To banish such worries, Ragna and her maids practiced speaking Anglo-Saxon. Ragna had been taking lessons every day from an Englishwoman married to a Cherbourg man. Now she made the others giggle by telling them the words for the different male and female parts of the body.

Then, with hardly any warning, the summer breeze turned into an autumn storm, and cold rain whipped the ship and all its passengers.

There was no shelter. Ragna had once seen a gaily painted river barge with a canopy to shade noble ladies from the heat of the sun, but apart from that she had never come across a ship with any kind of cabin or protective roof. When it rained, passengers and crew and cargo alike all got wet. Ragna and her maids huddled together, pulling the hoods of their cloaks over their heads, trying to keep their feet out of the pools that gathered in the bottom.

But that was only the beginning. They stopped smiling as the wind turned into a gale. Captain Guy seemed calm, but he lowered the sail for fear of capsizing. Now the ship went where the weather took it. The stars were hidden behind clouds, and even the crew did not know which way they were heading. Ragna began to be scared.

The crew dropped a sea anchor off the stern. This was a big sack that filled with water and acted as a drag on the ship, moderating its motion and keeping the stern to the wind. But the swells grew. The ship pitched violently: the angel blew his trumpet up at the black sky then, a second later, down into the roiling deeps. The horses could not keep their footing and fell to their knees, neighing in terror. The men-at-arms tried to calm them, without success. Water slopped over the sides. Some of the crew began to say prayers.

Ragna began to think she would never get to England. Perhaps she was not destined to marry Wilwulf and have his children. She might die and go to hell to be punished for the sin she had committed in making love to him before they were husband and wife.

She made the mistake of picturing what it would be like to drown. She recalled a childhood game of holding her breath to see how long she could keep it up, and she felt the panic that had come over her after a minute or two. She imagined the terror of being so desperate to breathe that she inhaled lungfuls of water. How long did it take to die? The thought made her feel ill, and she threw up the dinner she had enjoyed in sunshine only a couple of hours earlier. Vomiting failed to quiet her stomach, but nausea took away her fear, for now she hardly cared whether she lived or died.

She felt as if it would go on forever. When she could no longer see the rain falling she realized it was night. The temperature dropped and she shivered in her sodden clothing.