Needle in the Blood (82 page)

“Would you have wished it otherwise?” William asks.

“I don’t waste my time wishing for what cannot be. I am a good and faithful servant. I use my talents to the best of my ability.”

“Why do I not quite believe you?”

“What have I done that you should not?”

“Orchestrated a false oath?”

“In your interests as much as mine. Imagine, we could be sitting here now, under threat from England as much as France or Anjou, instead of preparing to celebrate the fact that we’ve drawn everybody’s teeth. All the pregnant bitch’s offspring,” he adds, reflecting how that fable too appears in the margins of his tapestry.
Twice
, his ghost reminds him,
though the second time was not me.

I understand
, he replies, yours was a warning to Harold,
the other—whose?— was William’s promise. Do not let Normandy get a foot in the door. If you do, he will give away everything you value.

“Except that we wouldn’t be here, in this spectacular cathedral, because you wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Did you get what you wanted? Is this enough for you? I should think even God must find all this,” he waves his arm at the spectacle of the cathedral, “hard to stomach.”

Did you get what you wanted
, asks his ghost,
is it enough?
He does not answer. He walks back slowly down the aisle, toward the glimmer of the white marble altar, with his tapestry in the corner of his eye, a strip of moony ribbon pierced and puckered with the story of his life, its lies and moments of truth, its fears, its compromises, its moments of shame and savagery, its loves. His great enterprise. It is not how he planned it.

A memory is vouchsafed him, something he has not thought about for many years, not lost, but disregarded, like an old sword at the bottom of a weapons chest, rusty but with an edge to nick the unwary hand. He remembers the dream that came to haunt him after Senlac, the four women beneath the tree, the mutilated beauty between his sheets. He used to think, when he thought about it at all, that perhaps it was a dream about the ambiguities of power, about the exhilaration of taking and the illusion of holding.

He finds himself staring at the embroidered image of a woman and child fleeing a burning house, and as he stares, the moonlight begins to play tricks with his eyes. He sees a meadow, very bright, almost luminous, studded with wild flowers the colours of gems, a filigree of silver water running through it. In the meadow are a woman and a small child in a linen bonnet, playing, laughing, their laughter dissolving in the sound of running water. As he looks, they become aware of him and wave, then the woman takes the child by the hand and they start to walk toward him.

“Yes,” he says, a note of wonder in his voice, “yes, I did.”

“Eh?” says William, pulling crossly at his earlobe.

“Get what I wanted,” Odo explains, raising his voice slightly. He blinks, and the luminous vision is replaced once again by the embroidered image.

A dream come true
, says the Beloved Ghost.

This is a work of fiction, and as such, it would be inappropriate for me to give a full set of references. I am indebted to the research of Jan Messant for my re-imagination of the embroidery workshop. My speculations as to the interpretation of some of the more obscure imagery of the Bayeux Tapestry are partly my own and partly those of David J. Bernstein in his book, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry.

I am sure I have committed many unintentional historical inaccuracies, but there also are a few quite deliberate ones. Although Odo of Bayeux did have two sisters, Agatha is entirely a figment of my imagination. There is no evidence that Odo did attend the great monastery school at Bec, but it is plausible that he did, and there is no evidence that he did not. Odo’s son, John, is his only recorded child and, as he was witnessing documents for his cousin, Henry I, as late as 1121, he was almost certainly born much later than 1056, which is the date I give for his birth in this novel.

One historical figure who I feel deserves an apology, because I have treated his reputation rather badly in this book, is Lanfranc of Bec. Lanfranc was a religious leader of good conscience, and an administrator so able that many of the structures he put in place as Archbishop of Canterbury govern the Church of England to this day.

As for Aelfgyva, well, who knows? Perhaps she was just an “elf-gift” after all. Remember, if you translate Odo’s surname, de Conteville, into English, you get Storyville.

Toledo, Omer 5252, which is the year of the Christians 1492

There are days when I believe I have given up hope of ever seeing you again, of ever being free, or master of my own fate. Then I find that the heart and guts keep their own stubborn vigil. When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madam Fortune to prove us wrong.

When I was a little girl in the city of my birth, when my mother was still alive, she would take me to the synagogue, to sit behind the screen with the other women and girls and listen to the men sing the prayers for Shabbat
.
Sometimes, out of sight of the menfolk, while they were preoccupied by the solemnity of their duty, the women would not behave as their husbands and brothers and fathers liked to think. There would be giggling and whispering, shifting of seats, gossip exchanged by mouthing words and raising eyebrows. Fans would flutter, raising perfumed dust to dance in sunbeams fractured by the fine stone trellis which shielded us from the men. And around me was a continuous eddy of women, touching my hair and face, murmuring and sighing the way I have since heard people do before great works of art or wonders of nature.

This attention scared me, but when I looked to my mother for reassurance, she was always smiling. When I pressed myself to her side, fitting the round of my cheek into the curve of her waist, she too would stroke my hair as she received the compliments of the other women. Such a beautiful child, so fair, such fine bones. If I hadn’t been there for her birth, added my Grand Aunt Sophia, I would say she was a changeling, possessed by a
dybbuk
. And several of the other children my age, the girls and little boys who had not yet had their
bar mitzvah
, would fix solemn, dark eyes on my blue ones as if, whatever Aunt Sophia said, I was indeed a
dybbuk
, a malign spirit, an outsider. Trouble. Rachel Abravanel used to pull my hair, winding it tight around her fingers and applying a steady pressure until I was forced to tip back my head as far as it would go to avoid crying out and drawing the attention of the men. Rachel never seemed to care that my hair bit into her flesh and cut off the blood to her finger ends; the reward of seeing me in pain made it worthwhile.

A year after the time I am thinking of, when Rachel had died on the ship crossing from Sardinia to Naples, Señora Abravanel told my mother, as she tried to cool her fever with a rag dipped in seawater, how much her daughter had loved me. Many years later still, I finally managed to unravel that puzzle, that strange compulsion we have to hurt the ones we love.

As it was, from before the beginning of knowledge, I knew I was different, and in the month of Omer in the year 5252, which Christians call May, 1492, I became convinced I was to blame for the misfortunes of the Jews. It was a hot night and I could not sleep. My room overlooked the central courtyard of our house in Toledo, and, mingling with the song of water in the fountain, were the voices of my parents engaged in conversation.

“No!” my mother shouted suddenly, and the sound sent a cold trickle of fear through my body, like when Little Haim dropped ice down my back during the Purim feast. I do not think I had ever heard my mother shout before; even when we displeased her, her response was always cool and rational, as though she had anticipated just such an incidence of naughtiness and had already devised the most suitable punishment. Besides, it was not anger that gave her voice its stridency, but panic.

“But Leah, be reasonable. With Esther, you can pass, stay here until I’ve found somewhere safe and can send for you.”

“Forgive me, Haim, but I will not consider it. If we have to go, we go together, as a family. We take our chances as a family.”

“The king and queen have given us three months, till Shavuot
.
Till then, we are under royal protection.”

My mother gave a harsh laugh, quite uncharacteristic of her. “Then we can complete Passover before we go. How ironic.”

“It is their Easter. It is a very holy time for them. Perhaps their majesties have a little conscience after all.” I could hear the shrug in my father’s voice. It was his business voice, the way he spoke when negotiating terms for loans with customers he hoped would be reliable, but for whom he set repayment terms which would minimise his risk.

“King Ferdinand’s conscience does not extend beyond the worshippers of the false messiah as the Moors found out. For hundreds of years they pave roads, make water systems, light the streets, and he destroys them on a whim of his wife.”

“And you would destroy us on a whim of yours? We have three months before the edict comes into force. I will go now, with the boys, and you and Esther will follow, before the three months is up, so you will be perfectly safe. Besides, I need you here to oversee the sale of all our property. Who else can I trust?”

“Here, then.” I heard a scrape of wood on stone as my mother leapt up from her chair. I dared not move from my bed to look out of the window in case the beam of her rage should focus on me. “Here is your plate. I will fill it and take it to the beggars in the street. If you go, you will die.”

“Leah, Leah.” My father’s conciliatory rumble. China smashing.

“Don’t move. If you tread the marzipan into the tiles I will never get them clean.” Then my mother burst into tears and the trickle of fear turned to a torrent of cold sweat, so when my nurse came in to see why I was crying, she thought I had a fever beginning and forced me to drink one of her foul tasting tisanes.

“I’m sorry, Haim,” I heard my mother say before the infusion took effect and sent me to sleep. My father made no response and I heard nothing more but clothes rustling against each other and the small, wet sound of kissing that made me cover my ears with my pillow.

***

A week later, my father and my three brothers, Eli, Simeon, and Little Haim, together with several other men from our community, left Toledo to make the journey to Italy, where many of the rulers of that land’s multitude of tyrannies and city states were known to tolerate the Jews and to be wary of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, whose approach to statecraft was not pragmatic enough for them. Even the Kingdom of Naples, which was ruled by relatives of the king, was said to be content to receive refugees from among the exiles of Jerusalem. My father, however, intended to go to Rome. The pope is dying, he explained, and there is a Spanish cardinal prepared to spend a lot of money to buy the office when the time comes. This Cardinal Borja will be needing a reliable banker. We were unsure what a pope was, or a cardinal, and Borja sounded more like a Catalan name than a Spanish one to us, and a Catalan is as trustworthy as a gypsy, but my father’s smile was so confident, his teeth so brilliant amid the black brush of his beard, that we had no option but to nod our agreement, bite back our tears, and tell him we would see him in Rome.

Many people have contributed to the making of this book. My warmest thanks are due first and foremost to Emma Barnes and Gilly Barnard at Snowbooks, Stephanie Thwaites and all at Curtis Brown, and Shana Drehs and all at Sourcebooks. Thanks also to Mary Allen, Mary-Jane Cullen, Patricia Duncker, Sara Fisher, Sue Fletcher, Ryan Gattis, Christina Johnson, Paul Magrs, Sarah Molloy, Andrew Motion, Ingrid Perrin, Michele Roberts, and not forgetting Mark, Guy and Hugh for their forbearance and unfailing optimism. Finally, I would like to make special mention of Bernardine Coverley, whose steady encouragement and gentle criticism was invaluable. She is missed more than she can know.

Sarah Bower has worked at an assortment of jobs, from call centres to market stalls. After many years working in the charitable sector, she became a professional writer and creative writing tutor after completing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives in the country with her husband, two dogs, and a geriatric cat.