London - Edward Rutherfurd [87]
Using fat from the venison, Offa did what he could to make some oil to rub into the welts around her neck and shoulders. She winced as he touched them, but said nothing as he went to work.
They made no mention, then or later, of the night she had spent with the merchant. But when he asked her, “Is it true you’re pregnant?” and she nodded, he felt a sense of both joy and relief. Somehow the merchant’s intrusion into his life seemed marginal now.
“We’ll manage here for a few days,” he said. “Then I’ll think of something.” The river was long. Its valley was lush. The river would look after them.
Another new life also began by the river that midwinter. By the second month of the year, Elfgiva became certain that she had conceived.
“I’m sure it was on Modranecht,” she told her husband, to his surprise and delight. She also had a feeling, which she did not share with him, that this child was a girl.
There was only one duty that Elfgiva knew she still had to perform. It was not until the fourth month of the year, when the Anglo-Saxons celebrated the ancient festival of Eostre, to welcome the spring, that Bishop Mellitus returned to supervise the construction of the little cathedral church of St Paul’s. Work now proceeded rapidly. Cerdic and the local farmers provided extra labourers and under the supervision of the monks, and using the Roman stones and tiles that lay all around, they built the walls in a modest rectangle with a tiny circular apse at one end. Lacking the skills to attempt anything more sophisticated, they made the roof of wood. Standing near the summit of the western hill, it looked very well.
And it was just before the Eostre feast that Elfgiva, watched by her sons, was led by her husband to the little River Fleet, where she knelt by the bank while Bishop Mellitus anointed her head with water in the simple rite of baptism.
“And since your name, Elfgiva, means ‘Gift of the Faeries’,” the bishop remarked with a smile, “I shall baptize you with a new name. Henceforth you shall be called Godiva, which means ‘Gift of God’.”
The same day he preached another sermon to the people of Lundenwic in which he explained to them in more detail the message of the Passion of Christ, and how, after the Crucifixion, this wondrous Frey had risen from the dead. This great feast of the Church calendar was of supreme importance, he told them, and always fell about this time of the year.
Which is why, in the years to follow, the English came to refer to this all-important Christian festival by the pagan name of Easter.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, and the re-establishment of the old Roman city of Londinium – or Lunden as the Saxons called it – did not continue without interruption.
A little over a decade later, when both the kings of Kent and Essex were dead, their people revolted against the new religion, and the new bishops were forced to flee.
But once the Roman Church had established a hold, it did not give up lightly. Soon afterwards, the bishops were back. Over the next century or so, great missionary bishops like Erkonwald went into the remotest forests, and the Anglo-Saxon Church, with its several notable saints, became one of the brightest lights of the Christian world.
In the centuries that followed, Lundenwic continued to grow into a substantial Saxon port. Only long afterwards, in the time of King Alfred, did the Roman city take over from it again; after which the old trading post a mile to the west was remembered as the old port – the auld wic – or Aldwych. But this was far in the future. For several generations after Cerdic, the walled enclosure of Londinium remained a place apart, with only a few religious structures and, perhaps, a modest royal hall. Certainly there were few houses on the western hill when Godiva’s daughter used to wander there as a girl. But she could always remember how she used to see, every month or two, a cheerful fisherman with a white patch of hair on the front of his head cross from the spit of land on the southern bank in a little dugout boat, accompanied