by Sarah Bower
The door opens. She is accompanied by Freya, the two of them in deep conversation, their heads inclined at a conspiratorial angle which alerts Judith to the importance of what they are saying.
“So you can do it?” asks Gytha. “You know someone?”
“The same as gave me the charmed stones for Leofwine. I never paid her properly that time. One of your trinkets should cover both debts nicely.”
“Good, but it must be quick. If it happened around Easter time…” Gytha holds up one hand and begins to count on her fingers, folding each one down as she says the numbers. “One, two, three, four. It’s a wonder it doesn’t show yet.”
“Lucky people only see what they’re expecting to see.”
“Come through to the solar. My jewel case is there. Let’s see what we can spare without his lordship noticing.”
Judith waits until she is sure they have crossed the bed chamber and gone into the solar beyond, then opens the door quietly and slips out of the earl’s apartments, head high, willfully disregarding the idly inquisitive stares of the two guards. But now what? The Archbishop told her what she was to do when she had news for him, but the implications of the conversation she has just heard are so enormous they have driven everything else out of her head. She can scarcely resist the urge to run straight to the abbey and tell him; the witch is with child and is trying to procure a miscarriage. The witch is with child, the witch is with child. It sounds like the refrain of a song.
Once outside the great hall door, she forces herself to take a deep breath and walk with measured steps back across the inner and outer courts to the atelier. As her heart stops jigging and the words cease whirling around her mind, she remembers the code she agreed with the Archbishop. Composing her features into a mournful expression, she tells Sister Jean she has developed a mighty sore head and wonders if a remedy might be sent for from Brother Thorold, who has a particular powder she always finds efficacious.
“Surely you can work till Vespers,” retorts Sister Jean, surveying her depleted workshop in exasperation.
“If the powder could be sent for, once I have taken it, I could work all night, Sister, if you wished it.”
“Very well. Go to your place and I will find someone to send.”
***
“You have done well,” says the Archbishop, leaning back in his chair, hefting the battered leather pouch in his cupped palm, but he does not invite her to sit, and his preoccupation seems deeper than when she was originally summoned before him, as though the first time was only a rehearsal. “Have you looked inside here?” He picks up the bronze and enamel locket in his free hand, letting the chain slip through his fingers.
“No, Your Grace,” she lies, because she could not see that the locks of hair might serve any useful purpose.
“It contains four locks of hair. From a small child, or a baby, or possibly four different babies. Does that suggest anything to you, Judith?”
The woman looks blank, compounding Lanfranc’s sadness.
“It suggests to me,” he goes on, feeling as though he is wading through mud, “a woman who uses the hair from infants, possibly other parts also, teeth, nail parings and the like, in unchristian practices. And in conjunction with the conversation you overheard and reported to me, a woman who might go to any lengths, even with the fruit of her own womb, to do the bidding of Satan. I believe the…er…products of miscarriage are much sought after by practitioners of the black arts.”
“So you think…?”
“I think,” he interrupts, his voice welling with passion, “that woman is very dangerous indeed, and Odo is risking his soul more than I could begin to imagine when I started my enquiries. She must be stopped before she kills him. Where will they go?”
Judith looks shocked. “I don’t know, Your Grace.”
“I might be able to guess,” he says, half to himself. There’s a woman with an assart in the middle of woodland belonging to the abbey who is rumoured to provide such a service, though he has never been able to catch her out. Perhaps this is his chance to kill two birds with one stone. As soon as he has dismissed Judith, he calls his captain of guards and instructs him to put a discreet watch on the place.
***
Gytha had not intended to accompany Margaret to the cunningwoman’s house. As soon as she had explained the situation to Freya, Freya had taken charge and Gytha had hoped that would be the end of her involvement. Odo will not let her outside the castle compound without an escort. Her presence would only complicate matters. But Margaret was adamant; she mistrusted Freya; she would not go to the wise woman unless Gytha went with her. Gytha judged that Margaret must be three months gone at least; there was no time for persuasion. Fulk could accompany them; he was trustworthy.
Even so they had some difficulty in persuading Margaret to enter the forest. She seemed to become delirious, struggling even against Fulk, muttering some nonsense about men with pink eyes and rats’ heads and the murder of the firstborn. Finally, Fulk picked her up and carried her over his shoulder, with Gytha walking where Margaret could see her. Although the path to the cunningwoman’s assart is clearly marked for those who wish to see, by scraps of cloth tied to branches, corn dollies, and little dishes of bark and leaves and flower petals, Gytha does not think they were observed, despite Margaret’s fuss.
Fulk is outside now, while Gytha waits with Margaret in the main room of the house for Freya and the wise woman to conclude their negotiations. The room is dark, its shutters closed, and little light entering through the doorway from the overcast day outside. A small fire burns, despite the oppressive heat, mingling the fragrance of pine logs with pungent scents of burning herbs. She smells rosemary, the fragrance of her love, fenugreek seeds smelling of burnt apples, sage to stimulate the mind and catnip to cure the ague, juniper to promote miscarriage. Gytha’s sweat breaks, sticky in her armpits, creeping down her spine in a slow, reptilian caress, plastering her gown to her back. The storm’s first lightning rips through the mellow firelight, momentarily blinding her.
When her eyes adjust, she sees a long table in the center of the room, patched with dark stains and scarred with knife cuts, a pile of folded sheets at one end. In the middle of one of the dark patches are two flies fucking. If that’s what flies do. Shelves house rows of stone jars, pestles and mortars, neat stacks of muslin strainers and a shallow dish in which various implements of metal and bone gleam fitfully as the light of the fire dances on their polished surfaces.
Freya and the cunningwoman rejoin them. As the cunningwoman lifts the greasy woollen curtain dividing this room from a smaller one at the back, Gytha catches a glimpse of a bed and a large basin standing beside it.
“My Lady will pay you,” says Freya.
As she holds out her hand for the gold brooch Gytha has brought, a piece she does not like and never wears, the woman reminds Gytha of the wife of the bathhouse manager in Winchester, who used to collect the girls’ rent, fleshy, respectably dressed, with her hair concealed beneath a voluminous matron’s head cloth. Her hands are very clean, smooth and plump as a child’s. “And the waste, of course.”
“The waste?”
“The foetus and the afterbirth. They are very useful and in short supply.”
Gytha glances at Margaret, still standing close to the door, looking slowly around her with stunned, vacant eyes. If she has heard what the wise woman said, she has not understood it. She responds to nothing but the thunder and lightning which produce an involuntary shuddering, as though her skin is creeping with parasites.
“Freya,” whispers Gytha urgently. “What is it?”
“What day is it?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Thunder on a Monday, a woman will die. If it’s Monday, we must come back another time.”
“Don’t worry. She won’t take any unnecessary risks.”
“Now.” The cunningwoman rubs her soft hands together with a dry whisper of skin, looking from Margaret to Gytha and back again, “wh
ich of you is the patient? For I think you are both with child.”
For a moment Gytha feels as though she is standing on a precipice. She holds her body so still it is as though even her heart has stopped beating, while terror and elation war inside her. She wants to dance and scream, but wills herself not even to smile.
“It is not you, is it, my dear?” the cunningwoman says to her. “Your baby will be a girl child, born under the sign of the Twins who govern the arms that bind in love and obligation. Her stone will be pearl, symbolising wealth.”
“Excuse me,” says Gytha in a small, tight voice, and goes outside.
She leans against the wall of the house and takes several deep breaths. The coming rain whispers like gossip in the tops of the trees surrounding the assart. Cupping one hand over her belly, she wonders if it can be true. Her cycle is erratic, but she is sure it hasn’t been that long; Odo would have noticed, probably even more quickly than she would herself. And she does not feel different, no nausea, none of that exquisite tenderness of her breasts that used to melt her with the lust for motherhood before fear took over and she simply wished to miscarry quickly rather than lose another child brought to term. Only the seasickness on the way back from Normandy, unusual for her. But what of her fall from her horse in Rochester? She is bound to miscarry this time.
Yet the wise woman was so matter of fact, so certain in her detail. Should she tell him? Not yet. She needs a little time alone with the new life swimming in her womb, her little mermaid, the two in one, an interlude of privacy before Odo takes possession of his child and makes up their trinity. They will be parted soon enough, the fish salter’s daughter and the king of England’s niece, in the inevitable social replication of birth. The cord of mother love severed, a husband will be found, and her daughter will be made to submit to the partial, imperfect nurturing and grooming of a stranger, a mother in law only, a woman to whom she represents limitable things: money, power, prestige, heirs, ambition. She remembers her own mother-in-law, binding her breasts with strips of linen to curtail the supply of useless milk and quicken her restoration to fertility, tightening the bandages until Gytha cried out in pain. No, she will not tell him yet; she will luxuriate in the freedom to love in secret for just a little longer, to imagine a life for this daughter, unconfined, impossible. She goes back inside.
***
Freya and the wise woman take Margaret through to the back room, each holding her by one arm.
“Where’s Gytha?” she keeps asking. “I’m not going without Gytha.” Her legs drag.
The two women push and pull, handling her as though she were a heavy sack, a load of dumb bad luck, thinks Freya, a bag full of rotten seed. Hardly worth the risk, if doing nothing could not be construed as a slur on her professional reputation. “Come on, Gytha will be back in a minute. The sooner we get started, the sooner it’ll be over.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Oh no, just a little sting,” the wise woman assures her breezily. “Now, up onto the bed with you. Legs apart, bend your knees. A bit further. That’s it, lovely. Good girl.”
Margaret lies as instructed, staring up at the roof, the thatch pushing between beams festooned with bunches of herbs and leather pouches with labels attached to their drawstrings. It reminds her of the room where she met Martin, and her mind floats back to that time of hope and clarity, the last time, it seems, when she understood anything properly. Since then, it has been as though the effects of Irene’s strange teas have never worn off, as though she exists on one side of a semi-transparent curtain and the rest of the world on the other. The only time anything makes sense, when she catches glimpses through a tear in the curtain, is when she is with the men who love her. Even now she exults in her secret courtships, the furtive smiles, the rolling eyes and jerks of the chin, teasing fingers, dark corners, muffled cries. How lucky she is to have so many suitors, the merest thought of whom floods her with passion.
“That’s it, dear, you relax; it will make it easier.” The cunningwoman emits a small, effortful grunt followed by a sigh. Margaret’s body jolts with the sudden stab of the long needle. Pain burns in her belly, her thighs, the base of her back, explodes hot red in her brain. Sweat breaks all over her body, needling her pores, prickling her hair. Her stomach heaves, flooding her mouth with bile. Hands pull her roughly onto her side; the last thing she remembers is the curiously pretty sight of her vomit, yellow and green with specks of red, cascading onto the earthen floor.
***
“Perhaps you shouldn’t go in there just yet,” says Freya, as Gytha re-enters the house, “not,” she adds with a knowing look, “in your condition.”
“Has it worked?”
“We shan’t know that for a while. She’ll be given something to help it along, when she comes round. She bled a lot, though, which is a good sign.” Seeing how the colour drains from Gytha’s face, she continues, “Look, madam, why don’t you go now? It will be an hour or two until Meg can be moved. We don’t want his lordship sending after you. Let Fulk take you back, and I’ll wait here.”
Gytha demurs and goes back outside, where Fulk is nowhere to be found. She calls him once or twice then, thinking perhaps he has moved out of earshot, or stepped behind a tree to relieve himself, then sets out alone, expecting he will catch her up. She has just rounded a bend in the path and is out of sight of the assart, when two men at arms in Lanfranc’s livery approach and fall into step on either side of her. One places his hand lightly on her shoulder; she stops. The rain has begun, slow, fat drops smacking against the leaves, spreading dark stains the size of pennies in the dust.
“What day is it?” she asks.
“Monday, madam,” one of the men replies. Gytha reaches around the back of her neck to untie the medal of Saint Christopher, which she has not removed since Odo put it there before their voyage to Normandy. Lanfranc’s soldiers are clearly nervous; one’s hand darts to the hilt of his dagger in response to her movement, making her laugh bitterly.
“Have no fear, I shall come with you quietly. I have nothing to hide from you. But please…” She puts on a wheedling tone, dangling the medal, still warm from its place between her breasts, in front of the soldiers. “Let me tie this to the oak here. It is a sacred tree.”
The men exchange doubtful glances, then the one who appears to be senior nods his assent. Wearing the Archbishop’s livery is no certain guarantee of salvation.
“I do not know the right words,” whispers Gytha to the spirit of the tree as she fastens the medal on its yellow ribbon in one of the lower branches, “but if my gift pleases you, guard poor Meg from the curse of thunder on a Monday.” She turns back toward the soldiers. “I will go with you now.” Where is Fulk? Perhaps his disappearance is her just desert for being so careless of Margaret.
***
“He’s not here,” says Osbern. “He’s gone out with Lord Hamo to inspect the firebreaks.” As lightning sheets across the square of sky framed by the parlour window and gleams on Fulk’s soaked hair, he adds, “I dare say they’ll be back sooner than my lord expected.”
Fulk brandishes the rolled parchment he is carrying; Lanfranc’s seal dangles from the ribbon appending it to the letter. “All the same, I’ll go after him. He needs to see this.”
Fulk would rather do almost anything than deliver this letter to his master. He thinks of using the storm as an excuse to await the earl’s return and give him the letter then. He thinks of simply taking a decent horse from the stables and setting out for the coast; back home in Normandy he could lose himself easily enough. But then he thinks of Freya, his ice princess with her winter blue eyes and her spun glass hair, Freya like a pale, polished gem, a diamond or…or…he doesn’t know the names of any others, found half buried in mud. He has seen what value his lordship puts on the lives of Saxon women and children, and he doubts the mere fact of Mistress Gytha being a Saxon would save Freya or Thecla if he were to fail in his duty. Or if he succeeds.
***
Odo and Hamo, oblivious to the rain, are deep in a discussion about replanting some of the breaks with low growing bushes to provide cover for game birds when they hear hoofbeats and, seconds later, Fulk’s horse slithers to a halt in front of them, mud and leaf slime spraying up around its fetlocks.
“My lord.” Fulk delves in the breast of his tunic and produces Lanfranc’s letter. “An urgent message. From the Archbishop.” He sounds panicky, yet Fulk is not a man to frighten easily. Telling himself it is merely that he is breathless from his ride, Odo takes the letter, breaks the seal, and reads it. His hands, he observes with irritation, are shaking.
“Do you know what this contains?” he asks Fulk.
“I have an idea, my lord.”
“A lot of men would have balked at bringing me such a message, Fulk, yet you have done it. Twice in a very few months. It begs the question, who is the more foolhardy, you or Mistress Gytha?”
“I couldn’t say, my lord.”
“No.” He sighs, drawing the wet, warm air into his lungs. He feels as though his arteries are full of frost, his mind as sharp and dead as an icicle. He bears Fulk no ill will; he knows he cannot afford to waste energy on futile emotions. “Well,” he continues, “we had better go and get her back again. Again. Hamo, go back to the castle and bring twenty good men from the garrison to join me at Christ Church. Quick as you can.”
“At the abbey, my lord?”
“Yes, man, the abbey. This is no time for scruples. Now, Fulk, let’s go and get even for your black eye, shall we? Were there a lot of them?”
“Three, my lord,” Fulk replies as they coax their horses into a stiff legged gallop in the slippery mud, “and a hulking great smith from the mint. I didn’t make it easy for them.”
“I’m sure not.”
***
She will say nothing. Odo must come soon and then they will let her go. For now, she will simply keep silent, even if the Archbishop himself tries to question her. He has been down to this room where they are holding her, some kind of strongroom, it seems, beneath the Mint Yard, the only light entering through a narrow barred window at ground level. Perhaps, usually, coins are kept here, or the ingots of gold and bronze and silver from which they are wrought. He had smiled, displaying long, yellow, irregularly spaced teeth, greeted her courteously and asked if she wanted for anything. Glancing up as a pair of clogs attached to bare mud-spattered ankles passed the window, he had apologised for the rain beginning to drip through it and the absence of anywhere for her to sit. He had not offered any explanation as to why she was there, and she had not asked. She must wait for Odo; surely it cannot be long.
