And in his rage, and remembering how he had dealt with a
previous boy king, whose beautiful young wife he had hounded to her
dreadful end, he charged Elfrida with having instigated her husband's
murder, and commanded the king to put that woman away. This roused the
man and passionate lover, and the tiger in the man, in Edgar, and the
wise and subtle-minded ecclesiastic quickly recognised that he had set
himself against one of a will more powerful and dangerous than his own.
He remembered that it was Edgar, who, when he had been deprived of his
abbey and driven in disgrace from the land, had recalled and made him so
great, and he knew that the result of a quarrel between them would be a
mighty upheaval in the land and the sweeping away of all his great
reforms. And so, cursing the woman in his heart and secretly vowing
vengeance on her, he was compelled in the interests of the Church to
acquiesce in this fresh crime of the king.
VII
Eight years had passed since the king's marriage with Elfrida, and the
one child born to them was now seven, the darling of his parents,
Ethelred the angelic child, who to the end of his long life would be
praised for one thing only--his personal beauty.
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