Needle in the Blood (34 page)

“You’ll have to excuse me,” says Agatha, trying to rise, but he stops her, his hand clamped over hers where she has rested it on the bench to push herself up.

“No work today. I forbid it.”

She sighs, and he relaxes his grip and rubs his shoulder.

“Why didn’t you come to me?”

“Because you were in Ely. Or dead, for all I knew. Because…well, what would be the point in confessing to you?”

“I’m a priest.”

“And up to your neck in sin yourself.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“You know what I mean. Tell me, when did you last confess?”

Four men enter the lists, two armed with swords and two with the curious double-headed axes favoured by some of the English.

“This will be bloody,” he says, then suddenly turns to look at her, full on, his eyes wide. “I love her. It’s not a sin.”

“Yet if I love, it is? Even though I have never laid a finger on the girl, never even spoken to her, well, not in language she would understand anyway. Whereas you…”

“You know there’s no comparison. The love of men and women is ordained for procreation.”

“Priests are ordained to love God.”

“She is…my way of loving God.”

“Then perhaps you should consider leaving the Church. If William will let you, of course.”

It is unthinkable. Sent to Lanfranc’s school at Bec when he was eleven, he can scarcely remember a time when his life was not dominated by the canonical hours, fasts, festivals, rules of dress and demeanour, the sacraments. Even in the breach he honours them. Even in his readings of the classical philosophers, he is looking for glimpses of the One True God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Outside the Church there would be no love.

***

Gytha’s eyes follow the path of candlelight from the mirror, as it breaks and spills over Freya’s glassy hair and is reflected back again. She is not yet ready to look at herself. She holds out one arm in front of her and admires the way the wide yellow sleeve falls back to reveal the close fitting emerald green underdress. She turns her hand in front of her, whitened and softened with baths of milk and scented oils, as though it belongs to someone else, then smoothes it over the gown, where it hugs the rise of her belly like a second skin, the skirt flaring where Freya will fasten the girdle set with citrines and freshwater pearls around her hips. So much silk, so many stones. She looks through the mirror, over the reflection of her shoulder, at the green satin slippers, embroidered with pearls and gold thread, aligned under a chair like miniature soldiers awaiting battle orders.
Foot soldiers
, she thinks, beginning to giggle.

“Just look at yourself, madam,” says Freya, leaning from behind to pass the girdle around Gytha’s body, “what is there to laugh at?”

Gytha swallows her laughter and lets her eyes move slowly away from the shoes until they meet themselves, silvery, blurred as though by tears, looking out from the polished surface of the mirror.
Where am I
, she asks herself,
where am I
? Who is this woman with gold in her hair and the eyes of a mermaid? She looks for herself for a long time, until Freya has buckled the girdle, arranged Gytha’s overskirt so the rich brocading beneath is set off to best advantage, and adjusted her neckline the better to show off her breasts and shoulders.

She looks for herself until Freya is beginning to cast anxious glances toward the adjoining door between this, Odo’s solar, which has been made over, for this evening, into a dressing room for Gytha, and the winter parlour where he will by now be waiting. But there are so many selves. Peeping through the legs of the adults is the little girl growing up on oysters and fish head broths, the silver black estuary and stories of Celtic princes consumed by passions for faeries, dream princesses, virgin-skinned witches with wits honed like shark’s teeth. Here is the bride wreathed with ivy and almond blossom, carried to her bridegroom’s house on the shoulders of tall young men who only yesterday were little boys she used to go digging for sandworms with; and here the young wife, earnest, hard working, awkward, and disappointed in her husband’s arms. The mother she will not look at, nor the ghosts whose tiny hands clutch at her skirts. Here is the lay sister sewing her tears into altar cloths, and here she, not Freya, dresses her lady for love, taking her time, exchanging charged glances in mirrors while my lord waits in the next room. The whore; ironically the only time in all her life that she ever slept alone in her curtained cell. And backwards, and forwards, to the dark woman of Odo’s dream. That is all she is, why her reflection wavers and fades in front of her as though she is watching herself drown. She is Odo’s dream.

She turns away from the mirror, crosses to where her shoes are waiting under the chair, and pushes her silk stockinged feet into them.

“Am I ready?” she asks Freya.

Freya’s gaze is careful and critical. She steps forward and makes a small adjustment to Gytha’s veil, a fine tissue of gold beneath which her hair hangs in a single thick braid, then nods her satisfaction.

“I’ll tell his lordship he can come in, shall I?”

“No, one more minute.” She has noticed, among her day clothes folded over a chair, the flat package tied with red ribbon. “I must hide the camel. Freya, can you take it into the bedroom and…slip it under my pillow?” My pillow? But Freya, taking the package, does not seem to notice.

Gytha shivers. Despite the fire, the extra rugs and thick hangings at the windows, the solar, with its large windows overlooking the Roman walls and the country to the south, is draughty, and she is used to woollen clothes. She knows silk holds warmth, but somehow it does not feel as though it does; this dress feels as though it is still hanging on the dressmaker’s dummy, or as though there is no heat in her body it can absorb. With a dizzying sense of unreality, she sees the door to the winter parlour open and Odo come in, resplendent in yew green velvet embroidered with hunting scenes in gold thread, gems and pearls enough to decorate the effigy of a saint in a cathedral. He takes her hands and holds her at arm’s length, appraising her.

Possessio mea.

“Turn round for me,” he says, letting go one hand and turning her by the other as though they are dancing. “You are absolutely beautiful. Here, I have something for you.” Loosing her other hand, he reaches into the close-fitting sleeve of his tunic where, she now notices, something is hidden, a jumble of hard edges pulling the fabric out of shape. As he pulls, a glittering snake uncoils itself from his sleeve and curls up again in his palm.

“I’ve heard tell of snake charmers,” she says, “mystics who can make snakes docile with music.”

He laughs. “And did Harold Godwinson have one of these wonders as well?”

“Thankfully not. I think I would have been mistrustful of it.”

“Then I shouldn’t regret my gift is not a snake charmer?”

“A gift, my lord? Surely we should be giving you gifts tonight.”

“You do, Gytha, you know it.” He takes a step toward her. “Every day.”

“Please, my lord. You’ll make me blush.”

He has lifted the bright snake to her throat and is reaching his hands around the back of her neck to clasp it.

“Careful of my veil,” she admonishes. “Freya has rearranged it I don’t know how many times.”

“A snake charmer would be more original,” he says, “but then, lovers aren’t very original are they? There seem to be so few ways to express love. So, we say, I love you, and give binding ornaments.” She says nothing as she turns to marvel at the necklace of emeralds and diamonds whose cold fire burns in the silver mirror, because she has no words to describe the sensation of such a jewel next to her skin. Will it corrode in the brine for salting fish, or will its lights be extinguished by mud? Will it throttle her? She puts up her hand to touch it, but her fingers encounter his instead, sliding away from the necklace, along the crest of her shoulder.

“You know the virtue of emeralds?” he asks. “They are for good fortune and constancy in love. They are the stone of Venus.”

“Ah, that excellent saint,” she teases.

“As you know, I am trying hard to master the variety of your saints.” He lightly squeezes her fingers. “The gold was mined in Wales. I thought you would appreciate that.”

Perhaps, if she holds onto that knowledge, the necklace may come to seem like hers.

***

This is a nightmare, a dream of excess of the sort you might fall prey to if you go to bed hungry. There is too much of everything, not a square inch of the bleached linen cloth spread over the high table that isn’t covered by a dish of food. Venison haunches marinated in red wine with cloves, fowls stuffed teasingly one inside the other, starting with swans and bustards, ending with ortolans and quails, squirrels’ legs fried in sweet batter, and pasties of songbirds crowned with tiny, gilded beaks. There are wild boars, and tame rabbits kept in cupboards in the kitchen, force fed herbs and corn. Dishes of peas in cream and parsnips stewed with saffron accompany them, dried figs and apricots from Acquitaine are washed down with sweet muscat wine from Provence. Everything is served on gold and silver platters, except the cheeses, displayed on slabs of marble so heavy it needed six little pages in Odo’s livery to carry them into the hall. The jewels in the wine cups wink mockingly in the light of hundreds of beeswax candles, all green and gold.

And where is Odo? Gytha feels sick. Her skin beneath the layers of clinging silk is clammy, sweat trickling down her sides and between her breasts. She wonders, trying to count the weeks, if she is about to start bleeding again, or if, God forbid…No, forget it, it’s far too early to tell.

Robert of Mortain, seated on her right, keeps leaning across her at the slightest provocation, belching stale wine in her face, grinning so she can see shreds of meat stuck between his teeth. Next to him, his thin, sour-faced wife is absorbed in poking a stick down her throat to make herself vomit. Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances regales her from the far side of Odo’s empty chair with accounts of the sexual prowess of his prize bulls. No doubt he considers this fit conversation for a mistress. Beyond him sits Sister Jean, but she cannot catch her eye, her slender, upright form completely obscured by Coutances’ jovial bulk. Every time she smiles at Countess Marie, the countess tilts her chin archly and looks away, so she gives up.

He said he wouldn’t be long, that he wanted a quick word with Thomas of York in private, Thomas being so recently back from Rome where he had been with Lanfranc to receive his pallium from the hands of the Holy Father himself. He had bitten her earlobe gently and gone outside. Hours ago, it seems.

“…covered the heifer from Charente five times between Sext and Vespers,” Coutances is saying.

“So tell me, my dear,” says Mortain, almost dropping a handful of quail’s eggs down the neck of her gown, “this hanging of Odo’s. Am I represented in it?”

Her beautiful gown. She could cry. “You are, my lord, twice that I can recall.”

“And have you made me a great hero?”

What she would really like to do is climb on the table, stamp her feet, and tell them all to go away. “You must ask Lord Odo if he will let you see it. Who am I to judge who are heroes and who are not?”

“By Jove, no wonder he has taken to you so, you even talk as he does.”

She nods and smiles and fixes her gaze on the far end of the hall, where the women are sitting, a soothing patch of grey and white, scarcely discernible beyond the forest of lights. If only she could go to them, sink back down among them as a fish drops to a riverbed, scooping out a rest for itself among sand and shale and cloudy water. But until the tables are moved for dancing, she is trapped, and that will not happen until Odo gives the word. She is a dragonfly in his net.

***

“Just look at those sleeves,” says Judith. “Did you ever see anything like them? And it’s all silk, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a silk dress before. Twice its weight in silver, silk costs, you know.”

“She looks a proper lady,” comments Margaret thoughtfully, remembering the odd comments Gytha used to drop regarding King Harold. “I always did think there was something about her, some reason she’d never tell us anything about herself. I wonder…”

“Oh, really. Put a silk frock on a sow and you women would call it a lady. You know very well why milady Gytha has kept her past life a secret, and you’d do well to give a little thought to what she’s done to get a gown like that.”

But what Gytha has done, what she and Lord Odo do, is a source of fascination rather than revulsion to Margaret, a hazy tableau, seen through veils, of featureless nakedness and long, chaste kisses. She yearns for a lover of her own, not the squire, Guerin, with his clumsy hands and kisses like being licked by an affectionate dog, nor like Lord Odo, of course. He will soon be old and looks as though he might run to fat if he did not spend so much time hunting and jousting and fighting wars, and she could not possibly make love to a man with a tonsure. She wonders if perhaps the Church requires its servants to shave their crowns to make them less attractive to women and therefore less a prey to temptation. Tonight, though, by the light of more candles than there are stars in heaven, full of rich food and unwatered wine, the earl, in the short tunic which flatters his long legs, seems to her to be a prince worthy of his princess.