Godiva

by Nerys Jones

  ‘Glowering. Your eyes are big and dark as a wolf’s.’ She put her hand over her own eyes and muttered to herself, ‘God help me, I am not myself.’

  ‘You see?’ said Sister Mary. ‘You are exciting the demon in her. Leave at once.’

  ‘No,’ Agatha said, but the nun raised her whip again and Agatha backed away towards the head of the stairs.

  Godiva’s face was now wet with tears and her cheeks were livid with patches of bright red, as though part of her face was blushing and part was shameless. These were the blotches that many people said were the outer marks of guilt and unclean spirits.

  ‘Oh, Holy Mary,’ Agatha mumbled, ‘save my mistress from whatever is making her sick, and from this nun, too.’

  ‘Go,’ said the nun, as Godiva began to toss and turn and scratch her itching face. ‘Just go, girl.’

  Agatha did not stay to see more, but stumbled down the stairs and ran out into the yard where she knocked on the stable door. A groom let her in and helped her bed down in the straw. He looked at Agatha’s terrified face and glanced across at the manor house, where a candle’s light could be seen flickering in an upstairs window.

  ‘Everything all right up there?’ he asked.

  But Agatha had buried herself in a mound of straw and wasn’t answering. He looked back at the window, but it was unlit now and the entire manor was in darkness again. The bats and hunting owls were swooping about above the yard, with its treasury of voles and mice, muttering their murderous intentions to the other spirits of the night. I’d best get in, he thought. It will be dawn soon and all manner of bad things will be flying off home and looking to take someone with them for company. He crossed himself and turned to settle back down to sleep. As he did so, a piercing scream came from the manor house, followed at once by a second and a third. Then a bat brushed past his head, and a bird sang the first note of day.

  ‘God save us all,’ said the man.

  A few minutes later Agatha gave up trying to sleep and ran across the yard to the lodging hall.

  ‘What a to-do! What’s all this banging about?’ Bertha grumbled. She got up, climbed over the sleeping Gwen and crossed the straw-strewn floor. ‘It’s you! I might have guessed.’

  ‘Sh!’ Agatha whispered, ‘Let me in. I need help.’

  ‘What is it?’ Gwen called out from the bed in the corner of the room. ‘Light a candle someone.’

  Bertha fumbled with the candle, melting half of it in the cinders of the hearth fire before she got the wick to flame.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Agatha said when they could all see each other. ‘Mistress be in danger. Them nuns say the Devil got into her and they be all set on exorcising him. That old one, Mary, she got a whip, and if the Devil don’t run away quickly I swear she’ll use it on mistress to beat him out of her. Then they’d cart her off to Evesham and she really would go mad, and we’d never see her here again.’

  ‘Too fast,’ Gwen said in her laboured speech. ‘You said too much for me to understand. Why is there talk of evil spirits?’

  Agatha recounted all that had occurred since Godiva first complained of sickness in the night.

  ‘She ain’t been violated by no she-vampire,’ she snorted. ‘She be in shock, from the shame of riding naked into town.’

  ‘And from the chill of the drizzle on her skin,’ Gwen added.

  ‘And from them nuns praying non-stop for forgiveness,’ Bertha pointed out. ‘Prayer be like rich cake. A little be tasty and make you feel nice. Too much make you throw up.’

  ‘I know what’s wrong with her,’ Agatha said, ‘but I ain’t going to tell them nuns. They’d twist what I said. Like old Sister Mary saying the Devil put blood on that pillow. That stain was plain proof mistress got chafed when she rode with no saddle. But no, it had to be the Devil. They ain’t got no sense, thinking like that.’

  ‘Well, what do you reckon then?’ Bertha asked.

  ‘Something is vexing her sorely, someone she saw in a dream, all done up like a vampire. Now, Miss Milly said that Peter Mallet’s mother calls mistress bad names and laughs at her. I think Mistress Mallet be the vampire in the dream, for she be the one round here telling folk that mistress’s ride was not a true penance, but a cruel joke played by King Edward.’

  ‘If Godiva believes that, it would drive her mad,’ Gwen nodded.

  ‘Them nuns be driving her out of her mind,’ Agatha said. ‘But we can’t stop them. They won’t listen to any of us. What can we do?’

  ‘I know what,’ Gwen said. ‘Send for Brother Michael – the exorcist at the priory. That Sister Mary would have to listen to him.’

  ‘The one what came to see about you talking filthy?’ Bertha asked.

  ‘Yes. He said my stroke caused that bad talk, not the Devil.’

  ‘Then come with me to the priory, Gwen,’ Agatha said. ‘We’ll get this Brother Michael to help mistress before worse happens.’

  ‘No,’ Gwen said quickly, ‘take your mother.’

  ‘But she don’t know him,’ Agatha protested. ‘And she be likely to speak her mind and offend someone.’

  ‘True,’ Bertha agreed. ‘Anyways, why you be such a coward this morning, Gwen? After all mistress done for you?’

  Gwen, looking ashamed, tried to make excuses, but Bertha would have none of it.

  ‘Very well,’ Gwen said. ‘You ought to know. Coventry is rife with rumours. Ethel from the dairy told me last night. They are saying that a man, a stranger, was up in the tower, watching mistress ride naked. Some are saying what that Agnes Mallet says; that this was no penance, but a shameful spectacle contrived for some man’s pleasure – some important priest, or bishop. Some even say, for the king himself. There’s terrible anger in the town, and a lot of wild talk, and the monks are so fearful they won’t open the priory door at all now.’

  ‘They’ll open to us, though, if we start shouting out what we want,’ Agatha said.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Agatha,’ Bertha said. ‘And I’ll stand at the priory door and start saying things that will make them do anything to shut my mouth. Come on, Gwen. Stop all this cowardice. Put on your clean clothes, and hurry up about it.’

  They left the lodging hall and headed towards the back entrance of the manor’s yard, the one that led into the fields where the housecarls’ horses were pastured when Lovric was in residence. They kept their heads covered and bowed, and only for a moment did Agatha see anything that made her pause: three strange horses alone on the pasture. Altogether they were exposed to view for only a few moments, but long enough to catch the eye of Mercy, who was standing at the window to Godiva’s chamber.

  ‘The lady’s servants are leaving the manor,’ she said to Sister Mary. ‘Agatha and two older women.’

  ‘They are going for help,’ said Sister Mary calmly. ‘But they won’t get it. The priory of St Mary, Coventry won’t act against the abbey of St Mary, Evesham, not for mere serving women anyway.’

  She adjusted her headdress and cast her mind back briefly to the days when she was a humble cobbler’s daughter. She had learned since then how the world worked: it worked for the powerful and their supporters. It had once worked for that poor woman going out of her mind on her own bed, a woman who had been blessed with a great legacy – noble birth, great wealth, celebrated beauty and love as well – and who had squandered it all. She gazed with pity at the deeply sleeping Godiva. Ruined though she was, traces of her beauty survived. Why had she refused the king’s demands – which must have been just – and earned herself a dreadful penance from which her good name, and perhaps her health, would never recover? Didn’t she know that only great lords with armies could defy a king? A woman such as Godiva should have been compliant and ingratiating, dissimulating and canny. What was wrong with her that she placed the love of others – a town full of churls and an ageing husband – above her own self-interest?

  Suddenly, as though answering her question, a long-unvisited piece of scripture came back to her, a relic of her days as a novi
ce in Evesham when she had no status in the convent and sought only to find her spirit’s way forward from the cold desert of her childhood. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal . . . Love is patient and is kind; love is not envious; love is not boastful and is not puffed up. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things . . . faith, hope and love, these three endure; but the greatest of these is love.

  But she blotted out these futile sentiments by starting to pray. Patience and kindness were virtues she admired far less than discipline and order, and as for love, it had played no part at all in the great success that she had made of her life. It was an irrelevance. It was obvious – just look at her, Sister Mary, robed in authority, and then look at that other: Lady Godiva, cast up amidst the wreckage she had made of her own life. What folly. What waste. What a shame.

  Seventeen

  How Agatha missed her horse now. How she longed to gallop into Coventry in a cloud of fury as she came to the rescue of her maligned mistress. She felt like a vanquishing queen of the dark world, and she longed for burnished weapons with which to terrify all who stood in her way. But when people looked at her, all they would see would be Aggy, Bertha’s girl, plodding up the dog-fouled main street of Coventry alongside her mother, who was supporting Gwen as she leaned on a walking stick on her lame right side.

  The last time Agatha had seen this street was when Godiva rode in to do penance. Then it had been newly swept and the animals were tied up in their pens. It had been quiet, clean and respectful; today it was filthier than it had ever been, and hazardous, too. An underfed dog snarled at her from near the door of the first house. She hurled a stone and it ran inside, where a child immediately screamed and a man started shouting. Up the street, ahead of them, stood a white sow with her farrow suckling beneath its massive, garbage-filled belly. The strongest creature in town, the sow stood her ground as the three women approached, lowered its head and squinted ferociously. The women from the manor froze.

  ‘Piggy! Come here!’ shouted the tinsmith’s wife, brandishing a bucket of slop as she ran into the street. The sow glimpsed the bucket and trotted off towards the pig-pen at the back of the house. The nervous women resumed their trudging progress up the incline, which – though slight – was making Gwen gasp and complain.

  ‘Wait,’ shouted the tinsmith’s wife behind them. She was not much older than Agatha and caught up with them quickly.

  ‘I must warn you,’ she panted. ‘The street is dirty because things in town are bad. People say we got no future here and it be better to think of going back where we come from. Be careful up by the town cross, in case some insult you. What you want in town, anyway?’

  ‘Mistress be sick and we be going to the priory for help,’ Bertha said, scowling at the young woman.

  ‘Mistress Godiva, sick? What kind of sickness?’

  ‘None of your business,’ Agatha snapped.

  ‘Well, you be going the wrong way, looking for help at the priory. Prior be gone, and Cherub, and some others, too.’ She crossed her arms in satisfaction as she saw the confounded look on their faces.

  ‘Gone where?’ Agatha asked, less haughty now.

  ‘No one rightly know. But they rode off yesterday afternoon, right after Godiva’s penance. There were two important men with them, and a group of soldiers guarding them all. One of the men was very tall and thin, and the other was very strong and had on a great big ring. They all wore helmets with visors and no one here knows who they be.’

  ‘We’d best continue,’ Agatha said to Gwen and Bertha, ‘and find out what we can at the priory.’

  But they had only reached the door to the house of Frith the baker when they were stopped again. Frith came out to meet them, and so did the tanner and his wife and their boy Tom. Then came the cobbler, the wood-turner and the candlestick-maker and his wife. They gathered round the three women, enclosing them in a ring of surly, jostling faces.

  ‘How is our lady?’ Frith began. Agatha quailed, for it seemed he was sneering. But she could not be sure. ‘I hear say she be abed,’ he went on, insinuating that he had heard much more than just that. ‘In bed, and tired, like.’

  Agatha didn’t answer him. Frith had been at the fore when Godiva gave out the flour rations that saved people’s lives. If he now openly despised her, what would others think? She shivered with fear, and her mother, noticing, folded her arms high across her bosom as though expecting more trouble.

  ‘Does Godiva know what has happened in the priory?’ asked the cobbler.

  Suddenly they were all talking at once, bombarding Agatha with questions. She was unprepared for this interrogation and folded her arms like her mother and stared back at them with narrowed, hard eyes.

  ‘And when will she lift the barriers at the roads and let the drovers back through? I get no skins to tan these days. The culling be done. She should get out of bed and open the roads.’

  ‘And we’re hungry again,’ the candlestick-maker’s wife said. ‘I lost one baby and now my other little one be ailing. When is Godiva going to be mistress here again?’

  ‘When she’s well, of course,’ Agatha said, finding her tongue. ‘Now tell us about the priory. We know nothing at the manor, except that nuns came to us from Evesham . . .’

  ‘To cure the lady of devils!’ said the wood-turner’s wife. ‘For she be a witch, and that’s why she done so bad a penance. That’s what some folk say.’

  ‘That’s what them nuns say,’ Agatha shot back. ‘But I didn’t expect treachery like that out of your mouth, missus.’

  ‘That ain’t no treachery, for many of us be thinking that. Watch your mouth,’ said a hefty girl who helped out at the inn. She had brought some friends up from the inn with her and now they closed in on Agatha, breathing foully into her face and muttering soft curses.

  ‘Come on, Aggy,’ Bertha said, putting herself between Agatha and the gang of girls. ‘No use talking to this lot.’

  ‘Wait,’ shouted the cobbler. ‘There’s more. Some are saying that the tall, thin man, what stayed in the priory the night before the penance, got into the tower and could watch Mistress Godiva come into the square. And they say the other man had a big ring on his finger and bossed all the monks around like he were a bishop . . .’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Agatha. ‘These stories are of no use. I don’t know what be true.’

  ‘But listen to this, then,’ the tanner butted in. ‘They’ve found the body of that huntsman from the manor. The one they say the lady liked.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a stream, on the road to London. And it weren’t no accident. He been pushed into the gravel so hard you wouldn’t know his face. Them that found him knew him only by his clothes. And one thing more, beside his body they found something you would not expect on a huntsman – a silver cross with a garnet in the middle. Valuable. Looks like the killer were a man in orders, and he lost his cross when he struggled to keep the fellow down.’

  ‘And then, too,’ Tom butted in, ‘there be the matter of Bret’s horse.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’ Agatha asked fearfully. ‘You been peeping again, Tom?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the boy cockily, risking his father’s hand. ‘One evening Bret disappeared, and that same night I saw two men ride into the priory yard with Bret’s horse tied to the saddle of one of them. I reckon . . .’

  ‘We reckon,’ said his father.

  ‘We reckon the men who came to the priory killed Bret, and one came back later with a third one, him what was fixing to watch Godiva, and these men be high-ups in the Church.’

  ‘And there’s something else,’ said the cobbler. ‘There be some new monks running the priory now. The Prior and Cherub and a few others be taken away. Looks like they’ll be before a church court to answer some questions.’

  ‘Now listen here, you good women of the manor.’ It was Frit
h the baker, more worked up than ever. ‘What we here in town all be asking is this – why was Godiva never sent to no church court? How come she be sentenced to a cruel penance, just like that? It don’t seem right. Rich or poor, all should be punished according to law. Even the prior going to get law. But it look to us like she were punished according to whim, by some bishop, or even by that unmanly king that we never see but everyone say can’t lie with no woman, but only look at her instead.’

  ‘And we don’t like it,’ said the town crier, who had just joined the growing crowd. ‘None of us ain’t going to pay no tithes to them there monks, priors, abbots and whatnots, till we be sure they got nothing to do with setting a trap for the lady of our manor.’

  ‘And,’ added Frith, ‘some be saying worse. Like, they would burn the priory down and take whatever they have in there. And give Godiva back her rosary. And you, missy,’ he said to Agatha, ‘they want to give you back that bag of coins you said was Bret’s Judas money.’

  ‘No! Stop all this talk!’ Gwen interrupted, jabbing with her stick at those who had moved too close to Agatha. ‘You people want to burn down the priory while your lady is still sick in bed? How would that help her? Have you lost your reason?’

  ‘Not as much as you have, crone,’ the innkeeper sneered. ‘Folks here have lost hope. Lost their faith in Godiva and the earl. They see themselves going back to poverty in some small hamlet in Arden Forest. What reason do they have to expect a turn for the better? Even if Godiva gets her strength back quickly, what can she do? She’s impoverished and so are we; her priory will probably be put under another monk’s rule; and we here are ripe for plundering by bandits, for we have no protection. The earl and his soldiers have gone away and may never come back.’

  ‘Exactly!’ exclaimed the candlestick-maker. ‘Why should he? His wars be always in the west and his family here be ruined. They say Alfgar be practically an outlaw, and Harry a . . .’ he avoided the word, ‘and his wife is being called “the holy harlot” and such like. That whole family be ruined. The king don’t like them, that’s why.’