Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “As warming as a fire built entirely of kindling, I think, Osbern,” he replies. “Now, for pity’s sake, get these bandages off me. I can hardly breathe.”

  Osbern undresses him and removes the bandages, which he rolls and puts away discreetly in the bottom of the linen press. Odo has orders to join the king in Ely as soon as possible, to put down a rebellion of the East Anglians. There can be no question of damaging rumours about his fitness.

  “Give me my dressing gown, then you may leave me to rest. I shall dine in hall tonight. Come back in an hour. No, on second thoughts, ask Lord Hamo to attend me, and a scribe.” Messengers must go out to his vassals no later than the morning ordering them to join him for the expedition to Ely.

  Good, loyal, efficient Hamo with his pasty, pockmarked face and his Gascon harridan, the Countess Marie, whose marriage Odo himself had blest days before they embarked for England, though in Odo’s opinion, the only good thing to come out of Gascony is its horses. It is lucky he knows his lord’s vassalage almost as well as his lord does, because this evening Odo is curiously and uncharacteristically absentminded about who owes what in knight service and how long everyone is likely to need to assemble their forces.

  “My lord,” he ventures, after pointing out for the third time that Ursulin FitzHugh is already in East Anglia and that therefore there is little point in ordering him to attend a muster in Canterbury, “should you be undertaking this campaign? Shall I go in your stead?”

  Where is she? Why was she not there to welcome him? Could she be ill? Dead? “Hamo, you’re a good man, but I assure you I’m fine, just a little tired. Besides, I need you here. I have been considering replacing this castle. It’s inadequately fortified and damnably uncomfortable.”

  How dare she have the gall to snub him? When he has been generous enough not to have her clapped in irons for attempting to murder him. Women. Whatever you give them, it is never enough.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “There’s a suitable site just beyond Worthgate, with the Roman walls to the southwest and the river to the north, roughly. There’s nothing much there at the moment, a few small houses and a church. To Saint Mildred, I think. The houses can come down, and we’ll put another church in the castle ward. I’d like you to get things started: plans, land clearance, foundations and so forth. Find me a good, plain mason. No artistic temperament. I want to see the keep up by All Souls.”

  “Possible if we use local stone, my lord, rather than bringing it in from Caen as you did for the women’s house.”

  “Fine.”

  But how would she excuse herself to Agatha? Has she told Agatha the truth? How else could she account for the fact that she no longer had the drawing? If she has, will Agatha be grateful to get her back, with her small hands so skilled at fine needlework, or will she account him a contemptible fool for letting her go?

  “My lord, there is just the matter of cost.”

  “If the money isn’t available, Hamo, levy a tax. We aren’t in a famine or anything, are we, and my people cannot expect me to defend them entirely at my personal expense? If there’s resistance, you hold my seal and command the garrison. You know what to do.”

  “Right, my lord. That just leaves de Mortimer.”

  Perhaps she was there after all, and it was just that he failed to see her because of her small stature, “De Mortimer?”

  “For the muster, my lord. Only a dozen knights and their people, but as he’s not more than a day’s ride away from your northern border, well situated to reinforce you if necessary. I suggest you send to him to stand in readiness in his own manor, rather than bringing his force here.”

  “Eminently sensible. See to it, Hamo.”

  Nonsense. Of course she wasn’t there. He saw Agatha, didn’t he, and she is of a similar height? He will go to the atelier as soon as he finishes his business with Hamo. No, he won’t. It isn’t for him to go begging to her. But it would be only natural, expected, that he should want to see how the work has progressed during his absence. After dark? When he can see so much more clearly in the morning, by daylight?

  Once Hamo has bowed his way out, Odo goes through to his bed chamber where Osbern is laying out his clothes for dinner in hall.

  “Leave me.”

  When Osbern has retired, he lies on his bed, cheek resting on his folded arms, staring into the darkness, feeling his back ache, feeling like a lovelorn adolescent. Feeling a fool. Feeling sorry for himself.

  Feeling, he realises, lonely. He has never been, is never, alone. He is surrounded by his household, his priests, his soldiers, his vassals at every waking moment, dressing, eating, shitting. Fucking…? Thinking, reading, ruling his world. More often than not he is in the company of the king, from whom, the chroniclers tell him, he is inseparable. Even as a tiny boy he shared a bed, first with Agatha, later with Robert. Now Osbern sleeps outside his door every night, or on the other side of the hanging which partitions his tent, close enough for his breathing to lull Odo to sleep, certainly close enough to be the one who holds him until his teeth stop chattering when his nightmare visits him. Even now, in solitude and darkness, God is watching him.

  Except that he has no sense of it. The crowds have dispersed from the wards, and it is so quiet. No rustle of angels’ wings, no muffled laughter, no one standing between him and himself. He feels abandoned by everyone. By William and Lanfranc in their reforming zeal. By Agatha, who cannot read his mind after all. By God.

  But Gytha cannot leave him; she is inside him, she is his, because he dreams her. Except that he does not; he has been free of his nightmare since recounting it to the anchorite. The anchorite. The anchorite must be found so Odo can reclaim his dream—and her.

  “Osbern!” he shouts as he returns to the parlour, running his hands over his face and through his hair as though trying to rid himself of the maudlin humour clinging like spiders’ webs in an unused room. Osbern hands a tray of wine and drinking horns to a small boy from the buttery summoned for the purpose and bows, flapping his hands behind his back at the boy in a gesture of dismissal. “My lord?”

  “Send the verderer to me. Straight away. I must speak to him before dinner. Then you may dress me.”

  Fables

  Lent 1071

  He sends no page to announce him this time. He does not have to. The women can hear the clank of his spurs as he runs up the stairs. Sister Jean breaks off in the middle of reading Aesop and hurries to meet him.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure, my lord. I thought you would be gone by now.” The household has been on a war footing for weeks. The shields have been taken down from above the high table, leaving pale ghosts of themselves on the plaster; the heavy mail hauberks have been unpacked from their boxes, the swords and javelins sharpened. Every day the outer court has been occupied by a queue of nervous war horses waiting for the farrier, and several people have been kicked or nipped, passing too close to the highly strung animals.

  “Any minute.” The din in the outer court is rising with the delay. Horses snicker, harness jangles, dogs bark, the occasional laugh, full of bravado, rises above the rest. “I…I wanted to take a last look. To have this work fresh in my mind to compare with the Byrhtnoth hanging when I see it again.”

  He has decided to give her one more chance. He has come to the atelier every day while waiting for the muster to assemble. Every day. Loitering about on some pretext or another, talking to Agatha about matters he knows she has perfectly well under control, such as the supply of wools, the consistency of dyes, the danger of fire if the women are allowed to have extra braziers. He knows he has driven his sister to distraction with remedies for Margaret when she had an inflammation of the eye, a present of Saint Agatha cakes from Master Pietro for the women to share on the day they commemorate the saint’s martyrdom, some needless nonsense about a mistake he has spotted in the embroidering of a bridle, which no one but he is ever likely to notice. Yet he could not help himself; he was powerless to keep away.

&nbs
p; And she has never once looked at him. Even now, she is the only one who does not raise her head as he comes in, but continues to sew as though not even the Trump of Doom could distract her. If he were to cross the room and stand, looking over her shoulder at what she is doing, breathing in her mermaid smell, she would simply sit motionless, her hands folded in her lap, her head demurely bowed, exposing the downy nape of her neck with its scribble of dark hair escaped from her cap, and wait. Whatever comment he might make would elicit nothing more than a low “Yes, my lord,” or “No, my lord,” or possibly a “Thank you, my lord,” if he tried to win her over by praising her work.

  She has no right to treat him this way when he has exercised such forbearance. She may have served Edith Swan Neck, but when all’s said and done, she’s no more than a common little whore, and a whore’s tiring woman before that. Oh yes, he knows all about her now. He has extracted the information from Agatha by degrees during these waiting days. Information is a commodity he understands well, the conditions in which it proliferates, how to harvest it, its uses and its resale price. Yet this information has somehow turned on him. The knowledge of her whoring has served only to draw him in more deeply.

  The thought of other men fucking her, of men fucking her for their pleasure, of the wishful thinking men indulge in with whores, obsesses him. It is like the gap left by a drawn tooth, a bloody mess you must always be poking your tongue into. When he thinks of her now, that is how he sees her, servicing her clients in some steamy, sordid little cell, her skin slippery with sweat, her hair sticking to her face, and he feels sick with lust, lying in his gut like an indigestible meal.

  When he does not think of her, he thinks of nothing. The only embassies to which he pays proper attention are the daily reports from his verderer, always the same, always nothing. Every evening his heart lifts at the prospect that today they may have, must have, found some trace of the anchorite. Every evening, when Osbern shows the man in to him, he can tell immediately from the mournful, slightly wary set of his countenance that they have not. The rational half of him knows they never will, that the anchorite is a mirage, conjured by fever, but he cannot give up looking. Remember Brutus, whose dream island he is now living on, enduring the very real vagaries of its climate and the dangerous eccentricities of its people.

  His confessor, clearing his throat, his ears turning scarlet, speaking in a strangled whisper, suggests that solitary vice, in moderation and for the sole purpose of averting the excessive accumulation of seed, which can contaminate the blood, is forgivable. But he doesn’t want solitary vice, or moderation. Or forgiveness.

  “Perhaps this will interest you, my lord,” says Agatha, leading him toward the frame where the twins are working, next to Gytha and Emma. She notices how his glance repeatedly flicks in their direction, understanding, probably better than he does himself, how he is ensnared. Margaret sits there too, blithely oblivious to the effect she has on Agatha, like a serene red and white cow, smiling her merry smile in response to some remark of her sister’s.

  He stands for long minutes, contemplating the scene stretched on the twins’ frame, without once looking up. There he is again, the tall knight with the arrow in his eye, but no longer dramatically suspended in empty space. He is flanked by a standard bearer, although the standard carries no clearly identifiable arms. It may be a dragon, the Godwinson emblem, or a fox, or a wolf. Anything really. A mounted Norman soldier canters behind him, and beneath the horse’s front hooves a footsoldier, mutilated by the Norman’s sword. The whole scene carries the legend, Hic Harold Rex interfectus est. Harold the King it reads, and it is impossible to say to which of the two dying men it refers.

  “I see,” he comments loudly, “that Mistress Gytha gave a full and frank account of our discussion about Godwinson’s death.” She must acknowledge him now.

  But if she does, he does not see it, because just at that moment, Alwys, who has been attending to him rather than her work, snaps her needle and tears the middle finger of her right hand with the sharp stub, letting out a little shriek, distracting him. He is mesmerised by drops of dark, bright blood falling onto the white linen, next to a tiny headless man with large hands, toppling to his death in the lower margin, beneath his executioner’s feet. He stares at it, certain it reminds him of something, until Agatha, bustling about with a bowl of water and strips of bandage, elbows him out of the way so she can attend to Alwys’ wound. Nobody notices Margaret wince, sucking her own middle finger as though it too is bleeding.

  By the time Alwys’ wound has been bound and the needle replaced, the moment in which Gytha might have said something, or even merely met his eye, has passed. He moves on, stopping to exchange courtesies with Judith and to ask one of the Saint Augustine’s women how the community feels about the appointment of a new abbot. He himself is overjoyed that it is to be Scolland, another man from Bec like most of Lanfranc’s appointments, but one whom Odo remembers for the warmth of his compassion, a priest more concerned for the plight of a sinner than the correct form of granting absolution. He hopes for an ally in Abbot Scolland. He then returns, pausing to satisfy himself that the damage to Alwys’ finger is not serious, to the position to which he is becoming hopelessly accustomed, standing behind Gytha.

  He is going away to war. True, these risings seem to have become almost routine over the years, but they are no less deadly for that. He could be horribly maimed or held to ransom for years. He might die. Suddenly it is unthinkable he should face these possibilities without holding her in his arms again, feeling the imprint of her body on his like a shield, or a sense of hope. Why is he hesitating? She belongs to him anyway; if he were to order her into his bed now, this instant, the only people with any right to complain would be the army waiting for him in the outer ward, in the squally March wind, the munitions carts sinking slowly into the mud.

  “Mistress,” he says, sounding horribly nervous and peremptory, “a word, if you please. Privately.”

  She cannot reply. Her heart seems to be stuck in her throat. Her palms are sweating. It is the same whenever he enters the atelier; she doesn’t look at him, tries to avoid speaking to him, yet her body responds to everything he does, every nuance and inflection of his speech, every one of those looks he darts at her. She marks them all. She lays down her needle, wipes her hands on her skirt, and pushes back her stool. As she rises, she becomes acutely aware of how close to her he is standing. The air between them seems to take on shape and substance. All conversation ceases; she hears nothing but the rhythmic jangle of his spurs and the knocking of Emma’s stool against the floor as she begins to twitch. All eyes are on them as they walk out of the workshop, passing Sister Jean’s long worktable on one side and the row of frames on the other, Gytha preceding Odo, who holds back the curtain for her at the head of the stairs. Even Alwys stops fiddling with the bandage around her finger.

  Gytha has no idea where to go. Even though the hall is empty, the door is open onto the courtyard where his army waits. The curiosity of the other women presses around them like a crowd at a fair. The only privacy is to be found in the women’s dormitory, or Sister Jean’s parlour, where she also sleeps. Is she destined always to meet him in rooms where there are beds? She turns at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Where…?” but her question remains unfinished. Taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger, he tilts her face toward him and kisses her mouth, sealing in the rest of her words with his lips. Struggle, she tells herself as he parts her lips with his tongue, resist this foreign, treacherous thing, but in the realm where his kiss is possible, where nothing exists but his kiss, the rules are different and her body won’t obey. She clings to him, her arms around his bowed neck, her fingers entangled in his hair, and kisses him back, hard and hungry, her tongue learning from his, a sinuous, sensuous dance. Her body arches itself against him. All her senses are flooded with him, the hot, salty smell of his skin mingling with the familiar perfume and the faint residue of the pig grease they use to rustp
roof armour, the play of bone and sinew as he wraps his arms around her, the surprising, minty taste of the cardamoms he chews to freshen his breath, the gorgeous pressure of his erection just above her pubic bone. His eyelashes curl, like his hair; a man in whom nothing is direct. His mail shirt brands small rings into her skin beneath her dress, though she feels no pain but the famished ache of lust between her thighs. She is disbelieving when, eventually, he draws back from kissing her, dazed to find they are still separate people, not fused irreversibly in the furnace of that kiss.

  “I only meant to talk to you about the camel,” he murmurs. She frowns, but her mouth smiles and she licks her lips, tasting bruises.

  “The camel?” Oh, fortunate camel, to be in Gytha’s mind, in Gytha’s lovely mouth.

  He straightens up but continues to hold her, hands clasped in the small of her back. “A favour for a soldier on the eve of battle.”

  “Another one?” Her fists are loosely curled against his chest.

  “One of anything is never enough.” He sounds hoarse, breathless, as though strangled by desire. She strokes his throat, holding her fingertips against the pulse that beats there like a moth trapped beneath the skin. Then they kiss again, watching each other with hungry eyes, until they are distracted by some commotion outside in the courtyard, horses whinnying, the stamp and slip of hooves, raised voices.

  “It’s time I was going,” he says, making no attempt to disengage himself, breathing the words into her mouth.

  “What about the camel? You’d better tell me quickly, or they might leave without you.” Giggling. Delicious conspiracy.

  “Shall I let them? And stay here with you?” He strokes her breast, the tips of his fingers tracing the hard bud of her nipple beneath her gown. “With the bed curtains drawn and Osbern guarding the door?”