Godiva (13 page)

CHAPTER 14

T
here was a letter in the chapter house at Leominster, writ a generation earlier from one anonymous nun to another. Godiva and Edey had memorized this together in their girlhood; it was the text they used to practice penmanship in private, away from the novice mistress, who made them always write out the Holy Writ.

Every person distrustful of her own counsel,
it read,
seeks a devoted friend in whom she has such faith that she lays down before her the secrets of her heart. Nothing is sweeter than having someone with whom one can converse as with oneself, who will treat our grief as their own, and so comfort us, sympathize with us, and counsel and uplift us with their wisdom
.

Coventry

T
he messenger Godiva sent to Bishop Aldred was a lad named Piers. He was the cook's son, a nervous boy but good with animals; the groom had taken him on, for he was as calm with horses as he was jittery with people. He left for Worcester the morning after Easter, and they did not see him for a fortnight, although Worcester was just two days' ride away. By then Godiva and Leofric had decided to delay their circuit until after May Day, no matter the outcome.

When Piers returned, as the bells tolled Sext and the midday meal was completed, he was sent straight to the kitchens, not only to be fed but also to calm his anxious parents. His mother rubbed his face clean with her dirty apron, fed him her own dinner, kissed him hard on the forehead, and then sent him into the hall, where Godiva and Leofric waited by Leofric's chair. Godiva wore two tunics, green over blue—the colors, she thought, would soothe the boy and help him to speak calmly. Around them, the daily buzz of manor business continued, but all of the servants and housecarls gave them wide berth.

Bishop Aldred's reply was strange. Nothing had been written. He'd had Piers memorize a speech to recite upon return to Coventry, and gave no excuse for detaining Piers for so long.

It often fell out that Godiva was in Coventry without Leofric, and Piers was unused to the earl's presence. Now, Piers bowed continually to Leofric until the earl asked him if he were suffering a stomach spasm, a question the boy looked too frightened to answer.

“His Eminence Bishop Aldred of Worcester bids you welcome and the blessing of the Christ on your head and wants me to explain to you that he has destroyed the message that you sent him lest it fall into the hands of King Edward's spies and likewise he is giving you a spoken response and not a written one lest I the messenger be overtaken likewise and have his response ripped away from me likewise by Edward's spies.”

“A surfeit of
likewise
s there,” Leofric said. Piers looked worried.

“I am only saying what I was told to say,” he said. “Please dinna whip me.”

The earl frowned. “Of course I will not whip you,” he said. “That would distract you from delivering the rest of the message. Out with it.”

The boy blinked nervously, three times, and then decided that looking at Godiva and ignoring Leofric would best steady his nerves. “His Eminence says there will be no bad reaper cushions if you do what His Majesty says.”

“Those pesky reaper cushions,” muttered Leofric somberly.

“That is not helping him, darling,” Godiva said.

Piers glanced between them unsurely, then presumed it was safe to continue. “The worst is you might have to perform some small penance after, if your personal confessor says so. But His Eminence says you are a good lady for accepting the humiliation to protect your people.” He stopped, with an unselfconscious nod of his head to reassure himself he'd finished. He bowed.

“Is that all?” Leofric said, after a moment.

Piers stared at him and bowed again. “Should there be more? I am sure I have not forgot anything.” And then, looking down almost cross-eyed, he began rapidly to repeat to himself the whole of his speech. They waited patiently, and then the boy raised his head, bowing. “Yes, my lord. That is all.”

Leofric gave his wife a look of droll displeasure, and then dismissed Piers, who bowed twice before darting out of the hall back toward the kitchens.

“Well, there you are,” Godiva said with no little satisfaction, radiating certainty.

“There I am what?” Leofric demanded. “There I am proven correct in my suspicions?”

“No, proven incorrect! Aldred condoned it, and with sound reason. It is not as if we are sacrificing an ox to Thor in church.”

Leofric frowned. “It is suspicious that he did not consign his opinion to ink.”

“He explained why.”

“Yes. But, of course, there is a reason equally compelling to avoid writing, and it does not speak well of him.”

“What is that?”

Leofric looked at her knowingly. She shrugged, bemused. “You are usually shrewder about these things, Godiva. He does not want any evidence that he encouraged you to do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you do it, and then another bishop—someone more established, more powerful, more respected—condemns it afterward, you cannot wave Aldred's letter about and use it as defense. He does not want to be held accountable for his counsel. He is a coward. He should not be bishop, he should be left alone to pray in a cave somewhere, like the hermetic monk he is.”

“Leofric. If he were determined to leave no trace of his counsel, he'd have sent his own man to give us the message. To assure that nobody else would be able to gainsay him.”

The earl shook his head. “That is the precise detail,” he said to the roof beams, “that suggests his fearfulness. If we call him to your defense at a Great Council, and our only witness is a near-simpleton in our own employ, it will appear that we have forged a story about his counsel. Any messenger of ours will naturally be biased.”

“But a messenger of his own would cover for him—”

“Are you certain?” He turned his gaze to meet hers. “He has just become bishop. Lyfing casts a long shadow, and I am sure there is some settling of dust yet in the Bishop's Palace. In Aldred's position, I myself would not trust anyone, at present, and I am not the fearful, fretful fellow that he is. He is not loved enough to be confident of his own messenger's discretion. So he used our messenger instead.”

She frowned. “This assessment comes from your dislike of the man.”

“My dislike of the man comes from my assessment of him,” Leofric countered. He grimaced briefly, then reached out for her hands with both of his. He squeezed them gently. “I will not condemn you for doing something you believe in, but I insist you ask another prelate's opinion on this matter before you go any further with it.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Somebody who will go on record with their counsel.” He thought a moment. “Perhaps you should go directly to the archbishop.”

Godiva made a scornful sound and pulled her hands away from him. “Do you mean Archbishop Edsige, or Nearly-Archbishop Siward? Edsige has been King Edward's lapdog, beside which he is on death's door. Nobody is certain what Siward's role is—as he is only an abbot, I don't see how he could possibly perform adequately as a deputy archbishop when he's surrounded by bishops who certainly feel that they should be in his place. Anyhow, he's creepy, and I have heard he's starving Edsige to death in hopes of taking his place. I would not trust Edsige's judgment and I do not trust Siward's character.” She thought. “Perhaps the Archbishop of York instead?”

“Alfric the Buzzard?” Leofric said, alarmed. “He's more reprehensible than all the other churchmen put together! It was he who framed Lyfing for murder—”

Godiva held up her hands in concession. “I spoke without thinking. Of course, I agree with you.”

There was a grim silence. With one calloused finger, Leofric traced the Saxon decorations along the edge of his chair, critically, as if he found the workmanship unsatisfactory.

“Lyfing would have been the man.” Godiva sighed.

Leofric stopped assessing the furniture to smile nostalgically. “Lyfing would have told you that your actions were pagan, but that there was nothing wrong with that, as long as you truly believed in your purpose.”

She nodded. “He was the last of his kind, I think.”

A sad pause.

She ran through her mental roster of high-ranking churchmen. Something unsavory was to be said of every one of them.

“But we are thoughtless fools!” Leofric said suddenly, brightening. “There is an abbess you can ask.”

Godiva laughed. “She will be biased, surely! She will want me to do it to advance her cause.”

“I think if anything she will be against it,” he said. “It discomfits her when you parade your femininity about.”

She grinned at him. “I think this would be different. I would not be reveling in my femininity, but rather being shamed by it.”

“I do not think she would want you to be shamed,” said Leofric. “Any more than I do.”

“At least she's honest, which is more than we can say of any of the others. Let me think on it. I wonder how things are in Leominster.”

With remarkable synchronicity, their steward, Temman, entered the hall, leading a dusty young man in dusty black riding clothes, a large cross sewn across the front of his tunic. “A message from Mother Edgiva of Leominster Abbey,” Temman announced, “to the lady Countess of Mercia.”

“Ask and it shall be given,” the lady Countess of Mercia said with a smile to her husband.

“When
you
ask, it shall be given. Few can say as much. Well, then.” Leofric clapped his hands together, grateful to change the course of the conversation. At the sound of his clap, every person in the hall—from the women weaving in the warmest corner to the musician restringing a harp by the door—looked up, at attention. “I am for the monastery to see how the refectory progresses.” Everyone but his chief housecarl, Druce, returned to their work. Druce went at once toward the earl's chamber to collect his cloak. “If I see an honest monk or abbot, I'll bring them home to supper, and you may speak to them of your plight.”

“It is not a
plight,
” she said lightly.

He passed by the dusty Leominster messenger and on into the sunlight, where he paused, awaiting Druce. The messenger bowed to Godiva and handed his folded parchment to the steward, who turned and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said. “Temman, give this fellow water and something to eat, and let him bathe in the lake if he wishes.”

A
s fond as Edgiva and Godiva were of each other, it was unlike either of them—and especially unlike the abbess—to casually send letters. Besides the lack of leisure time for writing, there was the expense of a messenger; vellum and ink were dear, and in Godiva's case a nuisance to obtain. Edgiva presided over one of the most famed scriptoriums in Britain, where the residents made their own ink and laid in huge supplies of parchment. But Leofric and his wife were in almost constant motion circuiting Mercia, and it was untenable to have anything but the most basic of supplies in small towns like Coventry. The monastery had a decent store, but none that she might filch to exchange letters with a friend.

Also, Leominster Abbey had precious few palfreys, and its village had only plodding farm animals. For Edgiva to send a message by horseback was no small thing. Godiva stared at the parchment with apprehension and thought about her friend.

Edgiva's seal had been designed for her when she was too young to truly fathom its significance. There was a central cross, the top quarters filled with crosiers to signify the abbey, and the bottom two quarters containing doves to signify her bloodline. She was Edward's niece, born in Normandy but brought to England at the age of five as a political hostage in the never-ending stratagems of rulers and would-be rulers. She had been deposited in ancient, tiny Leominster Abbey at about the same time Godiva was (in Godiva's case by well-born, well-intentioned parents who were not sure how best to foster her, given her willfulness). Because of Edgiva's lineage, it had been established early on—by now-dead men whom she had never met—that Edgiva must never leave the abbey, but neither must she be demeaned there by a lifelong lowly rank.

And so, at the age of eight, she had been designated abbess-elect, or deputy abbess, or vice-abbess, or some such title Godiva could never remember, and informed that someday, she would be in charge. She received this very seriously (Edgiva received everything seriously), and Godiva believed it had ruined her already fragile sense of humor.

Ten years later—after Godiva had escaped the abbey to marry the widowed Earl Leofric of Mercia—the reigning abbess passed away. A convocation of Religious Men swooped down upon the abbey and catechized Edgiva nearly to death, then pronounced her ready to assume the mantle of leadership, which was placed upon her following an election by the nuns. Just at that time, the earl and lady of Mercia elected to endow the abbey with an enormous gift of money, gold, and relics—and suddenly it was no mere abbey but a minster, bustling with industry as well as piety and study. Mother Edgiva took this in stride. A dozen years and more had passed since then.