Godiva (2 page)

“Will you never let me live that down?” Godiva sighed.

“You propositioned Harold Harefoot?” the abbess demanded, eyes widening.

“Of course not,” Godiva said in a disgusted voice. And then brightening, she pitched her voice just over Edgiva's shoulder: “Welcome, Sweyn. You are arrived in good time to hear my husband thoroughly embarrass me. I believe you will enjoy the story.”

The abbess's face had grown stony, and she took a step away with the gravity of a religious ritual. Leofric, desiring an attentive audience, reached out and rested an avuncular hand on the arm of Sweyn, who, dressed all in fawn-colored leather, now looked like a trapped deer.

“When Godiva was still young,” Leofric began, “Harold Harefoot was the king, and one of his housecarls took an interest in her.”

“I remember this,” Edgiva said, relenting, returning her attention to them.

“Understand, I had nothing to gain from his interest,” Godiva told Sweyn emphatically. “He was no threat to either Leofric or me; there was no information, favor, or agreement we wanted from him. There was no reason to encourage him.”

“Not that Godiva
always
needs a reason to encourage men,” said Leofric cheerfully, smiling at Sweyn, whose blush was now so deep it verged on purple.

“But he was very forward,” said Godiva, also to Sweyn. “He actually intended to get under my skirts, where I had no intention of allowing him.”

Leofric continued: “After dinner, somehow—she claims she knows not how this happened—”

“And I don't!” said Godiva. “Only that I was exceptionally naive and foolish—”

“Pinned, she was pinned against the outer wall of the stable,” her husband continued. “She was trying to stop him, of course, because she did not want to be fined for allowing a man to grope her in public—”

“That was not my prime concern—”

“—but he would not be dissuaded. He told her that I already knew myself to be a cuckold and I would not care, which is not true, by the way,” he said, a confiding aside to Sweyn, who looked so mortified that Godiva genuinely felt pity for him. She pressed a ringed hand against Leofric's hand to stop him, and took over the storytelling.

“I started to say ‘I am not a whore,' but as I spoke the words I realized he would disregard that. So I decided to try a trick I learned from Edgiva—”

The abbess gasped, mortified. “What?” she demanded, crossing herself and turning almost as violet as Sweyn—at whom she glanced nervously. “I have
never
—”

“I mean the trick of indirect resistance,” said Godiva. “Your hallmark tactic. That is all. Calm down, Mother.” It was a rare treat to tell Edey to calm down, Edey being perhaps the calmest woman she had ever known. Turning her attention to Sweyn, and ignoring his blush, Godiva continued, “Since I could not overpower him and since I could not change his belief in what I was, I decided to use his perception of me against him. So I kept speaking, and what I said was, ‘I am not a whore . . . whom you can afford.' ”

“She said, ‘I am sitting on a gold mine and there is a high charge to enter it,' ” chuckled Leofric. “ ‘You must pay the master of the mine—my husband. In person. With gold. And he has the privilege of witnessing it
.
' All of this, she said to the cur.” He delivered this again to Sweyn, who appeared increasingly confounded.

“And he looked just as you do now, Sweyn,” Godiva said. “So I continued, ‘Shall we seek him out? Come quickly, do let's find him!' He was so confused, I was able to push past him and back into the courtyard, where there were more people. He gave me a wide berth the rest of the Council. But that is not the best piece of the story.” She gave him an expectant look.

“Pray continue,” Sweyn said dutifully, clearly wishing he had never left off wrestling.

“I told both of these two about it that evening. Mother here grinned about it despite herself, although she was shocked.” She winked at Edgiva, who reddened and looked away again. “But Leofric? Oh, dear. He groaned and rubbed his fingers at his temples as he always does when he is distressed, and told me I would create the most atrocious trouble for both of us and he would divorce me if I did not cease flirting.”

“In my experience, you have not obeyed him,” Sweyn observed, embarrassed.

“But hear the coda,” Godiva said, in a triumphantly concluding tone. “The next day, I charmed an elderly Danish lord into forgetting he was not supposed to tell any Britons how many new warships King Harold was to build, and certainly could see no harm in sharing that number with a young lady who was staring at him adoringly and trying to speak Danish. Leofric was grateful, and lifted his censure.”

“Ah,” said Sweyn, at a loss for further commentary.

The horn sounded near the king's chair to announce the recommencement of the Council, and Sweyn nearly swooned with relief.

CHAPTER 2

Gloucester

I
t was an hour later and the countess Godiva was bored almost to nausea.

At the time the Great Council was called in Gloucester, the ruling couple of Mercia had been in the small, recently resettled hamlet known as Coventry in one of Godiva's estates. With Leofric, whose wealth dwarfed hers, she had just endowed a new Benedictine monastery there. They had done so mostly because King Edward had—the moment he'd been crowned three years ago—expressed a desire to build a monastery there himself, and the ruling couple decided they would rather be patrons of a minster in their territory than allow the king that chance. Edward had been quite irritable about this, claiming sorrow not to found such an auspiciously sited abbey himself.

“The site is auspicious chiefly for being deep in the bowels of my earldom,” Leofric had muttered to his wife. “An excellent harbor for his spies.”

So they had leapt into building the monastery, although they usually saved their patronage for monasteries placed in other people's territories (providing an excellent harbor for
Leofric's
spies).

From Coventry to Gloucester was two days' ride in summer, but this being early spring and the nights still long, they had given themselves a leisurely three days for it. Godiva wished they had given themselves a fortnight and missed the Council entirely.

The crush of well-dressed bodies, Lenten-lean, provided heat in the smoky great hall. But not everyone was given to perfumery, and once they were settled onto benches, it was a pungent gathering. There had been such fuss about positioning. Only earls and bishops warranted stools; the rest made shift cramped together on benches. The king was flanked by two of his three great earls: Godwin to his right, Siward to his left. Leofric of Mercia had chosen not to play the game of who-sits-where and quietly joined his wife on a bench among the lesser gentry.

Only out of love, Godiva now forced her attention to the end of the hall where the Abbess of Leominster, poised and elegant, had risen to address her uncle, the king, comfortably situated in the room's only chair.

There stood her childhood friend; there sat the king, who always looked irked when a woman stood to speak; and to either side of him, sat the men Godiva liked to call “those other earls.”

Godwin was that famous Godwin of Wessex: the most powerful man in England, more powerful than the king himself, and father of young Sweyn. He was tall and leathery faced with shoulders one could break rocks against.

Siward's eke-name was “the Stout.” And not without reason. But he was rumored to have pagan tendencies, and Godiva found that endearing.

Mother Edgiva declaimed gracefully, despite the shapeless dark robes that left nothing visible but the center of her face. Her voice resonated in the deeper tones of a woman twice her age. Godiva had always loved that voice and admired Edgiva in her rhetorical ecstasy. She had been pontificating gently since she was five, and she grew more splendid at it yearly.

And yet Godiva, in her red and gold and green layers of double-girdled tunics, her large gold and garnet necklaces weighing on her neck, clanking gently against her enormous circular pure-gold Byzantine brooch . . . Godiva remained bored almost to nausea. She already knew the intention of Edey's speech. At every Great Council, the abbess chronically agitated on behalf of those who had no direct voice here. This was foolhardy. Godiva cared about such people too, but lecturing about them to this Council was a waste of time.

“. . . abolish the heregeld and dispense with the mercenary bodyguard,” Edgiva was saying this time. “They are a reminder of a barbaric king and his barbaric rule. You cannot claim to have advanced the monarchy if you do not forswear them.”

Of all the suggestions Edgiva had ever made at council, thought Godiva—giving slaves the rights of serfs, allowing priests' wives the same religious status as nuns, returning to certain elements of Roman governmental policies—this was by far the most unlikely.

“But Mother Edgiva,” said King Edward, with a cloying smile, relaxing into his fur-trimmed leather cloak. “I do not tax the clergy or the Church. Your abbey is safe enough.”

“I do not protest it for myself,” she said. “I protest it surely on behalf of England.” Her somberly sweet face, bright eyes, thick dark brows, turned to stare at the crowded hall. “Will none of you stand up with me on this? It is your subjects who suffer under the tax.”

Her eyes rested meaningfully on Leofric, who frowned and looked straight at the floor. Godiva subtly stroked the back of his broad hand.

Rooted as an oak tree, slender as a sapling, Mother Edgiva began her litany: “We are battle-scarred from decades of invasions and strife. If we do not thrive, the invaders will come again. But we can only thrive by having a healthy population to provide food and materials and services to each other and to us. It is one thing to levy taxes that give rulers the means to care for their charges. But the heregeld was invoked by a despot, to pay his soldiers to keep all of us in submission to him. The perversion of that alone should make an enlightened monarch abolish it at once.”

There was murmuring around the room, at this unsubtle slight to His Majesty. His Majesty scowled at the back of Edgiva's head, but said nothing. Serenely, as if oblivious to having just insulted Godwin's Anointed, she continued. “There should be no need to raise monies to pay mercenaries to protect His Majesty from his own subjects. The heregeld is obsolete and should be abolished.”

There was a moment of silence. Then:

“Allow me the presumption, Mother, of explaining our silence.”

Earl Sweyn of Hereford stood up, the eldest son of the most powerful man in England, and brother to the king by marriage. He had regained the composure Godiva had robbed him of earlier, and had pushed his very short leather cloak back over his broad shoulders, drawing attention to their broadness.
Nicely done,
thought Godiva, who wished her handsome, broad-shouldered husband attended likewise to his presentation.

Sweyn strode to the open center of the gathering, toward Mother Edgiva and the king. “Mother, King Edward sits precariously on his throne, and we precariously keep him there. If I may be blunt, Your Majesty.”

Edward gave him an annoyed look, but also an allowing gesture.

“This is not the reign of Harthacnut, for which we all rejoice, but His Majesty requires a whiff of despotism for just a few more years yet, lest he be perceived as ineffective, and slip off that throne we've placed him on.”

This evoked murmurings from around the circle. Edward's expressionless face seemed suddenly made of stone.

“However, Mother . . .” Sweyn took another step toward her. It appeared to Godiva that the abbess—his senior by a decade—blushed slightly. “Once he has proven himself a goodly king, who knows himself a goodly king and therefore not needful of tyranny, I vow to instantly join your protest of what is, indeed, a heinous and unjust tax.”

Then he abruptly fell on one knee at Edgiva's feet. She tensed, and her upright bearing grew even more upright. He grabbed her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it, met her eyes, and said, “If you scribe a petition, I swear upon my own paternity, Holy Mother, I shall be the first to put my mark to it when the time is ripe.”

A murmuring rippled in the crowd, and Edgiva's face pinked.

“How gallant!” Godiva whispered to Leofric, from behind one yellow fluted sleeve.

“This is no time for amusements, Godiva,” Leofric said. “He is challenging me.” He rose. With deliberate steps he crossed the circle, somber and simple in his long wool cloak. The crowd hushed. This man carried the weight of a ruined town on his shoulders, and everyone there knew it.

“Likewise, in the name of Christ and Woden both, my support, Mother Abbess,” he said, taking Edgiva's hand from Sweyn's grasp, and pressing his own lips to it. “When it is timely.”

He turned his gaze to his chief rival and ally: Sweyn's father, Godwin.

Godwin, Earl of Wessex, dressed entirely in leather and violet, stood up from his stool to King Edward's right. He took Edgiva's hand from Leofric and kissed it without looking at her. “I match your oath,” he said. Then, offering Edgiva's hand, as if it were a delicacy, he asked Earl Siward the Stout, “Will you join us?”

Siward stood in his northern weave of colors and received, then kissed, Edgiva's hand.

All eyes turned to the king, whose blue eyes glittered out from under frowning brows. Then:

“Excellent!” said Edward in a confoundingly cheerful tone.

He stood up from the chair, gangly tall, dressed in bright embroidered silks all trimmed with ermine, and reached to take Edgiva's hand from Siward. “I would be pleased to feel that I could safely repeal the heregeld. I leave it to you all to make that a possibility,” he crooned in a slightly nasal tenor voice. Then he awkwardly flourished the abbess's hand, presenting it to the assembled lords and ladies and bishops as if it were a signed charter.

Edgiva's face had darkened, and now her brows pushed toward each other beneath her veil. “Do not belittle me, my lords,” she ordered sharply, and retrieved her hand from her uncle. The lordly clutch of them unclutched somewhat, each taking a small step back. “You have just turned my request into an exercise in etiquette, in which each of you has spoken words that make you sound quite noble and yet not one of you has actually said anything at all. The situation is precisely what it was before I stood up to speak about it.”

“I do not think so,” said Edward. “For myself, I swear on the blood of Christ that I will think hard on how my earls might help me to feel more secure.” Despite his pleasant expression, his tone was sinister. “I encourage them to do likewise.”

Edgiva blinked and looked away. “Then I have nothing more to say, Your Majesty,” she said in a flat voice. Underneath the discreet dark wimple and veil, her jaw was clenching with annoyance.

The earls of Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia kissed the king's hand and returned to their seats. Sweyn stood up, paused a moment, as if to make sure everybody saw him, then bowed once more toward Edgiva. “Your servant ever, Mother,” he said. He turned back toward his seat, providing Godiva with an excellent view of his attractive backside as he returned briskly to his place on the bench.

She glanced at Edgiva. Edgiva was looking at his attractive backside, too. And blushing.

“Edey has fallen for Sweyn,” Godiva whispered confidingly to Leofric as he settled beside her.

“Stop that,” he growled. “This is not the time.”

“I think it is
exactly
the time,” she replied pertly. She shifted her weight slightly, ruing the hard wooden bench, longing to arch and stretch her lower back. “Can you imagine a more beneficial match for us? My closest friend marries your rival's son, whose land borders ours? He is young and strong and able to fight off the Welsh and—”

“And she is an abbess, Godiva. She is not marrying
anyone
.”

“She can leave the Church.”

Leofric shot her a sardonic stare. “She glances at Sweyn's buttocks and so you think she will foreswear her sacred oaths?”

“So you noticed her looking at them too,” said Godiva, as if that settled it.