Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “Chilblains,” Gytha says. “We must be in for snow.” She looks out of the window, across the narrow strip of garden separating them from the outer palisade and up at the sky, which seems almost to be in the room with them, kept out only by sheer walls of glass. Dirty pink clouds hang low and swollen. The light has a grudging quality. “We shall be finishing early today.” They work only during the hours of daylight. Candles are forbidden in the workshop because of the risk of fire.

  “My brother Tom used to get chilblains. Our stepmother would cover his hands in goose grease and oil of henbane. It made him smell like a jakes.” She giggles. “And he was so particular about his looks. He was very good looking.” Her eyes shine.

  Margaret prattles about her dead brothers as though they were still alive, just away on a journey perhaps, or grown up and making independent lives for themselves far from home. She seems to feel no sense of loss. Is it, Gytha wonders, that she is somehow protected by the presence of her twin, or because she had years in which to get to know them? Not days, or even hours, before their spirits deserted her.

  “I hate the winters here,” Margaret continues, as though Tom has never been mentioned, “there’s nothing to do.”

  Gytha knows what she means. Though the work of the household goes on around them, they are not part of it. They are observers, as though their windows were frames around a picture or a tapestry. In the outer court today, for example, pigs are being slaughtered. Their squeals and the raised voices of the slaughterers, the barking of excited dogs and whickers of nervous horses reach them muffled by the glass. They cannot smell the blood as it is drained off into barrels where it will be left to thicken for making black puddings, but only their own, for someone is always menstruating and, as no one is pregnant or nursing, Sister Jean sees no reason for this to excuse them from work.

  “What about that blond boy from the garrison? Can’t you pass the evening teasing him after dinner? I saw him looking at you all doe-eyed when you were coming back from Mass this morning.” From these same windows, foreshortened, in the world on the other side of the glass, attempting to pinch Margaret’s waist before Sister Jean sent him packing. Gytha does not go to Mass.

  “Oh, it’s Advent,” says Margaret dismissively, though she is blushing, blotches of scarlet suffusing her freckles and clashing with her hair. “I never trust boys in Advent or Lent.” The longest periods of fasting and abstention prescribed by the Church, which Gytha used to look forward to when she was married, though not when she was whoring and had to take on the work pious wives could lay aside.

  “Gytha, are you married?” asks Margaret, glancing up then quickly, affecting deep concentration on her work.

  “Widowed.”

  Margaret waits, carefully couching down the rump of a horse, laying a second run of stitching over the ground to achieve a density of texture such that, in patting the chestnut hindquarters, you might almost raise dust and feel real horse hair. They are so close, on either side of the narrow frame, less than the width of a man’s stride, that she can see the grain of Gytha’s linen cap and hear, almost feel, her breathing as she continues to work but does not elaborate on the subject of her marriage.

  Margaret sleeps next to her in the dormitory, with Alwys at her other side, and has taken to creeping in beside her on cold nights, curling her soft, blowsy body around Gytha’s little frame. She knows Alwys feels left out, but Alwys is the younger sister, by the width of a nail their father says, holding his finger against the side of a burning candle, so she will have to get used to being on her own because Margaret will marry first.

  She and Gytha wash each other’s hair at the monthly baths, when Gytha applies the nettle paste and wraps Margaret’s head in a warmed towel to make it work more quickly. Every time Margaret unwinds the towel, her hair is as springy as before, but every month her dream of straight, silky locks is rekindled and they try again. After all, Alwys’ curls do not frizzle like hers do, as though they have been singed; Alwys’ hair cascades, like water stained red by running over rocks with iron in them. Gytha’s attentiveness makes Margaret feel like a separate person, not just one of the twins, part of a set like a pair of matching candlesticks or a couple of hounds. Tom had the same knack, a special way of looking at her, always standing up for her when she and Alwys fell out. He made her feel unique. Though she is ashamed to admit it, she has always missed Tom more than the others, but now Gytha has come into her life, she has begun to feel less lonely.

  Margaret has learned that cats make Gytha sneeze and that she sews with her left hand, but little more. Gytha never talks about her life before the invasion the way the other women do, though occasionally she will make some remark about the work she is doing which intrigues Margaret. Once she said, as she worked the wing feathers of a falcon, laying dense rows of ochre inside a terracotta outline, “King Harold always carried his hawk on his right wrist, you know. Obviously Sister Jean is unaware of it. I’ll change the next one round.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded Judith, seated opposite, her sharp nose fairly quivering with curiosity.

  Gytha shrugged. “I suppose you must have told me, you were at court.”

  Judith continued to stare at her intensely, but Gytha shifted her attention back to her work as though their exchange was already forgotten.

  Now she says, “I’m still alive and still whole. Being alone is best. Think of your poor parents, Meg, four sons dead and two daughters sent into slavery. Or Emma, taken away from her husband and children. How many is it?”

  “Five, I think, but it’s hard to tell if she misses them. You see things too much in black and white. I’m not a slave, slavery’s illegal now, isn’t it? And thankfully, my parents aren’t so far away that I couldn’t go home if I needed to.”

  “You’re as bad as Judith. Pass me some more of that blue, will you? I’m running short.”

  Margaret twists round to reach the wooden stand behind her, from which skeins hang from dowel pegs set in the cross pieces, and unwinds a length of the blue grey wool Gytha is using. A similar stand is beside each frame, each with eight pegs to carry skeins of each of the eight colours the embroiderers are using: terracotta red, blue woad, a deep blue-black derived from indigo, sea-green and sage-green, ochre yellow, yellow weld, and a dark yew green produced by over-dying. Gytha finds it curious, remembering the procession of Bishop Odo’s soldiers stripping Lady Edith’s hall of its treasures, that the materials for the hanging should be so plain. No silk thread or baudekyn, no gold or silver wires to cut and roughen the fingertips, just simple running stitch, wool on white linen, like making tablecloths.

  “Enough?” queries Margaret before cutting the thread with the small bone knife hanging from her girdle by a plaited leather thong.

  “You believe you’re free, but your father wasn’t really given any choice in the matter, was he?” Gytha continues, pausing to suck the end of the wool to a point so she can thread it through the eye of her needle. “When Sister Jean came to call on his new Norman lord with her royal warrant and her royal blood, I imagine his lordship rolled over like a puppy to have his belly tickled by our mighty and mysterious earl. Look at you. What are you? Nineteen, twenty? You should be married and raising a family of your own by now, not cooped up in here day after day.” She stabs her into the fetlock of a Norman war horse. “Mary Mother of God, my hands are cold.”

  A fire blazes in the hearth set into the chimney breast, a larger version of the one in the dormitory, the crackle of seasoned logs punctuating the murmur of conversation among the women, but little heat escapes into the room. In considering the design of the building, Bishop Odo’s first concern was clearly to preserve his hanging from smoke and flame rather than to keep the embroiderers warm.

  Sister Jean has a plan, on parchments, pasted together into a long strip, laid out on her work table beneath the north windows facing the courtyard, its top edge carefully measured and annotated. Gytha looks at it, when the rest are at Mass, but it is
always changing. Every morning there is something different, a newly scraped bare patch or the addition of some figure or marginal design. She almost believes fairies come during the night and meddle with it. She can read enough Latin, thanks to her years as a lay sister and then in the household of Lady Edith, who was an educated woman, to decipher the captions Sister Jean has added to some of the images, but many are not captioned and in others the words are ambiguous.

  The mystery is compounded by the way Sister Jean makes them work. The embroidery does not follow the order of the plan, nor any order recognisable as that of the events they have all lived through. One day horses falling in battle, the next King William and his brothers commissioning ships to be built; a morning on Saxon peasants pursued by Norman knights wielding whips, an afternoon on the exploits of Harold fighting alongside William against Conan of Brittany, heroically rescuing a man from drowning in a river writhing with giant eels. Some days working upside down before switching sides with your partner and seeing the strange world of wool and linen the right way up again. These partnerships also are ever changing, the women switching from one frame to another as they complete a figure or a scene.

  They are a small group, only eighteen women who meet Sister Jean’s exacting standards, working at nine frames set up on trestles in front of the great south facing windows. The frames, about half the length of a tall man, might just accommodate four workers each, but Sister Jean does not seem disposed to seek out any more. Clearly the quality of the work matters more to her than the speed of its completion. Gytha also suspects that her choice has been limited by the fact that much of the north of the country remains too dangerous for anyone but the army to enter.

  Everyone prefers to work with the outlines sketched in charcoal on the linen right way up, but Gytha is less insistent than most. She has plenty to occupy her thoughts when she is defeated in her efforts to understand the intentions of the design. Dwelling on her revenge on the bishop, as though by ceaselessly thinking about it she is somehow moving her plan forward, she goes over and over in her mind what she knows of the castle, its weak spots and hidden places, the access to the private apartments, the aspect of their windows. It is pitifully little. The women’s movements are strictly circumscribed by Sister Jean, to keep them well apart from the garrison, Gytha supposes. Apart from going to chapel and taking their meals in the great hall in the bailey, they rarely leave the atelier.

  Most of what they know of their surroundings is framed by the great workshop windows. Even Gytha cannot help but marvel at them, these sheer glass cliffs supported by lancets so fine and pale you would think they must crumble beneath the weight of glass. The walls of the workshop seem to be made of light, taut and insubstantial as a held breath. Sometimes she wonders whose vision they were, the bishop’s or his architect’s. Sometimes she catches herself off guard, revelling in their sparkle and purity, the unblemished panes couched flat in their leads, the flow of light lying cool as water against her eyes or, when the sun is out, warm as a lover’s hand in the small of her back.

  Slowly, often imperceptibly, it seems, the bolts of virgin linen shrink and the lengths of completed embroidery grow, carefully pleated into shallow baskets lying beside each frame, but the slowness reinforces Gytha’s sense of dislocation. Here in Canterbury she had believed she would be able to find out Lady Edith’s fate, that she would be at the core of her loathing for all things Norman. Yet the man who is the focus of her hatred is never here, the rumours of his whereabouts slipping through her fingers like wet fish. He is in London, or Normandy, or Rome. He has led an army to the north or a deputation of clergy to Flanders. He is like a sprite, this earl-bishop, a thing of shadows and whispers, a spell, a fever of the brain.

  Yet the embroidery is real enough, the wool stinking of the sheep’s piss used to set the dyes, the linen taut as drumskins in the frames, men and horses, ships and city walls emerging from the tangle of needles and thread and charcoal lines as the world came out of Chaos. Though a great deal more slowly. It can take a week or more to complete a single suit of mail, overlapping the stitches so densely that you can almost imagine the woollen replica would offer as much protection as the real thing, building up ring by ring the fishscale effect that sometimes reminds Gytha of accompanying her father to the early morning market, his great red, gentle hands lifting the gills of the fish to test their freshness. And you can eke out the process further by snapping needles, knotting threads, rubbing out Sister Jean’s guidelines so mistakes ensue and have to be unpicked.

  Last winter, Gytha lost track of the time she and Margaret spent embroidering the image of a Norman abbey called, according to Sister Jean’s legend, Mont Saint Michel, its dainty arches balanced on a folded hill of sage green and ochre, its roof ridged with yellow gold, a place impossible outside the imagination of God yet built by these two, with their aching backs and smarting fingers stiff with cold, their tips swollen with chilblains like overripe plums. Even if they could work the complete cycle of the hours, without stopping for food or rest, the project might take so many years its patron would be in his grave before it was complete. With only the most subtle of interruptions, Gytha knows, letting her sleeve smudge the outline of a hunting dog as she threads her needle, it need never be finished.

  “Attend me.” Agatha is standing at the lectern where she often reads to the women to help pass the hours. She elbows the cat off the lectern and brushes stray fur from Horace’s Odes, in her own, somewhat rough Anglo Saxon translation, before opening a parchment and smoothing it out before her. “I have received a letter from the earl,” she continues, “in which he tells me it is his intention, by the grace of God and King William, to hold Christmas court here at Canterbury this year. Naturally he regrets that he will not be with the king at his midwinter crown wearing, but is acutely aware that the king’s business has kept him out of Canterbury for almost three years and that his estates in Kent require his attention. My lord looks forward particularly, he writes, to inspecting what he calls his tapestry.” She looks up with a conspiratorial smile. “My lord’s grasp of the refinements of needlework is, I fear, somewhat tenuous.” There is a murmur of obsequious laughter from one of the Saint Augustine’s women, but the rest remain silent. Agatha continues, “He expects, God willing, to arrive here by the Feast of Saint Thomas and will stay at least until Saint Stephen’s Day before beginning a tour of his manors.”

  Not long, thinks Gytha, slowly laying down her needle, but long enough. Her hand moves to the little bone knife hanging from her own belt, just as Margaret’s does. If it could cut the underhung venison they had been given at the day meal yesterday, it will surely serve to cleave the pampered flesh of a bishop from his bones. All she needs is a dark corner of the hall, a narrow space of mud and shadow between the buildings in the outer court, a moment off guard. And she knows just how to catch a man off guard.

  What then? When it is done? She gives a mental shrug of the shoulders. It does not matter. She has been dead inside since the moment she collapsed, paralysed with fear, against the wall of the priory hospice in Winchester, and watched her mistress carried off in a wagon as though she were no more than the cups and plates and tapestries from her hall. Where her heart used to be is only the desire for revenge, her veins are threaded with hate, burning like hot wires. Let them do as they will with her body; she has no further use for it.

  “Might it be possible for me to speak to the earl about my estates, do you think, Sister?” Judith is asking, in the tone she keeps for Sister Jean, intended to remind listeners that she and the king’s sister are equals.

  Agatha gives her a tolerant smile. Gytha is looking very pale, she thinks, hoping her workshop will not be decimated by sickness by the time Odo arrives. This will be the first time he has set foot in the atelier since overseeing the installation of the windows, and she is anxious that he should be pleased by what he sees. His trust in her still terrifies her. Often she feels as though she is not quite in control of the embroidery, a
s though it is growing in unanticipated ways, like a child rebelling against the authority of its father.

  “His lordship takes a close interest in the management of all his business, Judith,” she replies. “I do not think you need be concerned that he will have neglected to ensure your husband’s holdings yield all that they should.”

  “It’s for my grandsons in Denmark, you see…” Her words trail off into a lame silence as Sister Jean’s smile freezes.

  ***

  Odo is in no mood for Christmas. His damaged wrist aches in damp weather, a nagging pain that gnaws at the edges of consciousness, leaving him irritable and frustrated with his physical limitations. He is approaching the age when a man’s blood starts to thicken and slow his body down; his inclinations and his abilities are increasingly at odds. The journey from London has been intolerably slow, the road sometimes a quagmire and sometimes a frozen sea of ruts and craters. He prefers to travel light and quickly, in the company of small groups of knights and men at arms. Certain journeys, however, have purposes in addition to that of leaving one place and arriving safely at another. They are freighted with significance.