Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  In remorse for his uncharitable thoughts, Lanfranc had locked himself in his room, this room, where he had scourged himself until his blood flowed then put on a hair shirt beneath his robe which he had sworn not to remove unless or until his old pupil made a full recovery. He had then, while keeping vigil at the sick man’s bedside, composed a letter to Pope Alexander, begging to be released from his Archbishopric and to be allowed to return to Caen. He has not the strength for this work; he is too easily corrupted. He must save himself from becoming like the man on the bed.

  “There was an anchorite,” Odo says again, his voice a little stronger now. “He gave me shelter. I got lost. My horse…The anchorite must be thanked. Provisions. Something for the chapel.”

  “I know of no anchorite. My wardens found you, unconscious, in a part of my chase that borders yours, near the Dover road. It seems you were caught across the face by a branch and thrown. My men found your horse later, wandering with a quarrel in its neck. It looks as though your bow must have discharged when you fell. The animal had to be destroyed. I’m sorry. The doctor diagnosed severed bruising to the kidneys. Luckily your jaw was not broken. He has been bleeding you daily to cure the jaundice.”

  The two men exchange sceptical looks. Odo glances at the backs of his hands. As well as looking as though they have been stained with turmeric, each bears several small cuts in varying stages of healing.

  “Your sister has been here every day,” Lanfranc continues. “I offered her lodgings, but she said she could not be spared from the workshop.” He pauses, as though he has thought better of what he was about to say and is looking for something to fill the gap. “When you’re stronger I can show you my plans to rebuild the cathedral. Now I think you should rest. Shall I remove this?” Lanfranc picks up the bowl of tea.

  “Thank you.”

  At the door, the Archbishop turns back. “Odo…”

  “Yes?”

  “I somehow have the feeling your fall was providential, that we have been circling around one another like a couple of fighting cocks since August. There is a great deal we should discuss, when you feel strong enough.”

  Odo smiles, a tight, lopsided smile, careful to avoid splitting his cracked lips any further, but says nothing, and by the time Lanfranc has shut the door on him, his eyes are closed once more. He is sad about the horse.

  ***

  By the time Odo’s recovery has advanced enough for Brother Thorold to allow him out of bed, there is a mood abroad in the Abbey, carefully concealed from the Archbishop, that the Bishop of Bayeux has outstayed his welcome. He has imported his own cook and his personal servant, as well as a miscellany of pages, his dwarf, three musicians and two favourite hounds and their handler, with each of these impositions insisting, sweetly but firmly, that they are necessary to the speedy restoration of his health. He has taken over all the Archbishop’s private apartments, except his chapel, which is currently serving as abbey church, to accommodate his household, although, to Brother Thorold’s horror, the dogs are allowed to sleep on his bed. The Archbishop’s bed, worries the infirmarer, wondering if he dare make known to the bishop his concerns for the Archbishop’s health and dignity if he has to sleep in the monks’ dormitory for very much longer.

  Brother Thorold and Odo’s physician wrangle with chilly courtesy over his treatment, but Osbern is a particular bone of contention. While his devotion to his lord is commendable, and hints at aspects of Odo’s character not immediately obvious to those charged with his care, his undisguised contempt for the Abbey’s domestic arrangements is stinging. He had been shocked by his first sight of his master on arrival at Christchurch, but more by the fact that Odo was unshaven and dressed in the plain black habit of a Benedictine than by his loss of weight or the bruises still discolouring his cheek and jaw. He had sent novices scurrying for soap and water and clean linen with an arrogance at least equal to his lord’s, and before long, the bed chamber was so imbued with Odo’s favourite perfume that Brother Thorold, bringing arnica to treat his bruises, wished he could avoid breathing the air for fear of corruption.

  Odo himself is bored and uncomfortable. His body has been made a battleground, pulled between doctor and infirmarer as though they are contenders in a tug of war. Lanfranc’s private apartments are furnished with the kind of pious simplicity Odo discarded without regret twenty years ago when summoned from school in Bec to take up his bishopric. Most of Archbishop Stigand’s library having been destroyed in the great fire three years ago, there is little to read. Lanfranc will not be able to begin to restore the collection until he has a building fit to house it. Perhaps Odo himself will commission a manuscript out of gratitude for Lanfranc’s care. A gospel, a book of hours? Perhaps a medical text would be appropriate in the circumstances, Galen, or the infidel Avicenna, of whom he has heard that he memorised the entire writings of Aristotle and could write while riding a camel. What does a camel look like? How can it be made to accommodate an escritoire? He envisages a sort of hunchbacked horse and wonders why anyone should want to ride such a thing.

  He is also becoming wary of Lanfranc’s hospitality. Despite the confines of his sickroom, he is aware of tensions in the abbey community. He is certain Lanfranc is equally conscious of them, yet he seems in no hurry to let his guest leave. Though Odo insists he is well enough to go home, that his recovery would progress more quickly if he had his own bed to sleep in, Lanfranc prevaricates. He feels it would be inadvisable for a man who has been so badly hurt to travel in this weather; he is afraid Odo might take another fall when it is so icy underfoot, and Brother Thorold fears the effects of a chill on his injured kidneys. Very well, Odo concludes, he will play for them, for now; he will be the spoilt prince, the degenerate priest. Let them think he believes himself unassailable behind the curtain wall of William’s authority.

  But it is a sensible precaution to put his own man in the kitchens and to keep his dogs close at hand. The three musicians brought from the castle have all served with him under arms, and no one should make the mistake of believing that Osbern’s devotion to his person extends only to its comfort and adornment. Razors are not the only blades he wields with accomplishment. Odo knows Lanfranc is wearing a hair shirt, and he knows why. They have been neighbours and rivals for many years, Odo in Bayeux, Lanfranc at Caen; they know one another like father and son. Better, in fact, in his own case, thinks Odo, who never saw his father again after he was sent to Bec. Lanfranc, on the other hand, is as persistently and inconveniently present as his conscience. The idea of his conscience as a venerable greybeard in a hair shirt amuses him, though it does not make him smile; smiling remains painful.

  ***

  On the morning of the Feast of Saint Agnes the city awakes to a thaw. Melting snow drips from the thatched roofs of the buildings in Mercery Lane and lies in wide puddles in the Buttermarket, reflecting the pale blue sky. Gytha and Leofgeat make their way through streets crowded with people abroad for the sheer enjoyment of one another’s company and the tenuous warmth of the sun. They greet one another with the conspiratorial camaraderie of those who have shared a great ordeal and lived to tell the tale. They have survived another winter and spring is round the corner. No one worries about wet feet or muddy hems. No one thinks of February, the coldest month, almost upon them, when the birds drop frozen from the sky and the dead sleep in the outhouses, waiting until the ground is soft enough to bury them. No one remembers it is still almost two months to the spring equinox and the beginning of a new year.

  “It looks as though the earth’s got holes in it,” says Gytha, stepping around a puddle, “and you can see right through to the other side.”

  Leofgeat gives her an uncomprehending stare, blank as the sky itself and Gytha wishes she’d held her tongue. She’s as jumpy as a virgin on her wedding day, swinging wildly between terror and elation. Here it is at last, the chance she has looked for, waited for, dreamt of for so long she can scarcely remember a time when it did not form the background to everything she
said or thought or did. But what if she fails? There will be no second opportunity; he is bound to make sure of that. And if she succeeds? If, when his guards run her through, or she gasps her last in some dank cell, blind and starving with only the rats and cockroaches to witness her passing, if his is the first face she sees in hell? Will that be her fate, to be bound to him for eternity? As they pass through the gate into the abbey close she has the sense of having stepped off the end of the world into the unknowable. She almost stumbles when she finds there is still earth beneath her feet.

  The abbey masons are taking advantage of the good weather. Sounds of stone chipping reach their ears from the leather clad lodges clustered around the edges of the cathedral building site like piglets round a sow. The air in the precincts smells of stone dust, cold and peppery. Two men, stripped to the waist and running with sweat despite the sun’s weakness, toil at a pump to speed up the drying out process; they pause in their work to cast an eye over the women. Gytha draws her hood closer over her head, but Leofgeat, newly pregnant and proud of her little belly and swelling breasts, lifts her chin at a coquettish angle and smiles at them. Gytha remembers that feeling, that sense of exultation in her womanhood, the way men responded to her fecundity, the way Adam couldn’t keep his hands off her, despite the rules about lying with a woman during pregnancy; the memory clenches her womb like a cramp, and she hurries past, shielding her body with the flat, leather scrip given her by Sister Jean.

  “I don’t feel well enough to go out of the house today,” she had said when Gytha, wondering what mark she had overstepped this time, answered the summons to her parlour. “I should like you to take Lord Odo’s letters to him.”

  “I’m sure Lord Odo will not wish to see me, madam.” Sister Jean must be sicker than she seemed. Had she forgotten entirely how Gytha stood up to Lord Odo before Christmas, how he cut short his examination of the work because of her outspokenness? “Why not simply send word that you are ill today and will go again when you feel better? After all, if I go, my share of the embroidery won’t get done.”

  “Ah, but it will. I want you to take this with you.” She picked up a parchment from the table beside her, folded so Gytha could not see what it contained, and handed it to her. “It’s a new drawing. I don’t want to go any further without my lord giving his opinion. I want you to bring his view back to me. Also, these letters are from the king and the Archbishop of York. He’ll want to see them straight away.” Her pale face, the nose scarlet with blowing, softened. “He’s chafing at the bit. He’s not a good patient, I’m afraid. Some new company may improve his temper.”

  “But mine, madam? Send Judith. She’ll have a better idea how to attend to his lordship than me.”

  “Oh, come, Gytha. All women are nurses, as all men are like children, given to recklessness and feeling sorry for themselves. It always falls to women to tidy up the mess. Some can make entertaining conversation as well.”

  Clearly she had not forgotten, so what was her intention? Then again, what did it matter? All that mattered was this chance to get close to him while he was still weak, to slip her little knife into the soft flesh between his ribs, up, twisting into his heart, to carve a channel in that stony organ and fill it with the sweetness of her revenge. There might never be another. Why was she stalling? Merely for the pleasure of the chase? Had she become so vindictive during the years of waiting?

  She took the scrip and went to find Leofgeat, who was to accompany her with a batch of delicacies from Master Pietro to aid his lordship’s recovery.

  ***

  They announce themselves at the gate and are shown into what is normally the Archbishop’s office, where Osbern meets them. He recognises Leofgeat from previous visits and, after a cursory examination of her basket, sends her to the kitchens.

  “And you are…?” He turns disdainfully to Gytha.

  “Aelfgytha,” she replies curtly. “I’m one of the embroiderers. Sister Jean is unwell and asked me to bring my lord’s dispatches in her stead. She has sent a note. Here.” Gytha pulls the bundle of documents out of her scrip and sorts through them until she finds the one bearing Sister Jean’s seal. Osbern flicks his eyes back and forth along the lines of writing, thankful the seal is clear enough for him to be certain the note does come from Sister Jean. All he has managed to understand is that the woman said she was sent by Sister Jean.

  “Wait,” he tells Gytha.

  The wait seems interminable. Looking out of the window behind the Archbishop’s desk, she is certain the angle of the sun, shining through sample cuttings of stained glass ranged along the sill, has altered completely before Osbern returns. Sunlight patterns the surface of the desk with rubies and topaz. Surely they have slid a thumbs’ length along its edge already. The day will be over before it has begun at this rate.

  “I have spoken to my lord,” says Osbern, in hesitant English, as he re-enters the room. At last. “He is not pleased, but he will see you. Follow me. He is up, but still in his chamber.”

  “I am to go in alone?” It is not the impropriety of it she questions, but her luck.

  Osbern gives her a long, considering look. She casts her eyes down, trying to look demure.

  “He’s a priest, mistress,” he says, “and sick.”

  And soon, very soon now, he will be dead.

  ***

  As saints are wafted to heaven on clouds of incense, Gytha has come to believe she will be carried down to hell on a tide of that perfume. Not incense. Not blood or shit or fear, or arnica for bruises. Rosemary and sandalwood. Always rosemary and sandalwood. Feeling like a Christian entering the circus, she plasters a smile to her face.

  “Good day, my lord. I thank God to see you looking so well.” And indeed she does. It would have been galling in the extreme to be cheated of her quarry by a hunting accident.

  “Do you, mistress, do you indeed?” He sits facing away from the door, in a chair close to the brazier on the hearthstone. He turns stiffly toward her, as though his back is causing him pain. The hound which had its head in his lap when she came in slinks away to hide under the bed. The same yellow eyed beast she saw in Winchester, or its descendant.

  “Of course, my lord, I am not entirely without charity.”

  “And like every charitable woman, you devote time to visiting the sick. Thank you for taking my sister’s place. I hope she is not seriously indisposed.”

  “A head cold, that’s all. She blames it on the change in the weather.” She keeps her tone clipped, neutral.

  How well his sister understands him, what a perfect morsel she has tossed into his den, flesh succulent, but enough bone to keep his teeth sharp. He extends his hand, but she does not kneel to kiss his ring, merely stands in front of him, clutching her scrip. Her hands, he notes curiously, are shaking. The ring slips down toward his knuckle and he pushes it back impatiently with his thumb.

  He is thinner, and his hair has grown longer, curling over the collar of his loose, dark gown. His face is somehow unveiled, the bones bold and delicate within the web of muscle, thrown into relief by the work of draught and flame. He looks like an angel, she thinks, a tired angel, worn out with watching over mankind, an angel who can never blink nor turn his head away, trapped in his own nature. She finds herself smiling at him. Looking at him, she realises, gives her a sense of joy, the same pure, arbitrary joy that comes with watching swallows at sunset or feeling snow on her eyelashes.

  Determinedly, she summons other memories, images of his men stripping Lady Edith’s hall, of Lady Edith holding out her hand to the soldier in charge of loading the cart, her back turned rigidly on the body of Skuli folded into the mud. Yet punctuating them is always the recurring memory of Odo’s face as he ordered the hall door closed, a mask of exhaustion, not a spark of triumph or a glint of avarice that she can recall.

  She is bewitched. He knows her intent and has called up some demon to infest her mind and deflect her from her purpose. She must do it now. Now, while she is still lucid enough to
know what power he is exercising. She takes a step forward, curling her fingers around the haft of her knife, reassured by its solid familiarity.

  “You have letters for me?” he prompts. Perhaps she is more touched than clever, he speculates, watching unreadable expressions chase each other across her face like clouds running before a wind. Sometimes, he thinks, reflecting on Turold, his dwarf, it is hard to tell the difference; both lie outside the main way, in the margins. It would be disappointing, though. Clever women are bracing, like new wine or a ride along the beach early on a winter’s morning.

  “Oh…yes.” Letting go of the knife, she rummages in the scrip and hands him the bundle of letters. “And this.” He has beaten her, beguiled her with his angel’s face. Instead of simply unhooking the knife from her girdle and driving it into his body, she has let herself become encumbered with the fastenings on the satchel, the bundles of documents with their festoon of dangling seals. “A new drawing Sister Jean would like your opinion on,” she adds crossly. He raises his eyebrows at this, but shows no inclination to unfold it, putting everything in a pile on the low table beside his chair.

  “Take off your cloak,” he orders her. “I think it too warm in here today, but Brother Infirmarer insists on burning his concoctions to keep the air pure, so the fire is never out.”

  She tightens her grip on her knife, focuses her concentration on the smooth bone handle, its warmth, the way it has worn over the years to fit her hand. “I mustn’t be long.”

  “But you must at least wait until I have looked at the drawing? If you are to take my opinion back to your mistress?”

  Her mistress? Sister Jean is not her mistress. Not as long as Lady Edith lives. Perhaps she was right to stay her hand after all; perhaps he might give away some clue as to her ladyship’s fate if she listens carefully enough to what he has to say.