Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  She rocks uneasily, hugging her knees up to her chin. “Why are you like you are? In bed?” A flicker of a puzzled frown, quickly extinguished. He will neither help her nor hinder. “You give so much, but you don’t let me give anything back. That’s not the way to love.”

  “You give me…your pleasure. Perhaps it’s just that you can’t possibly be aware of how you make me feel. Held. Cared for.”

  “What I do without awareness is surely of little value compared to what I can achieve with it. Now I see through a glass darkly?”

  He laughs at this, throwing his head back against the pillows. “Is this how you make love to a bishop? By bringing theology into the bed chamber? I fear Saint Paul would not approve.”

  “Don’t try to deflect me. It’s not the bishop we’re talking about here but the man. You’re holding out on me. Don’t try to deny it. I know. Everyone I have ever loved has been taken from me. I know what it feels like.” She stops rocking and looks at him, drawing his eyes, drawing it out of him. He sits up straight. He prises one of her hands from around her knees and plays with her fingers, their tips scarred and reddened from the years of pushing her needle through the taut, resistant linen, winding them between his own. It is a long time before he answers her.

  “Are you saying, then, that you love me?” She blushes and tries to withdraw her hand, but he tightens his grip, and she gives up. “Answer me,” he demands.

  “I…don’t know.”

  “Because I love you. I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, if you think it imposes too much of a burden on you, and God knows, it was never my intention, but it’s happened, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.” He gives a nervous laugh. “What was it Ovid said?” He translates, but poorly, which irritates him, though he doubts she would notice. “‘Then I submit, Cupid. I’m your latest victim, standing here with my hands raised.’ And my love has made me jealous.”

  “Jealous?” She gives an incredulous laugh. “Of me?”

  “Of the men. Those men. I can’t bear to think of what you did with them. I don’t want to know what you know.”

  So her past is not hidden from him, yet what he has done with his knowledge is not what she would have expected. “I didn’t think you were aware of that part of my life.”

  “I made Agatha tell me. After your visit to Christ Church.”

  “You know what they say about a little knowledge, my lord. If you wanted my life story, you should have asked me for it.”

  “I did try. You told me it wasn’t interesting.”

  “It wasn’t. But it happened, it’s part of me. If you find it…distasteful, then it would be best to take this no further.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know. Everything I have to do with you is so contradictory, it’s hard to know what I want.”

  “And if I said I’d try to be more…to overcome this delicacy, would you know then?” He guides her hand down between his legs, but she removes it, with a small, sad smile, and sits apart from him, hunched over her knees, with the sheet drawn up to her breasts. He waits. Briefly he thinks of the petitioners no doubt waiting in his hall, trapped on their seesaw of hopes and disappointments, and sees himself as part of a great pyramid of waiting, decisions endlessly deferred, men growing old listening to the empty spaces between heartbeats, with Gytha the goddess at the pinnacle, arbiter of all their fates. Well, he has spent a lifetime waiting on the whims of deities of one sort or another.

  As he watches her, she seems to soften, her shoulders relax, and she turns to him with a smile. Does she love him? Is she pleased that he loves her? “Ovid,” she says. “Did you know he was a favourite of King Harold?”

  “Really?” He does not quite manage to keep the cynicism out of his voice; everything he has won in this country seems to have been at the expense of Harold Godwinson, his incompetent double dealing tarnishes it all.

  “Yes. He and my lady were especially fond of the poem about the dinner. In the Ars Amatoria, I think it is.” Her hands begin the quick, darting gestures she uses when something excites her. He thinks he will explode with love. “All those instructions for secret communications to deceive the poor, cuckolded husband. Or, in their case, wife.”

  “The Amores,” he corrects.

  “Pedant,” she teases.

  He makes a rueful face, acknowledging the truth of her accusation. “‘The language of eyebrows and fingers with annotations in wine.’ So if I see you stroke your cheek at dinner, I shall know you’re thinking about me?”

  In reply, she pinches the lobe of her ear between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Ah, I’ve made you angry.”

  “Yes, you have rather. I can’t make my past life disappear, so how can I stop you being jealous? And besides, consider the circumstances that led to my becoming a whore.”

  He winces.

  “You would prefer me to dress it up in prettier language?” she goes on, her voice rising. “Just as you do when you talk about carrying out the wishes of King Edward? Or punishing a man who dishonoured himself by going back on his word? Perhaps I should make an embroidery of it, a new set of bed hangings to…inspire you.”

  “Enough!”

  Her cheeks are flushed, and the shooting stars have reappeared in her eyes. He is mesmerised by a little pulse beating furiously beneath the creamy skin of her neck. The depth of her anger mortifies him, yet he marvels at her ability to scythe through to the truth of things. It hurts him inexpressibly to be the object of such a rage, but he wants it to last forever because it makes her so beautiful. But then, everything makes her beautiful.

  She considers him for a moment, weighing something up in her mind, then.

  “All right,” she says calmly, kneeling, letting the sheet slip away from her, climbing between his legs. She winds her arms around him and kisses his mouth. His chest hair grazes her nipples, and she feels him stir and harden against her thigh. Desire floods her once more from her throat to her knees. “Lie down,” she commands, then, lacing her fingers between his and pinning his hands by his sides, starts to kiss his body, sliding her tongue over his breast, under his ribs, around his navel, measuring the tilt of his pelvis. He flinches slightly as she takes him gently in her mouth, but then he is sunk below thought, in a place where there is no Ovid or Godwinson or broken promises, nothing but the deep lake of her hair spread over him, the caress of her lips and tongue and the barest, most tantalising graze of the tips of her teeth. Ecstasy. Sin. How is that possible? But he wants children, longs for children. A dynasty. Waste.

  He holds her close, pressing her cheek against his chest, her hair snaking over his skin, so that she feels rather than hears his answering chuckle, a teasing vibration through the bones of her skull. Then how he freezes, the mechanics of it, the tensing of muscles, the locking of joints, the remorseless thud of his heart.

  “Is that what you would do,” he asks, “with them? To avoid…consequences?”

  She sits up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Consequences, Odo? Do you mean babies? How could you?” and before he can defend himself, “Osbern,” she calls. No response. “OSBERN!”

  “He won’t…” but he does. He appears from the other side of the arras, looking straight through her at Odo.

  “My lord?”

  “Have Mistress Gytha’s clothes brought, Osbern,” he says wearily.

  “And water, Osbern, please. I’m thirsty,” adds Gytha. Odo translates.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Odo gets out of bed and pulls on his dressing gown. He picks up a hand mirror from the dressing table. Looking at his reflection in the polished silver oval, he runs a hand through his curls, his unshaven tonsure, over the growth of beard smudging his jaw and frowns.

  “How long?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  They wait almost like strangers until Osbern returns with her clothes and a jug of water, saying nothing, exchanging tight smiles if they hap
pen to catch one another’s eye as he paces about the room, picking things up and putting them down. What he terms love, then, she thinks, is too fragile to survive even the oblique light of late afternoon, the ringing of Vespers which makes him start and look guilty. It is not the same as her love, which has survived four deaths and ten years of famine. She has bled for love, been transformed by it, restored and purified. For him, like everything, it is words and pictures.

  “Shall I be your tiring woman?” he asks, watching her struggle to fasten the laces down the back of her dress. He would have helped her sooner, but was prevented by her self-containment as she rolled her dark blue hose over her calves and thighs then tied her garters, straightening each leg in turn, pointing each toe; as she stood and slipped her shift over her head, hiding her body from him with an abruptness that shocked him.

  “Thank you.” She turns one way then the other as he threads and ties the laces, relaxing as she feels the competence of his hands. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

  “I have three sisters, remember, four if you include my father’s daughter from his first marriage. I’ve had plenty of practice. There were never enough maids to go round on feast days.”

  She smiles at him over her shoulder. “Even for Sister Jean? I can’t imagine her taking a lot of trouble over her dress.”

  “Oh, she was quite different when she was a girl. She loved dancing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, really. She still does love dancing. Now, turn round. Let me look at you.”

  She turns and he looks, trying to see beneath the drab gown all the glowing colours he has conjured from her flesh, the golds and apricots, pinks and peaches, the blue patterning of her veins, her nipples the colour of mulberries.

  “You should have some other clothes,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “You know why. You can’t go back to the atelier.”

  “I can, Odo; I want to.”

  “What?”

  “I want to finish something.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That I am keen to go back to work for you? I thought you would be glad.”

  “For what I said. It was unforgivable. If I try not to think…about the past, will you stay?”

  “You can’t be jealous of phantoms, Odo, they’re not real.” She puts her hands on his shoulders and stands on tiptoe to kiss his forehead and leaves him, sweeping past Osbern on his way into the bedroom with water and towels for shaving.

  “Will you see the man from Rome before dinner, my lord? He’s been waiting for three days.”

  ***

  She slips into chapel toward the end of Vespers, during the Magnificat, closing the door as quietly as she can and standing at the back. She has not set foot in a church since she prayed for King Harold in Lady Edith’s household chapel on the eve of the battle at Senlac. Staring at his butchered remains not twenty-four hours later, she convinced herself that God had been deaf to her prayers yet again and resolved it would be the last time. Now what is she to make of His plan?

  She watches the priest perform the rite of incensing the altar, but sees Odo in his vestments, the hands that have worshipped her swinging the censer, and feels that she is incense, infinitely precious and insubstantial, curling, floating, high above the congregation among the gilded angels gazing down from the roof. The words she has heard sung so often they have almost ceased to have any meaning now slice through her with a terrible, deceitful clarity. Quia fecit mihi magna, qui potens est. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things. Esurientes implevit bonis. With good things hath he filled the hungry. Words branded on her willful flesh, chiselled into the paving stones on the road to damnation. But if she is to burn with Odo, what use has she for salvation?

  As the plain chant ends and they kneel for the prayers, she notices she is kneeling beside Margaret and sees what she must look like in Margaret’s astonished, fearful, fascinated eyes. Even though she has dressed her hair in plaits hanging either side of her face, rather than putting it up under her cap as she usually does, the bruise on her temple remains ill concealed. She has neither eaten nor seen daylight for how long? Three days, she thinks, maybe four. Her eyes are huge and feverish above her sharpened cheekbones, and she has to press her hands together ardently to prevent them from trembling. She is hollowed out, fire runs in her veins, her bones are moondust, and she will live on nothing but her lover’s tears and smiles.

  Yet he is not in church, he is, she supposes, attending to whatever business he has been neglecting these past three days, and she has to parry the prurient stares, the unspoken questions, the way people freeze when they come near her as though she has the plague, alone. As soon as the service is over, she takes refuge in the dormitory, knowing the rest of the women will being going to hall for the evening meal. She cannot sit there among the clerks and squires and Countess Marie’s women, watching him chat and charm, making people laugh at high table as though the earth has not somehow slipped sideways on the pillars that support it over the abyss. How can she bear Margaret’s simpering expression when the squire, Guerin, pauses on his way up the hall to do some errand for his lord to pinch her waist? Or the way Judith sucks up to the Countess’ Gascon ladies? Or any oblique remark from anybody about the best treatment for bruises.

  When they return to the atelier to prepare for bed she pretends to be asleep. She can sense Margaret’s longing to talk to her, but though she shifts her position to make room for the big girl to climb in beside her, complaining of the cold, she says nothing. There is nothing to say, no words yet invented which would not mock and demean the transaction of hearts that has taken place between her and Odo. Holding herself still, forcing herself to breathe the even rhythm of sleep, she thinks about Aesop’s Fables to take her mind off the ache in her temple, the pins and needles in the arm trapped beneath her, and the questions that seem to be crowding behind her ribs like prisoners rattling the bars of a cell. Her own fables, she realises, as the bell tolls for Prime and the women begin to stir beneath their blankets, will be her last testimony to the life which died with Harold Godwinson.

  The Feast of Saint Odo

  Saint Odo’s Eve to Saint Odo’s Day 1071

  Odo’s shoulder is already beginning to throb as Osbern rubs a foulsmelling decoction of old wine and the root of Solomon’s seal into the bruise. He will be thirty-five years old tomorrow, the Feast of Saint Odo; it really is time he gave up jousting for sport.

  “That should disperse the blood and stop the skin discolouring, sir. I’m sure nothing’s broken, but perhaps your physician should take a look, just in case.”

  Odo grimaces. “I think I’ll leave well alone.”

  “As you wish, my lord.”

  Odo prods the injured area cautiously with his fingertips, feeling for swelling or broken skin, for changes she will notice the next time she kneels beside him on his bed and removes his clothes, slowly and lovingly, as though unwrapping a longed for gift.

  It has been six weeks. As Osbern dressed him after she had gone, leaving the reproachful imprint of her lips on his forehead, he was so preoccupied, he could not seem to understand what Osbern wanted of him when he asked him to raise his arms, or turn this way or that, or sit while Osbern fastened his shoes. Like a half grown boy not in control of his body, he fumbled the clasps holding his cross chain to his shoulders, knocked John’s figure of Saint Odo off his prie dieu when he knelt to pray.

  Feeling faint and somehow separated from himself, he could not concentrate on prayer. For hours, days, until he reminded himself how she had taken pleasure in him. He had not imagined the way her body was wracked with pleasure and her cunt clenched around him like a strong fist, how she held him as though she wanted to climb right inside his skin. How nearly she had admitted to loving him. To hold her, he must go to her; with the reminder of his physical presence, he was certain she would be unable to resist him.

  He went to the atelier. He stood behind her, breathing
in her scent of salt and camomile and the sharp smell of the wool which the dyers soak in sheep’s piss to set the colours. That translation he had made of Aesop for Agatha lay open in her lap, his words, sprung from his mind, his mouth, his hand guiding the pen, gathered in the slack of her skirt, between her slightly parted thighs. He smiled broadly, though only Margaret, at the opposite side of the frame, had the benefit of it. When Gytha finally turned to look at him, he rubbed the side of his nose with his finger, hoping she would remember their conversation about Ovid.

  He was barely halfway across the outer ward when she caught up with him, panting a little, her cheeks flushed, eyes cast down beneath their thick, black lashes. His only acknowledgment was to shorten his stride to match hers. He had no idea what he might say if he opened his mouth, no idea where it might end if he were to take her lightly by the elbow, as a gentleman should, to guide her around puddles or piles of horse dung. The hour was close to None; the only person in the hall was a spit boy turning a hog’s carcass over the fire, so absorbed in whatever pictures he could see in the flames, leaping as fat sputtered into them, he never noticed Odo and Gytha climbing the stairs to Odo’s apartments.

  He dismissed his servants, but without waiting for them all to leave, he gathered her into his arms and kissed her, long enough to know he was right, she was as hungry for him as he for her. Yet when she pulled away from him, he thought only the space of time measured by a single heartbeat had passed.

  “I missed you.”

  “You could have come sooner.”

  “It’s only been two days.”

  “Really?”

  “I still love you. I didn’t imagine it.”

  “And are you still jealous?”

  “I try not to think about it. I fill my mind with you as you are now, not then, or in the future. To be honest, now is as much as I can cope with.”

  She made no reply to this, but took him by both hands and led him through to his bedroom. “Lie down,” she said and, when he started to undo his belt, shook her head and repeated her command. Bemused, he obeyed, watching her, his arms folded behind his head, as she removed her cap and let down her hair, running her fingers through it, shaking it down her back to her buttocks. Then she bent to unlace her shoes, the hair falling forwards, dark, glossy coils catching on her breasts as she straightened up.