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CHAPTER 14

There 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

The 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 likewises 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.”

As 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.

Godiva walked into the cool sunlight, squinting in the sudden glare. She cracked the seal on the letter. In Edgiva’s flowing hand were words reminiscent of their childhood scrivening:

To you, I lay down the secrets of my heart. I am fallen. I cannot free myself of his presence, though he be not by. What I crave and what I fear are become as one. I am distrustful of my own counsel, and would converse with you as with myself. Advise me immediately, before the problem takes on a life of its own, I beg you. Edey.

Godiva smiled, delighted. Leofric would have told her not to, would have told her it was unsympathetic, but she could feel only satisfaction. Edey was in love! With Sweyn! And Sweyn was in love with Edey! How delightful. And how very convenient, politically, for Leofric.

She called for parchment, quill, ink, and her green mantle. She settled on a bench outside the southern wall, with a board across her lap. It was chilly, but the air was fresh and the sun held promises of warmer days to come. She craves my advice. Usually it was the countess writing to the abbess, quoting plaintively the friendship letter. Edgiva wanted Godiva’s advice. Had that ever been the case? Ever? Suddenly the countess felt extremely wise and worldly.

She stared at the parchment. What should she say? What counsel did Edgiva really want? Surely she knew Godiva would never say, “Forget him.” And yet surely she knew Godiva could not say, “Run off and marry him” (although Godiva desired very much to say that). Did she desire Godiva to come in person? But Godiva could not do that until she had sorted out Edward’s demands. On the other hand, had Leofric not just suggested she seek out Edgiva’s counsel about submitting to the ride? Surely the two women could advise each other.

She stared at the blank parchment before her until her teeth began to chatter in the cool. She wished she were wearing her warmer stockings. She could not think of a reply. And she could not presume to ask for aid in her own dilemma if she was not helping Edgiva with hers. Although Edgiva’s, to be frank, was not a dilemma; it was merely an inconvenience. And a convenient inconvenience, by Godiva’s lights.

She took from Edgiva’s message that perhaps Sweyn knew. That they had perhaps acknowledged their feelings for each other, and had perhaps agreed to hide them, only now Edgiva found she could not.

Or, perhaps, she meant only that she had managed to keep aloof from him entirely, and now found the burden of perfect secrecy too hard to bear. What then should Godiva say to her?

I should tell her to tell him.

But the abbess could hardly tell the earl in writing, and when were they likely to cross paths again? They lived a dozen miles or more apart and occasion almost never placed them in each other’s presence.

There it is, Godiva thought. That is how I can help. She sat up straighter, finally dipped the quill into the ink, and wrote clumsily with numbing fingers: If you want her, you need but go to Leominster for her.

She rolled the vellum around two chilled fingers, moved the board aside, and went in to call for sealing wax, her warmer mantle, and a glass of hot wine. She sealed the message with her ring—a complicated signet of Leofric’s double-headed eagle above, her dragon below. Then she gave the scroll to her fastest messenger. He was a grown man who weighed barely more than a boy, and could travel two dozen miles a day—not in itself too remarkable, but he could continue on at that rate for several days on end.

“This is for Earl Sweyn of Hereford,” she informed him. “Find him at Hereford Manor, or if he is on circuit, follow after. Ask him to indulge me in a verbal response.”

As she went out again, heading across the yard to the carding shed with her hands cupped around the heated wine, she made a calculation. Sixty-odd miles lay between Sweyn and Coventry; if the messenger had half of today and all of two days after, and did not falter, then Sweyn might get the message the evening of the day after tomorrow. The following day, Sweyn could go to Leominster, and by three days after, she might receive news of what had transpired, either from Hereford or from Leominster. Hopefully something both to Godiva’s liking and to Leofric’s political benefit.

She was fond of Sweyn, but he had his father’s ambition and energy. Possibly his ruthlessness as well. He had recently made an alliance with Gruffydd of Gwynedd, the brutal Welsh chieftain who had killed Leofric’s brother Edwin in a gratuitous incursion into Mercia seven years earlier. The best way to contain the Welshman was to have sway over his chief ally. That was plain enough, and Leofric would agree with her.

Having recently taken two of the three Welsh kingdoms by usurpation, Gruffydd also wanted the third, the southernmost one. He had convinced Sweyn—and indeed, King Edward—this would be in England’s interest, as the current prince of the southern kingdom was raiding the marches even more often and more violently than Gruffydd raided them himself. When Leofric had learned last year about Sweyn’s pact with Gruffydd, he had spent a day raging about the rashness of the young, the rashness of the Godwins, and therefore the impossible rashness of Godwin’s sons. That Edward had blessed the Hereford-Gwynedd pact had only made him rage more.

Sweyn as their neighbor could become increasingly dangerous with time, unless there was a mitigating factor—such as his marrying Godiva’s closest friend. The Church would go into seizure about that, but every churchman Godiva could think of was either corrupt, untried, or dying. With the value of nuns eroding as it was, there would be little time to fret about an absent abbess—indeed, given how formidable a woman Edgiva was, the Church might be glad to be rid of her. Edgiva had organized and stewarded the abbey so magnificently that even the most ordinary of sisters might step in to replace her without the place going to ruin, so—decided Godiva—there was no harm done there. Now that Edward was married, and (one assumed) in the process of getting an heir, his niece’s potential offspring would pose no dynastic threat or complication.

Clearly, Sweyn and Edgiva marrying would engender far more good than ill. It would engender no ill at all, in fact, just some temporary upset with the Church, but nothing compared to most of the other upset the Church was already dealing with. Most of which it brought upon itself.

Satisfied with the reasoning, Godiva turned her attention from policy, which was tiresome, to choosing dye colors for the spring shearing, which was pleasantly distracting. She had in mind a new overtunic for next Christmas, and now was the time to ensure that the red she was after would be rich enough. But the dye required cockles from the coast, and so she elected not to have it made in Coventry. She settled instead on a simple blue that could be made from local berries.

She forgot entirely about actually responding to Edgiva in the process.

It was only that evening at supper that she was reminded, when she saw the Leominster messenger dining with the lower servants. She told the steward to invite the fellow to stay the night in hall, and then depart for Leominster in the morning with a verbal message: “Trust me.”