Needle in the Blood (68 page)

He is not ill. Hovering just beneath the canopy, he looks down on himself lying in bed and knows he must rouse himself. He has to hold courts, hear petitions, take action to minimise the damage done by these storms just as he dealt with the drought before. He must inspect the atelier, make certain there are no leaks in the workshop roof and that the women have not lit braziers or candles against the descent of this permanent seeming dusk. He must give orders for the mares in suck to be brought into the hall before their foals drown, if Hamo has not already done so.

But before all that, he must decide what he is going to do about Gytha, and he cannot. Every scrap of physical and mental energy he possesses has been sucked into the vortex of his indecision, where possible solutions whirl past too quickly for him to grasp or even see clearly. Often he dozes and in the seconds after waking, before he knows he is awake, the answer will be clear to him, only to dissipate as dreams do, as all the other things he has to think about crowd back in on him. Simple, says the man’s body in the bed, soaked in cold piss and dog saliva: you love her, forgive her, get her out of there, and start again. Simple, answers the sprite swinging from the cobwebs stretched between blue satin pleats: she betrayed you, she did the worst thing a woman can do to a man, let Lanfranc condemn her. Forget her.

Forget her? Don’t be absurd, says his body. Think about something else, his mind pleads, like a choirmaster trying to bring discipline to a disorderly set of responses and antiphons.

***

Before long, Gytha loses track of the time they have kept her in this room, with its sodden floor and sweating walls, and sudden, magical glitters of gold dust when people come in with candles, which they do sporadically, throwing food at her from the door as if she is a dangerous beast. The days and nights leak into one another, the compartments formed by bells or meals, light and dark, breaking down as she drifts in and out of a torpid, dream-like inertia. Sometimes people speak to her: her guards, the novice who throws the food. The Archbishop, she thinks, his prophet’s beard wagging, his scalp pink as a baby’s bottom under his sparse hair. She doesn’t listen to any of them.

All she does is ask for Odo; all she hears is the silence which follows her pleas. If her mouth so much as forms the full moon shape of his name, if she even thinks of him, it seems, they shake their heads and turn away. So she gives up speaking, which only exacerbates the cracks forming in her lips, and tries to give up thinking, but her mind will not stay empty. He fills it, and Meg, and the baby. The baby. What did the cunningwoman say? What did she really say? What is her body telling her when there is nothing else to listen to but the scrabbling of rats and the soggy rustle of soiled straw?
Your child will be.

Saint Germanus to All Souls 1072

Odo awakens from a sleep that has descended like a gauze over his brain, fuzzing but not quite cutting out the remorseless round of arguments between the sprite in the cobwebs and the body on the bed, to find himself looking, not at the bed canopy but up into the face of his sister. Her features appear strangely pulled forward, cheeks, brows, lips all bunched around her sharp nose like a curious configuration of sails about a mast. He starts to laugh, though Agatha shows no sign of wishing to join him.

“You are awake? Aren’t you?” she demands. “Because I need to speak to you.” Juno growls. Agatha looks as though she may growl back. “This can’t go on, Odo. What with nursing Margaret, and Judith suddenly worse than useless…the workshop isn’t functioning, and I need you to do something about it.” She has tried to be patient with him, but if he is not ill, what is the meaning of this extraordinary lassitude, with Gytha imprisoned, the little of what remains of the livestock drowning in mudslides, the grain brought in from Normandy at such expense rotting in sodden granaries, and his workshop full of idle hands and poisonous gossip? Determined to bring him round, she will tip him out of bed and scrub him head to toe with cold water herself if need be. Watching a sullen frown settle between his eyes, she realises he is just a small boy in a sulk.

“Nursing Margaret?” he queries, prompted by what he will think of for the rest of his life as some kind of guardian angel. “What’s wrong with her?”

Agatha’s strangely distorted face recedes, then reappears looking more like Agatha as she perches on the edge of the bed and stares at her hands, wrangling in her lap. “Freya says it’s…a miscarriage. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering…”

“A miscarriage?”

The vortex stops spinning, the sprite clambers nimbly down the carved bedpost, and slips back into his body, smooth as a knife. He sits up, elbowing the dog out of the way. “Margaret,” he says, smiling at Agatha, a gleam in his eyes which comes as a relief to her after the eerie sensation that he had somehow gone missing from himself, though she cannot imagine what it presages. “Thank you.” He squeezes her hands, quickly and fiercely, then everything is a whirl of activity. Flinging back the bedclothes, he almost tips his sister off the edge of the bed. As he shouts for Osbern to have the bath filled, bring shaving things, find him a clean shirt, he is already stripping off his nightclothes regardless of her presence in his bed chamber.

“Christ, I stink!”

“The workshop, Odo.”

He gives her a blank look then waves her irritably away. “Yes, yes, later. Go and find Freya for me. Send her to me, and tell them to saddle me a horse.”

“And three bags full, sir,” says Agatha with a bow, but her teasing is lost on him so she shrugs and goes to relieve Freya at Margaret’s bedside.

Freya looks momentarily panic-stricken when Agatha delivers Odo’s summons, but recovers her usual, glacial composure almost immediately, handing over care of the invalid with calm efficiency.

“I’ve just changed her cloth, but she’s still bleeding quite heavily, and you should give her another spoonful of the syrup when they ring the bell for Sext. I’ll be happier when her fever goes down.”

Taking up a bowl of rosewater and a linen rag, Agatha begins patiently to mop the girl’s brow, dipping, ringing out, dabbing at her broad, pale forehead and freckled temples, tidying the damp coils of hair which have escaped from her coif. Soothed by the rhythm of her actions, she begins to hum the tunes of old rhymes remembered from her childhood, until Margaret’s eyelids flutter down over her gooseberry green eyes and she seems to sleep. How strange, reflects Agatha, as her fingertips make contact with the girl’s clammy skin, that dreams may come true, but only when you have stopped wanting them to, as though only by ceasing to be dreams can they become realities. How fitting that her career, founded on her revulsion from the violence of the sexual act between men and women, should come to this, to tending its casualties.

***

When Freya is shown into Odo’s parlour, he is rummaging in a jewel case, clad only in shirt and chausses, Osbern standing behind him with a long tunic of dark brown velvet draped over his arms. She tries to convince herself that he has sent for her merely to ask her to take something to Mistress Gytha, but she cannot deceive herself so easily. Why not go himself? And what could her mistress want with jewellery in the abbey prison?

“Freya.” As soon as he becomes aware of her presence, he closes the jewel case and fixes his attention on her, drawing her gaze to his despite Osbern helping him on with the tunic, tying its gold laces, fastening a belt set with turquoises and some green stones she cannot identify about his hips, fussing with a clothes brush and several pairs of shoes. “You must tell me all you know about your mistress’ visit to the cunningwoman Gunhild.”

He is impressed that her gaze does not falter; she does not blush, or fidget, or even pause before replying. Almost as though she has anticipated his question and has been rehearsing her reply.

“The truth,” he impresses upon her, “not whatever story you may have concocted between you should I ask.”

“She should have told you herself,” responds Freya bluntly. “What on earth has she said to you?”

“Nothing. Literally. She would not open her mouth.”

Freya pushes an exasperated blast of air down her nose. “So proud, that one,” she mutters.

“I beg your pardon?”

“She came to me for help, sir, knowing I have some…expertise.” She darts Odo a cautious glance, but he bids her continue with a gesture of his hand. “Told me some long, involved tale about Margaret and a hedge preacher who had raped her but was really her brother, so…”

“Her brother? Good God.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know it, apparently. He’s quite mad and believes he’s Saint Sebastian.”

Odo turns very pale and sits down suddenly.

“Are you ill, sir?”

“No. Go on.”

“Well, Mistress Gytha felt responsible, because she had helped Meg get away to try and find her brother and persuade him to go home to his wife and child, but then this happened, and Meg came to my mistress saying she was sure she was pregnant and sure her brother was the father.”

“How could she be so sure? By all accounts she’s since acquired a taste for barnyard behaviour, however nasty her initiation.”

Freya shrugs. “Women just know these things, my lord. We feel it. I can’t say more.”

“So you and Gytha took the wretched girl to this Gunhild, and I suppose Gytha wouldn’t talk because she was afraid of getting either of you into trouble. Of all the women I should fall in love with, why must it be one with such a contrary head on her shoulders?” And there, he thinks, is a question with its own answer hidden inside it.

“There’s more,” says Freya. God knows, the earl must be as grieved and anxious as any man about his mistress, but Gytha’s misplaced heroics have spoilt things for her and Fulk also. By telling his lordship everything, Freya sees her chance to strengthen Gytha in his favour and restore her own position at Winterbourne.

“Yes?”

“The wise woman said Mistress Gytha was with child also. She asked which of them had come for her help, for she thought they were both expecting. She said…” But before she can finish he has bounded across the room like an affectionate puppy and, seizing her face between his hands, plants a resounding kiss on her forehead.

“After the Holy Virgin and my beloved Gytha,” he says, “you are the most wonderful woman that ever lived,” and is gone, running down the stairs to the hall with Osbern in pursuit.

“Your cloak, sir; it’s still raining.”

“Is it, Osbern?” he shouts back over his shoulder. “It feels like the first day of spring to me.”

He will have their bed made with clean linen, scattered with bunches of mint and lavender, ready for her return, he thinks as he gallops through the narrow streets, a couple of guardsmen clearing a path for him through the shopkeepers and their customers, herdsmen with small flocks of soaked sheep and mud-caked pigs, an enterprising fellow hawking squares of oilcloth with head holes cut in them to make rain capes. She will have every care and consideration. She will be kept away from dogs and needles. She will not eat pork nor ride, especially not ride, after her terrible fall at Rochester, when she must already have been carrying the child. He crosses himself at the memory of it. She must not stoop or bathe or sit to the left of a monk.

He will kiss her eyes and hold her in his arms, but he will not make love to her, and he will sprinkle her with holy water and pray for her daily. He will make her presents of jewels set with jasper, moonstone, and chrysolite, all known to have special virtues for pregnant women. Six grains of pearl powder ingested daily will ensure the quality of her milk. The child will be born and will live, and there will be more, a dynasty, a whole string of brothers for John.

The abbey community is at None when he arrives, his horse skidding through the cautious crack in the gate with which the surprised porterer responds to his torrent of knocking and shouting. Flinging himself out of the saddle and tossing the reins to one of his guards, he makes straight for the chapel, where the singing of the psalm falters, then recovers as he slams the north door open and strides the short distance to the middle of the transept where the Archbishop’s throne stands, the monks’ voices mirroring the guttering of the candles in the sudden blast of damp air.

With the briefest of bows to the altar, he confronts Lanfranc.

“I need to see her,” he says in an urgent, careless whisper heard by all.

Let not mine enemies triumph over me
, chants the congregation. Lanfranc signs him to be patient, patting down the air with the flat of his hand.

“Now,” he hisses. One of the novices at the front of the congregation steals a quick glance in his direction and receives a withering stare from the novice master for his pains.

Thou art the God of my salvation
, the monks sing.

With a sigh, Lanfranc rises from his throne and leads the way back out of the north door. Odo’s spurs clank behind him, an incongruous accompaniment to the psalm. As Odo closes the door, Lanfranc rounds on him, the lappets of his mitre whipping furiously in the wind which has risen as the rain abates to a needling drizzle.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demands, as though Odo had been summoned before him at Bec to answer some charge of stealing books or raiding the kitchens during the Great Silence. But Odo is no longer a boy in his charge, and it is his mistake to keep forgetting it.