CHAPTER 1
I’ve lived too damn long. I sighed and started copying the questions Professor Barnes was writing on the board. Our midterm was in two weeks and Barnes was one of those teachers who gave us all the questions in advance but he’d choose two to be answered on the actual test day. I wasn’t much of a fan of the system because it took away the adrenaline rush that comes with the unknown. Granted, there’s little that I didn’t have some kind of firsthand knowledge of, especially of that covered in a bachelors level European history course, but still, I get my thrills in the smallest places. I decided that complaining wouldn’t make me any friends, though, so I quietly scratched away. I like my fountain pen, even if I do get funny looks about it. At least I had finally broke down and use a cartridge for ink, back in the seventies I was that oddball with the ink-well.
Maybe I just won’t bother to study for the test, I thought, writing: ‘Compare and contrast the House of Wessex and the House of Denmark and explain the effect of the Danish kings on England’. I chuckled to myself at the irony surrounding modern complaints about “revisionist historians”—supposedly liberal scholars who go out of their way to alter the past into a form that promoted their views for a “New Age” world. I remember clearly the way that my tutors had cursed the bloody Danes, pretending that all effects of their reign had been wiped out. For as long as modern ‘professional’ historians have studied early England, the stories they’ve uncovered have never been half as wrong. History is usually told from the winner’s prospective and the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle. If that means revising earlier histories as we discover more evidence to make them more accurate to what was real life, then what is the problem? The world wasn’t entirely the WASP ideal that modern conservatives promote. I’ve lived through a lot of history that is just now making it into the books…and even more that will never be ‘common knowledge’.
Professor Barnes dismissed us and I went back to my apartment, done with classes for the day. I thought about that question he’d asked and started chuckling again. The Danish kings sure had a hand in my English life; if it wasn’t for some obscure Danelaw, I might have lived a much simpler, and shorter, life. My father was the English king Harold Godwinson, to use the modern English spelling. You probably know him as the Harold who died at Hastings in 1066. I used to go by the name Gunhild, and still do sometimes when I play Dungeons and Dragons and other medieval-ish roll play games with friends, especially when I feel like pretending that I have a great imagination. I don’t, for the record. Real life goes far beyond anything my imagination could create.
After my father’s death, I got my first taste of formal education at Wilton Abbey, learning everything that was proper for a woman of my breeding. That stupid Danelaw made me a woman worth her weight in gold, to use an ancient concept. It made me heiress to some of my mother’s lands, near impossible under English law, which men hoped to convert into their own. One Alan Rufus decided that I would be the ideal bride and stole me away from the Abbey to marry me against what will I had, which admittedly wasn’t a lot. I was, and still am, a small woman while Alan was uncommonly tall. At the time I was flattered and submitted to my husband as was customary. In retrospect, ugh. He was fifteen years my senior and a brute in bed, but it was a long time before I learned that small fact. Sex education has always been lacking in the public sphere, though thankfully I eventually found female friends scandalous enough to enlighten me.
In any case, Alan, again seen in retrospect, made my life miserable from the first time we met. His actions toward me caused rumors to spread, and while the Middle Ages weren’t nearly as…conservative? (for all my years, I don’t think that I will ever keep track of what words mean what and when) as some may think, and I was still the laughing stock of our town. Alan laughed, too, and then he would proceed to show me how happy I should be to have him. Sigh, my poor naïve body. Still, what ‘friends’ I had told me to enjoy the fact that he was rich and that I was to be a Countess when he founded the Richmond Castle, even if my pride was slightly wounded. I knew that I was in the best position possible.
For all that I hate…well, seriously dislike, the way he treated me, now, I did love him. Or at least, I felt whatever passes as love in 1080. He was my world, or possibly, some small part of me knew that the world that I enjoyed would disappear should anything happen to him. We had no children, though not for a lack of his trying, and I had no one who would care for me. My lands had passed legally into his possession and together, they would pass on to his heir, his brother, whose only legal duty to me was as he would care for a sister, as the Bible says. But it wouldn’t be the first time that such duty was shirked in a world where Christianity was still just beginning to take hold, especially when I was still young enough to make a suitable bride. In essence, my choices were limited to the husband I had or the husband I didn’t yet know. Humans are creatures of habit and it took me a long time to embrace the thrill of the unknown. I would die to protect the man who was so vital to my life. And I did.
I wasn’t quite twenty-five that year, when a man walked into the great hall demanding a dual with Alan. I still have no idea what precisely caused this, I later suspected my husband’s fidelity, and I would not be surprised to hear that he had acted inappropriately with some woman in the man’s life. His name was Hugh de Montgomerie and he wanted my husband’s head for what he’d done. I, still the naïve child and willfully ignorant of the world around me, was certain of my husband’s innocence and stupidly stepped into the middle of their argument, which put my heart in the direct line of Hugh’s dagger. My breast stopped the hilt of the dagger, but not before the full ten inches of the blade passed through my body. I don’t recall most of what happened next, but I was told that the room went silent and Hugh’s face turned a ghastly shade of white. Alan, to his credit, caught me before I hit the floor and held my body until a trio of village women instructed him to take me to the kitchen and lay me on the table before telling everyone to leave the room. No one ever told me whether he shed any tears on my behalf, probably out of fear that he would retaliate. I remain on the fence as to whether he showed any emotion over my injury, though for a long time I liked to believe that inwardly he was broken.
The women stripped my bodice away and did their magic. Literally. They never told me exactly what they did, no matter how I asked, but after three hours or so I was suddenly aware again. I cannot say exactly where I was for those three hours; all I remember is feeling fuzzy, like my entire body had fallen asleep, blind and deaf. I hurt when awareness returned. Not just my chest, but my head, and especially my eyes and ears. It was as though three hours without even the minutest sound was too much. The buzz of a fly across the room was too loud, though this pain subsided after a few hours. The pain in my chest took longer to fade away, which turned out to be a good thing. Instead of being labeled a demon returned from the dead, I was congratulated on my good fortune that the dagger didn’t sever anything major and cause my death. The villagers stopped laughing at the way my husband possessed me, and proclaimed that I was a miracle, blessed by the angels.
The trio, though, knew the truth and shared it with me. I had died and they brought me back. It was the first time they’d tried such a spell and they didn’t know what the effects would be. What they did know was that I was bound to this Earth until I found love. But I was young and married. I knew that I had already met the requirement demanded by the spell that saved me. We actually shared a laugh at my good fortune, since I could easily have been destined to be an old maid. If the trio’s laugh sounded hallow, I didn’t notice, but I did strive to love my husband more. So what if he wouldn’t admit to crying over my lifeless body? He was a warrior. Warriors do not show emotion publically, and the best warriors do not show emotion privately.
At first I welcomed the comments on my youthful appearance, and ignored the implications that they foretold. It wasn’t until Alan was on his deathbed that I finally admitted to myself that my body was no longer aging. He’d collapsed while riding around the estate, checking on its progress. When he was brought into our bedchamber he was delirious and no longer recognized those who’d been with him for over fifteen years. But he recognized me immediately as I settled onto the bed beside him, confirming my worst fears. He admitted a number of secrets which I suspect he wished to die with him and which I will not repeat out of respect to a dying man. It did nothing to change my opinion of him and still does not. The fact that he opened up in such a way suggested that he did not believe me to really be there with him, thus proving that I did not in any way resemble a woman of thirty-eight years. He died the next day leaving me heartbroken and confused. The last of the trio had passed away two years before and I still had no children to care for me.
I turned to the man who literally held my fate in his hands, Alan’s brother, also named Alan. We’d never been close, but after my Alan’s funeral, I confided in him about my fears for the future. He asked me to marry him and I accepted, wondering how I could tell him about my ageless status. He proved to be a better man than my first Alan, at least when it came to caring for me. He admitted to lusting after me for years, but he was discreet enough to hide these feelings while Alan was alive. He also proved to be more attentive in bed, though still not to the caliber of some of my later lovers. But his most valuable asset was that he recognized my problem without my ever having to tell him. After three years of marriage and no sign that I had restarted aging, he helped me forge my death and prepare for my new life on the road.
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