Needle in the Blood (18 page)

“But mine, madam? Send Judith. She’ll have a better idea how to attend to his lordship than me.”

“Oh, come, Gytha. All women are nurses, as all men are like children, given to recklessness and feeling sorry for themselves. It always falls to women to tidy up the mess. Some can make entertaining conversation as well.”

Clearly she had not forgotten, so what was her intention? Then again, what did it matter? All that mattered was this chance to get close to him while he was still weak, to slip her little knife into the soft flesh between his ribs, up, twisting into his heart, to carve a channel in that stony organ and fill it with the sweetness of her revenge. There might never be another. Why was she stalling? Merely for the pleasure of the chase? Had she become so vindictive during the years of waiting?

She took the scrip and went to find Leofgeat, who was to accompany her with a batch of delicacies from Master Pietro to aid his lordship’s recovery.

***

They announce themselves at the gate and are shown into what is normally the Archbishop’s office, where Osbern meets them. He recognises Leofgeat from previous visits and, after a cursory examination of her basket, sends her to the kitchens.

“And you are…?” He turns disdainfully to Gytha.

“Aelfgytha,” she replies curtly. “I’m one of the embroiderers. Sister Jean is unwell and asked me to bring my lord’s dispatches in her stead. She has sent a note. Here.” Gytha pulls the bundle of documents out of her scrip and sorts through them until she finds the one bearing Sister Jean’s seal. Osbern flicks his eyes back and forth along the lines of writing, thankful the seal is clear enough for him to be certain the note does come from Sister Jean. All he has managed to understand is that the woman said she was sent by Sister Jean.

“Wait,” he tells Gytha.

The wait seems interminable. Looking out of the window behind the Archbishop’s desk, she is certain the angle of the sun, shining through sample cuttings of stained glass ranged along the sill, has altered completely before Osbern returns. Sunlight patterns the surface of the desk with rubies and topaz. Surely they have slid a thumbs’ length along its edge already. The day will be over before it has begun at this rate.

“I have spoken to my lord,” says Osbern, in hesitant English, as he re-enters the room. At last. “He is not pleased, but he will see you. Follow me. He is up, but still in his chamber.”

“I am to go in alone?” It is not the impropriety of it she questions, but her luck.

Osbern gives her a long, considering look. She casts her eyes down, trying to look demure.

“He’s a priest, mistress,” he says, “and sick.”

And soon, very soon now, he will be dead.

***

As saints are wafted to heaven on clouds of incense, Gytha has come to believe she will be carried down to hell on a tide of that perfume. Not incense. Not blood or shit or fear, or arnica for bruises. Rosemary and sandalwood. Always rosemary and sandalwood. Feeling like a Christian entering the circus, she plasters a smile to her face.

“Good day, my lord. I thank God to see you looking so well.” And indeed she does. It would have been galling in the extreme to be cheated of her quarry by a hunting accident.

“Do you, mistress, do you indeed?” He sits facing away from the door, in a chair close to the brazier on the hearthstone. He turns stiffly toward her, as though his back is causing him pain. The hound which had its head in his lap when she came in slinks away to hide under the bed. The same yellow eyed beast she saw in Winchester, or its descendant.

“Of course, my lord, I am not entirely without charity.”

“And like every charitable woman, you devote time to visiting the sick. Thank you for taking my sister’s place. I hope she is not seriously indisposed.”

“A head cold, that’s all. She blames it on the change in the weather.” She keeps her tone clipped, neutral.

How well his sister understands him, what a perfect morsel she has tossed into his den, flesh succulent, but enough bone to keep his teeth sharp. He extends his hand, but she does not kneel to kiss his ring, merely stands in front of him, clutching her scrip. Her hands, he notes curiously, are shaking. The ring slips down toward his knuckle and he pushes it back impatiently with his thumb.

He is thinner, and his hair has grown longer, curling over the collar of his loose, dark gown. His face is somehow unveiled, the bones bold and delicate within the web of muscle, thrown into relief by the work of draught and flame.
He looks like an angel
, she thinks,
a tired angel, worn out with watching over mankind, an angel who can never blink nor turn his head away, trapped in his own nature.
She finds herself smiling at him. Looking at him, she realises, gives her a sense of joy, the same pure, arbitrary joy that comes with watching swallows at sunset or feeling snow on her eyelashes.

Determinedly, she summons other memories, images of his men stripping Lady Edith’s hall, of Lady Edith holding out her hand to the soldier in charge of loading the cart, her back turned rigidly on the body of Skuli folded into the mud. Yet punctuating them is always the recurring memory of Odo’s face as he ordered the hall door closed, a mask of exhaustion, not a spark of triumph or a glint of avarice that she can recall.

She is bewitched. He knows her intent and has called up some demon to infest her mind and deflect her from her purpose. She must do it now. Now, while she is still lucid enough to know what power he is exercising. She takes a step forward, curling her fingers around the haft of her knife, reassured by its solid familiarity.

“You have letters for me?” he prompts. Perhaps she is more touched than clever, he speculates, watching unreadable expressions chase each other across her face like clouds running before a wind.
Sometimes
, he thinks, reflecting on Turold, his dwarf,
it is hard to tell the difference; both lie outside the main way, in the margins
. It would be disappointing, though. Clever women are bracing, like new wine or a ride along the beach early on a winter’s morning.

“Oh…yes.” Letting go of the knife, she rummages in the scrip and hands him the bundle of letters. “And this.” He has beaten her, beguiled her with his angel’s face. Instead of simply unhooking the knife from her girdle and driving it into his body, she has let herself become encumbered with the fastenings on the satchel, the bundles of documents with their festoon of dangling seals. “A new drawing Sister Jean would like your opinion on,” she adds crossly. He raises his eyebrows at this, but shows no inclination to unfold it, putting everything in a pile on the low table beside his chair.

“Take off your cloak,” he orders her. “I think it too warm in here today, but Brother Infirmarer insists on burning his concoctions to keep the air pure, so the fire is never out.”

She tightens her grip on her knife, focuses her concentration on the smooth bone handle, its warmth, the way it has worn over the years to fit her hand. “I mustn’t be long.”

“But you must at least wait until I have looked at the drawing? If you are to take my opinion back to your mistress?”

Her mistress? Sister Jean is not her mistress. Not as long as Lady Edith lives. Perhaps she was right to stay her hand after all; perhaps he might give away some clue as to her ladyship’s fate if she listens carefully enough to what he has to say.

He does not intend to stare at her as she removes her outdoor clothes, but he cannot help himself. She has the supple grace of a seal, as she pushes the cloak back from her shoulders, then stoops to gather it up before it falls to the floor. The way her breasts rise and flatten as she lifts her arms, the slenderness of her waist and her rounded hips entrance him. She wears her chaste uniform as though she is Venus adorned in nothing but her hair and a cockleshell. His mouth goes dry, his mind blank as he tries to think about something else.
Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…
Words. What use are words?

He clears his throat. “Sit,” he commands, indicating a stool facing his chair across the hearth. She sits, sweeping her skirt under her, her hands following the curve of her buttocks in a gesture of such unconscious loveliness he begins immediately to cast about in his mind for some pretext to make her rise and sit again. If he touched her hand, he wonders, would he feel what she felt, the warm flesh beneath the wool of her gown, the stretch of her sinews?
Adveniat regnum tuum.

This is not what Agatha anticipated. He knows Agatha and her cerebral games, dry as her wit, as her papery skin and the homilies she delivers to her novices. Like anyone rehearsed in the art of rhetoric, she marshals her facts selectively, and it would be Gytha’s acid, rebellious tongue, not her physical attractions, that would have persuaded her to send Gytha to him in her stead, give him his chance to get even. She expects Gytha to talk, not simply to be. “Tell me what is going on in the world,” he says, as soon as he can trust his voice. “I am so confined here I am even excused my religious observance. I keep pleading with Brother Infirmarer to let me go for a walk, but he thinks it’s too soon.”

“Surely, my lord, you need neither my account nor the evidence of your own eyes to know what is going on in the world.” Let him talk if he wants to; she has nothing to say.

“A picture is made of many brushstrokes, mistress, or should I say, many stitches?”

Yet she cannot help herself. “But only one design, which is the truth at its heart.”

“Are you sure of that? Is there no role for interpretation?”

“You are a bishop, Your Grace. You of all people must know there is only one right way.” If God brings her safely through this, she swears she will take a vow of silence.

“And they told me you were not religious, Gytha.”

His tone is light, but there is a serious enquiry at the back of it, a probing bass note which makes her feel she has been found out. The situation is running away from her; she is losing touch with her purpose. “Let me tell you about the hanging, my lord,” she says, rising. “I really must not be much longer. Sister Jean was anxious to have your view of the drawing as soon as possible.” She picks it out of the pile on the table at his side and thrusts it in front of him. He takes no notice. He looks only at her, his gaze disconcerting, devouring, an angel consumed by his duty of praise and contemplation.

A murderer, and a looter, and probably a rapist, and certainly a man for whom the right way is always the one which suits him best.

“Then I must not rush my consideration of it, must I?” His tone is languid, teasing, which makes her feel she is being patronised. “Talk to me while I look at it. Amuse me. They tell me my favourite stallion bit the marshal. Is it true? I gather one of the grooms took quite a beating for it. Do sit down again. It tires me to have to look up at you so.”

Eventually, she does as she is bidden, but this time fails to smooth her skirt under her, out of spite, he imagines, as though she is aware of the effect it had upon him.

“Sister Jean stayed up half the night with the boy herself, my lord, poulticing his injuries against infection.”

“Women are always so sentimental. I suppose she thought the boy shouldn’t have been beaten?”

“If she did, I doubt it was due to her being sentimental.”

“Then we must agree to differ. I can’t imagine what else urges her to these occasional forays of hers against the rule of law.”

Gytha remembers the poacher. “She does not believe the law is always right. I respect her for it.”

He does not reply immediately but looks at her as though trying to make up his mind about something, then gives a curt nod of his head, an approving nod, she thinks, the gesture of a man who has tested a horse’s fetlock and found it sound, or bitten a coin and found it solid. And she is pleased by his approval and yearns for a spirit less complicated, with fewer rooms whose doors remain locked against the power of the will.

He starts to unfold the drawing. “So tell me, what’s in this drawing she’s so concerned about?”

“I don’t know, my lord, I haven’t looked. She just asked me to note your comments for her. I am merely to be your mouthpiece.”

Mouth. Luscious mouth, lips the colour of overripe redcurrants, when they lose their transparency and the red darkens almost to mulberry. He is gripped by an overwhelming desire to take that full, slightly sulky bottom lip gently between his teeth. What’s to stop him? He could just get up, step across the hearth, bend, and kiss her. Why not?
Fiat voluntas tua
.

Look at him, holding the half folded parchment as though he has forgotten he has it in his hand. Taunting her, stringing their meeting out because he knows she wants to get away. She feels the light drag of her knife where it hangs from her girdle. “My lord? Will you look at it now?”

“What?” He frowns and passes his hand in front of his eyes in confusion. “I’m sorry, I was distracted. You know my mind was wandering for two weeks? I sometimes think it isn’t quite ready yet to make the return journey. Yesterday I was thinking about camels.”

“Camels, my lord?”

“Wondering what a camel looked like.”

“Like a sheep, my lord, a tall, brown sheep with a long neck and a hump of fat on its back.” She strokes her knife, hoping her gesture will look absent-minded, but he does not seem to notice. His eyes, fixed on her face, widen in astonishment.