All was well, except that Ragna had vanished, along with her children and servants. Edgar had spent two months going from town to town and village to village, but he had found no trace of her. He had even visited the new hunting lodge Wigelm was building near Outhenham. No one had seen Ragna pass by. Edgar was distraught but helpless, and Aldred pitied him.

Meanwhile, Wigelm was collecting all the rents from the Vale of Outhen.

Aldred had asked Sheriff Den how come the king did nothing about it. “Look at it from King Ethelred’s point of view,” Den had said. “He sees Ragna’s marriage as illegitimate. He declined to ratify it, but Wilwulf went ahead anyway. The royal court fined Wilf for disobedience, and he refused to pay the fine. Ethelred’s authority has been challenged and, what’s worse, his pride has been hurt. He’s not going to carry on as if this were a perfectly normal marriage.”

Aldred said indignantly: “So he’s punishing Ragna for Wilwulf’s sins!”

“What else can he do?”

“He could harry Shiring!”

“That’s an extreme measure: raising an army, burning the villages, killing the opposition, making off with the best horses and cattle and jewelry: it’s a king’s ultimate weapon, to be used only in extreme circumstances. Is he going to do that for a foreign widow whose marriage he never sanctioned in the first place?”

“Does her father know that she has disappeared?”

“Possibly. But a rescue operation from Normandy would be an invasion of England, and Count Hubert can’t manage that—especially when his neighbor’s daughter is about to marry the English king. Ethelred’s wedding to Emma of Normandy is set for November.”

“The king has to rule, come what may; and one of his duties is to take care of noble widows.”

“You should put that point to him yourself.”

“All right, I will.”

Aldred had written a letter to King Ethelred.

In response, the king had ordered Wigelm to produce the person of his brother’s widow.

Aldred thought Wigelm would simply ignore the order, as he had ignored royal decrees in the past, but this time it was different: Wigelm had announced that Ragna had gone home to Cherbourg.

If true, that would at least explain why no one had been able to find her in England. And she would naturally have taken her children and her Norman servants with her.

Edgar had made a second visit to Combe and had found no one who could confirm that Ragna had boarded a ship there—but she might have sailed from a different port.

While Aldred was worrying about Edgar, the man himself appeared. He had recovered from the beating he had suffered, except that his nose was slightly twisted now, and he was missing a front tooth. He approached the churchyard in the company of two others whom Aldred recognized. The man with the Norman-style haircut was Odo, and the small blond woman was his wife, Adelaide. They were the couriers from Cherbourg who brought Ragna her rents from Saint-Martin every three months. Close behind were three men-at-arms, their escort. They needed fewer bodyguards since the execution of Ironface.