Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  “Why am I always left with the impression that every word you utter has at least two meanings, Odo?”

  Odo laughs and moves on, only a few feet, then stops, abruptly, like an animal reaching the limits of a tether. Here is something he has never seen before, surely he has never seen before, he would have remembered. If he had seen even the sketch for it, he would have said, no, it’s private, irrelevant, leave it out. Yet he is glad that fate, or accident, or even God, has intervened to put it there. Ubi unus clericus et Aelfgyva. He touches the letters of her name, in its Latin spelling which he used to be so careful to avoid, as though they are a charm, as though their physical presence in indigo wool might somehow enable him to see what has become of her and the child.

  “There you are,” he says to her softly.

  “What?” says William, coming up beside him. William, he thinks, is growing deaf.

  “Nothing.” Our secret, he tells his ghost. “I wish Agatha had come.”

  “That comet’s a fine confection. Why didn’t she?”

  So, a comet may endure after all. “Oh, she’s quite a recluse these days. She isn’t even novice mistress at Saint Justina’s any more. She lives in her own little hermitage, in a field of cows, I’m told. The only people who see her are her confessor and the servant who looks after her. Not even me, and I’m her bishop, if nothing else.”

  William sighs and shakes his head. “Women,” he says. “I expect you miss her.”

  “Yes. Although part of me feels as though it has become a hermit with her.”

  “Why aren’t these ships finished?”

  The two men peer at the scene, a worried looking Harold listening to an adviser, the comet shooting overhead and in the lower border the empty hulls of ships, in pale yellow and whitework, suspended above a wintry sea.

  “Damned if I know,” says Odo, and his ghost says, of course you do. “Yes I do. They are finished. They’re dream ships.”

  “Godwinson’s nightmares,” adds William, catching on.

  “Or his dreams of Valhalla.”

  “Is there anything in this oddity that’s simply what it seems to be?”

  “As much as in me. Or you. It’s been nearly ten years in the making. What do you expect?”

  “What I like is things to be clear cut, unequivocal. Order.”

  “Ah.”

  The two men complete their circuit of the nave slowly and companionably. William admires the way Agatha has caught the syncopation of the horses at the beginning of a cavalry charge; his troops drill for hours a day to achieve such unity, good to see it appreciated. I know, responds Odo, seeing in his mind’s eye the beach at Saint Valery, the squares and circles, the parallel lines of hoofmarks in the damp sand like a giant child’s geometry slate. William teases him about the heroic representation of himself rallying the men when it was believed William had been killed. Whey-faced and knock-kneed as a virgin on her wedding night, more like it. He considers Godwinson’s death for a long time, searching his memory for any evidence of a shot in the eye, an unusual sort of injury, but it is years ago and not important. The sea will have had the man’s remains long since.

  Then, with his hand on the latch of the wicket in the west door, saying he must get back to the palace before Matilda sends out a search party, he confesses something puzzles him.

  “The oath,” he says. “You’ve got yourself in all over the place, even the odd council I could swear you weren’t at, but your biggest moment, when Godwinson swore on your relics and we thought we’d got him, well, where are you? You were certainly there, parading up the beach with your cope billowing out behind you and your swordbelt on like Saint Vigor himself.”

  Oh yes, he was there. He remembers the cloying softness of the sand, how the clergy carrying the heavy reliquaries, impeded by their skirts, struggled against it. He remembers the wind almost blowing his mitre off and whipping the words of the oath out to sea, so that William had to repeat them before Godwinson could hear what he was supposed to say. Silk vestments. Biting, salt cold. At least, with this grand new cathedral, there will be no more need to stage big events on the beach.

  Ever since William came into the building, Odo has been waiting for him to ask this question. Actually, he has been waiting for it, or something like it, for years. The pillars supporting the great arch of the west door are encircled by stone benches balanced on the spread wings of cherubim. Odo sits on one, William next to him. Their shoulders almost touch, yet they are facing away from one another due to the tight diameter of the bench. William is in darkness, shaded from the moon by the door recess. Odo listens to his brother’s laboured breathing. He feels sick but deadly calm.

  “Do you remember the Saint Exupery incident?”

  William laughs. “You mean when you spent all that money buying what you thought were the saint’s bones, only to find out they belonged to some peasant who probably couldn’t even say his Creed?”

  “People were punished,” says Odo defensively, before reminding himself not to be distracted. “Well, I never did anything about the bones. They just stayed in the crypt at the old church, in the reliquary shrine I bought them in. So when it looked to me as though Harold was reluctant to commit himself to supporting your claim to succeed Edward, I switched the reliquaries and told him he wasn’t binding himself to anything. He could swear, you’d let him take his hostages and go home, and then he could claim he was tricked, so his promise wasn’t worth anything.”

  Ah, says the beloved ghost, a debt of honour. Now I understand.

  “Splendour of God,” says William in a subdued voice, “so he never was foresworn. And you really did it? You didn’t just tell him you had?”

  “Of course I did it. He watched me do it. He never would have sworn otherwise. You were treating him well enough, and he’d profited from the campaign against Conan of Brittany, so he’d have stuck it out.”

  “What made you so sure of him? I didn’t see it.”

  “I knew him better than you. Remember, I’d visited him a couple of times, seen him on his home ground. And perhaps he was more prepared to talk openly to me. After all, I was just the bishop, the younger son sent into the church. None of Duke Robert’s blood in my veins.”

  And do you remember seeing me, prompts his ghost, through heat shimmer and wine haze, just one of the household women below the hearth? You never said you did.

  “No wonder you wanted to disassociate yourself. But why? Why make everything so complicated? The outcome would have been the same with or without the oath. Edward left the throne to me, Harold usurped it, even if he did pretty it up by getting himself elected king. Elected, I ask you. What nonsense.”

  “Because I wanted to be absolutely certain that, when the time came, you would act. I didn’t want to risk your being undecided, or not getting enough support. The oath was my surety. You see,” he goes on, rising from the bench and standing in front of William, “I couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of my life here, going to waste in that dark, damp old palace, passing my time in councils on the appropriate vestments for baptisms or what’s a suitable punishment for a priest who fails to maintain his tonsure, and grovelling to rich men who believe they can buy their way into heaven by paying to mend the cathedral roof. God gave me you, William, and then He reminded me that He helps those who help themselves.”

  William looks up at him. He speaks mildly, affecting hurt rather than anger. “I can’t believe that you had so little faith in me, brother. Did you think I would let what was rightfully mine just slip away from me?”

  “I doubted you’d get enough military support which, as it happens, was nearly true. You needed the Pope, and the notion that Harold had perjured himself lent weight to Lanfranc’s argument in Rome. And I wasn’t sure you were ruthless enough. There’s a squeamish side to you, William, a tendency to draw back from the brink.”

  “Alencon?” William asks, still in the same conciliatory tone. Me? asks the beloved ghost. “I remember how much you
used to like me to tell you that story when you were a boy.”

  “A fit of bad temper. Not ruthlessness. There’s nothing rational in hacking off tens of men’s hands and feet because they’ve insulted your mother.”

  Or driving out your brother’s mistress because you’re jealous of her place in his heart, scolds the ghost.

  “I see.” William clears his throat. “And the relics I wore during the battle? The false ones?”

  “Oh no, of course not. I had them switched back. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “You really are a very dangerous man, aren’t you, Odo? More of Ganelon than Turpin in your make up. I must be grateful I have you on my side.”

  “I am your man, Your Grace, by blood and honour.” He kneels before William, placing his hands between his brother’s as if performing homage. His knees crack. Moonlight illuminates half his face.

  “A pretty speech,” says William, prising Odo’s palms apart with his fingers so they are holding hands as they might have done if they had ever been children together. “I have heard you make so many over the years, inspired, I believed, by love of me. And now I find it was just your own ambition that fired you up.”

  Look into his eyes, Odo, commands the ghost, and you’ll see your own solitude mirrored there. His sons rebel against him and he cannot trust his wife not to side with them. You’re not the only one to have sacrificed your heart on the altar of ambition.

  “It’s the same thing,” says Odo.

  Odo frees his hands from William’s grasp and stands up.

  “Would you have wished it otherwise?” William asks.

  “I don’t waste my time wishing for what cannot be. I am a good and faithful servant. I use my talents to the best of my ability.”

  “Why do I not quite believe you?”

  “What have I done that you should not?”

  “Orchestrated a false oath?”

  “In your interests as much as mine. Imagine, we could be sitting here now, under threat from England as much as France or Anjou, instead of preparing to celebrate the fact that we’ve drawn everybody’s teeth. All the pregnant bitch’s offspring,” he adds, reflecting how that fable too appears in the margins of his tapestry. Twice, his ghost reminds him, though the second time was not me.

  I understand, he replies, yours was a warning to Harold, the other—whose?— was William’s promise. Do not let Normandy get a foot in the door. If you do, he will give away everything you value.

  “Except that we wouldn’t be here, in this spectacular cathedral, because you wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Did you get what you wanted? Is this enough for you? I should think even God must find all this,” he waves his arm at the spectacle of the cathedral, “hard to stomach.”

  Did you get what you wanted, asks his ghost, is it enough? He does not answer. He walks back slowly down the aisle, toward the glimmer of the white marble altar, with his tapestry in the corner of his eye, a strip of moony ribbon pierced and puckered with the story of his life, its lies and moments of truth, its fears, its compromises, its moments of shame and savagery, its loves. His great enterprise. It is not how he planned it.

  A memory is vouchsafed him, something he has not thought about for many years, not lost, but disregarded, like an old sword at the bottom of a weapons chest, rusty but with an edge to nick the unwary hand. He remembers the dream that came to haunt him after Senlac, the four women beneath the tree, the mutilated beauty between his sheets. He used to think, when he thought about it at all, that perhaps it was a dream about the ambiguities of power, about the exhilaration of taking and the illusion of holding.

  He finds himself staring at the embroidered image of a woman and child fleeing a burning house, and as he stares, the moonlight begins to play tricks with his eyes. He sees a meadow, very bright, almost luminous, studded with wild flowers the colours of gems, a filigree of silver water running through it. In the meadow are a woman and a small child in a linen bonnet, playing, laughing, their laughter dissolving in the sound of running water. As he looks, they become aware of him and wave, then the woman takes the child by the hand and they start to walk toward him.

  “Yes,” he says, a note of wonder in his voice, “yes, I did.”

  “Eh?” says William, pulling crossly at his earlobe.

  “Get what I wanted,” Odo explains, raising his voice slightly. He blinks, and the luminous vision is replaced once again by the embroidered image.

  A dream come true, says the Beloved Ghost.

  Afterword

  This is a work of fiction, and as such, it would be inappropriate for me to give a full set of references. I am indebted to the research of Jan Messant for my re-imagination of the embroidery workshop. My speculations as to the interpretation of some of the more obscure imagery of the Bayeux Tapestry are partly my own and partly those of David J. Bernstein in his book, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry.

  I am sure I have committed many unintentional historical inaccuracies, but there also are a few quite deliberate ones. Although Odo of Bayeux did have two sisters, Agatha is entirely a figment of my imagination. There is no evidence that Odo did attend the great monastery school at Bec, but it is plausible that he did, and there is no evidence that he did not. Odo’s son, John, is his only recorded child and, as he was witnessing documents for his cousin, Henry I, as late as 1121, he was almost certainly born much later than 1056, which is the date I give for his birth in this novel.

  One historical figure who I feel deserves an apology, because I have treated his reputation rather badly in this book, is Lanfranc of Bec. Lanfranc was a religious leader of good conscience, and an administrator so able that many of the structures he put in place as Archbishop of Canterbury govern the Church of England to this day.

  As for Aelfgyva, well, who knows? Perhaps she was just an “elf-gift” after all. Remember, if you translate Odo’s surname, de Conteville, into English, you get Storyville.

  Chapter 1

  Toledo, Omer 5252, which is the year of the Christians 1492

  There are days when I believe I have given up hope of ever seeing you again, of ever being free, or master of my own fate. Then I find that the heart and guts keep their own stubborn vigil. When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madam Fortune to prove us wrong.

  When I was a little girl in the city of my birth, when my mother was still alive, she would take me to the synagogue, to sit behind the screen with the other women and girls and listen to the men sing the prayers for Shabbat. Sometimes, out of sight of the menfolk, while they were preoccupied by the solemnity of their duty, the women would not behave as their husbands and brothers and fathers liked to think. There would be giggling and whispering, shifting of seats, gossip exchanged by mouthing words and raising eyebrows. Fans would flutter, raising perfumed dust to dance in sunbeams fractured by the fine stone trellis which shielded us from the men. And around me was a continuous eddy of women, touching my hair and face, murmuring and sighing the way I have since heard people do before great works of art or wonders of nature.

  This attention scared me, but when I looked to my mother for reassurance, she was always smiling. When I pressed myself to her side, fitting the round of my cheek into the curve of her waist, she too would stroke my hair as she received the compliments of the other women. Such a beautiful child, so fair, such fine bones. If I hadn’t been there for her birth, added my Grand Aunt Sophia, I would say she was a changeling, possessed by a dybbuk. And several of the other children my age, the girls and little boys who had not yet had their bar mitzvah, would fix solemn, dark eyes on my blue ones as if, whatever Aunt Sophia said, I was indeed a dybbuk, a malign spirit, an outsider. Trouble. Rachel Abravanel used to pull my hair, winding it tight around her fingers and applying a steady pressure until I was forced to tip back my head as far as it would go to avoid crying out and drawing the attention of the men. Rachel never seemed to care that my hair bit into her flesh and cut off the blood to her finger end
s; the reward of seeing me in pain made it worthwhile.

  A year after the time I am thinking of, when Rachel had died on the ship crossing from Sardinia to Naples, Señora Abravanel told my mother, as she tried to cool her fever with a rag dipped in seawater, how much her daughter had loved me. Many years later still, I finally managed to unravel that puzzle, that strange compulsion we have to hurt the ones we love.

  As it was, from before the beginning of knowledge, I knew I was different, and in the month of Omer in the year 5252, which Christians call May, 1492, I became convinced I was to blame for the misfortunes of the Jews. It was a hot night and I could not sleep. My room overlooked the central courtyard of our house in Toledo, and, mingling with the song of water in the fountain, were the voices of my parents engaged in conversation.

  “No!” my mother shouted suddenly, and the sound sent a cold trickle of fear through my body, like when Little Haim dropped ice down my back during the Purim feast. I do not think I had ever heard my mother shout before; even when we displeased her, her response was always cool and rational, as though she had anticipated just such an incidence of naughtiness and had already devised the most suitable punishment. Besides, it was not anger that gave her voice its stridency, but panic.

  “But Leah, be reasonable. With Esther, you can pass, stay here until I’ve found somewhere safe and can send for you.”

  “Forgive me, Haim, but I will not consider it. If we have to go, we go together, as a family. We take our chances as a family.”

  “The king and queen have given us three months, till Shavuot. Till then, we are under royal protection.”

  My mother gave a harsh laugh, quite uncharacteristic of her. “Then we can complete Passover before we go. How ironic.”

  “It is their Easter. It is a very holy time for them. Perhaps their majesties have a little conscience after all.” I could hear the shrug in my father’s voice. It was his business voice, the way he spoke when negotiating terms for loans with customers he hoped would be reliable, but for whom he set repayment terms which would minimise his risk.