Read Online Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sarah Bower
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together, she swallowed the frost down into her belly and it gave her strength, the strength of being part of the frozen earth beneath her feet, welcomed back from whence she came. Dust to dust. She knew Death was stalking her, awaiting his chance. Slowly, with arms outstretched as though to embrace a lover, she turned to face him.
But Death had a woman’s eyes with blank, lustreless, dilated pupils like holes in her face. Her body was spatchcocked against the woodpile beside the kitchen house, a gleam of exposed thigh pale in the starlight, shaken by the thrusts of the man fucking her like a dead rat worried by a dog. Gytha tried to turn away, but the woman’s gaze held her. She was captivated by its indifference, the sense that no one actually inhabited the body submitting to the man, now spent, after a moment of inertia straightening his tunic and placing something that looked like a hunk of bread in the woman’s open palm. And remembering the two Norman soldiers up on the wall, she realised there was a way to stay alive, to keep the memory of Harold and Edith golden and feed her hatred for Odo of Bayeux.
***
She rents one of the cells behind the city bathhouse. On her earnings she could afford a room of her own, even a modest house, set herself up in a small way as a courtesan, with regular gentlemen who would disguise payment as gifts, but she has no wish for this work to become entwined with the rest of her life. One-Eye Peg made that mistake, they say. A great beauty in her day, she entertained thegns and merchants and city burgesses, had even bought herself a burial plot under the priory nave. But when she was caught attempting to procure an abortion, none of her high connections could save her from a stoning. Those who remember say her punishment was all the more fierce because half those who sat in judgement on her had also lain with her. So now, scarred and toothless, with a dragging leg and a puckered hole where her right eye used to shine with love, she begs outside the bathhouse, permitted to remain there by the burgesses as a warning to others, or perhaps as a sop to their consciences.
Gytha sees her work as something that happens in the interval between heartbeats, the space between breaths, temporary and marginal, nothing to do with the woman inside her skin. She keeps only what she needs to survive, money for rent and fuel, and new soles for her shoes, cloth for a spare gown and a winter cloak, enough food to preserve the illusion of fecundity in the swell of her breasts, the rise of her belly, the sweep of her hips. The rest she gives to the priory for the maintenance of orphans, going there at dusk with her hood drawn close about her face so she will not be recognised, leaving her gifts of money and food, and the occasional piece of jewellery, with the porter.
She is popular and can charge highly for her services because she knows herself to be barren. The first month after her congress with the soldiers, when she did not bleed, she feared the worst. But then a second month passed, and a third, and though she remained clean, she experienced none of the symptoms of pregnancy and supposed her fertility ended, carried away like Lady Edith in her cart or Harold’s corpse washed out to sea. She had heard of it before, in women who had suffered sudden shocks, and knew it to be widespread during famine years, though then the problem would usually right itself when food was plentiful again.
She has no regrets, for what did a quickening womb bring her but pain overlaid with heartache? At least she does not have to take the precautions the others take to ward off conception. She does not have to swallow bees or drink her clients’ urine or smear her women’s parts with tincture of honey and excrement. No hopping seven times on her left leg after the act for her. The men are not obliged to withdraw and spill themselves on her belly, in the air that, even accounting for the steam from the baths, kills
But Death had a woman’s eyes with blank, lustreless, dilated pupils like holes in her face. Her body was spatchcocked against the woodpile beside the kitchen house, a gleam of exposed thigh pale in the starlight, shaken by the thrusts of the man fucking her like a dead rat worried by a dog. Gytha tried to turn away, but the woman’s gaze held her. She was captivated by its indifference, the sense that no one actually inhabited the body submitting to the man, now spent, after a moment of inertia straightening his tunic and placing something that looked like a hunk of bread in the woman’s open palm. And remembering the two Norman soldiers up on the wall, she realised there was a way to stay alive, to keep the memory of Harold and Edith golden and feed her hatred for Odo of Bayeux.
***
She rents one of the cells behind the city bathhouse. On her earnings she could afford a room of her own, even a modest house, set herself up in a small way as a courtesan, with regular gentlemen who would disguise payment as gifts, but she has no wish for this work to become entwined with the rest of her life. One-Eye Peg made that mistake, they say. A great beauty in her day, she entertained thegns and merchants and city burgesses, had even bought herself a burial plot under the priory nave. But when she was caught attempting to procure an abortion, none of her high connections could save her from a stoning. Those who remember say her punishment was all the more fierce because half those who sat in judgement on her had also lain with her. So now, scarred and toothless, with a dragging leg and a puckered hole where her right eye used to shine with love, she begs outside the bathhouse, permitted to remain there by the burgesses as a warning to others, or perhaps as a sop to their consciences.
Gytha sees her work as something that happens in the interval between heartbeats, the space between breaths, temporary and marginal, nothing to do with the woman inside her skin. She keeps only what she needs to survive, money for rent and fuel, and new soles for her shoes, cloth for a spare gown and a winter cloak, enough food to preserve the illusion of fecundity in the swell of her breasts, the rise of her belly, the sweep of her hips. The rest she gives to the priory for the maintenance of orphans, going there at dusk with her hood drawn close about her face so she will not be recognised, leaving her gifts of money and food, and the occasional piece of jewellery, with the porter.
She is popular and can charge highly for her services because she knows herself to be barren. The first month after her congress with the soldiers, when she did not bleed, she feared the worst. But then a second month passed, and a third, and though she remained clean, she experienced none of the symptoms of pregnancy and supposed her fertility ended, carried away like Lady Edith in her cart or Harold’s corpse washed out to sea. She had heard of it before, in women who had suffered sudden shocks, and knew it to be widespread during famine years, though then the problem would usually right itself when food was plentiful again.
She has no regrets, for what did a quickening womb bring her but pain overlaid with heartache? At least she does not have to take the precautions the others take to ward off conception. She does not have to swallow bees or drink her clients’ urine or smear her women’s parts with tincture of honey and excrement. No hopping seven times on her left leg after the act for her. The men are not obliged to withdraw and spill themselves on her belly, in the air that, even accounting for the steam from the baths, kills
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