Needle in the Blood (29 page)

“I have trusted you with matters even closer to my heart than the blood in my veins,” he says, abruptly soft and serious, a slight, but insistent, inclining of his head compelling her to meet his eyes. It is like being dazzled by the sun. Then, peeling her gaze away, she finds herself dazzled a second time by her surroundings.

She has never seen such opulence. Not even in Lady Edith’s house were there such rugs and hangings, silks napped like velvet, colours to dazzle and bemuse the northern eye, attuned to greys and browns and watery blues. Even the window ledge is scattered with silk cushions, marigold and peacock blue, and the windows hung with tapestries rather than the painted hides that served as curtains in Lady Edith’s house. With such objects surrounding him, what could he possibly have wanted with her mistress’ treasures? Perhaps to furnish one of his lesser houses? A man who owns more than four hundred manors must have many houses to equip. Or perhaps it is merely a habit with him, to strip and move on, the way locusts demolish cornfields or his brother ravaged the Vale of York.

Book chests bound in gold and ivory lie beside his richly curtained bed, some with the books spilling out of them. She frowns. She is accustomed to see books locked and chained to library shelves, not spread about a room with such abandon. For all the glinting haloes and angels’ wings she glimpses in their rich illuminations, there is something diabolical about such wantonness with words. She looks away from their dense texts and jewelled bindings, toward a prie dieu of polished walnut bearing a devotional work in a silver filigree cover and…a clumsily made wooden statuette of a saint in bishop’s cope and mitre, garishly painted, the fiddle head of his crook snapped off, a chip in his halo. This makes her glance enquiringly at Odo, trying not to notice the pattern of hair on his chest, lying flat against his skin in damp whorls, like links of embroidered mail.

“My patron saint,” he says, watching her with mild amusement. She drops her eyes. “Hideous, isn’t it? But it has sentimental value. John carved it. It goes everywhere with me; that’s why it’s in such a state.”

“My lord?” She will not be distracted a second time by his son.

“Yes, Gytha.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“And I thought you’d come to scrub my back.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Is it true you intend to make Alwys leave? You can’t. Where would she go? What can she do? And Margaret might go too, or at least not be able to work, so you’d lose two…”

“Gytha.” His hands on her shoulders, shaking her almost. How is he suddenly so close to her? Which of them has moved? How white his skin is, where the sun never touches it. Not even a fleabite. “Be quiet.” Mouth over hers, smothering her words, sucking out her anger like snake venom, licking it away. Tongue of flame.

One fire extinguished, another lit. This is what he has waited for, why he has held off from speaking to her until the uncertainty gnawing at him would evaporate in the heat of his desire. During the whole of the Ely campaign, though he planned tactics with William and Fitzosbern, deployed troops, fortified camps, gave stirring speeches, was the first man to set foot on William’s causeway across the marsh, he felt he was only acting the part of the king’s lieutenant. His true self was the lover, biting his pallet through the June nights of not quite darkness in a torment of doubt and frustration, riding out sometimes without even Osbern to protect him, to rage at the moon like a mad wolf.

Not a word, he would yell, not a bloody, fucking word, even when he sent her a direct enquiry. His worst enemy would treat him with greater courtesy. Who does she think she is? Just a whore, replied the moon, just a cunt to poke like any other. One of a kind, argued the moon’s reflection in the marsh, misted and pierced by spikes of grass. Precious, unique, remember her lips, that stern arch of her brows, her breasts, her little waist, remember her tongue, agile as a good sword in the hands of a master. Tread carefully as the prince hunting the sleeping beauty in her citadel of briars.

Even now, he does not know how she will react, but he can no longer help himself. He must have her whatever the cost, yet he is as gauche as the boy who fathered John with Adeliza. His hands refuse to work properly. They shake and fumble as though his brain can no longer control them. He tears at her clothes, the drab tunic, the plain linen shift, the underthings Agatha insists on for the women. At some point she trips, over her hose, over the edge of a rug, who knows, and falls, hitting the side of her head on the bath, but neither of them notices. He drops to his knees in front of her, the towel slipping from his hips, pinning her to the floor with one hand against her breastbone, pushing her legs apart with the other. Touches her heart’s dance, the skin high up the insides of her thighs almost too soft to feel.

Everything is going wrong. If this is the price of his compassion for Alwys, then she is better equipped to pay it than any of the other women, but there is no call on her to enjoy it, no reason why her body should respond as it does, opening, sucking, salivating at the taste and feel of him, forgetting even to breathe as she drinks him in. Her fingernails do not try to claw him away, but dig into his back, pressing him closer, branding him. Her legs entwine themselves around his waist, pulling him down into her with a violence that makes him cry out. Incomprehensibly, in his own language, with an intensity that makes her open her eyes to see him looking at her, his gaze sweet with lust, but mixed with something unexpected.

She had thought to see her own hunger reflected there, but she sees something else as well. A withholding, an apprehension, a terror even. Remembering the mistress of his dream, she smiles a little. Then frowns as he drives deeper inside her, tearing her open as Adam did, except that what he penetrates is not some token membrane but the door to her heart.

Her frown is the sweetest, most poignant thing, a sudden drawing together of her fine, dark brows to some point of introspection he longs to reach. He wants, needs to hurt her. Fucking her, he is punishing the other men. With every thrust into her he slays one of them, her husband, the sower in stony ground, the men who paid her, sowers by the wayside. His passion will make her fertile; he will give her children who live, make her happy, make her his. His.
Possessio mea
. How he will love her.

At the end of the line of men awaiting the little martyrdom is himself. Father, son, unruly spirit, emptied into her.

She relaxes her grasp on him a little, but only a little, and turns her face into the hot, damp skin of his neck. She does not think she can bear to have him any further from her than this, resting now inside her as his breathing slows down and his heart reclaims its normal rhythm, separated from her by nothing more than a slick of sweat.

“D’you think Aristophanes is right?” she mutters. Absorbed in the physical sensation of her breath stirring the tiny hairs on his skin, the words do not immediately make sense to him; even after his brain has sorted them out, they make very little sense to him. Lifting himself on his elbows, he smiles down at her, marvelling at how lovely she is, with her dark hair spread out around her flushed cheeks and the way her breasts lie like tears of flesh, slightly to her sides.

“Aristophanes?”

“Yes. The theory of perfect wholes.”

He is moved, not so much by her sentiment as by the way she has got it wrong. He loves the way she knows halves and parts and fragments of things, as though her mind is like a block of stone, waiting for the sculptor to free its images. One day he will tell her it was Plato, turning aside from his pursuit of love’s final mysteries to enjoy a joke, who put the words into the mouth of Aristophanes, and that Plato is now known only by Apuleius’ translation, and how sad it is, how frustrating, to be able to feel the living pulse of the Greek inside the Latin and yet have no means of freeing it. Though perhaps there may be something in the notion that lovers bound in perfect communion can challenge even the power of God.

He hugs her close, cupping one hand behind her head, her hair slipping like water through his fingers, then shivers. The room has grown cold, the darkness now almost total beyond the window shutters and the brazier burned down for lack of attention. He can feel gooseflesh creeping up his back and his wrist beginning to ache.

“Let’s get into bed.” He rolls off her and stands up.

It is then he notices the blood on his genitals. He looks at her in panic, in the same second that she sees him, sits up and stares at her own thighs similarly smeared with whorls and contours of blood.

“Is it your time?”

“No.”

No, of course not, he would have noticed. “Don’t move.” He fishes in the tepid bath water for a wash-cloth and cleans himself, quickly establishing that it is not he who has sustained any injury. Wrapping himself in his dressing gown, which he finds on a chair beside the bath, he takes the cloth and kneels in front of her. Parting her legs gently, his fingertips butterfly kisses on the tender skin inside her thighs, he mops away her blood and his semen, realising that the combination makes the carnage look worse than it is. She has the languid look of a rose about to drop, her lips swollen, tendrils of hair stuck to her forehead and temples, eyes dreaming beneath half closed lids.

“It’s cold, I’m sorry,” he says, stroking the cloth over her thighs and the tight, matted curls of her private hair and all the precious, secret, hidden parts of her. “Oh dear God, what have I done to you? Are you in any pain?”

She feels no pain, only a syrupy heaviness, a vestigial trace of him inside her, the working of his fingers beneath the cloth. “I’m all right. I’m sure it’s nothing. I feel…” She gives him a wise smile. “Wonderful.” He tosses the cloth back into the bath but remains kneeling in front of her like a penitent, his stricken gaze taking in her torn clothes and the bruise beginning to swell like a storm cloud on her temple, hers fixed mischievously on the renewed stirring of his sex, which she encourages by stroking him with the tips of her toes.

“You must rest,” he says, slightly anguished, moving out of reach of her foot, “and I shall have the physician sent for.”

“No, I don’t need a doctor.”

“But someone must attend you.”

“Freya, then,” she says, lying back with her arms folded behind her head, gazing up at the ceiling whose beams are decorated with the ubiquitous green and gold chevrons. “Sister Jean’s new servant. She has some knowledge.”

He raises his eyebrows at this, but lets it pass. “All right, I’ll have Osbern send someone to fetch her. Can you stand?”

“Of course I can,” but, weak with wanting him again, she has to let him take her weight. Her legs buckle like those of something newborn, the distance to his bed seems immeasurable. She leans against him as he pulls back the bed curtains, lazily admiring the deep blue damask, yellow-lined, embroidered in gold with moons and stars, the signs of the zodiac and feather-tailed comets. He lifts her, holding her against his heart, her cheek branded by the brocading on his gown. She feels her own smallness, her lightness, how nearly nothing she is.

“It’ll make you sneeze,” he says of the arctic fox coverlet on his bed, the colour of newly skimmed cream.

She laughs. “No, it’s only living things, not dead fur. Cats and dogs and so on.”

“Ah.” He lays her on the high bed and tucks the bedclothes around her with all the tender solicitude of a child’s nurse.

Then he tells her he must dress and go to hall, where a bevy of clergy are waiting to dine with him and submit a dispute over land title to his adjudication, a complicated matter, he explains, trying to look apologetic, involving liability for repairs to a grange and the translation of relics of a saint whose name he cannot remember. He is sorry, really sorry, he says, sitting down on the bed and kissing her bruised temple, but it will probably be late before his business is concluded. She pouts, runs a teasing finger along his collarbones and around the tight circles of his nipples, but she can see from the slight crinkling of the skin at the corners of his eyes how much he is looking forward to the argument.

“Osbern,” he shouts before she has a chance to protest that she is content, has no need of company, would, in fact, appreciate a little time alone before Freya is sent for. She thinks about her blood, darkening the gold brown hair where his penis now nestles demurely. What has he done to her? What has given way inside her after so many years?

Osbern appears, silently and promptly, from the other side of the arras.

“My lord?”

“I must get dressed, Osbern. And,” waving his hand in a gesture designed to take in the bath full of cold water, the torn clothes and bloodied rug, the woman in the bed, “sort all this out, will you? Oh, and Osbern, keep the dogs out.”

Gytha, enfolded in the vast warm space of Odo’s bed, cosseted by his feather mattress and pillows soft as clouds, the piles of quilts, the fox fur coverlet pulled up to her chin, nevertheless watches Osbern at work with the close interest of a fellow professional. She notes with approval, and not a little admiration, the way he never looks at her, behaves, indeed, as though she cannot possibly be there. He must notice her teeth marks in Odo’s shoulder, the scratches on his back, but if he does, nothing in his demeanour shows it. Perhaps it is not unusual. She recognises, with a pang of nostalgia for her own former life, the comfortable intimacy which exists between lord and man, born of the years that Osbern has been about his master’s person, far more years than she was granted with her beloved Lady Edith.