Needle in the Blood (9 page)

“You have nothing more to say?” queries Sister Jean-Baptiste. “Then let me explain what I want of you. As I said, the earl seeks a memorial of the invasion, and please, for now, let us not debate the wisdom of his desire. The desires of great men are facts, are they not, like the weather or the hours of light and dark? There is nothing we can do to change them. His idea is that this should take the form of an embroidered hanging depicting all the events leading to the coronation of King William. I have drawn up the design for the work, and now I am looking for the best needlewomen I can find to execute it.” She pauses.

Is she waiting for some acknowledgment of her compliment, Gytha wonders. Well, let her wait; she plied her needle in Saxon houses, for Saxon noblemen and their churches; the Normans made her the whore she is now, who does not even trouble to darn her hose.

“The abbess at the Convent of Saint Mary of Egypt in Colchester told me how the late Earl of Wessex’s concubine singled out your work for special praise on a visit to the convent,” Sister Jean continues, “and how she then took you into her household. So I came here to Winchester to find you. Though it has not been easy. You have hidden your tracks well. Most people I made enquiries of told me all Edith Swan Neck’s women went into exile with her.”

Exile. Thank God, oh, thank God she is still alive. “She is not dead then?” She cannot keep her relief out of her voice. Hearing it, the nun gives her a quick, warm smile, which makes her look younger, less severe. “Where is she? Do you know? Is she in the charge of your earl?”

“Alas, I know nothing more than my enquiries after you have turned up. But there is generally a kernel of truth in rumour so it seems likely she is not dead.”

Gytha slumps back against the wall. “Rumour, never anything but rumour.”

“Well, you may be sure of one thing, and that is, she is not in Winchester. Perhaps if you will come to Canterbury with me, you may learn more outside these walls.”

“My lady, I’m sure I should be flattered by your attention and yes, I was a good embroiderer, but that is all in the past. Nowadays I’m just a whore. I’ll tickle your earl’s cock for him, for a price, but not his vanity. I have little enough to be proud of; let me at least take pride in being a Saxon.” Sister Jean-Baptiste raises her eyebrows at this. Gytha, with her small stature and dark colouring, looks nothing like a Saxon. “Now I must ask you to leave. I have work to do.”

“I think not. It’s late and I can’t hear anyone outside. I am offering you respectable, reliable employment for years to come. You will have a sound roof over your head, regular meals, and the protection of one of the most powerful men in England, who has even stood regent for the king.”

“The work I have now is reliable, Sister, if not respectable. A good deal more reliable than embroidery, if I may say so, the one being merely a luxury, the other—as men would have it—a necessity of life.”

“I have seen the chasuble that captured Edith Swan Neck’s attention, Aelfgytha. God bestowed a great gift upon you. It is your duty to use your talent wisely.”

“And who’s to say I don’t?”

“Oh, really. Now you are talking like a child. Besides, this is not a work of mere luxury. It is to be a chronicle of sorts, an account of important events to hang in a cathedral. For people to see and learn from.”

“A cathedral? But I thought you said…”

“The earl is also a bishop, in Normandy.”

Gytha feels the blood grow still in her veins. When she opens her mouth to speak, she realises she has been holding her breath for several seconds. Everything has fallen away, the world is suddenly nothing but the nun and herself, the question hanging on her lips, the knowledge the nun has which may be everything or nothing. “Where?” she asks, sounding as casual as she can.

“Bayeux,” replies Sister Jean-Baptiste pleasantly. “He is building a new cathedral there. He envisages this embroidery hanging in the nave.” The nun continues to speak, but her words are nothing but background noise to Gytha, merging with voices and footsteps outside, hurrying to be indoors before dark, or the shuffled rearrangements of bodies in the neighbouring cubicles. Bayeux. The word hammers in her head like the ringing of the curfew bell. Obviously Lady Edith’s hangings were not enough for him then, and his greed has given her her chance. The little room is stuffy and reeks of sweat and semen. She begins to feel faint, separated, as though she is looking in on herself from outside.

“What about this hanging then?” she asks, as soon as she can trust her voice, struggling to keep her tone light, casual, non-committal. “I hope it will be truthful. I refuse to sew lies. Besides, a lot more people will see it than would read a chronicle. Your earl will get caught out quicker than a tale teller when he changes the words.”

“You will come then?”

“Is it up to you?” If he has any say in the matter, then he may already be aware of her identity, which will make her task harder. “I would have thought he would want to make the choice himself, if this hanging is so important to him.”

“He has entrusted the task to me entirely. I am to choose.”

Choice. There has never been any choice for a woman, not since Eve chose the serpent. Of course she will go with Sister Jean-Baptiste, though not for any reason the sister could dream of. She nods.

The nun stands up and holds out her hand. “Good. That’s settled then. I stay tonight at the priory. Come there tomorrow at Prime, and we will set out for Canterbury.” Sister Jean-Baptiste’s grip is sinewy and dry, though her hand feels as delicate as a songbird in Gytha’s.

***

They make slow progress on the first day of their journey. Traffic throngs the narrow road, heavy grain wagons rumbling between fields and mills, forcing their party off the track and into the woods and meadows bordering it, bands of old men and boys with scythes and flails balanced on their shoulders following the harvest, the usual assortment of barefoot friars, peddlers, prostitutes. If she catches a girl’s eye, Gytha smiles her recognition, but rarely receives anything other than a scowl or a blank stare in return. Without the white cockade of her profession pinned to her hood, they do not know her, and eventually she stops trying, riding with eyes cast down like a respectable woman.

Rain has fallen overnight, transforming baked earth into syrupy mud which clings to their clothes and faces and makes the horses slip and lurch uncomfortably. Several times they have to wait while their escorts help to free stuck wagons, laying mats of brush or sheaves of straw beneath the wheels. Nor does it aid their progress that Sister Jean-Baptiste insists on stopping every three hours to say the daily offices, despite the advice of the commander of their escort that they’re sitting ducks for all manner of outlaws on the quieter stretches of road.

“Nonsense,” she retorts. “It is the king’s boast that a man may travel the length and breadth of England with a crock of gold in his breast and remain unmolested, and I believe him.”

She doesn’t, of course, following her travels with Odo the previous year, noting down the account he gave her of the invasion as he toured his new manors, sitting in council, inspecting the rolls, holding courts, tithe bargaining with suspicious abbots, attempting to explain the obligations of frankpledge to bewildered villeins. Everywhere stamping the authority of his new seal, which showed on one side the bishop, his face bathed in saintly benevolence, his hand raised in blessing, and on the other, the earl, armed, mounted, holding an unsheathed sword.

When William appointed him regent, she remained unobtrusive among the crowd of sycophants and fortune hunters, watching the king embark for Normandy with his train of Saxon hostages. She saw how, when the brothers kissed, rivalry vied with love in the gesture. Odo, standing alone, ankle deep in the cold, grey sea, the hem of his cloak floating out behind him as the
Mora
diminished to the size of a great insect crawling across the water, was engaged in something much more complicated than a public display of fraternal affection and feudal obligation. Looking toward home, his dream of a cathedral, his library, his school, his son, with the great, wet weight of England at his back, he wrestled with the question, what if. What if William never returned? None of them, not his brother, Robert of Mortain, not Fitzosbern, with whom Odo was to share his regency, must see it on his face.

Sketching out her designs in makeshift accommodation in the half built castles at Dover and Rochester, she too fell prey to what if, after Odo had ridden in pursuit of the turncoat Eustace of Boulogne, whose vanity in his descent from Charlemagne had made him easy prey for whatever flotsam the tide of William’s success had left in its wake. What if Odo were killed? Would his hanging too, like that of Earl Byrhtnoth, become simply the doting memorial to a fallen hero sewn by the women he left behind? But he came back, and Eustace fled to France, and after her experience of the aftermath of that revolt, she will not be deflected from her religious duty by the prospect of a gang of half starved villeins on the run from their overlords.

Gytha never prays with her, even at the main daily office of Vespers, but Agatha, not wishing to antagonise her latest recruit, makes no comment. She is grateful for Gytha’s change of heart; she had feared she would be unable to persuade her to join in the fabrication of Odo’s memorial, and though she had the means of coercion at her disposal, she was loathe to use them. Gytha’s skill must be freely given if she is to bring to Odo’s hanging the same lovely spontaneity Agatha noted in the chasuble stitched at the Convent of Saint Mary.

As they converse along the road, she finds herself growing to like her companion, though not with the disquieting affection that leapt into her heart when she first saw Margaret in her father’s house, eyes cast down and blushing as she held out an embroidered shift for Sister Jean’s inspection. Margaret smells of fresh baking and orange blossom, and her plump, freckled forearms covered with fine red blond down make you want to stroke them. Gytha, with her awkward cleverness, her words like cats fighting in a sack, does not inspire such gentleness, more a sense of common identity. In other circumstances, Agatha wonders if she might have ended up living as Gytha has been living, in the margins of society, like a spark thrown off a Catherine wheel. She feels at ease with Gytha and senses that Gytha too is beginning to relax in her company, albeit cautiously, every friendly remark framed by some reminder that they are enemies, more divided than united by their common purpose. But who is she reminding, Agatha wonders. Agatha, or herself?

***

Toward None on the fourth day, Sister Jean calls a halt at a point where the road passes through a woodland clearing, the track temporarily losing itself in close bitten grass where the horses have to tread carefully to avoid rabbit burrows. Rabbits, like stunted hares without grace or magic or silver in their fur, forever escaping their warrens and ruining vegetable plots, another unwanted Norman invader. Gytha walks into the woods to stretch her cramped muscles, enjoying the cool, green light filtering through the trees, the silence hardly touched by the soft scurrying of unseen creatures in the undergrowth. She takes off her shoes, burrowing her toes into the forest floor, sensing through her worn hose the different textures of grass spikes, damp leaves, pine needles, beech mast, inhaling the sharp earth scent released by the disturbed vegetation.

Suddenly, to their mutual astonishment, a man erupts from the bushes only yards away from her. He has a bow slung across his chest and around his neck the carcass of a deer, tongue lolling, feet neatly hobbled. He is breathless and at the sight of Gytha goes very pale, his face reflecting the green light of the sun through leaves. Gytha flushes. How foolish she must look, wandering aimlessly in the woods with her shoes in her hand and her hose damp. Then turns cold at the thought of what will happen to him if he is caught.

“I haven’t seen you,” she says quickly. He gives a curt nod, and a grimace that might have been a smile, and runs on before Gytha can warn him that he is heading straight for Sister Jean and the earl’s men. She wants to run after him, but she will never be able to keep up in her bare feet, and by the time she has put her shoes back on it will be too late. She watches him disappear again among the trees. How can she help him anyway? The road is in the king’s peace and the woods on either side the king’s also. He will be shown no mercy where the king’s deer are concerned: the road is crawling with royal patrols; he is bound to be caught sooner or later.

By the time she emerges from the wood, the poacher has been taken, two men holding him by the arms while another secures the deer carcass to one of the packhorses. The man stands passively, as though submitting to the inevitable, but between Sister Jean and the escort commander it seems to be a different story. They are arguing, in low voices but with obvious ferocity, the commander’s face and neck flushed, Sister Jean drawn bolt upright in front of him, quivering with anger the way birch trees do in the lightest of breezes. As Gytha watches, she reaches into the flat leather wallet suspended from her girdle and withdraws a folded parchment with a showy seal appended to it. The officer makes a stiff bow and, crossing to his men, gives them their orders.

The two soldiers holding the poacher drag him toward the edge of the clearing, his legs buckling under him, his feet scuffing the grass. Another unclips his horse’s reins and uses the length of leather to bind the poacher by his wrists to a tree. He then takes his knife to the hem of the prisoner’s shirt, hacking away a sufficient length of it to act as a blindfold. Gytha cannot believe what she is seeing. The Normans are usually so particular about sticking to the rules, yet here is the Bastard’s own sister openly flouting his law. Or perhaps the law has no currency where poaching the Bastard’s own deer is concerned. She tries to catch Sister Jean’s eye, but the nun never for a moment looks away from her victim.