by Sarah Bower
“All the more reason…”
“But we know this one isn’t going to die, don’t we? We both heard what Gunhild said. I’m not afraid now, I haven’t been since we…cleaned the bed at Conteville.” Both women give Fulk a sidelong glance, but he is absorbed by the handful of gems and seems to have no curiosity about their conversation. “So please,” continues Gytha, “have no concern for me, think of yourselves.”
“His lordship…” ventures Fulk, wishing he had kept his mouth shut as the women turn on him.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” snaps Freya.
“You have more than discharged your obligations to Lord Odo,” Gytha insists. “He would be the first to say so. You have followed me beyond the grave, as it were, and built me a very fine ‘tomb.’ You could not have done more.” She laughs, but Fulk looks doubtful and shivers as the sun disappears behind the hill.
“Before dark,” she continues, “you will go down to Lord Owein’s stables and take two of the horses and the mule. I said I would give him my mare in exchange for one of the mountain ponies. And I will never see you again. You will forget me and all the danger I put you in, though I will not forget you.”
She kisses each of them, even Fulk, who flushes like a second sunset, and holds Freya for a moment by her upper arms in token of the secrets they have shared, but perhaps more because of the ones they have not. She watches them until a turn in the track takes them out of sight, Freya with her daughter on her hip, Fulk leading the way with their saddlebags slung over his shoulder. She watches until their foreshortened figures reappear outside Owein ap Llwyr’s stockade, and the gate opens, and they disappear inside. Then she rinses the drinking cups in the brook, stoppers the jug of Lord Owein’s wine, and carries everything indoors. She goes into her chapel and, finding kneeling difficult, sits cross-legged in front of the saint and the dragon locked in their interminable combat.
“Well, George,” she says, “here we are, you and me and the dragon.” And me, says her daughter, feet drumming against the walls of her mother’s womb.
One morning toward the end of May, she is certain something has changed the moment she opens her eyes. Her mattress still has the oily scent of freshly sheared wool and the room beyond her bed curtains smells, as it does every morning, of the dough put to prove the night before. Shards of sunlight pierce the false twilight of closed shutters, and outside, as always, skylarks bubble in competition with the brook. For a few moments she lies still, holding back the bed curtain and wondering. Then realisation dawns. The baby is not moving. Gytha feels no anxiety about this. She knows babies become still once they are ready to be born. Do they sleep, she wonders, gathering strength for the struggle ahead, or are they simply struck to stone by contemplation of the unknown world they are about to enter?
Heaving herself up from the bed on a surge of anticipation, she sets about making everything ready in her room. She spreads a clean sheet on the floor, and beside it puts twine, a knife, a cup of wine, and a linen envelope of powdered poppy seed Freya gave her for pain. Climbing cautiously onto a stool, she then fastens two lengths of rope over the rafters above the sheet. She wishes she still had her medal of Saint Margaret, patron saint of women in labour, that was tied to her left thigh during the births of her other children, together with eleven grains of coriander in a muslin bag. But the medal had been in her leather pouch and she has no coriander. She lights her fire, then goes out to the brook to fetch water, not bothering to dress but simply shoving her feet into her shoes and throwing a shawl over her night gown. Returning with her pail, she uncovers the dough, divides, kneads, and shapes her loaves, and puts them into the oven Fulk built for her beside the hearth.
Her mind is calm and clear, but her body is restless. She tries to sit, dragging a stool out into the morning sun, telling herself she must conserve her energy, but her feet twitch and her legs dance to a rhythm only they know. Her back aches and she knows she must be tired, up countless times every night to make water and then unable to sleep due to the baby’s remorseless kicking, but sitting brings on heartburn so she decides to take a walk. She climbs the ridge behind the hermitage from where, if she looks to the east, she can see the dark smudge of Y Gelli, Neufmarche’s tower shimmering over it this morning like the admonitory finger of some stone giant buried with his hand poking out of the earth. Just as she is perfecting this image to herself, the first pain creeps up on her, a stealthy shift of the ache at the base of her spine to some deeper, less definable location, vanished almost before she has registered what it is.
No harm in continuing her walk. It will be hours yet before anything happens. She goes on along the ridge in a northerly direction, trying to count the different shades of green and blue, mauve and grey in the vast, petrified sea of hills around her, watching the swoop and dart of swallows and wondering why it is you never see a skylark, as though its song forms a concealing cloud around it. When she reaches the pinnacle of the next hill, she returns the way she has come, gazing in delight at the neat, new thatch of her roof, the same warm shade as amber, but so much more precious. Like you, baby, says the voice inside as another pain comes, sharper this time, more focused, made, not found. The bread will be ready, she thinks, clambering down the scree into her backyard where her little spotted sow grazes incuriously, her chain rattling as she pulls it through the iron eye in the pole she is tethered to.
“You wait till I get the boar to you,” she says through gritted teeth. Definite pains now, sharp hammer blows to her abdomen, their rhythm growing quicker as though marking a Saint Vitus’ dance. “Fifteen at least for you, not just one.” But tiny, and with nice, narrow heads and neat, tucked in feet.
For the first time, bringing the loaves out of the oven with her hands wrapped in rags, taking care to leave the door open, for closed doors can obstruct the delivery of children, she feels a worm of fear burrowing into her. What if the baby is her father’s daughter, with his great build, so she tears inside like Leofgeat and bleeds to death, and no one finds the baby in time so she starves, or is taken by wild animals? She should have kept Freya with her. How stupid and selfish to let her go. How treacherous to Odo, what a waste of this perfect house. The next pain almost hurls the loaves out of her arms, as though their muscles are contracting in sympathy with her womb. She crawls onto the sheet, thinking she will try to rest a little, and lies miserably on her side, knees drawn up to her belly which no longer feels like part of her body but hard and smooth and indifferent as one of the great, flat stones in the bed of her stream. She is just a mind, floating free, utterly alone.
Until her body’s work brings her back from her feverish doze to a howling, sobbing, self-pitying consciousness. Turning onto her back, she notices the packet of poppyseed, but hesitates. How much? Too much and she may fall into a stupor and be unable to push when the time comes, but there is an iron band around her belly, and a torturer yanking it tighter.
“You bastard,” she shouts at Odo, at his pompous purse-lipped image when he spoke so spitefully to her of the punishment of Eve, “you fucking, fucking bastard!” She’ll take it all and die, serves him right.
Sitting up, she opens the envelope, licks her finger and dips it in the black, grainy powder then sticks her finger in her mouth. “Should have stuck to sucking,” she says, with a mad laugh. “Just as much fun and fewer consequences.” The torturer begs to differ, and tightens the band again. “Mary, a virgin, bare Christ,” she mutters, casting about in her mind for the rest of the charm, clutching Odo’s Tear of the Virgin, still fastened around her neck, “Elizabeth bore John the Baptist. I charge thee, infant…oooh, Christ, don’t let me die!” Obviously not enough poppyseed, she decides, when the contraction is over. She takes another fingerful and a mouthful of wine which she promptly vomits back up, but some of the poppy must have stayed down because she begins to feel dreamy, dissolving, liquescent, slowly flowing out of her pain-wracked body into cool, dark places made of sleep.
She becomes aware of being very
cold. The room is dark and the fire has gone out, and the sheet underneath her is soaking wet. Her night gown is soaking wet, her legs, her feet, as she struggles upright and puts them cautiously to the wet floor. Waters, she thinks, becoming aware of a pressing need to evacuate her bowels. Well, it will have to wait, she must build up the fire first. It may be June, but the nights up here are still cold, and she will have a baby to think of before long.
Oh God, she can’t, she isn’t ready. If she can just get this fire lit and have a shit, and put on some dry clothes, then she can think about the baby. She struggles across the room, bent as near double as a pregnant woman come to term can possibly be, the sodden gown clinging to her legs, and squats before the hearth, stirring the embers into life with a stick. She makes a careful heap of kindling over the glowing ash and, absorbed in her work, finds she has reached a brief truce with her body.
Stripping off her nightgown, she bundles it up with the wet sheet, which she replaces with another from her bed, and wraps herself in Odo’s cloak which she takes down from a peg on the back of her door. Her teeth chatter. Taking a spill of kindling from the fire, she lights two candles and puts them at either end of her table, then throws a log onto the fire, sparks flaring up toward the smoke hole like a physical manifestation of the excitement inside her that makes her feel ready to explode. Finally she fills her iron pot with water and hangs it from the tripod straddling the fire, before lying down on the clean sheet.
Parting her legs, she probes herself with tentative fingers, suddenly shy, suddenly aware that this patch of wrinkled skin and damp hair she can feel is a new person, someone about whom she knows nothing. How can she bring her up, here, alone, in a Welsh mountain, the niece of a king? The king. Neufmarche’s tower. They will find her, even here, and take her child. She should have continued to knot hairs. She should have taken Margaret’s place on Gunhild’s grubby bed.
But there is no time to answer her questions, no point in wishing she had made different decisions, because her touch has woken her body up again and she is overwhelmed by the urge to push, every last ounce of her strength bent to the task of forcing her child out into the world, the dumb act of love and violence. Squatting on the sheet, gripping the two ropes tied to the rafters until the grain of the twisted hemp eats into her palms, she bears down, sobbing raucously and uncontrollably as she thinks of Odo and how, for all these months, she has carried part of him inside her, treasured, nurtured, and protected, only for them now, finally, to be wrenched apart in the appalling solitude of a Welsh mountainside.
She has not cried until now; on the whole of her long pilgrimage from Kent she has not felt so utterly abandoned and alone as she does now. Sobs well up from every fault line in her heart, as cracked and chipped as an old earthenware jug, so that when, with a final skintearing, heart-bursting, bone-cracking heave, she brings her daughter slithering into life, the first thing she says to her is,
“Well, you must think you have a monster for a mother. Just look at me.” Wiping tears from her burning eyes, licking snot from the corners of her mouth, she holds up her baby, bloody and long-limbed as a skinned rabbit, and a smile as uncontrollable as her tears spreads across her face.
“And just look at you.” Wincing as a final contraction expels the afterbirth, she lays the baby carefully on a clean patch of sheet then ties off and cuts the cord before picking her up again and giving her a cautious shake. Her eyes fly open, she takes a tremulous breath, looks surprised for a second, then lets out a long wail like the cry of a seagull.
***
“Pearl,” she tells her daughter later, when they are washed and warm beside the fire, and she has the baby to her breast, feeling the sparkle of her milk in response to the sturdy suck. Once again, for the twentieth, or two hundredth, time, she unfolds the blanket and gazes at her daughter, pink and perfect in the firelight. She counts fingers and toes, marvels at her long eyelashes, her tiny nose, the way she sucks her lower lip, the dark curls plastered to her head like a mail hood, her indisputable female sex. “Pearl,” she says again, contemplating opalescent fingernails and the sheen of her eyelids as she falls asleep with a drop of milk sliding down her chin. “Tomorrow, when we’re all rested, I shall take you to my stream and name you Pearl.”
The following afternoon, a herdsman scouring the hills for yearling ponies for Lord Owein’s stables reports seeing the woman from old Dafydd’s hermitage beside the stream with an infant. The following morning Gytha is roused from sleep by a knock on her door.
“Who’s there?” she shouts crossly. She has been up half the night with Pearl, whose appetite and sleeping habits are already showing signs of resembling those of her father, and now she has slept late, and is all at odds with herself, her back aching, sunlight stabbing her eyes, damp shift stuck to sore nipples. Then she looks at the baby, tightly swaddled and sound asleep in her crib, pink cheeked and breathing regularly, and suddenly the morning is the most beautiful she has ever woken to and she exults in her body’s pains the way she used to love the trail of scratches and bruises and bite marks left on her skin by Odo’s passion.
“Lord Owein sent me,” says a woman’s voice, muffled by the door, “to see if you have everything you need.”
“Yes, thank you.” She does not open the door. She will not have these strangers in her house, invading its private space, set aside only for her and Pearl. If she had wanted other people, she would have kept Fulk and Freya by her, but when her four children by Adam were born, she was surrounded by people, hoardes of female relatives, neighbours, midwives, all regaling her with advice, exhortation, spells and prayers, sitting her up, lying her down, feeding her hot potions or ice water, and what good had any of it done? Other people are a plague to which she will not expose her precious daughter.
Silence. She can feel the visitor deliberating on the other side of the door, then she says, “Very well. Lord Owein sent some provisions. I’ll leave them outside the door.”
Gytha waits until the footsteps have receded, dislodging earth and stones which rattle down the path ahead of them, before going outside to see what the woman has left. A large basket covered with a muslin cloth stands on the doorstep, too heavy, Gytha decides, for a small woman who has just given birth to carry into the house. Squatting down, she begins to unpack eggs and cheeses, almond milk puddings, some blowsy cabbages with black earth clinging to their roots, and a box of strawberries to which she helps herself as she lifts out a parcel of tiny embroidered gowns wrapped in a crib coverlet made of lambskins from the bottom of the basket. Licking strawberry juice from her fingers, she holds one of the gowns up to the light to inspect the work. It is neat, though not as good as her own, but thankfully, no one here knows she can embroider. No one here must ever know the part she has played in embroidering history.
Her attention is caught by movement in the valley. The woman, in the company of a small boy, is re-entering Owein ap Llwyr’s compound, her hand gripping the boy’s shoulder as she follows him through the gate. So she is blind; the boy is a seeing-boy. True to his promise to make no enquiries about her wealth or the parentage of her child, Lord Owein sent a blind woman to her, who would be unable to answer any questions he might be tempted to ask about the appearance of the baby. Suddenly full of remorse, she regrets her unfriendliness. Perhaps, once she is fully recovered, once Pearl is stronger, she will take her down to the compound to thank her landlord in person.
***
“Well, Your Reverence, we have encountered the odd difficulty with interpretation,” says the workshop master to Scolland in answer to his enquiry as to the progress of Bishop Odo’s hanging. “It is very difficult to discern any order in the way the work has been done, almost as though Sister Jean did not wish her embroiderers to understand what was being asked of them. I suppose it’s possible some of her notes and drawings became confused during the move.”
More than possible, thinks Scolland, recalling the wagonload of collapsed frames, rolls of linen, boxes of needles,
hanks of wool, and chests of parchments. Above all, parchments. Drawings, notes, bills for dyeing, for needles, candles, firewood, and dressmaking, many, he was told, found scattered about the workshop floor. He marvels his master embroiderer has managed to make any sense of it at all.
“We have found this, for example.” Conducting the abbot to his work table, where the drawings lie pinned together in order, the master shows him a sketch which seems to have no bearing at all on the tale of William’s conquest. It lies to the right of a scene in which William and Harold of Wessex parley in William’s palace in Rouen. It shows an ornate doorway, with barley twist doorposts and pediments carved to resemble the heads of hounds, or bears, perhaps. Two figures stand in the doorway, a small woman and a priest, youthful and vigorous, long-legged and fashionably dressed in a short, close fitting tunic. He has one hand extended toward the woman’s cheek in a caress, or possibly a blow, the other on his hip, almost as though he is dancing. In the border immediately below squats a naked homunculus with his arm outstretched toward the priest and his lady, mirroring the gesture of the priest. Scolland shakes his head.
“Well, I cannot see that it has any bearing on the representation of King William’s conference with Wessex, and I wonder at the…detail of the nude figure. Bishop Odo insists he wishes to display this work in his new cathedral. Can he be aware what it contains?”
“It is most vexing, Father.”
“Wait.” Scolland peers more closely. “Bring me a candle. Really, my eyesight. Thank you. Yes, I thought so. Look, there is an inscription: Ubi unus clericus et Aelfgyva. And there it stops.”
“Aelfgyva,” the master repeats. “Was that not the name…?”
“It was. Perhaps we should exclude it. And yet, the drawing is there, and Bishop Odo was most insistent that we follow Sister Jean’s plan to the letter.”
