Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  Taking her hands in his, he rubs his thumbs gently over her fingertips, feeling the fine, raised lines scored in them by years of working with gold and silver wire. “And if you didn’t, they wouldn’t be your hands, and I wouldn’t love them as much.” He lifts them to his lips, but she wrenches them away. “That’s all that matters to me. I thought you felt the same. Why did you wait till now to say all this?”

  “I couldn’t…not in front of all those people. Besides,” she adds sulkily, “I didn’t want to spoil your party.”

  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.

  Purification

  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.

  The church is full of candles, their flames like shoals of tiny, luminous fish swimming in the murk of a February morning. The air is holy with the scent of stone and incense and beeswax, sweet with the disembodied music of the nuns singing behind the screen which shields them from the view of the congregation. Gytha imagines the golden light of the candles flowing through the church’s sturdy lancets, rippling over the newly ploughed soil, and sees it as a small ship in the middle of a petrified sea of damp, dark red earth.

  Despite the presence of her steward, and Fulk and Freya and the two babies, and the dwarf, Turold, she has discovered there is no consolation for the loneliness of his absence. Yet her happiness in knowing he will follow only a matter of days behind the messenger who brought his letter, and intends to stay at Winterbourne until the arrival of the papal legate in the spring, is mixed with apprehension. Closing her eyes, the candle flames dancing behind her eyelids, she tries to imagine what it will mean, not to be apart or circumscribed by the need for discretion. Her piety is a lie. What she thinks about in church is not the miracle of Christ’s love, but the love of His vicar, Odo. When she takes the Host in her mouth, she meditates on the gentle pressure of his fingers on her tongue, his hands cupping the chalice, his voice pronouncing the words, corpus Christi, sanguis Christi. During the sermon, she finds herself dreaming her own interpretations of scripture, and that holy writ is becoming, for her, a lexicon for earthly lovers, inscribed in the book of her heart.

  For all her early misgivings, her house has seduced her. A long house in the old style, with a separate women’s bower, it stands cradled in the rounded folds of its sheep pastures, the demesne holdings spread out in front like a patchwork apron, the stream, a porridge of ice but not quite frozen, winding down the hill behind. She delights in walking around it, touching the furniture, breathing in its orderly scents of beeswax polish, camphor and clean straw, watching the changes in the light spilling through its windows. She loves to stand in her courtyard and survey her byre, her stables, her kitchen, her dairy, the wattle shelter over the stream where the laundry is done, and to know that all these honest, purposeful buildings are hers. The order of the dome
stic cycle, the milking and churning, cooking and mending, even the care of the two babies, the endless rigmarole of feeding, changing clouts, swaddling and singing to sleep, brings a kind of peace she can lay over her heartache like a poultice.

  She opens her eyes, hearing the rustle of the congregation beginning to stir. Everyone stands for the blessing and distribution of candles. She smiles at the faces around her, weathered features softened by candlelight until they are almost indistinguishable from the faces of saints and angels gazing out serenely from the painted church walls. And they smile back, respectful of the handsome widow in her rich, sober clothes, pleased with her modest demeanour and courtesy, and the young man and woman who wait on her and accompany her to church with their two little children. She knows they like the dwarf, because she has caught him occasionally, out of the corner of her eye, cutting discreet capers or pulling comic faces to amuse them during the long Latin sermons which none of them understands. Of course she is happy. Happiness has these knots in it, like strong wood.

  ***

  Agatha stands beside Margaret in the procession to carry the blessed candles to the cemetery, glancing at her furtively, looking away before Margaret, or anyone else, becomes aware of her attention. The lights, flickering as the chapel door is opened, animate her placid features and galvanise the coppery springs of hair escaping from her cap. Agatha is aware of her flinching as hot wax splashes her, and longs to take her soft, plump hand in her own and kiss away the sudden pain, then peel off the coating of wax from the freckled skin. Perhaps she should offer to carry Margaret’s candle, to protect her from burning. She stares at the flame of her own until it fills her vision, and if she looks away, sees its silhouette superimposed on the dark corners of the chapel from which all the lights have now been gathered by the congregation.