Bernstein (1986), used by Sarah Bower in researching The Needle in the Blood. The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry by David J. Harold the King by Helen Hollick (2000), about the building tensions among Harold Godwinesson, King Edward of England, and William the Bastard of Normandy. Lord of Sunset by Parke Godwin (1998), about Harold and his common-law wife Edith. Odo's Hanging by Peter Benson (1993), about Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, and the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry. More about The Needle in the Blood from Powell's Books (2007, 576 pages, including a brief Afterword explaining where the story departs from the historical record)

That is for her characters, as Bower reaches for a more timeless truth than the merely factual. Along the way, she slips in imaginative possibilities for how and why various features of the Tapestry came to be, but these never dominate the story. The Needle in the Blood is a love story, but Bower takes her time with it, developing her characters with depth, insight and compassion before thrusting them into the predicament of a forbidden love affair. The bishop's formidable charm is less of a stumbling block than his innate, if incomplete, integrity: ''You have made Bayeux very pretty,' he remarks, an edge to his voice which makes it sound as though the prettification of Bayeux is some kind of misdemeanour. Keeping either of her resolves proves a slippery undertaking. Gytha says, 'I refuse to sew lies.' But she sees this as a chance to get close enough to Odo to kill him. For those chosen, it is a strange and bitter project. His sister scours the ravaged country for women with the skill to create it. Odo decides to commemorate the Norman victory with an embroidered wall hanging.

But within her talent for embroidery lie the seeds of a new life.

A few days later, as Gytha watches Edith and her court ladies carted away like criminals, she believes she has lost everything. William the Conqueror's half brother Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, refuses to deliver the dead king's body to Edith and Harold's mother for burial. As the novel opens on October 14, 1066, Harold is dead, butchered in the Battle of Hastings. Gytha is a serving woman to Edith, King Harold of England's common-law wife. This sophisticated novel is about love, ambition, fury, forgiveness, misunderstanding and again and always, love. In The Needle in the Blood, Sarah Bower imagines how the Bayeux Tapestry may have been created, but the Tapestry serves more as setting and symbol than as central purpose.