Coventry
Having been raised in Leominster Abbey, Godiva had exquisite penmanship, and she herself wrote to the new Bishop of Worcester. She did not much care to have anyone else, not even her most discreet scribe, know the substance of it.
Your Eminence, she wrote, the quill casting a long shadow over the parchment as Leofric paced behind her in broody agitation. He was nursing his second glass of mead. The monastery bells distantly tolled Compline.
I write to express my great pleasure that you have been raised to your new position as Bishop of Worcester following the sad passing of our esteemed Bishop Lyfing.
“I cannot conceive you would contemplate this,” Leofric said for the seventh time that hour.
The Bishop placed great faith in you and I am confident you will honor his memory now that you wear the mantle.
She paused and read this aloud, wondering how obsequious she would need to be.
“If you must pursue this, go and speak to him in person.”
“There is no time for that. The lambing will begin soon.” She dipped the pen into the well again and then wrote, saying the words aloud as she penned them,
“I seek your guidance on a remarkable matter that has been set before me this afternoon by His Majesty. As you may recall I am assisting my esteemed friend, Abbess Edgiva of Leominster, in a protestation of the heregeld. His Majesty graced us with an unexpected visit to my estate of Coventry to celebrate Easter with us.”
“You sound like a self-important gossip.”
She raised her head and pivoted it elegantly to look over the scarlet veil draping her right shoulder. She gave him a sultry look. “No. I do not,” she said. “You sound like a curmudgeonly fishwife.” She returned her attention to the letter. After sketching out Edward’s ultimatum, she came then to her point:
“Your Eminence, I am prepared to make this ride, at the king’s pleasure, if it will protect my people from His Majesty’s machinations.”
“It won’t,” Leofric said brusquely, and drained the cup.
“But I hesitate to commit to this ordeal unless the Church condones it. It strikes me as a very heathenish act to perform on a day still tinged with heathenish associations. Do you believe His Majesty means to endanger the immortal part of me, or merely to blemish my reputation? I do not oppose a blemished reputation if it saves my people from hardship. But as good a shepherdess as I try to be, I must not risk my soul for them. Your Eminence, you are the only man whose advice on this I trust. I beg you write to me, or summon me to Worcester to speak in greater depth. I am deeply grateful for your consideration. Leofric and I intend to come to Worcester soon, to make an offering at the Cathedral in celebration of your ascension—”
“No we do not,” said Leofric, reading over her shoulder. “If you wish to court Aldred’s favor, you are free to do so, but do not speak for me. I do not trust that little piglet of a man. He appears to me a cipher.”
“Lyfing’s sandals are hard to fill,” she said in a pacifying tone. Squinting in the lamplight, she waved a hand over the ink to speed its drying. It was foolish of her to have worn her favorite blue tunic while writing, but she had not spilled a drop.
“He was trying to fill Lyfing’s sandals three years before Lyfing had vacated them,” Leofric clarified.
“Lyfing was ill,” she reminded him. “He requested Aldred’s assistance, and Aldred has never overstepped his bounds. Indeed, I have found it a challenge to coax him to even approach his bounds.”
“Let us see if that remains true, now that he is himself bishop,” said Leofric. He sat heavily on their bed. “I still cannot conceive that you would consider this.”
She stood and turned to face him. “What else should I have done?” she asked.
“You should have let me pay the tax,” he said.
“The manner in which he would levy it makes him a tyrant.”
Leofric snorted and ran his finger along the elaborate gilded decoration on the glass he held. “It is naive to think this kingdom is ready for anything except a tyrant. Sweyn Godwinson was right: the king requires a whiff of despotism.” A grimace. “This, however, is much more than a whiff.”
“I think he is sincerely grateful for an opportunity to demonstrate he is not like Harthacnut,” she argued.
“He is grateful for this opportunity to ruin you.”
“That is not how I see it at all,” Godiva said reassuringly. “He and I would be staging a morality play for the rest of the kingdom. If one does this thing, the king will do that thing. That thing is not pleasant, but it is not despicable.”
“I find it very despicable.”
“Razing a town is despicable. Making somebody ride naked on a horse is quite an improvement over razing a town.”
“Razing the town was punishment for the townsmen committing murder.”
“Forcing an earl to raze a town over which he is liege—that is despicable.”
Having no response to that, he slumped back on the bed. Godiva loved the somber dignity of his carriage, even slumping, even aging now. His was the most dignified slump in all of Albion. She bit her lower lip to contain a grin, knowing how out of place he’d find it.
“He would not ruin me,” she said. “I would survive it.”
“Would you?” Leofric said, almost under his breath. He patted the empty mug with his left hand, and his rings struck the sides with tenor raps.
“I have ridden a horse bareback. I do not think the removal of a few layers of skirt is going to destroy me,” she said.
“Your physical well-being is not a concern; I know you for a strong rider,” Leofric said impatiently. “He is a shrewd man, Edward. He knows how you work. Once you are associated with such an act, you will never have the same freedom to tease and coax any man who is not an idiot.”
“I can make most men idiots,” she said, trying still to make light of it.
He gave her a look and sat up straighter. “It is one thing to believe oneself the special object of a lovely woman’s interest—even if you know you are but one item in her large collection of special objects. But, Godiva, if you do this thing, you shall have such a reputation on your shoulders, no man will allow himself to exchange three words with you. Either they shall think you truly wanton, which is Edward’s intention, and avoid you for their own reputations . . . or else they will be too proper and polite to you, lest they remind you of your shame. Either way, you would lose your power.” He shrugged in resignation. “I would love you no less, but it would be a shame.” He gave her an almost fatherly smile. “You have been a very useful coquette, all these years.”
“I’ll teach Edey how to flirt, and she may take over the practice from me,” she said. “Of course her loyalty will first be with Sweyn, but I am sure that if she learns anything of value . . .”
He laughed with tired exasperation. “Will you stop that?”
“You saw how she looked at him—”
“You look at him that way too, Godiva, but I have never for one moment worried I would lose my bride to him. If I do not fret about that, I am sure the Lord frets even less.”
She tucked her chin down, tipped her head to the side, and gave him a knowing look. “You do not fret at all?” she challenged. “Not even for the moment between an inhale and an exhale? Ever?”
He gave her a grim grin. “No,” he said. “I do not. If I did, I would not trust you with a priest, let alone a man like Sweyn.”
“What does that mean, ‘a man like Sweyn’? Does he have a reputation for roughness with ladies? If he does, I must protect Edgiva from him.”
His eyes narrowed with wry amusement. “First, you need not protect Edgiva from anyone, Godiva. The Church does that. The walls around the abbey do that. Propriety does that. Second, to answer your question, I do not mean Sweyn has a reputation, beyond being a bit dangerously fetching for a bachelor with lots of land and power. Godwin should get him married off at once so that he stops being a temptation to all the married ladies.”
“If he is a temptation to us now, why would he be any less a temptation when he’s married?”
“Because until he’s married, he might tempt some married women to arrange to become widows,” Leofric said.
She grinned. “I shall have the cook poison your soup.”
He moved back to the bed, sat on it, and patted the space beside it. “Put that quill down and come here, my little scribbler.”
“I have not finished the letter yet.”
“Do not finish it, Godiva. Do not send it. Do not even contemplate this.”
“I must,” she argued.
“I will pay the heregeld for you,” he said. “It is not your doing that Edward has placed this burden on you. He thought he would be placing it on me. In a sense, it is my fault that you are in this position, so let me resolve it for you. Let me resolve it for me. I have already suffered through one heregeld revolt; do not make me suffer through a second.”
She placed the quill down carefully on a piece of scrap vellum next to the letter. She moved to sit beside him on the bed. “Admit it, Leofric,” she said in a soft voice, giving him her most inviting smile. “You would love to see me riding naked on a bareback horse. You want to watch. You want to see my bare thighs squeeze tight against the horse’s hide, so you—ha!”
He had grabbed her round her girdled waist, lifted her up, and tossed her into the middle of the bed. “You are such a vixen!” he said, with a huff of frustrated bass laughter, twisting until his body stretched over hers. She loved the feeling of his weight on her.
“ ’Tis true, though, isn’t it?” she crooned to the bed’s canopy, running her fingers through his hair.
“That is beside the point, Godiva.”
She raised her head to grin at him. “So I am right. You long to pull me naked off the horse and take me right on the grass with the sunlight illuminating all our—”
“Stop that.” He laughed, raising his hips away from her when she wriggled. Then, sobering: “It does not matter what your husband would find provocative in private. It matters only what seems prudent in public, and you know that, so stop preening.”
“How could it look ill?” she asked. “I am obeying the will of the king in order to protect my people from unfair taxation.”
He pulled himself off of her, and off the bed, and then stared down at her, still aroused despite his irritation. “My wife rides naked through the streets of one of her villages. By the blood of all the saints, how could anyone take that amiss? There is no risk whatsoever of unfortunate rumors springing from that. It would occur to nobody, ever, to wonder if you had gone mad, or taken up with pagans, or become a prostitute. No, clearly, everyone who hears of it will think, Oh, yes, Godiva, that modest, retiring lady of Mercia—she is goodness, humility, and purity embodied, look what a model subject and ruler she is being, both at once.”
“I do not care what they think—”
“I care,” said Leofric. “You are not the wife of some minor thane. You are married to one of the three great earls. As a result of such a ride, there might be only two great earls remaining.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “As long as the Church is not opposed to it. In fact, I wager the bishop would be willing to go on record praising me for my humility.”
“Humiliation is not humility,” said Leofric impatiently. “I think perhaps both you and King Edward have forgotten that.” He walked away from the bed, pacing with long strides and rubbing his hair askew at the temple, as he always did when he was agitated. “Come along, love, if you insist upon writing this, finish it and send it out at daybreak. If Edward has set something in motion, let us at least be finished with it as soon as possible.”
She rose from the bed.
“But promise me,” he said, as she settled on her stool, “that if Aldred advises you against this, for whatever reason, you will refuse to make the ride? And allow me to pay the heregeld for you?”
She paused a moment, looking into her lap. “But you do not like Aldred. Why would you have me make a decision based on the counsel of a man you do not trust?”
“We give more to the Church than anybody else. Godwin is not known for generosity or piety, Siward is half pagan, and nobody else has near our means. Regardless of what I think of the man’s strength of character, he will look after us because that is a way of looking after himself and his interests. If he advises against it, there is a very good reason for it. So.” He pointed to the letter. “Finish writing that immediately. What is taking you so long?”