Godiva (12 page)

Leofric stood in agitation. “Godiva, stop speaking in this manner. Your Majesty, I beg you to disregard her, she is—”

“She is giving me an excellent chance to prove I am not my brother,” Edward said, amused. “Shut up and let her speak.”

Leofric gave his wife a look and sat down. Godiva, pausing long enough to think, was suddenly aware that her heart was beating very fast and her breath had become far too shallow. She herself could not quite believe she had just said all that. She stared at Edward, feeling wide-eyed and still defiant, but confused by his smug smile as he regarded her.

“You may sit,” he said after a moment.

She sat. She hoped he had something in mind to say, because she suddenly could not form any coherent thoughts.

“Thank you,” said Edward, “for giving me a chance to demonstrate what I am made of. Of course I will punish you for refusing to pay the heregeld—”

“I will pay it for her,” Leofric said, almost desperately. Edward made a dismissive gesture, as if the earl were a bug. “Harthacnut harried Worcester because the townsmen killed his men, but this is not what people remember. People remember only that Harthacnut burned the town down when its people refused to pay the tax. To prove I am not like Harthacnut, I need only find a very different kind of punishment to exact for a similar resistance, to show that I am made of different stuff. You tell me you are taking the town's burdens on your head? That you protect and represent the town? That in a sense you
are
the town.”

“Yes, I am,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding small to her. Edgiva now seemed very, very far away. Dimly she heard the bells down at the monastery tolling Vespers, and for perhaps the first time in her life, she lamented that she would not be at the service. She crossed herself.

“Excellent. So we are agreed that you shall be punished if you displease me, but I am not Harthacnut, so I will not
destroy
you to make an example of you.” He gave her a subtle, triumphant smile. “I will merely humiliate you.” And to Leofric in a confiding, reassuring tone: “You see, she is in no bodily danger at all.” He turned his attention back to Godiva. “If a subject is defiant of His Majesty,” said His Majesty, “the subject must be held to account. There is a certain cost in failing to be biddable. I do not wish to harm you, but it is a necessary ritual between ruler and ruled. You do that with your own subjects when they challenge you, and you can expect no less for yourself.”

“Of course,” she said, attempting to sound calm. She tried to imagine describing this conversation later to Edgiva. Edgiva would admire her. That thought alone kept her from falling apart now. “Tell me what my humiliation will be if I fail to be a dutiful subject.”

Edward stared at her a long moment then. An endlessly long moment.

She was expecting him to take all her jewelry, or confine her to a nunnery for a year. She thought, with sudden terror, that he might condemn her to a trial by ordeal.

That is not at all what happened.

“You,” he said, leaning forward, blue eyes bright, “who are so fond of trying to bend the will of others with the charm of your body. You shall take that impious impulse to its logical conclusion. Drown yourself in your own impropriety. Expose yourself to the world. Literally. Bare yourself. Walk naked, in public, through Coventry.”

“
What?
” Leofric said in a furious voice.

Godiva laughed from fear for the first time in her life.

Edward nodded, satisfied with his pronouncement. “On your hands and knees,” he decided. “Crawl. Be as lowly as the earth itself. Beg forgiveness for your offense.”

Godiva was speechless.

Her husband was not. “That too much resembles a religious penance,” Leofric said quickly. “Let her do that, and the archbishops will fall on you like a cathedral toppling. You may as well presume to excommunicate her. I recommend another tack.”

Edward frowned and sat back hard against the chair boards. Earl and countess waited, watching. His Majesty's face shifted slightly, sly, and suddenly Godiva felt cold.

“Thank you for your guidance,” the king said to the earl. “It is an excellent point. It is too Christian—the humility of hands and knees—so she shall not crawl through the streets of the town.”

“Thank you, sire,” she said, with genuine relief.

“You shall rather ride naked on a horse to do it. That better reveals your own bestial nature. Bareback on a naked horse, as naked as its rider.”

“Your Majesty,” Leofric said, sounding as if he might vomit. “I will pay the tax, there is no need—”

“On May Day,” Edward continued, increasingly delighted. “Yes, on the Kalends of May, when lechery comes most to light. Do nothing to hide your shame. Ride through the streets and let your people look upon you and know their lady is a harlot.” He nodded, with an air of polite satisfaction. “I will give you time to reconsider your defiance, but this is the price I exact from you if you refuse to heed me. I am not Harthacnut; I am not a barbaric violent foreigner. I am more politic than that. Thank you again, Countess, for giving me a chance to demonstrate it. Compared to what my predecessor did to tax offenders, my behavior will seem saintly. So. To review. I will receive from you the town, or money, or your abject humiliation.” He smiled at her beatifically. “You may choose which one to render to your king.”

CHAPTER 12

Leominster

S
he was early enough along that a simple brew of certain herbs would accomplish it. But they were low in stock in the abbey dispensary—enough for one heavy dosing only. There were new supplies drying to dull-hued crispness from the rafters of the workshop. But Audry would notice the depletion, and she could not lie to her own acolyte about where the stores had gone. Also, the side effects would not be pleasant—and Audry would recognize those side effects.

She would have to take Audry into her confidence.

No, she could not do that. For so many reasons. Her own distress would distress Audry, for one thing, but that was not her main concern. Audry believed Edgiva to be impeccably incapable of error or duplicity. Edgiva took no pride in that; in fact she found the responsibility of it quietly burdensome. She had often wondered how Audry would respond the day Edgiva inevitably toppled from the pedestal. If this was the event to do it, the result might be catastrophe. Better Audry hear Mother curse, or fall asleep in Lauds, or mutter heretically when Rome sent ever more laws that disempowered nuns. Let it not be wanton sluttishness.

Nobody here could ever know.

She was still mired in that uncomfortable moral swamp between the tactic of keeping secrets and the sin of lying.

But at least she had the means to make the problem disappear.

There were scattered huts in the fields around Leominster. Herders had built them to have shelter while moving their flocks. Some were still in fields, some now in woodland, where the sheep had not cared for the taste of the grass and so the shepherds had allowed the cleared land to revert to wood. These had become, as well, squatters' homes for herbalists and mystics, some of them entirely Christian, most of them not; some were the occasional lairs of robber bands, usually Welsh. But there were a number that were—so small and derelict—left empty most of the time. Here lovers sometimes met clandestinely; sometimes, rarely, a sister or a brother from the abbey would receive a message in a dream that they were to subject themselves to nature's forces for a period of a day or a week or longer, and meditate within a hut.

Edgiva decided she would take the herbs, a skin of water, a brewing pot, and means to light a fire, and sequester herself in such a hut for three days. She could spend time foraging for early-spring herbs that the dispensary needed, so that her absence from the abbey was not entirely selfish.

She departed one cool, sunny morning after Prime. She left through the gatehouse, exchanging blessings with the lay brother who guarded it. She walked through the eastern half of the small village, turned north, then bore east again, and without fear or fanfare wandered into the excellent grazing lands that surrounded Leominster for miles. Shocks of violets and daffodils peppered the ground with purple and yellow; the hazel and primroses and pussy willows offered their flowers as well. She made a note to herself to come back and harvest the celandine roots within the month.

The first mud-walled shack she encountered, some two miles away, was harboring a shepherd family, moving their flocks; the next two, just a few hundred paces apart, each hosted frightening-looking fellows in them, passed out drunk; the fourth, protected from view by a screen of witch hazel, contained a handful of naked people all entwined. Spring brought out every imaginable strain of lechery, Edgiva thought, glad that she was not the one who would eventually be hearing their confessions. She kept walking, hearing the bells of the abbey fading behind her at each service. By noon she had found an empty hut, on the edge of a glade of young oaks, still dormant, and hawthorn, whose tips were budding green. She laid her meager supplies outside the opening, beside a patch of violets; she wanted to stay in the sun for a while.

She lit a fire outside the hut. She poured water from the skin into the pot, and levered the pot over the fire on a branch. When the water was hot, she added the herbs. The delicately dusky scent of the dried herbs—half air, half earth—transformed into something syrupy and green, as the passivity of earth and air yielded to the active energy of fire and water.

When the decoction was full brewed, she removed it from the flames and set it on the dirt. As it steeped and then cooled enough to drink, she prepared what she needed for the aftermath: a bundle of clean rags outside the hut and a comfortable sleeping-sack with an extra blanket inside it, with more rags in ready reach; the rest of the water; a bag of dried apples. She knew this brew would ruin her appetite, but she would have to eat something.

When the pot had cooled enough for her to hold it, she sat cross-legged on her cloak by the dying fire, picked up the pot, and stared into the murky liquid. She said a few prayers for comfort. She thought for a moment about Sweyn, and what life might be like if, under different circumstances, there was some way that she could keep this child. She already suspected it was a boy, which made no difference to her but would probably have pleased him. She apologized to the spirit hovering near her that was waiting for the moment, months from now, when it could inhabit what was, as yet, not human. She promised it that there were many more babes due for birth. It would find a vessel soon.

She crossed herself, raised the pot to her lips, and felt the heat of the iron radiantly warm the inside of her mouth. She breathed in the acrid smell of the brew.

And then she set it down on the ground beside her.

It was an attack of nerves, that was all. She was not used to taking her own medicine—she was rarely in need of healing—and so she was nervous about the side effects, because she knew they'd be uncomfortable. That was all.

There was a rustle in the woods behind her. A mousy, dark-haired woman from the village, the blacksmith's wife—in a dull, ill-fitting tunic, torn stockings, no girdle—hesitatingly emerged from the scrub-oak glade. She was in tears. And when she saw Mother Edgiva, she looked frightened. She stopped short, was briefly rigid, and then turned, as if she would flee into the underbrush again.

“It's all right,” Edgiva called to her in a gentle voice. “I know why you're sobbing.”

And suddenly, she did know.

The woman looked even more frightened, even more rigid. But Edgiva, almost trancelike, held out her hand in a welcoming gesture, and slowly the weeping woman moved toward her.

“I fought him off, I swear I did, Mother,” she said. She was cringing with fear, her shoulders hunched up to her ears and forward almost to her breastbone. “But he's a lot stronger than me. Always has been, since we were wee. Mother used a shovel to get him off me. I know t'aint natural, but I swear I ne'er provoked him.”

“I believe you,” Edgiva said with almost eerie serenity.

“But my husband, he dinna believe me, he says if there be child—”

“There will not be,” Edgiva said. “Here. I have prepared this for you. Drink it.”

CHAPTER 13

Coventry

H
aving been raised in Leominster Abbey, Godiva had exquisite penmanship, and she herself wrote to the new Bishop of Worcester. She did not much care to have anyone else, not even her most discreet scribe, know the substance of it.

Your Eminence,
she wrote, the quill casting a long shadow over the parchment as Leofric paced behind her in broody agitation. He was nursing his second glass of mead. The monastery bells distantly tolled Compline.

I write to express my great pleasure that you have been raised to your new position as Bishop of Worcester following the sad passing of our esteemed Bishop Lyfing.

“I cannot conceive you would contemplate this,” Leofric said for the seventh time that hour.

The Bishop placed great faith in you and I am confident you will honor his memory now that you wear the mantle.

She paused and read this aloud, wondering how obsequious she would need to be.

“If you must pursue this, go and speak to him in person.”

“There is no time for that. The lambing will begin soon.” She dipped the pen into the well again and then wrote, saying the words aloud as she penned them,

“I seek your guidance on a remarkable matter that has been set before me this afternoon by His Majesty. As you may recall I am assisting my esteemed friend, Abbess Edgiva of Leominster, in a protestation of the heregeld. His Majesty graced us with an unexpected visit to my estate of Coventry to celebrate Easter with us.”

“You sound like a self-important gossip.”

She raised her head and pivoted it elegantly to look over the scarlet veil draping her right shoulder. She gave him a sultry look. “No. I do not,” she said. “
You
sound like a curmudgeonly fishwife.” She returned her attention to the letter. After sketching out Edward's ultimatum, she came then to her point:

“Your Eminence, I am prepared to make this ride, at the king's pleasure, if it will protect my people from His Majesty's machinations.”

“It won't,” Leofric said brusquely, and drained the cup.

“But I hesitate to commit to this ordeal unless the Church condones it. It strikes me as a very heathenish act to perform on a day still tinged with heathenish associations. Do you believe His Majesty means to endanger the immortal part of me, or merely to blemish my reputation? I do not oppose a blemished reputation if it saves my people from hardship. But as good a shepherdess as I try to be, I must not risk my soul for them. Your Eminence, you are the only man whose advice on this I trust. I beg you write to me, or summon me to Worcester to speak in greater depth. I am deeply grateful for your consideration. Leofric and I intend to come to Worcester soon, to make an offering at the Cathedral in celebration of your ascension—”

“No we do not,” said Leofric, reading over her shoulder. “If you wish to court Aldred's favor, you are free to do so, but do not speak for me. I do not trust that little piglet of a man. He appears to me a cipher.”

“Lyfing's sandals are hard to fill,” she said in a pacifying tone. Squinting in the lamplight, she waved a hand over the ink to speed its drying. It was foolish of her to have worn her favorite blue tunic while writing, but she had not spilled a drop.

“He was trying to fill Lyfing's sandals three years before Lyfing had vacated them,” Leofric clarified.

“Lyfing was ill,” she reminded him. “He requested Aldred's assistance, and Aldred has never overstepped his bounds. Indeed, I have found it a challenge to coax him to even
approach
his bounds.”

“Let us see if that remains true, now that he is himself bishop,” said Leofric. He sat heavily on their bed. “I still cannot conceive that you would consider this.”

She stood and turned to face him. “What else should I have done?” she asked.

“You should have let me pay the tax,” he said.

“The manner in which he would levy it makes him a tyrant.”

Leofric snorted and ran his finger along the elaborate gilded decoration on the glass he held. “It is naive to think this kingdom is ready for anything except a tyrant. Sweyn Godwinson was right: the king requires a whiff of despotism.” A grimace. “This, however, is much more than a whiff.”

“I think he is sincerely grateful for an opportunity to demonstrate he is not like Harthacnut,” she argued.

“He is grateful for this opportunity to ruin you.”

“That is not how I see it at all,” Godiva said reassuringly. “He and I would be staging a morality play for the rest of the kingdom. If one does
this
thing,
the king will do
that
thing
.
That
thing
is not pleasant, but it is not despicable.”

“I find it very despicable.”

“Razing a town is despicable. Making somebody ride naked on a horse is quite an improvement over razing a town.”

“Razing the town was punishment for the townsmen committing
murder
.”

“Forcing an earl to raze a town over which he is liege—that is despicable.”

Having no response to that, he slumped back on the bed. Godiva loved the somber dignity of his carriage, even slumping, even aging now. His was the most dignified slump in all of Albion. She bit her lower lip to contain a grin, knowing how out of place he'd find it.

“He would not ruin me,” she said. “I would survive it.”

“Would you?” Leofric said, almost under his breath. He patted the empty mug with his left hand, and his rings struck the sides with tenor raps.

“I have ridden a horse bareback. I do not think the removal of a few layers of skirt is going to destroy me,” she said.

“Your physical well-being is not a concern; I know you for a strong rider,” Leofric said impatiently. “He is a shrewd man, Edward. He knows how you work. Once you are associated with such an act, you will never have the same freedom to tease and coax any man who is not an idiot.”

“I can make most men idiots,” she said, trying still to make light of it.

He gave her a look and sat up straighter. “It is one thing to believe oneself the special object of a lovely woman's interest—even if you know you are but one item in her large collection of special objects. But, Godiva, if you do this thing, you shall have such a reputation on your shoulders, no man will allow himself to exchange three words with you. Either they shall think you truly wanton, which is Edward's intention, and avoid you for their own reputations . . . or else they will be too proper and polite to you, lest they remind you of your shame. Either way, you would lose your power.” He shrugged in resignation. “I would love you no less, but it would be a shame.” He gave her an almost fatherly smile. “You have been a very useful coquette, all these years.”

“I'll teach Edey how to flirt, and she may take over the practice from me,” she said. “Of course her loyalty will first be with Sweyn, but I am sure that if she learns anything of value . . .”

He laughed with tired exasperation. “Will you stop that?”

“You saw how she looked at him—”

“You look at him that way too, Godiva, but I have never for one moment worried I would lose my bride to him. If I do not fret about that, I am sure the Lord frets even less.”

She tucked her chin down, tipped her head to the side, and gave him a knowing look. “You do not fret at all?” she challenged. “Not even for the moment between an inhale and an exhale? Ever?”

He gave her a grim grin. “No,” he said. “I do not. If I did, I would not trust you with a priest, let alone a man like Sweyn.”

“What does that mean, ‘a man like Sweyn'? Does he have a reputation for roughness with ladies? If he does, I must protect Edgiva from him.”

His eyes narrowed with wry amusement. “First, you need not protect Edgiva from anyone, Godiva. The Church does that. The walls around the abbey do that. Propriety does that. Second, to answer your question, I do not mean Sweyn has a reputation, beyond being a bit dangerously fetching for a bachelor with lots of land and power. Godwin should get him married off at once so that he stops being a temptation to all the married ladies.”

“If he is a temptation to us now, why would he be any less a temptation when he's married?”

“Because until he's married, he might tempt some married women to arrange to become widows,” Leofric said.

She grinned. “I shall have the cook poison your soup.”

He moved back to the bed, sat on it, and patted the space beside it. “Put that quill down and come here, my little scribbler.”

“I have not finished the letter yet.”

“Do not finish it, Godiva. Do not send it. Do not even contemplate this.”

“I must,” she argued.

“I will pay the heregeld for you,” he said. “It is not your doing that Edward has placed this burden on you. He thought he would be placing it on me. In a sense, it is my fault that you are in this position, so let me resolve it for you. Let me resolve it for
me
. I have already suffered through one heregeld revolt; do not make me suffer through a second.”

She placed the quill down carefully on a piece of scrap vellum next to the letter. She moved to sit beside him on the bed. “Admit it, Leofric,” she said in a soft voice, giving him her most inviting smile. “You would love to see me riding naked on a bareback horse. You want to watch. You want to see my bare thighs squeeze tight against the horse's hide, so you—ha!”

He had grabbed her round her girdled waist, lifted her up, and tossed her into the middle of the bed. “You are such a vixen!” he said, with a huff of frustrated bass laughter, twisting until his body stretched over hers. She loved the feeling of his weight on her.

“ 'Tis true, though, isn't it?” she crooned to the bed's canopy, running her fingers through his hair.

“That is beside the point, Godiva.”

She raised her head to grin at him. “So I am right. You long to pull me naked off the horse and take me right on the grass with the sunlight illuminating all our—”

“Stop that.” He laughed, raising his hips away from her when she wriggled. Then, sobering: “It does not matter what your husband would find provocative in private. It matters only what seems prudent in public, and you know that, so stop preening.”

“How could it look ill?” she asked. “I am obeying the will of the king in order to protect my people from unfair taxation.”

He pulled himself off of her, and off the bed, and then stared down at her, still aroused despite his irritation. “My wife rides naked through the streets of one of her villages. By the blood of all the saints, how could anyone take that amiss? There is no risk whatsoever of unfortunate rumors springing from that. It would occur to nobody, ever, to wonder if you had gone mad, or taken up with pagans, or become a prostitute. No, clearly, everyone who hears of it will think,
Oh, yes, Godiva, that modest, retiring lady of Mercia—she is goodness, humility, and purity embodied, look what a model subject and ruler she is being, both at once
.”

“I do not care what they think—”

“I care,” said Leofric. “You are not the wife of some minor thane. You are married to one of the three great earls. As a result of such a ride, there might be only two great earls remaining.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “As long as the Church is not opposed to it. In fact, I wager the bishop would be willing to go on record praising me for my humility.”

“Humiliation is not humility,” said Leofric impatiently. “I think perhaps both you and King Edward have forgotten that.” He walked away from the bed, pacing with long strides and rubbing his hair askew at the temple, as he always did when he was agitated. “Come along, love, if you insist upon writing this, finish it and send it out at daybreak. If Edward has set something in motion, let us at least be finished with it as soon as possible.”

She rose from the bed.

“But promise me,” he said, as she settled on her stool, “that if Aldred advises you against this, for whatever reason, you will refuse to make the ride? And allow me to pay the heregeld for you?”

She paused a moment, looking into her lap. “But you do not like Aldred. Why would you have me make a decision based on the counsel of a man you do not trust?”

“We give more to the Church than anybody else. Godwin is not known for generosity or piety, Siward is half pagan, and nobody else has near our means. Regardless of what I think of the man's strength of character, he will look after us because that is a way of looking after himself and his interests. If he advises against it, there is a very good reason for it. So.” He pointed to the letter. “Finish writing that immediately. What is taking you so long?”