Needle in the Blood (17 page)

“Thank you, Brother. You are most considerate. Now, perhaps it would be best if you left us. My lord bishop shouldn’t be taxed with too many visitors all at once. You too, doctor, if you please.”

When they have gone, Lanfranc draws up a stool to the bedside. Odo’s eyes are closed, and the left side of his face remains badly swollen and discoloured, but when Lanfranc takes his hand, the pressure is returned.

“Well, brother, you gave us all quite a fright.”

Frowning with the effort, Odo opens his eyes. The whites are startlingly yellow.
Wolf eyes
, thinks Lanfranc, rather pleased with the analogy. The wolf is Odo’s emblem, a gold wolf on a green ground, predatory, cunning, a creature of the ancient dark.

“Where’s the anchorite?” He turns his head in Lanfranc’s direction, wincing as his jaw makes contact with the pillow. “Where am I?” He has spoken in French. Lanfranc, who is more comfortable in Latin, nevertheless replies in his own execrable vernacular.

“You are in my house. You have been here almost two weeks, unconscious or raving. Though I hesitate to appear disloyal to my infirmarer, or critical of your doctor, I think it is only God’s providence and the strength of your own constitution that have pulled you through. You took a terrible fall.”

“Two weeks?” His voice is weak and hoarse; the stiff jaw makes him slur his words like a drunkard. He tries to swallow but has no saliva. Lanfranc dips a sponge in the bowl of tea cooling on the nightstand and uses it to moisten Odo’s parched lips; Odo pulls a face. “The king…?”

“The king has been informed of your accident and that you are in my care. It’s the dead of winter; nothing will spoil while you recover. I will send a messenger to His Grace today to tell him you have regained consciousness. I’ve no doubt he’ll be very relieved. As am I.”

In this Lanfranc is in earnest, the more so because, when he had first laid eyes on the injured man lying on a litter in the great court of Christ Church Abbey, his lips and fingernails blue with cold, his swollen face encrusted with dried blood and vomit, his first thought had been that Odo’s death would make his job easier. It would set him free to concentrate on the subjugation of the English church to the king’s authority without always having to look over his shoulder to see what Odo was up to along the shared borders of their secular power.

And his second was this, that a world without Odo would somehow show less of the wonder of God’s creation and more of its order and predictability. Odo has always had this effect on him, since he was a boy of eleven, forever disrupting classes at Bec. It might be a toad tactically released from his sleeve just as Brother Damian, who taught rhetoric and was of a nervous disposition, walked past his desk. Or an unorthodox, but irrefutable, response to a question of doctrine. Nothing has changed, except in degree; it remains unwise to turn one’s back on Odo, though now you are more likely to feel a sword between your shoulder blades than a toad around your ankles, and lose the contents of your treasury rather than an argument. And, absurdly, end up admiring the charm with which he defeated you.

In remorse for his uncharitable thoughts, Lanfranc had locked himself in his room, this room, where he had scourged himself until his blood flowed then put on a hair shirt beneath his robe which he had sworn not to remove unless or until his old pupil made a full recovery. He had then, while keeping vigil at the sick man’s bedside, composed a letter to Pope Alexander, begging to be released from his Archbishopric and to be allowed to return to Caen. He has not the strength for this work; he is too easily corrupted. He must save himself from becoming like the man on the bed.

“There was an anchorite,” Odo says again, his voice a little stronger now. “He gave me shelter. I got lost. My horse…The anchorite must be thanked. Provisions. Something for the chapel.”

“I know of no anchorite. My wardens found you, unconscious, in a part of my chase that borders yours, near the Dover road. It seems you were caught across the face by a branch and thrown. My men found your horse later, wandering with a quarrel in its neck. It looks as though your bow must have discharged when you fell. The animal had to be destroyed. I’m sorry. The doctor diagnosed severed bruising to the kidneys. Luckily your jaw was not broken. He has been bleeding you daily to cure the jaundice.”

The two men exchange sceptical looks. Odo glances at the backs of his hands. As well as looking as though they have been stained with turmeric, each bears several small cuts in varying stages of healing.

“Your sister has been here every day,” Lanfranc continues. “I offered her lodgings, but she said she could not be spared from the workshop.” He pauses, as though he has thought better of what he was about to say and is looking for something to fill the gap. “When you’re stronger I can show you my plans to rebuild the cathedral. Now I think you should rest. Shall I remove this?” Lanfranc picks up the bowl of tea.

“Thank you.”

At the door, the Archbishop turns back. “Odo…”

“Yes?”

“I somehow have the feeling your fall was providential, that we have been circling around one another like a couple of fighting cocks since August. There is a great deal we should discuss, when you feel strong enough.”

Odo smiles, a tight, lopsided smile, careful to avoid splitting his cracked lips any further, but says nothing, and by the time Lanfranc has shut the door on him, his eyes are closed once more. He is sad about the horse.

***

By the time Odo’s recovery has advanced enough for Brother Thorold to allow him out of bed, there is a mood abroad in the Abbey, carefully concealed from the Archbishop, that the Bishop of Bayeux has outstayed his welcome. He has imported his own cook and his personal servant, as well as a miscellany of pages, his dwarf, three musicians and two favourite hounds and their handler, with each of these impositions insisting, sweetly but firmly, that they are necessary to the speedy restoration of his health. He has taken over all the Archbishop’s private apartments, except his chapel, which is currently serving as abbey church, to accommodate his household, although, to Brother Thorold’s horror, the dogs are allowed to sleep on his bed. The Archbishop’s bed, worries the infirmarer, wondering if he dare make known to the bishop his concerns for the Archbishop’s health and dignity if he has to sleep in the monks’ dormitory for very much longer.

Brother Thorold and Odo’s physician wrangle with chilly courtesy over his treatment, but Osbern is a particular bone of contention. While his devotion to his lord is commendable, and hints at aspects of Odo’s character not immediately obvious to those charged with his care, his undisguised contempt for the Abbey’s domestic arrangements is stinging. He had been shocked by his first sight of his master on arrival at Christchurch, but more by the fact that Odo was unshaven and dressed in the plain black habit of a Benedictine than by his loss of weight or the bruises still discolouring his cheek and jaw. He had sent novices scurrying for soap and water and clean linen with an arrogance at least equal to his lord’s, and before long, the bed chamber was so imbued with Odo’s favourite perfume that Brother Thorold, bringing arnica to treat his bruises, wished he could avoid breathing the air for fear of corruption.

Odo himself is bored and uncomfortable. His body has been made a battleground, pulled between doctor and infirmarer as though they are contenders in a tug of war. Lanfranc’s private apartments are furnished with the kind of pious simplicity Odo discarded without regret twenty years ago when summoned from school in Bec to take up his bishopric. Most of Archbishop Stigand’s library having been destroyed in the great fire three years ago, there is little to read. Lanfranc will not be able to begin to restore the collection until he has a building fit to house it. Perhaps Odo himself will commission a manuscript out of gratitude for Lanfranc’s care. A gospel, a book of hours? Perhaps a medical text would be appropriate in the circumstances, Galen, or the infidel Avicenna, of whom he has heard that he memorised the entire writings of Aristotle and could write while riding a camel. What does a camel look like? How can it be made to accommodate an escritoire? He envisages a sort of hunchbacked horse and wonders why anyone should want to ride such a thing.

He is also becoming wary of Lanfranc’s hospitality. Despite the confines of his sickroom, he is aware of tensions in the abbey community. He is certain Lanfranc is equally conscious of them, yet he seems in no hurry to let his guest leave. Though Odo insists he is well enough to go home, that his recovery would progress more quickly if he had his own bed to sleep in, Lanfranc prevaricates. He feels it would be inadvisable for a man who has been so badly hurt to travel in this weather; he is afraid Odo might take another fall when it is so icy underfoot, and Brother Thorold fears the effects of a chill on his injured kidneys. Very well, Odo concludes, he will play for them, for now; he will be the spoilt prince, the degenerate priest. Let them think he believes himself unassailable behind the curtain wall of William’s authority.

But it is a sensible precaution to put his own man in the kitchens and to keep his dogs close at hand. The three musicians brought from the castle have all served with him under arms, and no one should make the mistake of believing that Osbern’s devotion to his person extends only to its comfort and adornment. Razors are not the only blades he wields with accomplishment. Odo knows Lanfranc is wearing a hair shirt, and he knows why. They have been neighbours and rivals for many years, Odo in Bayeux, Lanfranc at Caen; they know one another like father and son. Better, in fact, in his own case, thinks Odo, who never saw his father again after he was sent to Bec. Lanfranc, on the other hand, is as persistently and inconveniently present as his conscience. The idea of his conscience as a venerable greybeard in a hair shirt amuses him, though it does not make him smile; smiling remains painful.

***

On the morning of the Feast of Saint Agnes the city awakes to a thaw. Melting snow drips from the thatched roofs of the buildings in Mercery Lane and lies in wide puddles in the Buttermarket, reflecting the pale blue sky. Gytha and Leofgeat make their way through streets crowded with people abroad for the sheer enjoyment of one another’s company and the tenuous warmth of the sun. They greet one another with the conspiratorial camaraderie of those who have shared a great ordeal and lived to tell the tale. They have survived another winter and spring is round the corner. No one worries about wet feet or muddy hems. No one thinks of February, the coldest month, almost upon them, when the birds drop frozen from the sky and the dead sleep in the outhouses, waiting until the ground is soft enough to bury them. No one remembers it is still almost two months to the spring equinox and the beginning of a new year.

“It looks as though the earth’s got holes in it,” says Gytha, stepping around a puddle, “and you can see right through to the other side.”

Leofgeat gives her an uncomprehending stare, blank as the sky itself and Gytha wishes she’d held her tongue. She’s as jumpy as a virgin on her wedding day, swinging wildly between terror and elation. Here it is at last, the chance she has looked for, waited for, dreamt of for so long she can scarcely remember a time when it did not form the background to everything she said or thought or did. But what if she fails? There will be no second opportunity; he is bound to make sure of that. And if she succeeds? If, when his guards run her through, or she gasps her last in some dank cell, blind and starving with only the rats and cockroaches to witness her passing, if his is the first face she sees in hell? Will that be her fate, to be bound to him for eternity? As they pass through the gate into the abbey close she has the sense of having stepped off the end of the world into the unknowable. She almost stumbles when she finds there is still earth beneath her feet.

The abbey masons are taking advantage of the good weather. Sounds of stone chipping reach their ears from the leather clad lodges clustered around the edges of the cathedral building site like piglets round a sow. The air in the precincts smells of stone dust, cold and peppery. Two men, stripped to the waist and running with sweat despite the sun’s weakness, toil at a pump to speed up the drying out process; they pause in their work to cast an eye over the women. Gytha draws her hood closer over her head, but Leofgeat, newly pregnant and proud of her little belly and swelling breasts, lifts her chin at a coquettish angle and smiles at them. Gytha remembers that feeling, that sense of exultation in her womanhood, the way men responded to her fecundity, the way Adam couldn’t keep his hands off her, despite the rules about lying with a woman during pregnancy; the memory clenches her womb like a cramp, and she hurries past, shielding her body with the flat, leather scrip given her by Sister Jean.

“I don’t feel well enough to go out of the house today,” she had said when Gytha, wondering what mark she had overstepped this time, answered the summons to her parlour. “I should like you to take Lord Odo’s letters to him.”

“I’m sure Lord Odo will not wish to see me, madam.” Sister Jean must be sicker than she seemed. Had she forgotten entirely how Gytha stood up to Lord Odo before Christmas, how he cut short his examination of the work because of her outspokenness? “Why not simply send word that you are ill today and will go again when you feel better? After all, if I go, my share of the embroidery won’t get done.”

“Ah, but it will. I want you to take this with you.” She picked up a parchment from the table beside her, folded so Gytha could not see what it contained, and handed it to her. “It’s a new drawing. I don’t want to go any further without my lord giving his opinion. I want you to bring his view back to me. Also, these letters are from the king and the Archbishop of York. He’ll want to see them straight away.” Her pale face, the nose scarlet with blowing, softened. “He’s chafing at the bit. He’s not a good patient, I’m afraid. Some new company may improve his temper.”