Needle in the Blood (5 page)

Opening the narrow gate, she slips from the alley into Lady Edith’s back court and squats behind the moult house to take a piss, grabbing a handful of straw to clean between her legs. She cannot enter Lady Edith’s presence still sticky with Norman spendings. As she rises and straightens her gown, she hears a clatter of hooves and harness, and voices. Men’s voices. French voices. She shakes her head. She must be mistaken, her ears still full of the hot, panting breath of the soldiers, playing tricks on her. She is exhausted, wanting nothing more than to warm herself beside the fire in her lady’s company, to tell her tale then drowse with a cup of mulled wine while her clothes steam gently dry and someone picks out sad tunes on a lute. But the voices come again, a string of words, a sudden bark of laughter. Harness jangling. A splash. She will have to get away from here.

And the family of the dead woman and child? The wounded left lying in the square? For they will have been left; on Senlac Ridge the Bastard gave no thought to the English dead and injured. Those whose houses have been burned or pulled down to make firebreaks, their bowls and drinking horns scattered in the street, looms and spinning wheels and children’s toys smashed for kindling? Can they get away? Besides, where can she go? This is her home now; she belongs to her mistress body and soul. Whatever the Bastard has in store for Lady Edith, that is Gytha’s fate also. She must go on, find what she will find. Crossing the yard, dizzy with the flutter and jolt of her heart in its bone cage, she pushes cautiously at the rear door to the hall.

She need not have feared anyone would notice her. The hall is in uproar, Norman soldiers swarming over its treasures like ants at a picnic. Rolled tapestries, jewel chests, sacks clanking with plate and silverware are being carried out into the main courtyard by a procession of men wearing green tabards over their mail, decorated with golden wolves, heads lowered, tails straight behind them like dogs on a scent. Two wrestle with the ungainly bulk of King Harold’s great chair. Neither Lady Edith nor any of her women are anywhere to be seen. Nothing but men, armed, spurred, some with blood-streaked faces, calling out to one another in voices harsh with greed and contempt, sudden explosions of derisive laughter as they hold gowns up against themselves, pursing their lips and wiggling their hips like tarts. Like me, Gytha realises, with an uprush of loathing and horror for what she has done.

All the lamps and candles have been lit, but remain untended, puddling oil and tallow onto the polished surface of the great oak table, too heavy to move, she supposes, or doubtless they would have their great, grimy paws on that too. Tapped barrels drip wine and ale; split grain sacks spill their contents among the floor rushes; a pair of hounds play tug o’ war with a venison haunch. The smoky glare has transformed the hall, Gytha’s home for the only happy time of her life since childhood, into a vision of hell. But then, hell is all she deserves now.

And in the midst of it all, Odo of Bayeux, pacing up and down trailed by a wake of scribes and page boys, a grey brachet with anxious, yellow eyes close at his heel, dictating letters in a dizzy mix of English, Latin, and French, snaking and swooping from one to the other with diabolical ease, describing extravagant gestures with his jewelled hands as he speaks. Once again, Gytha is reminded of a mummer. Is he so vain, so assured of his own importance, that he believes the world his stage? He looks briefly toward the door where she is standing, peering around its edge. For a second he seems to be looking directly at her, and she is resentful of how desperately tired he looks, with honey brown eyes from which everything appears blanked out, every spark extinguished. A look like that should be the prerogative of the vanquished.

Then she panics, but instead of retreating from the wedge of light falling through the open doorway, she freezes. He must see her, he is scarcely ten paces away, and yet he does not. The Devil knows what he does see, but it isn’t her.

“
Fermez la
,” he says to no one in particular, with a slight shiver and a weary wave of his hand toward the door. As one of his attendants hurries to do his bidding, Gytha snaps back into reality and slips away, back across the yard and out into a narrow lane leading down between Lady Edith’s compound and the rear wall of the priory hospice to the main street. The priory is the place to go; the prior will know what to do, and she will be safe there. She can rest overnight and decide what her next step should be in the morning. She is wet and worn out, cold to her bones, with nothing in her mind but a longing for somewhere warm and dry.

Emerging from the lane, her way is blocked by a covered cart. More of the bishop’s loot, no doubt, but no, she can hear voices, women’s voices, low and anxious, then a sudden cry, piercing, anguished.

“His heart! Where is his heart?” A slap. Some French. Gytha shrinks back against the hospice wall. Then the unmistakable boom of Skuli, whose malformed spine has deepened his chest into a kind of sounding box so his voice echoes around inside it.

“You take your hands off her, you ugly Norman c…” Silence. Peering around the edge of the wall, Gytha sees Skuli sink to his knees in the muddy wheel ruts, hands clutched to his chest as though in passionate prayer, except that the haft of a Norman pike protrudes between them. As he falls forward, his killer kicks him.

“
Cochon
,” he spits before turning his attention to the gaggle of women clustered beside the cart, herded together by two more Norman soldiers with weapons drawn.

“His heart!” Again that anguished wail from Lady Edith. Gytha starts forward out of the shadow of the wall. The soldiers’ backs are turned. They do not see her, but Edith does, and for a second her eyes clear. She shakes her head, so slightly it might easily be mistaken for a tremor of fear or cold, flicks one hand at Gytha as though wafting away a troublesome insect, mouths a single word: “No.”

She has gone too far. One of the soldiers throws a quick, sharp glance over his shoulder. Holding her breath, Gytha steps back against the wall, putting her foot down as slowly as she dare, toe to heel, like dancing. It seems to take forever.

“
A qui parles toi
?” growls the soldier.

“The king, of course.” Edith gives an inane giggle.

The soldier shrugs. “
Foue comme une hase
,” he says to his companion, making a circular motion with his hand beside his temple. Then, “In,” he says in English, prodding Trudy, who is nearest to him, with the point of his pike. She screams, echoed by one or two others. The women cluster around Edith, who stands her ground. The soldier shrugs, leans his pike against the tailgate of the cart, then picks up Trudy and bundles her inside. At this, Edith holds out her hand for assistance, almost as though inviting her captor to walk her in to dinner, and climbs onto the back of the cart followed by the rest of her women. For a second, Gytha’s heart is empty of everything but love and admiration for her mistress, the way she keeps her dignity intact, snatching a last, small victory from this catastrophic defeat. Then the soldiers close and bolt the tailgate, one of them slapping it twice with the flat of his hand to signal the carter the women are all aboard.

Whatever Lady Edith ordered, Gytha cannot simply let them go like this, dragged off to whatever fate Bishop Odo has in store for them like a load of pigs to market. Yet she is Lady Edith’s woman, sworn to serve, not to question, though it is more her nature to question than to serve. As she struggles to force some order into her thoughts, to stop the maypole dance in her head, the cart creaks into motion and begins to pull slowly away.
Now, it must be now
. A couple of steps, a jump, that’s all. But she cannot. Her legs buckle and she sinks down, trembling like a frightened dog, into the mud of the track, her back scraping against the hospice wall.

Everything. Home, honour, the joy of living there was in Lady Edith’s cornflower blue eyes and the laugh King Harold used to say sounded like a wood pigeon’s love call. He has taken everything, packed it up in a wet cart and dragged it down into the vortex of his greed. If she lives, she will find him and kill him.

***

By the time she comes to herself, night has fallen, bringing with it the total, almost solid dark of winter. Her hands clamped around her knees are the merest bone white glimmer. Only as she clambers unsteadily to her feet and feels the weight of her soaked clothes pressing down on the backs of her shoulders is she certain her body still exists. The rain has stopped and a wind has risen which seems to drive every cold, wet fibre of her gown into her flesh like a tiny cheese wire. The sodden rope of the braid down her back threatens to break her neck. Such beautiful hair, Lady Edith used to say, watching Gytha comb out the dark, glossy coils. Her own was fine and fair, soft as feathers against her long, white neck.

Was? Is. She cannot be dead. They had it from the bishop’s own mouth, from the Bastard’s brother himself, that there would be no executions. They will send her into exile, surely, to Ireland perhaps, where she has kin, where she can set up a new court and work for her children’s future. She will want Gytha then; Gytha is her favourite. She will spend tonight in the priory church, and tomorrow she will set about finding her mistress.

Tonight. Night. A curfew will be imposed at dusk, the bishop had said. If the Normans catch her now, they are bound to run her through first and ask questions afterwards, and she will only be reunited with Lady Edith in heaven. And not even there, after what she has done. But her motives were good. What matters most to God, thought or deed? A sudden blast of noise, laughter, raised voices, a dog barking, as the door to Lady Edith’s hall swings open, light leaking dimly through chinks in the compound fence to illuminate the ruts and puddles in the lane. Gytha shrinks back against the hospice wall, sidling cautiously toward where the lane opens into the street alongside the priory gatehouse. What does not seem to matter to God is the fate of the English.

She hears footsteps approaching on the other side of the fence, then silence. The night is so quiet under the curfew she can hear the man breathe, heavily, as though he has eaten and drunk to excess. She holds her own breath, her back pressed against the hospice wall, wishing she might simply dissolve into it, wet flesh into sodden plaster, bones to lath. Urine splashes into a puddle, the footsteps move away again; she lets her breath go in a long, shaky sigh and creeps out into the lane where she knocks stealthily on the priory gate and whispers her claim for sanctuary.

***

The church is packed. Entire families have established little encampments, barricading themselves behind stacks of their possessions. Some who were in the square sit alone and silent, hugging their knees to their chests, staring into the dark spaces between pools of smoky, orange tallowlight. Others huddle together, passing round casks of ale, noisily denouncing the occupation, inflaming one another as though their brave words are sticks rubbed together to make fire. A group of girls and young men sidle around each other, taking advantage of the unusual circumstances and the preoccupation of their elders to have unchaperoned conversations. Flurries of words and giggles are whipped up like dust devils and as quickly die. Hands touch then start back as if burned. Looks flicker, blushes flare. The wounded have been laid out in the choir, where the monks tend them, unhurried, unquestioning, sure in their knowledge that all this is less than a blink of God’s eye, that golden Harold Godwinson and William Bastard, for all their grand titles, all their virile swagger, are no more or less to God than the sparrows in the rafters or the spiders whose webs they have pulled from the corners of the church to staunch bleeding.

Finding herself a little space behind a pillar, wrapping herself in her cloak, Gytha falls into a deep, exhausted sleep, lulled by the warmth of the bodies around her, by the mundane domesticity of crying children, smells of tallow and wet wool, the monks performing the night offices in whispers, crammed into the little space left to them around the altar. She does not awake until after Prime, as bread and water are distributed, with a little milk for the children, and rueful jokes are cracked about the feeding of the five thousand. Then the monks, who are the only people who can quit sanctuary without fear of arrest, set about emptying pisspots, taking wet clothes to be dried over their laundry fires, foraging for food and news of friends and relatives on the outside.

Immediately after Terce, a knocking comes on the west door of the church, reverberating around the suddenly silent nave. Mothers hush their children, conversations tail away, even the wounded cease groaning as the prior unbars the door to reveal the Bishop of Bayeux in the full regalia of his office, his mitre on his head, the jewels in his gold crook, and the cross borne behind him winking in breezy winter sunlight. The weather is so transformed it is as though the world outside the church has somehow become somewhere else during the long hours of that miserable night.

Bishop and prior converse in Latin, though Gytha, quietly unlacing her shoes and rolling off her hose to give her feet a chance to dry in the sun that strikes warm through the windows in the lee of the wind, can understand enough of what is said to know that the prior stands his ground and refuses to let the bishop enter sanctuary, for he may be a bishop in Normandy, but here he is a soldier and an enemy of the people of Winchester. To which the bishop responds good humouredly that God makes no distinction between one side of the channel and the other, that heaven forbid he should violate sanctuary, but that he has come to guarantee the safety of those who will leave, as King William has need of the church for his coronation. More follows, the prior’s tone shifting from hostile, to dubious, to grudging capitulation while the bishop’s remains equable and reasonable, his words shaped by the smile which never leaves his face.