by Sarah Bower
***
Accompanied by Fulk, Gytha sets out for Saint Eufrosyna’s soon after Prime. The journey should not take longer than an hour on horseback, but Gytha, despite instruction from Fulk and Odo, remains a cautious horsewoman, and after the storm in the night, there is no telling what state they will find the roads in. They travel mostly in silence, Gytha riding slightly ahead, feeling irritable and nervous. She would have welcomed the opportunity to dress more carefully for this visit, but it was late by the time she and Freya could gain access to the bower where all her clothes are kept.
She chose a gown of fine dark blue wool, but now regrets it; although suitably sober, the indigo dye makes it too rich, too obviously the dress of a wealthy man’s mistress playing the part of an honest woman. She wears no jewellery but a tiny, rather battered gold ring set with turquoise and seed pearls which used to belong to Odo’s mother and which, having placed it on the air finger of her left hand the night before he left her for Christmas, a night of tearful looks and anguished hand holding during the Advent fast, he has forbidden her to remove. Nevertheless, her shoes are calfskin, her cloak silk-lined and her girdle of silver. Abbess Biota’s disapproval is already reaching back along the road, in the muddy puddles which splash her hem and the breeze whipping a flush into her cheeks.
When they reach the convent, however, the portress, having accepted Gytha’s offering of beeswax candles and duck eggs, tells her it is not Abbess Biota who wishes to see her but another nun, a Sister Cygnea, one who is not in orders but chooses, of her piety, to submit to the Rule. The portress’ gaze, properly lowered, reinforces the eloquence of her reproach. Has Abbess Biota set up this meeting as a warning to her irregular neighbour? Clearly this Sister Cygnea has herself at one time been a great man’s mistress; it is not uncommon for such women, ousted by younger rivals or exposed by the death of a lover, to seal a pact with a nunnery, to don a habit (though with fine linen beneath) and observe the offices (though not between Compline and Terce). Abbess Biota cannot know that Gytha has sought refuge in a convent before, or that, without Odo, monastic life would hold no terrors for her.
The portress conducts her to a low building of lath and plaster set apart in a corner of the convent garden, overlooking a rose bed whose well pruned stumps poke green wood through packed mounds of manure. Its sharp tang mingles with the scent of applewood smoking up from a narrow funnel in the roof. A cherry tree curves protective branches over the door arch, budding with fat, pink pledges of spring. The portress coughs discreetly at the door and excuses herself.
The occupant is a tall woman, who has to duck her head under the lintel to greet her guest, which she does with a graceful incline of her neck that seems to mirror the arc of the cherry tree. Slender beneath the shapeless habit cinctured tight at the waist, she stands very straight, making no attempt to disguise her height, her white hands with their pearly nails folded over her belly. She smiles; her lips are pale pink, her complexion almost as pale as her headcloth, so tightly wound her smile threatens to escape its bounds. With a low whimper, Gytha flings herself to her knees, embracing the nun’s legs, pressing her face into the folds of her habit.
The nun takes her gently by the shoulders and raises her to her feet. “Gytha, Gytha, there’s no need for all this.”
“Oh, madam,” says Gytha, and again, “oh, madam,” shaking her head, tears spilling from her eyes and running into the corners of her smile. “What a wonderful surprise,” she manages eventually. “It must be a miracle.”
“I think not, my dear, merely the triumph of common sense over adversity. I thought you would have guessed, from the name. You have a little Latin, don’t you? Cygnea. Swanlike.”
Gytha shakes her head, feels her smile spreading foolishly, without her volition, as though it lives independently of the muscles of her face. “Only what Lord Harold used to recite, and then I never understood the half of it.”
“And you have learnt no more?” Her tone is searching, her look almost mischievous as she stands aside and gestures for Gytha to enter her bower. She has eyes that would appear intelligent were it not for their doll-like roundness and cornflower blue colouring.
“Why should I, madam?” In her eagerness to take in her old mistress’ surroundings, Gytha gives no thought to Edith Swan Neck’s question, or her own, disingenuous reply. The room is small, but crammed with beautiful objects Gytha remembers from Edith’s house in Winchester. So Odo did not take everything, she realises with a surge of relief; her mistress managed to salvage some remnants of the old life.
“Sit, please.” Edith indicates a stool with scrolled armrests and an upholstered seat. As Gytha unclasps her cloak, Edith takes it from her, caressing the fine cloth as she hangs it from a peg beside the door. She herself takes a plain wooden stool, facing Gytha across the hearth where the apple logs crackle briskly.
“How…?” begins Gytha, but simultaneously Edith says, “I have seen you several times in church.”
“I never knew.”
“Of course not. I was always behind the screen with the rest of the sisters. Invisible,” she gives a short, ironic laugh, “like Saint Eufrosyna herself in her monk’s habit. Though I did wonder, at Candlemas…”
Candlemas. That sense that she was watched, then, was not merely a trick of her conscience, a stirring of what modesty she has left. She feels the blood boiling up her neck until her cheeks are a cauldron of shame. “If you summoned me here to chide me, it is no more than I deserve.”
But Edith merely laughs. “My dear, I have long given up taking a partisan view of these things. It cannot bring my lord back from the dead nor my children from exile, so what is the point of it? Besides, I knew long before I saw you with…your lover.”
Gytha flinches, but Edith seems not to notice. “There you were, expensively dressed, coming to church with your attendants like a great lady, and living at Winterbourne which I knew to be in Bishop Odo’s tenure. I am no mathematician, Gytha, but I can add two and two. No, I did not ask you here to appeal to your patriotism but merely for your company. I am lonely. Most of those I loved are dead or gone abroad.” She pauses for a moment, making a space in which Gytha, too, remembers, then goes on in a determined way, “I was thrilled to see you alive and well and obviously prospering, and near enough for you to visit me. I just wanted someone to talk to. The sisters mean well, but they are rather dry and do not quite approve of me.”
“Yet you live by the Rule?”
“Oh no, this,” wafting a pale hand around her habit and headrail, “is just for appearances. So Mother Abbess cannot be accused of harbouring an improper woman. And for my own protection. As you did not know I was here, so I am also kept hidden from others who may wish me ill.”
“I understand. I will be discreet.”
“Will you, my dear? Even in your pillow talk? My presence here must be kept strictly sub rosa.”
“I promise.” But he must know, he knows everything. Surely one of those men who come and go with sealed scrips and caches of jewels hidden in cloaks must have told him that Godwinson’s concubine was masquerading as a nun less than half a day’s ride from his border. So why has he never said anything? Does he trust her so little? Does he really not know? She wants to believe it, but she fears his silence on the subject has more complicated roots. Yet if she is sworn to secrecy by Lady Edith she cannot ask him. There is a worm in this rose.
“Now.” Edith rises to stir the fire. “There is a jug of wine on that little table behind you. And some honey cakes. Pour us a cup each and let us indulge in some gossip. We can both confess our idleness later, as we both have close access to a priest.”
“My lord is at court,” says Gytha, unable to suppress a giggle as she hands wine and cakes to Edith.
“You must tell me all about how you came to meet, and how he tolerates your stubbornness, for I doubt it is due to his saintly nature, but first,” leaning forward, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “tell me something I am dying to kno
w. Is it true Norman men kiss with their tongues?”
Gytha holds the shining, cornflower gaze for a moment, then looks down at her hands. “Yes, madam.”
Edith wrinkles her dainty nose. “That must be…unpleasant?”
The thought of Odo’s tongue laps Gytha’s face and neck, his saliva sweats between her breasts though her mouth feels parched. Oh, for one of his kisses, his deep, hungry cardamom kisses. “Not really,” she says, in a voice which is little more than a dry whisper. “I suppose you get used to it.”
Edith lets loose a peal of laughter. It’s true, thinks Gytha, what Earl Harold used to say, that she has a laugh like a wood pigeon, something between a coo and a hoot, altogether too comical to issue from those pale pink lips, that delicate breast. “Oh Gytha, you dissemble no better than you ever did. And there was I, surmising the Bishop was merely a strategy for survival.”
“Far from it, madam. On the contrary, I once believed he would be the death of me.”
“You are like two people, Gytha, one who speaks and one who acts. Be yourself, don’t try so hard. If I, of all people, do not reproach you for loving Bishop Odo, why should you reproach yourself? Besides,” she takes a bite out of her cake, licks crumbs from her fingers, “he is appealing to women. I always thought so. Does he remember you from that time he came to my house? When was that? Not long before Harold’s embassy to Normandy, I think.”
“He has never said so.”
“Well, I’m not surprised. I seem to recall he had set his cap at Trudy that night? I wonder what happened to her?”
Trudy, of course. Trudy with her cool, Nordic beauty, icy looks that made men burn to warm her. Trudy, married to one of Earl Harold’s thegns, already in his dotage and flagrantly cuckolded by his bored young wife. All Lady Edith’s male guests beat a path to Trudy’s bed eventually, just as they went to watch the illuminators at work in the great school founded in the reign of Athelstan, or walked up Saint Giles’ hill to admire the view. Why should she expect Odo to have behaved any differently? Did she believe him to have been a model of priestly virtue before they met? Of course not. There is John, and also the delicious, disquieting certainty that what he knows about pleasuring women could not have been learned merely by poring over proscribed texts in the library at Bec or playing the catamite to some older monk.
“And I don’t doubt he was successful,” she says, trying to sound as though she does not care one way or the other.
“Lesser men were,” replies Edith with a shrug.
It is after Sext by the time Gytha leaves. All their conversation has been in the same vein, remembering life in Winchester before Harold became king, gossiping about love affairs, recollections of people they knew then, always ending with the same refrain: I wonder what happened to…? Their chatter is enjoyable, undemanding, and the time passes quickly, but when the cakes have been eaten and the wine drunk, and Edith rises to bring an end to their meeting, Gytha cannot help feeling that something remains unsaid. She is both delighted and apprehensive when Edith invites her to visit again, as often as she likes.
***
Life at Winterbourne settles easily into its new routine. The continual comings and goings of Odo’s spies and messengers are replaced by the static industry of the women at the embroidery frames, the whispered bartering of information by inconsequential conversations about needles and colours, menstrual aches, Leofwine’s teething, and the comparative weight gain of the house piglets.
Sometimes Gytha herself works on the hanging, though only when she can show some justification for it, if one of the others is ill, or a scene is being embroidered which she worked on before. Just before. Nobody ever specifies what before, and that is part of the trouble. Seated at her frame alongside the other women, she is nevertheless apart, her rich gowns and jewels, her head often uncovered in the privacy of her own house contrasting with the grey and white of the atelier livery. A skilled seamstress but proven dispensable, she is envied and at the same time despised. She is mistress of this house and its demesne, but then again, where is its lord? Gone to London and left her in the charge of his dwarf.
Turold flirts shamelessly with the women, though Emma is his favourite. Because she can’t answer back, says Judith, making her the most receptive target for his barbs. What else could it be? No man could find Emma attractive, not even a dwarf. But dwarves, queries Margaret, who seems quite restored since their arrival at Winterbourne, surely they aren’t men, not in that sense? Turold wags his beard at her, Sister Jean’s pale stare flies arrow straight above the cloth and parchment landscape of her master plan spread over the hall table. One of the Saint Augustine’s women giggles and pinches Turold’s rump; puffing out his barrel chest, he emits a deafening cock crow.
Gytha, working opposite Margaret on a little dog in the Fable of the Wolf Who Reigned, left unfinished the day she went to Odo to appeal for his mercy for Alwys and never came back, keeps silent, but knows exactly what Turold sees in Emma. Himself. A mistake, an incarnation of sin, or carelessness. Careless loving.
“Put me in your hanging,” he pleads with Emma now. “Go on, his lordship won’t object. It will amuse him.”
Yes, thinks Gytha, it might.
Her smile is intercepted by Agatha, who goes across to where Emma is sitting, the dwarf on tiptoe, peering over her shoulder. Emma lays down her needle; her twitching begins almost immediately; the dwarf lays a soothing hand on her shoulder, her spasms travelling up his arm, shaking his shoulder in turn.
“Here is space enough for Turold,” says Agatha. “A little place in history.” Above and to the right of Judith’s plough horse, at one of the turning points, where Agatha has devised scenes to run right to left rather than left to right to accommodate the corners of the rooms in which the embroidery will hang. She sketches in a diminutive figure holding the panting mounts of the messengers sent by William to Guy of Ponthieu to order him to hand over Godwinson.
“Put my name,” pleads the dwarf, capering on his bandy legs, making the women laugh. “Please put my name. I can recognise it, you know.”
“You are a clever manikin. Here, then, tell me if I have it right.” Agatha forms the letters and the dwarf nods his approval. He has his place in history.
Leaving the dog still unfinished, after the day meal, Gytha escapes to visit Edith. She has been three or four times now, and she enjoys their meetings, the cakes and wine and gossip. She is grateful to Edith for helping her pass the time, which hangs heavy in Odo’s continuing absence, his silence, his embroidery colonising her hall, reminding her, if she cares to think about it, how they are each drawn according to different designs, intertwined but never united. Yet her sense of the unsaid persists, it hangs around the edges of her conversations with Edith like a curtain.
Edith delights in Gytha’s clothes and jewellery. She tries on her bracelets and necklaces, unties her hempen cincture and replaces it with Gytha’s various girdles set with precious stones and lozenges of silver or gold. A ritual has evolved whereby Gytha removes her shoes so Edith can sit with them in her lap, stroking the soft leather. Happy to talk for hours about Odo, she refuses to listen to anything Gytha has to say about him as he is today, but always as she remembers him on the several embassies he made to Harold during the later years of King Edward’s reign. If memory is a house, as Gytha has heard it described sometimes, a many roomed palace undergoing perpetual adaptations and alterations, then Odo is merely an anteroom to Harold in Lady Edith’s mind.
Edith’s gaiety and contentment are no more substantial than the sugar crust on the macaroons she so much enjoys, and sometimes, in the silences which can flow between them like an unfordable stream, Gytha sees again the shut off face of the woman who returned from their failed mission to the Bastard to plead for Harold’s corpse. Now, suddenly, she interrupts the story she has been telling of some escapade to throw Trudy’s husband off the scent of a new lover and says, her fingertips gliding more rapidly along the high fronts of Gytha’s shoes,
“His feet smelt terrible, you know, Harold’s.” She pins a pleading look on Gytha, as though pressing her for some justification. “However often I washed them for him.”
Gytha thinks of long morning kisses when bodies are indolent and lascivious, still imprinted with dreams, the intimate mingling of sleep sour, morning breath, hair catching in stubble. Where is Odo? Surely he should be back by this time. It cannot be long before the papal legate arrives and he has to go to Winchester.
“But he could run as swiftly as any man,” Edith says, “and dance better than most, so what does it matter?
“Oh, dancing. Didn’t we dance, Gytha? I remember mornings when I could scarcely put a foot to the floor after dancing all night. And how my lord used to laugh when we performed the mal mariee.” Letting Gytha’s shoes slip from her lap, Edith rises to her feet. “How does it go?” She closes her eyes and begins to hum, then to sway in time to the rhythm of the song impressed on her body’s memory even if its words elude her mind. Gytha knows the words, summons them up from the deep cauldron of words simmering inside her, the snatches of Ovid and Virgil, her mother’s fairytales, Aesop’s Fables strung out along downward sloping lines of script.
“Fat lot I care, husband, for your love.”
“Now that I have a friend,” she begins, but Edith is not listening. Edith bends and turns, twists and straightens, her hands and feet inscribing the air and the white oat straw covering the floor with patterns only she can see, lines converging, diverging, multiplying, bringing her to Harold, splitting them apart, scattering their children to foreign courts from Ireland to Denmark.
Stealthily Gytha picks up her shoes, removes her cloak from the hook by the door and creeps out, steadying the door with her outstretched hand so her mistress’ memories are not disturbed. As soon as she regains Winterbourne, she goes to her bower and takes Odo’s Christmas letters from the box in which she keeps them. How fortunate that she did not read them all when they were sent, that some remain with their seals still unbroken, to see her through this famine. She has heard from him, but sporadically, often by messenger or in letters written by a scribe, the sort of letters a man writes to his wife, in which she must try to interpret his affection between the lines of instruction about the management of the estate.
