“He must,” said Den. “Everywhere he goes, his subjects come to him with demands, accusations, pleas, proposals. He cannot help but hear them, and then people want decisions.”

“In Shiring?”

“If he comes here, yes.”

“Here or elsewhere, he must do something about Ragna, surely!”

“Sooner or later. His authority has been defied, and he can’t let that stand. But the timing is another matter.”

Every answer was maybe, Aldred thought with frustration, but perhaps that was normal with royalty. In a monastery, by contrast, a sin was a sin, and there was nothing to dither about. He said: “Ethelred’s new wife, Queen Emma, will surely be a strong ally to Ragna. They’re both Norman aristocrats, they knew each other when younger, they both married powerful English noblemen. They must have experienced similar joys and sorrows in our country. Queen Emma will want Ethelred to rescue Ragna.”

“And Ethelred would do so, were it not for Swein Forkbeard. Ethelred is gathering armies to do battle, and as always he relies on the thanes to muster men from the towns and villages. It’s a bad time for him to quarrel with powerful magnates such as Wigelm and Wynstan.”

Which boiled down to another maybe, Aldred thought. “Is there anything that could sway the decision?”

Den thought for a moment, then said: “Ragna herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Ethelred meets her he will do anything she asks. She is beautiful and vulnerable, and a noble widow. He will not be able to find it in himself to refuse justice to an alluring woman who has been ill-treated.”

“But that’s our problem. We can’t bring her before him because we can’t find her.”

“Exactly.”

“So anything could happen.”

“Yes.”

“By the way,” said Aldred, “while I was on my way here, Wigelm passed me on the road, going in the opposite direction, with a small group of men-at-arms. You don’t know where he was headed, do you?”

“Wherever he was going, his route must have led through Dreng’s Ferry, for there’s no other place of note on that stretch.”

“I hope he wasn’t intending to make trouble for me.”

Aldred rode home with a worried mind, but when he arrived Brother Godleof told him that in fact Wigelm had not visited Dreng’s Ferry. “He must have changed his mind on the road and turned back, for some reason,” Godleof said.

Aldred frowned. “I suppose so,” he said.

Aldred heard the army when they were still a mile or more away from Dreng’s Ferry. At first he did not know what he was listening to. It was a noise something like the sound of Shiring city center on market day: the cumulative result of hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, talking and laughing, shouting orders, cursing, whistling, and coughing, plus horses braying and whinnying, and carts creaking and bumping. He could also hear the destruction of foliage on either side of the mud road, men and horses treading down plants, carts rolling over bushes and saplings. It could only be an army.