by Sarah Bower
Then she panics, but instead of retreating from the wedge of light falling through the open doorway, she freezes. He must see her, he is scarcely ten paces away, and yet he does not. The Devil knows what he does see, but it isn’t her.
“Fermez la,” he says to no one in particular, with a slight shiver and a weary wave of his hand toward the door. As one of his attendants hurries to do his bidding, Gytha snaps back into reality and slips away, back across the yard and out into a narrow lane leading down between Lady Edith’s compound and the rear wall of the priory hospice to the main street. The priory is the place to go; the prior will know what to do, and she will be safe there. She can rest overnight and decide what her next step should be in the morning. She is wet and worn out, cold to her bones, with nothing in her mind but a longing for somewhere warm and dry.
Emerging from the lane, her way is blocked by a covered cart. More of the bishop’s loot, no doubt, but no, she can hear voices, women’s voices, low and anxious, then a sudden cry, piercing, anguished.
“His heart! Where is his heart?” A slap. Some French. Gytha shrinks back against the hospice wall. Then the unmistakable boom of Skuli, whose malformed spine has deepened his chest into a kind of sounding box so his voice echoes around inside it.
“You take your hands off her, you ugly Norman c…” Silence. Peering around the edge of the wall, Gytha sees Skuli sink to his knees in the muddy wheel ruts, hands clutched to his chest as though in passionate prayer, except that the haft of a Norman pike protrudes between them. As he falls forward, his killer kicks him.
“Cochon,” he spits before turning his attention to the gaggle of women clustered beside the cart, herded together by two more Norman soldiers with weapons drawn.
“His heart!” Again that anguished wail from Lady Edith. Gytha starts forward out of the shadow of the wall. The soldiers’ backs are turned. They do not see her, but Edith does, and for a second her eyes clear. She shakes her head, so slightly it might easily be mistaken for a tremor of fear or cold, flicks one hand at Gytha as though wafting away a troublesome insect, mouths a single word: “No.”
She has gone too far. One of the soldiers throws a quick, sharp glance over his shoulder. Holding her breath, Gytha steps back against the wall, putting her foot down as slowly as she dare, toe to heel, like dancing. It seems to take forever.
“A qui parles toi?” growls the soldier.
“The king, of course.” Edith gives an inane giggle.
The soldier shrugs. “Foue comme une hase,” he says to his companion, making a circular motion with his hand beside his temple. Then, “In,” he says in English, prodding Trudy, who is nearest to him, with the point of his pike. She screams, echoed by one or two others. The women cluster around Edith, who stands her ground. The soldier shrugs, leans his pike against the tailgate of the cart, then picks up Trudy and bundles her inside. At this, Edith holds out her hand for assistance, almost as though inviting her captor to walk her in to dinner, and climbs onto the back of the cart followed by the rest of her women. For a second, Gytha’s heart is empty of everything but love and admiration for her mistress, the way she keeps her dignity intact, snatching a last, small victory from this catastrophic defeat. Then the soldiers close and bolt the tailgate, one of them slapping it twice with the flat of his hand to signal the carter the women are all aboard.
Whatever Lady Edith ordered, Gytha cannot simply let them go like this, dragged off to whatever fate Bishop Odo has in store for them like a load of pigs to market. Yet she is Lady Edith’s woman, sworn to serve, not to question, though it is more her nature to question than to serve. As she struggles to force some order into her thoughts, to stop the maypole dance in her head, the cart creaks into motion and begins to pull slowly away. Now, it must be now. A couple of steps, a jump, that’s all. But she cannot. Her legs buckle and she sinks down, trembling like a frightened dog, into the mud of the track, her back scraping against the hospice wall.
Everything. Home, honour, the joy of living there was in Lady Edith’s cornflower blue eyes and the laugh King Harold used to say sounded like a wood pigeon’s love call. He has taken everything, packed it up in a wet cart and dragged it down into the vortex of his greed. If she lives, she will find him and kill him.
***
By the time she comes to herself, night has fallen, bringing with it the total, almost solid dark of winter. Her hands clamped around her knees are the merest bone white glimmer. Only as she clambers unsteadily to her feet and feels the weight of her soaked clothes pressing down on the backs of her shoulders is she certain her body still exists. The rain has stopped and a wind has risen which seems to drive every cold, wet fibre of her gown into her flesh like a tiny cheese wire. The sodden rope of the braid down her back threatens to break her neck. Such beautiful hair, Lady Edith used to say, watching Gytha comb out the dark, glossy coils. Her own was fine and fair, soft as feathers against her long, white neck.
Was? Is. She cannot be dead. They had it from the bishop’s own mouth, from the Bastard’s brother himself, that there would be no executions. They will send her into exile, surely, to Ireland perhaps, where she has kin, where she can set up a new court and work for her children’s future. She will want Gytha then; Gytha is her favourite. She will spend tonight in the priory church, and tomorrow she will set about finding her mistress.
Tonight. Night. A curfew will be imposed at dusk, the bishop had said. If the Normans catch her now, they are bound to run her through first and ask questions afterwards, and she will only be reunited with Lady Edith in heaven. And not even there, after what she has done. But her motives were good. What matters most to God, thought or deed? A sudden blast of noise, laughter, raised voices, a dog barking, as the door to Lady Edith’s hall swings open, light leaking dimly through chinks in the compound fence to illuminate the ruts and puddles in the lane. Gytha shrinks back against the hospice wall, sidling cautiously toward where the lane opens into the street alongside the priory gatehouse. What does not seem to matter to God is the fate of the English.
She hears footsteps approaching on the other side of the fence, then silence. The night is so quiet under the curfew she can hear the man breathe, heavily, as though he has eaten and drunk to excess. She holds her own breath, her back pressed against the hospice wall, wishing she might simply dissolve into it, wet flesh into sodden plaster, bones to lath. Urine splashes into a puddle, the footsteps move away again; she lets her breath go in a long, shaky sigh and creeps out into the lane where she knocks stealthily on the priory gate and whispers her claim for sanctuary.
***
The church is packed. Entire families have established little encampments, barricading themselves behind stacks of their possessions. Some who were in the square sit alone and silent, hugging their knees to their chests, staring into the dark spaces between pools of smoky, orange tallowlight. Others huddle together, passing round casks of ale, noisily denouncing the occupation, inflaming one another as though their brave words are sticks rubbed together to make fire. A group of girls and young men sidle around each other, taking advantage of the unusual circumstances and the preoccupation of their elders to have unchaperoned conversations. Flurries of words and giggles are whipped up like dust devils and as quickly die. Hands touch then start back as if burned. Looks flicker, blushes flare. The wounded have been laid out in the choir, where the monks tend them, unhurried, unquestioning, sure in their knowledge that all this is less than a blink of God’s eye, that golden Harold Godwinson and William Bastard, for all their grand titles, all their virile swagger, are no more or less to God than the sparrows in the rafters or the spiders whose webs they have pulled from the corners of the church to staunch bleeding.
Finding herself a little space behind a pillar, wrapping herself in her cloak, Gytha falls into a deep, exhausted sleep, lulled by the warmth of the bodies around her, by the mundane domesticity of crying children, smells of tallow and wet wool, the monks performing the night offices in whispers, crammed
into the little space left to them around the altar. She does not awake until after Prime, as bread and water are distributed, with a little milk for the children, and rueful jokes are cracked about the feeding of the five thousand. Then the monks, who are the only people who can quit sanctuary without fear of arrest, set about emptying pisspots, taking wet clothes to be dried over their laundry fires, foraging for food and news of friends and relatives on the outside.
Immediately after Terce, a knocking comes on the west door of the church, reverberating around the suddenly silent nave. Mothers hush their children, conversations tail away, even the wounded cease groaning as the prior unbars the door to reveal the Bishop of Bayeux in the full regalia of his office, his mitre on his head, the jewels in his gold crook, and the cross borne behind him winking in breezy winter sunlight. The weather is so transformed it is as though the world outside the church has somehow become somewhere else during the long hours of that miserable night.
Bishop and prior converse in Latin, though Gytha, quietly unlacing her shoes and rolling off her hose to give her feet a chance to dry in the sun that strikes warm through the windows in the lee of the wind, can understand enough of what is said to know that the prior stands his ground and refuses to let the bishop enter sanctuary, for he may be a bishop in Normandy, but here he is a soldier and an enemy of the people of Winchester. To which the bishop responds good humouredly that God makes no distinction between one side of the channel and the other, that heaven forbid he should violate sanctuary, but that he has come to guarantee the safety of those who will leave, as King William has need of the church for his coronation. More follows, the prior’s tone shifting from hostile, to dubious, to grudging capitulation while the bishop’s remains equable and reasonable, his words shaped by the smile which never leaves his face.
After half an hour or so, the prior allows Bishop Odo to enter the church. He stands just inside the door, attended by several clergy, and informs his audience that they have his word as a servant of the Church and brother to the king that the privileges of sanctuary will be respected and they need have no fear for their safety as long as they return immediately to their homes.
And he is as good as his word. Cautiously at first, but with growing confidence, families bundle up their belongings, retrieve their young people from the mischief of the night and their old from mumbling corners, and make their way back to hovels and houses, or for some, sifting dunes of ash, charred posts poking up like rotten teeth. No one is arrested, no one robbed, no one even jeered at by William Bastard’s soldiers.
Drifting in the wake of those with somewhere to go, someone waiting for them outside, Gytha hesitates to leave the priory precinct. Still barefoot, she flexes her toes against the hardening ruts of the yard and lifts her face to the sun, letting its brightness scour her heavy eyelids, hoping it might enlighten her as to what to do next.
“What now?” she asks the ash tree in the center of the courtyard, seating herself on the circular bench the monks have fashioned around its trunk while she draws on her hose and fastens her shoes. Keys pirouette down from its branches and slip through the slats of the bench. Too close, thinks Gytha, kicking one away, a new tree can never grow there. She cannot stay in Winchester, thinking of that smiling Norman lord dreaming his avaricious dreams in Lady Edith’s bed, eating at her table, keeping his horses in her stables and his falcons in her mews. She will return to the Convent of Saint Mary of Egypt. Yet if she does that, if it is even possible to travel as far as Colchester now, how can she ever find out Lady Edith’s fate? Then again, if she stays here, behind these locked gates and walls swarming with Norman patrols, how can she ever help her? The tree has no answers; the tree is driven by its own imperatives. The monks and lay brothers going about their daily work glance at her curiously but none stops to speak. She is no longer the sort of woman with whom Saint Benedict would think it suitable for a monk to have a conversation, and clearly, in some subtle fashion, in the tilt of her chin perhaps, or the way she points her toe to tie her shoe, it shows. Rising from the bench, she brushes down her clothes and sets out into the city. At least she has a good gown, a warm cloak, and serviceable shoes. And her locket. It is more than many people have this morning.
With no particular aim and nowhere to go, she finds herself drifting with others, first in ones and twos, swelling to a steady stream as they near the old royal palace, toward the court Bishop Odo has set up in the palace compound to hear the cases of the rioters. He is already sitting when she arrives, flanked by a number of other high ranking Normans, on a bench elevated above the defendants, their witnesses and advocates, and the crowd of onlookers, crowded onto the flat bed of a hay wain. Their standards snap and glitter behind them, the bishop’s golden wolf seeming to gallop across his green field for the sheer joy of sun and breeze. William Bastard and Queen Edith, whose guest he is, watch the proceedings from beneath an awning erected over the entrance to the great hall to protect them from the weather.
Apparently indifferent to hunger or thirst, or the bite of the November wind, Bishop Odo remains on the bench for all the hours it takes to hear the arguments and pronounce sentence. He gives equal weight to every plea and doles out penalties accordingly; his justice is severe, but no one can call it unfair. Where there is doubt, witnesses are called, and the bishop consults with his fellow lieutenants, even, on occasion, with burgesses of the city. People exchange looks of bewildered disappointment; they shrug and spread their hands helplessly. The spirit of rebellion is slipping down an ice floe of fairness; the bishop is ruthless in leaving it no foothold.
Among those sentenced is the soldier who ran through the mother of the dead child with his pike. Condemned to one hundred lashes, he is bound hand and foot to a wheel and the punishment carried out in front of the widower and other witnesses from among the burgesses and portmen. Accounts of this beating race from mouth to mouth faster than fire running before a wind. Not a strip of skin left on his back, they say, the white of his backbone plain to see. None could watch without turning away, not even the Bastard himself. No, corrects someone, that’s not right. The bishop watched; they say he never even blinked. Well, blinked perhaps, he must have done, but he never flinched. If the dead child had been his own son, thinks Gytha, fascinated and repelled in equal, bewildering measure, it would have made no difference. Though she doubts his blood is hot enough to make a son. Her hatred rises against the wall of his impassiveness like a high sea storming a breakwater, endlessly smashing and reforming itself. Everything, she tells herself again, as though reciting her catechism, he has taken everything, just as Adam, with his bad debts and dead babies, did before him.
But Adam died, and his death delivered her freedom, of a kind. Repudiated by Adam’s family because she had failed to give him an heir, unwelcome in her father’s house now that he had made a new marriage to a woman near her own age, she had become a lay sister in the Convent of Saint Mary of Egypt, where she discovered her small, deft hands possessed an exceptional skill in embroidery. This had brought her to Lady Edith’s attention, but that was not the whole of it. Lady Edith was sweet and kind and a generous mistress, but what underlay Gytha’s happiness in her service was the knowledge that she possessed this unique talent that did not depend on her being someone’s daughter, wife, mother, servant, but solely on being herself. It is the one treasure no one can take from her.
What, she wonders idly, enjoying the weak warmth of the sun where she sits in the lee of the wind, believing that if she does not think about her problems a solution will present itself, might she have to gain from Bishop Odo’s death? Fruitless speculation. He is well guarded, and well able to defend himself, as she has seen, and he looks as strong as a horse. She is powerless against him, and this realisation sharpens her hatred more, seasons it with frustration, brings angry tears to her eyes. Only when people turn to look at her does she become aware that she is weeping aloud, for butchered Harold and mad Edith, for the stories of dragons and princesses her mother too
k to her grave, and the ghost lives of her children, the empty spaces in the world that will never be filled. Fleeing the court, all the curious stares boring into her back, she believes her heart is broken. But it can’t be; it hurts too much for a dead thing.
Service
After Epiphany 1067
Agatha feels as though she is in the eye of the storm, standing in the courtyard of the Convent of Saint Justina the Virgin, watching snow meander out of a lowering sky. Both familiar, this rutted yard of frozen puddles and sodden straw with its low buildings humped beneath the snow, yet strange to Agatha, who has not set foot outside the convent since joining its community fifteen years ago. She watches the way each snowflake follows its individual course to earth to merge with the rest, effaced, but essential. A good analogy, she thinks, for the soul’s yearning toward oblivion in God; she will use it in teaching her novices.
Behind the walls surrounding her, a whirlwind of sweeping and dusting, polishing and scouring, has broken out in preparation for the bishop’s visit. Saint Justina’s being a house of little significance, despite its connection with the ducal family, his pastoral visits are infrequent. Its sisters are not drawn from families able to provide generous dowries; it possesses no important relics. Unless, thinks Agatha sometimes, she herself may be counted a relic. Comparing herself to the novices in her charge, the pink girls bursting like ripe fruit with tears of ecstasy or homesickness, blushing and giggling at confession, she feels sufficiently desiccated, revered rather than loved, more myth than flesh and blood. The Duke of Normandy’s odd sister, put away in this obscure place for reasons only she now knows, since the old Abbess’ death. Only she, and Bishop Odo, who gave her to Saint Justina’s.
