Naked (19 page)

But all this, before Northman had died. Before Leofric had become the stern man I knew. The grim-faced earl at table now.

The gleeman took up his place in front of the fire.

“Could we have dancing tonight, instead of singing?” Godwin enquired.

Leofric glanced up from his goblet but said nothing.

“Dancing?” I asked. We hadn’t danced in the hall since my parents had died.

“If you’ll allow it,” Godwin said.

“We know you’re still in mourning,” Elfreda added. “But dancing might make you happy again. If only for a while.”

They cared for my happiness. My lids prickled. “I’ve no objection to dancing.”

Inhospitable to stop the pleasure of others. But no dancing for me. Beneath the table my feet seemed stuck in mud.

Elfreda clapped. “Wonderful!”

Godwin jumped up. “Come and dance, Godiva!”

“Not tonight, Godwin.” I’d rarely felt less like dancing.

“But you must,” he insisted.

“Will you dance, my lord?” I asked.

Godwin chortled. “He won’t, will you, Leo? He hasn’t danced in years.”

Leofric picked up his goblet again. “Don’t let me stop you.”

I stared down at my empty trencher on the table, flecked with crumbs.

“Please, Godiva.” Elfreda pulled my sleeve. I wore a favorite blue tunic tonight. Not as rich as Elfreda’s embroidery, but fine nonetheless. “Come and dance with us.”

An invitation.

Churlish to refuse a guest.

I raised my head. In their eager faces I saw real affection I’d never expected to witness again.

Family.

Hall-joy.

Beneath the table my toes twitched.

I wanted to dance.

My arms outstretched I leapt to my feet. “Bring the pipes and drums!”

Commotion filled the hall as the lower trestle tables were pushed aside to clear the floor. The hall wasn’t as full as it was on a feast day, but there were plenty of folk. Warriors, townsfolk, servants, all formed a ring. Wilbert and Walburgha, at dinner in the hall that night, and even Acwell, Leofric’s grim bodyguard, joined the dance.

The gleemen began to play.

A rhythm first from the beating drum. Then it came, the call of the pipes.

The call no feet could resist.

I peeped at the dais. At the table Leofric sat alone.

Across the hall his gaze gripped mine.

As if he held me in the dance.

Stock still, I stood, unable to move.

Then Elfreda grabbed my hand, Godwin the other. In the ring we began.

Glee of dance and song,

And battle-throng—Battle, dance and song!

The gleemen chanted to the beat of the drums.

Fire! Fire! Steel and fire!

Oak! Oak! Earth and waves!

Waves, oak, earth and oak!

Verse after verse, until we were all puffing and panting. The ring surged in and out like waves. Elfreda glowed, Godwin laughed. Walburgha wiped her perspiring cheeks with a kerchief. Wilbert beside her, surprisingly nimble.

We danced and danced and danced.

The music changed. A new song started. Again the pipes called. Another dance, till my feet began to ache with joy.

In partners, in pairs. Godwin, Wilbert. Back in the ring. The circle formed, broke, reformed and broke again.

“Godiva! Here!”

Godwin threw me a horsewhip. Who knew where he’d found it. Perhaps he’d brought it with him to dinner.

Instinctively I caught it, single-handed. Black leather, fine-tipped. A handle, a tail. As long as I was tall.

“Clear away! Give her space!” Godwin shouted.

“Godwin, no,” I protested.

“Please, Godiva! Show us the dance of the Middle Lands!”

The other dancers backed away. I was alone in the circle.

The drums started pounding.

My feet found the beat.

Above my head I cracked the whip.

A cheer rang out, laughing and whooping.

In the circle they began to clap in time.

In a spiral I began to dance.

Twirling, swirling, around me the long tail coiled. Loose, tight, in, out, over, under. Leather on air, leather on earth, cutting high, swinging low.

It never caught me. Faster than the whip I twisted and turned my body and hands chasing each other.

“Godiva!”

“Godiva!”

Skipping, jumping, a rope, a loop. Inside the spiral.

“Godiva!”

“Godiva!”

In time they clapped, on and on. The drums beat faster and faster.

All that I kept inside me, fire, stars, sparks.

The whip became a comet, streaked across the sky.

The drums began to slow. I came to a halt.

The crowd cheered.

Dizzy and breathless, I glanced up at the high table.

His place was empty.

Leofric was gone.

*   *   *

“Leofric.”

Holding a candle aloft, his face was half light, half shadow as he stared down at me lying in my bed. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I wasn’t asleep.” After my dance, when he’d disappeared, I’d come away to my bower, my heart and feet heavy. Tossed my head on the pillow.

He found me undesirable.

Yet even now, I longed for him to blow out the candle, to come to bed and lay beside me, as he had done so many times during our sweet month. But he made no move to take me into his arms. He simply studied at me as I lay, my hair fanned out on the linen.

At last I broke the silence. “I like your brother.”

“Godwin has the gift of making friends easily.”

“Has he gone to bed at last? I thought he would drink mead all night.”

Is that what you have been doing these past nights, Leofric? Do you drink mead with Godwin until the early hours? Why do you not come to me? And where did you go while I was dancing for your eyes alone?

“Godwin sleeps now.” Leofric’s tone gentled. “So does Elfreda.”

“I like Elfreda as much as your brother.”

A smile. A private, soft, indulgent smile, that tore at me in spite of my growing fondness for its cause. “They’re two of a kind.”

When he focused on me his expression seemed to harden. “Since you’re awake there’s news I wish to tell you.”

“Please.” Shifting aside, I made room for him in the bed, my movement an invitation. He moved closer. The leather male scent of him. Desire flooded me.

Touch me
, I wanted to beg.
Touch me, the way you touched me during our honeymoon. Take me, as you did in the Forest of Arden.
But he did not. The coldness and distance that had come between us hung like an invisible tapestry, separating us from each other. I didn’t know how to tear it down.

Placing the candle on the table beside us he remained standing. “All is not as it should be in Mercia. My brothers have done their best but I’ve left my land in their care for too much time. They need me in the north. I’ve lingered too long in Coventry.”

He’d lingered too long with me. That was what he meant.

“When will you go?”

“On the morrow. There’s no reason to delay.”

Turning away into the cover of darkness, I bit my tongue. I kept my tone as water cool as his. There would be no weakness from me even as my deepest woman-self reeled at his news.

“Will you be away for long?”

“I can’t say.”

Why did I feel as if he was lying to me? Why didn’t he confide in me the urgent business in the north? Could I not to be trusted?

“Acwell will stay here in Coventry as your bodyguard,” Leofric said.

“Edmund is my bodyguard.” Whether he was in Coventry or not, that title still belonged to my friend.

Leofric moved the candle. In the sudden darkness his expression was indiscernible.

“Now you will have Acwell. You’re not to ride out alone.”

Acwell. That silent brute of a man. Yet I sensed his loyalty to Leofric, his Mercian lord. If Leofric had asked Acwell to watch me I’d never have a moment to myself.

Hard, I set my lip. Why, I’d ridden unattended in the Middle Lands for years. It was a pastime I treasured.

“Do you understand me?” Leofric grabbed my wrist. “Thurkill is gone but there are other enemies ready to take his place. Peace is not yet won.”

There was wisdom in such wariness, I knew it. A lull, perhaps, but no real rest for any Saxons while the Danish king was on the throne and the Dane law strangled half of Engla-lond. The Middle Lands with its vital position would always be desired. Who knew what evil plots were being made. Only through my alliance with Leofric had I any hope of keeping the shire safe.

“Promise me,” he demanded, when I made no response. “Promise me, for the love of your land.”

I wrenched my wrist away. “All right!”

Thurkill had terrified me more than I cared to admit. Nightmares of him still plagued me, though they never came when Leofric slumbered beside me.

It wasn’t Acwell I wanted. An internal whisper.

“So you’re leaving with Godwin and—Elfreda?”

“Yes, they’ll come north with me. When I return, we need to discuss some of the ways Coventry has been governed. Your father’s methods differ from mine.”

When he returned
. At least he did not plan to stay away.

“And … will you … sleep … now, my lord?”

Was that a flicker of warmth in his expression? In the candlelight I couldn’t be sure.

For a moment he hesitated, as if weighing something in his mind. “There’s much I need to do if I am to leave for Mercia in the morning. I’ll sleep in the hall with the men. With Godwin.”

Anger ignited in my brain as the rejection set in.

“Of course.” I lifted my chin. No disclosing how much he’d hurt me, the space I had made for him beside me turning cold. Or how many shadow hours I’d spent waiting, hoping, praying he would come to me. “I understand.”

“The Danes know that the Middle Lands are now under Mercia’s protection.” His lids were hooded. “You can hold Coventry in my absence?”

“I’ve told you before. I can hold my own lands.” My assertion came out more waspish than I intended.

Wax spattered as he seized the candle. “It seems you don’t need me after all.”

The bower door slammed behind him.

“Leofric. Wait!”

21

And all the mothers brought

Their children, clamouring, “If we pay, we starve!”

—Tennyson (1842):
Godiva

The candle dripped away its dim light. Needle in hand I sat alone in my bower, my ruby ring glinting in the firelight as I stitched. In the weeks that Leofric had been away I had taken up the task of completing my mother’s tapestry, a hanging she had planned for our hall, depicting a woodland hunt such as those my father had often enjoyed. Her embroidery was fine and delicate; I wielded my needle more like a blade. I would never be as skillful as she had been. But I hated to leave her work unfinished.

With a sigh I rethreaded the needle with a length of green silk to finish a cluster of leaves. Leofric had been gone for weeks but for each week it seemed as if a month had passed. The days were long but the nights … The nights were longer still.

When he’d come to me in the night before riding north with Godwin and Elfreda I’d called after him. I didn’t know if he hadn’t heard or just ignored my plea. If my husband had come back into the bower then, I’d have told him of my feelings, taken the chance. But once again the chance had slipped away.

More than once, at sleepy dawn, I found myself reaching out for him in my soft bed. My body craved his. Part of me now could only be filled by him, nothing else. A hunger, a thirst unquenched. I longed for him. In the darkling hours I lay awake. And if I did sleep, my dreams were full of him, so vivid, so colorful and full of passion, that when I awoke I would find myself in a tangle of blankets, my body aroused. I could still scent the leather of him on the linen. For weeks I hadn’t let Aine wash them.

The sensations, the feelings he’d aroused while he’d been in Coventry had grown stronger while he was away.

His body. My body.

In the bed, on a sheepsskin on the floor, against the wall.

The Earl of Mercia had vanquished my bower.

His skin. Leather-battled. Tanned hard. A survivor. Yet pale and smooth in those private places I’d explored by lip and fingertip.

His breathing. Even-chested. Reassuring in the night.

A yawning stretch upon awakening in the morning light.

Intimacy. Shared. Sacred.

What I missed most.

Dropping the needle I rubbed my temples. My head ached. Was he missing me at all? Or had he forgotten about me the moment he had left the Middle Lands and crossed the Mercian border?

It gnawed away at my very bones. I’d shown him my homeland, taken him to my beloved Arden. I wanted to see his great cities: Chester, Derby, Nottingham. I wanted to ride out with him to Sherwood Forest, discover the secret places where he’d hidden as an outlaw. To travel to the north would have been an adventure. I was the Lady of Mercia now, of shires I’d never seen. Yet he hadn’t wanted me with him.

And Elfreda. His
Doe
. The woman he’d planned to marry, if he hadn’t needed to marry me to keep his northern lands Saxon safe. Perhaps he was in her arms now, relieved to be away from the wife he had been forced to take for duty. In the short time she and Godwin had been in Coventry, I’d grown fond of her. It had been a wrench to say good-bye.

Yet night-dreams visited of Leofric making love to Elfreda, caressing her with his hands and lips in the same way he caressed me.

How could Leofric not love that soft, gentle girl-woman? Although she was older than me in years she had a soft girlishness that would never fade. That softness, an eagerness and enthusiasm for the world. Being with her each day would be seeing each day anew.

Elfreda. A prize. A wife fit for an earl, with all the womanly virtues. She wouldn’t argue with Leofric, make demands, parry and fight.

He called me a battle-maid.

Headstrong. Willful. Defiant. I knew my own shortcomings.

So much attention I’d given to having been forced to marry Leofric, I hadn’t given any to the fact that he’d been forced to marry me. Would I have been his first choice? Would he have chosen me over Elfreda, if not for the greater Saxon good?