Needle in the Blood (78 page)

“Will you not at least break bread with us and set out after the day meal?”

Thinking of Fulk and Freya, she demurs, but sits through the meal in an agony of impatience. All the time she endures Gereint’s wife’s counsels on childbirth, a vision shimmers in her mind of her new home and how it will be when the roof is sound and the beans planted, the hearth swept and a couple of these prettily carved stools before it, when there are stout hides at the windows and bees in the hives and a silver cross upon the altar to draw out the glitter in the granite dragon’s eyes.

***

They work unceasingly throughout the spring, Fulk and a couple of men from Owein ap Llwyr’s household. Though Freya is clearly minded to take up Gytha’s offer of freedom, Fulk will not hear of it until the hermitage is restored and a decent sow chosen. He is Lord Odo’s man before he is Freya’s, he tells her, with the uncomfortable suspicion that it is more complicated than that, though he could not say how.

By the time Owein ap Llwyr returns from his daughter’s wedding in Ireland, the hermit’s room is weatherproof and they are working on the roof of the chapel. Having chided his steward severely for letting the lady live up there in such conditions, and heard Gereint’s reply that she had refused all offers of hospitality, accepting only the services of the two workmen, a plain cross of silver forged by the smith, and the carpenter’s offer to make her an oak table, a set of stools, and a crib, Lord Owein mounts his pony and goes up to Saint George’s to see the mad Englishwoman for himself. Suspecting she may be genuinely holy, for how else to account for her behaviour, he takes with him a mule laden with two sacks of flour, a barrel of wine, some Welsh onion sets, and a bag of bean seed.

Her new landlord puts Gytha in mind of nothing so much as a goat. Though tall for a Welshman, he is a head shorter than Fulk, with a black beard which curls to a point like a goat’s and yellow goat eyes. His legs are bowed, but he is nimble, and so quick Gytha, now well into her sixth month, can scarcely keep pace as he tests the soundness of a rafter with the point of his knife, or praises the stonework around the hearth, or wonders that she can be content with so plain a cross, or frets about the safety of her child. His speech bubbles like the brook over stones, and occasionally falls into reflective pools, at the bottom of which Gytha suspects a cool, analytical intelligence lurks like an ancient and wily pike.

Once he has satisfied himself that the work is progressing to an acceptable standard, he asks Gytha to accompany him to a rock ledge overhanging the brook a few paces down the track from the hermitage’s eyrie.

“Permit me,” he says, taking her arm with a smile of stained goat teeth glimpsed through the glossy curls of his moustache, “the path is very rough.”

“And I am very ungainly,” she replies gallantly.

“I used to come here, you know, when I was a boy. Old Dafydd would hide me from my father when I’d displeased him, which was often. I would fish from this ledge and listen to Dafydd’s wisdom while we cooked the trout. He was my Merlin, you might say, though I am no Arthur, for if I were, Dafydd would still be here and Neufmarche back in Rouen.”

“Perhaps Dafydd’s time had come, my lord. The longer I live the more I see the futility of questioning God’s will or the way He goes about achieving it.”

“Then you are a wise woman and a worthy successor.” He pauses. “I also have a son who fishes up here. It might be well if you would make yourself known to him.”

“And do you suppose your father had this sort of conversation with Dafydd? Do you not think it wiser to let your son come to me of his own accord if he is minded to unburden himself? No doubt he has confidants more likely than me.”

“But not ones to whom I may speak candidly.”

“Which you believe you have a right to do to me because you have let me have your hermitage. I must take on the hermit’s duties as well as his house. Even though I paid, more than fairly, I thought, for so small a plot.”

“Gereint has shown me the stones. What’s more, there are people in some of the villages between here and Y Gelli who have become suddenly and inexplicably wealthy. I will not ask how you came by your jewels, or your swollen belly…as long as you will do me this occasional favour. The boy is pleasant enough. You should not find it too onerous.”

She looks into Owein’s crafty goat eyes, trying to read there if he is a man who will keep his word. She thinks he must, if it is a matter of his own son, but she wishes Odo were there. Odo has an instinct for these kinds of situations. Then thoughts of Odo lead her to see in her mind’s eye the image of the saint and the dragon on the chapel altar stone, and she knows she has no choice but to trust Owein, because this is the place where her child must be born.

“I’m sure I shall not.”

“Good, then we understand one another. I think we shall be fast neighbours, Aradrhon’s daughter.”

***

Though the weather in the hills is always changeable, it proves to be a kind spring, with few long periods when work on the hermitage is impossible. Under the inquisitive eyes of lambs and the occasional, lofty gaze of eagles, Fulk and his men complete the building and haul up the furniture from Owein ap Llwyr’s carpenter’s workshop. Helped by Thecla, the women plant out a vegetable garden, until Gytha can no longer bend to the work and occupies her time sewing baby clothes, hemming blankets for her bed and curtains for the crib, and embroidering a cloth for Saint George’s altar.

She waits out her goose month almost in a trance, in which nothing seems real but her daughter, turning somersaults in her belly, clearly visible now beneath the taut stretched fabric of the gown she has made out of two of her old ones. Even the work going on around her seems to be happening behind a veil, immediate yet distant, all to her direction and yet somehow not her responsibility. Sometimes, especially when the baby moves, she thinks of Odo, but not as often as she had expected to, and not with the pain for which she braces herself. She feels guilty about this. Sometimes she talks to her daughter about it, as though the baby is a wiser soul than she is.

You know I still love him, don’t you?
she says, her voice soundless, merely a vibration of the cord that binds her to her daughter.
It’s just that I have to think of you now. He would understand, wouldn’t he? After all, you’re part of him too.
She tries to conjure up his face, but though she can list each feature, from the lazy cat curve of the smile that says, I want you, to his short nose and curling eyelashes, she cannot seem to put them together. He is a picture in her memory, without the spark of animation. She knows she should regret this, but does not, and that compounds her guilt until she begins her monologue of self-justification all over again.

Her guilt becomes focused on Fulk, making her resentful of his obstinate loyalty to Odo, so that, in the end, she and Freya are working together to convince him he has done all he can for her. The day he puts the last straw in place on the ridge of the chapel roof, flailing at the swallows, newly arrived from their winter quarters and expecting to find their nests where they left them at the end of last summer, the three of them drink a toast to the future as the sun narrows to a bright diadem on the brow of the hill behind the hermitage. Then Gytha puts down her cup and goes into the chapel, where what remains of Odo’s jewels, except the pearls, are concealed in a recess behind the altar which was once, she presumes, intended to house the Host. Grabbing a handful at random, she goes back outside.

“Hold out your hands,” she says to Fulk, then pours the jewels into his cupped palms. “There. For you and your family. Go, lose yourselves, be happy. Keep the finest pigs in Christendom and give Thecla a tribe of brothers and sisters.”

“But what about the baby, madam?” This time, perversely, it is Freya who appears reluctant. “It can’t be long now.”

“Freya, this will be my fifth child.”

“Fifth? But I thought…”

“I have let you think a lot of things about me that were wrong. Forgive me. You believed I disliked children. I never disliked them, I was simply afraid. All my other four died, and it hurt me more than seemed reasonable or bearable.”

“All the more reason…”

“But we know this one isn’t going to die, don’t we? We both heard what Gunhild said. I’m not afraid now, I haven’t been since we…cleaned the bed at Conteville.” Both women give Fulk a sidelong glance, but he is absorbed by the handful of gems and seems to have no curiosity about their conversation. “So please,” continues Gytha, “have no concern for me, think of yourselves.”

“His lordship…” ventures Fulk, wishing he had kept his mouth shut as the women turn on him.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” snaps Freya.

“You have more than discharged your obligations to Lord Odo,” Gytha insists. “He would be the first to say so. You have followed me beyond the grave, as it were, and built me a very fine ‘tomb.’ You could not have done more.” She laughs, but Fulk looks doubtful and shivers as the sun disappears behind the hill.

“Before dark,” she continues, “you will go down to Lord Owein’s stables and take two of the horses and the mule. I said I would give him my mare in exchange for one of the mountain ponies. And I will never see you again. You will forget me and all the danger I put you in, though I will not forget you.”

She kisses each of them, even Fulk, who flushes like a second sunset, and holds Freya for a moment by her upper arms in token of the secrets they have shared, but perhaps more because of the ones they have not. She watches them until a turn in the track takes them out of sight, Freya with her daughter on her hip, Fulk leading the way with their saddlebags slung over his shoulder. She watches until their foreshortened figures reappear outside Owein ap Llwyr’s stockade, and the gate opens, and they disappear inside. Then she rinses the drinking cups in the brook, stoppers the jug of Lord Owein’s wine, and carries everything indoors. She goes into her chapel and, finding kneeling difficult, sits cross-legged in front of the saint and the dragon locked in their interminable combat.

“Well, George,” she says, “here we are, you and me and the dragon.”
And me
, says her daughter, feet drumming against the walls of her mother’s womb.

One morning toward the end of May, she is certain something has changed the moment she opens her eyes. Her mattress still has the oily scent of freshly sheared wool and the room beyond her bed curtains smells, as it does every morning, of the dough put to prove the night before. Shards of sunlight pierce the false twilight of closed shutters, and outside, as always, skylarks bubble in competition with the brook. For a few moments she lies still, holding back the bed curtain and wondering. Then realisation dawns. The baby is not moving. Gytha feels no anxiety about this. She knows babies become still once they are ready to be born. Do they sleep, she wonders, gathering strength for the struggle ahead, or are they simply struck to stone by contemplation of the unknown world they are about to enter?

Heaving herself up from the bed on a surge of anticipation, she sets about making everything ready in her room. She spreads a clean sheet on the floor, and beside it puts twine, a knife, a cup of wine, and a linen envelope of powdered poppy seed Freya gave her for pain. Climbing cautiously onto a stool, she then fastens two lengths of rope over the rafters above the sheet. She wishes she still had her medal of Saint Margaret, patron saint of women in labour, that was tied to her left thigh during the births of her other children, together with eleven grains of coriander in a muslin bag. But the medal had been in her leather pouch and she has no coriander. She lights her fire, then goes out to the brook to fetch water, not bothering to dress but simply shoving her feet into her shoes and throwing a shawl over her night gown. Returning with her pail, she uncovers the dough, divides, kneads, and shapes her loaves, and puts them into the oven Fulk built for her beside the hearth.

Her mind is calm and clear, but her body is restless. She tries to sit, dragging a stool out into the morning sun, telling herself she must conserve her energy, but her feet twitch and her legs dance to a rhythm only they know. Her back aches and she knows she must be tired, up countless times every night to make water and then unable to sleep due to the baby’s remorseless kicking, but sitting brings on heartburn so she decides to take a walk. She climbs the ridge behind the hermitage from where, if she looks to the east, she can see the dark smudge of Y Gelli, Neufmarche’s tower shimmering over it this morning like the admonitory finger of some stone giant buried with his hand poking out of the earth. Just as she is perfecting this image to herself, the first pain creeps up on her, a stealthy shift of the ache at the base of her spine to some deeper, less definable location, vanished almost before she has registered what it is.

No harm in continuing her walk. It will be hours yet before anything happens. She goes on along the ridge in a northerly direction, trying to count the different shades of green and blue, mauve and grey in the vast, petrified sea of hills around her, watching the swoop and dart of swallows and wondering why it is you never see a skylark, as though its song forms a concealing cloud around it. When she reaches the pinnacle of the next hill, she returns the way she has come, gazing in delight at the neat, new thatch of her roof, the same warm shade as amber, but so much more precious.
Like you, baby,
says the voice inside as another pain comes, sharper this time, more focused,
made, not found. The bread will be ready,
she thinks, clambering down the scree into her backyard where her little spotted sow grazes incuriously, her chain rattling as she pulls it through the iron eye in the pole she is tethered to.