Brede has a new letter to copy

“It’s about time! I wondered where you were all day,” Sigefrith said after Brede had finished kissing the hands of the assembled ladies.

“I was across the river. Was it urgent? I ate before I came.”

“I am certainly not foolish enough to stand between a young man and his supper. It wasn’t urgent. Only a letter I thought you might like to read.”

Brede waited while the King whispered something to his wife before asking, “From Theobald?”

“Theobald?” Sigefrith asked. “I didn’t realize you were such friends with Theobald. I shan’t need a cloak, shall I?”

“Are you afraid of catching a chill in your bones, grandfather?” Brede smiled.

“You laugh now!”

“I assure you, you won’t catch your death in crossing the court.” They went out through the great doors and descended the broad staircase. “I like Theobald very well,” Brede continued, “but he’s always writing to my uncle.”

“He has long since exhausted the resources of Father Brandt,” Sigefrith said. “I believe your uncle has opened up new possibilities for brooding over his Bible.”

“I like Theobald better when he isn’t brooding.”

“As do I,” Sigefrith sighed. “A little study of the Bible is surely a good thing, but too much…”

Brede did not know how to reply. He sometimes thought that Sigefrith believed that it was her Bible that had killed his first wife.

“I suppose some people simply shouldn’t be taught how to read,” he went on, as if he had been thinking the same thoughts as Brede. “Especially women.”

“Aren’t you having Brit taught?”

“That’s different. I have to teach Brit how to read so she can communicate with her husband someday.”

“Dunstan?” Brede laughed. “Do you suppose he will only communicate with her through letters?”

“No, but if I know that runt, he will be too shy to woo her any other way than by slipping poetry under her pillow.”

Brede laughed, and then waited as Sigefrith lit a candle in his study.

“There now,” Sigefrith said as he began to search through the books and papers on his writing table. “Where did Cenwulf put it already? It’s a little scrap of a thing, to have come such a long way.”

“Such a long way? I thought you said it was from Theobald?”

“I certainly did not. It is from your brother-​​in-​​law.”

“Eirik! What does he want? Did they arrive safely?”

“That, in fact, is all he wanted: to tell us so. It’s about five lines – no poet he. Here it is. I thought you would like to see it.”

Brede wrinkled his nose in disgust. “You could have simply told me what it said.”

“Take it, boy. I tell you, I think you will like to see it.”

Brede snatched the letter out of his hand and unfolded it gingerly, as if the thing were not fit to be touched. It was indeed brief: a line and a half of salutation, the information that they had gone out to sea on such a date on such a ship, arriving safely at port on such a date, and closing with a few more greetings from various relations. Below there was a bold cross followed by Eirik’s name – and then the thing Sigefrith had thought he would want to see: a second, smaller cross followed by a pitiful scrawl that could, if one knew what one was looking for, be seen to read SIGRID.

He did not know what to think. Had Eirik forced her to write her name so as to prove that he had taken her at least that far? Had she insisted on adding her signature to the letter in order to remind her family that she still existed? Both possibilities were somehow pathetic. And when he imagined his little sister sitting at a table, clutching a quill in her unpracticed hand, trying to copy the characters he had written out for her… and when he thought of that blond monster towering over her, whether forcing her to write or merely, in helping her, applying that sly mockery he had often used when “helping” Brede learn to swing a sword…

All the while Sigefrith had busied himself with straightening the affairs he had scattered during his search for the letter, and now he seemed to be further straightening the straight piles. Brede was grateful, but he wondered whether Sigefrith had seen the pathetic in the letter, or had merely thought that he would be amused to look upon this crude scribble of his illiterate sister’s. Most ladies signed with a cross, if they signed at all.

“Will she ever forgive me?” he asked hesitantly. It was the first time he had asked himself the question – not God, but his sister.

“I should think she would be grateful to you, for bringing him back to her,” Sigefrith said quietly.

Brede caught his eye for a moment, but then he looked back at the letter. He could not explain to Sigefrith what he meant. His very marriage to Estrid was a delicate subject between them. He certainly could not admit to Sigefrith that he feared he had been so busy trying to find a way to spend time with Estrid that he had not been paying sufficient attention to his sisters’ activities.

“You know very well,” Sigefrith said, “how difficult it can be to leave one’s family behind and go to a new country with near strangers. Also that one can be happy there.”

“I’m a man, though.”

“It is more often the women who are called upon to go far from home when they come of age. We must assume that they are better suited for it than we.”

“She didn’t want to go,” he muttered.

“Don’t forget – Eirik’s aunt is a Dane, and I suppose she will spend more time with her than with Eirik. And his uncle seems to be a delightful person who will surely favor her, if he liked you so well.”

Brede hadn’t the courage to admit that Tryggvason was rarely home, nor that his Danish wife was a severe, religious woman, who had little tolerance for girls who got themselves in trouble, even unto her own daughter. He suspected it had been she to insist that Ragnhild be denied her dowry when she married Sigefrith – the baby not being punishment enough. He felt another spasm of guilt at the thought of Sigrid spending her days with that woman, after spending her nights with that brute…

“May I keep it?” he asked.

“If you like,” Sigefrith shrugged. “Although I haven’t had it copied.”

“I shall copy it for you. I can do it now, if you like.”

“As you wish. May I return to the ladies? I feel a chill in my ancient bones.”

“I shall be with you before long,” Brede said as he sat.

“Mind,” Sigefrith called from the doorway, “it’s spelled E-​​I-​​R-​​I-​​K and not B-​​E-​​A-​​S-​​T.”

Brede grunted and set to work. He was no poet himself, for his boyhood education had been sporadic, but his handwriting was straight and bold. If Eirik had intended to humiliate her, he would not succeed. Brede would take the letter home with him, lock it away – his sister’s awkward scrawl was no joke to him, and indeed he loved it better that way. But all that Sigefrith or Cenwulf or anyone else would see would be SIGRID, straight and bold.