Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower Page A

with concern.
    There are new lines on his face, deep grooves gouged from cheek to jaw, and grey peppering the light brown curls fringing his tonsure. The fine skin beneath his eyes is blue tinged and puffy, like the skin of a bruised plum. He has lost weight since she last saw him and his complexion, beneath its superficial weathering, is pallid.
    “What happened to your hand?” she asks, as if his answer to that might contain replies to all the other questions she feels forbidden to ask.
    “A horse fell on me.”
    Agatha crosses herself. “Then you are lucky to be alive.”
    He shrugs.
    “And you look thin,” she persists, shrewish in her anxiety. She expects him to protest, but he does not.
    “There has been some fever among the troops. I was not seriously affected, thanks be to God.”
    “Troops? Surely you are not still with the army? I thought the fighting would be done by now.”
    “Done?” He repeats the word as though it is in a language he does not understand. He pauses, massaging his wrist. “It’s like trying to press air out of a bladder. As soon as we manage to put down one rebellion, another breaks out somewhere else. Always just beyond our reach, in some pathless forest or the far side of a river without fords. Or at least, none marked on the maps we have. The roads the Romans left are ruined, some say deliberately. William may have bribed or bludgeoned their thegns into submission, but these people don’t take account of their lords the way it’s done in Normandy.”
    “So our brother’s coronation was not universally welcomed. We had heard as much.” She gestures toward a chair and, though he does not sit himself, he grants her permission to do so.
    “Which?” he asks. “Winchester or London?”
    “Wasn’t one enough? Did he harbour some doubt after all about what he was doing?”
    “Winchester was Godwinson’s capital. London is the better place strategically, but Winchester has political significance. I…he…we…”
    “No need to explain. I dare say you will never unravel one from the other. It is London I am thinking of. We heard all sorts of rumours. Rioting, fires. Is any of it true?” she asks, smoothing her habit over her knees and folding her hands in her lap. The smell of wet wool is added to the mingled scents of tallow and lavender and the whiff of the stables.
    “It was nothing, a misunderstanding. The Saxon thegns set up some ritual shout or other, the custom, apparently, at their king makings. Our guards thought there was going to be a riot and set fires to contain it in the usual way. They had it under control within the hour.” He stands in front of the hearthstone, pinpoints of fire reflected in his eyes. She fears the element of fire may have gained the upper hand in him, drying the blood that gives him his normally sanguine temperament. That would account for the fever and the weight loss, the sense she has of a man devoured from within, the skeleton burning beneath the skin.
    “You know,” he says, “at the coronation, when I did homage to William for Kent, and I knelt and put my hands between his, I felt something between us, some force, like lightning. I really believed we were invincible, that if we had done this, we could do anything. Less than a hundred years since Rollo embraced Christianity, and now his descendant is made a Christian king. Like Charlemagne.”
    “I guessed that might be his reason for choosing Christmas Day. Such a dull man, but so good at the grand gesture. Or was that, perhaps, your idea?”
    He gives her a tight, enigmatic smile. “I wished only to please God, though He has shown us little sign since that He is on our side. I had expected it to be easier.”
    “Surely you of all people haven’t fallen into the trap of confusing the easy way with the right one, Odo.”
    They are interrupted by a servant who brings food and drink and waits to serve the bishop, but Odo dismisses her.
    “I will wait on His Reverence,” says