Needle in the Blood (6 page)

After half an hour or so, the prior allows Bishop Odo to enter the church. He stands just inside the door, attended by several clergy, and informs his audience that they have his word as a servant of the Church and brother to the king that the privileges of sanctuary will be respected and they need have no fear for their safety as long as they return immediately to their homes.

And he is as good as his word. Cautiously at first, but with growing confidence, families bundle up their belongings, retrieve their young people from the mischief of the night and their old from mumbling corners, and make their way back to hovels and houses, or for some, sifting dunes of ash, charred posts poking up like rotten teeth. No one is arrested, no one robbed, no one even jeered at by William Bastard’s soldiers.

Drifting in the wake of those with somewhere to go, someone waiting for them outside, Gytha hesitates to leave the priory precinct. Still barefoot, she flexes her toes against the hardening ruts of the yard and lifts her face to the sun, letting its brightness scour her heavy eyelids, hoping it might enlighten her as to what to do next.

“What now?” she asks the ash tree in the center of the courtyard, seating herself on the circular bench the monks have fashioned around its trunk while she draws on her hose and fastens her shoes. Keys pirouette down from its branches and slip through the slats of the bench.
Too close
, thinks Gytha, kicking one away,
a new tree can never grow there
. She cannot stay in Winchester, thinking of that smiling Norman lord dreaming his avaricious dreams in Lady Edith’s bed, eating at her table, keeping his horses in her stables and his falcons in her mews. She will return to the Convent of Saint Mary of Egypt. Yet if she does that, if it is even possible to travel as far as Colchester now, how can she ever find out Lady Edith’s fate? Then again, if she stays here, behind these locked gates and walls swarming with Norman patrols, how can she ever help her? The tree has no answers; the tree is driven by its own imperatives. The monks and lay brothers going about their daily work glance at her curiously but none stops to speak. She is no longer the sort of woman with whom Saint Benedict would think it suitable for a monk to have a conversation, and clearly, in some subtle fashion, in the tilt of her chin perhaps, or the way she points her toe to tie her shoe, it shows. Rising from the bench, she brushes down her clothes and sets out into the city. At least she has a good gown, a warm cloak, and serviceable shoes. And her locket. It is more than many people have this morning.

With no particular aim and nowhere to go, she finds herself drifting with others, first in ones and twos, swelling to a steady stream as they near the old royal palace, toward the court Bishop Odo has set up in the palace compound to hear the cases of the rioters. He is already sitting when she arrives, flanked by a number of other high ranking Normans, on a bench elevated above the defendants, their witnesses and advocates, and the crowd of onlookers, crowded onto the flat bed of a hay wain. Their standards snap and glitter behind them, the bishop’s golden wolf seeming to gallop across his green field for the sheer joy of sun and breeze. William Bastard and Queen Edith, whose guest he is, watch the proceedings from beneath an awning erected over the entrance to the great hall to protect them from the weather.

Apparently indifferent to hunger or thirst, or the bite of the November wind, Bishop Odo remains on the bench for all the hours it takes to hear the arguments and pronounce sentence. He gives equal weight to every plea and doles out penalties accordingly; his justice is severe, but no one can call it unfair. Where there is doubt, witnesses are called, and the bishop consults with his fellow lieutenants, even, on occasion, with burgesses of the city. People exchange looks of bewildered disappointment; they shrug and spread their hands helplessly. The spirit of rebellion is slipping down an ice floe of fairness; the bishop is ruthless in leaving it no foothold.

Among those sentenced is the soldier who ran through the mother of the dead child with his pike. Condemned to one hundred lashes, he is bound hand and foot to a wheel and the punishment carried out in front of the widower and other witnesses from among the burgesses and portmen. Accounts of this beating race from mouth to mouth faster than fire running before a wind. Not a strip of skin left on his back, they say, the white of his backbone plain to see. None could watch without turning away, not even the Bastard himself. No, corrects someone, that’s not right. The bishop watched; they say he never even blinked. Well, blinked perhaps, he must have done, but he never flinched.
If the dead child had been his own son
, thinks Gytha, fascinated and repelled in equal, bewildering measure,
it would have made no difference
. Though she doubts his blood is hot enough to make a son. Her hatred rises against the wall of his impassiveness like a high sea storming a breakwater, endlessly smashing and reforming itself. Everything, she tells herself again, as though reciting her catechism, he has taken everything, just as Adam, with his bad debts and dead babies, did before him.

But Adam died, and his death delivered her freedom, of a kind. Repudiated by Adam’s family because she had failed to give him an heir, unwelcome in her father’s house now that he had made a new marriage to a woman near her own age, she had become a lay sister in the Convent of Saint Mary of Egypt, where she discovered her small, deft hands possessed an exceptional skill in embroidery. This had brought her to Lady Edith’s attention, but that was not the whole of it. Lady Edith was sweet and kind and a generous mistress, but what underlay Gytha’s happiness in her service was the knowledge that she possessed this unique talent that did not depend on her being someone’s daughter, wife, mother, servant, but solely on being herself. It is the one treasure no one can take from her.

What, she wonders idly, enjoying the weak warmth of the sun where she sits in the lee of the wind, believing that if she does not think about her problems a solution will present itself, might she have to gain from Bishop Odo’s death? Fruitless speculation. He is well guarded, and well able to defend himself, as she has seen, and he looks as strong as a horse. She is powerless against him, and this realisation sharpens her hatred more, seasons it with frustration, brings angry tears to her eyes. Only when people turn to look at her does she become aware that she is weeping aloud, for butchered Harold and mad Edith, for the stories of dragons and princesses her mother took to her grave, and the ghost lives of her children, the empty spaces in the world that will never be filled. Fleeing the court, all the curious stares boring into her back, she believes her heart is broken. But it can’t be; it hurts too much for a dead thing.

After Epiphany 1067

Agatha feels as though she is in the eye of the storm, standing in the courtyard of the Convent of Saint Justina the Virgin, watching snow meander out of a lowering sky. Both familiar, this rutted yard of frozen puddles and sodden straw with its low buildings humped beneath the snow, yet strange to Agatha, who has not set foot outside the convent since joining its community fifteen years ago. She watches the way each snowflake follows its individual course to earth to merge with the rest, effaced, but essential.
A good analogy
, she thinks,
for the soul’s yearning toward oblivion in God
; she will use it in teaching her novices.

Behind the walls surrounding her, a whirlwind of sweeping and dusting, polishing and scouring, has broken out in preparation for the bishop’s visit. Saint Justina’s being a house of little significance, despite its connection with the ducal family, his pastoral visits are infrequent. Its sisters are not drawn from families able to provide generous dowries; it possesses no important relics. Unless, thinks Agatha sometimes, she herself may be counted a relic. Comparing herself to the novices in her charge, the pink girls bursting like ripe fruit with tears of ecstasy or homesickness, blushing and giggling at confession, she feels sufficiently desiccated, revered rather than loved, more myth than flesh and blood. The Duke of Normandy’s odd sister, put away in this obscure place for reasons only she now knows, since the old Abbess’ death. Only she, and Bishop Odo, who gave her to Saint Justina’s.

Where is he? The water in her basin is growing cold; she can no longer feel her feet. How long since the portress ran to Sister Prioress who ran in turn to Mother Abbess, who then sent word to Sister Jean-Baptiste, as Agatha is known in the convent, that the bishop’s party had been sighted and was expected within the quarter hour?

“You will greet His Reverence,” Mother Abbess instructed her. “According to his letter, it is you he has come to see. You will offer the water for washing.”

“Yes, Mother.” Always, yes, Mother. She glances at the Abbess standing beside her. Though her face is invisible behind the damp folds of her hood and veil, Agatha knows what she is thinking. She mistrusts Sister Jean-Baptiste, nobly born, well educated, so beloved by those who have served their novitiate under her that they all seem to keep in touch with her. On the days when letters are permitted, they arrive for Sister Jean from all over Europe, once, even, from the Holy Land, from a house said to stand in the shadow of Mount Sinai itself. Sister Jean was the one they asked to stand for election when the old Abbess was dying; her current superior only holds her position by default, because Sister Jean said she was unworthy. Bishop Odo was asked to intervene. Bishop Odo replied that his noble sister knew her own mind.

Agatha sighs; Mother Abbess darts her a reproving glance; Agatha makes a short prayer for patience, which God answers by carrying the muffled thud of hooves on snow and the jangle of harness to her ears. The two nuns, and the novice waiting beside Agatha with the towels, turn their heads sharply toward the gate.

I have seen something wonderful, something marvellously surprising in this wet, wretched island of bogs and haunted forests. It made me think immediately of you, dearest sister, and of a service you might do for me.

The words he wrote to her, in his own hand, in the note accompanying his letter to the Abbess, in which he requested, with all courtesy and every expectation of being obeyed, an audience with his beloved sister and daughter in Christ, Jean-Baptiste, and that the enclosed message be given to her.
A service you might do for me.
She knew he would ask one day.

She does not recognise him at first, among the small party of armed men who trot single file through the gate and reassemble in the courtyard. Although it is only a short time after Sext, the afternoon is dark and flares have been lit in the courtyard, sending gigantic shadows of men and horses leaping up walls and across the snow, the play of light and shadow confusing the eye. She looks for a mule, for episcopal dress, with a tiny trickle of dread, insistent as water dripping from the thatch over the kitchen, whose fires have melted the snow. What does it mean when you cannot recognise your own brother, your favourite brother, the person you love most in all the world?

Then a figure detaches itself from the rest, taller perhaps, but dressed the same, in short cloak and mud-spattered leather gaiters. As he approaches the women, he pauses suddenly, as though he has forgotten something, to unbuckle his sword from its belt, a task which seems to cause him some difficulty and is eventually completed for him by a second, shorter, older man she recognises as her brother’s servant, who takes the sword and stows it in a saddle scabbard. Odo then pushes back his hood to reveal his tonsure and the familiar contours of his face with its strong bones and seducer’s smile.

“You are welcome, my lord,” says Mother Abbess, curtseying, as Agatha steps forward with her bowl of water.

“I am glad to be here. The God of Moses has thrown all His box of tricks at us on the journey save fire and pestilence. I will save your gentle ears any account of the sea crossing.”

So why has he risked it?
wonders Agatha, handing the water bowl to the novice and taking a towel to dry his hands. As she performs this service, she realises why he struggled with his sword. His left hand is badly bruised and splinted at the wrist. Though she is tender and careful with him, he cannot repress a hiss of pain as she dries it. Yet she observes no swelling; it is not a recent fracture, just poorly tended, probably beyond proper healing.

“Thank you, Sister,” he says, exchanging with her the briefest of glances, teasing, affectionate, before she lowers her eyes and kneels with the others to kiss his ring and receive his blessing.

As they go indoors, he addresses himself to the Abbess. He has brought gifts from England. Some plate come by in Winchester, a pair of particularly handsome gold chalices from the island of Saint Columba, etched with designs in knotwork, a pleasing crucifix set with agates, a vial of water from the pool at Bethesda. The carcass of a boar they were lucky enough to kill en route and some flagons of a liquor made from honey by which the English set great store. The king? The king, God be praised, is in excellent health and spirits. And now, by Mother Abbess’ leave, time is short and he has urgent business with his sister while the horses are rested and his men refresh themselves.

Agatha accompanies him to the room normally set aside for lay guests. It has a larger fireplace than the nuns’ parlour and more comfortable furniture, and she has been given permission to light some candles, though only tallow; beeswax candles are kept strictly for the great festivals and the Feast of Saint Justina. By their smoky light she examines him, with concern.