Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  She looks away again, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand. The dog, he tells himself, just the dog, making them water. Her nails are black and broken, his mother’s little ring is missing.

  “She said all the wrong things too. She is so grateful to you for your protection, so loyal. She counselled me to be quiet and obedient. Like a good wife. But Odo…” Something in the way she uses his name gives him hope, his name in her mouth like the balm of a kiss, a declaration of love. He smiles at her. The dog stretches out, still pressed against Gytha’s foot, but with her snout pointing toward her master. “I don’t want to be your wife.”

  “Well, you never will be, barring some highly unlikely shift in the Church’s interpretation of Saint Paul.”

  Ignoring his attempt at levity, she goes on, “Then why do you entertain that notion, of presenting me at court as if I were?”

  “To show how I respect you, that you are more to me than just a…”

  “Whore?” Her eyes take on a hard glitter. “Is that it? Your little indulgence? Worth burning down the odd village for, though. I expect I should be grateful for that.”

  “The damage will be repaired. It will be better for the people in the long run. They will have stone churches and granaries.”

  “You still speak English like a foreigner,” she accuses. “At the place I was staying, at Terce the day your men…I left, a woman came to the gate. She had three small children, one a babe in arms, and nothing but what she stood up in. She begged the porter for charity, said the earl’s men had killed her husband for trying to stop them burning down his cottage. What use is a stone church to her? As for me, dear God, Odo, I was so ashamed.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of myself. My…of the English, what we have let you make of us.”

  “Don’t let Edith colour your view of me, Gytha. Do me the courtesy of hearing my justification for the behaviour of my own soldiers. Can’t you see it’s a measure of how much I love you? How afraid I was for you?” He thinks of Margaret with a shudder of distaste.

  She rises and begins to walk up and down the room with Juno at her heel, passing so close to where he is sitting all he has to do is reach out his hand to touch her. He strokes Juno’s head, pressing down so hard the dog ducks away from him with a whimper and follows Gytha to the window.

  “It’s getting light.” Pushing back her cloak, lifting her hair clear and shaking it down her back, she leans her elbows on the sill. As if on cue, the bells begin to ring for Lauds, and the mill wheel grinds into life with a sound like a giant’s bones cracking as he stretches himself. “What’s that?”

  “There’s a mill in the harbour mouth.”

  “No. Really?” She turns to him, incredulous, her reserve dispelled by curiosity. “What about storms?” She pauses, listening, perhaps, to the high-pitched moaning of the wind around the tower. “And ships coming in and out?”

  Suddenly he is filled with the beauty of the mill, tall and square between the jumble of rocks supporting the causeway leading out to it and the grey surge of the sea, milky on the harbour side, wave faceted on the other, as though the mill wheel itself had alchemical properties of turning mud to silver. “Every time I come here, I am badgered by some deputation or other begging me to take it down. But it’s stood through three winters and there have been no more wrecks than usual in the harbour entrance. I love it.”

  “How unwisely you love, my lord.” In the following silence they do not look at one another, but he can hear their memories conversing and feel the thread which joins them tightening until it begins to sing.

  “Why did you do it?” he asks softly.

  “To show you I am yours of my own free will.”

  Am yours, she says, and with such tenderness, such a tremor in her voice. Not was, or have been, or even, will be again, but am, now, in the present which has no end or beginning. At last he feels he has permission to look at her, absorbing into his heart the way she hugs her dark cloak around her body, her watchful eyes, her sad, inward smile, how pale she is in the watery dawn light beginning to trickle through the narrow window.

  Her gaze wanders away from his face to rest on the camel in its jewelled frame, which he has replaced on the table by his elbow. Frowning, she continues, “Just once, let me teach you something.”

  “Go on.”

  “As I see it, there’s not much difference between a whore and a wife. They’re both one side of a business transaction.” Seeing he is about to protest, she holds up her hand to prevent him. “Lovers are different. They come together, and stay together, or not, because they want to. Free will. You see?”

  It is a pretty notion, and he would like to believe it, but the law says otherwise. Everyone belongs to someone else; that is how society is bound together. He belongs to William as Gytha belongs to him, tied by duty and dependence. Why else would she work for him, or he protect her? Love makes no difference to such matters.

  Then the image of a horse-drawn plough comes to his mind, followed by other pictures from his tapestry, flaring up and disappearing at random, as though he were trying to view the work by the light of a frequently extinguished candle. A portable shrine like nothing he has ever seen, a filigree of crosses and arches balanced on poles. A row of empty stitch holes leading like tiny footsteps to the eye of a knight fallen under a Norman sword. A crow perched in a fantastically curlicued tree with a wolfish fox beneath. His tapestry, but not his pictures. His story, but not the way he has told it to himself. How orderly his life was once, neatly segmented by prayers and bells, collects and canticles, everything in its place and a place for everything. Now he flails at each day just as the mill’s arms wave at the immensity of the weather, and he knows a time must come when he and it will both be engulfed by his ambition, that life is short and God is unimpressed.

  “I have behaved very badly toward you, in all sorts of ways,” he says humbly, “and I don’t deserve to hear you say such beautiful things.” Thinking the time has come when he might take her in his arms and kiss away their misunderstandings, he crosses to the window, but she turns to look out at the broadening daylight.

  “We’re so high up.”

  He surveys the segment of courtyard and walls, and beyond them the sea, trying to see through her eyes. He sees foreshortened figures of herdsmen driving their cattle out to pasture, a guard on the crenellated wall, a small fleet of fishing boats crawling past the mill. This elephant skin sea bears no resemblance to the vision of the women in his atelier, who set William’s ships, and Godwinson’s, afloat on waving ribbons of ochre, teal, and ultramarine, rebellious, unpredictable colours. The party escorting Margaret back to Canterbury will be leaving soon, he thinks, and wonders if he should tell her about Margaret, and thinks he will not.

  “You should get some rest. I suppose you were on the road most of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where…? After Saint Eufrosyna’s?”

  “I’m tired, Odo. Ask your officer.” She turns to him with a bashful smile. “To be honest, I don’t rightly know. Isn’t that stupid?”

  He shrugs. “Sometimes places don’t matter, sometimes they’re everything. It just depends.” He moves away from her, toward the table, where he stands with his back to her, fiddling with the camel in its frame. “You may sleep in my bed. I…have matters to attend to before…I’ll send Freya to you.”

  “Freya? Why is she here?”

  “She came with your clothes and things. I decided that when…if…that I’d take you to Normandy.”

  “Oh, I see. I suppose I’m less likely to run away there, where I can’t speak the language and don’t know the roads.”

  “I hoped you would be less likely to run away if you really knew who I was.” He speaks with the voice he uses in debate, courteous, carefully modulated, attractive as thin ice under a canopy of snow. “To know is to love, or so we are taught. The harbour master tells me the tide will be with us late tomorrow afternoon. Your belongings are in my bed chamber.
It’s not as comfortable as…some others you have slept in, but I expect Freya has everything you need.” Pausing at the head of the stairs he adds, “You took very little with you.”

  “Odo?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you save Lady Edith?”

  He does not reply immediately, not because he does not know the answer, but because the answer touches his core in a way even Gytha has not, until now. Because it led him to Gytha, but could as easily snatch her away again. “It was a debt of honour,” he says eventually, then runs down the stairs before she can ask him anything more.

  ***

  It is a relief when he goes, a wrench also, but she scarcely notices the hurt. She has felt as though her heart were a block of ice burning her chest since she left Lady Edith, she does not know how many days ago now. Pushing herself away from the window frame she goes through to his bedroom, her legs shaking, so tired she feels like a ghost. She does not wait for Freya. Removing her cloak and shoes, loosening the laces either side of her gown, she falls onto the bed, not bothering to cover herself or draw the curtains.

  But sleep eludes her. Once she lies down, her body feels so heavy she has the sensation of falling through the mattress. Every time she begins to doze, some noise outside jolts her awake, the sudden cackle of geese, men shouting as a party rides out of the castle, the shrill whinny of a horse. She has bites in all the most inaccessible parts of her body, clamouring to be scratched; she is certain the pallet she has been sleeping on had an infestation. Even after she has closed the bed curtains, too much light seeps through, hammering against her closed lids the way the turning of the mill thuds in her head. The curtains are thin, the mattress filled with a mixture of wool and straw, crunching and crackling whenever she moves. It is a soldier’s bed, almost a priest’s bed, narrow and austere. She cannot lie here as she lies in the bed she thinks of as theirs, enfolded in feathers, hearing nothing but the rhythm of her lover’s sleeping breath in their own world bounded by the blue silk hangings.

  Her lover. When her wind-scalded eyes had picked him out, making his way through the throng of men and horses toward her, her body seemed to cave in on itself. She had not been aware until that moment how her teeth were clenched so hard her head ached, and her hands on the reins gripped like a prize fighters’ fists. He would not have approved. She smiles to herself now as she imagines the lecture he would have given on the sensitivity of horses’ mouths.

  Her mind, like the courtyard itself, was half lit and seething with impressions. Odo’s bare feet in the dust, so close to her horse’s hooves. The glint of his amulet in the open neck of his gown, his nakedness beneath, fur slipping over skin. Shivering as she watched the strong curve of his fingers scratching the mare’s muzzle, she waited for him to lift her out of the saddle, the way he did every time they rode together, and hold her for a moment, kissing her forehead before putting her down. Yet just as she had convinced herself he would do this, as though nothing had changed, he turned on his heel and strode back indoors, Osbern scurrying after him with a smoking candle, extinguished by the wind. Not a word, not a touch.

  Still not a touch, though she thought she had seen the intention in his red-rimmed eyes when he came to stand beside her at the window and his sleeve brushed her little finger. And he has not struck her, though no doubt he feels himself entitled. She wishes she had spoken what was in her heart when she had the chance. She did not mean to be shrewish or evasive. She longed to tell him how it felt to be with him again, how it feels now to lie like a leveret in a form, in the indentation left by his body in the mattress. Inhaling his perfume, remembering his mouth, his hands, his taste, his belly pressed against hers, the luscious, slippery abandonment when he is inside her. It is as though, by some unnameable magic, the vessels of their bodies are fused, and each carries the other’s blood in their veins like an extra humour.

  When he tried to ask her where she had been, why could she not simply answer him? That she has been in a priory, whose monks found her sleeping in the woods when they brought their pigs out to graze. Not in the guest house, packed with Easter pilgrims, palm crosses, and spring lilies pinned to their hats, but in a cell alone, the menstruating woman kept apart for fear of curdling milk or sending dogs mad. The brooding, silent woman at odds with the joy of the Resurrection. She did not know it was Easter Day until she heard the friar charged with waking his brothers for Matins shouting, “Hallelujah! Christ is risen!” outside her door. She remained unaware of any activity beyond the agitation of her own mind, going over and over his words and Edith’s the way an ant dissecting a cockroach treads the same route backwards and forwards, each time carrying what it can, until the prior himself came to her and told her a detachment of soldiers with orders from the Earl of Kent were waiting for her in the courtyard.

  “Forgive me, daughter,” he had said, plucking nervously at the sleeves of his habit, “for revealing your presence here, but they have done a great deal of damage round about and now they are threatening to plunder my church and have the brothers whipped one by one until I surrender you to them. I have exacted the officer’s promise not to harm you.”

  “Don’t worry, Father Prior, the earl’s men won’t hurt me.”

  “I thought not.” She had not, it seemed, travelled far enough from Winterbourne for the prior to be in ignorance of her identity.

  The earl’s mistress. Odo’s lover. All the time they were together in the next door room, the sea below them turning from pewter to pearl to diamonds as the sun rose above the shoulder of the cliffs, a voice inside her was pleading with him to understand what lay beneath the words she spoke. I love you, said the voice, I love you, over and over. Why could she not simply speak the words out loud? Humble herself to say the true, simple thing instead of always taking pride in clever obliquity.

  And now it is too late. He is going to imprison her in Normandy, where she will be completely dependant on him. She must ask him, when he takes Winterbourne back, if he will make a gift from the estate to the priory where she stayed, for she had nothing to give when she left, only the horse she needed to ride and her locket, which she could not part with. She must remember to tell him her jewel case is safe, and that Fulk and Freya had nothing to do with any of it. She hopes he will take care of Freya. She will ask him, in honour of the love he once bore her, to let Fulk and Freya marry.

  A debt of honour? Mentally, she turns away from the phrase with a shrug of incomprehension. Honour is for men, a pretty thing of little practical use.

  ***

  “Madam? Wake up, madam.”

  In the second between the return of consciousness and coming fully awake, she thinks it is him, he has come after all. Then she is aware of being shaken quite roughly by the shoulder. She opens her eyes on Freya, sharp-featured with impatience.

  “His lordship says the ships will be ready to sail in an hour.”

  “An hour?” Gytha sits up, rubbing her eyes and the back of her neck, greasy from her hair which badly needs to be washed. “I can’t be ready in an hour.”

  “Of course you can. The wind and the tide are right and that’s that. His lordship gave orders not to wake you sooner. Your boxes have gone on board so you’ll have to go as you are. I dare say, with a bit of a brush…” Freya looks her up and down with a sigh and a shake of her head. Meekly, Gytha swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands up, keeping silent as Freya brushes her dress, tightens her laces, straightens her garters, and re-does her hair, all to the accompaniment of a sustained tirade against her mistress’ feckless behaviour.

  “That poor man loves you to distraction,” she concludes, stepping back to consider her handiwork. “It’s plain to anyone.”

  “So you think I’ve forfeited my right to fart through silk as you once so beautifully put it?”

  Freya lays hold of a strand of hair which has escaped Gytha’s braid and yanks it into place. Gytha sucks her breath sharply through her teeth, but says nothing.

  “He’s a de
cent man, madam, fair and loyal. You should count your blessings in him.”

  ***

  He is waiting for her in the outer ward, already mounted, alone except for several dogs and a groom holding her roan mare’s head. Looking composed and well rested, he makes her a slight bow, an air of mischief playing about his freshly shaven face. She feels he is somehow mocking her, with his clean shirt and his sable-lined cloak newly brushed. The groom squires her onto her horse then Odo dismisses him with a curt nod.

  “I have something for you.” He does not ask how she has slept. Biting back the urge to remind him she is not to be bought, she smiles and thanks him, and he hands her a tin disk stamped with the image of Saint Christopher bearing the Child on his shoulder.

  “For a safe journey,” he says as she turns the medal about, examining it from all angles. Her smile broadens; it is a poor thing, crudely made, the sort of trinket you might buy from any market miracle seller with his horsehair crosses and Bleeding Heart pin cushions.

  “There is a ribbon if you wish,” he adds, fishing in the money purse he has hanging from his belt. “I hope the colour is to your liking.”

  “Yellow. You have always said it was my colour. Will you tie it on for me?”

  He takes the medallion, threads the ribbon through a small hole stamped near its rim, and maneuvers his horse until he is in a position to fasten the ribbon around her neck, his fingers skimming her flesh as he lifts her couvre chef. She shivers, but he gives no sign of having noticed.

  “Yellow has the virtue of faithfulness. And,” he adds, squinting up at the sky, itself glowing primrose in the remains of the late afternoon sun, “it’s the colour of spring. Hope. April, the month God made man.”

  And jealousy, she thinks, what of jealousy?

  “Come on. Have you ever seen horses being loaded onto ships? It’s usually quite a pantomime.” He sets his spurs lightly to his horse’s flanks and she follows suit, riding beside him down the hill to the harbour.