Needle in the Blood (36 page)

He gives her a sceptical look, but says nothing.

“Odo?”

“Yes?”

“When you go to court at Christmas, what will become of me? What will I do? Go and sit in the workshop in my fine dresses? Stay cooped up in these apartments like some pet bird from Africa? Where will I sit in hall? I’m not the chatelaine here, Countess Marie is. Then Sister Jean takes precedence. Who am I, Odo?”

He picks up the lamp and carries it through to the parlour, stepping over Osbern rolled in his blanket on the threshold, and returns almost immediately with a sealed document in his hand. “This is a title deed, made out in your name, see?” He points to Gytha’s name at the head of it, the capital A adorned with flourishes. “It relates to the manor of Winterbourne in Essex, only a small place with a couple of hamlets, but the house is comfortable and the land is good there. It has a decent wool flock, and a mill. And I suppose it will be a kind of homecoming for you, though I’m afraid it’s nowhere near Colchester. Anyway, I’ve decided to give it to you, so you will be relieved of all these worries about precedence and what to do while I am away. You can simply…sit in your hall and read my love letters.” He gives a brief, bashful laugh. “The steward of Winterbourne is my guest here for the feast. I will introduce you to him tomorrow.”

“Do you think,” she asks after a chilly pause, “that you can make me into a lady simply by dressing me up as one? Keep your land. It’s of no interest to me. There is nothing I yearn for in Essex, I assure you. Give it back to the man you took it from if you have no further use for it. You said you loved me just as I am.”

“Beside the point,” he says, in what she thinks of as his business voice. “I’m not sentimental where land is concerned, Gytha. I would have explained this properly tomorrow, but as you seemed so anxious about being left alone here at Christmas, I thought it might help to set your mind at rest. So let me explain now. You are my mistress. All these people here know it; before long, the whole country will, the king and his court, Lanfranc. They will know in Normandy, Burgundy, France, Anjou, Rome. Maybe even Constantinople. And don’t try to shrug it off. That’s not modesty, it’s naiveté. There will be a great deal of interest in you, because you’re mine.” He pauses, putting the deed down on his dressing table and pushing it toward where she is standing. As she neither speaks nor shows any interest in the deed, he goes on: “A man like me has no friends, only flatterers, debtors, and enemies. I could be assassinated, or killed in battle, and then what do you think would become of you? Well, I don’t have to tell you, do I? You saw what happened to Edith Swan Neck. And say we have children, how would it go for them? Ask William. He knows all about being a fatherless bastard. So you see, I’ve decided to make over this property to you to safeguard you and my children. I am a practical man, Gytha. The fief is yours, you have no option, the legalities are already set in motion. I dare say you’ll find it easier to accept with a good grace.”

“And…if there are no children? What then?”

“You think I would value you less?”

“It has been my experience thus far, and that of most women. I expect you would leave me for someone younger, with more chance of bearing you healthy sons.” She twists her hair into knots. “Then what?”

“I won’t leave you.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“You know how. My dream.”

“It was a dream, Odo. At best a disturbance of the mind brought on by the emotions of battle.”

“You should take dreams more seriously. Did you not know this island of yours was predicated on a dream of Brutus, in which the goddess Diana told him of a land beyond Gaul, surrounded by sea? To me, my dream was a promise. It binds us as surely as if the priest had bound our hands with his stole. I will never leave you, Gytha, I cannot, however sorely you try me. And you do try me.” He gives a rueful laugh. “You do question everything so. Can you not be content?”

He’s right, Freya’s right, they are all right. She knows perfectly well why Marie and the Countess of Mortain acted so coldly toward her. They are jealous. Neither of them was dressed in silk or wearing such fine jewellery. She should be content; she will try. She goes and puts her arms around him, suddenly conscious of how late it is, how her feet ache and her head throbs as the effects of the wine wear off. The lamp sputters and goes out, making them aware the night is almost over. A glimmer of dawn catches and holds, in their eyes, his glass amulet, her emeralds and diamonds.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “my tongue was always my curse. For my next gift, perhaps you should give me a scold’s bridle.”

“I think,” he says, leading her toward the bed, “your tongue has other skills enough to compensate for its sharpness.”

Sinking among the quilts and featherbeds, suddenly she struggles up again. “I almost forgot.” Supporting herself on one elbow she rummages under the pillows and triumphantly withdraws the flat package bound with red ribbons. “For you.”

His face, lined with sleeplessness and the pain from his shoulder, suddenly seems to light up. “What’s this?” He unfastens the ribbons and withdraws the piece of embroidery from its wrapping. “The camel.” He goes to the window and opens the shutters, turning the camel this way and that in the grey light, feeling the raised texture of the couched and laid work with the tip of one index finger. “What a perfect gift, and so beautifully done. Perhaps I should send you back to the atelier after all.”

“It’s a small thing compared to emeralds and acres of Essex, but I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten.”

“It’s a much bigger thing than either,” he says, smoothing it out over the fox fur bedspread, then laughs suddenly. “For it will be as precious to me as my little wooden Saint Odo, but far better executed.”

***

Later that morning Odo presides over a High Mass in celebration of his saint. The chapel is so crowded with his household and its guests that even some of the most nobly born of the congregation are forced to huddle around the doors, wrapped in their ermine and sables to protect them from the dusty cold. Standing in the vestry as his deacons robe him, he wonders how he will make himself heard and wishes he were with Gytha, whom he left sleeping in his warm bed, her cheeks still flushed with making up their quarrel. He will not see her now until evening, for the men are to hunt after Mass, yet he would far rather eat breakfast with her and talk about her plans for the day, or watch Freya braid her hair, all these inconsequential domestic intimacies which have suddenly acquired such meaning for him.

He had gone into the cold chapel for Prime, unconfessed, unshaven, mentally and physically dishevelled. Once the service was over, he could not remember a word of it and was certain this was obvious to Thomas, his chaplain, and the handful of others present, and was even more, terrifyingly, certain he did not care. He has remained in church since, trying to prepare for Mass, but his thoughts do not seem to be under his control. He has cast his mind over his sermon without improving a word of it. He has made his confession, but it was a partial and inadequate affair, listing only those thoughts, words, and deeds which he feels to be sinful, leaving unsaid everything to do with Gytha. He is so mired in his own shifting sense of right and wrong he has forgotten entirely to pray for the peril to her soul.

He watches the two deacons about their work, moved by the reverence with which they take the sacred vestments out of the chests inlaid with ivory crosses in which they are stored, gently shaking and smoothing and brushing before laying them out in the order in which he will assume them: alb, dalmatic, amice, cincture, stole, chasuble, pallium, and mitre. The names flow like poetry through his mind. The ritual of clothing, which must be done in the same way, with the same prayers, before every service, calms him as he is transformed from mortal man to priest, from the victim of his senses to the servant of his faith.

But this morning, when he raises his arms to allow the tying of the cincture and beseeches God,
Praecinge me, Domine, cingulo puritatis, et extingue in lumbis meis humorem libidinis
, he falters and is almost unable to continue. Because he does not want the fire of concupiscence quenched in him; he can no longer be satisfied with spiritual passion now that he is in thrall to his earthly love. He wants God and Gytha, but if God makes him choose, he will choose Gytha. Yet he does not believe God will make him choose. God sent him Gytha, in a dream, His preferred means of communicating with his people from Joseph in Egypt to the Holy Virgin.

In the heat of his conviction he steps out of the vestry, the warrior of Christ, to confront his congregation. He has chosen to preach on Saint Odo’s dictum that those whom you have snubbed and treated ungenerously in life will be the first to greet you in purgatory and will have the last word on when, if ever, your soul may enter paradise. He chose this text for her, even though he knows she never attends Mass, but he does not want anyone with whom she comes into contact to be in any doubt as to how to treat her.
Possessio mea
.

Not until she kneels in front of him at the altar rail does he realise she is there, and then he doesn’t know what astonishes him more, her being there, in church, or the fact that he was unaware of it. He had thought he would always know when she was in the same room, that he would somehow feel the air shift to accommodate her. He is only caught off guard for a second, however, as she lifts her face to him and opens her mouth to receive the Host. She looks not at his hands or the cross on the altar, but directly into his eyes, smiling very slightly as he places the sliver of bread on her tongue. His lips form the words,
corpus Christi
. Her saliva is on his fingertips, her breath brushes the back of his hand, and these intimacies, watched by hundreds of pairs of eyes yet not seen, not understood, are a sign from God.

Christmas 1071 to Candlemas 1072

Odo, to his beloved Gytha

In the midst of our festivities, I alone, my darling girl, am sunk in misery. To see me you would think me the model of priestly virtue and restraint. I do not eat, because I am sick with longing. I do not dance, because you are not here to partner me. I do not drink, for fear it will make me maudlin or indiscreet. I do not tourney because my life is suddenly too precious to be thrown away in a game. I hear all the night offices because I cannot sleep. As the poet says, “One in a state of desire loses his reason for love – he thinks nothing at all of cliffs and rivers; he thinks vigils are rest and passes plains.” When I close my eyes, I can still feel your body next to mine, your lips, your hands, your breasts, the secret parts of you I may name in thought and deed but not in word, your breath like waves whispering over sand. These poor impressions must be my life until the king releases me and I can return to your side.

Every mile that lies between us is like the unbridgeable gulf between time and eternity, and time itself seems an eternity here at Gloucester, where wet snow falls daily from a sky the colour of untempered steel. I had hoped by now to be able to tell you when I shall be free to leave, but the king seems determined to keep me here until Candlemas, and even then I think I must be the very last to quit this damp, overcrowded place. Only this morning, His Grace asked me some question about the wording of the new Charter for London; he believes I have left the matter of inheritance too ambiguous. We will speak again after the Purification service, he then said, peering at me most shrewdly, in the hope that it purifies your thinking.

In the meantime, he and I play endless games of chess and backgammon (for we are better matched than most here), and he chides me for leaving Turold with you at Winterbourne – as if none but he is entitled to be entertained at Christmas time - and tries to tease out of me the source of my seriousness, as though we are bound together on a treadmill of puzzles. But in chess, a bishop may travel farther and faster than a king. William is brave and ambitious, but he is also narrow—there is no romance in his soul. Without jongleurs like Turold – or kin as wayward as me – he has no stories to tell himself. Should I pity him? This may be the season of good will, but I have no pity for any but my own aching heart.

It is as well William cannot read English.

As I breathe, I love you and live only to serve you. I will come to you as soon as ever I can. A thousand kisses.

Odo

***

His messenger brought her his letter this morning, as one has done every morning since his departure. She has not read them all, because she reads slowly and occasionally he makes mistakes of grammar or idiom which give his English the feel of a foreign language whose meaning she cannot quite grasp. So some of them have been added to the bundle beneath her pillow with their seals still unbroken, and some memorised in part, phrases disjointed, mysterious and beautiful as the fragments of Roman mosaic occasionally turned up by her ploughman.
Never reproach yourself for loving me, never fear
, he wrote on Saint Stephen’s Day,
for God made Eve from Adam’s rib.
And again:
Why do I keep writing when I know you cannot reply? For the thought of your eyes caressing the pages I have smoothed with my hand and inscribed with my nib. A poor substitute for your warm skin.

This latest she has read, during her walk to the church of the neighbouring Convent of Saint Eufrosyna, where she has fallen into the habit of worshipping. She hoped it would tell her when she might expect him to join her at Winterbourne, for today is Candlemas, the fortieth day after Christmas, when the court will break up.