Father Brandt learns the truth

Father Brandt found the Queen already waiting for him in the chapel.

“Father! I must confess a mortal sin!”

Brandt stopped in the aisle. He had thought she had sent for him to pray for the Princess’s recovery – or perhaps they had lost hope of her recovery. But he had not been expecting this.

“Even so, dear heart,” he murmured. He led her to a seat in the corner and pulled a chair for himself up before her.

“Credo in Deum, Patrem omnipotentem…” she began at once, rattling off her faith as if it were an obstacle to be overcome before she could reach her goal.

Brandt sighed. Maud was a practiced penitent, but he had often wondered whether her weekly catalog of minor transgressions were not, as was so often the case, dressed precisely to hide the one important sin. He would not ask her to slow down today. If the Princess were in danger, she would no doubt be agitated – and all the more so if she had recognized that her own soul was in danger.

“Amen,” he repeated after her when she reached the end.

“Father,” she began, but she stopped with her mouth open and tears gathering in her eyes.

Brandt took her hand. This was not the Maud who detailed her little jealousies and vanities with almost the relish of a peasant’s wife gossiping against her neighbor. “Should I question thee, lest thou be led into forgetting thy sins?”

“No, no – I remember. I have – I have committed the sin of adultery!” she gasped, and then hung her head.

“Ach so!” Father Brandt dropped her hand and sat back in his chair. “In body or in mind?” This was not at all what he had been expecting this morning.

“In body.”

Brandt blinked in astonishment. This was the confession he had been expecting to hear from the King, who had taken up separate quarters from the Queen, presumably the better to receive his mistresses. He knew the Danes saw nothing wrong with such proceedings. Were they both at fault? 

“How many times?” he asked her automatically.

“Many times – twice the autumn before last, and many times the autumn before.”

So long ago? Then the Princess…? Father Brandt found suddenly that he had forgotten how to count. He would have to think this over later.

“And I knew it was a sin!” she continued, her eyes growing bright in her rapture of contrition. “And I didn’t care! I only cared about him!”

Him! Who was he? But he couldn’t ask.

“But Father – ” The light in her eyes suddenly dimmed. “You know I have been ill. And I have prayed and prayed that my children not be touched. But I have done something terribly wrong.” She leaned closer to him and whispered, “I prayed most especially that my little son not be touched–his son.”

Brandt nodded, but he scarcely knew what to think. Was it the young Prince, then? Had he been so blind? But it was true the child did not resemble his father overmuch.

Maud sat up suddenly. “Because, you know, Father,” she said matter-​​of-​​factly, “he’s not as strong as my other children, and I thought – I thought – No!” she sobbed. “That’s not why. It’s because he is his son. He’s all I have of him!”

“Dost love this man still?”

“Yes! No… I don’t know.” Her shoulders slumped. “I shall likely never see him again,” she murmured.

“Thou must never,” he corrected.

“I must never. But Father – my baby!” She clutched his hands. “I prayed for his son to be saved, and so the Lord will punish me by taking Sigefrith’s daughter!”

“Now, now,” Brandt soothed, but he wondered. These were grave sins upon grave sins. For a woman to pray for her lover’s bastard child above those of her husband – there was nothing in his penitential for this. Perhaps the Lord was preparing her penance for her.

“What must I do?” she begged. “I would do anything!”

Ah, it was the question. She always begged for the most absurd penances to be imposed for the least little sin. Perhaps she had meant to do silent penance for these crimes alongside the petty things. What could he invent for her now?

“Dost know that thou hast sinned?” he asked her in order to gain time.

“I know! I know!” Her eyes flared again.

“Shalt thou sin again?”

“No more!” She leaned towards him, breathing through parted lips, awaiting his verdict.

Brandt frowned. She was not playing a game, but he did doubt this child-​​woman had any true sense of the gravity of what she had told him. A woman such as the gentle Baroness would be struck down with a fever of the brain if she ever learned that she had sinned thus, even unknowing. But the Queen loved her children dearly – this he knew. All of them.

“What must I do?” she begged.

“For adultery,” he said, thinking to begin with the sin he knew well, but he suddenly wondered whether the prescribed separation from one’s spouse were the appropriate penance in this case. The principle of contraria should seem to dictate a reunion, especially given that the Queen had been sleeping alone for some time now.

“For adultery,” he began again, “thou shalt abstain from meat for seven years. And for thy mendacity, thou shalt keep silent for the month of – of October,” he said, recalling that she had sinned in the autumn, “for the next seven years. And thou shalt rejoin thy husband in his bed.”

She nodded eagerly.

“For the sin of loving the illegitimate child of thy lover before thine other children…” Was it a proscribed sin? It seemed wrong… What would Augustine have said? He had loved his illegitimate son. “Thou must give him up to God. He shall become a priest and love God before thee.”

“I can’t!” she gasped. “He is not mine to give. In three years’ time, I must give him up to his father.”

Brandt thought quickly. The Prince was to go to his godfather to be raised – was his godfather then his true father? This was a grave sin indeed – but not hers. It did not surprise him of these savage Scots, who swore on their knives and wore amulets of bone like pagans. And to call a man brother while defiling his wife – it was too much! But this was not his affair.

“Thou must do what thou mayest,” he told her. “And I also.” He would do all he could to keep the child away from the influence of its treacherous father. But there would be the King to convince.

“Will it save Emma?” she begged.

“Ach! She is in the hands of the Lord, and He does not make bargains.”

“But, Father!”

“Do all I have said. Repent. Pray to Him. Love thy husband and thy children. Forget this man. Wilt thou?”

“I will.”

“Now I shall hear thee pray.”

“Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet…” she began at once.

Father Brandt nodded, listening, but his mind ran elsewhere. Nothing, perhaps, was as he thought in this castle. Perhaps it had been the Queen to send the King away. Perhaps the King was not the sinner he had thought – and then he would be at fault, for he had judged a man based on nothing but his own suppositions.