Wynstan remembered it vividly. “I hated you for it.”

“And yet I did it out of love.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you did.”

She picked up his doubt. “You had to become a priest. Let peasant brats play.”

“Why were you so sure I should be a priest?”

“Because you’re a second son, and I’m a second wife. Wilwulf was going to inherit your father’s wealth, and probably become ealdorman, and you might have been an unimportant person, only wanted just in case Wilf should die. I was determined not to let that happen to us. The church was your route to power and wealth and high status.”

“And yours.”

“I’m nothing,” she said.

Her modesty was utterly insincere and he ignored it. “After me, you had no offspring for five years. Was that deliberate? Because of my difficult birth?”

“No,” she said indignantly. “A noblewoman does not shirk childbirth.”

“Of course.”

“But I had two miscarriages between you and Wigelm, not to mention a stillbirth later.”

“I remember the arrival of Wigelm,” Wynstan mused. “When I was five years old, I wanted to murder him.”

“An older child often has such feelings. It’s a sign of spirit. He rarely does anything about it, but I kept you away from Wigelm’s cradle just the same.”

“What was his delivery like?”

“Not so bad, though childbirth is rarely easy. The second child is normally less agonizing than the first.” She glanced in the direction of the noise. “Though clearly that’s not so for Ragna. Something may be going wrong.”

“Death in childbirth is a common occurrence,” Wynstan said cheerfully; then he caught a black look from Gytha and realized he had gone too far. She was on his side, whatever he did, but she was still a woman. “Who is attending Ragna?” he asked.

“A Shiring midwife called Hildi.”

“Local woman with heathen remedies, I suppose.”

“Yes. But if Ragna and the newborn were to die, that would still leave Osbert.”

Ragna’s first child was coming up to two years old, a ginger-haired baby Norman, named Osbert after Wilwulf’s father. Osbert was Wilf’s legitimate heir, and would be even if Ragna’s newborn died today. But Wynstan waved a hand dismissively. “A child without a mother is little threat,” he said. A two-year-old was not difficult to get rid of, he was thinking; but he did not say so, remembering Gytha’s black look.

She just nodded.

He studied her face. Thirty years ago that face had terrified him. She was in her middle fifties now, and her hair had been gray for years; but lately her dark eyebrows had grown silver strands, there were new little vertical lines above her upper lip, and her figure was not so much voluptuous as lumpy. But she still had the power to strike fear into his heart.

She was patient and still. Women could do that. Wynstan could not: he tapped his foot, shifted in his seat, and said: “Dear God, how much longer?”