Needle in the Blood (37 page)

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 domestic 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.

They are celebrating the purification of the Blessed Virgin, sealing her virginity in white beeswax and fire. Yet, Agatha asks herself, what are candles compared to the unclouded innocence of this girl, enclosed in the atelier like a virgin martyr in a reliquary? And suddenly it becomes clear to her what she must do. Guerin will not touch her; no one will touch her. Agatha will give her to God. In the crucible of that milk white body the gold of her maidenhead will be tested and will not be found wanting. She is too good, too pure for human love in all its messy absurdity.

Margaret loves Candlemas, with its sense of beginnings, the presentation of the new baby in the temple, the ploughing and sowing begun at Epiphany, a foretaste of spring in the light of all the candles burning in church and among the graves, a light of hope between black earth and lowering sky. This is when she remembers her brothers, not in the November depths of All Souls but now, when the days have begun to lengthen again, with hope. She knows nothing happens in vain; it is all part of God’s plan and God, like Sister Jean, knows the order of the narrative, the purpose of everything in it from the humblest mongrel looking for scraps under the table to the vertiginous loneliness of the king confronting history. God and Sister Jean understand, so Margaret does not have to.

The priest intones the opening line of the anthem, and they begin to move forward, following the choir, around the chapel, across the outer ward and through the gate. The cemetery lies beneath a large oak on the far side of the flat expanse of grass separating the castle from the town, where the lists had been set up for Odo’s birthday celebrations. The air is dry and icy, almost windless so the candles can burn unshielded. A thin layer of snow crunches beneath their feet, unmarked till now by anything but the delicate tracery of bird tracks. When Odo’s hanging is finished, resolves Agatha, she will take Margaret back to Falaise with her. She will be safe there, in the house of women, where Alwys can also be cared for. She will be saved from the world’s corruption.

***

A thin, biting rain has begun to fall. Freya hands Thecla to her father, who tucks the child inside his sheepskin jerkin. Thecla laughs, an exultant bubble of sound rising above the prayers intoned by the priest, and one of the nuns briefly raises her head to smile at the little girl. Shivering, Gytha pulls her hood closer around her face. Her fingers clutching the candle are stiff and aching with cold, but it is more than the wind and rain that has made her shiver. She has a disturbing sensation of being watched, a strange gaze raking the back of her neck, setting her hair on end. It is a relief when the procession starts to wind back among the graves toward the church, forming a queue as each one pauses to cross himself, or kiss the image of the Christ child held up in greeting by a member of the clergy standing at the church door. The queue moves slowly, shuffling forward with heads bowed, the rain soaking through clothes, mud seeping under the soles of shoes. It seems as though they are not moving at all. Behind her, Thecla begins to whine, then to bawl, which seems to trigger a general murmuring of discontent.

When her turn finally comes, she sees what the problem is. Instead of merely bowing to the image, or brushing it briefly with their lips, the worshippers have been kneeling to receive the priest’s blessing, each small delay shunting into the next, slowing and sometimes stopping the line. Well, she will not. She recoils from pictures of the Child, mocking her with His chubby knees and rosy cheeks, and is annoyed when the priest takes a step toward her, blocking her way into the building. Raising her head to defy him, she finds herself looking into the laughing eyes of her lover, her sadness and irritability purged in a golden glint of mischief. Aware of the people queuing behind her in the rain, she lets her gaze linger for the briefest of moments, but it is enough to take in everything, to soak him up as though she is a sponge, every detail familiar and loved, yet new as the spring about to begin. In his haste to prepare this surprise for her, he has not found time to remove his spurs which poke, muddy and incongruous, from beneath his alb. She frowns at his feet, and he grins.

“I rode all night,” he whispers as she lowers her hood to receive the kiss of peace, his lips brushing her cheek like a wingbeat. She steps back, but her gaze remains locked to his.

“What about the king’s charter?” She tries to speak without moving her lips, so her words come out flat-edged as knife blades.

He shrugs dismissively. “Oh, there was nothing wrong with it. He was just…being a king.” Enunciating clearly now, in the priestly voice which carries back above the wind to the rest of the congregation waiting among the graves, he continues, “‘Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many.’” He holds the painted panel at waist height, challenging her to kneel if she is to kiss the Child.

Well, this is as good a way to begin as any. The priest in his spurs, the whore on her knees in her widow’s weeds, the painted image of the perfect child between them. As she kisses the Child, the wood seems to dissolve at her touch, moulding itself to the flesh behind, beneath his sacramental robes, the bowl of his pelvis cupping his sex in its nest of dark blond hair, the skin, taut, white, mapped with blue veins. Suddenly the sense of being watched, of being somehow found out, once again creeps up her back.
They know
, she thinks,
they all know; if we stood here as naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden we could not make it any clearer.
She rises too quickly, the blood rushing to her head, suffusing her cheeks, making her stumble. Odo takes her arm to steady her, letting the picture drop at an angle from his other hand, where it hangs between them, a corner digging into her thigh. He makes a play of stifling a yawn.

“I’m ready for my bed,” he murmurs, then steps back to let her into the church where the nuns have begun yet another repetition of the canticle of Zachary.

***

Within days, everything changes. Although he rode from Gloucester accompanied only by a couple of men at arms, to travel fast, it is not long before Osbern joins them in a chaos of noise, men shouting, harness jangling, hooves clattering over the little bridge where the stream crosses in front of her gate. The hall seethes with dogs and soldiers, clerks and squires, all jostling for places at table and hearthside sleeping plots. The silver bathtub is hung from a beam in the kitchen building, where people tend to strike their heads against its bevelled edges; a cut or a linear bruise on the forehead rapidly assumes the status of a Winterbourne brand. The great bed is set up in the bower, leaving scarcely room for a linen chest or a brazier, let alone Odo’s clothes and books. There are gifts for the babies, rattles, balls, an articulated wooden tumbling man whose joints click as he somersaults over a stick. One day, Odo goes out and reappears with a puppy, the smallest Gytha has ever seen, tucked into his hauberk. The French name for this type of dog, he says, is terrier, because it excels at digging rabbits, foxes, even badgers, out of the earth. They quickly discover it also likes biting the backs of ankles and sleeping in Leofwine’s crib.

He is never still, pacing around the hall, cracking cardamoms between his teeth, describing great gestures with his ringed hands as he elaborates his plans for her estate. The house must be pulled down and replaced with something more modern. Two storeys, private apartments for himself and Gytha, an integral kitchen with a chimney. A chapel. Bigger stables, a mews. There must be a grain store closer to the mill. Do these English have no concept whatsoever of efficiency? And here, look, they have planted mancorn when it would be better for wheat. He goes on until she feels as disorientated as Thecla and Leofwine when he plays his hectic games with them, tossing them into the air until they scream with terror and delight, pursuing Thecla, who is beginning to crawl, among the legs of tables and chairs, growling like a bear in a forest.

“But I like everything the way it is,” she protests gently when they are alone at night, winding her fingers in among the hairs on his chest.

“It could be so much better. I want it to be perfect. Our perfect place.”

“Its imperfections endear it to me,” she replies, and he folds her in his arms and kisses her, knowing she is no longer talking about Winterbourne.

She has spent her life confined to small spaces, to single rooms and low roofs, cells, a narrow bed, a linen chest, a locket containing four twists of hair. Now she is mistress of an estate, a world whose boundaries she can only just encompass in a day’s ride. Odo has enlarged her life immeasurably, and yet he remains larger. He has confided the secrets of his heart and body in her but is as elusive and unpredictable as the gryphons and unicorns everyone can describe but no one ever seems to have seen.

“I’m the luckiest man in England,” he tells her sometimes, but the look on his face when he says it is often complicated; remote, wistful, hungry.

Saint Agatha’s Eve to the Annunication 1072

Two days after Candlemas, a messenger from Christ Church arrives for Agatha between Terce and Sext. Archbishop Lanfranc wishes to consult her regarding the setting up of a daughter house for women. He craves the opportunity to seek the counsel of an educated and intelligent woman with long experience of living by the Rule. He is obliged to travel to London the following day, to hear pleas in his court at Saint Mary le Bow, and therefore hopes Sister Jean-Baptiste will be free to spend an hour with him this afternoon. Their conversation will give him food for thought on the dreary journey to London.