by Sarah Bower
Nor is he here to be consulted, though Scolland has had letters from him aplenty, recounting his travels. He has been in Normandy with the king, thence to France and Flanders and Rome. Abbess Clothilde, he reports, is mightily pleased with the trophy Agatha brought her, an embroiderer of Opus Anglicanum, even if the girl does appear somewhat sickly. After visiting his cousin, Count Roger, in Sicily, he took ship for Alexandria where he learned to ride a camel, which confirmed his admiration for the horse, and purchased a Septuagint in Greek, though he has yet to find a translator for it. He has seen the great pyramids of the pharaohs glittering in the desert moonlight and found the face of the Sphinx very reminiscent of the cathedral choirmaster at Rochester. He has prayed at the holy sites of Jerusalem, from where he sent Scolland a hair from the Baptist’s beard in a gold reliquary to be placed in his chapel, and had cotton shirts made in Damascus. Once a man has worn cotton next to his skin, he will never want a linen shirt again.
He is travelling, thinks Scolland, like a man trying to escape from himself. “And Aelfgyva is a common enough name in this country,” he adds, remembering the dead child for whom Odo ordered masses to be said. “Perhaps she is not who we think she is. Continue with it, Master, just as it is.”
***
As it turns out, Gytha has plenty of opportunity to make up for her initial hostility to the blind woman, for she and her seeing-boy climb up from Owein ap Llwyr’s compound quite regularly after their first visit. The woman, she finds out, is called Bronwen, and was blinded during childhood by a kick to the head from a mule. The seeing-boy has no name; he is an orphan, as dependant on Bronwen, she says with a bleak laugh, as she is on him.
Sometimes they bring food and wine, or small beer, and sometimes they come with tools over their shoulders and work among Gytha’s vegetables. Lord Owein himself does not come, nor does his son, though one evening she sees a young man with black curls fishing at the pool where she struck her bargain with Owein. She gives him a friendly smile, in response to which he packs up rod and net and moves downstream.
Though the seeing-boy gabbles in Welsh, Bronwen says little in any tongue, but Gytha can feel her listening, as though fine webs of hearing spread out from her ears to enmesh her in the life of the hermitage. She knows the state of the soil from the sound of a spade entering it and the growth of the little sow by the depth of her grunts. When rain is coming it whispers a warning to her, and when Pearl awakes, she is almost as quick to detect her snuffles and whimpers as Gytha herself. So it comes as a surprise to Gytha when, one afternoon near Lammastide, driving her spade into the earth at the very place between two rows of carrots where the afterbirth is buried, Bronwen says,
“Odd name, Pearl. Heathenish,” she adds after a pause.
“It’s her birth stone,” says Gytha, thinking of the pearls, wrapped in a waxed cloth and buried in the earthen floor beneath her bed. “Better than no name at all.”
Bronwen shrugs.
Her remark rankles with Gytha, as her garden matures and the little sow fattens, and Pearl’s dark eyelashes begin to curl. Perhaps Pearl really is no name, chosen on a whim, yet what other kind of name can she give the child if no one is to know who she is? When William dies, when Odo finds them, he can name her. But what did he say? You choose, she’s your child. Well, she has chosen. And if William lives ten more years, or twenty? There are all the poxes and fevers of childhood to be got through; there are plagues, droughts, and freezing winters, and Pearl is not even baptised. One day a man may wish to marry her, but how can he marry a girl without even a name to bring him?
Once she has stopped bleeding, Gytha goes into the chapel to confide her anxieties to the saint, who is sometimes George, sometimes Vigor, and sometimes, improbably, Odo. The cross glows against a backdrop of dark blue, luminous cloud, full of rain. Autumn is coming, she tells him, looking at stalks of honesty poking like fine bones from a vase on the altar, the seeing-boy brought blackberries this morning. It will be very cold up here come winter. How far does Gunhild’s prophecy extend? How safe is our daughter?
She should be properly baptised, cautions the saint. I am a bishop after all, adds Pearl’s father, with his downturned smile.
“Please will you ask Lord Owein to send me a priest,” she says to Bronwen as she and the boy prepare to depart one evening. Bronwen looks surprised, eyebrows arched above her milky, roaming eyes.
“It’s time Pearl was baptised.”
Bronwen nods. “Frost tonight,” she says, sniffing the air. Gytha hugs her daughter close.
***
The priest comes on the following day, mounted on a shaggy pony, sure-footed as a goat, his vestments and phials of oil and salt and holy water strapped to the back of his saddle. He is an old man, who used to give the Sacrament to Dafydd from time to time. He speaks no English, but his walnut face creases into a wide, toothless smile when Gytha addresses him in Latin. That, it seems, is enough to drive from his mind all the questions he might have thought to ask a woman living alone with a baby, two months old at least and still unbaptised, the questions Owein ap Llwyr has forbidden him to ask, though doubtless he will have a few of his own when the priest gets back.
“What will you name her?” he asks when he has finished his preparations. Gytha, still caught up in the memories evoked by the prayers for the ritual of clothing, does not reply immediately.
“Have you chosen?” prompts the priest.
“Oh…yes. She is to be named for her grandmothers. Aranrhod Herleva.”
What harm can it do, naming her Herleva? It is not such an unusual name and besides, she doubts the Bastard boasts much of his mother, the undertaker’s daughter content to open her legs out of wedlock for a man high enough born, when he had Duke Robert of Normandy for his father. And anyway, her child will never be known as Herleva. She is still Pearl.
Taking her from the priest’s arms, she kisses her forehead, tasting the holy oil, and smoothes droplets of holy water from her downy curls with the flat of her hand. The baby fixes her dark blue gaze on her mother’s face and begins rooting for the breast. Gytha feels her milk come in like a blessing, an affirmation of life and hope.
“I’ll take my leave then,” says the priest. “God keep you, daughter.”
“Thank you, Father, and you.”
It’s true what Agatha said, she thinks, drawing a stool up to the fire and unlacing the front of her gown, at Winterbourne, when her life seemed on the verge of unravelling. Love doesn’t die, love endures; it merely changes shape.
Beloved Ghost
The Eve of Saint Vigor and Saint Exupery 1077
He still counts. Nine lengths of linen, four loops in the back of each, two at the top margin and two at the bottom, except the length stretched behind the altar, thirty-two loops, thirty-two hooks nailed into sixteen pillars. Twenty inches high, nearly two hundred forty feet long, incalculable lengths of thread spun from inestimable numbers of fleeces. Eight dyes only, but he observes infinite variations and subtleties of colour because he looks at his tapestry with a lover’s eyes.
The work was completed more than twelve months since, each finished piece then carefully washed and dried before they were stitched together and the borders hemmed. To avert any risk of the dyes running, the wool was not washed, and Odo has noticed dark-edged needle marks and a few places where Agatha’s original charcoal outlines show through the embroidery. He misses no detail, not even the faded, rusty stain of Alwys’ blood, looking as though it has drained from the severed head of some Saxon Holofernes. The hanging was unpacked from the lead-lined box it has been stored in since completion, its folds interleaved with cedar chippings to keep off moths, only this afternoon. Ten and a half years since he first disclosed his vision to Agatha.
Four years, seven months, and a week since he started talking to ghosts. For that is how he thinks of them, Gytha and his daughter. For all he knows they could be dead, but if they are living, he has all the more reason to behave as if they are not.
&nb
sp; “Pardon, Your Reverence,” says the young deacon charged with the responsibility of locking up for the night. He only recognises his bishop, sitting on the steps leading to the high altar, by his robes, for he is new to Bayeux and has not met Odo before. “I didn’t realise anyone was still here.”
“Only me, I think. Give me the keys, and I will lock up. I aim to share a moment of quiet reflection with Our Lady and all these other saints before the service of dedication tomorrow.”
“The cathedral is magnificent, Father,” ventures the deacon cautiously, aware of his bishop’s reputation for a capricious temper, though he looks meek enough this evening, saintly even, the fringe of largely grey hair around his tonsured head like a halo by moonlight, his expression grave almost to mournfulness. The bishop smiles, a smile which does not reach his eyes, although their natural warmth conceals this from the deacon.
“A bride awaiting her husband,” he says, a slight catch in his voice, an intimation of something in his tone which brings, unbidden, to the deacon’s mind the memory of a little girl he used to play with before he was dedicated to the service of God. He clears his throat.
“The hanging, Your Reverence,” he says, because there has been a lot of talk about the hanging in the deacons’ dormitory, about its suitability or otherwise for display in a house of God. “It looks very well.”
“Look at it carefully tomorrow, boy, in daylight. If I were a betting man, I’d wager you’d never seen anything like it before. The Council of Arras exhorted us to use hangings in our churches for the purposes of educating our congregations. So here is the first lesson of my hanging. Remember, it is not what we see but the way we look at it which matters.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Now give me the keys and get yourself to bed.”
“Yes, Father. Good night, Father.”
“God bless you, boy.”
Odo continues to smile into the darkness, tossing the bunch of keys from hand to hand until the boy has gone, shutting the wicket in the great west door quietly behind him, sealing in the curiously sterile silence of a new, unconsecrated church. Everything has been brought from the old cathedral, the gospels and vestments, the mortuary rolls and calendars of saints, the reliquaries like miniature gold and silver palaces with windows made of crystal and precious stones. Yet what had life there seems, in these imposing surroundings, not dead, but waiting for the breath of the Holy Spirit that will come with consecration. The relics of the saints, bone splinters, twists of hair, flakes of dried flesh and threads of martyrs’ garments, the reinterred bones of former bishops and benefactors of the diocese, are all, in Odo’s imagination, sleeping beauties waiting for the kiss of their prince.
Now the boy has gone, he is alone again with his beloved ghost. He puts the keys down on the top step. Turning toward the altar, his fingers seek out the contours of the Magdalene at the right-hand edge of the pieta. He prefers this to looking, to conjure from touch and memory the exact curve of her cheek, her grave, ironic mouth, and the candour of her look, rather than having to settle for cold, white marble which, however beautiful, has an unsatisfying glitter. Even in candlelight it is a poor approximation of all the subtle variations in shade of a woman’s skin. In this midsummer moonlight, it is impossible. But it is what he has.
At first he used to dream about her repeatedly, terrible, vivid dreams from which he would awaken breathless, heart-shaken, lathered in sweat and wasted semen. Profligate, murderer. He punished himself with scourges, ice water baths, prostrations clad only in his shift, stone striking his unruly heart and ungovernable sex through a veil of linen. In time the pain has eased. His heart has not healed, but he has learned to compensate for its wounds, like a man with one eye or a three-legged dog. Sometimes, he is almost content.
“Well,” he says to her, “what do you think? Is it how you imagined it would be? I haven’t overdone it, have I? You know what a magpie I am.” He gazes around the building, its construction thrown into elaborate relief by the light of the full moon pouring through the windows of nave and clerestory, a lattice of silver crisscrossing the expectant space beneath its vaulted ceiling. The light sings, glancing off the gilded scales of the dragon in the chapel of Saint Vigor and the spread, silver wings of the eagle which looks as though it has just this minute come to roost on top of the lectern, firing the hearts of gems, skidding over ivory and mother-of-pearl. The carved and painted faces of saints and angels smile down from the roof, the chevrons decorating the lancets vibrate with colour, viridian, lapis, cardinal red.
Perhaps a little, she tells him, directing his gaze toward certain pieces he couldn’t resist, taken from Holy Trinity at Bosham and one or two other churches close to the heart of Harold Godwinson, but she sounds, in the voice he gives her, absent-minded, like an adult humouring a child while thinking about something else. She really isn’t interested in the gold and silver and precious gems, the statues and frescoes, the high bishop’s chair, even the huge silver gilt corona hanging in the intersection of nave and transept, its arms straddling the high cross of air, or the ornate pulpit, intricate as lace, from which he will preach tomorrow, the feast day of his two holy predecessors, Exupery and Vigor. It will be the greatest sermon of his life, on God’s gift of the Virgin as daughter to Anna and Joachim and the many miracles wrought by her…
Show me the embroidery, she says impatiently.
“The cope I shall wear, embroidered with the Life of Mary, with the Virgin at her lying-in placed so she and her Child will appear exactly between my shoulder blades? The haloes are done, I’m told, by something called underside couching, which will cause them to glitter when I move. My congregation will be dazzled by my back. I wonder what we may read into that? Aren’t you impressed I’ve learnt the name of the stitch? For you.”
Yes, yes, I know it. I have used it many times for just such a purpose. But stop teasing me. You know what embroidery I mean.
Stroking the Magdalene’s cheek one last time with the tip of his finger, he stands up and starts to walk slowly down the nave toward the west door. His left hip pains him a little after sitting for so long. The work has been hung so Edward enthroned at Westminster, in counsel with Harold before his ill-fated voyage to Normandy, appears to the left of the west door. It is stretched between the pillars of the nave, barring the side aisles, across the choir behind the high altar, so that Odo blessing the feast at Pevensey is exactly aligned with a fresco of the Last Supper decorating the eastern end of the apse.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he says.
All the best stories do, replies the ghost.
“Talking to yourself, brother?”
Preoccupied with listening to his ghost, his sight confused by the alternating shafts of light and dark, he has not noticed William come into the cathedral. William has advanced a little way up the nave and is peering closely at the other end of the hanging, which is not exactly opposite the first panel as the Pevensey blessing scene is not central to its length. He is bare-headed, and the moonlight pouring through the rose window picks out the grey in his hair, giving its red a faded appearance.
“You’re starting at the wrong end,” says Odo, crossing the main aisle to join him. William, he notices, is wheezing slightly and smells like an old dog.
“Oh, I don’t know. That’s me, isn’t it?” He points at the enthroned king, the towers of Saint Peter’s abbey church at Westminster behind him, the mirror image of King Edward at the opening of the tale, if you were to ignore the variations in the lower border, where Edward is framed by pairs of dogs and pelicans, but William has flames licking his feet. “This is devilish tricky light to see in. What’s that, some sort of…Splendour of God, flames. You might have glossed over that unfortunate detail.”
“I might, Agatha clearly wouldn’t. This part was done at Saint Augustine’s, after…Agatha had gone home. I gave them instructions to follow her sketches absolutely. I hadn’t seen it myself until earlier today, when they were hanging it. I like it. T
he more adversities, the greater the triumph.”
William gives a sceptical grunt. “You’re thinner,” he says. “What’s your secret?”
Odo makes a dismissive gesture with his hands. “I don’t seem to have the appetite I used to.”
“Fortunate for you. My physician’s got me on a diet. All boiled chicken and lettuces. Enough to drive a man to an early grave. And that’s you?” William has moved onto the next, or former, image, which shows himself standing with Odo kneeling before him, his hands between William’s in the act of homage.
“Touching,” William remarks.
“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” asks Odo, ushering his brother across the aisle.
“Was this Agatha’s notion?” he asks as they reach Harold’s last supper at Bosham, pointing at the little figures of Aesop’s fox and crow in the border below. “Or yours?”
Oh, clever girl, he says to his ghost, you clever girl. “Neither,” he says to William, with an abruptness which diverts William’s attention from the hanging to his brother.
“Ah. You surprise me. For surely here we have Godwinson, the vain and stupid crow, dropping the prize into the waiting jaws of the wily fox, me.”
“Or, the disingenuous and trusting crow being taken advantage of by the ruthless fox.”
“Somewhat like this young woman here. Honestly, Odo, I wonder that you have the audacity to display this in a house of God.” William frowns at one of Margaret’s naked couples.
“The best love stories mingle the earthly and the divine,” comments Odo.
“I wasn’t aware this was a love story.” William fixes a beady look on his brother. “I thought you were done with all that nonsense.”
“Oh, quite chastened. As you said at the time, it’s just like striking your funny bone. But the memory lingers even after the pain has gone. As a warning, perhaps, to be more careful next time. Think of these,” Odo waves a nonchalant hand at the little figures, “as characters in a cautionary tale if you like.”