Needle in the Blood (65 page)

The difficulty lies in finding the earl’s apartments unattended. Freya seems always to be there, and the sinister Osbern, and the outer door is guarded night and day because the earl keeps his treasury and his great seal in those rooms. Sometimes Judith is tempted just to give up and accept her destiny. Then she sees them together, Gytha in her fine gowns and jewels with her doting lover in attendance, the pair of them utterly careless of the spectacle they make with their nuzzling and fondling, and her determination to smash their charmed circle, their willful conspiracy of oblivion, clenches like a fist in her belly. She thinks of the earl’s casual treachery and her resolve to repay him in bitterer and more heartfelt coin is hammered down against the anvil of her heart.

Bearing her grudge before her like a shield, she climbs the stairs to the private apartments one afternoon when the heat has cast a spell of torpor over the castle and even Lord Odo’s guards are dozing at their posts, lolling over their pikes. Although she knows Lord Odo himself is out, having seen him ride away between Terce and morning mass in the company, God be praised, of Osbern, and she has observed Gytha, accompanied by Freya and two guardsmen encumbered with a faldstool, a blanket, and a sewing box, setting out after the day meal to walk in the meadow in front of the castle. Sister Jean thinks she has gone to the privy, so she doesn’t have long.

“Mistress Gytha sent me to fetch something for her,” she announces, her voice strident and uncertain. The men look her up and down without interest and stand aside. It is so easy she is almost resentful, her courage hanging in the air like a half-finished sentence. She steps confidently through the door one of the soldiers pushes open for her, only to feel herself almost knocked senseless by the overpowering opulence of Odo’s rooms. The hot air is nearly solid with the scent of that perfume he wears, the colours hammer her eyes, weak with age and years of close work, the clutter strewing the floor seeming to rise up deliberately to trip her as she wanders around, wondering where to start, stumbling over discarded clothes and scattered cushions, barking her shins on book chests.

Evidence, the Archbishop had insisted, anything to help prove a case against the woman. But what? Judith had pleaded. She was not the sort of person to know what constituted evidence of witchcraft. The Archbishop had merely shrugged his shoulders as if to say nor was he.

“We must release my brother of Bayeux from her spell,” he had said, rising to draw their interview to a close. “Only then can we hope to make him see the injustice he has done you.”

We. It had been flattering at the time, but now she wishes the Archbishop were more than a sleeping partner in the hunt.
The bedroom
, she thinks, catching sight of the great bed beyond the archway, its hangings tied back to reveal the rich fur coverlet. She approaches the bed cautiously, as though it were a large beast of uncertain temper. It gives off a sickly odour of stale sweat, fallen roses, and something else that brings unbidden to her memory the image of her husband, toiling over her stiff, inert body, his sweat dripping and chilling against her skin. She prods at the bedclothes, arm extended to its limit, recoiling from their telltale rumples, the dents in the pillows, one with a long, dark hair snaked across it.

And the tip of a leather thong peeping out from under it, a lace, perhaps, or a drawstring. Something hidden, a secret: this is what she has been looking for. Heart wedged in her throat, she grabs the thong and tugs. The pouch, the one containing Gytha’s white cockade. Well that on its own might be of use to the Archbishop, but wait, there’s something else. A hard disk, a medallion of some kind. Cramming the pouch into her sleeve she turns her back on the bed and flees, but as she is crossing the parlour, dodging its snares, she hears voices on the other side of the door.

“Ma’am,” says one of the guards smartly, then a drumming of feet, scrape of iron on wood as the men come to attention. Judith scans the room in a panic. Nowhere to hide; even the space beneath Lord Odo’s worktable is stuffed with locked chests. She scurries behind the door; if the guards close it from the outside, then Gytha, for it must be Gytha, may not see her. If she does…if she does…

The door opens. She is accompanied by Freya, the two of them in deep conversation, their heads inclined at a conspiratorial angle which alerts Judith to the importance of what they are saying.

“So you can do it?” asks Gytha. “You know someone?”

“The same as gave me the charmed stones for Leofwine. I never paid her properly that time. One of your trinkets should cover both debts nicely.”

“Good, but it must be quick. If it happened around Easter time…” Gytha holds up one hand and begins to count on her fingers, folding each one down as she says the numbers. “One, two, three, four. It’s a wonder it doesn’t show yet.”

“Lucky people only see what they’re expecting to see.”

“Come through to the solar. My jewel case is there. Let’s see what we can spare without his lordship noticing.”

Judith waits until she is sure they have crossed the bed chamber and gone into the solar beyond, then opens the door quietly and slips out of the earl’s apartments, head high, willfully disregarding the idly inquisitive stares of the two guards. But now what? The Archbishop told her what she was to do when she had news for him, but the implications of the conversation she has just heard are so enormous they have driven everything else out of her head. She can scarcely resist the urge to run straight to the abbey and tell him; the witch is with child and is trying to procure a miscarriage. The witch is with child, the witch is with child. It sounds like the refrain of a song.

Once outside the great hall door, she forces herself to take a deep breath and walk with measured steps back across the inner and outer courts to the atelier. As her heart stops jigging and the words cease whirling around her mind, she remembers the code she agreed with the Archbishop. Composing her features into a mournful expression, she tells Sister Jean she has developed a mighty sore head and wonders if a remedy might be sent for from Brother Thorold, who has a particular powder she always finds efficacious.

“Surely you can work till Vespers,” retorts Sister Jean, surveying her depleted workshop in exasperation.

“If the powder could be sent for, once I have taken it, I could work all night, Sister, if you wished it.”

“Very well. Go to your place and I will find someone to send.”

***

“You have done well,” says the Archbishop, leaning back in his chair, hefting the battered leather pouch in his cupped palm, but he does not invite her to sit, and his preoccupation seems deeper than when she was originally summoned before him, as though the first time was only a rehearsal. “Have you looked inside here?” He picks up the bronze and enamel locket in his free hand, letting the chain slip through his fingers.

“No, Your Grace,” she lies, because she could not see that the locks of hair might serve any useful purpose.

“It contains four locks of hair. From a small child, or a baby, or possibly four different babies. Does that suggest anything to you, Judith?”

The woman looks blank, compounding Lanfranc’s sadness.

“It suggests to me,” he goes on, feeling as though he is wading through mud, “a woman who uses the hair from infants, possibly other parts also, teeth, nail parings and the like, in unchristian practices. And in conjunction with the conversation you overheard and reported to me, a woman who might go to any lengths, even with the fruit of her own womb, to do the bidding of Satan. I believe the…er…products of miscarriage are much sought after by practitioners of the black arts.”

“So you think…?”

“I think,” he interrupts, his voice welling with passion, “that woman is very dangerous indeed, and Odo is risking his soul more than I could begin to imagine when I started my enquiries. She must be stopped before she kills him. Where will they go?”

Judith looks shocked. “I don’t know, Your Grace.”

“I might be able to guess,” he says, half to himself. There’s a woman with an assart in the middle of woodland belonging to the abbey who is rumoured to provide such a service, though he has never been able to catch her out. Perhaps this is his chance to kill two birds with one stone. As soon as he has dismissed Judith, he calls his captain of guards and instructs him to put a discreet watch on the place.

***

Gytha had not intended to accompany Margaret to the cunningwoman’s house. As soon as she had explained the situation to Freya, Freya had taken charge and Gytha had hoped that would be the end of her involvement. Odo will not let her outside the castle compound without an escort. Her presence would only complicate matters. But Margaret was adamant; she mistrusted Freya; she would not go to the wise woman unless Gytha went with her. Gytha judged that Margaret must be three months gone at least; there was no time for persuasion. Fulk could accompany them; he was trustworthy.

Even so they had some difficulty in persuading Margaret to enter the forest. She seemed to become delirious, struggling even against Fulk, muttering some nonsense about men with pink eyes and rats’ heads and the murder of the firstborn. Finally, Fulk picked her up and carried her over his shoulder, with Gytha walking where Margaret could see her. Although the path to the cunningwoman’s assart is clearly marked for those who wish to see, by scraps of cloth tied to branches, corn dollies, and little dishes of bark and leaves and flower petals, Gytha does not think they were observed, despite Margaret’s fuss.

Fulk is outside now, while Gytha waits with Margaret in the main room of the house for Freya and the wise woman to conclude their negotiations. The room is dark, its shutters closed, and little light entering through the doorway from the overcast day outside. A small fire burns, despite the oppressive heat, mingling the fragrance of pine logs with pungent scents of burning herbs. She smells rosemary, the fragrance of her love, fenugreek seeds smelling of burnt apples, sage to stimulate the mind and catnip to cure the ague, juniper to promote miscarriage. Gytha’s sweat breaks, sticky in her armpits, creeping down her spine in a slow, reptilian caress, plastering her gown to her back. The storm’s first lightning rips through the mellow firelight, momentarily blinding her.

When her eyes adjust, she sees a long table in the center of the room, patched with dark stains and scarred with knife cuts, a pile of folded sheets at one end. In the middle of one of the dark patches are two flies fucking. If that’s what flies do. Shelves house rows of stone jars, pestles and mortars, neat stacks of muslin strainers and a shallow dish in which various implements of metal and bone gleam fitfully as the light of the fire dances on their polished surfaces.

Freya and the cunningwoman rejoin them. As the cunningwoman lifts the greasy woollen curtain dividing this room from a smaller one at the back, Gytha catches a glimpse of a bed and a large basin standing beside it.

“My Lady will pay you,” says Freya.

As she holds out her hand for the gold brooch Gytha has brought, a piece she does not like and never wears, the woman reminds Gytha of the wife of the bathhouse manager in Winchester, who used to collect the girls’ rent, fleshy, respectably dressed, with her hair concealed beneath a voluminous matron’s head cloth. Her hands are very clean, smooth and plump as a child’s. “And the waste, of course.”

“The waste?”

“The foetus and the afterbirth. They are very useful and in short supply.”

Gytha glances at Margaret, still standing close to the door, looking slowly around her with stunned, vacant eyes. If she has heard what the wise woman said, she has not understood it. She responds to nothing but the thunder and lightning which produce an involuntary shuddering, as though her skin is creeping with parasites.

“Freya,” whispers Gytha urgently. “What is it?”

“What day is it?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Thunder on a Monday, a woman will die. If it’s Monday, we must come back another time.”

“Don’t worry. She won’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“Now.” The cunningwoman rubs her soft hands together with a dry whisper of skin, looking from Margaret to Gytha and back again, “which of you is the patient? For I think you are both with child.”

For a moment Gytha feels as though she is standing on a precipice. She holds her body so still it is as though even her heart has stopped beating, while terror and elation war inside her. She wants to dance and scream, but wills herself not even to smile.

“It is not you, is it, my dear?” the cunningwoman says to her. “Your baby will be a girl child, born under the sign of the Twins who govern the arms that bind in love and obligation. Her stone will be pearl, symbolising wealth.”

“Excuse me,” says Gytha in a small, tight voice, and goes outside.

She leans against the wall of the house and takes several deep breaths. The coming rain whispers like gossip in the tops of the trees surrounding the assart. Cupping one hand over her belly, she wonders if it can be true. Her cycle is erratic, but she is sure it hasn’t been that long; Odo would have noticed, probably even more quickly than she would herself. And she does not feel different, no nausea, none of that exquisite tenderness of her breasts that used to melt her with the lust for motherhood before fear took over and she simply wished to miscarry quickly rather than lose another child brought to term. Only the seasickness on the way back from Normandy, unusual for her. But what of her fall from her horse in Rochester? She is bound to miscarry this time.