"She is the star and flower of all Mercia," this henchman had said, "and she is to wed Lord Ethelbert, the star of the Eastern Angles."
Although she had remarked it, the expression of the speaker's countenance had in no wise stirred her sensibilities; she had been a little ruffled in temper, perhaps—no more. For Ethelfrith had no affinities with the courtiers; the overfed, voluptuous women and their satellites filled her with a cold disgust. The nuns of Marden, she thought, led peaceful lives, and bore in their faces a truly joyous light. Yet she had no longing for the seclusion of a religious house. She would sometimes, however—though very rarely—go to visit the sisters and spend a day in their company. The reverend mother was a motherly woman indeed; she was very gentle with the princess, and careful to refrain in her presence from any allusion to her life or her kinsfolk that might dash her girlish, half-childish dreams. When the maiden returned to her ordinary surroundings, how the glare and the chatter tired her head and oppressed her whole dainty frame! So it came about that the Lady Ethelfrith was little accounted by the great folk of Mercia: she was always silent, usually prim, and sometimes brusque; and to some she seemed a cross, spoilt child, and to others, witless.
Then there had been her mother's half-teasing words of the evening before; that was really all she knew! At the thought of King Ethelbert, a sharper pain than the ache of loneliness amid natural beauties struck through her heart. She remembered the Queen's parting injunctions. Her childhood was surely at an end. This Ethelbert would be coming by the highway to the halls of Sutton before long.
Impatiently she turned away from the dusty road. Her eyes lighted upon the flowering gorse-bushes that blazed upon the outskirts of an upland covert in the distance. There ran through her head a riddle of her nursery days, couched in the rhyming metre which the Mercians had begun to imitate from the neighbouring Welsh.
"Yellow and green,
Sharp and keen,
Grows in the mene.
The King can't ride it, no more can the Queen."
Song after song, carol after carol, lay after lay, came tripping after—some of God and the saints and ghostly blessedness; some of love and mirth; others of woe. A smile hovered about the lips of Ethelfrith. She loved songs—they were often her only solace.
She would walk in the garden—no, she would not. The sun was too hot—the wind was too cold. She had just decided to wile away the time by strumming upon her cither, when she descried figures approaching along the road. They were horsemen, many horsemen; a mighty train. And there, unmistakably, was the banner of some great one. It was not a lord of Mercia, nor a lord of Wessex! Ethelfrith rushed from her room, down the stairs, and headlong into the orchard-close, in a fit of wild shyness.