by Sarah Bower
He smiles absently, nodding a brief assent. “Gytha, I think you should go to Winterbourne.”
“Without you, my lord?”
“I will come as soon as I have sorted matters out here.”
“But that could be weeks. Longer. Who knows when it will rain?”
“You would be safer there and make less mouths for the castle to feed.”
“By that reckoning, you should not stay here yourself. You know others will be deprived to put food on the high table.”
He gazes at her, at how beautiful she is in her dismay, and how marvellously right in drawing his attention to something he would never otherwise have considered. How firmly she is rooted in the flesh and blood reality of the people who, for him, represent battles won or lost, weights of crops harvested, sheep sheared, pigs bred, masses sung for the numberless dead. He can hardly bear to be parted from her, yet Lanfranc’s almost casual reference to William is like cold rain dripping down the back of his neck. It was a warning, he is certain of it, a scrap tossed by the Archbishop to his conscience.
“I will make sure that is not the case,” he assures her gently, touching her cheek with his fingertips. “Thank you for reminding me of it.”
“I won’t go.” She takes his hand and replaces it firmly in his lap, stroking the fingers flat against his thigh.
“Oh, won’t you, madam. We have been apart before and managed. Why should it be any different this time?”
“Odo…” Playing with his fingers now, lifting them one after the other, entwining them with her own, “since we were at Conteville, and I told you about my children…”
“I know. You don’t have to say anything. I feel it too, whenever I make love to you. It’s as though…you’ve finally begun to trust me. But don’t you see? That’s why it’s more important to me than ever to keep you safe.”
“And why I would rather face any peril at your side than be cosseted like a jewel in a padded box anywhere else. So what shall we do?”
“You will do as I say.” He keeps his tone light, teasing, but he can tell as soon as he looks at her that she knows he is serious and has no intention of doing as he says.
Yet she bites back the temptation to rise to his bait; if they quarrel, then those who wish them ill will have won. “Consider this,” she says. “If you send me away, won’t it make you look guilty? Surely we should just carry on as though we have nothing to hide.”
“We do have nothing to hide.”
“Exactly.”
***
Margaret dawdles. Although the afternoon is well advanced, the day’s heat has stagnated between the buildings, thick with dust, heavy with odours of dung and rotting meat which make her feel queasy. The sound of the air is the sound of flies buzzing. Her clothes stick to her skin, her belly feels bloated, due no doubt to the diet of peas. She almost forgets the purpose of her errand but then, passing the chapel, remembers what Sister Jean has asked her to do, and tells herself not to worry. Sister Jean is a holy bride of Christ; whatever Gytha’s magic, Sister Jean’s is stronger. Besides, she and Gytha were friends, Gytha will not bear her any ill will. And she vaguely recollects that there was something she wanted to ask Gytha. And if her nerve fails her, she can always leave the needle and thread with one of Lord Odo’s guards; none of them would give her away to Sister Jean; they love her too much.
When she reaches the door to Odo’s apartments, curiosity triumphs. She has never been into these rooms, though Gytha occasionally used to let drop some remark about books and precious ornaments and window recesses full of silk cushions. And, remembering the gown of primrose silk, the emerald necklace, and green satin slippers, she longs to see what Gytha is wearing, what jewels she has, how her hair is dressed.
She is shown into the solar. Gytha and his lordship are seated in one of the window embrasures, holding hands, their heads bent close together as they talk quietly. As Gytha springs to her feet, Margaret feels like a thief caught in the act of breaking into a house.
“Meg.” Gytha embraces her warmly, kissing her cheek. She smells faintly of the earl’s perfume. The earl rises and gives her a courteous greeting, as though he has no recollection of their last meeting in Dover. She tries not to flinch from Gytha’s kiss and hopes her voice will not fail her as she tries to answer the earl’s questions about his tapestry.
“Well,” he concludes, stretching like a great cat, “if you ladies will excuse me, I’ll leave you to gossip. I have letters to write.” Planting an uxorious kiss on Gytha’s proffered cheek, he adds, puzzlingly, “All right, nothing to hide.”
Gytha gives him a warm smile, touching his sleeve as though he is a talisman.
“When you return to the atelier, Margaret, warn my sister I shall come tomorrow to see how you are getting on. Give her time to evict all the young pikemen and cover up the books of dirty stories.”
“What did he mean?” asks Margaret, aghast, when he has gone.
“Just a joke.”
The two women stand looking at one another. Margaret is disappointed. Gytha is still wearing the same travelling dress she arrived in. Her head is uncovered and her hair falls down her back in a single plait without even a ribbon in it. She wears stout shoes and little jewellery. She looks tired.
“I brought you these,” says Margaret, hurriedly putting down the sewing materials on a small table, next to the camel in its frame.
“Thank you. You couldn’t sew the tear for me, could you? It’s an awkward angle for me to reach unless I undress.”
“Oh no, I mean, Sister Jean said to go straight back.”
“Oh, come on, take a little break. What can she do? Besides, I want to hear all the gossip.” And Sister Jean will be disappointed in her if Margaret returns too quickly. Margaret does not look well, though perhaps that is just a consequence of the drought. She also looks, realises Gytha, with a tightening of her chest, panic-stricken. “You believe them, don’t you, Meg, the people who say I’m a witch?” She sits down suddenly in the window seat she had been sharing with Odo. There are fires burning somewhere; a blue pall of smoke veils the trees beyond the Roman wall. “You’re afraid of me.”
“Judith says…” Margaret begins, in a whining tone aimed at deflecting blame.
“Judith.” Gytha cuts across her contemptuously. “Judith just wants the head of her Holofernes.”
“What?”
“She’s jealous, Meg, and disapproving. Thinks blue bloods should stick together.”
“But she has evidence.”
“Evidence? What evidence?”
Margaret says nothing; the deception over the naked figures has gone too far.
“You see?” Gytha continues. “Nothing. Because there is none.”
“Freya,” says Margaret suddenly. “Freya knows spells, and she’s your maid.”
“Freya knows no more than most women, a few charms to protect infants and mothers in childbirth. Hardly enough to cause a drought.”
“Gytha.” A pleading note in Margaret’s voice, together with her own slight unease about Freya, makes Gytha look up at the girl. Two oily tears run down either side of her face, channelled between her cheeks and the sides of her nose, into the corners of her mouth. She licks her lips. Gytha folds her hands in her lap and waits. Margaret struggles, twisting her fingers together as though what she has to say is captive in her hands and she cannot make up her mind whether or not to let it out.
She sniffs noisily and blurts out, “I think I might be pregnant. I don’t know, but I haven’t bled for ages and I can’t eat, but maybe that’s the peas…”
Hardly surprising, if all Sister Jean told her is true. “Have you tried any remedies?” She will not condemn Margaret’s behaviour; that is Sister Jean’s responsibility. “Some swear by motherwort and honey, or feverfew boiled in wine. I suppose you can still find both, despite the drought. They grow anywhere.”
Margaret shakes her head dumbly.
“Well, what about the father? Could it be Guerin? He’d marry you, I’m
certain of it, and if he hesitated, I’m sure Odo could…persuade him.”
Margaret stares at her, then bursts into noisy sobs, shaking her head, her tears and snot leaving a silvery trail up her sleeve as she wipes her face. “You don’t understand. I know who the father is. I can’t marry him.”
Tom. What mischief has she done in her zeal to help Margaret? Almost before she has cast herself in the excusable role of misguided well-wisher, she has snatched it back, torn it up, and scattered the pieces to the wind. The only person she had sought to help was herself, sacrificing Margaret on the altar of her spleen as surely as a true witch might sacrifice a goat or a cat or a newborn child. And what if she herself had not run away? Presumably Margaret would never have been found and returned to Canterbury. She might have had the child and lived well enough among the heretics, strong and willing with her blithe, unquestioning good nature.
Or died giving birth in some dank forest somewhere, or lost her child. Her brother’s child, destined to be born in mortal sin, a monster, deformed perhaps, or wicked as the Black Oppressor of the tale of Peredur. Her mother’s stories come back to her, always in the identical words her mother would use, as though reciting charms. A big, black, one-eyed man who lost his eye to the Worm of the Barrow, who is greed.
“How can you be so sure? By all accounts there have been others since.”
Margaret shrugs. “I just know.”
Gytha has heard other women say this, usually when the putative father was a man of sufficient wealth to have some to spare to keep a bastard and its mother. But she has changed since those days; she has learned to listen to her body, to be aware of all the minute signs of its cycles. She nods.
“I’m scared, Gytha. What will Sister Jean say, or his lordship? Where can I go?”
“Let me worry about Sister Jean and his lordship. I’ll think what’s best to do and speak to you again in a few days.” How easy it is to take charge, to reassure this great, stupid girl. “Now dry your eyes and go back to work, and try to eat; it’s important for your health.”
“Shall I do your skirt first?”
“Thank you. Now tell me, how is your sister?”
“Oh, mad as ever, though quite happy. A walking Book of Psalms. The cat died, you know, caught in a cart wheel, poor little thing.”
“And I should be sorry?”
“Of course, I’d forgotten, they make you sneeze. Fancy my forgetting that.”
“It’s been some time, Meg. I’d say a lot of water under the bridge if it didn’t sound like a bad joke, the way things are.”
***
Lanfranc seizes his opportunity when Odo is called to Dover on some matter of coastal security. He uses the truth insofar as it serves him, instructing his messenger to tell Sister Jean he wishes to question Judith on a matter connected with Lord Odo’s plans for her marriage. He suspects Judith has no inkling of Odo’s intentions. Why should she? All the better. The walk from the castle to the abbey will give her just enough time to reflect on the implications for her grandsons and become rattled. An agitated mind will grasp quickly and uncritically at any opportunity to soothe itself.
Awaiting her arrival, he feels like a poacher skulking around his snares, a sensation not lessened by Judith’s trapped, baffled air when she is brought before him. Dark sweat patches stain the underarms of her gown, and her horse face has a shiny pallor; when she kneels to kiss his ring, she is shaking so hard she almost loses her balance. Staring at her quivering couvre chef, Lanfranc is suddenly overwhelmed with loathing, so strong it feels like nausea, washing bile into the back of his throat. Of her, of himself, but mainly of Odo and William for entangling him in their complex and obsessive relationship, their rivalry and jealousy and total inability to keep out of one another’s business. Something snags at his memory. Was there not some incident during William’s courtship of Matilda, some upset involving Odo and Agatha that brought William hurrying back from Flanders? He thinks of his cathedral and sees himself and Agatha as capstones, set to prevent their arch from falling. He wonders how Mortain stands it.
Raising Judith to her feet, he tells her she may sit and does the same himself, steepling his hands over the document which says he can find no prohibitive grounds of consanguinity between her and her proposed bridegroom.
“You know why I have sent for you, daughter?” he begins, which unleashes a torrent of protests from Judith. She knows, but His Grace must be mistaken. It contravenes everything the Earl of Kent promised her, and surely the earl is a man of his word.
“I assure you,” he says smoothly, as soon as he can get a word in, “I am not mistaken. Lord Odo discussed the matter with me some months ago. He was very clear, save in the matter of consanguinity.”
“Consanguinity?” Judith repeats, staring at him, her manners quite forgotten.
“Yes. His lordship was concerned there might be a prohibitive relationship between yourself and the man he has in mind for you. He asked for my opinion. I have looked into the matter and…” He springs the trap. “I can find none.” Snaps it shut. “But…”
“Yes?”
“These matters are seldom clear cut. I might be persuaded to look into it again. If you could see your way to doing me a small service.”
“Anything,” sighs Judith, her bony chest suddenly curved and hollowed out with relief.
***
It is not difficult to find a time when Gytha is away from the castle, for wherever Lord Odo goes, she likes to ride with him, distributing alms to the weakest, inspecting firebreaks, watching the work of dowsers and well diggers, the sluggish progress of grain barges up the exhausted Stour to unload under heavy guard at Fordwich. A cynical exercise, some say, to make the people associate her with the remedies for the drought rather than its causes, but seeing them together, riding hand in hand, the way he kisses her as he lifts her from the saddle in the outer court, the laughter blooming between them as they climb up to the keep shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, it seems to be something much simpler and more reckless.
The difficulty lies in finding the earl’s apartments unattended. Freya seems always to be there, and the sinister Osbern, and the outer door is guarded night and day because the earl keeps his treasury and his great seal in those rooms. Sometimes Judith is tempted just to give up and accept her destiny. Then she sees them together, Gytha in her fine gowns and jewels with her doting lover in attendance, the pair of them utterly careless of the spectacle they make with their nuzzling and fondling, and her determination to smash their charmed circle, their willful conspiracy of oblivion, clenches like a fist in her belly. She thinks of the earl’s casual treachery and her resolve to repay him in bitterer and more heartfelt coin is hammered down against the anvil of her heart.
Bearing her grudge before her like a shield, she climbs the stairs to the private apartments one afternoon when the heat has cast a spell of torpor over the castle and even Lord Odo’s guards are dozing at their posts, lolling over their pikes. Although she knows Lord Odo himself is out, having seen him ride away between Terce and morning mass in the company, God be praised, of Osbern, and she has observed Gytha, accompanied by Freya and two guardsmen encumbered with a faldstool, a blanket, and a sewing box, setting out after the day meal to walk in the meadow in front of the castle. Sister Jean thinks she has gone to the privy, so she doesn’t have long.
“Mistress Gytha sent me to fetch something for her,” she announces, her voice strident and uncertain. The men look her up and down without interest and stand aside. It is so easy she is almost resentful, her courage hanging in the air like a half-finished sentence. She steps confidently through the door one of the soldiers pushes open for her, only to feel herself almost knocked senseless by the overpowering opulence of Odo’s rooms. The hot air is nearly solid with the scent of that perfume he wears, the colours hammer her eyes, weak with age and years of close work, the clutter strewing the floor seeming to rise up deliberately to trip her as she wanders around, wondering where to start, stum
bling over discarded clothes and scattered cushions, barking her shins on book chests.
Evidence, the Archbishop had insisted, anything to help prove a case against the woman. But what? Judith had pleaded. She was not the sort of person to know what constituted evidence of witchcraft. The Archbishop had merely shrugged his shoulders as if to say nor was he.
“We must release my brother of Bayeux from her spell,” he had said, rising to draw their interview to a close. “Only then can we hope to make him see the injustice he has done you.”
We. It had been flattering at the time, but now she wishes the Archbishop were more than a sleeping partner in the hunt. The bedroom, she thinks, catching sight of the great bed beyond the archway, its hangings tied back to reveal the rich fur coverlet. She approaches the bed cautiously, as though it were a large beast of uncertain temper. It gives off a sickly odour of stale sweat, fallen roses, and something else that brings unbidden to her memory the image of her husband, toiling over her stiff, inert body, his sweat dripping and chilling against her skin. She prods at the bedclothes, arm extended to its limit, recoiling from their telltale rumples, the dents in the pillows, one with a long, dark hair snaked across it.
And the tip of a leather thong peeping out from under it, a lace, perhaps, or a drawstring. Something hidden, a secret: this is what she has been looking for. Heart wedged in her throat, she grabs the thong and tugs. The pouch, the one containing Gytha’s white cockade. Well that on its own might be of use to the Archbishop, but wait, there’s something else. A hard disk, a medallion of some kind. Cramming the pouch into her sleeve she turns her back on the bed and flees, but as she is crossing the parlour, dodging its snares, she hears voices on the other side of the door.
“Ma’am,” says one of the guards smartly, then a drumming of feet, scrape of iron on wood as the men come to attention. Judith scans the room in a panic. Nowhere to hide; even the space beneath Lord Odo’s worktable is stuffed with locked chests. She scurries behind the door; if the guards close it from the outside, then Gytha, for it must be Gytha, may not see her. If she does…if she does…
