Needle in the Blood (13 page)

Not long
, thinks Gytha, slowly laying down her needle, but long enough. Her hand moves to the little bone knife hanging from her own belt, just as Margaret’s does. If it could cut the underhung venison they had been given at the day meal yesterday, it will surely serve to cleave the pampered flesh of a bishop from his bones. All she needs is a dark corner of the hall, a narrow space of mud and shadow between the buildings in the outer court, a moment off guard. And she knows just how to catch a man off guard.

What then? When it is done?
She gives a mental shrug of the shoulders. It does not matter. She has been dead inside since the moment she collapsed, paralysed with fear, against the wall of the priory hospice in Winchester, and watched her mistress carried off in a wagon as though she were no more than the cups and plates and tapestries from her hall. Where her heart used to be is only the desire for revenge, her veins are threaded with hate, burning like hot wires. Let them do as they will with her body; she has no further use for it.

“Might it be possible for me to speak to the earl about my estates, do you think, Sister?” Judith is asking, in the tone she keeps for Sister Jean, intended to remind listeners that she and the king’s sister are equals.

Agatha gives her a tolerant smile. Gytha is looking very pale, she thinks, hoping her workshop will not be decimated by sickness by the time Odo arrives. This will be the first time he has set foot in the atelier since overseeing the installation of the windows, and she is anxious that he should be pleased by what he sees. His trust in her still terrifies her. Often she feels as though she is not quite in control of the embroidery, as though it is growing in unanticipated ways, like a child rebelling against the authority of its father.

“His lordship takes a close interest in the management of all his business, Judith,” she replies. “I do not think you need be concerned that he will have neglected to ensure your husband’s holdings yield all that they should.”

“It’s for my grandsons in Denmark, you see…” Her words trail off into a lame silence as Sister Jean’s smile freezes.

***

Odo is in no mood for Christmas. His damaged wrist aches in damp weather, a nagging pain that gnaws at the edges of consciousness, leaving him irritable and frustrated with his physical limitations. He is approaching the age when a man’s blood starts to thicken and slow his body down; his inclinations and his abilities are increasingly at odds. The journey from London has been intolerably slow, the road sometimes a quagmire and sometimes a frozen sea of ruts and craters. He prefers to travel light and quickly, in the company of small groups of knights and men at arms. Certain journeys, however, have purposes in addition to that of leaving one place and arriving safely at another. They are freighted with significance.

The really heavy wagons left several days in advance of the main party, carrying wine and provisions, furnishings, tableware, several litters of pups too young to make the journey on foot, and Master Pietro, the Italian pastrycook whose girth reassures Odo as to his professional skills but makes riding a practical impossibility. Odo’s hawks travelled in a specially designed cart, a wheeled cage containing a perch for each bird, though their handler had to sit in its bed and endure being shat on by the unsettled birds. Further wagonloads of Odo’s personal effects, his clothes and jewellery, his sacramental plate, as well as his treasury and various official seals, all under heavy guard, set the pace for the main party. This was as carefully orchestrated as any of William’s public crown wearings, and served a similar purpose. After conquest comes occupation, says William.

Odo himself, surrounded by the lords and senior clergy of his entourage, his standard bearer at his shoulder and his midget, Turold, beside him on one of the tiny ponies William discovered in Scotland, rode at the center of the procession, preceded by a body of knights and his personal praetorian guard in his new green and gold livery. A seemingly endless trail of cooks, varlets, concubines, laundresses, body servants, chaplains, huntsmen, dogs, horses, and their handlers, brought up the rear. Outside every town or village en route, the entire party ground to a halt as the varlets were sent ahead to strew the way with brush and straw to make the going easier and alert the people to the impending spectacle. The musicians would be assembled and thrust up front to provide an accompaniment to their lord’s progress and entertain the spectators. Balanced on the shaggy back of his pony, the dwarf would perform rolls and handstands. Odo had also devised other distractions; the release of white doves from baskets, the distribution of wheat loaves or silver pennies stamped with his image as Earl of Kent. This is the part of the planning he enjoys, for the rest he relies on Osbern.

Osbern, who holds no official status in the household other than that of being Odo’s body servant, nevertheless understands its workings so intimately that he acts almost in place of the chamberlain. He directs his master’s relocations with a strategic skill and attention to detail at least as thorough, thinks Odo, a little disconcerted, as his own. Throughout these progresses he is invaluable, able to conjure billets from the most unpromising communities. He can cajole the surliest prior into letting them overrun his hospice and is equally accomplished in shielding his master from the worst excesses of obsequious vassals who seem only too pleased to let their households go hungry and bedless to accommodate the earl and his entourage.

The rigours of the journey are not the source of his wretched humour. On the whole, it has gone well. There have been no attempts at robbery, no broken axles. The onlookers tended to be sullen, but not openly hostile as has happened in the past; no blood has been shed. The enfolding warmth and good odours of meat roasting in his own kitchens after days on the road do not account for his lassitude as he sits in his winter parlour above the kitchen and Osbern directs the unpacking around him.

Lanfranc is the problem. Everything he wrote to Agatha is true, but Lanfranc is the real reason he is not spending this Christmas with William. He still feels stunned by William’s decision to appoint the Lombard to the Archbishopric. He had been so certain of his brother’s mind, and so certain that, even if offered the appointment, Lanfranc would refuse it, as he has steadfastly refused everything William has tried to lavish upon him other than the abbacy of Caen, that he had never even thought to articulate his expectation. But now, suddenly, unexpectedly as a crossbow bolt from out of the sun, this fissure has opened up between them. William, his duke and benefactor, the older brother he adores and looks up to beyond the power of words to express, has let him down.

Surely he was the obvious choice, already combining his ecclesiastical responsibilities in Normandy with his lay lordships in England, and with an administration established in Canterbury. If William wished to ensure a minimum of papal interference in the government of the church in England, how better to do it than to combine church and state in the person of a single man, and that man his brother and close confidant, and one of his strongest supporters in his English venture? Fluent in the language, moreover, and well versed in English culture and mores. By bestowing the See of Canterbury on a member of his own family, William would have sent the clearest possible message to the English about the concentration of power both spiritual and temporal in the person of their new king and the men of his blood.

And then, in the spring, when Thomas, formerly a canon of his own cathedral in Bayeux, came to England to be made Archbishop of York, William had said, casually, over the welcome feast at Dover, with his mouth full of roast pigeon,

“I’d like to delay the consecration for a month or two. I’ve asked Lanfranc to take on Canterbury, but he can’t be here before the summer. It would send out the right message if Thomas’ consecration was reserved to him. I hope you agree, Odo.”

“Lanfranc?” he demanded, almost choking on his own food. “Lanfranc? He’ll never come.”

“Why do you think that? The delay is only while he puts his affairs in order at Caen. He has given his word, and Lanfranc does not go back on his word. Besides, I have ordered it.”

“I thought he was your friend. I suppose a king must command even his friends.”

“Beware, brother.” And immediately he understood William’s decision. Lanfranc was discreet, diplomatic. He remembered his station the way a dog remembers a rabbit hole. Whereas he himself, though just as good a jurist, just as persuasive and possibly a better administrator, was also flamboyant and restless, cursed with a passionate imagination which sometimes blinded him to things as they were. His understanding brought him no peace, it only embittered his disappointment, but he was wise enough to dissemble and couch his objections in terms of pure political expediency. William had greeted his protests with smiling disbelief.

“You, Odo? It was never in my mind. You are my Justiciar, you guard me against all comers along the south coast. Splendour of God, man, you even rule in my place when I’m overseas. Are there no bounds to your ambition?”

“I want only what is best for Your Grace,” he had replied, laying his knife carefully beside his plate, suddenly not hungry. “I haven’t once failed in your service nor questioned your decisions since I was a boy. You cannot doubt my loyalty, but I am your brother, which I think gives me the right to speak freely. Lanfranc is a churchman through and through. If it comes to it, he will support the Pope against you.”

“You disobeyed me once only, as far as I can remember, and I forgave you then, as I forgive you now. Tell me, Odo, this business with Lanfranc, what is it all about? Did he have you beaten once too often when you studied at Bec? Or perhaps not often enough. He is my friend, and a man of the utmost virtue and integrity, without whose good offices, I might remind you, we probably wouldn’t be here at all. It wasn’t until he went to Rome and got us the Pope’s backing I was able to raise an army.”

“You had my ships, William, a hundred of them and all the men they could carry. I didn’t wait to be told what to do by the Pope. I risked my soul to fight beside you. I didn’t skulk in Normandy saying my prayers or loiter behind the lines with my altar boys like Coutances.
Ja bon vassal nen ert vif recreut.
”

William had embraced him then, with tears in his eyes, pressing his greasy mouth to Odo’s cheek, and Odo found himself fascinated once again by how easily words came to him, billowing out of him like a smokescreen to conceal his feelings.

“And you are a good vassal, the best. And my gratitude is beyond measure, Odo, as I hope I have always shown. Here, drink. This is really very good.” Offering Odo his own cup, the rim carefully turned so that he must place his lips over the imprint of his brother’s. Odo drank.

“Lanfranc may be my friend,” went on William, “but you are my flesh and blood. Which is why I don’t want to see you torn between Rome and me. We are one, Odo. Let it remain so.”

Of course it is so, he had wanted to shout, it will always be so. He has adored William since the moment he first set eyes on him, himself a boy of ten or eleven years, William then eighteen, tall, powerfully built, the shock of red hair blazing in the dim light of the great hall at Conteville. Since his father said, “Here is your brother, Odo, Duke William of Normandy,” and had then fetched him a good clout about the head because he stood gaping and forgot to kneel.

And William had laughed and hugged him, pressing his smarting cheek against the hard body beneath its leather hauberk, and said, “I have brought you a merlin, Odo. I’m told you like to hunt. So do I. We will hunt together.”

His own hawk. As if he were a man, not just a boy kicking about among the varlets. As if the young duke, god-like in his glamour, heroic as Roland in his feats of arms and narrow escapes from his enemies, were admitting him to the pantheon.

As for William, he keeps his feelings close, as though they were his most dangerous enemies, but Odo knows how much he is needed. Weaving and shouldering his way through the press of people in the hall on his arrival, sidestepping a nasty altercation between one of the castle dogs and a hound he had brought with him from London, he had noticed that the clerk to whom he usually entrusts his correspondence with his brother was already waiting for him, a bulging satchel slung across his shoulder.

***

“My lord.” Osbern is hovering in front of him with a surcoat of yellow silk edged with ermine draped across his outstretched arms. “Will you dress for the ladies now?”

Odo passes his hand across his face, as though trying to erase his bitter recollections from his features. “Yes,” he says, “but not that, not for Sister Jean’s women.”

He is soberly dressed, in a long tunic of deep blue trimmed only with squirrel, when he leaves his apartments in the keep and, descending the motte cautiously to avoid slipping on the steep, muddy slope, passes through the gate in the inner ward on his way to the atelier. His only concession to outward show is the gold pectoral cross set with pearls and sapphires. Osbern has certain notions about how men should dress to please women, and his instincts are often, in Odo’s experience, shrewd. The women Osbern is thinking of, however, bear no resemblance to Agatha and her group of quasi-nuns. He has been amused, when approving accounts for payment, to note that she has purchased cloth similar to that used for making monastic habits for her women’s clothes, their livery. Snow is falling briskly; flakes catch in his hair and sting his newly shaved tonsure.