Godiva (10 page)

Some Edgiva-looking stranger gave each morning's circator a lantern to wave in the face of those weak-willed nuns whose attention drifted dreamward during Lauds and Prime; some other creature, whom the sisters all called Mother, led the meeting in the chapter house after morning mass, read aloud in her deep mellifluous voice the day's chapter of the Rule, prayed for the dead, announced the saints' days, listened with the others to the confessions of their sisters, determined fair punishment, even—although rarely—lashed penitents, and then salved them herself in the infirmary. The soul “Edgiva” was but a distant consciousness watching some other spirit fill her body, move her limbs and jaw and vocal cords, as she washed her hands outside the refectory before each meal, washed her sisters' feet at weekly Maundy, raised her voice in chant and prayer at Terce and Sext and None and Vespers and Compline and wrote her daily observations in her private prayer book and then finally returned to the little room with the little bed, too small for two people to thrash around in, as this stranger's body she now watched had thrashed around with the Earl of Hereford.

She would sleep and dream of thrashing, and rise some few hours later with Audry tapping her awake for Matins to begin it all again.

And somehow also, nearly daily, she would take reports from the lay brothers, of how the ploughing progressed, and the clearing of fields, and the diverting of the stream near the fishpond; she would check the stores of the shrift-corn and check the state of the baking and the mead; she would meet with the cellarer and the infirmarian and the gardener; she would make a circuit of the workshops, and meet with the prior from the monks' side to make sure all was well there. She would check the soundness of the water clocks, and see the time-candles were in good supply. She would herself receive patients at the infirmary, victims of abusive kin or farming accidents or age or illness or weather or goblins or elves or unhappy ancestors; she would treat them not only with bleeding (since the moon was waning), with tinctures and poultices, but also with charms to fend off evil spirits. She would visit the west side of the cloister, where the white-veiled novices were being schooled, some wide-eyed, some sullen, all more innocent than she; then to the north side, her favorite place in all the compound, perhaps in all the world: the famed scriptorium of Leominster Abbey.

Each nun bent dutifully with inks, quills, and other tools over her parchment, each sequestered in a shallow, low-ceilinged nook with a table-board, each nook illuminated by a window to let in God's light. There was a similar, smaller scriptorium on the men's side, but—perhaps for the novelty of it—it was the copies made by the sisters that fetched the highest sums for the abbey. The most recent had been bought by Sweyn of Hereford. His strong, broad hands might be unclasping it even now, pressing open the vellum pages. No, she must not think that way, especially not in here, the room most sacred to her heart.

The scratching of quill on vellum was as soothing to her as a mother's heartbeat to a babe, and it was here, and only here, that she almost felt she was, indeed, Mother Edgiva, Abbess of Leominster, despite her transgressions. She knew each pen scratch, could sometimes almost tell which letter was being formed by the rhythm of the scratches, which ink was being used by the scent of it.

No monastic house was allowed its own style. She formally instructed each of her calligraphers, nuns and monks alike, to follow the model of the scribe Eadui Basan—the thick lines and enormous capital letters resting on patterns of warmly tinted background colors. Privately, however, if she saw that any scrivener had a gift, and wished to indulge in animals or mythic figures or horological symbols, she allowed it and even encouraged them. The illuminations had little enough to do with the matter they illuminated anyhow; truly, they were just an opportunity to add beauty to the world.

Also, she had always felt, there was nothing sinful in having the opportunity to resist pridefulness, and how could one learn to resist a sin but to be tempted by it first? A talented botanist, she herself was admired among scribes throughout England for having perfected a certain blue ink from the juice of larkspur petals mixed with alum.
That is who I am.
Not some wanton whore. Not even Godiva—so reckless and absent of all modesty—not even
Godiva
had ever behaved as shamefully as Edgiva.

Every time a messenger approached she would send a novice rushing to see if he was from Bishop Lyfing; she needed Lyfing to come to her, or for him to summon her to him. She could think of almost nothing else. At one time she had moved among her charges daily, hourly, by the minute, spirited yet self-contained, outspoken but soft-spoken, a calm bundle of energy. Now she was distracted, distant, sometimes confused. She was supposed to represent the presence of the Virgin Mary. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Approximately weekly, usually Saturdays, she received a letter from some superior in the Church, instructing her or reminding her of the newest proscriptions that would touch upon her position or her charges. She would at once reply, carefully but firmly, protesting the erosion of her rights and duties, pointing out, as she did every week, that forbidding sisters from touching holy books was difficult when they were themselves the ones who
wrote
the holy books. But so it goes in Rome now, came the tart Lateran replies, and howsoever Rome evolves, so must the rest of Christendom follow suit—and especially in England, where finally at last there was a good continental and wholly Christian king to help repair the laxity of a semiheathen past.

Sundays, she led the ceremony to sprinkle holy water on all the buildings in the compound, although reports from Rome warned her that new theology suggested only monks should do that. Weekly, usually Mondays, she would counsel Audry through her confusion: the young sister never understood why penance was not a part of healing, since clearly ill health was a punishment or trial from God. No, Edgiva would say patiently, that is not so, although in fact the great religious minds of Rome were beginning to consider that.

She watched herself, and she watched Audry watching her with increasing concern and curiosity, and all the time she fought to keep her thoughts away from Hereford and focused on the gold band on her finger that wedded her to Christ. She needed the calm and understanding Lyfing to help her to renew her vows.

Coventry

O
n the feast of the Assumption, Leofric and Godiva wrote to Bishop Lyfing, inviting him to join them for Easter, and briefly, proudly recapitulating Godiva's role in the Land Ceremony. Godiva, cheered at the possibility of the bishop's presence, estimated the size of his entourage and informed the cook and steward to prepare extra food and cots.

But the following morning, Godiva returned from a visit to the monastery, enjoying how the drying breeze buffeted her blue silk outfit . . . to find Leofric sitting at his chair, staring into the hearth-pit with sorrowful eyes. The steward and the other hall servants moved quietly around the edges of the room, afraid of disturbing his trance.

Somehow she knew before he even said the words that Bishop Lyfing was no longer with the living. She took a stool and placed it close to Leofric's chair, sat on it, and rested her head sadly on his lap, breathing in his scent for comfort.

He handed her an unsealed scroll; she unrolled it and began to read, as Leofric said, “It is a disrespectful way to tell us. Disrespectful to Lyfing, I mean. As if he were an afterthought.”

King Edward sends friendly greetings to Earl Godwin and Earl Leofric and Earl Sweyn and Mother Edgiva and all the thanes in Worcestershire and Herefordshire and Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. I inform you that, upon the passing of the inimitable Lyfing, I have granted to the abbot Aldred the bishopric of Worcester, with sake and soll, toll and team, within borough and without, as fully and completely in all things as ever any of his predecessors possessed it.

Leominster

S
ixty-odd miles to the west of Coventry, Mother Edgiva was receiving the same news. She wrote with trembling hands into her private diary and felt more alone than ever in the world. There was nobody upon whose knee she could rest her head. The news brought with it far greater dismay than her saddened sisters ever could begin to know.

CHAPTER 10

H
oly Week was always a blur to Godiva. She and Leofric conventionally hosted somebody of prominence wherever they were, and always invited the housecarls and the manor population, including servants, to feast with them. This year there would be no guest, but there was still to be a feast—the largest feast Coventry manor had yet tried to provide. It rained most of the week, which was a blessing for the crops, if not for anybody's mood. The cook was testy, and everyone supplying any kind of foodstuff was rightfully afraid of him.

There was some anxiety underlying these preparations, because the stores were low. Godiva knew this, and knew things were worse for the villagers and farmers—that was why she had been asked to perform the Land Ceremony spell.

“Perhaps we should feed everyone,” she said to Leofric. “The village, the monastery, all of them.”

“Must they all receive new clothes?” he asked in a lugubrious voice. “I haven't many castoffs with me; I brought only enough from Brom Legge to cover the regulars.”

“All will get eggs,” said Godiva. “I'll hire that young Edwyn from Baginton to decorate the rest of them; they will understand the gesture.” Eggs and milk were forbidden during Lent, but one could not tell hens and cows that. By Easter, when the prohibitions were lifted, any given household had a mass of boiled eggs and plenty of cheese ripening; these were the main ingredients in half the dishes of the Easter feast. It was a custom borrowed from the Continent to dye the eggs and decorate them festively, leaving them all over the house to add some color to what was otherwise the blandest forty days of the entire year.

The local hundredcourt met the day of each full moon at Coffa's Tree, where the men (this time of year) would carelessly tread upon the daffodils and celandines. The earl had gone to oversee the hundredcourt on the first day of Holy Week, and had been rained on. Godiva took an hour away from her endless whirl of chores: “I'll dry you off . . . and then I'll dampen you again,” she offered, closing her arms around his waist beneath his cloak.

He pressed her hard against him, and she let the worrisome duties of the week fade away. Just for an hour.

The shire-courts of Worcester and Warwick were both to meet at Easter, but Leofric requested a deferment out of respect for Lyfing's death. He bemoaned to Godiva how dull the Worcester court proceedings would be now, without the bishop as company. “I'll give you something entertaining to look forward to,” she said. “Step into our chamber and I shall give you a sample of it now,” and again they found an hour to escape the cacophony of being earl and countess.

They approached the holiest of holy periods, the Triduum—the Tedium, Godiva called it secretly—feeling stretched beyond their means to feed the household, and excessively weary of the odor of boiling eggs. The so-called feast of Maundy Thursday represented Christ's last supper about as much as a dandelion resembled an oak. There was nothing but fish stew, withered winter greens, and baggy-looking root vegetables. This was not God's fault, of course, but the natural cycle of the year. There was precious little around to eat, Lent or no Lent—at least Lent gave Hunger the illusion of accomplishment.

Good Friday found Godiva in the monastery, creeping toward the cross on bended knees, an occasion for which she donned her nearly monastic dark wool dress. This was more to protect her brighter tunics from the dirt than to appear demure and holy, but she was fond of her monks at St. Mary's and liked to please them too. God knew her soul, her sins and charities, no matter how she dressed. (For that reason, Edgiva's aggressively drab nun's habit had always seemed to Godiva an empty gesture, bordering even on an inverted kind of vanity.)

Late morning of Holy Saturday, finally, it was dry again and even sunny. Every member of the manor household rushed about fulfilling their particular chores for the greatest and most joyful day of the year. A young man on a palfrey appeared on the southern road. He wore the king's livery, and Leofric, seeing this from the door of the manor, groaned quietly to himself.

This messenger informed them that His Majesty King Edward had decided to honor them with his presence for the Easter feast, and would be arriving in Coventry by nightfall. With his retinue. Of approximately ten housecarls, his chaplain, and his groom, but not his wife.

This meant that in addition to preparing the Easter festivities, the household now had also to turn its attention toward preparing for an unexpected royal visit. Leofric was fuming most of the day, but Godiva managed to keep in fairly good temper as they rushed to prepare their home for him. Their chamberlain outfitted their room for His Majesty and turned the manor office beside it into a bedroom for the earl and his lady, while the steward and other household officers would sleep on bedrolls on the hall floor with the king's retinue. Likewise the horses had to be moved about in the stables to make room for His Majesty's equine train.

“Why is he coming?” Leofric muttered to himself in her hearing each of the three moments their paths crossed during the day, which meant he was probably muttering it to himself constantly, even when she wasn't there.

“He is clumsily flexing his royal muscle,” Godiva said reassuringly, the third time, when they encountered each other by the kitchen screens. “Do you remember at Council, he was forever making noise about wanting to demonstrate his independent power? Even Aldred commented, and Aldred never comments on anything. So here's his go at it. Inconveniencing an earl, just because he can. He thinks if he can force us to be gracious over dinner, he has somehow belittled you for his own aggrandizement.”

“He will certainly be belittling my stores,” said Leofric grumpily. “We've hardly anything to feed him.”

Godiva shook her head. “We'll not give him the satisfaction of knowing that. This must be handled with Edgiva's trick of indirect resistance. He is coming for a feast, and thinks he will break us by demanding that? We will throw him such a feast he'll think our means are limitless. He will be cowed, and move on to bully someone else. 'Tis a petty show of power, that is all. He lacks imagination, and thank God for it.”

H
aving a moment to spare in the late afternoon, Godiva went into the wardrobe of the room she would be yielding to Edward overnight, and pulled from it the most flattering double-tunic she had with her. Her favorite girdle was in Brom Legge, but she had here the one with green glass beads, and the veil with gold thread woven into the scarlet silk. As she was adding an unnecessary Byzantine-style garnet brooch to her outer tunic at the neck, Leofric walked in. He stopped abruptly and eyed her up and down.

She smiled, expecting a compliment. The brooch had been a gift from him.

“Godiva, that is a dreadful idea,” he said sternly. “Put on your most modest clothes.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Whatever the reason that man is coming here, I know he does not like to see you dazzling, and you are dazzling in that outfit.”

“I will not dress to please him,” she said, and reached for her rosary, to hang it from her girdle. “He was put onto the throne to return this kingdom from tyranny to lawful rule, and there is to my knowledge no law against my dressing festively. I will remind him that the earl he is trying to prove himself superior to has by far the superior wife.”

“You will provoke him,” Leofric said.

“Provoke him to do what?” Godiva scoffed.

T
hey received His Majesty in the hall at sundown, with all the necessary formal obsequities and rituals of greeting. They thanked him for the lavish gifts of clothing he brought them both. But there was no ease between them. From the way Edward looked at her raiment, Godiva felt a stone in her gut and realized Leofric had been right. After a moment, however, she decided she was glad to have dressed this way, and determined to dress even more vibrantly tomorrow.

When asked the reason for his arrival, the king declared that he had heard from Lyfing, and now Aldred, such marvelous things about the development of the monastery here, and he wanted to be present for its first full Easter services. He was especially glad to have arrived in time for the Tenebrae service.

After midnight, the whole of the manor proceeded down the town's street to join the villagers, lay brothers, and monks within the monastery's church. It was the first time since the Land Ceremony that Godiva had been here for religious observances.

The inverted V of the hearse candelabrum sat upon the altar, every candle lit, sending terrifically spooky shadows against all the walls. Godiva, Leofric, and Edward sat on a cushioned bench up at the front, Edward shrinking somewhat away from Leofric, and Godiva grateful that her husband was between them. Most everyone else stood behind them, shifting about throughout the service.

The monks and the priest recited Psalms, and Lamentations, and sections of Jeremiah, all in Latin and therefore unintelligible to almost everybody in the small, crowded church. Godiva, remembering Latin well enough, still could not keep her mind upon it, and she shivered in the dark, shifting frequently from one buttock to the other, occasionally worrying Leofric's gloved fingers with her own, just to feel something of his touch.

At certain points during the service, one candle was extinguished, and then another, until deep in the recesses of nocturnal hours, there remained only the top light on the candelabrum. The priest reciting Lamentations, assisted by tonsured brothers, lifted the candelabrum off the altar and lowered it behind the altar, throwing the church into almost total darkness.

A loud crash, and Godiva jumped—as she did every year. Behind her, villagers and servants yelped in startlement. She knew this was just a trick—monks breaking crockery against the church walls while others rattled metal sticks—but still she liked the drama of it. Finally something interesting was happening inside a church: the symbolic re-creation of the earthquakes following Christ's death.

If only his resurrection were so engaging, she thought, then crossed herself guiltily.

A
few hours of fitful sleep back at the manor was allowed then. Then a hurried return to the church, where Easter services themselves began shortly before dawn and went on for approximately ten months, to judge by how empty the countess's stomach felt. This was the most exalted and most joyful of all days within the Church calendar, but the Land Ceremony had been so much more meaningful to her that it was hard to pay attention now. At almost every reference to the risen Lord, she had to squelch the urge to whisper “We already took care of that last week by Coffa's Tree.”

Once they were released from services, the earl, his wife, and the king and his retinue walked the still-muddy length of Coventry back to the manor, followed by the population of the town and monastery. In a coordinated convocation of every person who owed allegiance to either Leofric or Godiva, or both, Godiva had orchestrated a merry gathering in which scores were fed and given decorated eggs, and dozens were given gifts of new clothes from herself and her husband. Daffodils and catkins were woven into hawthorn branches to decorate the tables. Edward would not catch them throwing a paltry feast.

Honestly, though, she was so exhausted from the week of preparation, she was too bleary-eyed now to enjoy or even notice most of the festivities. Mostly she was glad all those painted eggs would no longer be underfoot everywhere. What she had conjured would have been quite an accomplishment, even if she had not had to rearrange the household at the last moment to accommodate King Edward's abrupt arrival. Given that added burden on their time and resources, Godiva considered her household's achievement nearly miraculous; if the ornate silver necklace she was donating to a statue of Mary at the monastery had been rendered into coin, she would have strewn it freely around the room for her own people to collect. They needed it more than Mother Mary did.

T
he earl in leather, his lady in silk, the king in fur, and his retinue in wool had put on smiling faces throughout the tour of the town, and continued so throughout the feast; the commoners were ecstatic to be in the presence of His Majesty, which for most of them would happen only this one time in their whole lives. Even the brothers from the monastery were awed at the honor of sharing a meal with His Majesty. The nobles smiled and beamed with tired beneficence to the housecarls and the well-dressed local thanes, the cheese maker, the beadle, the beekeeper, the shepherd and oxherd and goatherd and cowherd and hayward, the barnman and woodward and sowers and grooms.

But His Majesty and his hosts were warm as frost to each other, as they exchanged and received toasts in their intricately decorated green-glass wine cups, a recent gift from Alfgar. Godiva found herself counting to one hundred and then backward again to one, and then forward to one hundred and then backward again to one, to try to keep her patience as she waited for the feast to be over. Beside her, Leofric ate his lamb in cream sauce and boiled eggs, and quail and boiled quail eggs, and spring greens garnished with boiled eggs, without once smiling or even looking up from his food.
Why is Edward here?
She could hear his thoughts grinding over and over like a groaning gristmill. She wished she could remind Leofric of the answer:
Merely to prove he has the right.