Godiva

by Nerys Jones

  She lunged forward and tried to place Godiva as she had been, lying on her back, but as she pushed and strained, Godiva woke up, screamed at the sight of the nun’s face and fell onto her side with the loose nightgown falling off her shoulder. Everyone in the room saw clearly the long, red marks that ran from her neck to somewhere beneath the gown.

  ‘My God, you’ll pay for this,’ said the exorcist.

  ‘I can explain,’ the nun protested.

  ‘Yes, to your own abbess. Did you arrive by wagon? Then go back as you came. Now!’

  ‘Wait,’ the nun said, and then she began to cry. ‘I was only doing my best for her. I thought what I did would cure her. And I was so frightened myself. These devils hate the ones who struggle with them. I thought I would be possessed, too . . .’

  ‘Enough,’ said the exorcist. ‘Say all these things to your abbess. She will no doubt offer you a suitable penance and a cure for your soul. Go now.’

  Sister Mary and the novices vanished down the stairs, and soon the sound of wagon wheels could be heard, creaking too rapidly for safety as the nuns’ driver urged the carthorses to make the fastest getaway possible from Coventry.

  ‘My good lady,’ said Brother Michael, taking hold of Godiva’s hand, ‘I am sad that we should meet again like this. But you will recover quickly now.’

  The herbalist approached the bed and put a small silver spoon to her lips. For several minutes, as the tincture worked its way into her head, Godiva lay back with her eyes shut as the dizzy reeling that had sickened her slowly calmed down, grew faint and passed away altogether. After a while, when her head was clearer, she asked the monks why the Abbess of Evesham, who had once been her good friend, would have sent Sister Mary to her.

  ‘She didn’t,’ the exorcist said. ‘That nun tricked her way in here while the abbess was unwell. Sister Mary is notorious for imposing her will on weaker nuns. She has exceeded her authority for years, most recently by attempting to heal those whose minds are confused – something for which she is untrained. She probably came here, knowing how the penance would lower your spirits, and hoping to prove her merit as a healer so as better to defend herself in the bishop’s court. But now she has gone. So have some others, Godiva. You’ll find the priory much changed. Prior Edwin, a boy known as Cherub and several members of the choir have been taken to say what they can in their defence. Your confessor, though – a certain Father Godric – was deemed to be merely disorderly and was released to the care and admonitions of his wife.’

  ‘I should have dealt with them all myself,’ Godiva said, ‘but there were so many pressing matters, and they are cunning men.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Poor Cherub! What will happen to the boy now?’

  ‘Who can tell? As you know, lady, he suffers from fits. It would be a great kindness were you to let him come back to the priory. He has no enemies at St Mary’s and nowhere else to go.’

  Godiva nodded.

  ‘She seems strong enough,’ the herbalist said to the exorcist.

  ‘Then let me break the news,’ Brother Michael said to Godiva. He opened the palm of her hand and enclosed in it the huge, familiar gold ring that Godiva had seen on Lovric’s hand for years. The gold warmed her fingers quickly. Then, reluctantly, unwilling to face the message it conveyed, she held it up to the light and confirmed its ownership.

  ‘Tell me at once, does this mean he is dead?’

  ‘No. The earl is at the priory. He asks when he may visit you here.’

  For several minutes Godiva said nothing. The herbalist offered her some more of the tincture, but she refused. Her mind was clear enough: it was her heart that lay in two halves, one full of love, the other of anger. No medicine would bring them together. At last she took the exorcist’s hand.

  ‘Tell Lovric I need more rest. He could see me here tomorrow evening. Until then, if he will, let him look into the affairs of my priory.’

  As soon as the monks had gone, she eased herself out of bed, stretched her stiffened limbs and gingerly fingered the weals on her back. Contemptuously, she reflected that worse scratches were to be had from brambles on forest paths; a few drops of lavender oil would soon erase the irritating reminder of that hideous nun and her little instrument of spite and fear. Her muscles were still weak, it was true, and she felt tired and unable to stand as straight as she used to. But that would pass. As for her mind, the chaotic visions of the night after the penance seemed to have acted like a yellow bristle broom, sweeping the debris of the penance and the clutter of the summer’s miseries from all its corners, leaving it clear, untroubled and ready for whatever would happen next. Even ready, she thought, to face Lovric tomorrow.

  A few minutes later Agatha knocked excitedly at Godiva’s chamber door.

  ‘Them nuns from hell be gone already,’ she said gleefully. ‘I’ve warm water here to wash you clean, mistress. Gwen be making you a good breakfast. I’m going to put clean linen on your bed, with lavender flowers under the sheets, and you will have a day and night of perfect rest before the earl come here. You going to be well again, mistress, and beautiful too. The good old days have come back to us here in Coventry, praise Mary and all the saints.’

  Agatha rushed downstairs to help Gwen. But Godiva did not hurry to wash. She lingered by her chamber window and watched as the monks departed, and in the ensuing interval of silence, as the smell of frying bacon and sausages came up the stairs, she became acutely aware that the aching in her limbs was beginning to ease and fade away like mist steaming out of the wet earth when sunshine falls on sodden fields. Despite this, she sighed deeply. Old times, she knew, would not be coming back. Some things had changed forever, and tomorrow, when she saw Lovric again, she would find out what could continue and what had gone forever.

  Eighteen

  The Earl of Mercia would come in secret at dusk, riding an ordinary horse from the priory’s stables and wearing a monk’s robe over his cloak, its hood pulled over his forehead. His messenger said he wanted Godiva to send the servants out of the manor house, the yard and the stables. And he wanted a good dinner ready for him when he arrived. He is hopeful, she thought, but uncertain. He wants no premature shouts of welcome. ‘Yes,’ she said to the messenger. ‘Tell the earl that I await him at the appointed time.’

  That afternoon Gwen went into a frenzy of cooking, scouring the pantry for any delicacies that had survived the recent frugality. Agatha left her to it, and turned her attention to Godiva’s torn and faded beauty. She too was over-anxious to do the things that she had always done, to make the past come back to life at once. She offered to prepare a bath with soured milk in the water, and produced tinted cornflower for dusting Godiva’s skin after the bath. She found the oil used on the hooves of newborn foals and suggested a manicure. Then she got hold of some camomile and talked of washing her hair. But Godiva would have none of this and lay down alone on her bed until it was nearly time for Lovric’s arrival. Bored and unsettled, Agatha went off to find her mother. Bertha was in the store room, brushing everything she could get her hands on and scowling ferociously.

  ‘Them nuns,’ she said resentfully, ‘poking about, looking for the Devil and bringing moths in here with them.’

  ‘Hush, mother. No more about them.’ Agatha, discomfited by the too-recent memory of the nuns, wriggled around on her seat and stared at the lengths of fabric her mother had laid out on the table. Suddenly her eyes alighted on a long head-wrap she had not seen before. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It be old. Mistress say she wore it when she first met the earl.’

  Agatha shook it out and whistled with admiration. The length of shimmering mauve silk was finely embroidered at its loose end so that a cascade of seed pearls would seem to fall down the neck of the wearer onto her breast. How beautiful Godiva must have looked in this.

  ‘When she gets up I’ll show it to her,’ she said, wrapping up the silk carefully into a neat little scroll. ‘Perhaps she’ll remember, then, how she ought to look to meet the earl.’
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  But Godiva showed no interest in the pearl-strewn veil. Nor did she want her hair braided in the style Agatha had invented for her short hair, nor her face blotted with the tinted cornflour, nor her dry lips dabbed with reddened wax. Gwen’s delicacies were set aside in favour of a light stew with rye bread.

  ‘I appreciate your efforts,’ Godiva said, reading the surly contours of Agatha’s face. ‘But I want my husband to see me as I am now, not as a shadow of what I looked like before our troubles.’

  Agatha’s lip curled slightly. Mistress had taken to calling her horrible penance, her shame and her delirium ‘our troubles’. She seemed to want to remind everyone of the link between the famine, the threat of heregeld and her penance. But in the town the talk was only of the king’s dirty mind and how the lady had been fooled by the great and ghastly scopman of England. No one could get over it.

  ‘Very well,’ Agatha said sullenly. She still loved Godiva, but she was bursting to tell her to stand up for her good name. ‘How shall we do your hair then? We can’t just leave it dangling down like rats’ tails. It look truly bad, mistress, like you be not right up here,’ she said, patting the side of her head.

  ‘Agatha, how dare you!’ Godiva snapped.

  Agatha bowed her head in confusion, realizing she had gone too far.

  ‘Just make some small braids at the sides to keep it tidy, and then go away and leave me in peace.’

  Silently and deftly, her little fingers flying like a weaver’s shuttle, Agatha made several minute plaits that she finished off with bits of gold wire.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled and ran out of the room.

  Godiva watched her go, and felt her weariness return. It was immense, like a sea in which she bobbed about aimlessly, the lapping of its waves giving incessant voice to one idea: dear God, I am sick and tired of other people’s thoughts. My own are enough trouble for me. God help me tonight if Lovric tests my patience, for I truly have none left.

  The knock, when it came, was as it always was. Loud, insistent, but not too long. It was the knock of a man who expected to be let into his own home. Agatha answered the door, assured the earl that no one but Godiva was in the house and ran off to the lodging hall.

  Lovric, thinking how pretty the girl had become, watched her cross the yard and saw Odo’s boy, Wulf, run up to her, take her arm and say something. Wulf had grown at least four inches in the year since he’d last seen him. Nothing stays the same, Lovric reflected, and braced himself for the sight of Godiva.

  ‘In here,’ she called from the back of the house.

  He crossed the floor of the main room and stepped down into the kitchen. She was standing facing the hearth, stirring a small cauldron that contained the stew they would eat for supper. It would be a simple meal, served by a woman who seemed frailer and thinner than she had ever been before.

  ‘Eva?’ he said warily.

  She turned slowly and let him take his time absorbing what he saw. A spasm of pain crumpled his brow. She was almost as dismayed at the sight of him. He looked ten years older than when he had ridden away.

  ‘Did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘About the penance? No. Only that you had agreed to an act of contrition of some sort.’

  ‘Where were you when you heard? Who told you?’

  ‘In Bristol, about to take ship to Anglesey.’

  ‘And go to war against Edward?’

  ‘Yes. Eva, ever since I left you I have been making preparations to wage war against him. The only thing that delayed me was bad weather on the Irish Sea and the failure of some of the Welsh and Irish to rendezvous with me in time. That, and Godwin’s sudden loss of nerve. As things turned out, I never did go to war. On the day you left Egg Ring messengers reached me from Edward. He praised you and said he had forgiven all our sins. And Alfgar and Harry, too. I had no idea what he was up to. And no idea what he had told you to do. I only learned about this . . . so-called penance . . . in the priory, last night. I came here from Bristol as fast as I could, but I was too late to stop it.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, suddenly having nothing more to say. He too found he couldn’t carry on. After several moments she turned back to stirring the stew.

  ‘What shall we do, Eva?’ he asked eventually.

  She put down the ladle, folded her arms and turned to look at him.

  ‘The last time I saw you, you accused me of wanting a divorce and then you stormed off. The thought had never even crossed my mind until you mentioned it. I was angry at you, but I never wanted a divorce, Lovric.’

  ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was Edward, wasn’t it? He misled you – told you in Winchester that I had agreed to annul our marriage, agreed when I met him in the cathedral?’

  ‘You guessed?’

  ‘Yes. But not until I was in Egg Ring, listening to him give me reasons why our marriage should be annulled. That’s when I realized he must have said the same things to you, in Winchester. In fact, though, I had agreed to nothing at Winchester. It was later, at Egg Ring, that he said he would lift the threat to Coventry, and spare me the penance, if I agreed to divorce you. But by then you had already left me in a fury – and yet I refused to divorce you.’

  Lovric, remorse and anger clashing, looked away. ‘Eva,’ he said carefully at last, ‘don’t take what I am going to say now as an excuse for my actions. I said I was in the wrong, and I don’t mean to excuse myself . . .’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I was afraid you were leaving me, and that made me act rashly. But there was something else, too. Something that made me so angry I couldn’t talk clearly with you. I couldn’t believe you didn’t realize what that was, while we were quarrelling. It seemed as though you wanted me to put it into words, so we could argue about it and toss it around like any other matter about which we disagree. But it was too painful.’

  She ransacked her memory, but nothing came to mind.

  ‘I thought it might be obvious. It was to me, after Edward said it.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Godiva, you’re not going to deny it, are you? I’ve forgiven you already, so let us not go through lies and inventions now.’

  She folded her arms again, and was about to tell him to stop speaking in riddles, when she stopped. Her eyes met his, and she understood his meaning as plainly as if it had slammed into her face.

  ‘Oh Eva,’ he muttered. ‘That man, Bret.’

  Eyes shut, reeling, she leaned back against the wall. Minutes seemed to pass and neither spoke. Then she began to collect herself, retracing the events of the last month and looking amongst them for something she knew to be there, some key, lying amongst the chaos of conflicting stories and disparate memories. She went back to the point where Lovric had arrived in Coventry, blazing with anger, and her fear that he knew about Bret. She remembered in precise detail how his dagger looked, and the hilt of his sword in his hand, her own panic, and then her reassuring certainty that he could not possibly know anything about her infidelity. And then, as her memory grew ever sharper, she saw it: the little key to the big lie. Of course he did not know.

  ‘But, Lovric,’ she said slowly, ‘how could Edward have told you about Bret in Winchester? It is impossible. Nothing had happened between me and that man. Later – yes, I must admit it, but not then. Not in Winchester.’

  ‘I’m not lying to you, Godiva. That is what Edward said – you lay with that huntsman.’

  ‘Yes, Edward told you about it – told you before it happened.’

  Now it was Lovric who closed his eyes in shock. He said nothing for several moments, unwilling to admit the king’s victory in his game with them.

  ‘That man,’ he said at last, ‘that man was sent to seduce you. It was planned by Edward. My God, Bret didn’t even love you.’

  ‘No. He deceived me. And Edward deceived you.’ She paused, and for the first time in all their years together Lovric saw Godiva’s face in its bare, essential stru
cture, unadorned by smiles or any other expression of concern for him. ‘I can explain how Bret deceived me. I was tired and lonely, and he was young and handsome. If you had stayed at my side when I asked you to, I would not have gone with him. But as for you, how can you explain how the king deceived you? Why did you so quickly think badly of me? For years I put my jealous feelings aside and kept faith with you. But you . . .’

  ‘It’s true. I believed Edward instantly. I remembered how you and Bret looked when you left Winchester, seated beside each other. You seemed made for each other, happy together, good for each other. And I knew that was not true of you and me. I felt old, and I felt tarnished by all the compromises I’ve made and my half-truths. I could easily imagine you wanting another man instead of me.’

  ‘But why didn’t you act on your misgivings? It would have been so easy. One promise from you, one token of concern, and Bret would never . . .’

  ‘Stop it, Eva,’ he shouted. ‘I don’t ever want to hear that man’s name again. It’s worse still when you say it was my fault.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant . . .’

  ‘Anyway, the bastard is dead. I didn’t kill him, but somebody did,’ Lovric gloated shamelessly.

  Godiva blanched. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she murmured.

  Lovric paused, feeling less triumphal and a bit ashamed that he had broken the news so roughly. ‘Some scouts who were coming back to meet me found him near the London Road. He was face down in a stream. They believe he was murdered by king’s men from Cleley.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said again. ‘He made enemies wherever he went.’

  Lovric hung his head for a while. Then he remembered something else that had long been on his mind, a detail from the time of their angry parting. ‘I went to the priory and prayed for you before I left Coventry. I prayed that we would love each other again one day. Didn’t the prior tell you? He was listening behind a pillar.’

  ‘No. But I’m not surprised at him, either. He would have liked us to separate. With me away in some distant convent, he could have done as he pleased.’