Needle in the Blood (61 page)

Odo, without dismounting, proffers his ring to be kissed.

“Explain to me the meaning of what I have just witnessed,” he says.

“The woman is mad, Your Reverence, out of her head with grief. It is her child we have come to bury.”

“But the child did not die of witchcraft, I think.”

“No, Your Reverence, of a flux, from eating berries before they were ripe.”

“Which she wouldn’t have been eating if we weren’t all starving,” interjects the mother.

Odo ignores her. “And these people believe that the drought has come about through witchcraft, do they? Good God, man, what do you preach? ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God.’ Beware you do not set up rivals to Him in determining the weather.”

“I preach as instructed by my lord Archbishop, Your Reverence,” announces the priest in a clear voice.

My lord Archbishop? So Lanfranc has directed his clergy to preach witchcraft against Gytha? Odo is unsure whether to laugh or despair. If he is so far out of his senses then retirement to Caen in favour of a more capable man cannot be long. But if he is not out of his mind, if he believes such a tactic can be of use to him, then Odo has overestimated his own strength and Gytha may be in real danger.

Sidling closer to Odo’s horse, emboldened by his silence, the priest goes on in a more confidential, obsequious tone. “Your Reverence, the people are simple. They see your lordship acting against the ordinances of Holy Mother Church, and then their crops fail, and guided by their prayers, they make a simple connection…”

The priest is abruptly silenced by Odo’s whip coming down with great force across his cheek. He looks at Odo in disbelief, putting a plump hand up to the blow, a gash of white through the pink flesh, rapidly assuming various shades of purple and red as the blood flows back into it. There is a gasp from the mourning party, a backward stepping and stumbling. Odo leans down close to the priest’s ear.

“Listen to me,” he says quietly. “Mistress Aelfgytha is more to me than my life, and certainly more to me than yours, or any of your halfwit congregation. If you value your hide, you will never even think such things as you have implied to me, let alone say them. I am your lord after the king’s grace, and I will have you out on the road like a mendicant in the time it takes to match that stripe on your cheek with another if I ever, ever hear such talk from you again.”

“But Canterbury is my bishop,” retorts the priest.

“Aye, and you may repeat all I have said word for word in his ear, as I will make sure to tell him all you have told me, you fat bastard travesty of a man of God.” He digs the point of his whip into the man’s paunch, up under his ribs. The priest chokes and splutters.

“Fulk.”

“My lord?”

“Take a couple of men into the priest’s house. Whatever food and drink you find there, give to the people. Now, priest.” Odo removes his foot from his stirrup and gives the priest’s arse a sound boot. “Go and bury your dead. But first,” he continues, raising his voice as the priest stumbles away, “let the mother come forward.”

She emerges from the crowd and stands trembling in front of him, her head bowed almost as though she can already feel his whip across her shoulders.

“Here,” he says gently, holding out a coin. “Take it. For Masses for your daughter’s soul.”

The woman shakes her head. “We can’t eat your money, my lord.”

“Woman, we must nourish the soul as well as the body. Would you deny your child the sustenance of prayer?”

She looks up. She has hard, pale, implacable eyes. “I never denied her anything, my lord. Perhaps if I had she might still be alive.”

Odo sighs and returns his money to his purse. “Very well. Tell me your daughter’s name, and I will have the Mass said for her myself, on this day, every year, by the brothers at Saint Augustine’s. And I promise you this, I will do everything in my power to alleviate the situation in which Kent finds itself. And you know that, saving the king’s grace, no one in this land has more power than I do.”

“My daughter was called Aelfgytha, sir.”

“Then I will not forget it. Pray for me too, Aelfgytha’s mother.”

Our Lady of Sorrows 1072

Dried peas again.” Margaret pushes the yellow, glutinous mass around her plate with a small piece of bread. “As if taking our land wasn’t bad enough, they have to grow peas on it.” She still surprises herself by talking this way, although the others seem to have become used to it. It is almost as though she has grown to fill the space left by Gytha’s departure, the way everything in nature shapes itself to the place God has allotted it. She wonders, with an apprehensive tightening in her stomach, what will happen now that Gytha has come back.

Margaret has not seen her yet, at least, not to speak to, though she saw the earl’s party arrive from the workshop windows, and Gytha, elegantly dressed in a plum-coloured gown with gold embroidery, leaning heavily on Odo’s arm as they made their way toward the inner court and the private apartments. She never so much as glanced in the direction of the atelier. No one has seen them since, and there have been rumours that Gytha is under some kind of house arrest, as she was, apparently, in Normandy. Margaret is somehow afraid it all relates back to the garden at Winterbourne, and the plan Gytha hatched to help her get away to look for Tom; everything has been so hazy since then, like fighting her way through lines of wet sheets hung out to dry, the clear view glimpsed then snatched away by heavy slaps of linen.

“They say she was deceiving him all along, getting close then plotting against him,” said one of the Saint Augustine’s women as they peered down from the great windows.

“Nonsense,” replied Judith. “He’s just doing what great men do when they tire of mistresses who know too much about them.”

“ ‘And the kings of the earth who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her shall bewail her and lament for her when they shall see the smoke of her burning,’ ” chanted Alwys, drawing a sharp look from Sister Jean as she summoned them back to their frames. Sister Jean did not hear what Margaret heard, Judith whispering to Alwys,

“The Whore of Babylon. Good girl. Quite right.”

Looking at the peas, pus coloured and lumpy, suddenly makes Margaret feel sick. She pushes her bowl away.

“That girl’s looking peaky,” comments Hamo, glancing down the hall. “Are you sure all is well in your workshop, Sister? There’s a lot of sickness about.”

Agatha has been much occupied with sick visiting in recent weeks, though there has been little she can do to help those suffering from bad air, brackish water, and failing crops, and nothing she can say in response to the mumbled imprecations against Odo and his woman.

The hall is gloomy, lights being kept to a minimum because of the risk of fire. Agatha envies Hamo his eyesight, though she is relieved to be spared too clear a picture of the women seated below the empty hearth. The atmosphere in the atelier has become scarcely bearable. In the early days, there was grief and anger, but they laughed more as well. All of them, not just Agatha, were infected by the excitement of the project, its novelty, its enormous scale and ambition. Perhaps it was because, even if as individuals they did not grasp the overall plan and purpose of the work, they knew that Sister Jean did. Sister Jean gave them all a sense that they were making history, that they were important in the new Norman scheme of things, more than heads to be counted in Lord Odo’s assessment of his holdings, more than pawns in whatever game Harold of Wessex and William of Normandy had played with the English crown.

But four years have passed. The miraculous windows are dusty; the cat has died, entangled in the spokes of a cartwheel; the linen is grimy and overworked; and the conquest of England, the history of which they fancied themselves a part, is all but finished. Typical of Margaret to discover resistance just as everybody else has given it up. And that is not all Margaret has discovered since she was brought back from Dover. Discovered, Agatha says to herself, how appropriate. There is Guerin, of course, and Gird, the widowed baker, and who knows how many more in this castle full of soldiers. She has heard the whispered jokes about bed and bawd, and what’s sauce for the goose.

“We are all well, God be thanked,” she replies to Hamo’s enquiry, “but the heat is oppressive. It does tend to sap the appetite.” At high table, the peas have been leavened by the addition of a large eel, but the flesh is dry and chalky. Probably it would have been thrown back if the need were not so pressing, and Agatha, chiding herself for her ingratitude for God’s bounty, wonders if everyone might not be better off if it had been. If it does not call down more bad luck upon them, it may well poison them.

“All the same, we can’t afford to waste food. She’ll live to regret it, a bonny girl like that one.”

Bonny once, perhaps, but now she has begun to dress carelessly; she has pimples on her chin as though even her skin is reflecting some wantonness in her attitude. Her flesh is slack and blowsy, arrayed about her big bones like an ill-fitting gown imperfectly pressed. The girl is a slut; glancing sidelong at Hamo, she wonders if even he has been dipping his wick in that particular cresset of oil. And who is to blame him for taking what is offered? After all, he would merely be following his overlord’s example.

***

Odo is solicitous, but preoccupied. He has not told her what the priest said about Lanfranc’s directions to his clergy on preaching the causes of the drought, or worse still, the cure implied in those causes. No point in upsetting her further with such obvious nonsense, but he is rattled by it in spite of himself. He will not rest easy until he knows what he is up against, whether Lanfranc has lost his wits or has launched a serious campaign against Gytha.

“Rub my back for me,” she pleads. “I am stiff as a corpse from my fall.”

“I thought I might try and get to see Lanfranc this evening. You don’t mind, do you?”

Yes, yes, I mind. Today I have been twice accused of witchcraft and nearly killed falling from my horse for you.
“No, but I think you’re being hasty. You haven’t slept for nearly two days. Even your powers of persuasion must be at a low ebb by now. Go in the morning.”

Contemplating her face, pinched with anxiety, her eyes huge with pleas she will not utter because she doesn’t want him to know how afraid she is, he yields to her advice. Though he does not expect to sleep; he is apprehensive himself, if not afraid. He does rub her back, and her round buttocks, and the arches of her feet whose sinews make him think of the roof vaults of his cathedral, slender and strong. He kisses a bruise emerging like a stain on the creamy skin of her thigh and makes love to her with great tenderness, but a distraction which makes her certain he is hiding something from her.

She lies beside him pretending to sleep, while he sits with his long legs stretched out on top of the white fur coverlet, ankles crossed in a parody of relaxation, turned a little away from her toward the light of the cresset on his night stand, pretending to re-read Ealdred’s deposition. Listening to the too perfect regularity of her breathing, he knows she is awake. When she steals a glance at him under her lashes, she sees he is not looking at the parchment in his hand but into the dark beyond the tallowlight, his eyes red with the reflection of whatever he sees there.

Eventually she puts a hand out from under the covers and touches his arm lightly.

“Come to bed, Odo. It’ll all look better in the morning, whatever it is.”

Giving her a wan smile and a nod, he stands, placing the deposition on the nightstand and shrugging off his fur-lined gown. The deep, simple joy of watching the gown slip away from his fair skin, the play of muscle and bone in the smoky light as he unties the bed hangings before climbing into bed beside her, consoles her like drinking mulled wine on a winter day. Her love sparkles in her fingers and the tips of her toes. With a contented sigh she surrenders to the curve of his body around hers, the damp heat of his breath on the back of her neck, the perfect seclusion of the world bounded by the bed curtains.

He remembers the first time he lay with her this way, her small frame curled inside his like the sweet kernel of a nut, and how she had been talking about Aristophanes and his theory of wholes.
That’s it
, says a voice which may be inside him or may be the voice of God,
the
power
of
the
perfect
whole
. Whoever, or whatever, is trying to prise them apart cannot succeed; they are fused together by love, tempered and shaped by it into a single, indissoluble being. Lanfranc’s hints at witchcraft and divine retribution are powerless against them as long as they are together. Besides, if the people have been so easily swayed by words, how much more easily can he persuade them by deeds, by importing grain to feed them and engaging dowsers to find them water? The bishoprics and Brother Ealdred’s intriguing revelations, those are what set him on this course, and he will not be deflected.

***

Lanfranc, approached by one of the abbey servants as he makes his way from chapter to Terce the following morning, knows before the man opens his mouth that he has come to tell him the Earl of Kent is here in person and is asking for an audience. The only surprise is that he did not come last night, although he will admit to having been caught off-guard by the abruptness of Odo’s departure from Normandy. He is as certain as he can be that no word could have reached him about the drought, and positive that, had he received reports of sermons being preached against Gytha, he would not have brought her to Canterbury but would have kept her out of harm’s way in some more peripheral corner of his empire.