for a murderer, ruthless enough to rid himself of the people he no longer wanted, she wasn’t sure what to do.
He helped himself to another cup of ale, shaking his head.
“Well, horrid people will do horrid things, and that’s all there is to it.”
Yes. She could only agree with him.