Needle in the Blood (76 page)

The Archbishop crosses himself fervently. “Her power reaches you even from beyond the grave.”

Before Odo can reply, they are distracted by a soft coughing outside the door.

“Come,” calls Lanfranc. A young monk sticks his head cautiously into the room. “What is it?”

“If you please, your grace, Brother Mark needs the key to the plate room and the Prior can’t find his.”

“Very well.” Lanfranc unlocks a small chest standing on his desk, with a key on the end of a chain around his neck. Rummaging among its contents, he eventually withdraws a much larger key with a fancy, trefoil head, but has some trouble disentangling it from a bronze chain with a locket on the end of it. As he holds out the key to the young monk, the locket swings from it, its enamel patterning nearly as familiar to Odo as the back of his own hand. Or hers.

“Where did you get that?”

In his haste to disentangle the jewel and return it to his box, Lanfranc is simply making matters worse. There is no possibility of pretending Odo has not seen it, or that it is anything other than what they both know it to be. Time to throw a sop to the wolf.

“One of Sister Jean’s women brought it to me. She was troubled by what it contained.”

Odo looks puzzled. “It has some locks of hair in it. Most lockets do, it’s what they’re for.”

“Infants’ hair, Odo. It is well known that witches will take the souls of infants who die unbaptised to be their familiars.”

“All those children were baptised, Lanfranc.” Odo speaks with icy precision, his power of self-control stretched to its limit. “There were four of them. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Johanna. None lived more than a few days. What more would you like to know? Perhaps Mistress Gytha’s attachment to her dead children bordered on the idolatrous, but I’ve seen worse, even among men, whose minds are known to be stronger. Which of those foolish mares of Agatha’s brought it to you? No, let me guess. It was Judith, wasn’t it? You have based your whole case against Gytha on that woman’s spite.”

Lanfranc continues his futile fiddling with the locket while the young monk shuffles nervously in the doorway.

“Oh, give it to me,” says Odo, snatching the key and its burden from Lanfranc. He unwinds the chain easily and hands the key to the young monk, who flashes him a grateful smile and flees. “You know,” he goes on, dribbling the locket chain from hand to hand, “her hatred of Gytha was not even born of her pride in being the widow of one of Godwinson’s leaders. That might have made them allies. Oh no, it was nothing but jealousy, that Gytha was loved, not only by me but by all sorts of people, and had pretty dresses. And you know I intended well by the woman, she had not even anything to be jealous of.”

“In God’s name, stop your fiddling,” snaps Lanfranc. Has Odo guessed the bargain he struck with Judith? If so, he is as much shamed by her mean-spiritedness as she is herself.

“Did you really believe Judith thought Gytha was a witch, old man? Seems to me the only witch you have had dealings with is Judith herself.” He rises, pulling the ill-fitting habit into place and tucking the locket into his scapular.

“I burnt the hair,” says Lanfranc defiantly.

“No matter.” Odo gives him a glacial smile. “She is with her children now.” With the one that counts anyway, he adds to himself, the one who is going to live.

***

Secure in the knowledge of her death, Gytha is content to travel openly once they leave the village near Horsham. They purchase an extra horse with a topaz taken from the store hidden in Odo’s cloak, and call it Topaz, though it never answers to any name other than Maud. They take to the main roads and spend the nights in manor houses or priory guest houses. Everywhere they elaborate their story of Gytha’s absent husband and her mother in the west a little further, which is why they avoid any great households or prominent abbeys where they might encounter those who could put their fabrications to the test. He is an older man, named Alain, in his fifties, to whom Gytha has been married for two years, having been widowed during the invasion. This will be their first child, though there is a grown-up son from a previous marriage who regards her with suspicion. Regarding Sir Alain’s estate, they do not have to rely on imagination, but on memory, and they recreate Winterbourne in every particular, even giving Sir Alain an aptitude for rearing orphaned piglets.

Though the weather worsens toward Advent, they continue to make good progress, travelling steadily northwest as the character of Gytha’s mother develops and it becomes clear to them she lives near Brysheiniog.
Brysh…what?
queries Freya when Gytha first comes up with it. Where is this unpronounceable place, for she has never heard of it? Gytha thinks she may have made it up, but she knows she hasn’t, and on Christmas Eve, as they are returning from Mass in the company of their hosts, a family of wool merchants in Oxford, the sky ablaze with stars and the ground silvered with frost crunching beneath their feet, the memory comes to her.

It is as if the cloud of her breath forms itself into her mother’s face, and the singing of the ice in tree branches and the eaves of the tall, stooping houses takes on the likeness of her voice, describing bony hills with their peaks bitten off by the dragons who live in the caves above racing streams which draw breath in deep, clear pools where the dragons cool their noses and read the future. There are sheep in the hills, of course, but also wild ponies, shaggy as goats, too wild even to be ridden by Lleu Llaw Gyffes who was raised to ride every horse, and they crop the grass so well that in the spring it is as green as seaweed. From then on, she knows where she is going and the character of her journey changes. No longer an escape, it becomes a running toward.

***

Days before his birthday, Odo makes the short journey to Saint Augustine’s, on a visit to his old friend Scolland, who receives him warmly, coming out in person to the abbey gate, accompanied by a young novice bearing a bowl of water and towels with which the abbot washes his visitor’s hands before kissing him with an affection much more enthusiastic than courtesy requires.

“My dear boy, you have been in difficult times. We remember you in our prayers.”

“For which I thank you.” Looking about him, at piles of timber and scaffolding, a wagonload of rough hewn stone awaiting the attentions of a mason, he asks, “How does the rebuilding of the church progress?”

“Excellently well. Blither, my master mason, is a treasure, and we are very grateful to you for the grant of Fordwich. We would be paying you so much import duty for the stone otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to afford to build on the scale we are doing. You must let me show you round.”

“I am glad to be of help. I should like to do more, though this time, I fear, I have come to ask you a favour. Two favours, actually. First, that you will have masses said here for…Aelfgytha.”

They are crossing in front of the chapter house toward the abbatial lodging. It is mid-morning, between Terce and Sext, and the abbey’s public spaces are almost deserted, the monks and abbey servants all at their work. Odo can hear a chorus of boys’ voices reciting their lessons in the cloister, which makes him smile, though he notices that Scolland, as he links arms with him, is frowning.

“I cannot pretend to be happy about it.”

“Why not?” asks Odo, all innocence. “She is but a child who died during the drought. I made a promise to her mother.”

Scolland looks relieved. “Ah, I thought…” He opens the door to his house and stands aside for his guest to enter the austere vestibule with its lime-washed walls and a great ebony crucifix before which Odo briefly bows his head.

“It’s a common enough name among the English. Your confusion is understandable.” Turning to Scolland, he seizes him by his arms. “Pray for her, Scolland, of your compassion, or just because I ask it if that makes it easier for you. Write what you will in your necrology, but when you say the Mass, let it be for her. And for me with her. My sins are many times greater than hers, and I feel…just as dead. I will pay handsomely, of course.”

God knows, the abbey needs the money; when Scolland first arrived there from Mont Saint Michel, the place had been falling down. Shortly after his arrival a monk was killed in the church itself, struck on the head by a lump of falling plaster. It was heart-breaking to think that this place, one of the great sites of Christian pilgrimage, should have fallen into such neglect. And whether Odo means the child, or the woman of the same name, who is he to decide who is deserving of God’s mercy and who is not? “Of course we will pray for her. I will have a scribe sent for to enter her into the roll.”

“Later. I must come to my second favour first.” They climb the stairs to Scolland’s parlour where they sit beside a window overlooking the church, the old building dwarfed by scaffolding. “I want you to finish my tapestry. A lot of your people have already worked on it. Your workshop is one of the best in the country, whereas mine…well, let us say I underestimated the difficulties.” Gazing out at the workmen swarming over the scaffolding, their tools between their teeth or strapped to their backs, he casts his mind back to his interview with Judith the day after his penitential visit to Christ Church. Watching her turn more and more pale and agitated as he swung Gytha’s locket in front of her weasel snout like an enticing tidbit, he had calmly announced that the man he had had in mind for her had been smitten by the charms of a young woman, the virgin daughter of one of his neighbours, and had begged leave to marry her with such urgency Odo had not the heart to refuse.

“Love is a powerful persuader, I find,” he had commented equably, watching the woman’s lips purse till they resembled nothing so much as a dog’s arse. So, he continued, he had made arrangements for her to enter a convent which held land from him near Thetford. The abbess was, as Judith could surely imagine, delighted at the dowry she would bring of an entire estate in Kent.

What he did not tell her, seeing no reason to distress her further, was that he had also sent word to his man at the Danish court to seek out the grandsons of the thegn of Harbourne and ensure some accident befell them. Like those who are doubtless still harbouring Gunhild, he is easier in his mind if he has insurance.

“I have all my sister’s notes and drawings,” he continues, recollecting himself. “It shouldn’t be difficult for your master to pick up where she left off.”

“I thought, when Sister Jean returned to Normandy, that you had decided against continuing with it.”

“Briefly. But I changed my mind. No, don’t look at me like that. It’s not my vanity. It’s an important record. Time passes, people forget. You and I probably feel as though we’ve lived this way, one foot in England, one in Normandy, forever, but we haven’t. We shouldn’t take it for granted. And besides, so much work has already been done. It would be a pity to let it go to waste. It should be finished, for remembrance.” He pauses, looks out at the church, then continues, “I thought, with your agreement, it might be appropriate if I were to sponsor a chapel, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, say, in gratitude.”

“There’s a perfect spot at the eastern end. I could show you now, if you like.”

***

Gytha knows she has reached the place when the people around her all seem to speak English with the same accent as her mother, a pattern of speech that reflects the hills they live in, a dizzy plunge into the vowel sounds followed by a climb up crumbling consonants. She knows because her daughter begins to dance in her belly the way bees dance at the mouth of the hive to thank God for a safe homecoming.

“Feel,” she says to Freya, eyes shining above ruddy cheeks. “The baby moved.”

They are standing beside the horses in the square of a small market town tucked into an elbow of river, the broader channel of which forms one boundary of the square and, swollen with meltwater from the mountains they can see in the distance, has overlapped its banks and turned trampled earth into syrupy mud. It is near dusk on an afternoon during Lent, and Fulk has gone in search of lodgings for the night.

“With good food,” Freya had called after him. The Lenten fast is hard enough without being in the company of a pregnant woman whose condition exempts her from its rigours. Now she lays her hand over Gytha’s hard little belly and waits, looking into Gytha’s eyes where the image of the earl is still discernible, but fainter, as though sunk very deep in a pool of dark water. Within a moment she feels it, not only the flutter of tiny legs and arms but something more, a life force disproportionate to the strength of this five month child who has known nothing but persecution, flight, and deceit almost since the moment of her conception.

“Strong,” she says to Gytha, removing her hand.

Gytha beams at her. “It’s because she can smell the air from the mountains. That’s the place, Freya.” Freya’s gaze follows hers to the western horizon where the mountains are heaped up behind a barricade of strangely sculpted, dark green hills, the sun waning from primrose to apricot as it sinks behind them. “That’s where we’re going.”

“But madam,” says Freya, gripping Thecla’s hand tight in dismay, “there’ll be nothing out there except sheep and bandits.”

“It’ll be all right, I know it will. You must trust me.”

For all the glow of her physical well-being, as though her body is alight with the life of the child inside her, Freya thinks her mistress must have lost her mind. Perhaps the earl chose unwisely in his tale of wolves at All Souls, conjuring spirits which have colonised Gytha’s senses the way the baby has taken over her body. Perhaps the child is an incubus after all. Turning her back on the darkening mountains she says impatiently,