Godiva (18 page)

She eyed Edgiva. They were dressed similarly enough that Edgiva could have passed as the countess from a distance, except Godiva's sober tunic had some embroidery on it, Edgiva's veil was longer, and Godiva had jeweled gold chains around her neck.

Bundling her veil to one side, Godiva pulled the necklaces off, clanking over her head, and handed them out to her friend. Edgiva stared at them without taking them. “Put these on. Then if anyone catches a glimpse, you may pass for a noblewoman dressed for pilgrimage, and not quite like an abbess sneaking away from her abbey. Anyone who sees you from a distance with my men in the Mercian livery will think you're me.”

Trembling, Edgiva took the jeweled chains and put them on. They lay over her veil.

“One of you help her with those before you get to Bromyard,” Godiva said. Her neck and shoulders felt strangely light without them. “This way she looks like an abbess trying very ineptly to disguise herself as a noblewoman.”

“Why must I disguise myself?” Edgiva asked. She was trembling.

“Because there are so many unforeseen confusions added to this situation that I cannot think straight about it,” Godiva said. “And until I can—as Leofric would counsel—the less known by the wide world, the better. I will have to tell Sweyn everything,” she added, quieter.

Edgiva went very pale. “No.”

“I need give him a reason why he cannot simply take you now.”

“Why does he think he could?” she demanded.

Oh dear,
thought Godiva. Edgiva did not remember Godiva's self-recrimination from before her faint. “Because I am the one who told him to come here,” she said. She did not sound as horrified with herself as she had the first time she'd confessed it. She wished Edgiva could remember the first time she had said it, because that confession, spontaneous, had sincerely struck just the right note, while now, she sounded somehow defiant.

Edgiva's face changed from white to red. “
What?
” she shouted.

“I can explain, but let me get him out of the way first,” Godiva said.

Edgiva crossed herself. “Mother Mary,” she said, horrified and looking as if she might be sick. “Godiva, you are such a—”

“I know, yes, I know I am,” Godiva said, anxious that Sweyn might change his mind if left alone out there too long. “But having interfered, I must mend things now, so unless you have suddenly decided that you want to stay here, let us get out of the gate rather than sitting here and bickering until everyone realizes there is no attack and comes out of the church and wants to know exactly what is going on. Shall we do that? Let's do that. I'll remove Sweyn, and one of the men can lag behind to tell the porter it was all a misunderstanding, Sweyn was merely trying to pay his respects to Mother Edgiva on his way home from defending her borders, he's terribly sorry for scaring everyone, and now we must be off, Godspeed—open the gates!”

The mounted guard closest to the gates nudged his mount over and reached down to unbolt it. The gate was weighted to swing slowly open on its own. Druce followed Godiva out of the gate first, and as they exited they moved to the left. The cluster of men around Edgiva followed them out, then reined sharply to the right, tails toward Sweyn, and urged their horses to trot.

“Edgiva—” Sweyn pined, a moonstruck youth.

“None of that,” Godiva said sharply, a knot of worry in her gut. “We go.”

“Edgiva!” Sweyn hollered, louder than most men could ever scream. Edgiva, looking over her shoulder at him as they rode away, looked tormented and terrified.

Godiva shouted to her men. “Go north around the abbey and the path will take you back to the Bromyard road.” The riding party pushed to a canter and Edgiva faced forward again, as Sweyn screamed out her name.

Godiva reined her horse around to face Sweyn. “Shut up,” she said firmly. “Or I will smack you. You promised me a gallop. Let's go!” She closed her riding veil over her face, took the excess length of reins and slapped her horse's rump, turning south as she did it. Behind her she heard Sweyn curse and urge his horse likewise to a run. She sent her thanks to heaven: he would not pursue Edgiva.

At least not now.

T
hey raced the horses until they were sweaty, then reined them to a trot for another quarter mile, and then allowed them their heads. Still ten miles lay ahead to Hereford. The gallop seemed to calm Sweyn's rage; she let him ride in a sulky silence for another couple of miles. She shifted subtly in the saddle, to relax the muscles of her lower back; she had not galloped in a good while.

“Are you ready to listen now?” she asked, when they reined the horses from a trot.

He grimaced, squinted into the sun, and nodded.

“I should never have sent the message,” Godiva said. “Not because it wasn't true, but because it wasn't wise. I did not mean you to show up with armed men outside the abbey gates and riotously abduct a woman of the cloth. I did not think I would have to instruct you in that. And I was trying to be discreet.”

“What should I have done, then?” he demanded.

“What you should have done does not matter now; you've already botched the should-have thoroughly. First control the damage you have caused. You appeared with armed soldiers at an abbey, terrified its residents, and made a fool of yourself. Even though Edgiva will not lodge a complaint, her prioress will. She will complain to the Bishop of Hereford, and perhaps even to your father. So the very first thing you will do, the moment you dismount at Hereford, is to write to the abbey with your deepest and most shamed regrets, and some plausible excuse for your behavior. Say you were drunk. Say the Welsh chieftain gave you some of those mushrooms as a parting gift and you ate too many of them. If you are chastised—by anyone—you will accept whatever penalty they thrust upon you.”

“And what about Edgiva?” he demanded.

Was he not too old for such a childish infatuation? How irritating. She tore her riding veil off her face and welcomed the cooling breeze on her cheeks. “Edgiva is going to Coventry,” she said.

“Why?” he demanded. “What's in Coventry? Why is it you may have her, but I must not?”

“I am not planning to seduce her, to start with,” Godiva said pertly. “She is going for two reasons. First, I need her there. I have a crisis of my own and I require her counsel, and for reasons I will not explain, I require her counsel in person, there. However, she also needs some time in seclusion, away from her duties, to sort through her own conflicted feelings.”

“About me?” Sweyn demanded. Really, Godiva thought, there was no end to it.

“Among other things. Let us use the rest of this ride for you to make your intentions clear to me, that I may share them with her. That will help her to her decision.”

“Are you her mother?” he demanded mockingly.

“I am her friend and confidante. She has asked me to help her, and I am honored by the task. So tell me first: what do you want?”

“I want
her,
” he said, as if it should be obvious.

“As a mistress? As a wife? Do you wish to run off in the middle of the night together to some foreign clime? Do you intend a clandestine affair that goes on for years while she remains an abbess and you an earl?”

He sighed with aggravation, very nearly a harrumph. “I want for us to meet and then decide, together, what is right for us. I would not dictate my terms to her.”

“Really? You were dictating them to the entire village of Leominster not an hour back.”

His young eyes blazed with righteous indignation. “I can catechize just as easily as you can, Countess. You are the one told me I should go to get her. Why did you do that, lady? Did you wish me to make an abominable fool of myself and cause a scandal? With the king's niece? That reflects badly on my family and gives Leofric something of a moral advantage in dealing with King Edward, does it not?”

Even in the midst of his accelerated passion, he was not purely impetuous; he could think strategically.

“That is ridiculous,” she said.

“Is it? It is meddlesome in precisely the way you, Godiva of Mercia, tend to meddle.”

“I only meddle for good,” she protested.

“Oh, what I have just described would be very good for Leofric, I think.”

“If you distrust me, why did you show up there?”

He made an impatient sound. “I had no reason to distrust you until you walked out of the gate and blundered everything.”

If she'd had a rock she would have thrown it at his handsome head. “I did not blunder anything—I prevented a far greater blunder. I have saved your reputation, Sweyn, and possibly your office. If you had wrested her from her perch and carried her off under siege, do you know how quickly the wrath of the Church and the crown would come down upon your head? The king's niece. The most respected holy woman in the kingdom! And you some ruffian whelp of Godwin, not two dozen years of age, helping yourself to her? You would lose everything for such an act, with the possible exception of your life. I did not intend you to carry her off, I intended you to woo her.”

“I am not well versed in wooing.”

“I hear you already managed it nicely once.” She reddened and closed her lips. She should not have said that.

He looked at her sharply. “She told you.”

“She implied it,” Godiva said woodenly. She could not tell him about the child now.

Suddenly the anger and defensiveness faded away. “What did she say?” he demanded eagerly, like the new-minted earl she was used to cajoling. “What did she say about me?”

She burst out with a release of angry laughter. “What a boy you are!” she said. “I was at the abbey not an hour before your absurd approach. I heard no details, I only know that . . .” She tried to make her mind work quicker than her mouth, without appearing to do so. “I only heard there was proof of mutual attraction.”

He grinned at that, and looked cocky. “That is true enough,” he said heartily. “Several proofs, in fact.”

More than you know,
she thought.

They rode on in silence. The occasional glance at his face suggested he was thinking—actually thinking, mulling, pondering, considering. She was distracted by the way her veil and mantle sat on her without her necklaces; without the weight of them on her chest, she felt exposed, almost naked.
If that's what the absence of a few necklaces does, imagine how it would feel to ride with
everything
missing,
she thought unhappily. Then she pushed that from her mind. This was far more urgent.

When the horses had their breath back, they trotted them again for several miles, and when they reined them again to a walk, Sweyn brought his horse beside hers.

“You are wise to have rebuked me,” he said, with every bit of the earnestness he had used to defy her before. “Especially given who she is. I do want her at my side, I will marry her if she will have me, but even in the best and happiest of circumstances, that must not happen until Edward has an heir. Otherwise our coupling, especially if she were to have my child, will seem calculatingly ambitious—certainly on my part, and possibly even on hers. I do not care what the churchmen say, but I would not have my peers think suspiciously of her.”

Godiva had not expected that, and she was pleased with it. “I confess,” she said, “I worried about that myself. I have not told Leofric a thing about this, because he sees the worst in everything and would in this.”

“I should have thought of that,” said Sweyn. “No matter what happens now, I will make that plain to everyone. For her sake. I would not have scandal touch her—”

“If she leaves the Church to wed you, scandal will more than touch her, it will scorch her.”

“Then I would rather, for her safety, that it be a scandal regarding passion and not one in which ambition is suspected. I will not press to marry her until Edward has an heir. Even if we are married sooner, I will swear an oath to Edward not to procreate before he does.” Only somebody so young, so fiercely earnest as Sweyn, could say such a thing and sound sincere in it.

“One cannot always control such things,” she said.

“Edgiva is an herbalist. I am sure she can control ‘such things' more than most women. In fact—” His face lit up with an adolescent sheen again. “If we may not marry, it is entirely possible we could carry on in secret and never be found out for it, as she would be able to cover our tracks completely.” He grinned.

“It will not be secret if you show up at her gates and scream for her,” Godiva said tersely.

“I will not do so again,” he said. “And I will do exactly as you demand to repair matters.”

“Then all should be well,” she said. “Edgiva might be scolded by the bishop for leaving Leominster to come to Coventry, but nothing so severe as would have happened if she'd gone off with you to Hereford.”

“In that case, I am very glad you arrived at the cloister before I did,” he said. “And I will manifest my gratitude by handling this matter exactly as you say. Especially if it will make you happy so that you still occasionally flirt with me.”

She smiled a little, hoping they had passed through the worst of matters. Her face softened into the expression that was usual for it when she was in the company of handsome men. “Well,” she said, “there is still that palisade to be built . . .”

“Ah, the sheep fence!” he said. “Yes, you must come visit me at the border and see how that is going, when all of this bother is settled. Otherwise my minions might accidentally poach your sheep again. Can't have that.”

“What a shame Leofric shant be able to come along.”

“I shall bring my bride Edgiva to prevent any mischief.”

She laughed then, with a glimmer of genuine hope. “I will pray for that,” she said.

T
hey approached Hereford. Godiva, having been near no large towns but the newly rebuilt Worcester in a month, was surprised by it.