Godiva (5 page)

He stood up and towered over her; she winced from the suddenness of it. He was a tall man and spoke directly downward to the top of her head. “Of course you would not
say
it. You would
imply
it. You are a mistress of the indirect, do you think I do not know it? I've watched you at your work, Godiva, I know your rule. If your plea includes so much as an inviting smile, I must reject the plea, or I will be perceived as having fallen for the smile.”

“Perceived by whom?” she demanded, trying to think how to salvage this. She had not expected any such astuteness from him; he had seemed socially inept in the past.

Edward sat on the bed again and gestured around the room. “You have done it before witnesses! Foolish woman, that is your great error. You shall get no satisfaction from me. You are dismissed. See her out, Alden, and then explain to me why you let her enter in the first place.”

And with that he lay back on the bed, brought his muddy boots upon the gold coverlet, and closed his eyes.

CHAPTER 5

H
aving failed to attain royal endorsement, Godiva now pursued the ecclesiastical.

Only the three great earls and the two archbishops were accommodated, all together with their retinues, in the hall. The rest of the Council attendees brought tents and pavilions and made shift in the courtyard or out on the green. Happily the weather had been agreeable for March, but Godiva was glad not to be among those awakening with cold dew on her face. On the other hand, it would have been a welcome change to go out into the clear air more regularly, rather than continually inhaling everybody else's exhales, as they had been.

However, having cleansed their lungs, most of the attending bishops retreated to the Holy Corner of the hall until dinnertime, enjoying the respite from Compline services and their more trying Lenten duties. Some half-score men in unseasonably vibrant silk dalmatics, albs, and hooded mantles, their necks and shoulders weighed down by chains and rosaries that put Godiva's to shame, stood about together muttering importantly. Near them, a half-dozen women in darker but still highly decorated garments, far too decorated for Lent—even Godiva knew that—clustered together around the celestially contained Mother Edgiva of Leominster.

Edgiva stood out for being starkly unadorned. She was always uncompromising in her costume.
She looks like the Virgin Mary dressed in mourning,
thought Godiva, reflexively checking that her own veil showed off her pale forehead. The other religious women wanted Edgiva's attention; there was an adoration there which she either did not notice or ignored. If Godiva did not know her so well, she would think her friend was lost in prayer.

But Edgiva seldom prayed—not in private, not the way the nuns had taught them to as young girls. She led her congregation through certain accepted sections of the daily services, but left to her own time she was more likely to be fretting silently about the rights of slaves than about her own immortal soul. To her, that was a kind of prayer. She would cross herself and count her rosary, but Godiva was certain that was no more “religious” than the way she herself fidgeted with her jewelry. Godiva decided that Edey was probably now fretting about the heregeld. Or perhaps Sweyn's attractive backside. She returned her attention to the prelates.

The man Godiva most wished to speak with was her friend, the sternly handsome, reed-slender Shepherd of Worcester, Bishop Lyfing. But Lyfing lay ailing in Tavistock Abbey; his subordinate, Aldred, was at the Council in his stead.

Lyfing and the ruling couple of Mercia had, for years, shared prejudices and preferences. King Harthacnut, almost as soon as he was crowned, had removed Lyfing from the Worcester see, accusing the bishop of murder. He restored Lyfing to Worcester just in time for Harthacnut to raze the town for its infamous tax refusal. There were probably no men alive who spat on Harthacnut's memory more than Lyfing and Leofric when they were in their cups together.

Besides his political alliance with Leofric, Bishop Lyfing was one of the few men of the cloth not appalled by Countess Godiva's industrious eyelash-batting. Other bishops endured her methods because she and Leofric sagely made enormous donations to several outlying religious houses. But Lyfing was indulgent of Godiva's mischievousness. He understood her. He was himself unorthodox to a degree his peers found alarming. He was not a dogmatic man; indeed, he regularly performed the Land Ceremony Charm with the farmers around Worcester. He saw it as a way to infuse Christianity into paganism, while other Church authorities saw it as a dangerous incursion of paganism into the lives of Christians. Many were the bishops who would have rejoiced at his expulsion, but preoccupied with their own machinations, they settled for spreading gossip about him in the hope that Rome might take an interest. The gossip—that Lyfing was a heathen-lover, a heretic, a pluralist—fell indifferently on the ears of his flock. To those he shepherded, Lyfing was known and beloved chiefly for consoling and rebuilding Worcester after the heregeld razing.

Godiva was very fond of Lyfing. And she knew that he would sign a petition.

But his deputy, Aldred . . . Brother Aldred was a different creature, their physical contrast a living metaphor. There was Lyfing's sleek frame and calm deportment—“flexible as a blade of grass no wind can bend,” as Leofric oft said of him—and then there was his deputy's thickset, ungraceful carriage, suggesting a heavy tree that even a breeze could buffet.

Aldred had attended the Great Council for three years now—as long as Sweyn had been an earl, as long as Edward had been king. He had always attended as Lyfing's subordinate. When Lyfing was absent for illness, Aldred always deflected, refusing ever to take a position on behalf of his superior. He had signed his name as a witness to charters, but on anything requiring policy, he declined to give counsel. Godiva and Leofric had no idea where he stood on anything. Leofric hypothesized that perhaps he was spineless by nature and thus could not stand at all.

He was certain to be the next Bishop of Worcester. Surely
any
Bishop of Worcester would want to see the heregeld abolished. How to make such a quiet, retiring one speak up, then? Godiva wondered.

Brother Aldred was just past the prime of life. He was from a wealthy Devonshire family and held estates from the Church, so he was not in need of material largesse and therefore he could not be bribed or rewarded. His face was pink and pudgy and his hair a thinning mouse brown, his body mercifully indistinct beneath his vestments. But he seemed comfortable in his homeliness, so appealing to his vanity would get her nowhere, and besides, after the embarrassment with Edward, she did not want to be called out for eyelash-batting. She would have to appeal to his sense of righteousness. She hoped he had one.

She glanced at the men of the Holy Corner. Brother Aldred was not among them. She wandered the crowded hall, ill-lit with rush lights and growing pungent again as people brought the twilight and their own odors back inside with them, and finally found him near the entrance to the kitchens.

Servants had pitched tents outside the hall to accommodate the extra food and preparation to feed so many bellies, even in this lean season. Aldred had taken it upon himself to hear confession of the kitchen workers. Perhaps this assured him a better selection of the wrinkled parsnips and salted trout. He'd set a stool near to the kitchen screen, where he was sheepishly examining several crudely half-painted eggs that had been set down, almost carelessly, upon a pile of strewing herbs. Servants scurried to make way around him; he was in the way and did not realize it, he was so self-absorbed. Important to know.

She pulled her scarlet veil modestly down over her brow, which felt slightly claustrophobic, as it had all those childhood years in Leominster Abbey. She commanded his attention with a nod and a smile. He stood when he saw her, but seemed unwilling to forsake his prime spot by the screen. For the sake of the servants as much as her own, Godiva gestured him to cross toward her, closer to the central fire pit.

“Your Eminence,” she said with a smile as he waddled in her direction. “I wish to speak to you on behalf of my foster-sister, Edgiva of Leominster. She is seeking a quorum of wise men who might, at the next Council, beseech His Majesty to abolish the heregeld. She is concerned that nobody is willing to do anything about this.”

He gave her a distracted smile. “Countess, do not disturb yourself about it. There was great promise today in the earls' oaths.”

“I do not think so,” Godiva said. “And I believe that if His Eminence Lyfing had been here, he would have stood with Edgiva.”

“He has not done so in the past,” said Aldred thoughtfully, fingering his rosary as if the gesture were a nervous tic.

“His Majesty has not been married in the past,” Godiva pointed out. “The marriage changes things. There will surely be an heir soon, and by marrying Edith he has healed his relationship with Godwin, which was the most volatile obstacle of his reign. So I do not agree with Sweyn about the need for despotism.”

He gave her a look. Godiva was familiar with that look. It was the look men gave her upon realizing she had enough intelligence to actually speak of things. “The young earl made a valid point,” he countered, almost apologetically. “We are not yet recovered from the turmoils of a generation. Naturally the king wants to maintain an independent army.”

“Until the mercenary army is eliminated, there is no possible way for the earls to trust the king—partly because of what happened at Worcester, partly because it upsets the natural order of the kingdom. He should surround himself only with his own men and the men his earls and thanes provide him. His army should be
us
, not
them
. Lyfing said exactly that to me. Has not the bishop ever said as much to you?”

“No,” said Aldred, embarrassed. He added, hurriedly, “His Eminence and I seldom discuss political matters. Until he raised me to subordinate bishop, I was an abbot, and cloistered, and not much concerned with secular matters of any sort.”

Godiva doubted this was true—she could not imagine any powerful family allowing even its least-promising member to grow up ignorant of politics. But it was typical of Aldred, to decline adding his own voice to any matter.

“Well, I have had conversations with His Eminence on this topic,” she said. “You would be acting in his interests and supporting his beliefs to add your name to a rostrum of great men who would see the tax repealed.” She gave him her ingenuous-yet-serious look and repressed an instinct to smile coyly.

He looked thoughtful. “I try to please His Eminence in all ways,” he said.

“Then you had best support this petition of Edgiva's,” she advised.

He pursed his lips. “I suppose I am willing,
conditionally,
to have my name associated with those who would beseech the king.”

Success! She repressed an urge to cackle gleefully. “I will let the abbess know at once,” she said quickly. “I am sure she will want to express her thanks to you most fervently. As do I.” That had been so effortless.

“But I will not put my mark to a petition until I have spoken personally with His Eminence once I am home to Tavistock.”

“Do you not think it wise counsel?” she said, surprised. “After all, what is your opinion of His Majesty?”

“I do not see why that matters,” Aldred said uncomfortably, his large cheeks reddening a bit. He had not once met her gaze fully. “I myself am . . . waiting to see what Edward makes of himself,” he added with excessive neutrality.

“As am I,” she said, reassuringly. “As is Leofric. And everyone else here, I am sure. Of course,” she added brightly, “if he does abolish the heregeld he will make friends much faster than if he doesn't.”

“Yes,” said Aldred, blowing out air from between fat pink lips. “But it is an enormous thing to demand of a monarch who is trying to establish his own power. And he is, you know, preoccupied with establishing his own power.”

She considered him. Might he be won by appealing not to his sense of justice, but rather to his ambition? She did not like to play that card—the only man's ambition she approved of was her husband's—but she wanted his support for Edgiva.

“Perhaps you might make yourself useful to His Majesty and encourage him to feel at ease with this proposal. It seems to me he has yet to take any particular Saxon prelate as a favorite. It might be in your interest to present yourself as a friendly counselor.”

He looked startled, and then blushed. “I forget you are a woman of the world,” he said, awkwardly. “I do not think that way. If His Majesty were to call upon me for assistance, I would of course be honored to assist him, but I am not as yet convinced he is made of such material as I would choose to align with.” For the first time he met her gaze. She was surprised to see his piggy eyes were a startlingly strong, deep brown, expressive and intense. For a moment she could imagine an earnest, insecure, intelligent child who chose the Church for refuge and Lyfing for a father. “Do not forget, my lady, I have been at Bishop Lyfing's elbow for years now. It would take a man of tremendous integrity to win my confidence as much as Lyfing ever did.”

“How dear of you to say so!” she said, warmly. This meant more to her even than Edgiva's petition. “There are so few who will admit to his goodness so freely; it is not in style to do so. You gladden me to speak this.” She grabbed both of his hands in both of hers, and pulled him to her and kissed him briefly upon the lips.

“What an appalling act of harlotry, under my roof, against a man of the Church,” said an angry, nasal voice behind her. Shocked, she released the bishop's hands and spun around to see long-legged Edward staring at her.

Aldred stumbled backward and nearly stepped into the fire pit, gasping. “Sire, she was only expressing—” he began, grasping his rosary so hard Godiva worried he might crush the beads.