Gloucester
In the time it took Godiva to wrest a concession from the young man, she could have as easily spun a skein of yarn. She did not much like spinning yarn; wresting concessions from young men, however, was agreeable enough. Gloucester’s dank great hall proved especially agreeable for concession-wresting; this was her third today. But Sweyn, who was absurdly handsome and had the intensity of a catamount, was her perennial favorite. At the moment she had him against a wall. The hall was full, bustling with men and women of rank, and he was certain they were all laughing at him.
“I concede that perhaps,” Sweyn allowed, at last, “accidentally, my herders might have strayed over the border. A bit. In that one valley.”
“Thus accounting for . . . ?” she prompted.
“Thus accounting for Mercian sheep,” he acknowledged, “ending up as mutton on Herefordshire tables.”
Her golden-green eyes, framed by her glittering veil, blinked expectantly. This was about more than poached mutton, and they both knew it, but each hoped to avoid saying so outright.
“And, of course, I shall make amends for that,” he said urgently into the silence.
The countess Godiva relaxed and smiled. “In what manner?”
“If you give me an accounting of the missing flocks, I will replace them.”
“That’s an excellent beginning,” she approved. With confiding tone she added, “But he’ll want more than that as recompense. Of course.”
“Of course.” Sweyn watched her sparrowlike hand flutter toward the spot on his chest where his leather cloak hung open. She watched him watching her; she could smell the mix of pleasure and dismay her movement elicited in him. It was a scent she was familiar with. “Lady Countess, pray but tell me what he wants.”
She stood up straighter, enough that he could breathe without inhaling her perfume. She clasped her hands together at her heart, her bracelets clinking importantly against her necklaces. “I suspect he shall like to hear that you will express your regret and replace the missing sheep twice over. That would be so very generous of you.”
“Oh, ’tis nothing,” said Sweyn, trying to maintain a shred of dignity.
“And I think perhaps building palisades, or earthworks that are defensible from our side, not yours, just to remind your naughty . . . shepherds . . . not to wander so far into Leofric’s land again.”
He stiffened, resisting, as she looked at him with one fine pale eyebrow cocked in warning. He frowned.
“Shall I call him over to ask if he would like that, or shall you trust my judgment on it?” Her fingers probed between the two sides of his cloak, coming to rest delicately beneath them on the decorative seam of his tunic. He pulled away, as if shocked by the touch. “I’ll build the palisades,” he offered almost desperately.
“And sign your mark to such a promise? Just so there is no confusion as to what we have discussed?”
“Yes,” he growled.
“And might you show me the progress, if we meet seasonally at the border?”
“Very well,” he said, a chastised child.
“Lovely,” she said. She moved her small hand so that the flat of her palm rested on his chest. He inhaled sharply, at which she smiled apologetically. Then unnecessarily lowering her voice she added, “What a shame Leofric will not be able to join us. Will you mind terribly a rendezvous with me alone?”
“You alone with half a dozen of your husband’s armed men, Countess. And no doubt a priest.”
“I shall send them all on an errand for an evening,” she whispered.
“Your methods of persuasion should be outlawed,” Sweyn said. “And I am not the only one to think so.” His handsome head nodded slightly to his right, and she glanced in that direction without quite turning her head.
When she saw whom he referred to, she pulled away from him on reflex, almost guiltily.
The redoubtable Abbess of Leominster was eyeing them from the Holy Corner of the king’s drab wattle-and-daub hall, where all the religious congregated between sessions of the Great Council. Godiva could tell it was the abbess by her remarkably erect carriage, and because there was no decoration whatsoever on her garments, hanging shapeless and dark about her. It was too dim to read the Face Superior—what little of it showed—but Godiva, knowing her so well, could guess her thoughts.
To avoid dwelling on them, Godiva turned her head in the other direction and saw her husband’s broad, slightly slouching silhouette near the hall door. He too had been eyeing them.
She stepped back from Sweyn abruptly again, as if they had been practicing a dance move and the musician had suddenly been shot. “Thank you, darling Hereford, I shall have His Majesty’s cleric take down your mark this evening after whatever tries to pass as supper.” And then, dropping all pretense of playfulness, she asked him firmly, but not unkindly: “Was not this better than Leofric accusing you before the Council of armed incursions?”
Before he could answer, she swirled to her right and walked, graceful and swift, toward the hall door where Leofric of Mercia awaited her.
Sweyn watched after her a moment, and then ruefully rubbed his face with both hands. Someday she will be old, he reminded himself. And will stop having this effect on everyone.
He glanced guiltily at the abbess, but could not read her expression in the dim light.
And he will himself build the palisades for us,” she said, her cheek resting on Leofric’s bare chest. “Under our supervision. Defensible from our side only. He will sign his mark to it tonight.”
“How great a danger do you rate him?”
She grimaced dismissively. “ ’Tis nothing serious. An impulsive youthful escapade in amorality, nothing strategic or even considered. Let it go, love. I’ve scared him into knowing better.”
They were naked together, wrapped in Leofric’s woolen mantle, in the feed room of the king’s stables.
“I am too old for this,” he said, regarding the setting of this clandestine tryst during the Great Council’s dinner break.
“No you are not, you’re merely spoiled from so many nights in feather beds,” she said with breezy affection. “Also,” she continued, fidgeting with the Woden amulet around his neck, “it is only nine men-at-arms that the redheaded thane at the Northumbrian border has to call upon for service, not fifteen as he told you. One from Wessex, if that makes any difference.”
“It doesn’t—but he admitted to fewer men? I’d think he’d have exaggerated to impress you.”
“Oh, no, he claims he has no need of more men than that. He does all the heavy soldiering himself, whatever that is supposed to mean. If I’m ever widowed or deserted, he’d be honored to show me what a man he is.”
“Of course he would.” His hand absently, affectionately, closed over hers, his rough thumb caressing her soft knuckles.
“I love the way your skin smells,” she said, “as if you have been out in the moors in the rain when the gorse is blooming.”
“The gorse is always blooming,” Leofric said, now stroking her pale hair. “Save your seductive commentary for the men who cannot have you.”
“And you assume you can have me, just like that?” She grinned up at him. “You do not believe you must needs earn me?”
He harrumphed. “A good thing I do not, as I would fail in the attempt, grey as I am.”
Godiva shifted within the woolen cloak, wishing the boards beneath them were cushioned with some hay. She tugged at his beard. “This is not grey, but silver.” She smiled with a girlish overbite, a private affectionate expression she saved just for him. “Yours is the silver that purchases my heart.”
“Spare me your poetic hogwash,” he said, sounding pleased, and kissed her.
In the time it takes to jog a mile, they were clothed again, oat husks swatted briskly off each other, and strolling back into the great hall. Here men and women were still milling and mulling in the lee of what had passed as Lenten dinner. Some of the more devout were praying at portable altars the king had set up around the perimeters of the hall. The trestle tables were being set away, the slops distributed for pigs and servants. Servants lifted and moved the benches and the few stools to create an awkward oblong corral with the king’s high-backed painted chair nearest to the fire pit. Lords, ladies, bishops, thanes, and all their retinues were moving like contrasting tides, some inward bound, some outward, some busy, some waiting. The earnest and abashed young Sweyn of Hereford had doffed his leather cape to demonstrate some wrestling moves to an admiring thane. In a few moments the final session of the Great Council would convene. And then eventually, thank God, adjourn.
“There you are.” She heard the abbess’s resonant alto. Godiva smiled and turned toward the voice, oddly maternal in one so young and delicate.
“Edey,” she said, kissing Edgiva’s cheek.
Abbess Edgiva kissed her back without smiling, then glanced at Leofric, her expression questioning.
“Yes, I saw her with Sweyn,” he assured Edgiva. “In fact, I set her on him. I noticed you watching like an anxious chaperone from a distance. Just as the fellow himself is now watching us anxiously. Do not turn, he’s directly behind you, Mother.”
“Perhaps he worries you are cross at him,” Godiva said to her husband.
“About poaching our sheep?” Leofric said drily.
“About Godiva throwing herself at him in view of you,” Edgiva corrected.
“Oh, that,” said Leofric dismissively.
“I will never understand you two,” the abbess said, blue eyes glancing from one to the other. “I believe you are devoted in your marriage, and yet Godiva behaves like a heathen strumpet almost daily.”
“I do not,” Godiva rebuked her affectionately. “I simply find flirting an effective way of getting a man’s complete attention while conveniently disarming him at the same time.”
“It is remarkable,” Leofric assured the abbess, “what crumbs of information men share with her that never would they share with me.”
“It is because you are not as pretty as I am,” Godiva said.
The abbess pursed her lips to repress both a grudging smile and chastisement. Her fingers—strong fingers, so out of place in a woman of such physical refinement—worried the rosary hanging from her undertunic. Godiva always suspected this was just a nervous habit, and that she would find as much comfort in worrying a river stone or an amulet of polished oak.
“My behavior hardly differs from your own, Edey,” the countess said. Sweyn had dismissed his wrestling partner and was indeed staring at them, apparently fighting off the urge to fidget, inching toward them. She pretended not to notice. “I use my beauty and you use your righteous gift of rhetoric, each to persuade men to behave as we believe they ought.”
“I persuade by winning over their higher faculties,” Edgiva retorted, “You, my daughter, appeal to their basest impulses.”
“We both achieve results, so what does it matter which means we use? We are neither of us abusing anyone.”
Although they had this conversation nearly every time they saw each other, Edgiva plunged into it again: “Are not you abusing your marriage vows with such behavior?”
“On the contrary, I applaud her skill,” said Leofric heartily. “While I exert my might and my right, she exercises subtler influence over the workings of the world.”
“I have nipped in the bud illicit affairs that might have destabilized the kingdom,” Godiva offered as example.
“You have promoted friendly marriages,” Leofric added agreeably.
“I have negotiated the fostering of noble scions.”
“Indeed you have. You,” he concluded, gazing at her with such admiration it almost made the abbess blush, “are a self-appointed matchmaker, not only of marriage but of harmonious relationships of all kinds. It is”—here he turned his attention back to Edgiva—“a talent inborn and unteachable, and rarer than military skill or political savvy. I would be a fool to consider it abuse.”
“Why thank you, husband.” As if noticing the Earl of Hereford for the first time, she called out genially, “Earl Sweyn, how do you? Join us. We have quite concluded complaining of you. I believe we are about to begin complaining of me.”
The young man reddened to his ears, and with leather cape draped over one arm, and a grim smile, he began to walk toward them, as casually as he could manage it, but looking as if he did not really wish to arrive.
“You are not always so enamored of her,” Edgiva was meanwhile insisting to Leofric. “I have heard you groan about her behavior often enough.”
“Yes,” Godiva agreed comfortably. “Occasionally he even wants to divorce me.”
“Occasionally you are very foolish with your . . . talents,” Leofric said. “Remember with King Harold’s—”
“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.