And all Northumbria had to show for the treaty was an unwanted woman and Grimbald’s bald head that was impaled on a spear-blade and displayed in the palace courtyard.

And Edward had his peace treaty.

Sigtryggr was baptized that afternoon and married two hours later. Both ceremonies took place in Tamweorthin’s high church so that as many folk as possible could see his humiliation. Æthelflaed had built the church, and I remember grousing to her that she would have been better off spending the silver on spears and shields, an argument I inevitably lost, and now, under a clear spring sky, the big church was packed to watch Sigtryggr. He was dressed in a white penitent’s robe and ordered to climb into a great barrel filled with water from the River Tame, though Archbishop Hrothweard, who insisted on conducting the baptism, added water from a small jar. “This water,” he declared, “was brought all the way from the River Jordan, the same river in which our Lord was baptized.” I wondered how much he had paid for the stoppered jar, which, I suspected, had been filled from some monastery’s scum-covered fish pond. Sigtryggr, who had taken the precaution of giving me his hammer amulet for safekeeping, looked bemused throughout the ceremony and good-naturedly allowed his head to be pushed under water as a choir chanted and as Hrothweard prayed. Afterward he was presented with a silver cross, which he dutifully hung about his neck.

He was still wearing the cross when he married Eadgyth, though now he also wore his crown and a dark scarlet robe trimmed with fur, which was a gift from Prince Æthelstan. After the wedding, Sigtryggr and his bride were conducted to a chamber in the palace and that was the last I saw of him that day.

Next morning I sent to the far steading where my men had waited, and by midday we were all on the road north. Sigtryggr took back his hammer and ostentatiously hung it about his neck. The silver cross was nowhere to be seen. “I trust you had a good night, lord King?” I asked him mischievously.

“I slept badly,” he grunted.

“Badly?”

“The miserable bitch was in tears all night.”

“Tears of joy, I’m sure.”

Sigtryggr scowled at me. “She’s still a virgin.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

I stopped teasing him. “I knew her when she was a child,” I said, “and she was clever then, and I’m sure she’s clever still. She’ll give you good counsel.”

He growled at that. “Damn her counsel, I’d rather she gave me a dowry.”

“There’s no dowry?”

“She said I’d been given the best dowry of all, the gift of eternal life. Pious bitch.”

The pious bitch was mounted on a white gelding, a present from her twin brother. She looked uncomfortable even though her maid had padded the saddle with a thick woolen cloth. She was flanked by two priests. One, Father Eadsig, was her confessor. He was a small, worried-looking young man who kept glancing nervously at the warriors who surrounded him, while the other, Father Amandus, was a Danish convert who had been appointed as Sigtryggr’s chaplain, a job that could have explained his scowling face.