Needle in the Blood (46 page)

“Meg.” Waiting for Margaret to lower her side of the wattle oblong to the floor, she then slips her arm through the girl’s and draws her aside. “Fulk has gone this morning,” she tells her. “He will be back in a few days with news of your brother.”

***

“Gone?” Margaret repeats, collapsing onto an upturned half barrel the smith keeps outside his forge, to sit on when he needs the cooler air.

“The day after the Annunciation, apparently,” says Gytha. “Brother Thorold couldn’t persuade him to stay. But Fulk only just missed him; he can’t have gone far, especially if he’s still not completely recovered.”

Margaret looks up, naked trust beaming from her broad face. “That’s true.” Then she frowns, her features folding in on themselves. “But if he isn’t at Christ Church, how can I go after him? Sister Jean will never let me.”

As the two women consider this problem in silence, Alwys appears in the yard, carrying Leofwine on her hip, Thecla trailing from the end of her stump as though the best adults were designed with stumps for little girls to hang on to. They meander across the yard at Thecla’s pace, Alwys with her face turned up to the buttermilk sun pouring over the jumbled roofs of the outbuildings whose shadow holds Margaret and Gytha in its depths. Margaret wonders if Alwys would have any more idea who Tom is than he would of her. How their family has unravelled as Lord Odo’s embroidery takes its inexorable shape.

“I think she might be persuaded,” says Gytha, “if you don’t mind stretching the truth a little.”

Glancing from the empty dish of her sister’s face to Gytha, whose features seem to be fighting for space in their pinched, heart shaped frame, Margaret is certain she does not object to tearing the truth to shreds if it will give her the chance to save Tom. “Tell me,” she says.

“Let’s walk.” Gytha takes Margaret’s arm and guides her around to the south side of her house where vegetables and herbs grow in strips and squares divided by plank walks, rocking and wobbling beneath their feet exactly as they do beneath Sister Jean’s stout hide shoes when Margaret, a short time after listening to Gytha’s plan, asks Sister Jean if she can speak privately with her, and Sister Jean suggests a walk in the garden.

“So, Fulk has brought you news of your brother?”

“Yes, Sister. He is fully recovered, Saint Dymphna be praised. Brother Thorold told me he had gone home, though he had no memory, apparently, of my visit to him, and that he has since sent a gift of preserves to the abbey with a message that our father is dangerously ill and that God’s providence worked through Brother Thorold to enable him to be reunited with his son before he dies. Sister, please may I go to him? I know it will make difficulties for you, but surely you can bring in someone to replace me for the time being. Besides, I cannot work well if I am thinking about my father dying.” God forgive her, but the lies come so easily, bubbling up inside her like a brook of clear water through rock.

Agatha surveys the garden, its rows of crinkled spring cabbages and beanstalks entwining bowers of hawthorn and hazel. The rosemary is dotted with pale blue stars of blossom and chives nod heads of tousled purple. New sage leaves sprout silver green among the brittle, frostbrowned remains of last year’s growth.
Lily of the valley
, she thinks, that will be out in the cloister garden at Saint Justina’s by now. As the end of her task draws closer, time seems to move more and more slowly, so that her hopes of one day returning to Falaise, to the order of the community and the immutability of its stone buildings, seem as remote as ever. What must it be like for a young woman who has just learned her father is dying?

“Of course you must go,” she says. “You will have an escort from among the men Lord Odo is sending us. Will two weeks be sufficient? I will expect you back by the second Sunday after Easter, or you must send word by then if your father is still sick.”

“Thank you, Sister.” She smiles at Sister Jean, at her powdery skin crazed with fine lines like a sheet hung to dry without being properly shaken out, at her shrewd, blue eyes and her clean, deft hands. Excitement fizzes and ferments inside her as she thinks of her plan. She may never see Sister Jean again. One thing is for certain: if she finds Tom and succeeds in taking him home, she is never going to embroider another stitch as long as she lives. Not even shirts for her husband when she gets one.

***

At the beginning of Holy Week, a party of men from the garrison at Canterbury arrives at Winterbourne to escort Lord Odo’s tapestry back to its rightful place. Of course it is sensible, as the danger of contagion has passed, thinks Agatha, of course the work will go better in the light of the great windows, where smoke and sparks are sucked up a chimney and the women can sleep soundly in their own beds instead of chattering all night in the den of cushions they have made around Gytha’s hearth. Yet it is comfortable here, a chaotic peace prevails among children and piglets, removed from the iron grid of watch changes and chapel bells ringing the hours. And when they leave, it will be without Margaret.

Of course they must go, Gytha tells herself, as she must. She has already made a bundle of the few items she will need – an extra gown, a change of linen, the small leather pouch containing her bronze locket and her white rosette, all rolled in her second best cloak which is perfectly serviceable. She has removed her jewel case from beneath the bed linen piled in the chest at the foot of her…
his
bed, and hidden her bundle there instead. The jewel case, smelling faintly of camphor, his mother’s ring added to the treasures it contains, is now stowed behind a loose brick at the back of the bread oven, a place decreed as a
secretum
should the household ever be under threat. Briefly she wondered if she should take one of her necklaces or bracelets with her, as a dowry offering to the nuns, but she will not. She has no wish to contaminate the next stage of her life with what has gone before, no intention of incurring any further debt to Odo. She will take the roan mare, simply because it would raise suspicion if she left the house on foot or on any other mount, but she will have a groom from Saint Eufrosyna’s bring her straight back again as soon as she arrives.

***

Margaret is the first to leave, mounted on a jennet which seems too small for her between the tall horses of her escort. They are crammed into a corner of the courtyard, now filled once again by the two great carts, serviced by a revolving stream of men carrying boxes, frames, trestles, stands out of the hall, then returning empty-handed for more. Soon the hall will be empty, with no more trace of the embroidery than the body of a dead moth dismembered by ants.

At the jennet’s head stands Freya, with a basket of provisions, and Sister Jean, handing up last-minute advice on the proper conduct of a young woman travelling unchaperoned at this busy time of year when pilgrims are making their way to the great religious centers for Easter. Margaret nods each time Sister Jean pauses in her speech, she accepts Freya’s basket with an eager smile, but her eyes rove the yard until they light on Gytha, standing at the gate.

“Good luck,” she mouths as the little party rides past her, taking the same direction as Odo had done, and holds up her right hand, the middle and index fingers crossed. For a blessing, for the triumph of earth over water, life over oblivion.

***

By early afternoon, the loading of the carts is complete, covers lashed down, the oxen, to the accompaniment of much whooping and hooting, shouldering, shoving, warning flicks of the whip above broad, pink muzzles, backed into the shafts. In response to the women’s complaints about the hardness of the benches running down either side of the wagon in which they are to travel, Gytha has invited them to help themselves to the cushions spread around the hearth.

“There are plenty more,” she reassures them, returning Agatha’s curious gaze without blinking. “His lordship will probably never notice they have gone. At any rate, they will be restored to him in Canterbury.”

As one of the guards bolts the tailgate behind the last of them, Agatha mounts her mule, eschewing the offer of a leg up from another of the soldiers. Watching, Gytha is reminded that she is only a year older than Odo, a woman in the prime of her life, yet shrivelled by her self-imposed drought.
In time
, she thinks, both relieved and disbelieving,
I shall become the same, sexless, invisible. Free. If I can find the strength for it.

“Gytha…” Speaking quietly, Agatha leans down from the saddle so Gytha can hear her. Gytha’s face is composed to receive the thanks due to a hostess, a modest smile, a distance in the eyes measuring the extent to which she is thinking, no longer of her guests, but of clearing up after them. “Love changes, that is all, it is a shape shifter.” The composition crumbles, plaster flaking from a damp wall in a bathhouse. “The challenge lies in continuing to recognise it.”

Gytha reaches up to take both Agatha’s dry, bird-boned hands in hers. “Goodbye, Sister.”

The silence in the hall seems much greater than the space it has to occupy. The sounds of daily life—one of the children crying in the yard, chickens clucking, the cloying persistence of a blackbird’s song, the byre door banging in the wind (how many times has she asked Fulk to see to it?)—drop into it like pebbles into a deep lake. The floor strewing is crushed in a repeating rectangular pattern, as though the trestles are still there but have become invisible. How can nothing take on shapes? Embroidery shapes, Meg shapes, Agatha shapes? The maimed form of the flirtation between Emma and Turold, the courting dance of two birds with broken wings, cut short by Odo’s order to Turold to accompany him to Winchester. Love shapes. Odo’s shape.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the empty hall, but, struck dumb with grief, it gives nothing back. She crosses the yard to her bower, intending to make herself ready for her own departure, but finds herself instead lying down on the bed, its mattress now worn into unfamiliar contours by the sleeping twists and turns of Agatha and Judith. She bleeds heavily, with pain balanced like a burning stone in the bowl of her pelvis, as though her body is still purging itself of the accumulation of humours dammed up in her during the time when she did not bleed at all. Drawing up her knees, curling herself around the precious ache, which means she is free, yet can still be caught, she closes her eyes, tells herself she is merely gathering her strength for her journey. The scent of rosemary and sandalwood is in the air, light and distinct as a distant note of music.

When her eyes open they are hot and sore, as though she has been weeping, yet dry. So dry. Looking at her eyes, she sees dark stones, salt scratched, tossed up above the tideline. Then she looks at what her eyes are watching. Flames. Orange fingers, blue tongues, licking, caressing, probing, making love to the figure of a man. A tonsured man with familiar hands. His hands speak, they remonstrate with the fire, they soothe it and mould it until it goes to sit on the hearth and glowers like a whipped dog with acrid breath. Then the man laughs.
Do what you will
, he gasps between guffaws.
After all, I am only made of wool
. She must have slept for an hour at least, to judge by the angle of the buttery sunlight falling through the open bower door when she wakes. Thoughts jostle her, pushing her off the bed before she has a chance to order their clamour. What time is it? Will there still be enough daylight to see her safely to Saint Eufrosyna’s? Her bundle? Check. Still where she put it, at the bottom of the linen chest. The jewel case? Let them guess. Surely they will guess. They will not think…he would not believe her capable of theft.

Damn him, oh, damn him. When she thought of burning the embroidery, what stayed her hand was the thought of so many years of hard work, such an investment of skill, being destroyed. Not Odo’s story, but the stories between, the Fables, Alwys’ blood, Judith’s plough horse. What she believed she had envisioned, making her shudder with revulsion, were shipbuilders, seed sowers, cooks, men carrying dogs into the sea, soot blackened and curling at the edges, frayed, distorted, silenced. Yet all along, her most deep-rooted fear had been the fear of burning Odo. However late it is, she must go. Now.

***

Fulk has made a better job of teaching her to ride than he believes. Once clear of Winterbourne, she kicks the little roan into a gallop and manages to keep her seat even when the mare breaks her stride and gathers herself to jump a tree which has fallen across the track leading up to the summer pastures. She climbs the hill, following the path of the stream, letting the mare slow to a walk as the way grows steeper. This is not the direct route to the convent, but she needs time to compose herself after her disturbed sleep and heart-in-the-mouth departure, saddling the mare herself with fumbling fingers, leading her out of the wicket giving straight onto the sheep pasture behind the house to avoid being seen.

Her spirits begin to lift at the antics of the lambs, the sight of clusters of violets and primroses studding the stream’s banks, the songs of skylarks bubbling up through bright blue air. He has played her like a fish, letting her run then reeling her in, but this time is different; this time she will escape. She can feel the surge of the sea in her veins, see it sparkle in the grass. From the top of the hill, facing east, with the evening sun warm on her back, she can almost smell it, almost glimpse the flat, mud-silvered, oyster-crusted shores of her childhood. As the roofs of the convent, green gold thatch and dark slates shot through with gleams of lead, come into view in the valley bottom, just where the stream now rushing down the hill beside her widens and slows enough to accommodate a mill, she starts to sing. A ditty her mother used to sing to her, whose beat she fits to the rhythm of the mare’s sway-backed downhill jog. It was nonsense to her ears, though her mother told her it was in the language of the Celts and had a meaning for those prepared to hear. Well, she will hear nothing but English from now on; she has had her fill of foreign tongues.