Needle in the Blood (54 page)

Her lover. When her wind-scalded eyes had picked him out, making his way through the throng of men and horses toward her, her body seemed to cave in on itself. She had not been aware until that moment how her teeth were clenched so hard her head ached, and her hands on the reins gripped like a prize fighters’ fists. He would not have approved. She smiles to herself now as she imagines the lecture he would have given on the sensitivity of horses’ mouths.

Her mind, like the courtyard itself, was half lit and seething with impressions. Odo’s bare feet in the dust, so close to her horse’s hooves. The glint of his amulet in the open neck of his gown, his nakedness beneath, fur slipping over skin. Shivering as she watched the strong curve of his fingers scratching the mare’s muzzle, she waited for him to lift her out of the saddle, the way he did every time they rode together, and hold her for a moment, kissing her forehead before putting her down. Yet just as she had convinced herself he would do this, as though nothing had changed, he turned on his heel and strode back indoors, Osbern scurrying after him with a smoking candle, extinguished by the wind. Not a word, not a touch.

Still not a touch, though she thought she had seen the intention in his red-rimmed eyes when he came to stand beside her at the window and his sleeve brushed her little finger. And he has not struck her, though no doubt he feels himself entitled. She wishes she had spoken what was in her heart when she had the chance. She did not mean to be shrewish or evasive. She longed to tell him how it felt to be with him again, how it feels now to lie like a leveret in a form, in the indentation left by his body in the mattress. Inhaling his perfume, remembering his mouth, his hands, his taste, his belly pressed against hers, the luscious, slippery abandonment when he is inside her. It is as though, by some unnameable magic, the vessels of their bodies are fused, and each carries the other’s blood in their veins like an extra humour.

When he tried to ask her where she had been, why could she not simply answer him? That she has been in a priory, whose monks found her sleeping in the woods when they brought their pigs out to graze. Not in the guest house, packed with Easter pilgrims, palm crosses, and spring lilies pinned to their hats, but in a cell alone, the menstruating woman kept apart for fear of curdling milk or sending dogs mad. The brooding, silent woman at odds with the joy of the Resurrection. She did not know it was Easter Day until she heard the friar charged with waking his brothers for Matins shouting, “Hallelujah! Christ is risen!” outside her door. She remained unaware of any activity beyond the agitation of her own mind, going over and over his words and Edith’s the way an ant dissecting a cockroach treads the same route backwards and forwards, each time carrying what it can, until the prior himself came to her and told her a detachment of soldiers with orders from the Earl of Kent were waiting for her in the courtyard.

“Forgive me, daughter,” he had said, plucking nervously at the sleeves of his habit, “for revealing your presence here, but they have done a great deal of damage round about and now they are threatening to plunder my church and have the brothers whipped one by one until I surrender you to them. I have exacted the officer’s promise not to harm you.”

“Don’t worry, Father Prior, the earl’s men won’t hurt me.”

“I thought not.” She had not, it seemed, travelled far enough from Winterbourne for the prior to be in ignorance of her identity.

The earl’s mistress. Odo’s lover. All the time they were together in the next door room, the sea below them turning from pewter to pearl to diamonds as the sun rose above the shoulder of the cliffs, a voice inside her was pleading with him to understand what lay beneath the words she spoke. I love you, said the voice, I love you, over and over. Why could she not simply speak the words out loud? Humble herself to say the true, simple thing instead of always taking pride in clever obliquity.

And now it is too late. He is going to imprison her in Normandy, where she will be completely dependant on him. She must ask him, when he takes Winterbourne back, if he will make a gift from the estate to the priory where she stayed, for she had nothing to give when she left, only the horse she needed to ride and her locket, which she could not part with. She must remember to tell him her jewel case is safe, and that Fulk and Freya had nothing to do with any of it. She hopes he will take care of Freya. She will ask him, in honour of the love he once bore her, to let Fulk and Freya marry.

A debt of honour? Mentally, she turns away from the phrase with a shrug of incomprehension. Honour is for men, a pretty thing of little practical use.

***

“Madam? Wake up, madam.”

In the second between the return of consciousness and coming fully awake, she thinks it is him, he has come after all. Then she is aware of being shaken quite roughly by the shoulder. She opens her eyes on Freya, sharp-featured with impatience.

“His lordship says the ships will be ready to sail in an hour.”

“An hour?” Gytha sits up, rubbing her eyes and the back of her neck, greasy from her hair which badly needs to be washed. “I can’t be ready in an hour.”

“Of course you can. The wind and the tide are right and that’s that. His lordship gave orders not to wake you sooner. Your boxes have gone on board so you’ll have to go as you are. I dare say, with a bit of a brush…” Freya looks her up and down with a sigh and a shake of her head. Meekly, Gytha swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands up, keeping silent as Freya brushes her dress, tightens her laces, straightens her garters, and re-does her hair, all to the accompaniment of a sustained tirade against her mistress’ feckless behaviour.

“That poor man loves you to distraction,” she concludes, stepping back to consider her handiwork. “It’s plain to anyone.”

“So you think I’ve forfeited my right to fart through silk as you once so beautifully put it?”

Freya lays hold of a strand of hair which has escaped Gytha’s braid and yanks it into place. Gytha sucks her breath sharply through her teeth, but says nothing.

“He’s a decent man, madam, fair and loyal. You should count your blessings in him.”

***

He is waiting for her in the outer ward, already mounted, alone except for several dogs and a groom holding her roan mare’s head. Looking composed and well rested, he makes her a slight bow, an air of mischief playing about his freshly shaven face. She feels he is somehow mocking her, with his clean shirt and his sable-lined cloak newly brushed. The groom squires her onto her horse then Odo dismisses him with a curt nod.

“I have something for you.” He does not ask how she has slept. Biting back the urge to remind him she is not to be bought, she smiles and thanks him, and he hands her a tin disk stamped with the image of Saint Christopher bearing the Child on his shoulder.

“For a safe journey,” he says as she turns the medal about, examining it from all angles. Her smile broadens; it is a poor thing, crudely made, the sort of trinket you might buy from any market miracle seller with his horsehair crosses and Bleeding Heart pin cushions.

“There is a ribbon if you wish,” he adds, fishing in the money purse he has hanging from his belt. “I hope the colour is to your liking.”

“Yellow. You have always said it was my colour. Will you tie it on for me?”

He takes the medallion, threads the ribbon through a small hole stamped near its rim, and maneuvers his horse until he is in a position to fasten the ribbon around her neck, his fingers skimming her flesh as he lifts her couvre chef. She shivers, but he gives no sign of having noticed.

“Yellow has the virtue of faithfulness. And,” he adds, squinting up at the sky, itself glowing primrose in the remains of the late afternoon sun, “it’s the colour of spring. Hope. April, the month God made man.”

And jealousy
, she thinks,
what of jealousy?

“Come on. Have you ever seen horses being loaded onto ships? It’s usually quite a pantomime.” He sets his spurs lightly to his horse’s flanks and she follows suit, riding beside him down the hill to the harbour.

***

He has commissioned two ships, one to carry their luggage and the horses, one, smaller and deeper keeled, for themselves and Turold who, Odo says, will help to distract him from the nausea sea voyages always induce in him. How can a descendant of Rollo the Viking suffer from seasickness, she teases. Perhaps he is a changeling. They hand their mounts over to Fulk and board the smaller ship; two sailors with their shirts kilted up to their thighs link hands to make a lift to carry her through the idle waves. She remembers how, as a little girl, she would swim out to the fishing boats wearing only her chemise, alongside the men and boys who were tall enough to wade and carried her dress for her, holding the bundle high above the spray. She looks at Odo, sitting on a bollard, fastening his shoes. A sailor hovers nearby with a coil of rope, but he appears oblivious.

She turns to watch Fulk, soaked with sweat and sea water, coaxing the horses into the other boat. It lies broadside to the shore, the shore side gunwale tilted until the water is just beginning to lap it, enabling the animals to step on board without jumping. Most of them look as though they have done this before, needing little more than a few words and a slap on the rump to encourage them, but the roan mare shies, whinnying and kicking out at the side of the boat. By the time Fulk has calmed her, with his French nonsense and a handful of oats from a pouch on his belt, and she is standing in the hull with the others, her head poking just above the deck, the sun is nothing but a rosy fingertip above the western horizon, staining the sea pink and violet between furrows of indigo. The thrashing, whinnying chaos gives way to a litany of orders and responses as anchors are weighed and the two ships get underway.

Gytha does not like the set of their sails; with the wind from this quarter, just east of northeast, she thinks, it will bring them too close to the mill. But Odo already has the inward expression of a man preoccupied with the question of whether he is going to vomit, so she watches the Kent coast recede in silence. Already most of the town is in darkness, only the cliffs glimmering pale green in the twilight and the silhouette of the castle dark and sharp above them. It is a long way from the coastline she used to know, flat and shifting, the iron grey sea ribbed with sandbars, the boundary between sea and water always uncertain.

***

Odo’s stomach feels like a wineskin turned inside out and scraped with a blunt knife. Lying propped against the gunwale somewhere near the stern of the ship, cursing William for having chosen to conquer an island rather than France, or Burgundy, or Anjou, he watches Gytha moving among the seamen, clambering over coils of rope and stacked oars, ducking under the boom, twisting around sheets tautly angled from masthead to cleat. He marvels at her knowledge of fishing lines, hooks, net gauges, the surest bait for cod or bass, how you must never eat a petrel because they carry the souls of the damned down to hell, and keep silent near herring gulls because they are gossips. She talks to the men about tarring and sail mending and the best way to season hemp for rope-making. When the wind veers further to the west, it is Gytha who tells him, sparing the captain, that they may have to spend a second night at sea or put ashore before reaching Arromanches.

Dipping the hem of her skirt in a bucket of seawater, she mops his face as though he were a small boy being made ready for an important visitor.

“Why did you come?” She sounds exasperated. “You could have sent me with one of your officers, or even just Freya. She has your interests well at heart.”

“Gytha, what are you talking about? I’m in no condition for riddles.”

The captain gives the command to go about. Odo groans and shuts his eyes.

“Don’t close your eyes, it’ll only make it worse. I’m afraid we shall be in for a lot of this. It looks as though the captain’s decided to make short tacks into the wind to try and make headway west.” She glances up at the sky, the map of the heavens flawless with neither moon nor cloud to obscure the spheres and the fixed stars, not glimpses of heaven, or dead gods, or the light in lovers’ eyes, but a tool, a fine, functional part of God’s creation.

“Even your words make me feel sick. Couldn’t we dispense with the seafarer’s jargon?”

“Sorry.” She sits beside him silently, her knees drawn up to her chest for warmth; the temperature has dropped sharply since sunset. The sailors bring the ship about, the rattle of loose canvas and the slap of the sea against the hull momentarily overwhelming the delicate notes of Turold’s lute. On the other side of the ship, Osbern, who appears to know better than to try to do anything for his master, is grinding the oyster shells left from dinner with cardamoms to make tooth powder. The breeze carries the minty scent of the spices, and she parts her lips to catch the familiar, beloved taste on her tongue.

Despite her situation, she feels a deep contentment, a sense that everything is in order. It is the way she always feels at sea, underlying whatever else may be in her mind the way the sinews of water flex and twist beneath the boat. Perhaps she is really a mermaid. Perhaps she will jump overboard, and her legs will fuse into a muscular, silvery tail, bearing her into the depths, far below the reach of men’s nets.

“Are you serious?” he asks suddenly. “Do you really think I intend to imprison you in Normandy?” She gives a sheepish laugh but says nothing. “Because I was, when I said to know is to love. You only know half of me, not even that. I want to show you where I was for the first thirty years of my life. You know this…king’s brother. But until I was about eleven, I didn’t even know I had an older brother.”