by Sarah Bower
The really heavy wagons left several days in advance of the main party, carrying wine and provisions, furnishings, tableware, several litters of pups too young to make the journey on foot, and Master Pietro, the Italian pastrycook whose girth reassures Odo as to his professional skills but makes riding a practical impossibility. Odo’s hawks travelled in a specially designed cart, a wheeled cage containing a perch for each bird, though their handler had to sit in its bed and endure being shat on by the unsettled birds. Further wagonloads of Odo’s personal effects, his clothes and jewellery, his sacramental plate, as well as his treasury and various official seals, all under heavy guard, set the pace for the main party. This was as carefully orchestrated as any of William’s public crown wearings, and served a similar purpose. After conquest comes occupation, says William.
Odo himself, surrounded by the lords and senior clergy of his entourage, his standard bearer at his shoulder and his midget, Turold, beside him on one of the tiny ponies William discovered in Scotland, rode at the center of the procession, preceded by a body of knights and his personal praetorian guard in his new green and gold livery. A seemingly endless trail of cooks, varlets, concubines, laundresses, body servants, chaplains, huntsmen, dogs, horses, and their handlers, brought up the rear. Outside every town or village en route, the entire party ground to a halt as the varlets were sent ahead to strew the way with brush and straw to make the going easier and alert the people to the impending spectacle. The musicians would be assembled and thrust up front to provide an accompaniment to their lord’s progress and entertain the spectators. Balanced on the shaggy back of his pony, the dwarf would perform rolls and handstands. Odo had also devised other distractions; the release of white doves from baskets, the distribution of wheat loaves or silver pennies stamped with his image as Earl of Kent. This is the part of the planning he enjoys, for the rest he relies on Osbern.
Osbern, who holds no official status in the household other than that of being Odo’s body servant, nevertheless understands its workings so intimately that he acts almost in place of the chamberlain. He directs his master’s relocations with a strategic skill and attention to detail at least as thorough, thinks Odo, a little disconcerted, as his own. Throughout these progresses he is invaluable, able to conjure billets from the most unpromising communities. He can cajole the surliest prior into letting them overrun his hospice and is equally accomplished in shielding his master from the worst excesses of obsequious vassals who seem only too pleased to let their households go hungry and bedless to accommodate the earl and his entourage.
The rigours of the journey are not the source of his wretched humour. On the whole, it has gone well. There have been no attempts at robbery, no broken axles. The onlookers tended to be sullen, but not openly hostile as has happened in the past; no blood has been shed. The enfolding warmth and good odours of meat roasting in his own kitchens after days on the road do not account for his lassitude as he sits in his winter parlour above the kitchen and Osbern directs the unpacking around him.
Lanfranc is the problem. Everything he wrote to Agatha is true, but Lanfranc is the real reason he is not spending this Christmas with William. He still feels stunned by William’s decision to appoint the Lombard to the Archbishopric. He had been so certain of his brother’s mind, and so certain that, even if offered the appointment, Lanfranc would refuse it, as he has steadfastly refused everything William has tried to lavish upon him other than the abbacy of Caen, that he had never even thought to articulate his expectation. But now, suddenly, unexpectedly as a crossbow bolt from out of the sun, this fissure has opened up between them. William, his duke and benefactor, the older brother he adores and looks up to beyond the power of words to express, has let him down.
Surely he was the obvious choice, already combining his ecclesiastical responsibilities in Normandy with his lay lordships in England, and with an administration established in Canterbury. If William wished to ensure a minimum of papal interference in the government of the church in England, how better to do it than to combine church and state in the person of a single man, and that man his brother and close confidant, and one of his strongest supporters in his English venture? Fluent in the language, moreover, and well versed in English culture and mores. By bestowing the See of Canterbury on a member of his own family, William would have sent the clearest possible message to the English about the concentration of power both spiritual and temporal in the person of their new king and the men of his blood.
And then, in the spring, when Thomas, formerly a canon of his own cathedral in Bayeux, came to England to be made Archbishop of York, William had said, casually, over the welcome feast at Dover, with his mouth full of roast pigeon,
“I’d like to delay the consecration for a month or two. I’ve asked Lanfranc to take on Canterbury, but he can’t be here before the summer. It would send out the right message if Thomas’ consecration was reserved to him. I hope you agree, Odo.”
“Lanfranc?” he demanded, almost choking on his own food. “Lanfranc? He’ll never come.”
“Why do you think that? The delay is only while he puts his affairs in order at Caen. He has given his word, and Lanfranc does not go back on his word. Besides, I have ordered it.”
“I thought he was your friend. I suppose a king must command even his friends.”
“Beware, brother.” And immediately he understood William’s decision. Lanfranc was discreet, diplomatic. He remembered his station the way a dog remembers a rabbit hole. Whereas he himself, though just as good a jurist, just as persuasive and possibly a better administrator, was also flamboyant and restless, cursed with a passionate imagination which sometimes blinded him to things as they were. His understanding brought him no peace, it only embittered his disappointment, but he was wise enough to dissemble and couch his objections in terms of pure political expediency. William had greeted his protests with smiling disbelief.
“You, Odo? It was never in my mind. You are my Justiciar, you guard me against all comers along the south coast. Splendour of God, man, you even rule in my place when I’m overseas. Are there no bounds to your ambition?”
“I want only what is best for Your Grace,” he had replied, laying his knife carefully beside his plate, suddenly not hungry. “I haven’t once failed in your service nor questioned your decisions since I was a boy. You cannot doubt my loyalty, but I am your brother, which I think gives me the right to speak freely. Lanfranc is a churchman through and through. If it comes to it, he will support the Pope against you.”
“You disobeyed me once only, as far as I can remember, and I forgave you then, as I forgive you now. Tell me, Odo, this business with Lanfranc, what is it all about? Did he have you beaten once too often when you studied at Bec? Or perhaps not often enough. He is my friend, and a man of the utmost virtue and integrity, without whose good offices, I might remind you, we probably wouldn’t be here at all. It wasn’t until he went to Rome and got us the Pope’s backing I was able to raise an army.”
“You had my ships, William, a hundred of them and all the men they could carry. I didn’t wait to be told what to do by the Pope. I risked my soul to fight beside you. I didn’t skulk in Normandy saying my prayers or loiter behind the lines with my altar boys like Coutances. Ja bon vassal nen ert vif recreut.”
William had embraced him then, with tears in his eyes, pressing his greasy mouth to Odo’s cheek, and Odo found himself fascinated once again by how easily words came to him, billowing out of him like a smokescreen to conceal his feelings.
“And you are a good vassal, the best. And my gratitude is beyond measure, Odo, as I hope I have always shown. Here, drink. This is really very good.” Offering Odo his own cup, the rim carefully turned so that he must place his lips over the imprint of his brother’s. Odo drank.
“Lanfranc may be my friend,” went on William, “but you are my flesh and blood. Which is why I don’t want to see you torn between Rome and me. We are one, Odo. Let it remain so.”
Of cour
se it is so, he had wanted to shout, it will always be so. He has adored William since the moment he first set eyes on him, himself a boy of ten or eleven years, William then eighteen, tall, powerfully built, the shock of red hair blazing in the dim light of the great hall at Conteville. Since his father said, “Here is your brother, Odo, Duke William of Normandy,” and had then fetched him a good clout about the head because he stood gaping and forgot to kneel.
And William had laughed and hugged him, pressing his smarting cheek against the hard body beneath its leather hauberk, and said, “I have brought you a merlin, Odo. I’m told you like to hunt. So do I. We will hunt together.”
His own hawk. As if he were a man, not just a boy kicking about among the varlets. As if the young duke, god-like in his glamour, heroic as Roland in his feats of arms and narrow escapes from his enemies, were admitting him to the pantheon.
As for William, he keeps his feelings close, as though they were his most dangerous enemies, but Odo knows how much he is needed. Weaving and shouldering his way through the press of people in the hall on his arrival, sidestepping a nasty altercation between one of the castle dogs and a hound he had brought with him from London, he had noticed that the clerk to whom he usually entrusts his correspondence with his brother was already waiting for him, a bulging satchel slung across his shoulder.
***
“My lord.” Osbern is hovering in front of him with a surcoat of yellow silk edged with ermine draped across his outstretched arms. “Will you dress for the ladies now?”
Odo passes his hand across his face, as though trying to erase his bitter recollections from his features. “Yes,” he says, “but not that, not for Sister Jean’s women.”
He is soberly dressed, in a long tunic of deep blue trimmed only with squirrel, when he leaves his apartments in the keep and, descending the motte cautiously to avoid slipping on the steep, muddy slope, passes through the gate in the inner ward on his way to the atelier. His only concession to outward show is the gold pectoral cross set with pearls and sapphires. Osbern has certain notions about how men should dress to please women, and his instincts are often, in Odo’s experience, shrewd. The women Osbern is thinking of, however, bear no resemblance to Agatha and her group of quasi-nuns. He has been amused, when approving accounts for payment, to note that she has purchased cloth similar to that used for making monastic habits for her women’s clothes, their livery. Snow is falling briskly; flakes catch in his hair and sting his newly shaved tonsure.
Entering the building, he sends the page ahead to announce him to his sister and waits in the hall, strolling up and down its length, looking at the mass of sketches and cartoons pasted to the walls, stopping frequently to peer at a particular piece of work. Many of them he has seen before, but not all, and even those he has have been thrust to the back of his mind in the intervening years, so it is like seeing them as new. More than that, seeing them as though he himself is someone different.
Here, a little smudged and grimy with ash from the torches on the wall, is an image of himself, round cheeked and boyish looking, blessing the feast they held to celebrate their landing at Pevensey. Memory, imagination, the way events are changed by the process of translation from one person to another, all peel away to nothing like the layers of an onion. What’s real? The tables made of shields balanced on scaffolding poles, the Roman fort looming against the sky as the light drained away, the ill grace with which the men set to reinforcing it, exhausted, hungry, and still hampered by their sea legs. But where’s the sand sticking to the food or the sharp onshore wind that bit off his prayers as he uttered them? Where is the fear sucking his still nauseous stomach up against his ribs whenever he looked at William, eating heartily, cheerfully likening himself to Caesar, who had also lost his footing and fallen, when disembarking on the coast of Africa? How can Agatha ever have imagined he was smiling like that? Or that they had time to bake bread? At least she has left out William’s fall from the Mora, that sickening, incredible moment when everyone who witnessed it united in yearning to be able to wind back time, to erase such an omen from the record. Perhaps he never told her about it, he can’t remember.
“So, my dear lord, all these pictures and I find you studying yourself.” There is just enough humour in that dry tone to soften the blow, though not to deflect it from the target. Odo blushes.
“I wasn’t…”
“Welcome home.” Agatha kneels to kiss his ring. The wrist, as she had predicted, has healed badly, the bone now lying at an odd angle. He raises her to her feet and enfolds her little frame in his arms, then holds her away from him.
“You look well, thank God.”
“I am. Now that we are settled here, this work keeps me out of the world and out of trouble just as well as the Rule of Saint Benedict. Although the sisters are a mite more unruly.”
“Are they, indeed?”
“Nothing I can’t handle, though there’s one…But the women aren’t your concern. You’re here to see your ‘tapestry.’”
“And I’ve come to you before seeing to any other business. There’s a queue of petitioners half a league long in the hall, they tell me, and Hamo says my knights are putting up too many tents in the court so he can’t move the garrison out. I don’t know what he’s afraid of. Perhaps he thinks Archbishop Lanfranc has designs on my earldom.”
“And my servant, Leofgeat, whose husband works in the bakehouse, says your fancy Roman pastrycook is likely to get his sweetbreads battered if he can’t keep his hands to himself.”
“D’you think I could hide out here among your seamstresses till Saint Stephen’s?” Laughing together, they climb the stairs to the atelier. Despite the snow clouds and the early beginnings of the winter dusk, he is momentarily dazzled as Agatha holds back the curtain and he steps into the workshop. It is like a concussion, no, more a glimpse of heaven. He had not forgotten the windows; the slender lancets of creamy Caen stone, the fine tracery of lead, the lights flawless as diamonds conjured from fire and sand, shine in his memory. He had just forgotten the physical impact of beauty, how it makes the pulse race and the blood sing. His life at William’s court, always in the company of soldiers and politicians, has become mean and narrow. He hears nothing but dispatches and petitions for his patronage, talks of nothing but the last campaign or the next rebellion, the clearance of a road here or the construction of a fortification there; even the mystery of the sacraments has been soured for him by the thought of Lanfranc. Enthralled by the expanse of white sky reflecting the snow covered earth back at itself, he gasps, like a man in the throes of passion, making the women look up from their work.
He will not know her, Gytha reassures herself, of course he will not, after so many seasons, so many towns occupied, halls looted, women and children killed. But if she lets him see her face he will recognise her loathing, sleek and fattened on its own bile, like the serpent endlessly consuming its own tail. She busies herself with the little page, making sure he has his feet properly on the hearth where his shoes stand the best chance of drying, then returns to her stool with her head bowed and her face turned aside. He will think her modest and seemly, if he thinks of her at all.
“Attend me,” Sister Jean orders the women, coming to stand beside her brother, the top of her head reaching just below his shoulder, “here is our lord and patron, the Earl of Kent.” Gytha notices how carefully Sister Jean announces his title, as though she is not yet quite used to it, her Norman tongue struggling with the Anglo Saxon earl. Stealing a glance from the corner of her eye, Gytha sees him incline his head slightly toward the women, a gesture of teasing charm. Stools scrape along the floor, releasing the perfume of the dried lavender strewn among the rushes, as the women stand and bow. Emma almost falls; she lunges at her frame to prevent herself, but it wobbles on its trestles and would have overturned had not her sewing partner, on the other side, reached out to steady it. Bishop Odo watches this pantomime with a puzzled frown.
Briefly, he glances in Gytha’s directio
n, and once again she has the sense of not being seen. It is her failure to bow he notices, not her. Then he whispers something to Sister Jean, who nods and they smile at each other, the same downturned smile, the same humorous crinkling of the eyes at the corners.
“Will you inspect the embroidery, Your Grace?” Sister Jean enquires.
“That would please me very much.”
“You may sit,” she instructs the women. “Resume your work.” Then, turning to her brother, she asks, “Where will you begin?”
“Here, I think,” he decides, striding across the workshop to Emma’s frame. He stands behind Emma for several minutes, his expression shifting from relief to wonder as he observes how still she becomes once her needle is in her hand, and the excellence of her work, the faces she embroiders which have almost more life in them than the flesh and blood she emulates with needle and thread.
As Judith sees him heading in her direction, she lays down her needle, rises once again from her stool, and kneels to kiss his ring, all in a single, fluent movement. Every inch the courtier, thinks Gytha, bowing and scraping to some man or other from the moment she could walk.
“May I speak, madam?” Judith asks Sister Jean.
“Please,” says the bishop.
“Thank you, my lord, you are very gracious. It is the matter of my estates, my lord…”
“His grace has no time for such trifles now, Judith.”
“It’s all right, sister.” The gaze he fixes on Judith glows with sincerity. “All that I have promised will come to pass, madam, I assure you. Now…where next?”
As he turns away, Gytha sees the light extinguished, snuffed out by hard indifference.
“Here, I think,” he concludes, advancing on her and Alwys. Gytha lays down her needle across the image of Earl Harold swearing fealty to the Bastard, her hands trembling too much to continue. He is so close, neither armed nor surrounded by guards, just himself, a man like any other, with veins that can be emptied, lungs punctured, heart broken. Her wait is nearly over, all the patient hours and days and years of bones that ached with the yearning for vengeance and eyes seared by the images of his triumph have come to a halt this snowy afternoon. She folds her hands in her lap and bows her head. She thinks of Christmas; her time, like Mary’s, has almost come.
