Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “I sent Osbern and a couple of others, but before they could return, Henry had launched his assault. And, thank God, I was busy enough with our defence to stop thinking about her until the French were beaten off and I went out to inspect the damage, where one of the other men found me and begged me to come straight to the mason’s house. It seemed to take forever to get there, the streets were full of people celebrating, all stopping me to thank me, press wine on me and so forth. I was…I felt…as though I was the only man in the world ever to have achieved something so extraordinary as becoming a father, and at the same time ashamed. Because all these people believed I was their hero and really, I had done nothing. Henry had brought about his own defeat entirely.

  “Anyway, I found Adeliza safe and well, sitting up in bed nursing her child, and Osbern beside her feeding her a broth of fennel which, he told me with great assurance, would help bring down her milk.”

  Until now, Gytha has listened to him without comment. Now she gives a curt nod of affirmation.

  “It was the strangest thing,” he goes on, misled by her silence. “Adeliza put the baby in my arms and when I looked at his face, I…recognised him. I can’t put it any better, even though I know it’s nonsense.” Lost in his memories, his senses once again filled with the scent of his son, clean linen, milky breath, the perfection of his ears and fingernails, his lashless eyelids and the tiny, moist sound of him sucking his bottom lip in his sleep, he does not notice Gytha turn away, digging her nails into her palms.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it? The mason didn’t ask for me to go there, you wanted it.”

  “Well, yes, I admit it would please me.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “Why? Because of Adeliza? I’ve told you, she’s been in Rouen for years.”

  “Not Adeliza. I wish you would understand. It’s John. I can’t go because of John.” She starts to walk away from him, in the direction of the stables. She longs to flee to her own room but is unsure of being able to find it.

  “John?” He follows her, attempts to take hold of her hand, but she twists it out of his grasp. “Gytha.” Lengthening his stride, he overtakes her easily as she crosses the stableyard.

  “You may unsaddle that horse,” she tells the groom holding her mare beside the mounting block, “there has been a change of plan.” The groom remains motionless until Odo repeats her instruction; her French is still incomprehensible.

  “Gytha.” Hands on her shoulders this time, bearing down, fingers digging into the web of flesh beneath the bone. “Stop. This has something to do with your children, hasn’t it?” His tone is that of a man to whom a mystery has been revealed. “Are you afraid we shall not have any?”

  “Please don’t ask me about my children.”

  “Because you mustn’t be. I know I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I should like more children, but I won’t love you any the less if God sees fit to deny me.”

  “Oh well, if you and God are content, why should I worry?” She scratches the black nose of a stallion, tethered on his own in the far corner of the yard. “Are you enjoying yourself, horse? We humans are a pretty spectacle, aren’t we?”

  Odo stands next to her, arms hanging helpless at his sides. “Tell me, Gytha,” he pleads, “tell me what happened?”

  “I can’t talk about it, not even to you.”

  “Careful,” he warns as she begins to scratch the horse harder. “He has an awful temper, this one. Don’t make him bite you.” He summons a careless sounding laugh to conceal his hurt. “You are honoured. He doesn’t usually let anyone near him except his groom. I keep him for stud. He’s a purebred Turkey, a gift from the Patriarch of Alexandria.”

  “Do you not place your soul in peril, accepting gifts from an excommunicate?” Her tone is sulky, but there is a spark of curiosity.

  “Just because he believes one thing about the Trinity and I another doesn’t mean we should fall out over important matters like horse breeding. I call the horse Filioque, to remind me that good may come even of schism.”

  She smiles, but she still feels the souls of her children plucking at the frayed threads of her heart. “Odo, what do you believe?”

  “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and Earth…”

  Now she laughs. It is not his fault they died; priest he may be, but he cannot take all men’s sins and shortcomings on himself, and he cannot bring her children back. Go, she tells them, sit quietly, behave yourselves until I can be with you again. The horse, as if jealous, tosses its head, butting Odo in the chest. “Be serious,” she orders. “You are never serious. Even the horse thinks so.”

  “All right. I believe God made me to love you. Seriously. Now perhaps the damned horse will not knock me over.”

  ***

  She does agree to sit for the master mason, though in his tracing house rather than at his home, an arrangement more suitable to them both as the light is better there. While the master prepares his sketching tools, she occupies herself leafing through a pile of drawings on his work table.

  “Your son?” she asks in her hesitant French, pausing over the image of a round-faced boy with a shock of hair falling into one eye, and a broad grin which reveals the absence of both top front teeth. He must be six or seven years of age, she thinks.

  “Master John,” replies the mason, glancing over her shoulder, “just before he was sent away.”

  “He is not very like his father.”

  The mason shrugs. “Might be by now. Boys change.” He taps his own front teeth. “These will have grown for one thing. He hasn’t been back here in years, now my lord bishop has so many commitments in England.”

  She lays the drawing aside with a polite smile. Though she understood nothing of the master’s reply except the word Angleterre, his disapproving tone was unmistakable. And the gesture with the teeth was not polite. Perhaps he dislikes the English, or perhaps the fact that his bishop has a son, in which case…

  “Are you ready to begin?” she asks, suddenly anxious for the sitting to be over as quickly as possible. The master looks surprised but nods his assent, then shakes his head vehemently as she turns her head to the light. Picking up the sketch of John from the table, he places it in her lap where she is sitting close to the open north side of the tracing house, the pure, pale spring light bathing one side of her face while the other remains in soft shadow.

  “This is better,” he explains slowly. “Your expression is right when you look at the picture. So…look, please.”

  ***

  The master takes the finished drawing to Odo with a light heart. It is the best he has done, the agony of loss and powerlessness so perfectly captured in that slight, concentrated frown, the sad, grave curve of the bowed neck. She is, he comments without a trace of irony, the perfect Magdalene at the foot of the Cross. Odo agrees, though he looks more exasperated than gratified.

  ***

  He takes her outside the city walls to the handsome new abbey he has built to the glory of Saint Vigor, on land which still bears the scars of forest clearance but where he can already see, in his mind’s eye, lawns and an herb garden and white cattle grazing.

  She is among the congregation gathered to witness him and Abbot Robert bestowing their blessing on a party of knights setting out for Jerusalem to do penance for the murder of a neighbour’s two sons during a border dispute. In Chapter she sees a young oblate, no more than eight or nine years old, handed over to the monastery by his parents; when he is presented to Odo, Odo raises him from his knees and kisses his pale cheeks, causing the boy’s father to puff out his chest like a fighting cock. A murmur runs around the chapterhouse in response to his unusual gesture, and he glances up as if to quell it, but she knows he is looking, not at the assembled community, but at the fresco behind them, depicting him, baculum in hand, conducting the defence of Bayeux from the top of the city wall. He is measuring the distance from schoolboy to hero, son to father.

  After Chapter, he shows
her his tomb in a side chapel of the abbey church, dedicated to his patron saint, whose familiar image gazes down sternly from a niche in the wall beside the altar. The tomb stands before the altar, finely wrought of the same pale Caen stone he used to build his atelier in Canterbury, its sides decorated with friezes, only the lid left plain, waiting for the effigy of the bishop himself, the unimaginable postscript to this unforeseeable life. Stilled heart, petrified breath. He takes her hand.

  “I recognise him,” she says, pointing to a relief of Turpin, four spears sticking out of his body, decapitating a fantastically bearded infidel.

  “You know the Song of Roland, then. I always thought it a very Norman preference.”

  “Strangely enough, it was a great favourite of King Harold. I have heard it sung many times, though I understand it poorly. But who is this?” she asks, indicating a muscular carving on the front of the tomb depicting a haloed saint slaying a dragon.

  “It’s Saint Vigor himself. He was a dragon slayer.”

  “It makes me think. The Godwinson family emblem was a dragon.”

  “And are there not dragons to be found in Wales?”

  “I believe so, my lord, though I have never been there.”

  “Well, if there are, I dare say my brother’s armies will make short work of them.”

  “I think Welsh dragons may be more easily tamed by kisses than the sword, my lord.”

  “You think the saint should kiss the dragon?”

  “If he dares. It would take more courage than to slay him.”

  “Gytha?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you lie with me here? When we are both dead? ‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones?’” Standing on tiptoe, she kisses his cheek. “Don’t be maudlin. What a thing to think about on such a beautiful day.”

  ***

  Conteville is an old house, though house is not the right word for it. It is a muddled agglomeration of buildings, some wood framed, some stone, a rough patchwork of tow-coloured thatch, red tiles, dark moss, and buttery clay interspersed with shadowy courtyards and sudden patches of garden. Odo reveals it to her, leading her along twisting passages, in and out of doors which then seem to disappear, like the doors to a labyrinth, with the eager delight of a boy showing off a treasure of conkers and pheasant feathers and odd-shaped stones. He shows her the irregular row of notches on the kitchen doorpost which mark his and his brothers’ and sisters’ growth, pointing out with a pride not entirely ironic that, actually, he is about half an inch taller than William. And the lumpy patch of ground in the orchard where generations of de Conteville dogs and falcons lie beneath a miniature forest of mouldering wooden crosses.

  “Full funeral Masses, the lot of them,” he tells her. “Such an advantage, having a bishop in the family.”

  On a morning of high winds and driving rain, he leads her up a winding stair to a small, octagonal room at the top of the lookout tower.

  “What’s this?” The room is bare, except for a narrow bed whose moth-eaten hangings look as though spiders have attempted to darn them with cobwebs, and a plain linen chest which reminds her of the dormitory in the atelier at Canterbury. He does not answer immediately and his expression, when she glances at him to prompt his reply, is ruefully humorous. “I know. This is the bed where you lost your virginity.”

  He shakes his head. “This is where Agatha spent the night before her wedding.”

  “Her wedding? But…”

  “Precisely. Come here.” He leads her to one of the seven arrow slits cut into the walls, one overlooking a patch of muddy ground between the house and the moat. Rain blows through it, condensing into a steady trickle of water down the wall underneath. “Down there, there used to be a brew house. A small person could squeeze through this window, drop onto the brew house roof, then down onto the barrels stacked outside, and then to the ground. And if you could swim, well…”

  “So you knew all along. And you helped her?”

  “She told me. Wrote to me, in fact, when William made the match. Some man with land on the Breton border, married a girl from Anjou in the end. I dare say it still rankles with William.”

  “I dare say.”

  “But I couldn’t…You see, I already knew how it felt to be forced into William’s mould. He still had Muriel and Mathilde at his disposal, and Robert, of course. I didn’t see why Agatha shouldn’t get away, if the thought of marriage was so distressing to her. I tried to persuade William she had a vocation. I was wonderfully eloquent, almost believed it myself by the time I’d finished, but William would have none of it. He’d had to come back from Flanders to sort matters out, right in the middle of his negotiations for Matilda’s hand, so he wasn’t in the best of tempers.”

  “I can imagine.” She clears her throat. “My lord and lady used to make some very unflattering jokes about…the king’s…courtship methods. Is it true he favoured a horsewhip?”

  Odo laughs. “Is there no one from whom that is hidden?”

  “You must remember Lord Harold was family. One of his brothers was married to the queen’s sister.”

  “Yes, well, apparently that was all Agatha’s fault as well. When William discovered her escape, he was so mad even the ride back to Baldwin of Flanders’ court wasn’t enough to calm him. And then Matilda refused him again, and made the mistake of raising his bastardy as her reason. So he clouted her with his riding whip, which appeared to do what no amount of presents or flattery or orders from her father could achieve, and she agreed to have him.”

  “So really, he has cause to be grateful to you and Agatha.”

  “It did help to bring him round. He has never known the truth. He still believes Agatha was called to God, and, being William, he sees it all as part of God’s plan for him. He doesn’t understand why she agreed to come to England to oversee the tapestry, or why she refused to stand for election as Abbess when the old one died. Maybe those bits are part of God’s plan for me.”

  A gust of wind buffets the tower, whining through the narrow windows, dislodging some of the cobwebs from the bed posts.

  “Let’s go down.” Gytha shivers. “I’m not sure God approves of us second guessing His plans like this.”

  “It’ll be fine this afternoon, you’ll see. It always is when the wind’s in this direction. I shall take you to visit my old nurse.”

  ***

  She is an ancient woman, small and hard as a walnut, with seamed lips folded over toothless gums so that her smile, which is ready and frequent, looks like a row of untidy stitching. It is hard to imagine her wizened body could ever have nourished a child. Her flat chest beneath the coarse, shapeless garment she wears makes Gytha acutely aware of her own body, of the ache in her womb with its sewn up mouth, of her breasts which her lover suckles in the insatiable hunger of his passion the way he used to suckle this old woman.

  Odet, she calls him, still using his childhood nickname, and shows no surprise, no pleasure or alarm, at all the adventures that have befallen him. He might be a bishop and the brother of a king, but to her he is still the boy who, scratched and sweating, wielded a scythe beside the villagers every harvest, made solemn visits with his parents on the occasions of births and deaths and broke his collarbone twice in one year falling off his pony. She tells, at least as Odo translates her tale, how Guy, her son, Odo’s foster brother, spiked Odo’s cider one harvest supper, and how he was sick all over the priest when the man tried to take him home, slung across the shoulders of his mule. And another occasion when he took a fledgling hawk into church, hidden in his clothes, but the bird escaped and shat on the altar cross and the priest had to consult the bishop about the need for a rededication. And look at him now, she says, gesturing with her clawed, arthritic hand, tonsure, crucifix, amethyst, and all.

  “Does she realise who I am?” Gytha asks Odo when their visit is over and they are walking back to the house, across the grass common around which the village is built. He nods a greeting to a woman tethering a goat, stops to admi
re a saddleback sow in the charge of a small, dusty boy carrying a dead rat tied to a stick.

  “Most certainly,” he replies. “That’s why she was so anxious to make sure you know who I am.”

  ***

  At Pentecost he preaches in that same church, though thanks to his generosity, the old statue of the Virgin no longer has to suffer the indignity of rain dripping on her through a hole in the roof, wearing a groove in her cheek down which the water flowed like tears, and the altar cross in question has been replaced by a much more impressive ornament of chased silver set with garnets and lapis lazuli. She cannot understand what he says to his congregation, because he speaks in French, but she sees the way their eyes follow his every move as he crosses and recrosses the space before the altar, makes gestures of head or hands for emphasis, his body dedicated to the message he wants to convey, his brow wreathed with flowers to signify the descent of the Holy Spirit. Several times he makes them laugh, and when he goes among them to exchange the kiss of peace, they crowd around him, enmeshing him in their love, holding him fast in his place.

  ***

  They sleep in his parents’ bed, the bed in which he was conceived and born, in which his mother laid out the body of her husband, and was in her turn prepared for burial by her daughters. It is the bed in which Robert spent his wedding night and to which Odo crawled for comfort on the eve of his departure for Bec, his mother stroking his curls until his father, sensing an extra presence beneath the quilts, kicked him out and sent him back to the pallet he shared with Robert at the other end of the chamber, telling him to stop snivelling like a girl. And lying next to him, their limbs and nightclothes entangled in an effigy of their passion, listening to bats squeak and the ghostly conversations of owls, the rustle of mice in the stack of pallets kept for visiting kin and honoured guests, Gytha too is seduced by a sense of belonging.

  They lead the life of a vicomte and his lady, riding and hawking, practising at the butts, making and receiving visits from neighbours. They hold a feast, at which the men stay up all night playing dice, and a boar hunt during which they lose a young de Conteville cousin who returns long after dark with leaves and brambles in his hair, swearing he has seen a fairy in the woods. They do not sleep together on Wednesdays or Fridays or the eve of festivals. Odo tours the estate with Robert’s steward, viewing frankpledge, updating the rolls, noting repairs to be made, births and deaths among the villein families likely to affect the number of days’ labour due to their lord.