Needle in the Blood (53 page)

Osbern has wasted no time setting the room to rights. He invites her to sit, which she does, on a faldstool brought in to replace the smashed chair whose severed limbs are now piled beside the brazier, smoothing her skirts under her the way he remembers, with a lurch of his heart into his sore throat. The lamps are all lit, and by their light he considers her. Though she has not removed her cloak, she has pushed back her hood to expose features pinched with exhaustion. She might veil her feelings, but she cannot conceal the greyness of her skin, the frown lines between her brows, her lank hair gathered into an untidy bunch at the back of her neck. Her eyes look dull and dry, yet she never seems to blink. He does not know if she is looking at him, or beyond him, at things he cannot imagine. A momentary terror grips him. Perhaps, like Margaret, she has lost her mind. Perhaps, like Margaret…But no, she was sane enough when she recognised the camel, and she seems to have no cuts or bruises, no signs of misuse. And if any man had attempted such a thing, she would have fought, surely, out of love for him. Wouldn’t she? There are so many words inside him his chest aches with the effort of containing them, yet he has no idea what to say to her. Perhaps he should simply fling himself at her feet and beg her forgiveness.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but makes no move toward her, telling himself it is because Juno is now sitting on his feet, and Gytha will not like it if he kicks the dog out of the way; in an abstract way, she is sentimental about Juno.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. Her voice has a husky, cobwebbed note to it, as though she has not used it for a long time.

“What?”

And simultaneously she says, “What for?” A brief flicker of humour kindles between them, then she looks away again, twisting her fingers in her lap.

“Tell you what?” he repeats.

“About Lady Edith?”

Swan Neck? It had been a gamble to leave her at Saint Eufrosyna’s when he decided to set Gytha up at Winterbourne, but he had believed she would keep silent. She owed him that much, he thought, chiding himself immediately for being so trusting of an Anglo Saxon. “How did you find out? Both she and Abbess Biota were sworn to secrecy on pain of losing Edith’s dowry.”

“Her ladyship sent for me,” she replies, her voice gaining strength and clarity, “after seeing us together at Candlemas. It seems you were…careless, my lord. Or perhaps you just assumed that, having told her to keep quiet, she would simply do as she was bidden. You forget how curious women are. Must I remind a bishop to consider Eve and the serpent?”

“And must I remind you how women continue to be punished?”

His words hang in the air like a foul smell, float like scum on bad water. He does not even have to look at her for confirmation of his arrogance, his tactlessness, his want of any feeling save the fury of self loathing swelling in his throat. Her very silence on the matter of her children should have been enough to warn him, that and the four locks of hair he discovered, in a moment of curiosity of his own, in the cheap locket she keeps under her pillow. Is he really the same man who stood on the dais in the great hall of Rouen castle and preached the crusade against the English with such conviction, in phrases so exquisitely constructed, even William had tears in his eyes as his vassals, hard-nosed realists the lot of them, fell to their knees in waves, like scythed grass, to pledge their allegiance to his great enterprise? Yet this mere woman, this little English seamstress, has the power to tie his words in knots, to jumble and break them until he vomits them up like a spiteful imbecile.

This time he does kick the dog, which scurries, whimpering, to Gytha’s side, where it leans against her leg, its head in her lap. He glowers at them, this alliance of motherhood, wondering how many times he has sat with the bitch during whelping, worried because she has such slender hips, stroking her, singing to her, even on one occasion having Turold play to her on the citole. They look back, woman and dog, mute and uncomprehending of his cruelty. Damn them, damn their invincible vulnerability.

He draws a deep breath, sucking the cold, smoky air down into his lungs to damp down his emotions. “Is that where you went? To Edith? Yet that is not where you were found. I would have made the connection if Saint Eufrosyna’s had been mentioned.”

She looks away again, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand. The dog, he tells himself, just the dog, making them water. Her nails are black and broken, his mother’s little ring is missing.

“She said all the wrong things too. She is so grateful to you for your protection, so loyal. She counselled me to be quiet and obedient. Like a good wife. But Odo…” Something in the way she uses his name gives him hope, his name in her mouth like the balm of a kiss, a declaration of love. He smiles at her. The dog stretches out, still pressed against Gytha’s foot, but with her snout pointing toward her master. “I don’t want to be your wife.”

“Well, you never will be, barring some highly unlikely shift in the Church’s interpretation of Saint Paul.”

Ignoring his attempt at levity, she goes on, “Then why do you entertain that notion, of presenting me at court as if I were?”

“To show how I respect you, that you are more to me than just a…”

“Whore?” Her eyes take on a hard glitter. “Is that it? Your little indulgence? Worth burning down the odd village for, though. I expect I should be grateful for that.”

“The damage will be repaired. It will be better for the people in the long run. They will have stone churches and granaries.”

“You still speak English like a foreigner,” she accuses. “At the place I was staying, at Terce the day your men…I left, a woman came to the gate. She had three small children, one a babe in arms, and nothing but what she stood up in. She begged the porter for charity, said the earl’s men had killed her husband for trying to stop them burning down his cottage. What use is a stone church to her? As for me, dear God, Odo, I was so ashamed.”

“Of me?”

“Of myself. My…of the English, what we have let you make of us.”

“Don’t let Edith colour your view of me, Gytha. Do me the courtesy of hearing my justification for the behaviour of my own soldiers. Can’t you see it’s a measure of how much I love you? How afraid I was for you?” He thinks of Margaret with a shudder of distaste.

She rises and begins to walk up and down the room with Juno at her heel, passing so close to where he is sitting all he has to do is reach out his hand to touch her. He strokes Juno’s head, pressing down so hard the dog ducks away from him with a whimper and follows Gytha to the window.

“It’s getting light.” Pushing back her cloak, lifting her hair clear and shaking it down her back, she leans her elbows on the sill. As if on cue, the bells begin to ring for Lauds, and the mill wheel grinds into life with a sound like a giant’s bones cracking as he stretches himself. “What’s that?”

“There’s a mill in the harbour mouth.”

“No. Really?” She turns to him, incredulous, her reserve dispelled by curiosity. “What about storms?” She pauses, listening, perhaps, to the high-pitched moaning of the wind around the tower. “And ships coming in and out?”

Suddenly he is filled with the beauty of the mill, tall and square between the jumble of rocks supporting the causeway leading out to it and the grey surge of the sea, milky on the harbour side, wave faceted on the other, as though the mill wheel itself had alchemical properties of turning mud to silver. “Every time I come here, I am badgered by some deputation or other begging me to take it down. But it’s stood through three winters and there have been no more wrecks than usual in the harbour entrance. I love it.”

“How unwisely you love, my lord.” In the following silence they do not look at one another, but he can hear their memories conversing and feel the thread which joins them tightening until it begins to sing.

“Why did you do it?” he asks softly.

“To show you I am yours of my own free will.”

Am yours, she says, and with such tenderness, such a tremor in her voice. Not was, or have been, or even, will be again, but am, now, in the present which has no end or beginning. At last he feels he has permission to look at her, absorbing into his heart the way she hugs her dark cloak around her body, her watchful eyes, her sad, inward smile, how pale she is in the watery dawn light beginning to trickle through the narrow window.

Her gaze wanders away from his face to rest on the camel in its jewelled frame, which he has replaced on the table by his elbow. Frowning, she continues, “Just once, let me teach you something.”

“Go on.”

“As I see it, there’s not much difference between a whore and a wife. They’re both one side of a business transaction.” Seeing he is about to protest, she holds up her hand to prevent him. “Lovers are different. They come together, and stay together, or not, because they want to. Free will. You see?”

It is a pretty notion, and he would like to believe it, but the law says otherwise. Everyone belongs to someone else; that is how society is bound together. He belongs to William as Gytha belongs to him, tied by duty and dependence. Why else would she work for him, or he protect her? Love makes no difference to such matters.

Then the image of a horse-drawn plough comes to his mind, followed by other pictures from his tapestry, flaring up and disappearing at random, as though he were trying to view the work by the light of a frequently extinguished candle. A portable shrine like nothing he has ever seen, a filigree of crosses and arches balanced on poles. A row of empty stitch holes leading like tiny footsteps to the eye of a knight fallen under a Norman sword. A crow perched in a fantastically curlicued tree with a wolfish fox beneath. His tapestry, but not his pictures. His story, but not the way he has told it to himself. How orderly his life was once, neatly segmented by prayers and bells, collects and canticles, everything in its place and a place for everything. Now he flails at each day just as the mill’s arms wave at the immensity of the weather, and he knows a time must come when he and it will both be engulfed by his ambition, that life is short and God is unimpressed.

“I have behaved very badly toward you, in all sorts of ways,” he says humbly, “and I don’t deserve to hear you say such beautiful things.” Thinking the time has come when he might take her in his arms and kiss away their misunderstandings, he crosses to the window, but she turns to look out at the broadening daylight.

“We’re so high up.”

He surveys the segment of courtyard and walls, and beyond them the sea, trying to see through her eyes. He sees foreshortened figures of herdsmen driving their cattle out to pasture, a guard on the crenellated wall, a small fleet of fishing boats crawling past the mill. This elephant skin sea bears no resemblance to the vision of the women in his atelier, who set William’s ships, and Godwinson’s, afloat on waving ribbons of ochre, teal, and ultramarine, rebellious, unpredictable colours. The party escorting Margaret back to Canterbury will be leaving soon, he thinks, and wonders if he should tell her about Margaret, and thinks he will not.

“You should get some rest. I suppose you were on the road most of the night?”

“Yes.”

“Where…? After Saint Eufrosyna’s?”

“I’m tired, Odo. Ask your officer.” She turns to him with a bashful smile. “To be honest, I don’t rightly know. Isn’t that stupid?”

He shrugs. “Sometimes places don’t matter, sometimes they’re everything. It just depends.” He moves away from her, toward the table, where he stands with his back to her, fiddling with the camel in its frame. “You may sleep in my bed. I…have matters to attend to before…I’ll send Freya to you.”

“Freya? Why is she here?”

“She came with your clothes and things. I decided that when…if…that I’d take you to Normandy.”

“Oh, I see. I suppose I’m less likely to run away there, where I can’t speak the language and don’t know the roads.”

“I hoped you would be less likely to run away if you really knew who I was.” He speaks with the voice he uses in debate, courteous, carefully modulated, attractive as thin ice under a canopy of snow. “To know is to love, or so we are taught. The harbour master tells me the tide will be with us late tomorrow afternoon. Your belongings are in my bed chamber. It’s not as comfortable as…some others you have slept in, but I expect Freya has everything you need.” Pausing at the head of the stairs he adds, “You took very little with you.”

“Odo?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you save Lady Edith?”

He does not reply immediately, not because he does not know the answer, but because the answer touches his core in a way even Gytha has not, until now. Because it led him to Gytha, but could as easily snatch her away again. “It was a debt of honour,” he says eventually, then runs down the stairs before she can ask him anything more.

***

It is a relief when he goes, a wrench also, but she scarcely notices the hurt. She has felt as though her heart were a block of ice burning her chest since she left Lady Edith, she does not know how many days ago now. Pushing herself away from the window frame she goes through to his bedroom, her legs shaking, so tired she feels like a ghost. She does not wait for Freya. Removing her cloak and shoes, loosening the laces either side of her gown, she falls onto the bed, not bothering to cover herself or draw the curtains.

But sleep eludes her. Once she lies down, her body feels so heavy she has the sensation of falling through the mattress. Every time she begins to doze, some noise outside jolts her awake, the sudden cackle of geese, men shouting as a party rides out of the castle, the shrill whinny of a horse. She has bites in all the most inaccessible parts of her body, clamouring to be scratched; she is certain the pallet she has been sleeping on had an infestation. Even after she has closed the bed curtains, too much light seeps through, hammering against her closed lids the way the turning of the mill thuds in her head. The curtains are thin, the mattress filled with a mixture of wool and straw, crunching and crackling whenever she moves. It is a soldier’s bed, almost a priest’s bed, narrow and austere. She cannot lie here as she lies in the bed she thinks of as theirs, enfolded in feathers, hearing nothing but the rhythm of her lover’s sleeping breath in their own world bounded by the blue silk hangings.