Needle in the Blood (74 page)

“Wolves,” he gasps and, “Toussaint,” letting his haunted eyes do the rest. Then, when he can see the men have filled in the gaps for themselves, that before morning it will be all round the castle that the witch’s escape attempt was thwarted by ghosts in wolfskins, and only he managed to escape with his life, he shows them the cloak, torn and bloodstained, which they all recognise as Gytha’s. Humbly, he begs leave to sit awhile in the gatehouse. He will take a cup of ale and try to recover himself, but he bids them summon Osbern, because he does not think he has the strength to take another step unaided.

He realises how thoroughly his playacting has succeeded when he sees Osbern’s face, stricken and drained of colour as a souling mask. Full of solicitude, he cups his hand under Odo’s elbow to help him to his feet.

“Come along, my lord, let’s get you to your bed.”

As soon as they are clear of the guardhouse, in the outer court, deserted at this hour, Osbern sees his master somehow grow in stature, the broken man mend himself. He is afraid, for a moment, that Odo too is a ghost, a further elaboration of whatever hideous spell has been worked by the spirits of the forest in this season of mischief. But when his master speaks, in a voice on the strained side of normal, he is reassured; whatever has happened, it has not involved any congress with the other side.

“Have men arrived from the king, Osbern?”

“Only this evening, sir, around Vespers. Lord Hamo managed to impress upon them that it was too late to go after you tonight.”

“Good. And no nonsense from the Archbishop?”

“Quiet as a mouse, sir. I suppose he will leave it to the king now?”

“And we, I trust, will slip in between the two of them.”

“We, my lord? Do I take it Mistress Gytha got away then?”

They are just outside the hall door. Putting a finger to his lips, Odo nods, then says loudly, as he precedes his servant through the wicket, “Have my bath filled, Osbern.”

While he bathes, he debates sending some men to bury Tom in the morning, but thinks better of it. Let the forest take care of its own, let the earwigs have his brain and the worms his mad eyes, boar take his flesh and wolves his great bones. Odo has had enough of him, and his men have better things to do. He closes his eyes and tries to believe the world is nothing but this cocoon of fragrant steam he is wrapped in, and the delicious tingling of his skin as Osbern scrubs it with a stiff brush until he glows like a bridegroom.

He grants William’s officer a brief audience, clad only in his shirt and dressing gown, during which he listens to nothing the man has to say but manages to persuade him he is almost out of his mind with shock and grief, drawing quite coldly on whatever resource drove him to disfigure Tom as he did. If, he tells himself, he harbours a lunatic inside his skull, then he might as well learn to turn this strange affliction to his advantage. So he speaks in disjointed phrases of wolves and hobgoblins and peering through the fabric of the universe to the other side. He crosses himself frequently, contriving to make his hand shake as he does so, and continually breaks off in the middle of sentences to stare distractedly into the gloom beyond the wavering circle of light shed by his single candle.

Disconcerted by the earl’s ravings, the officer withdraws as soon as he decently can, satisfied the task he was charged with by the king has been done for him by some other agency whose nature he would prefer not to dwell on. Osbern, with a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder as he sees the officer out, mouthing obsequious apologies as he does so, expects to be reassured by a smile or a wink from his master, but instead sees him slumped in his chair staring moodily into the heart of his fire. Though surely the blankness in his eyes is just a trick of the poor light.

Once Odo is alone, and Osbern in his usual position, rolled in his blanket across the threshold to his lord’s bedchamber, he kneels at his prie dieu and hopes for prayer to enter him, if not to drive out his tormentor, at least to silence it for the night. He recites the Nunc Dimittis but the words cannot exclude him from the life of the castle around him, the tramp of the guards’ feet on the wall, his household packed into the hall and the great chamber above this room, many, no doubt, too nervous to sleep, staring up into the dusty dark between the roof beams or into the glimmering eyes of lovers. He thinks of the baker and his boy, and baby Leofwine, curled up beside the ovens which never go cold, of the smith whose night breath blows ash across the embers in his forge, of the fletcher, the armourer, the grooms and pigmen and cattleherds, the dairy women and the laundresses with their forearms like prize fighters, of Master Pietro stroking his great belly as if it were his mistress, and Turold, probably stroking the mute, Emma, while he turns over new jests in his hard mind, of Hamo pretending to sleep while the countess berates him for some imagined slight or other.

Of his great hanging, packed away in boxes, all its figures, the soldiers and lovers, kings and shipwrights, the horses and dogs and wolves and falcons, his brothers, himself, holding their breath, waiting to dance, to ride down an enemy, to pursue a destiny.
You must finish it
, she had said,
look at the price some of us have paid.

Not some of us, all of us
, he answers her now, from the dark heart of his castle whose walls bristle with the armed men he has interposed between himself and William.
Nothing
, he thinks as he climbs shivering into bed and flexes his toes against the hot stone wrapped in flannel Osbern has placed at the bottom of it, which is as cold as a cold love. And tries to hate William for forcing him to replace the warmth of his love’s embrace with hot stones. But cannot.

Because there is a new bond between them now, the bond of solitude.

The Feast of Saint Odo 1072 to the Solemnity of Peter and Paul 1073

But where are we going?” Freya asks this several times a day, as though it is the refrain to the long song of their exile.

“I shall know when we get there,” Gytha replies, an inadequate response, plunging Freya back into a hostile silence, but it is the best she can do. Fulk, riding beside Gytha, with Freya and Thecla a little way behind on the overloaded mule, says nothing. He is torn between his sympathy for his woman and her longing for a destination, a place where she can establish a household and bring up their child, and his solemn promise to Odo to watch over Gytha as if she were his own flesh and blood. In such circumstances, where women are concerned, he thinks it wisest to keep silent.

Gytha is uncertain how long they have been travelling, though she knows there have been two Sabbaths, when the roads were quiet, the fields deserted, the doors of houses more firmly closed. Despite their good horses, stout shoes, and warm clothes, the conditions of their journey have been wretched due to the need for discretion. T
hey are out of Kent now, in the honour of William de Warenne
, Gytha thinks,
or possibly Fitzosbern. Every other Norman seems to be called William.
Whichever lord it is, like Odo, he keeps the main roads in good order, potholes filled, verges cut back, troops of liveried soldiers barracked at regular intervals, inns and way stations where the price of bread and ale is strictly controlled. These are the routes leading from London to the south coast, the king’s communications links with Normandy, and his buttress against invasion from France or Anjou, and for this reason Gytha keeps away from them.

She insists on taking by-roads and sheltering at night in remote granges or byres, even caves, sometimes, in preference to risking identification in a manor hall or abbey pilgrim house. They are permanently soaked to the skin and plastered in mud, it seems, from the rain driven through their clothes by the bitter November winds or from fording streams that have burst their banks. They have to make frequent stops for Fulk to gouge packed, sodden earth from the horses’ hooves before their feet rot or bruise. Thecla whines incessantly, exhausted by nights without fires when it is too cold to sleep and, sometimes, a shortage of food if Gytha thinks it unsafe to exchange any of Odo’s jewels for supplies. His generosity has been too ostentatious; she must find somewhere, far enough away for no one to ask questions, or at least, not pertinent ones, where she can change showers of diamonds, uncut emeralds and rubies, veined lumps of turquoise and smoky quartz the colour of his eyes in a summer dusk, into small coins to buy bread or herrings or bacon. She will not sell the pearls, though; she will keep them for her daughter.

She banishes all considerations but practical ones. Her heart is hardened against Freya’s complaints and Thecla’s misery; it will not even listen to Fulk’s silence. She knows they struggle to understand her behaviour, but how could they? They have each other. They may have wet feet and frozen hands, but not the chill she feels, in her spirit, in the marrow of her bones, the cold of pennies on her eyes and soil in her mouth. Her only concern is to stay alive for the child, his child, the ember glowing in her belly. Curled around that nugget of hope, looking always inward, she becomes oblivious to everything outside her own body, its needs and changes.

It is no longer possible to doubt the cunningwoman’s prediction. Her breasts are swollen and tender, and she is sick almost every morning, craving certain foods yet, when they are put in front of her, her stomach revolts. But cruellest of all is her almost permanent state of arousal, which gives her no peace, and makes her believe Odo was right when he said God had a sense of humour, though it disturbs her that it seems to be such a bitter one. Sometimes she touches herself for relief, but the respite is brief and hollow, and carries the danger of memories she dare not admit to consciousness. Sometimes, to her shame, she finds herself eying up men they pass on the road, or even Fulk, speculating, wondering, dismissing, spurring her horse ahead with a flush scalding her neck and cheeks.

Before she fell in love, she could lose herself in bed in the consolatory power of her imagination; if she kept her eyes closed and her head averted from panting breaths that stank of onions, or tooth rot, or other women’s kisses, any man might be a prince in one of her mother’s tales. Now, however, there is no substitute for her real prince, even though, or perhaps because, he is a Norman, a bishop and tends to heaviness. Often, when she does succeed in deceiving her body into a brief and troubled sleep, enfolded in Odo’s sable cloak, she dreams of being at sea and wakes with her eyes full of tears and the scent of rosemary and sandalwood, and salt and iron, in her nostrils. She will sell the cloak, she tells herself firmly.

She feels better when she crawls out of a barn one morning to be sick and finds the cloud has lifted to reveal the first day of sunshine she can remember since riding away from the hunting lodge, however long ago that was. The simple beauty of the scene before her, rolling pasture dotted with trees and, in a fold in the hills half submerged in white mist, a village huddled around a long hall and a church, its cultivated strips fringing it like a striped skirt, has the effect of settling her stomach and giving her a sense of hope. But the wind has risen and veered to the east, bringing the temperature down sharply, and it is not long before Freya has followed her outside with straw stuck to the back of her shawl and a mulish look on her face.

“Thecla has a cough,” she announces. She squats down beside Gytha, who is sitting on a grass hummock, taking deep breaths of the clean air to scour out the residue of nausea and the terrible nostalgia of her dreams. “Madam, we can’t go on like this. Whatever you decide, I must think of my daughter.”

“And I of mine.”

“Then you should be taking better care of yourself. What do you think his lordship would say if he could see us now? He would be horrified.”

“But he can’t. It’s up to me to do what I think best. If I am found by some man anxious to do William Bastard a good turn, I shall most likely be killed.”

“And this way you’re likely to die of cold or hunger.”

“Watch your tone with me, girl.” Part of her knows Freya is right, but another part asks, if you are warm and comfortable and well fed, what then is to distract you from thinking about the past? She is too worn out arguing with herself to argue with Freya as well. She glares at Freya, and Freya, who has never pretended her relationship with Gytha was anything so straightforward as that between servant and mistress, glares back.

“You’ll find out what it is to be a mother soon enough,” she hisses, and in the ensuing silence they hear Thecla racked by coughs and the low, rumbling tones of Fulk attempting to soothe her.

“All right,” says Gytha. “We’ll go down to that village.” She points to where the mist is thinning around the jumble of walls and thatch and the squat stone tower of a Norman church. “We’ll ask for lodging in the manor for tonight. But just tonight, mind. We haven’t gone nearly far enough yet.”

***

The master of the house is away, explains his wife, on a trip to sell their surplus sheep at the market at Horsham, before the winter sets in properly and there is no more grazing. But she would be heartily glad of company, as her two sons have gone with their father, and her youngest daughter is recently married and moved to live with her husband’s people, and her daughters-in-law, well, you know daughters-in-law, always criticising, aloof…And more of the same, as she ushers the women into her hall, then breaks off to tell Fulk where to put the horses and to recommend a tincture of liquorice root pounded with common horehound, taken before bed, for the little girl’s cough.