Needle in the Blood (58 page)

***

Conteville is an old house, though house is not the right word for it. It is a muddled agglomeration of buildings, some wood framed, some stone, a rough patchwork of tow-coloured thatch, red tiles, dark moss, and buttery clay interspersed with shadowy courtyards and sudden patches of garden. Odo reveals it to her, leading her along twisting passages, in and out of doors which then seem to disappear, like the doors to a labyrinth, with the eager delight of a boy showing off a treasure of conkers and pheasant feathers and odd-shaped stones. He shows her the irregular row of notches on the kitchen doorpost which mark his and his brothers’ and sisters’ growth, pointing out with a pride not entirely ironic that, actually, he is about half an inch taller than William. And the lumpy patch of ground in the orchard where generations of de Conteville dogs and falcons lie beneath a miniature forest of mouldering wooden crosses.

“Full funeral Masses, the lot of them,” he tells her. “Such an advantage, having a bishop in the family.”

On a morning of high winds and driving rain, he leads her up a winding stair to a small, octagonal room at the top of the lookout tower.

“What’s this?” The room is bare, except for a narrow bed whose moth-eaten hangings look as though spiders have attempted to darn them with cobwebs, and a plain linen chest which reminds her of the dormitory in the atelier at Canterbury. He does not answer immediately and his expression, when she glances at him to prompt his reply, is ruefully humorous. “I know. This is the bed where you lost your virginity.”

He shakes his head. “This is where Agatha spent the night before her wedding.”

“Her wedding? But…”

“Precisely. Come here.” He leads her to one of the seven arrow slits cut into the walls, one overlooking a patch of muddy ground between the house and the moat. Rain blows through it, condensing into a steady trickle of water down the wall underneath. “Down there, there used to be a brew house. A small person could squeeze through this window, drop onto the brew house roof, then down onto the barrels stacked outside, and then to the ground. And if you could swim, well…”

“So you knew all along. And you helped her?”

“She told me. Wrote to me, in fact, when William made the match. Some man with land on the Breton border, married a girl from Anjou in the end. I dare say it still rankles with William.”

“I dare say.”

“But I couldn’t…You see, I already knew how it felt to be forced into William’s mould. He still had Muriel and Mathilde at his disposal, and Robert, of course. I didn’t see why Agatha shouldn’t get away, if the thought of marriage was so distressing to her. I tried to persuade William she had a vocation. I was wonderfully eloquent, almost believed it myself by the time I’d finished, but William would have none of it. He’d had to come back from Flanders to sort matters out, right in the middle of his negotiations for Matilda’s hand, so he wasn’t in the best of tempers.”

“I can imagine.” She clears her throat. “My lord and lady used to make some very unflattering jokes about…the king’s…courtship methods. Is it true he favoured a horsewhip?”

Odo laughs. “Is there no one from whom that is hidden?”

“You must remember Lord Harold was family. One of his brothers was married to the queen’s sister.”

“Yes, well, apparently that was all Agatha’s fault as well. When William discovered her escape, he was so mad even the ride back to Baldwin of Flanders’ court wasn’t enough to calm him. And then Matilda refused him again, and made the mistake of raising his bastardy as her reason. So he clouted her with his riding whip, which appeared to do what no amount of presents or flattery or orders from her father could achieve, and she agreed to have him.”

“So really, he has cause to be grateful to you and Agatha.”

“It did help to bring him round. He has never known the truth. He still believes Agatha was called to God, and, being William, he sees it all as part of God’s plan for him. He doesn’t understand why she agreed to come to England to oversee the tapestry, or why she refused to stand for election as Abbess when the old one died. Maybe those bits are part of God’s plan for me.”

A gust of wind buffets the tower, whining through the narrow windows, dislodging some of the cobwebs from the bed posts.

“Let’s go down.” Gytha shivers. “I’m not sure God approves of us second guessing His plans like this.”

“It’ll be fine this afternoon, you’ll see. It always is when the wind’s in this direction. I shall take you to visit my old nurse.”

***

She is an ancient woman, small and hard as a walnut, with seamed lips folded over toothless gums so that her smile, which is ready and frequent, looks like a row of untidy stitching. It is hard to imagine her wizened body could ever have nourished a child. Her flat chest beneath the coarse, shapeless garment she wears makes Gytha acutely aware of her own body, of the ache in her womb with its sewn up mouth, of her breasts which her lover suckles in the insatiable hunger of his passion the way he used to suckle this old woman.

Odet, she calls him, still using his childhood nickname, and shows no surprise, no pleasure or alarm, at all the adventures that have befallen him. He might be a bishop and the brother of a king, but to her he is still the boy who, scratched and sweating, wielded a scythe beside the villagers every harvest, made solemn visits with his parents on the occasions of births and deaths and broke his collarbone twice in one year falling off his pony. She tells, at least as Odo translates her tale, how Guy, her son, Odo’s foster brother, spiked Odo’s cider one harvest supper, and how he was sick all over the priest when the man tried to take him home, slung across the shoulders of his mule. And another occasion when he took a fledgling hawk into church, hidden in his clothes, but the bird escaped and shat on the altar cross and the priest had to consult the bishop about the need for a rededication. And look at him now, she says, gesturing with her clawed, arthritic hand, tonsure, crucifix, amethyst, and all.

“Does she realise who I am?” Gytha asks Odo when their visit is over and they are walking back to the house, across the grass common around which the village is built. He nods a greeting to a woman tethering a goat, stops to admire a saddleback sow in the charge of a small, dusty boy carrying a dead rat tied to a stick.

“Most certainly,” he replies. “That’s why she was so anxious to make sure you know who I am.”

***

At Pentecost he preaches in that same church, though thanks to his generosity, the old statue of the Virgin no longer has to suffer the indignity of rain dripping on her through a hole in the roof, wearing a groove in her cheek down which the water flowed like tears, and the altar cross in question has been replaced by a much more impressive ornament of chased silver set with garnets and lapis lazuli. She cannot understand what he says to his congregation, because he speaks in French, but she sees the way their eyes follow his every move as he crosses and recrosses the space before the altar, makes gestures of head or hands for emphasis, his body dedicated to the message he wants to convey, his brow wreathed with flowers to signify the descent of the Holy Spirit. Several times he makes them laugh, and when he goes among them to exchange the kiss of peace, they crowd around him, enmeshing him in their love, holding him fast in his place.

***

They sleep in his parents’ bed, the bed in which he was conceived and born, in which his mother laid out the body of her husband, and was in her turn prepared for burial by her daughters. It is the bed in which Robert spent his wedding night and to which Odo crawled for comfort on the eve of his departure for Bec, his mother stroking his curls until his father, sensing an extra presence beneath the quilts, kicked him out and sent him back to the pallet he shared with Robert at the other end of the chamber, telling him to stop snivelling like a girl. And lying next to him, their limbs and nightclothes entangled in an effigy of their passion, listening to bats squeak and the ghostly conversations of owls, the rustle of mice in the stack of pallets kept for visiting kin and honoured guests, Gytha too is seduced by a sense of belonging.

They lead the life of a vicomte and his lady, riding and hawking, practising at the butts, making and receiving visits from neighbours. They hold a feast, at which the men stay up all night playing dice, and a boar hunt during which they lose a young de Conteville cousin who returns long after dark with leaves and brambles in his hair, swearing he has seen a fairy in the woods. They do not sleep together on Wednesdays or Fridays or the eve of festivals. Odo tours the estate with Robert’s steward, viewing frankpledge, updating the rolls, noting repairs to be made, births and deaths among the villein families likely to affect the number of days’ labour due to their lord.

***

When Lammas comes, the villagers celebrate with fire-leaping and the distribution of loaves made from the first barley, and the consumption of heroic quantities of liquor made from last year’s crop. Gytha pleads with him to join in, but he shakes his head, fiddling his amethyst ring around his finger, and confines himself to remarking that there will be a fine crop of babies presented for baptism come spring. The night is close and she cannot sleep, so wrapping herself in her dressing gown, she goes outside and stands looking across the moat at the shadows leaping up the bleached mud walls of the cottages, dancing to the relentless rhythm of drums and an eerie, high-pitched singing. The fire flares and sinks back in showers of sparks; laughter gusts then dies; voices surge into song and as suddenly fade away.

Gytha’s heart drums in her chest, her bare feet tingling with remembered steps; she is dizzy with scents of cow parsley and wild garlic and hot earth. The goddess sends her a memory, of Lammas in the last year of King Edward’s reign, of watching Harold and his two younger brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, leaping the fire, flashing white grins at the women, their long hair alive with lights of tawny and gold and redcurrant. It seems to her now that they were like the comet crossing the night sky, from the dark disgrace of Harold’s journey to Normandy to the dark, damp earth where the remains of all three now lie. A brief, sparkling trajectory of glamour. Not real. She turns her back on the celebrations and returns indoors.

“Now harvest is over,” he mutters sleepily, turning to put his arms around her as she climbs back into bed, “I think we might plan a trip to Liege, to see John.”

***

Fruit picking begins; in the kitchens, when she is not tending Fulk’s burnt feet, Freya supervises the serving women as they clean bottles and cut fine linen sieves for preserving; in the woods, the lovers feed each other blackberries and lick the rich, dark juices from one another’s lips. They bring home baskets of elderberries and sloes for wine-making, and in every barn the cider press is cleaned down, greased, and set up to await the bitter apples for which, each autumn, Norman farmers do battle with legions of wasps. It is not so different from home, remarks Gytha to Freya as they sit in the last of the afternoon sun, outside the kitchen house, stoning plums. Freya hands a plum to Thecla, who throws it for a passing wolfhound pup, and smiles.

***

In the evenings, unless they have company, she and Odo often dine alone, in what used to be his mother’s solar, while the sun sets beyond the open window shutters, staining the moat silver rose. Gytha fishes the moat when she has the opportunity, sitting on the jetty, thinking of Agatha and her desperate swim. When darkness falls and the lamps have been lit, Odo attempts to teach her to play chess, or they sing part songs to Turold’s accompaniment. Odo is surprised by the quality of her voice, high and true, but fragile, as though it comes from some other source than her speaking voice, which is deep and slightly husky.

On other evenings, she does her needlework, and he simply watches her, seeing in the angle of her head, the arc of her needle as she pulls it up through the fabric, the woman he first saw in the atelier at Canterbury, in the dark dress and white cap, mimicking Agatha’s monasticism. He is touched and amused that she darns his chausses and patches his shirts, although he does not wear the mended clothes; he gives them to Osbern and tells him to be discreet about where he distributes them. Their talk is domestic, inconsequential. They discuss the life of the estate, the forthcoming visit to John, for whom Gytha is embroidering a set of shirts, and their plans for Winterbourne when they return.

***

Late one afternoon near the Feast of Saint Augustine, they emerge from a woodland ride into a broad water meadow. The sun is low, spilling apricot light across a narrow band of clear sky between the meadow and a mass of cloud the colour of Toledo steel. Rain has fallen, and the standing water in the meadow forms patches of luminous gold from which grass and wild flowers emerge as delicate silhouettes. They stop to admire the view and a family of grazing storks, rising and falling with great, slow flappings of wings and an occasional splash. With their narrow beaks and thin legs trailing, the birds look unfinished, skeletons only half fleshed out. Gytha laughs at their antics.

“D’you know,” says Odo, “when I was little, my mother told me that new babies were left by storks in the well, ready for us to fish out. So whenever we knew she was expecting another child, I’d spend ages peering down the well to see if I could see it. Hoping it’d be a boy. As I could never see the babies, I started to believe they must be transparent, and only take on the colour of flesh when exposed to the air. Like those stones that are translucent under water but turn opaque when they’re dry.