Needle in the Blood (70 page)

“I did wonder what all this was for,” he says, with the familiarity born of his peculiar intimacy with his lord’s soul, when he has pronounced absolution. He’s stalling, thinks Odo; he can’t decide what penance I deserve. But repentance was not the true purpose of this confession. What he wanted was to clear his mind; by confessing his actions he has put them in order and stacked them up outside himself, like a housewife clearing her rooms for spring cleaning. And knows exactly what he must do. He must go to William, get to him before Lanfranc does, and tell his side of the story. There can be no question of Lanfranc presiding over a fair trial, since he has clearly already made his mind up that Gytha is a witch. There might as well be no trial at all until the child is delivered, since no corporal sentence may be carried out on a pregnant woman, and by then, he will have spirited her away somewhere safe.

“What you have done is grievously sinful, my lord,” the priest continues when Odo makes no response, “but as no harm came to the Archbishop, other than a stiff neck, perhaps, which is not exactly an injury, I see no need for a physical penance. On the other hand…a pilgrimage. A long one. To Compostela, or even Jerusalem.”

Odo gives an absent-minded nod of concurrence. A pilgrimage to Westminster first, he thinks, shouting for Osbern over the hubbub in the courts.

***

When Odo arrives at the king’s palace, the hall is full of people. A court is in noisy session just inside the great door, before a judge unknown to Odo, drowsing fitfully over a dispute as to milling rights on one of the city’s many rivers. A merchant, surrounded by rolls of carpet, awaits an audience with the king. Odo recognises William, Bishop of London, who breaks off from conversation with a group of other priests to greet him, but responds with no more than a curt nod as he makes his way toward his brother, seated at a long table on a dais with a number of plans spread before him. Standing looking over his shoulder is a man whose dusty hair and leather apron proclaim him to be a mason.

Odo steps onto the dais and kneels on one knee, head bowed. The curious eyes of everyone else in the room burn the back of his neck; he feels the sweat break and prickle his skin. But everything must be done properly. He has taken care to leave his men at arms outside the palace gates, and his swordbelt in Osbern’s custody at the entrance to the hall, though he is still wearing the shirt of light mail he thought it prudent to put on for the journey.

“Odo,” says William, dismissing the mason with a nod of his head. He does not sound surprised. Surely no messenger from Lanfranc can have reached him already, though one of his own spies possibly…

“Your Grace.” He kisses William’s proffered hand.

“Get up, man, no need to stand on ceremony. I’ve been expecting you. Drink?”

Both men rise and embrace, exchanging the kiss of peace. William dispatches a servant to bring wine and clear the hall, though the crowd is slow to disperse.
Carrion crows
, thinks Odo savagely. They sit with the wine jug between them, William in his high-backed chair at the head of the table, Odo across its corner from him, on the end of a padded bench. The lamps smoke, logs settle in the fire, a sudden flurry of wingbeats draws their attention briefly, away from one another and toward a knot of sparrows roosting in the beams.

“Well?” says William eventually.

Odo pours wine for them both. “It seems you know why I’m here.”

William drinks. “It has to do with the woman, I suppose.”

He doesn’t know, no word has come from Lanfranc. Odo feels almost more shaken by relief than by the prospect that William was already familiar with the facts as Lanfranc wished to present them. “Something new has come to light,” he says. The wine beckons, but he dare not lift his cup for fear William should see his hands trembling.

“Oh yes?”

“She is pregnant, William; she is expecting my child.” He pauses. Best not to divulge Gytha’s conviction she already knows the sex of the child. “Your niece or nephew.” He watches William absorb the news. A brief flicker of pride lights his lonely eyes, marooned among the folds of fat developing around his cheeks and brows, before their look of old ice or glass pebbles returns and his mouth turns thin and mean.

“How do you know? It could be a trick.”

“She would not lie about such a thing, you must take my word for that.”

“Your word, Odo?” He gives a harsh laugh. “Show me proof, and I will listen.”

Clinging to the thought of that brief, arctic glow in William’s eyes, he says coolly, with just the right note of masculine camaraderie in his voice, “Proof, brother? Diagnosing pregnancy is hardly an exact science. If I tell you she is sick, bursts into tears over foolish songs or finches in cages, has a yearning for lambs’ liver with honey and has missed two courses, will you call that proof?” He leans toward William and glares at him. “Or perhaps you must have some quack poke and prod her till she miscarries and you can see the foetus for yourself.” He waits, a fervent prayer repeating itself in his head. That the symptoms he has described, remembered from Adeliza’s pregnancy with John, will come true. That he has sowed enough doubt in William’s mind to make him hesitate.

“You wish me to order Lanfranc to postpone the trial?”

“Yes.”

“But what guarantees can you offer me that the woman will not miraculously disappear before she comes to term, she and my niece or nephew?”

“William, I implore you. I have seen how Lanfranc keeps her; it is as though he has already tried and convicted her in his own mind. She will die if she is left there, she and the child, and I could not live without her. My heart would be dead. So you would lose us both, brother and nephew.”

William stretches his legs, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “It’s a funny thing, dying,” he says reflectively. “I remember a letter I received from King Edward, when he was in his last illness, in which he wrote that he was dying piecemeal. His feet were dead for he could no longer feel them, and his bladder, he was certain, was already in paradise because his piss smelt of honey.”

“The feet and the bladder are one thing, the heart quite another.”

“That I grant you, but I do not think it is your heart that will die of her death. Unless your heart is in your prick and not your chest.”

“I am born in Scorpio. It’s possible, I suppose.”

“An inconvenient affliction for a churchman.”

“Perhaps you should have consulted your astrologers more carefully before making me one.”

“Perhaps you should meditate more upon the love of God than of this woman. I tell you, Odo, though you cannot see it, she has bewitched you. Everything points to it.”

“I am in love with her, William. Were you never in love?”

William purses his lips. “I do not call this monstrous, puffed up thing consuming you love. Possession, more like.”

Possessio mea
. What he says is true, merely their construction of the words differs.

William leans across and gives Odo’s thigh a hearty pat. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send her to Matilda in Rouen. She’ll have her taken care of until the child’s born, and then we’ll see what’s to be done. Perhaps she can be made to repent, then she could go into the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen and atone for…everything.” William smiles, the smile he wears on the rare occasions he beats Odo at chess.

Rome
, thinks Odo,
Rome
, where figs and lemons grow in his garden, and the stone is warm, and the worldly ambitions of priests are understood. He will take her to Rome.

“That is my decision, Odo, and I think it is more than you deserve. I suggest, if you love her as much as you say you do, you persuade her to acquiesce. If she is inclined to listen. Listening is not her strong point by all accounts.” He stands up, signalling an end to the audience. “Splendour of God, Odo, how did we ever come to this?”

Odo rises also and looks at his brother, measuring the fractional difference in their height. “We gambled, William,” he says softly. “One can never anticipate all the consequences.”

***

“You’re back so soon,” she says, greeting him at the door to the private apartments. Her smile, the way it seems to spread over half her thin face and warm her grave eyes, almost breaks his heart. Without waiting for the door to close behind them, she winds her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him, giving little moans of pleasure as his mail shirt grazes her tender breasts.

She has missed him, but in the poignant serenity of knowing he would return with William’s blessing, that they are together again, that Lanfranc may have tarnished the magic of their shared life a little but now it is bright again, brighter than ever, shiny as a silver spoon for their daughter’s baptism. Feeling him stiffen, she kisses him, thinking to herself she must disabuse him of this notion he has that lovemaking is dangerous for the child. There is an irrational sentimentality in men which is, in its way, as cruel as violence. Now, already, he is pulling back from her, licking her kiss from his lips, unwinding her arms from his neck.

“I must speak with you,” he says, in a tone which makes her search his face anxiously. He is drawn, serious, his skin grey with the dust of the road, his eyes bloodshot, their long lids pleated with weariness.

“What’s wrong?” She follows him into the parlour, feeling suddenly sick. Good, she tells herself firmly, that means the baby’s taken well. He lets Osbern divest him of his chain mail then dismisses him and Freya.

“Sit,” she says, “let me pour you some wine. Let me take off your boots.”

“For Christ’s sake, stop fussing, woman.” He waves her away as if she were an irritating insect, then immediately holds out his arms to her. “I’m sorry,” he says, pressing her cheek to his heart. “Tell me how you have been?”

“A little tired and sick, but that’s all to the good.”

“I told you, I make my children tough. Which is just as well.” He moves away from her, twisting his rings around his fingers. “Because we’re going to have to go on a long journey.”

“To get away from Lanfranc? I thought…”

“To get away from William.”

“William?” She had pinned her hopes on William. He won’t jeopardise the child, Odo had assured her, his conscience won’t let him, not his own flesh and blood.

“He has proposed sending you to the court at Rouen, into Matilda’s safekeeping until the baby arrives.”

“Is that so bad? You could visit me. Perhaps I could go to Conteville.”

Odo shakes his head. “I’ll tell you how it would be, Gytha. You wouldn’t be out of Matilda’s sight for a moment till the cord was cut, and the minute that was done, she would take the baby and you’d be packed off to her nunnery at Saint Etienne in Caen. That’s William’s deal. He gets our child, we get nothing, not even each other.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’ll go to Rome. I have a house there, you know, on the Tiber. It has a garden with figs and lemons in it, and an olive grove. Have you ever eaten olives? They taste like hot sunshine.”

She looks at Odo, at the play of hope and anxiety over his beloved features. She imagines olives, like miniature suns, burning her tongue. She imagines Rome, full of mysterious white ruins, broken pillars, and eyeless statues such as you would suddenly come across in the landscape of her childhood, rounding the shoulder of a low hill or a bend in a lane. She imagines dark, glossy creepers; stone drapery; hot, spicy air; and making love in gardens, by starlight, like Ovid and Corinna.

But the lover of her imagination is not Odo. He is some eyeless man, beautiful, marble, with broken arms. She cannot see Odo in Rome, so far from his home, his roots, his schemes and ambitions, his family. She thinks of John, sequestered in Liege, and of their canceled visit to him, and of this unborn daughter in her belly. In Odo’s world of dangerous aspirations and shifting alliances, loving one’s children means keeping them at a distance, cloistered in a monastery or subject to a husband. Loving one’s children is making the best use of them. That is why his meeting with William has left him so disappointed, because William intends to deprive him of a counter to play in his power games, not because he intends to part him from her.

“And what are you going to do in Rome?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Write, teach, be a farmer. Become Pope. Does it matter?”

It would be so easy…Perhaps he’s right. Doesn’t he have relatives in Sicily? She isn’t sure where Sicily is, but she is certain it is even further from here than Rome. It may even have camels. She glances up at his profile, the candlelight glimmering ruddy gold on his chin stubble.

“The half finished angel,” she murmurs.

“What?” He is somewhere else.
Good God
, she thinks, registering the absence in his eyes; it wasn’t a joke, he can see himself on the throne of Saint Peter. He is already calculating the sacrifice he must make to keep her in terms of the benefits it might bring him. There is, she realises, no escape for him from William because they are too much alike.

“You look so tired,” she says. “Sit. We don’t have to go this minute, I suppose.”

“Within the day, to be safe.” But he does sit and allows her to pull off his boots. Sitting back on her heels, she rubs his feet, tracing the fan of fine bones with her fingertips then drawing her thumbs hard along the arches so she does not tickle him. He sighs with pleasure and closes his eyes, resting his head against the chair back.