Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  She feels as though her bones and sinews and all her organs have dissolved into a hot, languorous fog. Her voice, brittle and teasing, seems to come from somewhere else. “I would have thought you’d spent enough time confined to bed recently, my lord.” She fences, she fends. “Now, what about the camel?”

  “Will you embroider me one? So I can see what it looks like?”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “Whatever you wish.”

  “I have the notion now that I shall ask for it as a lady’s favour, instead of a sleeve or a pennant or what have you. Something to carry with me into battle and keep under my pillow at night.”

  “But I can’t possibly do it now; there isn’t time.”

  He smiles, though sadly, at her stricken expression, and strokes her cheek, savouring the realness of her skin, the crazing of tiny veins beneath its whiteness, the fine lines bracketing her mouth. “There’ll be other wars, don’t doubt it. Give it to me next time.”

  “I pray you live to see a next time, my lord.”

  “If I have your prayers, Gytha, then I am sure no harm can come to me.” Nevertheless, he fishes his glass amulet out from the neck of his shirt and kisses it. One of anything is never enough.

  “What is that, my lord?”

  “This? It’s called a Tear of the Virgin. It has a splinter of the True Cross inside. See?” He holds the charm toward her, extending the chain to its limit. She takes it between thumb and forefinger, tilting it to the light until she can see the tiny dark filaments at the heart of the glass drop. It feels warm from its place next to his skin. This, and her prayers, a fragile defence. “William gave it to me at my consecration.”

  William. Here she is, nestled against the still beating heart of the Bastard’s brother, the man she swore to kill. How easily her body has betrayed her, let her forget him laughing with his brother over the mangled corpse of King Harold, dictating to his scribes as his men bundled Lady Edith off God knows where and stole her possessions. For all she knows, his apartments are decorated with Lady Edith’s tapestries, his rooms lighted by her silver candlesticks. She doesn’t move, but he senses some change and holds her closer.

  “It’s all right,” he reassures her. “I’m sure nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  “Your men are getting impatient, sir, and Sister Jean will be after me if I don’t go back upstairs.” She struggles to free herself, but he won’t let her go.

  “A last kiss?” he begs.

  “Come back safely, my lord.” She pushes at his chest, gently, steadily, until he releases her with an uncertain laugh.

  “One more thing,” he says, turning at the foot of the stairs.

  “Yes, my lord?” She has already started back toward the workshop. Although she pauses, she remains facing away from him, fists clenched at her sides. He fancies she is trembling slightly.

  “Why did you not come out to greet me when I returned from Christ Church? It is the custom, you know, when your lord has been away for some time.”

  She raises one hand, rubbing distractedly at the back of her neck. “I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I could not. I was not ready…to see you again so soon.”

  “Yet it was you who brought me home.”

  The gentleness of his tone, the swoop from lordly arrogance to something almost humble, makes her turn to face him. She feels she owes him an explanation, but what can she tell him? That she is ashamed of her behaviour, that she regrets having failed in her mission? Better to say nothing than to tell a lie.

  He waits, watches how she looks around, everywhere but at him, as though the words she wants may be hidden somewhere in the hall, behind the open door, or in the curled corners of the drawings pinned to the walls and rustling softly in the wind.

  “It’s all wrong,” she says eventually. “This is all wrong.”

  Again that brief, uncertain laugh. “We shall see,” he says.

  And is gone, into the embrace of men and horses, tactics, map reading, muddy roads, comfortable words for the dying.

  “God speed,” she murmurs as the door closes behind him and crosses herself, something she has not done for years. She hears the clatter of hooves and armour, the creak of cart wheels, the squelch of feet in mud as she climbs the stairs to the atelier. They’ll follow the old wall north and go out of the Quenin Gate, she thinks, the way she would go if she were going home. Returning to the workshop, she glances out the windows over the outer ward, unable to help herself. Of course she cannot see him, but she does glimpse his standard, the golden wolf on the green ground, fluttering among the banners of the other knights in his company as they file out of the gate.

  ***

  “What was that all about?” hisses Margaret as Gytha passes her on her way back to her frame. She sounds like a goose, a silly, plump goose.

  “Nothing. A small favour.”

  Margaret leaves her place under the pretext of collecting wool. “There’s none of the green left on our stand, Sister,” she calls in response to a sharp glance from Sister Jean. Then, “Don’t be so cagey,” she says to Gytha. “He’s sweet on you, isn’t he? It’s obvious.”

  They speak in loud whispers. Gytha glances at Sister Jean, who is watching them intently from her lectern, continuing to recite Aesop from memory rather than reading. “You should pay more attention to the feelings you arouse in others, Meg, and less to what his lordship might or might not think of me. Anyway, I’m sure he’s completely indifferent to me.”

  “That’s impossible. You’re too…I don’t know. Anyway, he can’t take his eyes off you. And look at the way he’s taken to hanging around here, like some moonstruck boy. It drives Sister Jean to distraction, you can tell. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Not much I could do if it were true, is there? I’m his to do as he likes with, just as you are. Anyway, if he’s gone after Hereward, he’ll most likely get himself killed, and my virtue will remain unsullied.”

  “D’you really think he might? I wonder what would happen to us if he did?”

  “You’d be all right, I’m certain of that.”

  “Gytha, what are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Just saying you’d be all right. You could…go home to your parents and let your father find you a nice husband.”

  “Gytha?” Forgetting herself, Margaret lays down her needle but, catching Sister Jean’s eye, quickly picks it up again.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s it like? You know, going with a man?”

  It’s messy, ridiculous, humiliating, irresistable, painful in all kinds of ways. “My husband did his best to be pleasing.” She laughs, a wry puff of air through her nose. “He had a notion there must be pleasure on both sides to make babies.” And what is Odo’s best? Odo, with his living son. “But…there was a beggar woman I used to see sometimes, with a little child. She’d been a slave in a thegn’s household. Her master had had her against her will and got her pregnant, and then, because she wouldn’t give up the child to his wife to be raised, had her thrown out of the house in disgrace. I used to wonder how Adam’s theory stacked up against that. But I was grateful too. Adam was dim-witted, but he wasn’t cruel.”

  “Is he the only man you ever went with?”

  “Meg, is your brain overheated? If this is about the earl, there really is nothing to tell. Did you imagine he’d ripped off my clothes and made passionate love to me on the hall floor while you were all sitting here listening to Aesop?” The pit of her stomach suddenly feels as though it is filled with quicksilver. “He is a bishop, you know,” she says, as much to remind herself as Margaret.

  Margaret lets out a little shriek of laughter, quickly stifled. She tries to concentrate on her work but can make no sense of the charcoal lines in front of her that she is meant to transform into embroidery. Something is in the air, something confusing, adult, mysterious. She curses the luck that brought her here, to be mewed up in a castle before her time, like Saint Barbara in her tower.
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  “This is life,” Gytha continues, “not a romance.”

  Margaret doesn’t believe her. “Oh well, I don’t suppose I shall ever know. By the time the earl’s finished with us, I shall be an old maid with no property, and I’ll have to go back to my parents, if they’re still living, or my sister-in-law.”

  “I didn’t realise any of your brothers was married.” Gytha is relieved to be able to change the subject.

  “Oh, Tom was. He married young. Christine brought a good dowry, and Papa said it would do him good to settle down. He was a bit wild.” She smiles wistfully. “They were expecting a baby when he went to join King Harold. Christine had a little boy. She called him Tom too.”

  Odo, the widow maker.

  “It’s the fear he might have died unshriven,” continues Margaret. “It worries me more because his body was never found so we couldn’t even be sure of giving him a Christian burial. D’you suppose God makes allowances?”

  “I think God makes all sorts of allowances for soldiers.”

  “Gytha, Margaret.” Sister Jean raps on the lectern.

  “Sorry, Sister,” says Margaret, looping her wool off the stand and returning to her frame.

  “Thank you. The next fable is that of the Fox and the Crow. A crow was sitting on the branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese.

  “Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, ‘What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only her voice is as sweet as her looks are fair, she ought without doubt to be Queen of the Birds.’

  “The crow was hugely flattered by this, and just to show the fox that she could sing, she gave a loud caw. Down came the cheese and the fox, snatching it up, said, ‘You have a voice, madam, I see; what you want is wits.’

  “What do we understand from this? That flatterers are not to be trusted.”

  Margaret gives Gytha a meaningful look. “See. She’s noticed too.”

  Gytha continues to sew. Chain mail. Only now does she begin to feel the bruises on her breasts and upper arms.

  ***

  She cannot sleep, her mind plodding a treadmill of its small stock of memories of Odo, the discomfort of her bruises dissolved in the encompassing ache of guilt and frustration. She fears he will be killed; she fears he will not. She is relieved it went no further, yet feels the promise of his body pressed against hers as distinctly as her linen shift bunching and tangling as she tosses and turns. She tries to imagine becoming his mistress, but it is beyond imagining. She conjures visions of him out of the darkness, his hands, his mouth, his doe eyes, the weight of his body—what does he look like, feel like, naked—and remembers in a flood of mortification that he is a bridegroom of the Church. And her enemy. As grey light begins to filter through the window shutters, she abandons all attempts at sleep. Pulling her cloak around her shoulders, she creeps out of the dormitory, drawn to the workshop and the view from the great windows. Somewhere to breathe, to be alone and think.

  Dawn has already reached the workshop. The sky in the east is the colour of opals, and the tips of the palisade are touched with the first, tentative, rose gold light of the sun. She walks slowly down the length of the room, feeling the knots and splinters of the floorboards under her bare feet, breathing the solitude of cold ash and cat’s piss, running her hand over the embroidery frames, feeling expectancy in the taut stretched linen from which figures emerge like Adam from the dust.

  She stops at random and quickly recognises Emma’s work in the face of a soldier riding to Bosham with Harold at the beginning of his ill-fated embassy to Duke William. The face that seems to foresee how it will all go wrong, looking far ahead of the homely scenes of prayer and feasting and dogs being carried into the ships by patient men with their skirts kilted up to the buttocks, seeing shipwreck and false promises. Emma has a real gift for faces.

  Why did Harold go to Normandy when he did, when it was obvious the old king had not much longer to live? In Lady Edith’s household it was understood that he went to negotiate with William for the release of hostages. Yet the Normans say he carried King Edward’s confirmation of his promise of his throne to their duke. That would explain his journey, but not why he would swear fealty to the Bastard. He and his brothers had the Witan in their pockets; there was no doubt they would elect him king when the time came. He must have been tricked, duped by the Judas’ Hair from the moment he fell into the hands of that pirate, Ponthieu, forced off course by a storm in the Channel. Do the Normans even have the weather on their side? Dear God, it’s all so unfair.

  Yet now, looking at Harold’s entourage boarding their ships, she finds herself remembering Odo’s bitch, Juno, and thinking how the scene with the dogs would delight him, how it is probably derived from Sister Jean’s experience of life in Odo’s camp rather than anything she has been told about King Harold. She turns her back on the frame and leans her elbows on the smooth stone sill to watch the sun rise. Through Odo’s windows.

  Just then, the cat, which has been asleep on the lectern as usual, decides her day is beginning and jumps down. The copy of Aesop falls to the floor on her tail, the loose pages fluttering after it, making her squawk and run for the stairs.

  Gytha only starts to read, in her painstaking way, so she can return everything to the lectern in order. The book is, of course, in Latin, primitively illuminated so that she cannot rely on the illustrations to show her which fable is which. Foxes look like wolves, crows like eagles, and men like monkeys. The loose leaves are transcriptions of the Latin text, each line alternated with an English translation.

  Sister Jean has made many translations, of everything from Ovid to Archbishop Lanfranc’s much acclaimed new commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul. But this is not in Sister Jean’s hand, nor, to judge by its erratic layout, that of a professional scribe. The letters are boldly made and easy to read, but often the lines are not very straight and are frequently interrupted by marginal notes and glosses in French which Gytha cannot understand. The translation, she thinks, is also better, more subtle and less literal, than Sister Jean could manage, made by somebody with a greater facility in the nuances of the English tongue.

  The more she reads, the more certain she becomes of the translator’s identity. She can feel his hand forming the letters, the play of muscle and bone beneath the skin, the pressure of his square-tipped fingers on quill and sand caster. She sees the light catching in his jewellery and the gold hairs on the back of his hand as it moves over the parchment. She hears the scratch of the nib and the long silences in between, tense with thought. And, knowing him, is drawn into the reading as though into his mind, her lips shaping the words he has made, oblivious to everything but the precarious thrill of falling, past Aesop’s creatures in their Babel Tower of morals, through the sheets of linen stretched out to break her fall, through the sparkle of shattered glass, like Lucifer falling through the floor of heaven.

  At the end of The Fox and the Crow he has written, “‘The moral of this story is…’” then something in French, then “‘…that you must know you can stomach lies before you swallow them.’” Which gives her an idea, a kernel, an embryo she will nurse. This one will not die.

  ***

  She listens avidly to Sister Jean’s readings from Aesop, sizing up each tale to see if it will fit the mould of her idea. Her sleepless nights, whenever Odo will leave her alone, when, perhaps, he sleeps himself and does not dream, are peopled by Aesop’s creatures, the smooth-talking fox, the vain crow, the frog and the mouse running a three-legged race from drowning, the lion made foolish by childlessness. The darkness around her seethes with them, as though her thoughts have taken physical form. The air rustles and whispers, pads across the floor on bare feet, murmurs her name.

  “Gytha. Are you awake?”

  “Alwys? What is it?”

  “I thought you were awake. I didn’t want
to disturb Meg.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s my finger.”

  “Your finger?”

  “The one I pricked the day the earl left.”

  The day the earl left. A full and frank account of our discussion about Godwinson’s death. Oh, of course. Lord Odo has had a change of heart, Sister. He would like to tell the truth now. Surely he could see how easily she has compounded his lies with her own. What a myth they have created between them, what a bond of dreams and make believe.

  “I’d quite forgotten. Sorry.”

  “I don’t think it’s right.” A note of genuine fear in her voice refocuses Gytha on the present. “It’s all swollen up and throbbing fit to burst.”

  Gytha gropes under her bed where she keeps a stub of candle and a flint. Glancing into the darkness in the direction of Margaret’s bed, but detecting no sign the other twin is awake, she whispers, “Come out into the hall and let’s have a look at it.”

  They go out, closing the dormitory door softly behind them. Gytha strikes the flint against one of the few patches of wall not covered with pictures and, by the light of the candle, examines Alwys’ finger. It looks like a half cooked sausage, the skin stretched and shiny, on the verge of splitting. At the tip, where the needle entered, it is crimson. “Cold water,” she says with a confidence she does not feel, “I’ll go to the well. You get back into bed. I might be a little while, I shall have to get Sister Jean up to unlock.”

  Agatha is not asleep when the knock comes on her parlour door. She is kneeling at the prie dieu in her bedroom, contemplating the image of her patron saint hanging above it, oddly animated by the warm, flickering light of a candle. The saint, chastely clutching the flaps of redundant skin over the bloody gashes where her breasts used to be, seems to be laughing. Her mouth gapes more in a grin than a grimace, her shoulders heave with mirth. Is this, thinks Agatha, the best she can do with her prayers, make the saint laugh? She wishes she could see the joke. Cupping her hands over her own shallow breasts, she wonders if the solution can truly be so simple; she would do it if it was. It is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. For the saint perhaps, the victim of cruelty, tortured by the lover she had spurned. But what defence of virtue is there for the victim of Margaret’s cheerful indifference? How can she fight an enemy who does not even know she is one?