Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “I must speak with you,” he says, in a tone which makes her search his face anxiously. He is drawn, serious, his skin grey with the dust of the road, his eyes bloodshot, their long lids pleated with weariness.

  “What’s wrong?” She follows him into the parlour, feeling suddenly sick. Good, she tells herself firmly, that means the baby’s taken well. He lets Osbern divest him of his chain mail then dismisses him and Freya.

  “Sit,” she says, “let me pour you some wine. Let me take off your boots.”

  “For Christ’s sake, stop fussing, woman.” He waves her away as if she were an irritating insect, then immediately holds out his arms to her. “I’m sorry,” he says, pressing her cheek to his heart. “Tell me how you have been?”

  “A little tired and sick, but that’s all to the good.”

  “I told you, I make my children tough. Which is just as well.” He moves away from her, twisting his rings around his fingers. “Because we’re going to have to go on a long journey.”

  “To get away from Lanfranc? I thought…”

  “To get away from William.”

  “William?” She had pinned her hopes on William. He won’t jeopardise the child, Odo had assured her, his conscience won’t let him, not his own flesh and blood.

  “He has proposed sending you to the court at Rouen, into Matilda’s safekeeping until the baby arrives.”

  “Is that so bad? You could visit me. Perhaps I could go to Conteville.”

  Odo shakes his head. “I’ll tell you how it would be, Gytha. You wouldn’t be out of Matilda’s sight for a moment till the cord was cut, and the minute that was done, she would take the baby and you’d be packed off to her nunnery at Saint Etienne in Caen. That’s William’s deal. He gets our child, we get nothing, not even each other.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll go to Rome. I have a house there, you know, on the Tiber. It has a garden with figs and lemons in it, and an olive grove. Have you ever eaten olives? They taste like hot sunshine.”

  She looks at Odo, at the play of hope and anxiety over his beloved features. She imagines olives, like miniature suns, burning her tongue. She imagines Rome, full of mysterious white ruins, broken pillars, and eyeless statues such as you would suddenly come across in the landscape of her childhood, rounding the shoulder of a low hill or a bend in a lane. She imagines dark, glossy creepers; stone drapery; hot, spicy air; and making love in gardens, by starlight, like Ovid and Corinna.

  But the lover of her imagination is not Odo. He is some eyeless man, beautiful, marble, with broken arms. She cannot see Odo in Rome, so far from his home, his roots, his schemes and ambitions, his family. She thinks of John, sequestered in Liege, and of their canceled visit to him, and of this unborn daughter in her belly. In Odo’s world of dangerous aspirations and shifting alliances, loving one’s children means keeping them at a distance, cloistered in a monastery or subject to a husband. Loving one’s children is making the best use of them. That is why his meeting with William has left him so disappointed, because William intends to deprive him of a counter to play in his power games, not because he intends to part him from her.

  “And what are you going to do in Rome?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Write, teach, be a farmer. Become Pope. Does it matter?”

  It would be so easy…Perhaps he’s right. Doesn’t he have relatives in Sicily? She isn’t sure where Sicily is, but she is certain it is even further from here than Rome. It may even have camels. She glances up at his profile, the candlelight glimmering ruddy gold on his chin stubble.

  “The half finished angel,” she murmurs.

  “What?” He is somewhere else. Good God, she thinks, registering the absence in his eyes; it wasn’t a joke, he can see himself on the throne of Saint Peter. He is already calculating the sacrifice he must make to keep her in terms of the benefits it might bring him. There is, she realises, no escape for him from William because they are too much alike.

  “You look so tired,” she says. “Sit. We don’t have to go this minute, I suppose.”

  “Within the day, to be safe.” But he does sit and allows her to pull off his boots. Sitting back on her heels, she rubs his feet, tracing the fan of fine bones with her fingertips then drawing her thumbs hard along the arches so she does not tickle him. He sighs with pleasure and closes his eyes, resting his head against the chair back.

  “Odo…”

  Her tone makes him sit up straight.

  “What is it?”

  “Running away to Rome isn’t the answer, is it? Wherever you go, William will find you, and you’d miss…everything you’ve achieved here.”

  He gives an uncertain laugh. “I never thought to hear you say such a thing. Perhaps I would miss some of it, but it’s a price worth paying to keep you safe.”

  “Not if it fails.” Prising his knees apart, she kneels between his legs, resting her arms on his thighs and considers him in silence for a long time. “You know, don’t you,” she says finally, “that the only way to keep your daughter free from William, the only foolproof way, is for me to disappear.”

  “Disappear? Rubbish. I have a lot of friends in Rome; there are a great many Normans there. I’m not without influence among them, and I was at Bec with His Holiness. William would soon give up; he’s only going to risk so much for one little girl.”

  “But for you, Odo? It seems to me he would risk a great deal to have you back in the fold. I think he not only loves you, but fears you, and that is a potent combination.”

  “Darling Gytha.” Leaning forward, he encases her hands in his own, loving how they curl like nestlings in his broad palms. How could she disappear? There is no place on Earth remote enough to hide her from him, were she to shroud herself in the holiness of Jerusalem or go to the far south where men stand on their heads and shield themselves from the sun with their single foot shaped like a hood. No desert is so featureless nor forest so dark he would not find her in it. The attraction between them is as elemental as that of stone for the Earth or the soul of man for God. “Don’t trouble yourself about William. Trust me.”

  Yet he is curiously withdrawn, displaying little interest in Freya’s packing or Osbern’s preparations for their journey, content to leave the selection of horses, the stowing of wagons and calculations of winds and tides to others. When Gytha retires, he does not join her, saying he will inspect the guard before turning in, then he has last minute business to discuss with Hamo and perhaps he will hear Matins.

  He walks on the walls for half a watch or more, prowling among the guards, sunk in thought, apparently oblivious to the crunch of their footfalls, the occasional chink of arms on mail, the odd, smart, “Good night, sir,” as he passes. Tonight is Toussaint, when the universe wears thin and the different orders confront one another through a veil. As a priest, he should be keeping vigil, placating the souls of the dead with his prayers, yet he feels more like one of those spirits his office commands him to fight than a soldier of Christ on Earth. His body is here, feeling the cold, damp air settling against his skin like the breath of a sea serpent, but his heart is somewhere far from these men with their mundane jokes, the small comforts of their smoking fires and jugs of ale and mittens knitted by their women. His heart is howling in a desert with no one to hear it but sand and stones.

  She is right, he knows it. He cannot barricade the truth behind an edifice of maps and packing cases and messengers bearing complicated gifts to cardinals in Rome, the way he has sealed their love inside this castle where it will suffocate. And if not here, in another fortress, always running, hiding, fighting petty rearguard actions, patching up breaches in walls, holes in purses and cracks in hearts. That is no way for his daughter to live, like an outlaw, under the protection of a father who is a fugitive from himself. Gytha is right; if their child is to have any chance at all, she must be dead to him.

  At least until William himself dies, then who knows? Neither Curthose nor Rufus shows much aptitude for ki
ngship and though Henry is a bright lad, he is barely eight years old and might be moulded to any shape if he survives childhood. Yes, he would miss England; she is right about that too.

  He goes down to the atelier, where the women still sleep even though the embroidery languishes in its chests in the overcrowded hall, and wakes Agatha, creeping into her chamber and shaking her by the shoulder himself, as she has refused any other servant since Leofgeat died. He remembers, with a yearning that pricks like needles behind his eyes, scenes like this at Conteville, summer nights of darkness fine as a moth’s wing or thick with the scent of windfalls mouldering in the orchard, when the children of the household, in varying combinations, would rise from their pallets like ghosts and go hunting for adventures.

  “Agatha, wake up.” When real adventures come, with heroes and villains and damsels in distress, he thinks, as his sister stirs, mumbles, opens her eyes and sits up in confusion, they are a long way from what you have come to expect from those far off, barefoot, heart-in-mouth nights.

  “Odo? What is it? Are Lanfranc’s men here?”

  “No. But I want you to get dressed, wake Margaret, and come up to the hall.”

  “Why?”

  “You have to leave here. Tonight. William is coming, and you and the girl must be away from here before his people arrive.”

  “William?”

  “It was all William, Agatha, all along. He’s used Lanfranc as a smokescreen.”

  “And you? Gytha?” She is out of bed now, pulling on her habit in the dark just as monks and nuns do every night in every corner of the Christian world as the Great Silence ends and the bell summons them to Matins.

  “I shall be all right. Gytha…Take Meg to Saint Justina’s. I’ll give you money for a dowry for her and a letter to Abbess Clothilde. She can travel? Well, even if she can’t, there’s no alternative. William’s people mustn’t get their hands on her, do you understand?”

  “Not entirely. Why is Meg such a risk to you?”

  “Her miscarriage, Agatha, it wasn’t a miscarriage as such, and Gytha…helped.” He tells Agatha everything, about Sebastian and the cunningwoman, and all that she said to Gytha, while Agatha unwinds and rewinds her headrail, gets it wrong, and appeals for Odo to help. He has to light a candle, by whose light he contemplates his sister’s bare head, the bones and nodes of her skull beneath the close-cropped grey hair, the sharp planes of cheek and jaw. His blood, all iron and intellect.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, his hands on her bird-boned shoulders, “you were right. I should never have brought you here.”

  “What will happen to the embroidery?”

  He shrugs. “It doesn’t really matter any more. Go and get Meg, and I’ll meet you in the hall shortly.” He smiles, but his smile does not reach his eyes.

  Once back inside the keep, he wakes Freya and orders her to make her mistress ready to travel immediately, with only what one mule can carry. Fulk, she tells him in answer to his enquiry, is on watch on the horse lines, probably, she adds with a wan smile, under the personal command of Lord Hamo’s daughter who is still most anxious about her pony. He kicks a small boy hunched under a threadbare cloak by the great door and sends him to find Fulk.

  He does not return to his apartments until he has bidden Agatha farewell, standing at the hall door, watching her small, upright frame as she pulls Margaret, stumbling and blowsy, down the motte and into the outer court, lighting their way with a smoking torch. Trying to shake off the irrational conviction that he has seen his sister in this life for the last time, he climbs the stairs to his parlour where he finds Gytha and Freya rummaging among the packing cases, turning out clothes, jewel boxes, comb cases, books, and bundles of quills in a frenzied hunt, Osbern following in their wake, putting everything back again.

  “I can’t find my leather purse,” explains Gytha, “you know, with my locket in it.”

  “We have to go,” says Odo firmly. He knows what the locket means to her, with its freight of baby curls, but they must look forward now, to this new life growing inside her. They cannot delay out of nostalgia.

  “But…” It seems an ill omen to her, to leave without those few precious possessions she has carried with her through everything which has befallen her since the Bastard’s arrival in Winchester so long ago it seems like another life.

  “Now.”

  Then again, perhaps it is a good thing. The locket, the cockade, a gritty lump of unpolished amber with a fly trapped inside it from an east coast beach, these are the symbols of her past, and without her past, she is no one. Which is what she must become from now on. Odo takes her mantle from Freya and settles it around her shoulders, then they go quietly down into the hall where Fulk meets them with Thecla asleep in his arms. Gytha forbids herself a backward glance; the joys she has known in those makeshift rooms have been superseded now by a greater joy and a graver responsibility. She takes Odo’s hand and lets him lead her away, only pausing for a space between heartbeats to contemplate the cedar chests, fire orange in the glow of the embers from the great hearth, in which she knows the embroidery is stored. She feels a little surge of pride, almost as though her daughter is dancing in her belly, at the hand she had in it. Her future may contain other silk hung beds, gilded chairs, and jewels fit for a queen, but she knows that tangle of truth and lies, real life and make-believe, stained with sweat and blood, unpicked, restitched, and probably covered with cat hair, is unique, a miracle of human endeavour in all its savagery and devotion.

  ***

  Odo guides their small party to a hunting lodge he has in a densely wooded stretch of forest some miles to the west of the city. He has chosen it for its concealment, also because it is a place he often uses and knows he can find his way to in darkness, and, which he keeps to himself, it will serve his plan for it to be known he took a forest path at night. The sky is covered by thick cloud, so even though many of the trees are leafless as a consequence of the drought, their path is lit by little more than the gleam in Juno’s eye at the prospect of game. They travel at a cautious trot, their horses’ hooves and those of the mule carrying Gytha’s belongings bound in rags to mute their sound. The two women are flanked by Fulk and Odo, both with swords drawn, eyes and ears straining in the darkness to catch anything more than the loom of bushes and trees, the rustle of foxes and badgers and the small creatures of the night fleeing the scent of men and horses. Gytha leads the mule. At one point Thecla awakes and starts to cry, until her mother tucks her inside her own cloak and sings to her softly. Odo snaps at her to shut up, feels Gytha’s eyes upon him through the dark, and is glad she cannot see his face.

  They reach the lodge, a low stone building with a thatched roof, without incident. Though he had been sure none of William’s men could be in the area yet, Odo is relieved to have been left unmolested by Lanfranc’s. A great jurist and churchman he might be, but the Archbishop is no tactician. As he dismounts, he glances up at the sky. He can sense the thinning of the night, the light pushing at its fabric like the wind filling a sail. A pheasant starts up from the ground with a cacophony of chinking calls and a clatter of wings, which make the horses start and send Juno off in pursuit. No fire, Odo commands, pushing open the door; they will not be there long enough to make the effort worthwhile, and no light. He and Fulk take the animals around to the back of the building while Gytha and Freya go inside, groping their way in darkness imbued with the smells of damp earth, stale smoke, and rank meat. Gytha stumbles over a stool, rights it, and says, “Come toward me, Freya; there’s a stool here. You can sit with Thecla.”

  She hears the swish of Freya’s cloak along ground covered with drifts of dead leaves as she negotiates her way to the stool and sits, her breathing suddenly loud, close. Though she says nothing, her resentment is like another person in the room.

  “I’m sorry,” says Gytha. “This is hardly what you can have expected from waiting on a royal mistress.”

  Freya makes some non-committal murmur of demur.

  �
�I shall make it up to you as soon as I can, I swear to you.”

  As soon as the men come in, Odo tells Fulk to take Freya and his daughter to the small room adjoining the main body of the lodge which is, on happier occasions, used to prepare the game. He longs to be alone with Gytha, yet once Fulk and Freya have left them, he is suddenly overwhelmed by dread. There is nothing more to do now than say good-bye. As soon as it is light she must go. He is grateful for the fact that the lodge’s shutters are closed, for the density of the woods and the cloud obscuring the sun, for anything which will postpone the coming of day.

  Though she cannot read the expression on his face, the shadowy outline of his body, where he stands on the other side of the narrow trestle table in the center of the room, tells her all his pain and grief, the ache of loneliness opening up between them. She waits for panic, or tears, or a flood of regrets and retractions to choke her, yet all she feels is a profound calm. Walking around to his side of the table, she slips her arms around his waist and presses her face against his chest, breathing him in, committing each scent to memory. Rosemary, sandalwood, horses, saddle soap, sweat and earth and cardamoms.

  “I love you,” she murmurs, but her words are stifled and he knows them only as a change in the rhythm of her breathing, warm through his clothes.

  “What?”

  She disengages herself and smiles up at him; their breath mists and mingles in the cold air between them. “Nothing.” She takes his hands, turning them palm up and smoothing her thumbs over the callouses at the base of his fingers. It was the wrong thing to say. If she truly loves him, she must do all she can to make this easier for him.

  Dismayed, he realises her features are becoming clearer to him by the second as the sun advances toward the eastern horizon. Why isn’t the tree canopy denser, the shutters stouter, the cloud thicker? Disengaging his hands from hers, he starts to prowl about the room, peering into the fading shadows as though whatever words there are for a situation like this may be hidden there. A scratching comes at the door. They freeze. Fulk bursts through from the game larder, sword drawn.