by Sarah Bower
Sometimes she longs for the world to dissolve to nothing, for all the whispers and strong boxes, the mysterious caches of jewels, the dogs and chickens and milk cows, the children, the quotidian pain of kitchen scalds, scratches and bruises, stiff joints and lost lives, to be whipped up into some great whirlwind, leaving nothing but the two of them, suspended, repeating for eternity the act of union which makes their separateness a miracle.
“Gytha, my darling.” All the time with one eye on the clergyman, challenging him to object. “This is Guy de Saint-Omer, a canon of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. Canon Guy, Aelfgytha, the mistress of this house.” He makes the introductions in Latin, their formality emphasised by the slow, careful way he speaks, to be sure Gytha can understand him. “Canon Guy has kindly come to escort me to the king. He would like to leave this afternoon, but I have persuaded him to spend the night and travel fresh in the morning.”
Canon Guy forces a wan smile but will not meet Gytha’s gaze; he has the punch drunk expression typical of those who have been subjected to Odo’s persuasion. Gytha, her palm resting in the small of his back, almost laughs. With relief that he is not going today, in despair that he will go tomorrow.
***
“Must you?” she pleads with him later that night, or early next morning. He lies with his cheek resting against her rib cage, his head rising and falling on the tide of her breathing, its rhythm interrupted by her speech, the percussive interrogatives like light blows against his ear. Dawn is finding its way through the bower’s wattle window shutters and the dark blue, star scattered bed curtains. Yes, he thinks, his fingers idly tracing the line of dark hair below her belly button, burrowing into the moist, glossy bush covering her mons veneris, yes, I must. Because William is my king and my brother, and I love him, and he needs me, and I owe him service, and now I have made him angry.
“I could string it out a few more days, I suppose, but Guy won’t leave without me. He has made that very plain. It depends how long you can stand his whey-faced prudery.”
“Long enough to travel to London with you?”
She is not a stupid woman, far from it; he could not love a stupid woman. But she does not know William. He is no easygoing Harold Godwinson, nor can he be seduced by the shambolic charm of English customs; Odin hanging from the branches of Yggdrasil does not foreshadow Christ’s crucifixion in his mythology. He sighs, adoring the way his breath ruffles her hair. “You would not be received.”
“No matter, I could stay in your house and see you when you were not at court. If I never set eyes on your brother again, it will be too soon for me.”
He shakes his head. “If William knew you were there, he would never give me leave of the palace. William and I…it’s like a marriage. It works because we show one another the face the other wants to see. He may know almost as much about you as I do, but he would not like to be confronted by you in the flesh, so to speak. He…idealises me.”
“And you?” she probes.
“I idealise him. I can’t help it; it’s a habit of long standing.”
“You should beware of confusing love and idealism.”
He kisses her, his tongue exploring the whorls of her belly button. “Except in loving God, who is perfect. And made you.” His fingers push deeper between her legs, to a place where there is no William, or, if there is, he doesn’t matter. This matters, this woman opening to his touch. God is here, in their bed, their sweat, their tangled sheets, in her eyes and tongue and warm skin, how their seed mingles in her womb, the tears of frustration that sometimes well up in him when he makes love to her because, among all the words he knows, none are adequate to tell her how he feels. And if God is here, what does William matter?
***
In the atelier, the days pass as they always do. On her saint’s day, Agatha grants the women an afternoon off, though she bids them not to stray too far from the castle; she is as anxious to avoid rumour as she is to avoid the plague itself. In hall that evening, everyone eats the little breast-shaped cakes, though Gird has not made them as light and melting as Master Pietro did the year before, and Margaret does not appear to notice Guerin pointedly flicking his tongue at a raisin nipple. She has become unusually quiet and preoccupied since her visit to Christ Church; the other women put it down to her being in love, though if she is, Agatha is certain, it is not with poor Guerin.
By the Feast of Saint Valentine, even though Brother Thorold has assured her he has seen no more cases and must have been mistaken in his initial diagnosis, the risk to the embroidery of an epidemic still preys on Agatha’s mind. Except for Margaret, who remains as aloof as a virgin martyr, her women are sillier than ever, sewing hearts and love knots on their sleeves when they should be stitching ships and swords, tucking yarrow leaves and eryngoes beneath their pillows to provoke dreams of love. They giggle in groups, pout and blush and switch their hips at the men of the garrison who do nothing to discourage them, cutting lewd faces on love lanterns made of hollowed out turnips and drawing lots for nonce lovers from a large dish they have set up in the armoury, filled with trinkets to represent each of the women in the castle.
Even Countess Marie is not exempt, so Agatha has been told, her token being a little wooden horse with exaggerated buttocks and a mane of black wool. Will some poor swain draw her company for the feast, wonders Agatha. An emaciated Baptist clad in rabbit skins? With Lanfranc’s warning niggling at the back of her mind, she feels like the Baptist, preaching to sand and locusts. A severed breast? A broken heart bound with copper curls?
The atmosphere is hectic, feverish, almost as though Odo and Gytha are still there, infecting everyone with their lust. The tiniest spark of rumour would be enough to set the place ablaze. Briefly, she contemplates confiding her anxiety to Margaret, until she remembers that Margaret has not suddenly become sensible; it is merely that her lover lies sick in the Christ Church infirmary, rather than playing a masque of lovesickness with cloth hearts and quails eggs.
On the day following Saint Valentine’s, she goes to see Hamo. She catches him off guard, before Prime, before the hall has been cleared of sleeping drunkards and other debris of the feast. As she enters the hall, Hamo is picking his way around mounds of snoring cloaks and blankets, frowning occasionally at puzzling combinations of limbs protruding from them. He is clad only in his shirt and chausses, a small page struggling in his wake with his tunic and boots.
“Lady Agatha,” he says, resentfully appraising her clear eyes and immaculate white headrail. “How is your atelier this morning? Not such a mess as this, I’ll wager.”
“Oh, there’ll be a few sore heads, I dare say.” Her tone, a parody of the barrack room familiarity she learned from her brothers, because she found there was nothing she could learn from her sisters, disarms him. Turning to his page, he takes the tunic and shrugs it over his head, then stands with arms held out stiffly at his sides while the boy buckles his belt. His complexion has the clotted, yellowish texture of curds, his wiry, greying hair stands up on his head, his eyes are small and poached above bags that look as though, if you punctured them, the wine he drank last night would gush out. He will agree to whatever she suggests just to be rid of her.
“I don’t wish to detain you long, my lord, but I am proposing a move which courtesy dictates I apprise you of.”
“A move?” Hamo picks up the silver wassail cup from the table and peers into it with distaste; the dregs are full of sodden flakes of roast parsnip. “Hard to imagine that was ever a love potion,” he comments as he puts it down again, “saving your presence, Sister. Page, find me something to drink.”
Waiting until the page is out of earshot, Agatha continues in a low voice, “The infirmarer at Christ Church thinks he has seen plague, in a village to the north.”
“Christ’s blood, that’s all I need.” Hamo runs his hand through his hair, merely redirecting rather than smoothing its turmoil. “Forgive me, Sister.”
Agatha makes a gesture of demur. “It’s probabl
y nothing. Brother Thorold seemed unsure, and he is an experienced doctor. But to be on the safe side, I have decided to remove the embroidery from Canterbury for the time being. And the women with it, of course. And I must ask you for an escort.”
“Well, I can’t pretend my job wouldn’t be easier without your women.” He surveys the mounds of tangled forms on the floor around them. Like Aristophanes’ wholes, thinks Agatha, though perhaps less perfect than Plato envisaged.
“What size escort would you need? I can’t spare more than a half dozen at most. Have you told Lord Odo?”
“I sent a message to…to his manor at Winterbourne…”
“That’s the place he set his…Mistress Gytha up, isn’t it?”
“I understood him to be staying there, but now my messenger tells me he has gone to London, so I do not know if he is aware of my decision or not. Either way, the responsibility is mine.”
“Where will you go?”
“To Winterbourne.”
“Makes sense. You’ll have another hand at the stitching, if he hasn’t taken her with him.”
“I doubt that. The king is in London.”
“I see.”
***
“Well speaking for myself, I’m relieved he’s gone.” Freya steps back from the kitchen table, holding her rolling pin aloft like a short, thick sword. Gytha gives her a quizzical look as she spoons quince jam into the center of the ragged pastry circle.
“He always treats you kindly. Probably better than you deserve, with such a sharp tongue on you.”
Freya gives her a look whose meaning is unmistakable; she is not the only woman at Winterbourne with an ill-governed tongue. But she says nothing; she may not know her place, but she knows it is too good to risk losing. “It’s not his lordship. It’s that wretched cook of his.”
“Ah, Master Pietro.” Laughing, the two women lift opposite edges of the pastry sheet and bring them together. Freya pinches the pie closed.
“And that’s just what Master Pietro was in the habit of doing to my backside. Fulk threatened him with a beating, but he burst into tears and went running to his lordship.”
“I know. My lord thought it very funny. He told Pietro that Fulk was the finest swordsman in Normandy, and if he valued his extremities he’d lose some weight and get some practice in with a good armourer.”
“That’s why he stopped, then, and I thought his eye must have alighted on some girl with a fatter arse.”
They are distracted by the lowing of an ox and the creak of cartwheels in the yard.
“That’ll be Fulk back. I hope the nuns were grateful for the venison.” Freya smoothes her hair back from her forehead.
“No more grateful than I am to be rid of it. Odo will have to learn to adjust his hunting ability in line with what storage space we have here.”
“Dadadada,” says Thecla, stumbling toward the doorway.
“You’ve got flour on your cheek. Hold still.” Gytha leans across to brush away the dusty smudge, holding her fingers briefly against the other woman’s cheek. “You’re so lucky, you and Fulk.”
“Lord Odo won’t be gone long.”
“Not this time. But don’t you see, it’ll always be like this. Waiting. He’ll always be either just about to go somewhere or on his way back from somewhere. You know the kind of man he is.” Glancing toward the kitchen entrance, lit by dusty shafts of early spring sunshine, she says, “I feel like a baby bird trying to fly, rising a little way and falling back again, never getting anywhere.”
But Freya isn’t listening. “Madam,” she calls from the doorway. “It’s not Fulk, it’s…you’d better come.”
It’s him, he’s back, he’s changed his mind. He could not bear to leave her after all. There’s been some accident, that’s why his party has come back. He’s hurt, he’s…
Side by side in the kitchen doorway, the two women survey the courtyard. Two oxcarts and an assortment of mules and horses are crammed into the space between the house and its outbuildings. As Freya and Gytha look on, one of the horses, startled by a hen fluttering up from the ground, skitters sideways into the uncovered cart. The oxen stamp and toss their heads, their driver lets loose a string of invective between their ears, the women seated in the cart begin to dismount in a flurry of chatter and complaint, straightening their clothes, dusting themselves down, stretching as they clamber over the tailgate. The other wagon, which is covered, seems to be sinking into the mud.
“I wonder what’s in there?” Gytha speculates.
“I think I can guess,” replies Freya ruefully, as Sister Jean-Baptiste, leading a fine, white mule, detaches herself from the melee. Freya drops a curtsey, Gytha makes an uncertain bow.
“Gytha, Freya. God be with you.” She is immaculate: the dust of the road disdains to cling to her hem or soil her headrail, and even her mule’s hooves look freshly oiled.
“Welcome to my house, Sister,” says Gytha with a confidence she does not feel. Sister Jean nods impassively.
“You must forgive our descending on you this way.”
By now all the women except Emma, who is still carefully levering her unruly body over the tailgate, have climbed down from the cart and are making their way toward the house. There is Alwys, kneading her backside with her stump, and Judith’s scornful gaze raking the low wooden frontage of the house, its tousled fringe of thatch, a thin coil of smoke unravelling into the pale blue sky. Her contempt brings Gytha’s passion for her house boiling to the surface, and she stands proudly at the door to her hall, smiling a welcome as Sister Jean explains why she has come to Winterbourne and the escort begin to unload the embroidery from the covered cart.
“Plague,” says Freya. “Well, I’m sure Lord Odo will be thrilled to bits to find you’ve risked bringing plague into this house.”
“Be careful,” calls Sister Jean, rubbing her elbows as the corner of a frame catches on the tailgate of the cart and tumbles into the mud.
Gytha gives Freya a sharp frown. “Freya, go and look out for Fulk returning. We shall need him to help move the furniture.” She is aware of Sister Jean suddenly stiffening beside her, of a pause in the file of women who greet their hostess uncertainly, knowing no better than she does how they should conduct themselves with her. Margaret is standing in front of her, blank-eyed and speechless. “Meg. Oh, I have missed you.” Only realising as she says it that it is true. Seizing Margaret’s hands, she is immediately aware of how thin they have become. Margaret says nothing, merely stands, meek and abstracted, waiting for her hands to be released so she can continue her sleepwalker’s progress across the threshold. Gytha lets her go.
“Is she…?” Surely Sister Jean would not knowingly have brought a sick person with her.
“Of course not. I told you, it’s a rumour merely, I am just being cautious. I could not bear…how would Odo react if all this work were to be destroyed?” Both women glance toward the cart emptying its cargo into the yard, the rising stack of frames and trestles, the wooden chests which Gytha presumes contain the linen sheets themselves, the wool stands poking up from the mud like strange, stiff saplings. Rubbing her thumbs over her fingertips, feeling the fine ridges of scar tissue there, she wonders how she would feel.
By evening, it is as though the atelier at Canterbury had never existed. The hall table has been shoved against the wall, directly beneath one of the two windows that light opposite ends of the hall, and is already covered by Sister Jean’s master plan, her box of knives and charcoal, and the palimpsests and linen offcuts on which she makes her preliminary drawings and calculations. The frames have been set up between the hearth and the hall door, and Fulk has rigged a makeshift firescreen from deer hides and a broken shield. The sorting and hanging of wools has taken longer than anticipated due to Thecla’s insistence on helping. Finally she was distracted by the dwarf, once again left behind when his master went to court, making a bouquet of woollen offcuts disappear then reappear tied together in a single, multi-coloured strand. The carts hav
e been stowed in an empty barn, the mules and oxen turned out, the escort sent on their way, having orders not to be away from Canterbury any longer than absolutely necessary.
As the evening closes in, Sister Jean retires to a secluded corner of the hall where she sets out her devotional objects to say Vespers, while Gytha and Freya collect up all the cushions scattered about the house, splashes of silken colour and elaborate tapestry left like a spoor in the wake of Odo’s departure. Is he also saying his office, in the king’s chapel, or that of his own London house, or one of the city’s great churches, she wonders. Perhaps missing these very cushions as his knees strike cold stone or pitted earth. Or perhaps he is feasting with his brother, surrounded by glistening goblets and golden platters piled with steaming meats and Master Pietro’s cakes.
Gytha has no idea how her household will feed so many guests, especially now they have sent all their surplus game to the sisters at Saint Eufrosyna’s. But Freya appears unfazed, rolling up her sleeves in the kitchen, dispatching Fulk to bring in women and boys from the estate villages to help. Hesitating in the kitchen doorway, in billows of steam and gusts of laughter, a thin wail as a spit boy is splashed by hot fat, putting off the moment when she has to join the women in the hall, she feels suspended in a different element. Sounds are muffled, images indeterminate, as though she is peering at them through water. All in the kitchen is fire, which will dry her to nothing if she enters. In the hall is earth, the women sitting on the ground, the gritty, gravely remarks quarried from deep scars of envy, or mistrust, or simple confusion. Water breaks against earth, scattered in rainbows, or soaks into it, becomes indistinguishable from it.
“Good job that tub’s gone,” she hears from one of Freya’s kitchen helpers, and a forest of floury arms rises, hands rubbing brows, laughter ballooning into the yard where she stands, dusk gathering about her, February cold nudging her toward the hall. A path of silence leads her across the room, between the frames and wool stands looming out of muffled firelight, to where the women sit around the far side of the hearth, a crescent of watchful faces in a splash of orange.
