Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  Freya presses Gytha’s belly with cool, knowledgeable hands. She inserts her fingers between Gytha’s legs, asking as she turns her wrist whether she feels any pain. Here? Or here? Her tone is detached, as though she is a shopkeeper asking what weight of cheese or length of linen.

  “Not pain exactly,” says Gytha, struggling to name what she does feel, this opening, melting sensation, sweet and visceral. Freya suddenly straightens up, wiping her hand on her skirt. She gives Gytha a quizzical, almost conspiratorial, look.

  “I can’t find anything wrong with you, nothing your lover doesn’t have just as badly at any rate.”

  Her lover. Her lover. “What do you mean?”

  Freya picks up her daughter and sits back down. “That you’re smitten with lust just as strong as he is.”

  “And how do you know what he feels?”

  “Everyone does. Except you, it seems. He’s carried your image in his eyes as long as I’ve known him face to face, and it looks fixed, as though it was there a long time before I had the chance to see it.”

  “It will pass.”

  Freya frowns. “You sound almost as though you wish it. On the contrary, you should make sure you hold onto him.”

  “He’s my enemy, Freya.” Gytha sits up, shaking her hair out of her eyes, hugging her knees. “I wonder you don’t understand that, after what you told me earlier.”

  “They’re here to stay, Gytha, and they’re not all bad. Just people like the rest of us.”

  “Odo isn’t people like the rest of us. He’s the Bastard’s brother. For all we know, the harrying of York was his idea. My…they do say most of the Bastard’s ideas are his.”

  “And my Fulk is in his personal service. Be sensible.”

  “I’m afraid. What will happen to me?”

  “If you play your cards shrewdly, you’ll become rich enough to fart through silk and pick your teeth with gold.” Freya leans and kisses her sleeping daughter’s head. “I can help, you know. Binding spells, love potions, that sort of thing.”

  Gytha reaches out and squeezes her hand to silence her, quickly withdrawing it as her fingers brush against the baby’s cheek. “One thing, perhaps,” she says, thinking of the blood, the familiar, though long forgotten, dragging sensation in the pit of her stomach. “I can’t have a child.”

  “You don’t like children, do you?” The accusation stings like sparks from a fire in a high wind. “Children would be a good idea. Make sure he had to go on paying out even after you’ve grown old and fat and he’s moved onto fresh pastures.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Suit yourself. You could try this,” Freya suggests, “it works for some women. Take a piece of thread from your clothes, or a hair from your head’s best. Tie a knot in it and put it somewhere in the bed. Shouldn’t be difficult to hide it in a bed this size. It will tie up the neck of your womb and stop his seed getting in. You must say these words whilst you tie the knot.” She leans and whispers in Gytha’s ear.

  “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll do it now.”

  “No. When you’re thinking of him, of bedding him.”

  When is she not thinking of him? When was she ever not thinking of him? Wincing slightly, she pulls a strand of hair from the top of her head and knots it deftly, just as she knots threads at the back of a piece of embroidery, to make a neat finish.

  ***

  It is late when he comes back to her, stepping carefully around the inert form of Osbern, rolled in a blanket on the threshold to his bed chamber.

  “You can go to sleep now, Osbern,” he whispers.

  The fire is out and the room is cold. He takes off his clothes unattended and feels his way to bed in pitch darkness, guided by familiarity and the sound of Gytha’s breathing. He crawls, shivering, under the covers and snuggles up to her, curling his body around hers, her back to his chest, her hair catching in the chain of his amulet. He is so relieved to find her still there. He had not been sure she would be.

  He has tormented himself with the question, in the part of his mind not engaged in the sharp delights of the evening’s legal and theological arguments. He has stipulated terms, driven bargains, made small compromises and subtle changes of emphasis. He has sent his guests on their way satisfied, full of fine wine and excellent food, each one thinking he has won a victory, each one convinced he basks in the bright, narrow beam of the earl’s special favour. Yet his heart was not in it, his heart was lying here all along, beating against her ribs. Of course she’s here; she belongs here.

  He thinks he will lie quietly beside her, emptying his head, letting his heartbeat slow to keep pace with hers, until he sleeps. He thinks he will look at this new and wonderful situation in the morning and that daylight will show him the ways in which it is going to change his life. But his body has other ideas. His body burns. He tosses and turns about the bed in search of places where the sheets are cool, but his nerves are strung so tight that even the bland caress of linen sets them humming with desire. He wakes her, though when he shakes her shoulder, she turns to him so promptly he wonders if she was ever asleep.

  ***

  Afterward, they lie fused together in a long, sweating silence, wondering at the changes they find, back in their own skins, as they cautiously flex fingertips, stretch arms and legs, draw breath into their lungs. Gytha feels as though her bones have melted. Her throat aches, her sinews sing like harp strings. She cannot remember a man who kept his eyes open and looked at her as he fucked her, any man who has made love to her as Odo has, with that insistent, questioning gaze fixed on her. Do I please you? How? Where? Here? What are you thinking? How do you feel? If? When? Nor has he left the bed, or turned his back on her and withdrawn into sleep, but lies now with his arms around her and her knees trapped between his, stroking her back and shoulders until they fall together into a shared dream.

  Their passion overflows them, spills out of them, floods the room, washes through the castle, carrying away walls and guard posts, stables, mews, armoury, brew house, chapel. Page boys and altar boys, cooks and priests, gossiping laundresses, soldiers, dogs, and horses are swept up in it. The flood is littered with splintered fence posts, lumps of sealing wax, upturned helmets, wooden spoons, barrels, basins of fizzing yeast. It smashes the atelier, sets Agatha’s drawings bobbing on its surface like gulls riding out a storm, rips the embroidery from splintered frames and drags the linen sheets in its wake. Hanks of wool tangle with rusting crossbows, illuminated letters from holy books wink like gems beneath love’s sparkling surface. Waves break on Norman beaches and wash around the foot of William’s great tower by the Thames.

  And their bed becomes a ship of fools.

  ***

  “You were talking in your sleep,” she whispers as, sensing she is watching him, he opens his eyes and looks at her through his curling lashes.

  “Was I? What did I say?”

  “I don’t know. It was all in French. What were you dreaming about?” She touches his brow, close to his hairline.

  “You know. You were in it with me.”

  Her fingers trace the v-shape of the veins in his forehead where his seed is made. A smile spreads over her face as she runs her hand down his neck and shoulder and flank, over his hip and into the warm fold of flesh between the top of his thigh and the parts where the seed is stored.

  ***

  The life of the castle goes on around them, yet seems curiously suspended. There is nothing unusual in the fact that Hamo sits in Odo’s great chair, with its arched back and gilded heads of gryphons carved into the arms; except that Odo is not absent, and everyone who comes to transact business before Hamo knows it. Hamo’s decisions are valueless, transitory, liable at any moment to be overturned. Everyone keeps one eye on the castellan and one on the stairs to the earl’s apartments, expecting to see him descend as he usually does after Terce, threading his way through the crowd of messengers, petitioners, clerks looking for preferment, knights seeking places for their sons or husbands for their daug
hters, smiling, grasping a hand here, touching a shoulder there, exchanging a word about the price of wool or the prospect of game. They hunger for his charm, the ease with which he makes things happen; they mill around the foot of his staircase, only reluctantly moving forward in the line leading to Hamo.

  Each morning it is the same. The door to Odo’s apartments opens and all eyes, even those of the dogs with their enquiring brows, are raised in hope, then hope expires in a great, concerted sigh, when Osbern appears and makes his way stiffly through the crowds to his daily assignation with the stewards of pantry and buttery to inform them that no, his lordship will not dine in hall tonight. His lordship is not to be disturbed. He remains…indisposed.

  Osbern is furious. What is he supposed to say? Any rumour of a prolonged indisposition is bound to be unsettling to that great mass of people whose security depends on the earl’s person, and who in turn owe him their service only so long as he can protect them. On the other hand, what mischief might His Reverence the Archbishop make of hearing that the Bishop of Bayeux was choosing to neglect his public duties in favour of a mistress? Osbern does not doubt the ability of such news to fly across the Alps to Rome with the speed of winged Mercury, and he doubts not at all how it would set the Archbishop pulling out his beard by the handful. He takes particular care to evade the strained expression of the chaplain, who has been attempting to gain an audience since Odo’s return from East Anglia, on an urgent matter of family business, he says. He notes that the messenger from Rome is still there, calmly paring his fingernails in a corner out of the press.

  ***

  The atelier, away from the public eye, the censoring proximity of the earl’s apartments at the head of the stairs, buzzes with gossip, much of it orchestrated by Judith, who wastes no time in telling the women of Canterbury about the white cockade she saw among Gytha’s possessions. Alwys takes no part in it, nor does Freya, though the rest, knowing she has been up to the earl’s apartments since Gytha’s disappearance, do everything they can to engage her.

  “Gytha is quite well, is she?” asks one, full of casual sympathy, as she comes for wool to reload one of the stands.

  “Is it true the earl keeps books up there?” queries another. Men of the earl’s stature usually employ clerks to read books for them.

  Margaret is in agony, torn between curiosity and the fear that, if something bad has happened, she is at least partly to blame. Eventually, just before Vespers on the second day, she goes to Sister Jean’s parlour.

  “I do not think you should have stopped work just yet,” says Sister Jean, standing at the door, wearing that familiar expression of disapproval which seems to Margaret to pull all her features down toward a point just beneath her chin, as though they have been knotted together like the strings of a child’s bonnet. “I have not heard the Vespers bell.”

  “Sorry, Sister.” She curtseys. “But I’d just finished a horse and it didn’t seem worth starting anything else, and I wanted to talk to you before Vespers.” But only just before Vespers, so Sister Jean cannot detain her as she occasionally does, rambling on about something, or someone, she calls “the tenth muse,” and Saint Augustine’s letters to his sister.

  “You had better come in then.” She steps aside to allow Margaret to enter. As usual, there is no brazier lit, and the room smells cold and musty, the way old people smell, which is odd, because Margaret doesn’t think Sister Jean is much older than the earl, though she looks it, being so thin and spare. “What is it you want to talk to me about?” She does not invite Margaret to sit and remains standing herself, beside the table under the window, which is covered with papers, pens, inkpots, pebble-shaped lumps of charcoal, squiggles of wool, and candle stubs.

  “It’s Gytha.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “It’s not fair, Sister, the things they’re saying, and I feel bad about it because she only went to see the earl about Alwys and now, well, he’s…taken her prisoner.”

  Sister Jean gives a faint, chilly smile. “Is that what you think?”

  Fiddling with a twist of hair that has escaped her cap, Margaret stares at her feet, feeling the blush creep up her neck and face as though she is being immersed in hot water.

  “My brother is not in the habit of imprisoning women, Margaret. I do not think he generally sees the need, although perhaps, for political reasons, where the woman concerned has wealth or influence…”

  “Then…?”

  “I think we may safely assume Gytha is with his lordship of her own free will.”

  “So…?”

  “And that the gossip in the workshop contains at least a kernel of truth.” Her bitter tone shocks Margaret. This is not her customary acerbic humour but something more intense, reminding Margaret of the fierce resentments that used to blow up between Alwys and her and their brothers. As though she is envious of Lord Odo and Gytha, yet why should she be? Presumably she did not have to become a nun.

  “Sit down,” she commands.

  “But Vespers…” The flat note of the chapel bell, which has a crack in it, is clearly audible across the courtyard.

  “No matter if we miss it. It will happen again tomorrow.” Sister Jean lights a taper from a tinderbox lying on her table and stalks about the room lighting candles. “He’s a fool, and selfish with it,” she mutters eventually, as though she has forgotten Margaret is there.

  “Perhaps he loves her, madam,” ventures Margaret, for whom romantic love is an excuse for any kind of boldness.

  Pausing in front of her, Sister Jean strokes her cheek with dry fingertips. Margaret shrinks instinctively from the caress and is immediately annoyed with herself. She doesn’t want to put Sister Jean off now, just when the conversation is becoming interesting.

  “You’re not a child any more, Meg,” she says, a little more kindly. “It’s time you stopped seeing life as a romance.” What a coincidence; exactly the same thing Gytha said before the earl went to Ely. She and Sister Jean, both busy denying what seems to be going on right under their noses. “Lord Odo’s heart is not his own to dispose of. It is pledged to the king and ultimately, to God. They are both jealous masters.”

  Margaret feels suddenly cold and shivery, as though she has the beginnings of chill, or someone has walked over her grave. She has never properly considered before just who Sister Jean and Lord Odo are. The brother and sister of the king, the Conqueror. Danger enters the room with this thought, and the determination to tell Gytha what Sister Jean has said. To warn her.

  ***

  Odo loves Gytha with every part of his body. He makes love to her with his eyes and fingers, his lips, his tongue, his arms and toes and neat, clean teeth. He eats and drinks her, leaves his skin beneath her fingernails. His greed for her makes her feel as precious as all the rare and beautiful things surrounding them. She is mined, melted, and cast like gold, blown like the finest Venetian glass. Her skin is illuminated like vellum, brushed with colour and papered with gilt, polished like gemstones. She floats in an ether of bliss, yet something is wrong: there is a fly in the nectar, a niggle of mortality in heaven, of time in eternity. No lover could give as generously as he does as though, having taken everything from her, having even appropriated her skill with a needle, he now feels bound to try to fill the empty space inside her. But if he fills her with himself, if he gives so relentlessly without being able to receive acts of love from her in return, then she will cease to exist just as Lady Edith and her children, and her household treasures, have ceased to exist, dissolved in the boundless mass of everything he owns.

  Why does he shy away from her advances? Is it some unfathomable treaty he has negotiated with God concerning the boundaries of sin? Is it that they have completely misunderstood one another, their intuitions scrambled by desire? The question swells between them until she feels it must be lanced, whatever poison may be contained in the answer. She tears herself away from his kisses, his salty skin, his incomprehensible French endearments, unlocks the circle of hi
s arms and sits up, pulling back the curtains on her side of the bed to reveal a wedge of the room, its treasures lit by the honey glow of autumn afternoon sunshine. Apple picking, she thinks desperately, gulping down air, her throat full of sadness, and the oyster harvest, at home, in the rich, iron-smelling mud. A sob escapes her, and then there is no stopping her tears.

  “Gytha? What is it?” His voice, tender with anxiety, the shape of her name on his tongue, almost melts her, but when he sits up and tries to put his arms back around her, she wrenches herself away. She has to say something, she owes him that much, but she has no idea where to begin. It is like trying to speak a different language. When she doesn’t reply, he takes her by the shoulders and turns her to face him. Her cheeks shine with tears, her nose is running, and he begins to lick her clean, his tongue moving strong and gentle over her face, smoothing her hair out of her eyes.

  “Stop it,” she says, holding him away from her.

  “Tell me, then.” He leans against the high back of the bed, arms folded behind his head. The light splashes his face and chest, gleams in his three days’ growth of beard and the dark blond hair curling in his armpits. She wants to say it doesn’t matter, but it does.

  “Why…?” she begins, and stops.

  He turns briefly to look at her, then averts his gaze and fixes it on the steepled outline of his feet beneath the bedclothes, composing his face into the neutral mask he wears to hear confessions.