Needle in the Blood (21 page)

She twists round angrily. “Do you believe a word you’ve just said?”

He gives her a rueful smile. “Well, the bit about locking up seems uncontroversial. As for the rest, think what you like. You and I might not believe it, but other people will, the people who only see my tapestry. We have to be practical. I’m not going back to live obscurely in Bayeux. You’re never going back to Godwinson’s court. The shot in the eye, it’s a myth for the present. It greases the wheels, makes things easier. God aid, he died four years ago. It won’t make a bit of difference to him, or your poor, mad mistress, wherever she is.”

“Or his children?”

“It won’t make any difference to them.” It is plain from his tone he will not entertain any enquiry as to why not. Two years ago, she remembers, rumours circulated for a while that Harold’s elder sons had launched an invasion from Ireland. It was believed they had landed in Wales, but then no more had been heard of them.

“But the truth, my lord…”

“Is what the victors say it is, I’m afraid. Interpretation, Gytha, do not underestimate its importance. Now, I am tired, and I must look at my letters. You may go. You will have an escort back to the castle, and you will please convey my best wishes to my sister and tell her I pray for her recovery.” After a pause, he adds, “As regards Godwinson’s death, tell her…whatever you like.”

With a questioning frown, she sweeps up her cloak to leave, her heels beating a rapid tattoo on the floor. He does not offer his ring to be kissed, and she neither bows nor bids him farewell. Uncertain whether she has won or lost, she has no idea how to conduct herself. All she knows is she has to escape the tricky, stifling atmosphere of the sickroom, to clear her head and cool her blood. Backward and forward her feelings have gone, like the shuttle in a loom, but in the hands of a poor weaver, so now everything is tangled, the design corrupt and impossible to follow.

Odo smiles at her back. She will say nothing to Agatha about the shot in the eye, he is certain of it, for if she did, she would be forced to disclose a great deal more.

***

He tells Osbern he will attend Compline. While Osbern dresses him, he reads his letters; he is determined not to think about Gytha, despite fact that Osbern’s studious disinterest keeps her present to him as though she were still in the room. Sometimes he does confide in Osbern, often enough for Osbern to consider it his right and take offence when his lord is less than open with him. But his confidences are not genuine; they are merely rehearsals of decisions already taken, attitudes already adopted. They are like his public confessions. Whatever he may feel the need to confess about this afternoon is far from clear to him yet; it lies in a murky, unexamined corner of his heart.

There to remain, as he breaks the seal on the letter from Thomas of York. He becomes increasingly bad tempered as he reads, prowling around the room so Osbern has to perform various feats of agility to divest him of his loose gown and persuade him into a clean shirt. Only when he helps Odo on with his chausses does he manage to keep him still, and then with such a poor grace that, fearful of a cuff on the head before he completes the task, he wishes chausses fitted more easily over the heels. Still, God must be thanked for small mercies; a week ago Odo wouldn’t have had the energy for such a display of petulance, and a woman in his bed chamber all afternoon as well. He brushes Odo’s long tunic and hands him his Psalter with a smile of satisfaction.

“Fit for Saint Peter himself, my lord.”

“On the contrary, I feel we’re giving Saint Peter a good run for his money. I think we shall go home tomorrow, Osbern. I feel so much stronger. And the king has business needing my attention. Make the necessary arrangements.”

“Certainly, my lord.”

“And Osbern.” He stoops to pick up Agatha’s crumpled drawing from the floor and tosses it onto the brazier where it flares up briefly before crumbling into ash. “Get this room cleared up. I want that revolting sweet wine out of here and the physician’s instruments of torture returned to him. He’ll have no more of my blood for now.”

“No, my lord.”

***

“Such a beautiful, beautiful night,” remarks Gytha and as she and Leofgeat make their way back through the town, two men in Odo’s livery preceding them. The moon is full, sharp-etched in a cold, cloudless sky. An O-shaped moon, an Odo moon, open as a mouth for kissing. Beneath it, Canterbury lies bewitched, still and blue and silver.

“Cold.” Leofgeat shivers. “There’ll be a frost.” She shifts her basket to her other arm. “My back aches.”

“Give me the basket.” Though it is heavy with stone jars of preserved plums from the Archbishop’s excellent orchard, and a blood pudding sent by Lord Odo to his sister to aid her recovery, Gytha swings it effortlessly from one hand to the other, striding out to its rhythm as though pulled along by its weight. She starts to sing. She wants to dance. Her bones are full of music. She is reprieved, reborn, a new life beginning, lit by this bright, fat moon. “Look at the man in the moon,” she says, “grinning like a jackanapes.”

“Just listen to my stomach rumble,” Leofgeat complains, “and supper will be long over by the time we get back.”

***

Odo enters the chapel late, attended by two of his pages and Juno. Having read Thomas’ letter, he is in no mood for appeasement and if he wants to take his dog into church, he will. She attracts no more than a cursory glance, however, from some of the younger novices whose powers of concentration are not yet well developed and for whom Archbishop Lanfranc’s exalted guest is a boundless source of lurid speculation. As the hound is just a hound, and the pages boys much like themselves, and the Bishop of Bayeux has neither horns on his head nor a tail behind, they quickly lose interest.

The congregation is singing the first of the psalms, the men’s and boys’ voices in harmony, swelling to fill the incense fragrant arch of the nave.
If
incense had a sound
, thinks Odo,
this would be it
. The plangency of the men’s voices makes the air tremble in ecstasy, the purity of the boys’ soars to heaven. And hears his own voice, faltering, broken, then gaining in confidence, merged with the rest.
Commune with your own heart and be still.

Compline is a short service. Having missed the start of it, he does not feel ready to leave the chapel after the Dismissal and, as the rest of the congregation makes its way to the dormitory for the first sleep of the night, he goes forward to kneel at the altar. No questioning eye catches his; he is not a member of the order nor bound by its rule. His two pages, having received no signal from him, hover at the west door until Lanfranc puts an arm round each, like a hen gathering her chicks, and ushers them out. Juno, not so easily influenced, lies at the altar rail with her head on her outstretched paws, beside her kneeling master.

He does not pray, not in words, but, in the stillness of the Great Silence that will now hold the abbey till Matins, he tries to offer his day to God. He starts with what he can see when he lifts his head and opens his eyes, the rood screen carved with scenes from the Passion, leading the eye up to the tall east window whose stained glass shows Christ coming in glory, though it is a muted and human sort of glory now that night has fallen and only moonlight illuminates it. The acolytes have snuffed out the candles; there is no light in the church but the red pinpoint glow of the lamp burning before the Host. Odo kneels back on his heels, head bowed, hands loosely clasped in front of him, and waits for the cool wings of God’s compassion to brush him in the darkness.

But it does not come. All there is in the day now ending is confusion. A woman tries to kill him, and he responds by making love to her, and then shies away like some silly virgin unable to make up his mind. Was that God’s intervention? Should he give thanks that he has been turned aside from sin? But fornication is only a venal sin, and besides, neither he nor the woman is committed to anyone else. And besides, if God had intended him to be celibate, surely he would not have given him John. God knows better than most the seductive agony of having a son to love. So what? Guilt about Godwinson? Ridiculous. He sees again the man’s great hands with their freckled backs lying on the gold filigree reliquaries beneath their embroidered silk shrouds and feels sick.

“Today is the Feast of Saint Agnes the Virgin, who resisted the blandishments of Rome to dedicate her life to Christ. Do you meditate on Saint Agnes, my son?” Lanfranc. The music of his Latin, the flat of his hand resting lightly between Odo’s shoulder blades, the smell of his unwashed, old man’s body. He does not answer immediately; he has lost his voice somewhere among all the other voices clamouring inside him. Eventually he says, “Meditation is too strong a word for it, I think, Father. I am simply waiting for things to make sense.”

“Is it not enough for you that your life makes sense to God? Can’t you trust him even that far?”

“To be honest, Father, He hasn’t given me much cause.”

“That is where faith comes in, Odo.”

“And if the consequences of faith call faith itself into question? If, in doing what I understood to be my Christian duty, I have fallen from grace?”

“Then your understanding is mistaken.”

“So easy to say, Father. We priests, we say these things to our flock every day. We never let them see our struggles, though, do we? Even in confession we hide behind the form of words.”

“I will allow, Odo, that in your case the way has been made harder by another’s intervention. You should have been allowed to complete your education. Find your vocation in your own time, as I have no doubt you would have done.”

“‘What if, is an absorbing question, but not a very useful one. I have a more practical matter I should like to discuss with you before I leave tomorrow.”

“I rejoice in your recovery, my son.” A clipped, business-like note entering his voice, the edges of his words hard and clearly defined. He cannot allow himself to be seduced for long by the satisfactions of giving priestly counsel; he is an Archbishop now. “Come to me after Chapter in the morning, and I shall be glad to hear you. Now I shall leave you to your prayers. I do recommend you give some thought to Saint Agnes.”

“Goodnight, Father. God grant you rest.”

“And you, my son.”

***

God grants Odo an imperfect rest, filling his mind with Thomas’ complaints, William’s summons to him to join him in arms as soon as possible to put down an uprising in the Fens; and with half waking dreams of Gytha that seem to brand the shape of her lips and eyes and breasts into his flesh, leaving his blood clinging in his veins like hot oil and his nerves so raw he feels as though his skin has been flayed. Eventually, as dawn sifts through gaps in the shutters, he rouses Osbern and sends him to the well for cold water in which he douses himself repeatedly until the fire in his body is extinguished and his mind is clear. He dresses soberly and, wrapped in his sable-lined cloak, lets himself out of the house.

He walks in the Archbishop’s garden, the cold air scouring his lungs, among frost-blackened roses with a few scarlet hips still clinging to their branches. He pauses to pick a quince from a leafless bush and tosses the golden fruit from hand to hand as he walks, pearly mirrors of honesty catching and breaking against the hem of his cloak as he passes.

***

Lanfranc also rises before Prime and summons his personal servant to the bath house to help him remove the hair shirt. It is a slow and painful process. The rough hair-cloth has delayed the healing of the wounds he inflicted on himself by scourging, so that the shirt is now embedded in a sticky mass of blood and putrescence and has to be peeled away from the Archbishop’s tender skin like a plaster. Though the servant winces and groans, and has occasionally to turn away from the mess of mortified flesh, Lanfranc, naked but for the shirt and braced against the clammy bath house wall, neither moves nor utters a sound.

As his servant washes and binds his wounds, his mind is fixed on the coming interview with Odo. He has a shrewd idea what direction it will take, for which he is much indebted to one of the cellarer’s boys, who overheard a member of Lord Odo’s household talking about letters from Thomas of York and saw fit to report his intelligence. God has rewarded Lanfranc’s abasement with Odo’s recovery; now he must substitute soft wool for hair-cloth, politics for prayer, and resume his temporal mission. The pain is transitory.

***

They stand in the master mason’s tracing house on the site of Lanfranc’s new cathedral. A chilly breeze slices through the unglazed windows, setting up dust devils in the corners and swirling the men’s skirts around their legs. Odo draws his cloak closer, the fur silky against his neck and jaw. Lanfranc, clad in a white habit embroidered in gold thread, shivers. Odo ignores him; he appraises the older man’s solid, square body and is satisfied that Lanfranc has no need of his pity or his cloak. The masque of frailty is merely the opening performance in the play they are about to enact.

“Let me show you the designs for the corbels in the nave,” says Lanfranc, riffling through the heap of dust-covered parchments on the long worktable beneath the windows. “I find them most amusing. You see? Caricatures of members of our community here. You’ll recognise Brother Thorold. And the Prior. And this, I fear,” pointing a finger whose joints are swollen with rheumatism, “is me.”