Needle in the Blood (41 page)

“Plague,” says Freya. “Well, I’m sure Lord Odo will be thrilled to bits to find you’ve risked bringing plague into this house.”

“Be careful,” calls Sister Jean, rubbing her elbows as the corner of a frame catches on the tailgate of the cart and tumbles into the mud.

Gytha gives Freya a sharp frown. “Freya, go and look out for Fulk returning. We shall need him to help move the furniture.” She is aware of Sister Jean suddenly stiffening beside her, of a pause in the file of women who greet their hostess uncertainly, knowing no better than she does how they should conduct themselves with her. Margaret is standing in front of her, blank-eyed and speechless. “Meg. Oh, I have missed you.” Only realising as she says it that it is true. Seizing Margaret’s hands, she is immediately aware of how thin they have become. Margaret says nothing, merely stands, meek and abstracted, waiting for her hands to be released so she can continue her sleepwalker’s progress across the threshold. Gytha lets her go.

“Is she…?” Surely Sister Jean would not knowingly have brought a sick person with her.

“Of course not. I told you, it’s a rumour merely, I am just being cautious. I could not bear…how would Odo react if all this work were to be destroyed?” Both women glance toward the cart emptying its cargo into the yard, the rising stack of frames and trestles, the wooden chests which Gytha presumes contain the linen sheets themselves, the wool stands poking up from the mud like strange, stiff saplings. Rubbing her thumbs over her fingertips, feeling the fine ridges of scar tissue there, she wonders how she would feel.

By evening, it is as though the atelier at Canterbury had never existed. The hall table has been shoved against the wall, directly beneath one of the two windows that light opposite ends of the hall, and is already covered by Sister Jean’s master plan, her box of knives and charcoal, and the palimpsests and linen offcuts on which she makes her preliminary drawings and calculations. The frames have been set up between the hearth and the hall door, and Fulk has rigged a makeshift firescreen from deer hides and a broken shield. The sorting and hanging of wools has taken longer than anticipated due to Thecla’s insistence on helping. Finally she was distracted by the dwarf, once again left behind when his master went to court, making a bouquet of woollen offcuts disappear then reappear tied together in a single, multi-coloured strand. The carts have been stowed in an empty barn, the mules and oxen turned out, the escort sent on their way, having orders not to be away from Canterbury any longer than absolutely necessary.

As the evening closes in, Sister Jean retires to a secluded corner of the hall where she sets out her devotional objects to say Vespers, while Gytha and Freya collect up all the cushions scattered about the house, splashes of silken colour and elaborate tapestry left like a spoor in the wake of Odo’s departure. Is he also saying his office, in the king’s chapel, or that of his own London house, or one of the city’s great churches, she wonders. Perhaps missing these very cushions as his knees strike cold stone or pitted earth. Or perhaps he is feasting with his brother, surrounded by glistening goblets and golden platters piled with steaming meats and Master Pietro’s cakes.

Gytha has no idea how her household will feed so many guests, especially now they have sent all their surplus game to the sisters at Saint Eufrosyna’s. But Freya appears unfazed, rolling up her sleeves in the kitchen, dispatching Fulk to bring in women and boys from the estate villages to help. Hesitating in the kitchen doorway, in billows of steam and gusts of laughter, a thin wail as a spit boy is splashed by hot fat, putting off the moment when she has to join the women in the hall, she feels suspended in a different element. Sounds are muffled, images indeterminate, as though she is peering at them through water. All in the kitchen is fire, which will dry her to nothing if she enters. In the hall is earth, the women sitting on the ground, the gritty, gravely remarks quarried from deep scars of envy, or mistrust, or simple confusion. Water breaks against earth, scattered in rainbows, or soaks into it, becomes indistinguishable from it.

“Good job that tub’s gone,” she hears from one of Freya’s kitchen helpers, and a forest of floury arms rises, hands rubbing brows, laughter ballooning into the yard where she stands, dusk gathering about her, February cold nudging her toward the hall. A path of silence leads her across the room, between the frames and wool stands looming out of muffled firelight, to where the women sit around the far side of the hearth, a crescent of watchful faces in a splash of orange.

“May I?” She smiles, feeling the tension in every muscle. Judith shuffles sideways to make space for her; she sits, cross-legged, smoothing her skirt over her knees, garnet red among the grey, a girdle of plaited silk bound with gold wire whose bright tails coil in her lap. “How was your journey?” Her voice comes to her across a great distance, false, distorted, as though she has spoken through a kerchief or into the neck of a jar. Will they understand her? Will they even hear her?

“Long,” says one of the women recruited from Saint Augustine’s, who normally, Gytha recalls, goes home at the end of the day.

“We will be as comfortable as we can here, though you will miss your family.”

“You’d know all about that,” hisses Judith, a whiff of sour breath making Gytha recoil slightly. She folds her hands over her belly to still the ghosts and tries to feel compassion, to see what Judith must see in this Saxon house whose Norman lord is everywhere, in its furnishings, the wine they are drinking instead of beer, the kite-shaped Norman shield guarding the embroidery from the fire. In the dress she is wearing, cut close to the figure in the latest style from Rouen, and the jewels he has presented to her like milestones to mark the stages of their love. But what does Judith see? What are the colours of spite?

“Like Israel fleeing Egypt,” says Alwys to Leofwine, cradled in her lap under Turold’s watchful eye. Leofwine, who is teething, gnaws on Alwys’ stump. “What is the dwarf for?”

“For Lord Odo’s amusement,” says Gytha.

Judith sits up, tugging her cap straight. “Is he here, then?”

“He is at court. He left the dwarf to keep me company.” To guard her, the dwarf who is not a man, and Fulk, who notices no woman but Freya.

Women. There will be women in London, exotic, beautiful, witty and wise as the women who used to grace Lady Edith’s table, where Odo never noticed her. Stupid. That was then, everything is different now. He trusts Fulk because he understands the exclusivity of Fulk’s devotion. Because he feels the same. If he did not, why would he have strung out his departure so, why endure the implacable disapproval of Canon Guy and the undoubted wrath of William? She fingers the ruby pendant hanging from a string of pearls around her neck. She found it after he left, hidden under her pillow with a note and a sprig of dried rue.
Rue for remembrance, ruby for the fire in my blood, pearls for my tears
, he had written.
Pearls for the moon
, she thinks,
the full, bright, beautiful moon of his name.
The dwarf is no consolation; nothing can fill the space he leaves when he goes; it is like the emptiness left inside her by her dead children.

“What can the dwarf do?” It is the first time Margaret has opened her mouth. From the reactions of the other women, all turning toward her with varying expressions of surprise and relief, it is the first time she has spoken for some while.

“Oh, he sings and plays and juggles a bit. But mostly he likes to remind Lord Odo that he is only a mortal man.”

“It’s just that there was a dwarf at a fair once who could tell the future.”

“Telling the future and telling a great man he will one day come to dust carry quite similar risks,” remarks Turold, refilling his drinking horn. Gytha laughs, but Margaret just looks sad.

Sister Jean finishes her devotions as Freya and her team of village women come in with trays of food, and Gytha marvels as greatly as her guests at what they have managed to produce out of nothing but a half-finished quince pie. It may be Lent, but this is still a great man’s household, make no mistake. In the general shuffling around that takes place to accommodate the meal, Gytha finds herself seated beside Margaret. Noticing the big girl makes no attempt to help herself to food, Gytha takes a wooden platter, piles it with mackerel in mint sauce and pike with a pudding in its belly. Freya has adapted seamlessly to Odo’s culinary standards, but Margaret, for a girl whose appetite for food was always at least healthy, picks at her plate with as little relish as the sickly Countess of Mortain.

“Come, Margaret,” orders Sister Jean, “eat up.”

Margaret picks up a piece of bread and tears at it dutifully with her teeth, but she has to make several anguished attempts to swallow, her throat straining and gagging, eyes watering from the effort.

Gytha takes the plate from her and puts it down on the hearth. “Never mind.”

Margaret’s grateful expression is pitiful. Gytha longs to retreat to her bower, to lie in Odo’s bed behind the silk curtains, love’s soft footprints all around her in dented pillows and creased quilts. But she will have to give up the bed to Sister Jean, or at least offer to share it with her and Judith, who is also of noble blood, and the thought of sharing that bed with anyone but Odo is unbearable. No, she will sleep here in the hall with the rest of the women.

She rises, which acts as a signal to silence Turold, who has been telling a long, complicated story about a wizard, a magically embroidered robe, and an adventurous girl who becomes a pirate. Emma looks disappointed.

“It’s late, and you must all be very tired. Sister Jean, Judith, I will put my bower at your disposal.” She takes a torch from a basket on the hearth, ignites it, and escorts the two women to the bower by its smoky, tarry light. Judith’s resentment bores into her back; Judith would be happier if Gytha left her something to complain about.

“This is good of you,” says Sister Jean, contemplating the great fur-covered bed while Gytha fastens the bower door against a sharp wind now prowling around the courtyard.

“I hope you sleep soundly.”

“After four nights of priory hospices or bare earth, I shall at least,” says Judith.

“Then I will leave you.” Lighting a couple of candles from her torch, Gytha collects a cloak from a hook beside the door.

“Gytha,” says Sister Jean.

“Yes, Sister?”

“I have never replaced you, you know. There is a space for you at one of the frames if you want it.”

“I…there is a woman in Winterbourne village whose daughter is very sick with a catarrh of the lungs. I intend to visit her tomorrow, to take some medicine my lord’s physician recommended.”

“Send Freya.”

“Goodnight, Sister. I hope you find the bed…comfortable.”

***

Gytha cannot sleep. The wind rises during the night, snapping and snarling around the house, pushing under the door and through gaps in the shutters. Rain batters the walls and hisses onto the hearth through the smoke vent in the roof. Her straw pallet crackles and prickles as she turns from side to side, trying to make herself comfortable. She frets, feeling lonely and responsible, flinching at every creak or crash, every bark or whinny or flurry of cackling from the yard. When Odo is with her, she loves stormy nights, secure in his arms, curtained and cosseted, knowing the ghouls and demons that come with darkness are powerless against the steady beat of his heart. Even when he gets up, to check for broken shutters and fallen branches or calm his horses, the feeling of safety stays with her. Her father used to do the same; several times a night on rough nights she would hear through the plank floor of the loft where she slept, her head inches from salt winds and the rattle of hailstones, her parents whispering together, clothes rustling and the creak of hinges as he went out to make sure of the stacks of salt pans and barrels in his yard. Then she would burrow contentedly beneath her blanket, as though, in his going, he left his watchfulness with her.

But tonight, she is the watcher, her senses strained to encompass the snores and mutters and shufflings of the sleepers around her, the patter of mice, dust sifting through the wind-buffeted thatch. A sudden blast of air sends sparks showering out of the hearth; wrapping herself in her cloak, Gytha pads around to the other side to move Fulk’s makeshift guard back out of harm’s way.

“The Lord has looked on you, Sister, and found you wanting. Praise the name of the Lord.”

Alwys.

“Shhh,” says someone, and though nothing more is said, a pale figure detaches itself from the mound of bedding Alwys shares with her sister and glides toward Gytha among the shadowy angles of frames and stools and stands of wool. It’s only Meg, Gytha tells herself firmly, though her hands on the broken shield begin to shake and her bowels feel as though they are being tightened around a winch. Only Meg in her shift.

“Can’t you sleep either?” she whispers, gripping the shield tight, but the pale figure makes no response. Weaving its way among the frames, it sits on a stool, where it seems to crumple, to melt and pool like the final extinction of a candle. Sniffs and hiccoughs, then sobs, rise and die away into dark corners.

Resting the shield on the floor, Gytha sits down opposite her old sewing partner, marvelling how her body adapts itself to the low stool, her wrists balanced on the edge of the frame as though she is about to take up her needle and plunge it into the taut linen; she had believed her skin so crammed with new sensations there would be no room inside it for impressions of the old.