The Steel Beneath the Silk by Patricia Bracewell

Author:Patricia Bracewell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellastoria Press LLP
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

May 1014

Gainsborough, Lindsey, Mercia

Elgiva hesitated just inside the door of the squat, timbered shed where Tyra mixed her potions and kept the growing supply of the salves, elixirs, and herbs she used for treating wounds. She considered the array of boxes and bags that lined the walls and sprawled across the floor and, spotting a pile of empty sacks, she grabbed one. Wrestling her armload of neatly folded, narrow lengths of scrap linen into it, she secured it with a bit of string before placing it on the hard-packed, dirt floor between bags of herbs and a stack of sealed pots of salted honey.

In less than a week everything stored here, she thought bitterly, would go south with Cnut and his army, and once again he would leave her behind. Tyra would go with him, because her healing skills would be needed. And Lindsey women who had attached themselves to Danish warriors would go simply because there was no one to stop them. But she had been ordered to remain here.

“It is war, Elgiva,” Cnut had told her, “and you have no place in it.”

And so Cnut would ride to London and claim his throne without her.

Resentment chafed at her like a blistered heel, and although she was still trying to discover a way to circumvent Cnut’s edict that she stay behind, she had not yet found it.

Stepping back outside, she raised her hand to block the late afternoon sun as she cast a nervous glance toward the gate. It had been ten days since Cnut left on his mission to gather supplies and men, and it worried her that he had not yet returned. She had an edgy feeling—a prickling against her skin—that some trouble lurked nearby, just out of sight.

With an effort she shrugged off her disquiet. Nothing was wrong, she told herself. Cnut would surely return today, as he had promised. Dragging her eyes away from the gate she went to where Tyra stood in the shade of an oak tree, straining something viscous into one of several bronze vessels that were arrayed on a trestle table in front of her.

“We have eight sacks of bandages now,” Elgiva told her. The lengths of linen would be used to bind broken heads, limbs, and she did not like to think what else. “Should I tell the women to prepare more?”

“If I need any more,” Tyra murmured, her eyes focused on her work, “I shall cut strips from the tunics of the dead.”

Her reply evoked images of dead men stripped naked, and Elgiva grimaced. She grimaced again when a foul smell reached her, wafting from a nearby trio of cauldrons that hung suspended over cooking fires. It was the salve that Tyra smeared on wounds to aid in healing—radish, wormwood, and cropleek pounded and boiled in butter and celandine.

She was about to ask how much longer the wretched stuff needed to simmer when there was a cry from the gate ward and she saw three horsemen race into the yard, sending up a flurry of mud and gravel.

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