Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “What’s going on, my lord?…Oh.” The commotion has brought Osbern running from the room next door, but seeing his lord and the woman standing close, flushed and panting, he grins and withdraws. Osbern, Odo teases him, guards his lord’s morals so fiercely even he cannot always gain access to them.

  “Now,” says Odo calmly, though he remains pale and somewhat breathless, “tell me what this is all about.”

  “I saw the king’s body,” she says, her veins full of ice now, the spark of his flesh against hers doused. “I know he didn’t die of a shot in the eye. You have lied. There, I have said it. Send for your soldiers, I’m ready.”

  “How do you know?” he asks, sounding almost fearful.

  “The household I spoke of, with the camel? It was Edith Swan Neck’s. I accompanied her when she came to ask for his body.”

  Silence. Now he will do it, send for his men, or perhaps just break her neck himself with those broad, muscular hands. She closes her eyes, squeezes them shut until she sees tiny, dancing points of light in the darkness. Her children’s souls, beckoning her. A weight lifts from her shoulders. She is floating. She opens her eyes.

  He has not moved. He stands very still, his arms hanging at his sides. His stillness has an air of impending catastrophe about it, as though he is suspended over nothingness by a frayed rope that will break if he moves.

  “Then,” he says slowly, as though the words don’t quite fit in his mouth, “you have been in my dreams these past four years.” Four women, two tall and fair, one dark, one with her head covered. One dark. “I wonder, are you real? Or like the anchorite? Am I going to wake up soon with Lanfranc wagging his beard at me and find Godwinson really was shot in the eye? Or that he’s not dead at all and I’m still in Normandy? Maybe I even dreamed William. Did you know that the Romans weren’t sure this island existed before Caesar invaded it? I read a lot of Caesar while I was sitting around in Saint Valery waiting for the wind to change. And Tacitus…”

  He slumps back into his chair, staring into the fire, apparently no longer aware of her presence. God knows what he sees there. He must have suffered some sort of relapse, ranting like a madman about dreams and hermits and Julius Caesar when confronted with her knowledge of his deceit. He is possessed, she is sure of it. Devils live in the hearts of fires; if you stare into them as he is doing you will see their faces, and if you stare long enough they will enter through the eyes and travel straight to the spirit. If a devil takes her she will never find her children.

  “I’ll call your servant, sir,” she says fearfully, hurrying toward the door, fumbling to unfasten her knife before the Devil gains the strength to pursue her.

  “Wait,” he says suddenly, wrenching his gaze away from the fire. “Come back. Were you truly on the battlefield? Can you confirm my dream to me?”

  “I don’t know, my lord. I don’t know what you dream.” And don’t tell me, please don’t tell me, begs her heart, one hand on the latch, the other still fiddling with the thong fastening her knife. “Let me fetch your servant. You are unwell.”

  He waves a dismissive hand at that. Looking at him she feels her panic subside a little. He looks more himself again. Perhaps, after all, the fire devil did not have time to jump into his eyes. She stops trying to free her knife, noticing his gaze flick from her hand to her face. He gives her a quick, knowing smile. He is not ill, or possessed, but completely in control.

  “Did my sister know all this when she found you?”

  “No, my lord, only that I had been a tiring woman to Lady Edith, on account of my skill as an embroiderer. You might have remembered me, but you did not.”

  “Men notice women after battles, mistress, not during them.”

  “Men do not notice women at all, my lord. What men notice is if their bellies are empty or their shirts need mending.”

  She could be pretty, he thinks, yet it is the hardness in her that appeals to him; it is probably what he deserves. He starts to laugh, displaying even teeth. “And you call me plainspoken. Come here. Sit down. We will have a drink and decide what’s to be done about poor Godwinson.”

  “Aren’t you going to have me arrested?”

  “Why? Is that what you want?”

  “It is what I expected.”

  “For now, my main concern is for my tapestry. When it is finished, if you still wish to be arrested, I will see what can be done, you have my word on it.”

  “You should be more careful of words, my lord. It’s not a tapestry. That’s a different thing altogether.”

  “So Agatha keeps telling me. A detail. Here, drink this, only be warned. Brother Infirmarer insists on adding honey to it. It’s abominably sweet.” He hands her a drinking horn, the tips of their fingers brushing as she takes it. He watches her drink, the tilt of her chin, the ripple of the muscles in her throat, rosy in the firelight, a little shudder as she swallows the overly sweetened drink.

  Emboldened by his obvious appreciation, she decides she will try to salvage something from her failure. “Can I ask you a question, sir?” She smiles, feeling herself flush from the fire, the wine, her ridiculous desperation. Her pride.

  He looks amused and perplexed all at once. “You can.”

  “Lady Edith, what happened to her?”

  “I have not laid eyes on her since Winchester fell, and that’s the honest truth of it.” Turning from her he adds, in a more hesitant tone, “I suppose you saw…all that also?”

  His day’s growth of beard gives the impression that some celestial illuminator has partially gilded his face before stopping work till tomorrow. A half finished angel. She has no more stomach, all of a sudden, for baiting him. “You mean the child?”

  He nods.

  “That was an accident. It was terrible, but I do not blame you for it. I have no wish to hold you accountable for things beyond your power. To be honest, it’s a relief to me to find there are some things beyond your power.”

  “Thank you.” He looks at her sidelong, and their eyes meet. She recalls her father, the day her mother died, Adam struggling to tally his figures by a smoky tallowlight. He wears the same expression, of hurt and bewilderment; he makes the same mute, hopeless appeal for an explanation.

  Rising from her stool, she replaces the horn in a silver bracket on the hearth. At the same instant, as though by some signal, Odo also stands and, stepping toward her, folds her in his arms, his left around her waist, his right hand drawing her head down against his breast, enveloping her in his perfume. With a sense of blissful relief, she leans into him and lets him take the weight of all the grief and anger that has wracked her for so long. She closes her eyes, luxuriating in the breadth of his frame, the strength of his arms, the certainty which comes to her that he can absorb it all the way a good shield takes the shock of a lance.

  The bones of her skull, beneath her cap and couvre chef, curve perfectly into the cup of his hand. His heart pounds as though trying to break out of his chest, and he wonders if she feels it too. Her lips part slightly and he feels, rather than hears, the soft sigh which escapes her, caressing his fingers as they explore her face. Her strong little hands glide down his back, stroking his ribs like harp strings.

  But it’s not enough. What he craves is more than she can offer. His emotions, forced out of shape by the imbalance in his body, are too raw for the absurdity of the physical. He isn’t ready for knots in laces and stuck belt buckles, for exposure, for saliva, sweat, and semen. He’s afraid, sick of body and heart as he is, that he wouldn’t be capable of making love. He feels too vulnerable to expose himself to Osbern’s knowing leer if he asks him to ensure they are not disturbed and refuses altogether to consider the notion that the bed behind him belongs to Lanfranc. He yearns for an exalted passion, for consummation without the mess, to love and be loved without trying. He’s exhausted. He’s being childish. He loosens his grip on her and, seconds later, trembling with frustrated desire, she does the same.

  She has failed, and she will never have another c
hance. He will always be on his guard now. Clearly he thought it was her intention to seduce him only to finish what she started, and that is why he drew back. Yet he wants her, his body will not let him lie about that. And he did make the first move: he did put his arms around her, holding her with such fierce tenderness that the memory of it tugs at her with visceral sweetness. As she waits to be dismissed she tries to concentrate on breathing, sucking clear air into her lungs, yet the air in this room is as tricky as a marsh, laden with the scents of medicinal herbs, and his perfume, and the sharp, feral heat of his body seeping under her skin.

  Odo is sure a host of tiny demons is practising dance steps in the pit of his stomach, wantonly calling his heart to keep changing its tempo. He has loved all kinds of women in his life, modest or strident, demanding or discreet, some beautiful, others who compensated for a lack of beauty with certain rare skills he hardly likes to admit to himself, let alone his confessor. He knows the love of women. It does not feel like this, not dumb and inept and bewitched by dreams.

  “The fact is,” he begins, “I have this dream, often, sometimes every night for a week or more. Though not, I grant you, since my accident. And you seem to be part of it. The thought had a strange effect on me. No doubt a consequence of my delirium.”

  “Tell me. Perhaps it will help.” He cannot refuse the immense gravity of her expression, where the answers to all his questions seem to be suspended as the fixed stars are in heaven. He thinks, as he begins, that he will not tell her the end of it, but as he nears the point, as he stumbles over his account of the feelings the fair beauty arouses in him, he realises she is already the custodian of his shame, in life as in his dream. She has discovered him in lies and in lust, as he has discovered in her the intent to kill him. One more perversion can only bind them closer. The dream seeping into life. He tells her everything. He rehearses every word he spoke to the anchorite of his delirium; he spares her nothing.

  Revolted yet fascinated, her blood cold and dancing, she cannot take her eyes off him. She keeps her fists clenched beneath her chin because she does not know, if she gives her hands their freedom, whether she will try to claw his throat out or wind her arms around him and cover him with kisses. She exults in his pain—it is no more than he deserves—and then her heart goes out to his weakness; she yearns to smooth the lines from his forehead and kiss away the shadows around his eyes. He must feel pain; it is his just desert for what he has done, condoned, lied about. Yet the suffering in this dream may also be a sign of repentance, and if he repents, then the hatred and anger which has sustained her will have nothing left on which to feed. They are together in the power of his dream.

  When he comes to the end of his tale, he is leaning forward in his chair, his forearms resting on his knees, twisting one of his rings around and around his finger. The room has grown dark, Osbern conjecturing his master would not welcome his intrusion to light the lamps. The fire murmurs and pops; Gytha scoops a handful of dried herbs out of an earthenware bowl standing on the hearthstone and tosses them into the brazier. She breathes deeply, scents of juniper, thyme, mint, and lavender bringing echoes of summer into the late winter afternoon.

  “Is it God or the Devil speaks to us in dreams, do you think?” she asks, looking into the fire, the fizz and flare of the burning herbs dancing in her eyes.

  “Or our own poor souls released from the constraints of their humanity.”

  “Which sounds like the same thing.”

  “Sounds like, but isn’t. If the soul were God or the Devil, then we would be sublime, immortal. Instead of just a battleground, as the Manichees have it.”

  “Perhaps your dream is a battle, my lord. The black and the white. Love and violence. The woman among the bodies. Life and death.”

  “Yet it seems to me more of a memory than an allegory, Gytha.”

  “I don’t doubt it. You need to be conscious to play at allegory. Like dice.”

  “And none of us would consciously think the things that fill our minds in sleep.”

  “If we did, we wouldn’t need to dream. God—”

  “Or the Devil?”

  “—or the Devil could speak to us more directly.”

  “So we have come full circle. Tell me, Gytha, in your opinion, is this dream of mine sent by God or the Devil? Is it of somnium coeleste or somnium animale?”

  She considers him earnestly, a slight frown drawing her brows into a sweet furrow above her nose. “I think it is sent by your guilty conscience, my lord.”

  “I have no conscience.” He drops his gaze and stares at his hands, at the thin scorings of the infirmarer’s fleam like tiny bridges of scar tissue across his veins. As though he has willed it, her fingers reach out to him until their tips brush one of the cuts.

  “You do yourself an injustice, my lord, if you think that, as your dream shows,” she says gently. “Confess and be absolved.”

  “Do you confess?”

  “When I had a priest, I confessed to him. But he is dead and the church I worshipped in burned down. I imagine there’s some great dark lump of stone in its place by now. I don’t see how God can be present in a stone house. So cold and earthbound, none of the warmth and life there is in wood. I keep my prayers to myself these days.”

  “Do you think I shall be plagued by this dream forever? Perhaps now I’ve confessed it to you, it’s up to you to grant me absolution.”

  “Even if it were in my power to absolve you, my lord, I don’t think you have shown sufficient contrition for your sins yet.” She keeps her tone light, but she is testing him.

  “For what? For lying about Godwinson? Consider. If I asked my sister to record what you and I saw, what do you think it would do for his memory? I know my honour means nothing to you, but how might his suffer if it was allowed to be known that he was cut up like butchers’ meat? I made my decision out of charity, out of respect for the man I once knew.”

  “And looting Lady Edith’s house? Bundling her off in a cart with her women as though they were pigs to market? Did you do all that out of respect also?”

  A spasm of embarrassment crosses his face; for a second he looks like a boy caught stealing apples, before his expression clears again. “When I remember how Godwinson was foresworn, it would be easy for me to say, all right, let’s have the truth in all its grisly, humiliating detail. It’s no more than he deserves. And it’s not as though my reputation would suffer. It couldn’t get much worse. Besides, I didn’t kill him, nor did any of my vassals. I’ve no idea who did. And in dispersing his household I did no more than any sensible man in my position would. Frankly, Aelfgytha, there is little honour on either side, the way it’s told to us in songs and stories.” He crosses to the window and looks out on the shadowy cloister wall and the square of lawn, blue in the dusk. “They’ll be locking up soon.”

  She twists round angrily. “Do you believe a word you’ve just said?”

  He gives her a rueful smile. “Well, the bit about locking up seems uncontroversial. As for the rest, think what you like. You and I might not believe it, but other people will, the people who only see my tapestry. We have to be practical. I’m not going back to live obscurely in Bayeux. You’re never going back to Godwinson’s court. The shot in the eye, it’s a myth for the present. It greases the wheels, makes things easier. God aid, he died four years ago. It won’t make a bit of difference to him, or your poor, mad mistress, wherever she is.”

  “Or his children?”

  “It won’t make any difference to them.” It is plain from his tone he will not entertain any enquiry as to why not. Two years ago, she remembers, rumours circulated for a while that Harold’s elder sons had launched an invasion from Ireland. It was believed they had landed in Wales, but then no more had been heard of them.

  “But the truth, my lord…”

  “Is what the victors say it is, I’m afraid. Interpretation, Gytha, do not underestimate its importance. Now, I am tired, and I must look at my letters. You may go. You will have an
escort back to the castle, and you will please convey my best wishes to my sister and tell her I pray for her recovery.” After a pause, he adds, “As regards Godwinson’s death, tell her…whatever you like.”

  With a questioning frown, she sweeps up her cloak to leave, her heels beating a rapid tattoo on the floor. He does not offer his ring to be kissed, and she neither bows nor bids him farewell. Uncertain whether she has won or lost, she has no idea how to conduct herself. All she knows is she has to escape the tricky, stifling atmosphere of the sickroom, to clear her head and cool her blood. Backward and forward her feelings have gone, like the shuttle in a loom, but in the hands of a poor weaver, so now everything is tangled, the design corrupt and impossible to follow.

  Odo smiles at her back. She will say nothing to Agatha about the shot in the eye, he is certain of it, for if she did, she would be forced to disclose a great deal more.

  ***

  He tells Osbern he will attend Compline. While Osbern dresses him, he reads his letters; he is determined not to think about Gytha, despite fact that Osbern’s studious disinterest keeps her present to him as though she were still in the room. Sometimes he does confide in Osbern, often enough for Osbern to consider it his right and take offence when his lord is less than open with him. But his confidences are not genuine; they are merely rehearsals of decisions already taken, attitudes already adopted. They are like his public confessions. Whatever he may feel the need to confess about this afternoon is far from clear to him yet; it lies in a murky, unexamined corner of his heart.

  There to remain, as he breaks the seal on the letter from Thomas of York. He becomes increasingly bad tempered as he reads, prowling around the room so Osbern has to perform various feats of agility to divest him of his loose gown and persuade him into a clean shirt. Only when he helps Odo on with his chausses does he manage to keep him still, and then with such a poor grace that, fearful of a cuff on the head before he completes the task, he wishes chausses fitted more easily over the heels. Still, God must be thanked for small mercies; a week ago Odo wouldn’t have had the energy for such a display of petulance, and a woman in his bed chamber all afternoon as well. He brushes Odo’s long tunic and hands him his Psalter with a smile of satisfaction.