by Sarah Bower
“I want to have the chapel washed.”
“Mmmm,” he replies sleepily, “on Palm Sunday. We always do.”
“Before. Tomorrow. What happened in there at Vespers, it was the Devil’s work. I think it must be exorcised also.”
“Go to sleep, woman. Things’ll look different in the morning.”
***
In the workshop Gytha shivers and chafes her hands to stop them stiffening. She sets her candle carefully beside the frame where Harold’s embassy to Normandy is depicted, smiling again at the farsighted soldier and the dogs that must be kept dry. She then carries Aesop across from the lectern and balances it on the edge of the frame, though when she opens it, part of it rests on the linen itself and obscures Harold’s entry into the church at Bosham. She takes a stub of charcoal from Sister Jean’s worktable and begins to draw on the linen in the empty bottom border.
Beneath the scene where Harold holds a banquet before embarking for Normandy, she draws a pair of hounds licking their paws. Or a pair of wolves perhaps. Then, as the diners begin to board the ships, a crow sitting in a tree, dropping a morsel of cheese from its beak into the waiting jaws of a fox. Although the fox has a thin, whippy tail, more like a wolf. The predator, the law breaker. Usurper of the golden lion king.
She begins to sew.
***
Yet Aesop says, in the Fable of the Wolf Who Reigned, that the lion gave up his throne willingly to the wolf.
Flood
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary 1071
Odo is taking a bath, soaking in warm water, fragrant with his perfume. He has spent the afternoon with Hamo, inspecting the foundations for the new keep. No rain has fallen since harvest, and he feels as though the dust is everywhere, even under his eyelids and coating the back of his throat. Now his long body is sprawled as far as possible in the beaten silver tub. Eyes closed, neck cushioned by folded sheets, he listens to Turold the dwarf picking out a tune on the citole, the notes of music mingling in the steamy air with the swish and bubble of water every time he moves. He dozes, considers idly that he is hungry, and glad the trouble in the bakery seems to have been sorted out. What was that all about? he wonders, hardly aware of the sudden commotion erupting in the parlour adjoining his bed chamber, raised voices muffled from his hearing by the heavy arras hanging across the doorway. Nothing to do with him, he thinks comfortably, Osbern can sort it out. It’s a pretty tune, he’ll get Turold to teach it to him, he’ll amuse himself setting words to it. He starts to hum, pleased with the acoustic effect of the high-sided bath, irritated when Osbern appears from the parlour.
“My lord,” he says firmly, “that woman’s here. I’ve tried to send her packing, but she won’t take no for an answer.”
“What woman?” he asks, though he knows perfectly well. There’s only one woman who won’t take no for an answer, and he has been deprived of her company for far too long, in the bloody, bog-ridden shambles of Ely, and he wants to hear her name spoken.
***
“You’re the only one he’ll listen to,” Margaret had said, her voice a pleading whine, her eyes full of tears. Since her fit in the chapel during Alwys’ amputation, she has been well enough physically, but changed, shaken. “If he sends Alwys away, what will she do? No one will want her.”
“Sister Jean should speak to him.” Gytha stabbed her needle into the linen, but she was shaking so with rage there was no point in her continuing to try to embroider. She looked across at Alwys, rocking the babies with her foot, top to tail in their crib, as she and Freya wound wool into odd, three-handed hanks. Late afternoon sunlight washed through the great windows and broke around them, over Freya’s glassy hair, Alwys’ pacific smile, and the two babies’ curled, sleeping fists. It was as if all Margaret’s blithe self-confidence had flowed into her sister, though Alwys, talking in undigested chunks of Psalms and Bible stories, would doubtless say it was the Holy Spirit. Should she tell them what Lord Odo intended? It would mean nothing to Alwys, but Freya had some spirit, even if she had thrown in her lot with one of his men.
Freya had quickly made herself indispensable to the atelier. As Leofgeat’s pregnancy advanced with the summer, Freya took over her duties while Leofgeat waited out her goose month, still and swollen, her child’s kicks now plain to see beneath the clothes stretched tight across her belly. When her pains began, the midwife was away attending another birth, so Freya said she would be happy to sit with Leofgeat. After all, she said, she had given birth herself only recently, and she had had an aunt who was a midwife in York. Gytha had dreaded this duty falling to her. She was certain her attendance would have put the evil eye on the baby so it would not live, and Leofgeat’s love, like her own, be buried alive alongside the tiny bones and papery skin swaddled in a winding sheet.
Whatever knowledge Freya had, however, it turned out not to be enough. Toward the end, Leofgeat’s screams and curses could be heard clear across the castle wards. They shuttered all the windows on the courtyard side of the atelier, but it made no difference, and the women waited, in a tense, wincing silence, broken only by Alwys singing to Freya’s baby, Thecla. When the bell rang for None, Sister Jean gathered them together in prayer, the women kneeling around her in a semicircle, reciting their responses by rote, for each the same words expressing a different supplication. For an end to pain, for a new life, for courage, for love, for abstinence, for the dead. Some crossed their fingers behind their backs and thought of spells they knew had worked for a neighbour, a sister, a woman in the next village. Margaret remembered words Gytha once spoke to her: this is life, not a romance. Agatha thanked God, and Odo, for her deliverance and, opening her eyes briefly, saw Margaret, grasping Gytha’s hand, and considered the cost. Odo gave, God exacted the price. Gytha saw souls behind her tight shut eyes, bright souls floating like scraps of silk caught up by the wind, twisting and turning through shafts of sunlight. Keep them safe, she prayed, don’t let them forget me.
Freya came back then, with Leofgeat’s son in her arms. He was a good, sturdy boy, she said, as proudly as though he were her own, with a lusty cry and a strong suck. He would live, but there had been nothing to be done for Leofgeat. He was a large baby, and Leofgeat had torn inside giving birth to him. She had lost too much blood. Gird was out of his mind with grief and refused to see the child, so Freya had brought him with her. She had more than enough milk for two. As his father would make no decision on the matter, she had decided to call him Leofwine, for his mother.
Everyone living in the castle suffered with Gird. It was natural enough for those few who had known his wife to mourn her, but the discontent of the rest lay closer to their bellies than their hearts. It was Gird’s responsibility to prepare the bread dough for the household. Every afternoon he mixed the dough during Vespers and left it to prove till Compline. After Compline he prepared the loaves: rye for below the salt, wheaten for high table, oven bottom cakes as broad as upturned plates and small, sweet rolls to be glazed with honey or apricot conserve for the ladies, then covered them all with sheets of muslin, as tenderly as he might tuck a child into bed, and left them by the warm oven to rise until Matins when the fires were lit.
When Leofgeat died, the dough stopped rising. Perhaps the tears Gird wept over his work slaked it until it was too thin. Perhaps the chill of his misery infected the air in the bakehouse so it was never warm enough to activate the yeast. Weeks passed. The young pages became desultory in their practice at arms, the men of the garrison grew mutinous, even the dogs lay dry-nosed and panting, their bellies distended to bursting point by feasts of unleavened bread handed furtively under the tables in hall. Then one day during the barley harvest, Freya carried Leofwine out of the castle, on a visit, she said, to her mother, to show her the baby. Agatha, who understood Freya had lost her family during the harrying of York, was briefly puzzled before a problem with a batch of needles put the matter out of her mind.
On Freya’s return, she took the baby to the bakehouse, where his father was p
reparing his dough on the long wooden counter, smoothed and worn to a shallow basin by years of kneading and folding. She said nothing, merely stood in the doorway with Leofwine on her hip, but something drew Gird’s attention away from the dough and toward the pair of them, the young woman holding his child. He left his work and gathered up Leofwine in his floury arms. He tossed him in the air and kissed him, from the soft crown of his head to the tips of his prehensile baby toes. He carried him around his domain, showing him flour sacks, rolling pins, some weevils and a dead mouse, the maw of the bread oven behind its great iron door.
Freya shrugged when he thought to ask about the leather pouch full of coloured stones hanging around Leofwine’s neck. A gift, she said, bring him to me when he’s hungry. The name is good, Gird had called after her, thank you, and went back to his kneading and folding. When bread was broken next morning, everyone remarked on the lightness of the loaves, everyone hung their noses over them and inhaled the warm, doughy smell. Sweet as a baby’s breath, they said. Only the dogs were disappointed with the lack of bounty from the tables.
Though the rest of the household were thankful for the small miracle of the bread, Alwys, since her accident, had been absorbed by a much greater miracle of her own. She had never felt the slightest twinge of pain from her stump. Sometimes she experienced ghostly visitations from the absent hand, tingling fingers, a sensation of grasping, dreams in which she was whole of body yet lame of spirit. She knew she would triumph over these bodily deceptions, that holiness entered her when Fulk hacked off her hand, filling her bones with light. That she could no longer embroider to a standard acceptable to Sister Jean perturbed her not at all. She passed her days serenely, doing small jobs in the atelier, soothing the babies with cooings and snatches of song she said Our Lady used to lull the Christ Child.
Then Margaret, coming up beside Gytha as they were leaving the workshop one evening at Vespers, whispered that the earl intended to replace Alwys. The intensity of her reaction surprised her as much as it did Margaret. She felt betrayed. How could he? Making love to her one minute, casting aside her friends like a suit of worn-out clothes the next? What harm was Alwys doing? What difference could she possibly make to him? It was not as though providing bed and board for a single crippled woman would tax the charity of a man as wealthy as Odo. But Margaret had it on good authority. Sister Jean had told her.
“Go and see him,” urged Margaret next morning. “Get him to change his mind.”
Very well, she would go; she would not be made a fool of.
***
He has been back in Canterbury for two weeks, but she has not spoken to him, and only seen him at a distance, in hall or crossing the outer ward on his way into or out of the castle. The only sign she has that he has remembered her existence at all is the cryptic message he sent her in a letter to Sister Jean during the summer. He asked her to inform her women that the king, with God’s help, had defeated the rebel, Hereward, and then he asked about the camel.
“‘Mistress Gytha will know what I mean,’” Sister Jean quoted, with a bemused expression on her face. Gytha sent no reply, because she cannot write and had nothing to say to him fit for the ears of a scribe, or Sister Jean. Because she has done nothing about the camel, preoccupied as she has been with her fables. Because of Alwys.
She happened to glance out of the windows overlooking the courtyard one morning, and saw him mount his horse and lean down to take a hawk onto his wrist from his squire, saw him talk to the bird, holding her up close enough for his breath to ruffle her feathers, and scratch her breast. And look up briefly at the window where Gytha was standing. And see her. And ride out of the gate.
Waiting here now outside the entrance to his apartments, her way barred by two men at arms with pikes crossed in front of her, she doubts she can change his mind about anything, even if she can gain access to him. But the guards have made her angry, the knowing, contemptuous way they look at her. Besides, how could she face Margaret if she failed even to speak to him?
“I want to see his lordship,” she announces, straightening her back and tilting her chin defiantly, though the top of her head is still scarcely as high as the point where the men’s weapons cross. Perhaps she could duck underneath and make a run for it.
“And you are…?” sneers one.
“From the atelier.” The two men exchange a doubtful glance, but mention of the atelier clearly has some effect, for one of them slips through the parlour door, and a few seconds later reappears with the servant, Osbern.
“His lordship is bathing, but he will see you. Come back in a little while.”
“I will not. You know me, Osbern.” She lowers her chin a little and darts Osbern a coquettish glance from beneath her thick, black lashes. Funny how there are some things you never forget. “You have seen me before.” Osbern nods. “So let me enter. I doubt his lordship will object.”
This must be the end. She remembers the dagger, the flash of gems, the smooth balance of the haft as she closed her fingers around it. Her wrist burning as he twisted the blade from her grasp. Something she was unaware of until now, a vision of Osbern’s face appearing around the door to Archbishop Lanfranc’s bed chamber. She waits, thinking of her children, for the long point of a pike to enter her. How will it feel? A sharp pain or a dull one? How will she know when she is dead?
“Very well. Wait in the parlour. I’ll tell him.” The soldiers stand aside and she follows Osbern inside.
***
“Hand me a dry sheet,” he says to Osbern. He dismisses the dwarf with a wave of his hand, climbs out of the tub, and turns himself about in front of Osbern to enable his servant to dry him. As Turold lifts the arras on his way out of the room, Gytha strides in past him.
“Mistress!” exclaims Osbern, fumbling in his haste to cover his lord’s nakedness with the drying sheet.
“Leave us,” commands Odo, taking the sheet from his servant and tying it himself with unhurried nonchalance. Go on, then, his body says to Gytha, look, it’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
“I see I did you no permanent damage, then, my lord,” she remarks, trying to sound flippant.
He laughs. “I should engage you instead of my physician if you can make a diagnosis on so cursory an examination, mistress.”
“Except that you might find it hard to trust me with a bleeding knife.” For once her sharp tongue works for rather than against her; as long as she can keep the rational part of her mind to the fore, she can pretend not to notice the beast writhing and moaning in her belly, the beast that wants to lap up the shadows pooling behind his collarbones and lay its cheek against his naked chest, and shudders in ecstasy at the memory of his kiss.
“I have trusted you with matters even closer to my heart than the blood in my veins,” he says, abruptly soft and serious, a slight, but insistent, inclining of his head compelling her to meet his eyes. It is like being dazzled by the sun. Then, peeling her gaze away, she finds herself dazzled a second time by her surroundings.
She has never seen such opulence. Not even in Lady Edith’s house were there such rugs and hangings, silks napped like velvet, colours to dazzle and bemuse the northern eye, attuned to greys and browns and watery blues. Even the window ledge is scattered with silk cushions, marigold and peacock blue, and the windows hung with tapestries rather than the painted hides that served as curtains in Lady Edith’s house. With such objects surrounding him, what could he possibly have wanted with her mistress’ treasures? Perhaps to furnish one of his lesser houses? A man who owns more than four hundred manors must have many houses to equip. Or perhaps it is merely a habit with him, to strip and move on, the way locusts demolish cornfields or his brother ravaged the Vale of York.
Book chests bound in gold and ivory lie beside his richly curtained bed, some with the books spilling out of them. She frowns. She is accustomed to see books locked and chained to library shelves, not spread about a room with such abandon. For all the glinting haloes and angels’ wings sh
e glimpses in their rich illuminations, there is something diabolical about such wantonness with words. She looks away from their dense texts and jewelled bindings, toward a prie dieu of polished walnut bearing a devotional work in a silver filigree cover and…a clumsily made wooden statuette of a saint in bishop’s cope and mitre, garishly painted, the fiddle head of his crook snapped off, a chip in his halo. This makes her glance enquiringly at Odo, trying not to notice the pattern of hair on his chest, lying flat against his skin in damp whorls, like links of embroidered mail.
“My patron saint,” he says, watching her with mild amusement. She drops her eyes. “Hideous, isn’t it? But it has sentimental value. John carved it. It goes everywhere with me; that’s why it’s in such a state.”
“My lord?” She will not be distracted a second time by his son.
“Yes, Gytha.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“And I thought you’d come to scrub my back.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Is it true you intend to make Alwys leave? You can’t. Where would she go? What can she do? And Margaret might go too, or at least not be able to work, so you’d lose two…”
“Gytha.” His hands on her shoulders, shaking her almost. How is he suddenly so close to her? Which of them has moved? How white his skin is, where the sun never touches it. Not even a fleabite. “Be quiet.” Mouth over hers, smothering her words, sucking out her anger like snake venom, licking it away. Tongue of flame.
One fire extinguished, another lit. This is what he has waited for, why he has held off from speaking to her until the uncertainty gnawing at him would evaporate in the heat of his desire. During the whole of the Ely campaign, though he planned tactics with William and Fitzosbern, deployed troops, fortified camps, gave stirring speeches, was the first man to set foot on William’s causeway across the marsh, he felt he was only acting the part of the king’s lieutenant. His true self was the lover, biting his pallet through the June nights of not quite darkness in a torment of doubt and frustration, riding out sometimes without even Osbern to protect him, to rage at the moon like a mad wolf.
