As far as I could tell, Orm had one true ally at Heldeby apart from his brother, and that was the smirking man who had danced with me that night after the marriage feast. His name was ?lfric and he was Skalpi’s reeve, a weasel-faced creature for whom nothing was ever enough. He was forever arguing that we could squeeze higher rents out of the cottars who lived on our lands, or that we could get better prices on the fleeces if we sold them across the sea rather than at the markets nearby, or that the slaves, the few that we owned, should be made to work harder for their keep, and when he didn’t get his way he would hold it as a slight against his person and spend the rest of that day lashing out at whoever happened to cross his path. He had a quick temper and was no man’s friend.
Skalpi himself was no great supporter of his but instead tolerated him, and only kept him on because in spite of everything else he was a good overseer. ?lfric took a liking to Orm, though, I think because they were similar in character. He would spar with him in the training yard and ruffle his hair when he did well, and they would go on hunts together, and drink and joke long into the night, often laughing so loudly that they would wake me in my chamber, which was next to the hall. The reeve wasn’t married and had no sons of his own, and so he saw Orm almost as a fosterling: someone whom he could teach and whom he could fashion as he chose.
They were each intimidating enough by themselves, but together they were worse. They took confidence from one another, inflicting cruel words that neither one alone would dare deliver. I quickly noticed how the house servants and the stable hands and the kitchen girls all took care to avoid them, especially when they were together.
That’s how I met Tova.
*
Hearing Merewyn speak, Tova feels a pricking in her eyes. Her cheeks burn and she bows her head before her lady notices.
To hear these things from someone else’s lips, as they saw it, is strange. Uncomfortable. It’s like looking down a well and seeing oneself reflected in the flat water below. All the details are there, but they’re dimmer and more distant and harder to recognise.
*
This was around the same time as the business with the silver. I’d been counting out some coins from Skalpi’s money kist, the one he kept locked in the floor space underneath his chamber, so that I could buy a few lengths of linen at market, when I noticed that we were a few shillings short. I checked again to see how much there was supposed to be, and tried to think if there was anything I’d paid for lately that I might have forgotten to note down. But the numbers were the same, and I couldn’t think of anything, which meant that somebody must have taken it, and recently too, because nothing had been missing three days before, which was when we’d last had the kist out, to give the geld we owed to the shire reeve.
Of course I went to Skalpi. At once he ordered all the cottars and the slaves out of their houses so that they could be searched, and ?lfric went in with Orm and Penda the smith, to protests from the men and weeping from the women. Knives were drawn and mattresses were slashed open and the straw emptied out; thatch was torn in clumps from the roofs; cooking pots were overturned and the heaps of dung that stood outside every toft were raked over as the men looked for the telltale glint.
Eventually we found it, in the slave quarters close to the kitchen, hidden beneath the bed of one of the women, whose name I think was Gundrada, who had a daughter. She pleaded ignorance, saying that she didn’t know how it had got there, but then one of the male slaves remembered that not a few days before she had been complaining about how hard they were being made to work, and he said that maybe she thought she deserved it and that was why she had taken it. Anyway, Gundrada—
*
‘Gunnhild,’ Tova murmurs under her breath.
‘What?’ asks Merewyn.
‘It was Gunnhild,’ she says. She remembers only too well. ‘Not Gundrada.’
‘Is it important?’
‘It was her name, that’s all.’
*
Gunnhild, then. She said that he was lying, and no, she hadn’t taken the silver, and if she had she would never have hidden it in so obvious a place. But that only made people think that if nothing else she must have considered stealing it, which made her guilty in mind if not in deed.
What did I think? That she was guilty, of course, although I pleaded with Skalpi not to be too harsh. But it was his decision and his alone, and eventually he made up his mind. An example needed to be made, he announced, so that no one else would ever think about doing the same thing again. And so he sent her away, and not just her but her daughter too, who must have been around the same age as Tova. What happened to them? Well, they were slaves so they were sold on, of course, to a merchant who would take them across the sea. To Dyflin, I think, where he said he could get a good price for them.