Needle in the Blood (81 page)

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he says.

All the best stories do, replies the ghost.

“Talking to yourself, brother?”

Preoccupied with listening to his ghost, his sight confused by the alternating shafts of light and dark, he has not noticed William come into the cathedral. William has advanced a little way up the nave and is peering closely at the other end of the hanging, which is not exactly opposite the first panel as the Pevensey blessing scene is not central to its length. He is bare-headed, and the moonlight pouring through the rose window picks out the grey in his hair, giving its red a faded appearance.

“You’re starting at the wrong end,” says Odo, crossing the main aisle to join him. William, he notices, is wheezing slightly and smells like an old dog.

“Oh, I don’t know. That’s me, isn’t it?” He points at the enthroned king, the towers of Saint Peter’s abbey church at Westminster behind him, the mirror image of King Edward at the opening of the tale, if you were to ignore the variations in the lower border, where Edward is framed by pairs of dogs and pelicans, but William has flames licking his feet. “This is devilish tricky light to see in. What’s that, some sort of…Splendour of God, flames. You might have glossed over that unfortunate detail.”

“I might, Agatha clearly wouldn’t. This part was done at Saint Augustine’s, after…Agatha had gone home. I gave them instructions to follow her sketches absolutely. I hadn’t seen it myself until earlier today, when they were hanging it. I like it. The more adversities, the greater the triumph.”

William gives a sceptical grunt. “You’re thinner,” he says. “What’s your secret?”

Odo makes a dismissive gesture with his hands. “I don’t seem to have the appetite I used to.”

“Fortunate for you. My physician’s got me on a diet. All boiled chicken and lettuces. Enough to drive a man to an early grave. And that’s you?” William has moved onto the next, or former, image, which shows himself standing with Odo kneeling before him, his hands between William’s in the act of homage.

“Touching,” William remarks.

“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” asks Odo, ushering his brother across the aisle.

“Was this Agatha’s notion?” he asks as they reach Harold’s last supper at Bosham, pointing at the little figures of Aesop’s fox and crow in the border below. “Or yours?”

Oh, clever girl
, he says to his ghost,
you clever girl.
“Neither,” he says to William, with an abruptness which diverts William’s attention from the hanging to his brother.

“Ah. You surprise me. For surely here we have Godwinson, the vain and stupid crow, dropping the prize into the waiting jaws of the wily fox, me.”

“Or, the disingenuous and trusting crow being taken advantage of by the ruthless fox.”

“Somewhat like this young woman here. Honestly, Odo, I wonder that you have the audacity to display this in a house of God.” William frowns at one of Margaret’s naked couples.

“The best love stories mingle the earthly and the divine,” comments Odo.

“I wasn’t aware this was a love story.” William fixes a beady look on his brother. “I thought you were done with all that nonsense.”

“Oh, quite chastened. As you said at the time, it’s just like striking your funny bone. But the memory lingers even after the pain has gone. As a warning, perhaps, to be more careful next time. Think of these,” Odo waves a nonchalant hand at the little figures, “as characters in a cautionary tale if you like.”

“Why am I always left with the impression that every word you utter has at least two meanings, Odo?”

Odo laughs and moves on, only a few feet, then stops, abruptly, like an animal reaching the limits of a tether. Here is something he has never seen before, surely he has never seen before, he would have remembered. If he had seen even the sketch for it, he would have said, no, it’s private, irrelevant, leave it out. Yet he is glad that fate, or accident, or even God, has intervened to put it there.
Ubi unus clericus et Aelfgyva.
He touches the letters of her name, in its Latin spelling which he used to be so careful to avoid, as though they are a charm, as though their physical presence in indigo wool might somehow enable him to see what has become of her and the child.

“There you are,” he says to her softly.

“What?” says William, coming up beside him. William, he thinks, is growing deaf.

“Nothing.”
Our secret
, he tells his ghost. “I wish Agatha had come.”

“That comet’s a fine confection. Why didn’t she?”

So, a comet may endure after all.
“Oh, she’s quite a recluse these days. She isn’t even novice mistress at Saint Justina’s any more. She lives in her own little hermitage, in a field of cows, I’m told. The only people who see her are her confessor and the servant who looks after her. Not even me, and I’m her bishop, if nothing else.”

William sighs and shakes his head. “Women,” he says. “I expect you miss her.”

“Yes. Although part of me feels as though it has become a hermit with her.”

“Why aren’t these ships finished?”

The two men peer at the scene, a worried looking Harold listening to an adviser, the comet shooting overhead and in the lower border the empty hulls of ships, in pale yellow and whitework, suspended above a wintry sea.

“Damned if I know,” says Odo, and his ghost says, of course you do. “Yes I do. They are finished. They’re dream ships.”

“Godwinson’s nightmares,” adds William, catching on.

“Or his dreams of Valhalla.”

“Is there anything in this oddity that’s simply what it seems to be?”

“As much as in me. Or you. It’s been nearly ten years in the making. What do you expect?”

“What I like is things to be clear cut, unequivocal. Order.”

“Ah.”

The two men complete their circuit of the nave slowly and companionably. William admires the way Agatha has caught the syncopation of the horses at the beginning of a cavalry charge; his troops drill for hours a day to achieve such unity, good to see it appreciated. I know, responds Odo, seeing in his mind’s eye the beach at Saint Valery, the squares and circles, the parallel lines of hoofmarks in the damp sand like a giant child’s geometry slate. William teases him about the heroic representation of himself rallying the men when it was believed William had been killed. Whey-faced and knock-kneed as a virgin on her wedding night, more like it. He considers Godwinson’s death for a long time, searching his memory for any evidence of a shot in the eye, an unusual sort of injury, but it is years ago and not important. The sea will have had the man’s remains long since.

Then, with his hand on the latch of the wicket in the west door, saying he must get back to the palace before Matilda sends out a search party, he confesses something puzzles him.

“The oath,” he says. “You’ve got yourself in all over the place, even the odd council I could swear you weren’t at, but your biggest moment, when Godwinson swore on your relics and we thought we’d got him, well, where are you? You were certainly there, parading up the beach with your cope billowing out behind you and your swordbelt on like Saint Vigor himself.”

Oh yes, he was there. He remembers the cloying softness of the sand, how the clergy carrying the heavy reliquaries, impeded by their skirts, struggled against it. He remembers the wind almost blowing his mitre off and whipping the words of the oath out to sea, so that William had to repeat them before Godwinson could hear what he was supposed to say. Silk vestments. Biting, salt cold. At least, with this grand new cathedral, there will be no more need to stage big events on the beach.

Ever since William came into the building, Odo has been waiting for him to ask this question. Actually, he has been waiting for it, or something like it, for years. The pillars supporting the great arch of the west door are encircled by stone benches balanced on the spread wings of cherubim. Odo sits on one, William next to him. Their shoulders almost touch, yet they are facing away from one another due to the tight diameter of the bench. William is in darkness, shaded from the moon by the door recess. Odo listens to his brother’s laboured breathing. He feels sick but deadly calm.

“Do you remember the Saint Exupery incident?”

William laughs. “You mean when you spent all that money buying what you thought were the saint’s bones, only to find out they belonged to some peasant who probably couldn’t even say his Creed?”

“People were punished,” says Odo defensively, before reminding himself not to be distracted. “Well, I never did anything about the bones. They just stayed in the crypt at the old church, in the reliquary shrine I bought them in. So when it looked to me as though Harold was reluctant to commit himself to supporting your claim to succeed Edward, I switched the reliquaries and told him he wasn’t binding himself to anything. He could swear, you’d let him take his hostages and go home, and then he could claim he was tricked, so his promise wasn’t worth anything.”

Ah
, says the beloved ghost,
a debt of honour. Now I understand.

“Splendour of God,” says William in a subdued voice, “so he never was foresworn. And you really did it? You didn’t just tell him you had?”

“Of course I did it. He watched me do it. He never would have sworn otherwise. You were treating him well enough, and he’d profited from the campaign against Conan of Brittany, so he’d have stuck it out.”

“What made you so sure of him? I didn’t see it.”

“I knew him better than you. Remember, I’d visited him a couple of times, seen him on his home ground. And perhaps he was more prepared to talk openly to me. After all, I was just the bishop, the younger son sent into the church. None of Duke Robert’s blood in my veins.”

And do you remember seeing me,
prompts his ghost,
through heat shimmer and wine haze, just one of the household women below the hearth? You never said you did.

“No wonder you wanted to disassociate yourself. But why? Why make everything so complicated? The outcome would have been the same with or without the oath. Edward left the throne to me, Harold usurped it, even if he did pretty it up by getting himself elected king. Elected, I ask you. What nonsense.”

“Because I wanted to be absolutely certain that, when the time came, you would act. I didn’t want to risk your being undecided, or not getting enough support. The oath was my surety. You see,” he goes on, rising from the bench and standing in front of William, “I couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of my life here, going to waste in that dark, damp old palace, passing my time in councils on the appropriate vestments for baptisms or what’s a suitable punishment for a priest who fails to maintain his tonsure, and grovelling to rich men who believe they can buy their way into heaven by paying to mend the cathedral roof. God gave me you, William, and then He reminded me that He helps those who help themselves.”

William looks up at him. He speaks mildly, affecting hurt rather than anger. “I can’t believe that you had so little faith in me, brother. Did you think I would let what was rightfully mine just slip away from me?”

“I doubted you’d get enough military support which, as it happens, was nearly true. You needed the Pope, and the notion that Harold had perjured himself lent weight to Lanfranc’s argument in Rome. And I wasn’t sure you were ruthless enough. There’s a squeamish side to you, William, a tendency to draw back from the brink.”

“Alencon?” William asks, still in the same conciliatory tone.
Me?
asks the beloved ghost. “I remember how much you used to like me to tell you that story when you were a boy.”

“A fit of bad temper. Not ruthlessness. There’s nothing rational in hacking off tens of men’s hands and feet because they’ve insulted your mother.”

Or driving out your brother’s mistress because you’re jealous of her place in his heart
, scolds the ghost.

“I see.” William clears his throat. “And the relics I wore during the battle? The false ones?”

“Oh no, of course not. I had them switched back. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“You really are a very dangerous man, aren’t you, Odo? More of Ganelon than Turpin in your make up. I must be grateful I have you on my side.”

“I am your man, Your Grace, by blood and honour.” He kneels before William, placing his hands between his brother’s as if performing homage. His knees crack. Moonlight illuminates half his face.

“A pretty speech,” says William, prising Odo’s palms apart with his fingers so they are holding hands as they might have done if they had ever been children together. “I have heard you make so many over the years, inspired, I believed, by love of me. And now I find it was just your own ambition that fired you up.”

Look into his eyes, Odo
, commands the ghost,
and you’ll see your own solitude mirrored there. His sons rebel against him and he cannot trust his wife not to side with them. You’re not the only one to have sacrificed your heart on the altar of ambition.

“It’s the same thing,” says Odo.

Odo frees his hands from William’s grasp and stands up.