They located their ponies and led them forward by the light of a burning torch. They reached the bottom of the valley and found themselves in noman’s-land. Hidden by fog and darkness, they slipped out of their boys’ clothing. For a moment they were terribly vulnerable, two naked women in the middle of a battlefield. But no one could see them, and a second later they were pulling their nuns’ robes over their heads. They packed up their male garments in case they should need them again: it was a long way home.

Caris decided to abandon the torch, in case an English archer should take it into his head to shoot at the light and ask questions afterward. Holding hands so that they would not get separated they went forward, still leading the horses. They could see nothing: the fog obscured whatever light might have come from moon or stars. They headed uphill toward the English lines. There was a smell like a butcher’s shop. So many bodies of horses and men covered the ground that they could not walk around them. They had to grit their teeth and step on the corpses. Soon their shoes were covered with a mixture of mud and blood.

The bodies on the ground thinned out, and soon there were none. Caris began to feel a deep sense of relief as she approached the English army. She and Mair had traveled hundreds of miles, lived rough for two weeks, and risked their lives, for this moment. She had almost forgotten the outrageous theft by Prior Godwyn of one hundred and fifty pounds from the nuns’ treasury—the reason for her journey. Somehow it seemed less important after all this bloodshed. Still, she would appeal to Bishop Richard and win justice for the nunnery.

The walk seemed farther than Caris had imagined when she looked across the valley in daylight. She wondered nervously if she had become disoriented. She might have turned in the wrong direction and just walked straight past the English. Perhaps the army was now behind her. She strained to hear some noise—ten thousand men could not be silent, even if most of them had fallen into exhausted sleep—but the fog muffled sound.

She clung to the conviction that, as King Edward had positioned his forces on the highest land, she must be approaching him as long as she was walking uphill. But the blindness was unnerving. If there had been a precipice, she would have stepped right over it.

The light of dawn was turning the fog to the color of pearl when at last she heard a voice. She stopped. It was a man speaking in a low murmur. Mair squeezed her hand nervously. Another man spoke. She could not make out the language. She feared that she might have walked in a full circle and arrived back on the French side.

She turned toward the voice, still holding Mair’s hand. The red glow of flames became visible through the gray mist, and she headed for it gratefully. As she came nearer, she heard the talk more clearly, and realized with immense relief that the men were speaking English. A moment later she made out a group of men around a fire. Several lay asleep, rolled in blankets, but three sat upright, legs crossed, looking into the flames, talking. A moment later Caris saw a man standing, peering into the fog, presumably on sentry duty, though the fact that he had not noticed her approach proved his job was impossible.

To get their attention, Caris said in a low voice: “God bless you, men of England.”

She startled them. One gave a shout of fear. The sentry said belatedly: “Who goes there?”

“Two nuns from Kingsbridge Priory,” Caris said. The men stared at her in superstitious dread, and she realized they thought she might be an apparition. “Don’t worry, we’re flesh and blood, and so are these ponies.”

“Did you say Kingsbridge?” said one of them in surprise. “I know you,” he said, standing up. “I’ve seen you before.”

Caris recognized him. “Lord William of Caster,” she said.

“I am the earl of Shiring, now,” he said. “My father died of his wounds an hour ago.”

“May his soul rest in peace. We have come here to see your brother, Bishop Richard, who is our abbot.”

“You’re too late,” William said. “My brother, too, is dead.”

 

Later in the morning, when the fog had lifted and the battlefield looked like a sunlit slaughterhouse, Earl William took Caris and Mair to see King Edward.

Everyone was astonished at the tale of the two nuns who had followed the English army all through Normandy, and soldiers who had faced death only yesterday were fascinated by their adventures. William told Caris that the king would want to hear the story from her own lips.

Edward III had been king for nineteen years, but he was still only thirty-three years old. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was imposing rather than handsome, with a face that might have been molded for power: a big nose, high cheekbones, and luxuriant long hair just beginning to recede from his high forehead. Caris saw why people called him a lion.

He sat on a stool in front of his tent, fashionably dressed in two-colored hose and a cape with a scalloped border. He wore no armor or weapons: the French had vanished, and in fact a force of vengeful troops had been sent out to hunt down and kill any stragglers. A handful of barons stood around.

As Caris told how she and Mair had sought food and shelter in the devastated landscape of Normandy, she wondered if the king felt criticized by her tale of hardship. However, he seemed not to think the sufferings of the people reflected on him. He was as delighted with her exploits as if he were hearing of someone who had been brave during a shipwreck.

She ended by telling him of her disappointment on finding, after all her travails, that Bishop Richard, from whom she had hoped for justice, was dead. “I beg Your Majesty to order the prior of Kingsbridge to restore to the nuns the money he stole.”

Edward smiled ruefully. “You’re a brave woman, but you know nothing of politics,” he said with condescension. “The king can’t get involved in an ecclesiastical quarrel such as this. We would have all our bishops banging on our door in protest.”

That might be so, Caris reflected, but it did not prevent the king interfering with the church when it suited his own purposes. However, she said nothing.

Edward went on: “And it would do your cause harm. The church would be so outraged that every cleric in the land would oppose our ruling, regardless of its merits.”

There might be something in that, she judged. But he was not as powerless as he pretended. “I know you will remember the wronged nuns of Kingsbridge,” she said. “When you appoint the new bishop of Kingsbridge, please tell him our story.”

“Of course,” said the king, but Caris had the feeling he would forget.

The interview seemed to be over, but then William said: “Your Majesty, now that you have graciously confirmed my elevation to my father’s earldom, there is the question of who is to be lord of Caster.”

“Ah, yes. Our son the prince of Wales suggests Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, who was knighted yesterday for saving his life.”

Caris murmured: “Oh, no!”

The king did not hear her, but William did, and he obviously felt the same way. He was not quite able to hide his indignation as he said: “Ralph was an outlaw, guilty of numerous thefts, murders, and rapes, until he obtained a royal pardon by joining your majesty’s army.”

The king was not as moved by this as Caris expected. He said: “All the same, Ralph has fought with us for seven years now. He has earned a second chance.”

“Indeed he has,” William said diplomatically. “But, given the trouble we’ve had with him in the past, I’d like to see him settle down peacefully for a year of two before he’s ennobled.”

“Well, you will be his overlord, so you’ll have to deal with him,” Edward granted. “We won’t impose him on you against your will. However, the prince is keen that he should have some further reward.” The king thought for a few moments, then said: “Don’t you have a cousin who is eligible for marriage?”

“Yes, Matilda,” said William. “We call her Tilly.”

Caris knew Tilly. She was at the nunnery school.

“That’s right,” said Edward. “She was your father Roland’s ward. Her father had three villages near Shiring.”

“Your Majesty has a good memory for detail.”

“Marry Lady Matilda to Ralph and give him her father’s villages,” said the king.

Caris was appalled. “But she’s only twelve!” she burst out.

William said to her: “Hush!”

King Edward turned a cold gaze on her. “The children of the nobility must grow up fast, Sister. Queen Philippa was fourteen when I married her.”

Caris knew she should shut up, but she could not. Tilly was only four years older than the daughter she might have had, if she had given birth to Merthin’s baby. “There’s a big difference between twelve and fourteen,” she said desperately.

The young king became even more frosty. “In the royal presence, people give their opinions only when asked. And the king almost never asks for the opinions of women.”

Caris realized she had taken the wrong tack. Her objection to the marriage was not based on Tilly’s age so much as Ralph’s character. “I know Tilly,” she said. “You can’t marry her to that brute Ralph.”

Mair said in a scared whisper: “Caris! Remember who you’re speaking to!”

Edward looked at William. “Take her away, Shiring, before she says something that cannot be overlooked.”

William took Caris’s arm and firmly marched her out of the royal presence. Mair followed. Behind them, Caris heard the king say: “I can see how she survived in Normandy—the locals must have been terrified of her.” The noblemen around him laughed.

“You must be mad!” William hissed.

“Must I?” Caris said. They were out of earshot of the king now, and she raised her voice. “In the last six weeks the king has caused the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children, and burned their crops and their homes. And I have tried to save a twelve-year-old girl from being married to a murderer. Tell me again, Lord William, which of us is mad?”

51

In the year 1347 the peasants of Wigleigh suffered a poor harvest. The villagers did what they always did in such times: they ate less food, postponed the purchase of hats and belts, and slept closer together for warmth. Old Widow Huberts died earlier than expected; Janey Jones succumbed to a cough that she might have survived in a good year; and Joanna David’s new baby, who might otherwise have had a chance, failed to make it to his first birthday.

Gwenda kept an anxious eye on her two little boys. Sam, the eight-year-old, was big for his age, and strong: he had Wulfric’s physique, people said, though Gwenda knew that in truth he was like his real father, Ralph Fitzgerald. Even so, Sam was visibly thinner by December. David, named after Wulfric’s brother who had died when the bridge collapsed, was six. He resembled Gwenda, being small and dark. The poor diet had weakened him, and all through the autumn he suffered minor ailments: a cold, then a skin rash, then a cough.

All the same, she took the boys with her when she went with Wulfric to finish sowing the winter wheat on Perkin’s land. A bitterly cold wind swept across the open fields. She dropped seeds into the furrows, and Sam and David chased off the daring birds who tried to snatch the corn before Wulfric turned the earth over. As they ran, and jumped, and shouted, Gwenda marveled that these two fully functioning miniature human beings had come from inside her body. They turned the chasing of the birds into some kind of competitive game, and she delighted in the miracle of their imagination. Once part of her, they were now able to have thoughts she did not know about.

Mud clung to their feet as they tramped up and down. A fast-running stream bordered the big field, and on the far bank stood the fulling mill Merthin had built nine years ago. The distant rumble of its pounding wooden hammers accompanied their work. The mill was run by two eccentric brothers, Jack and Eli—both unmarried men with no land—and an apprentice boy who was their nephew. They were the only villagers who had not suffered on account of the bad harvest: Mark Webber paid them the same wages all winter long.

It was a short midwinter day. Gwenda and her family finished sowing just as the gray sky began to darken, and the twilight gathered mistily in the distant woods. They were all tired.

There was half a sack of seed leftover, so they took it to Perkin’s house. As they approached the place, they saw Perkin himself coming from the opposite direction. He was walking beside a cart on which his daughter, Annet, was riding. They had been to Kingsbridge to sell the last of the year’s apples and pears from Perkin’s trees.

Annet still retained her girlish figure, although she was now twenty-eight, and had had a child. She called attention to her youthfulness with a dress that was a little too short and a hairstyle that was charmingly disarrayed. She looked silly, Gwenda thought. Her opinion was shared by every woman in the village and none of the men.

Gwenda was shocked to see that Perkin’s cart was full of fruit. “What happened?” she said.

Perkin’s face was grim. “Kingsbridge folk are having a hard winter just like us,” he said. “They’ve no money to buy apples. We shall have to make cider with this lot.”

That was bad news. Gwenda had never known Perkin to come home from the market with so much unsold produce.

Annet seemed unworried. She held out a hand to Wulfric, who helped her down from the cart. As she stepped to the ground, she stumbled, and fell against him with her hand on his chest. “Oops!” she said, and smiled at him as she recovered her balance. Wulfric flushed with pleasure.

You blind idiot, Gwenda thought.

They went inside. Perkin sat at the table, and his wife, Peggy, brought him a bowl of pottage. He cut a thick slice from the loaf on the board. Peggy served her own family next. Annet, her husband Billy Howard, Annet’s brother Rob, and Rob’s wife. She gave a little to Annet’s four-year-old daughter, Amabel, and to Rob’s two small boys. Then she invited Wulfric and his family to sit down.

Gwenda spooned up the broth hungrily. It was thicker than the pottage she made: Peggy was putting stale bread in, whereas in Gwenda’s house the bread never lasted long enough to go stale. Perkin’s family got cups of ale, but Gwenda and Wulfric were not offered any: hospitality went only so far in hard times.

Perkin was jocular with his customers, but otherwise a sourpuss, and the atmosphere in his house was always more or less dismal. He talked in a disheartened way about the Kingsbridge market. Most of the traders had had a bad day. The only ones doing any business were those who sold essentials such as corn, meat, and salt. No one was buying the now-famous Kingsbridge Scarlet cloth.

Peggy lit a lamp. Gwenda wanted to go home, but she and Wulfric were waiting for their wages. The boys began to misbehave, running around the room and bumping into adults. “It’s getting near their bedtime,” said Gwenda, though it was not really.

At last Wulfric said: “If you’ll give us our wages, Perkin, we’ll leave.”

“I haven’t got any money,” Perkin said.

Gwenda stared at him. He had never said anything like this in the nine years she and Wulfric had been working for him.

Wulfric said: “We must have our wages. We’ve got to eat.”

“You’ve had some pottage, haven’t you?” Perkin said.

Gwenda was outraged. “We work for money, not pottage!”

“Well, I haven’t got any money,” Perkin repeated. “I went to market to sell my apples, but no one bought them, so I’ve got more apples than we can eat, and no money.”

Gwenda was so shocked that she did not know what to say. It had never occurred to her that Perkin might not pay them. She felt a stab of fear as she realized there was nothing she could do about it.

Wulfric said slowly: “Well, what’s to be done about it? Shall we go to the Long Field and take the seeds back out of the ground?”

“I’ll have to owe you this week’s wages,” Perkin said. “I’ll pay you when things get better.”

“And next week?”

“I won’t have any money next week, either—where do you think it’s to come from?”

Gwenda said: “We’ll go to Mark Webber. Perhaps he can employ us at the fulling mill.”

Perkin shook his head. “I spoke to him yesterday, in Kingsbridge, and asked if he could hire you. He said no. He’s not selling enough cloth. He’ll continue to employ Jack and Eli and the boy, and stockpile the cloth until trade picks up, but he can’t take on any extra hands.”

Wulfric was bewildered. “How are we to live? How will you get your spring plowing done?”

“You can work for food,” Perkin offered.

Wulfric looked at Gwenda. She choked back a scornful retort. She and her family were in deep trouble, and this was not the moment to antagonize anyone. She thought fast. They did not have much choice: eat or starve. “We’ll work for food, and you’ll owe us the money,” she said.

Perkin shook his head. “What you’re suggesting may be fair—”

“It is fair!”

“All right, it is fair, but just the same I can’t do it. I don’t know when I’ll have the money. Why, I could owe you a pound come Whitsun! You can work for food, or not at all.”

“You’ll have to feed all four of us.”

“Yes.”

“But only Wulfric will work.”

“I don’t know—”

“A family wants more than food. Children need clothes. A man must have boots. If you can’t pay me, I will have to find some other way of providing such things.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” She paused. The truth was, she had no idea. She fought down panic. “I may have to ask my father how he manages.”

Peggy put in: “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you—Joby will tell you to steal.”

Gwenda was stung. What right did Peggy have to take a supercilious attitude? Joby had never employed people then told them at the end of the week that he could not pay them. But she bit her tongue and said mildly: “He fed me through eighteen winters, even if he did sell me to outlaws at the end.”

Peggy tossed her head and abruptly began to pick up the bowls from the table.

Wulfric said: “We should go.”

Gwenda did not move. Whatever advantages she could gain had to be won now. When she left this house, Perkin would consider that a bargain had been struck, and could not be renegotiated. She thought hard. Remembering how Peggy had given ale only to her own family, she said: “You won’t fob us off with stale fish and watery beer. You’ll feed us exactly the same as yourself and your family—meat, bread, ale, whatever it may be.”

Peggy made a deprecating noise. She had been planning to do just what Gwenda feared, it seemed.

Gwenda added: “That is, if you want Wulfric to do the same work as you and Rob.” They all knew perfectly well that Wulfric did more work than Rob and twice as much as Perkin.

“All right,” Perkin said.

“And this is strictly an emergency arrangement. As soon as you get money, you have to start paying us again at the old rate—a penny a day each.”

“Yes.”

There was a short silence. Wulfric said: “Is that it?”

“I think so,” Gwenda said. “You and Perkin should shake hands on the bargain.”

They shook hands.

Taking their children, Gwenda and Wulfric left. It was now full dark. Clouds hid the stars, and they had to make their way by the glimmer of light shining through cracks in shutters and around doors. Fortunately they had walked from Perkin’s house to their own a thousand times before.

Wulfric lit a lamp and built up the fire while Gwenda put the boys to bed. Although there were bedrooms upstairs—they were still living in the large house that had been occupied by Wulfric’s parents—nevertheless they all slept in the kitchen, for warmth.

Gwenda felt depressed as she wrapped the boys in blankets and settled them near the fire. She had grown up determined not to live the way her mother did, in constant worry and want. She had aspired to independence: a patch of land, a hardworking husband, a reasonable lord. Wulfric yearned to get back the land his father had farmed. In all those aspirations they had failed. She was a pauper, and her husband a landless laborer whose employer could not even pay him a penny a day. She had ended up exactly like her mother, she thought; and she felt too bitter for tears.

Wulfric took a pottery bottle from a shelf and poured ale into a wooden cup. “Enjoy it,” Gwenda said sourly. “You won’t be able to buy your own ale for a while.”

Wulfric said conversationally: “It’s amazing that Perkin has no money. He’s the richest man in the village, apart from Nathan Reeve.”

“Perkin has money,” Gwenda said. “There’s a jar of silver pennies under his fireplace. I’ve seen it.”

“Then why won’t he pay us?”

“He doesn’t want to dip into his savings.”

Wulfric was taken aback. “But he could pay us, if he wanted to?”

“Of course.”

“Then why am I going to work for food?”

Gwenda let out an impatient grunt. Wulfric was so slow on the uptake. “Because the alternative was no work at all.”

Wulfric was feeling that they had been hoodwinked. “We should have insisted on payment.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know about the jar of pennies under the fireplace.”

“For God’s sake, do you think a man as rich as Perkin can be impoverished by failing to sell one cartload of apples? He’s been the largest landholder in Wigleigh ever since he got hold of your father’s acres ten years ago. Of course he has savings!”

“Yes, I see that.”

She stared into the fire while he finished the ale, then they went to bed. He put his arms around her, and she rested her head on his chest, but she did not want to make love. She was too angry. She told herself she should not take it out on her husband: Perkin had let them down, not Wulfric. But she was angry with Wulfric—furious. As she sensed him drifting off to sleep, she realized that her anger was not about their wages. That was the kind of misfortune that afflicted everyone from time to time, like bad weather and barley mold.

What, then?

She recalled the way Annet had fallen against Wulfric as she stepped down from the cart. When she remembered Annet’s coquettish smile, and Wulfric’s flush of pleasure, she wanted to slap his face. I’m angry with you, she thought, because that worthless, empty-headed flirt can still make you look such a damn fool.

 

On the Sunday before Christmas, a manor court was held in the church after the service. It was cold, and the villagers huddled together, wrapped in cloaks and blankets. Nathan Reeve was in charge. The lord of the manor, Ralph Fitzgerald, had not been seen in Wigleigh for years. So much the better, Gwenda thought. Besides, he was Sir Ralph now, with three other villages in his fiefdom, so he would not take much interest in ox teams and cow pasture.

Alfred Shorthouse had died during the week. He was a childless widower with ten acres. “He has no natural heirs,” said Nate Reeve. “Perkin is willing to take over his land.”

Gwenda was surprised. How could Perkin think of taking on more land? She was too startled to respond immediately, and Aaron Appletree, the bagpipe player, spoke first. “Alfred has been in poor health since the summer,” he said. “He’s done no autumn plowing and sown no winter wheat. All the work is to be done. Perkin will have his hands full.”

Nate said aggressively: “Are you asking for the land yourself?”

Aaron shook his head. “In a few more years, when my boys are big enough to help, I’ll jump at such a chance,” he said. “I couldn’t handle it now.”

“I can manage it,” Perkin said.

Gwenda frowned. Nate obviously wanted Perkin to have the land. No doubt a bribe had been promised. She had known all along that Perkin had money. But she had little interest in exposing Perkin’s duplicity. She was thinking of how she could exploit this situation to her advantage, and get her family out of poverty.

Nate said: “You could take on another laborer, Perkin.”

“Wait a minute,” Gwenda said. “Perkin can’t pay the laborers he’s got now. How can he take on more land?”

Perkin was taken aback, but he could hardly deny what Gwenda was saying, so he remained silent.

Nate said: “Well, who else can cope with it?”

Gwenda said quickly: “We’ll take it.”

Nate looked surprised.

She added quickly: “Wulfric is working for food. I have no work. We need land.”

She noticed several nodding heads. No one in the village liked what Perkin had done. They all feared that one day they might end up in the same situation.

Nate saw the danger of his plan going awry. “You can’t afford the entry fee,” he said.

“We’ll pay it a little at a time.”

Nate shook his head. “I want a tenant who can pay right away.” He looked around the assembled villagers. However, no one volunteered. “David Johns?”

David was a middle-aged man whose sons had land of their own. “I would have said yes a year ago,” he said. “But the rain at harvest time knocked me back.”

The offer of an extra ten acres would normally have had the more ambitious villagers fighting among themselves, but it was a bad year. Gwenda and Wulfric were different. For one thing, Wulfric had never ceased to long for land of his own. Alfred’s acres were not Wulfric’s birthright, but they were better than nothing. Anyway, Gwenda and Wulfric were desperate.

Aaron Appletree said: “Give it to Wulfric, Nate. He’s a hard worker, he’ll get the plowing done in time. And he and his wife deserve some good luck—they’ve had more than their fair share of bad.”

Nate looked bad-tempered, but there was a loud rumble of assent from the peasants. Wulfric and Gwenda were well respected despite their poverty.

This was a rare combination of circumstances that could get Gwenda and her family started on the road to a better life, and she felt growing excitement as it began to seem possible.

But Nate was still looking dubious. “Sir Ralph hates Wulfric,” he said.

Wulfric’s hand went to his cheek, and he touched the scar made by Ralph’s sword.

“I know,” said Gwenda. “But Ralph’s not here.”

52

When Earl Roland died the day after the battle of Crécy, several people moved a step up the ladder. His elder son, William, became the earl, overlord of the county of Shiring, answerable to the king. A cousin of William’s, Sir Edward Courthose, became lord of Caster, took over the rule of the forty villages of that fiefdom as a subtenant of the earl, and moved into William and Philippa’s old house in Casterham. And Sir Ralph Fitzgerald became lord of Tench.

For the next eighteen months, none of them went home. They were all too busy traveling with the king and killing French people. Then, in 1347, the war reached a stalemate. The English captured and held the valuable port city of Calais, but otherwise there was little to show for a decade of war—except, of course, a great deal of booty.

In January 1348 Ralph took possession of his new property. Tench was a large village with a hundred peasant families, and the manor included two smaller villages nearby. He also retained Wigleigh, which was half a day’s ride away.

Ralph felt a thrill of pride as he rode through Tench. He had looked forward to this moment. The serfs bowed and their children stared. He was lord of every person and owner of every object in the place.

The house was set in a compound. Riding in, followed by a cart loaded with French loot, Ralph saw immediately that the defensive walls had long ago fallen into disrepair. He wondered whether he should restore them. The burghers of Normandy had neglected their defenses, by and large, and that had made it relatively easy for Edward III to overrun them. On the other hand, the likelihood of an invasion of southern England was now very small. Early in the war, most of the French fleet had been wiped out at the port of Sluys, and thereafter the English had controlled the sea channel that separated the two countries. Apart from minor raids by freelance pirates, every battle since Sluys had been fought on French soil. On balance it hardly seemed worthwhile to rebuild the compound walls.

Several grooms appeared and took the horses. Ralph left Alan Fernhill to supervise the unloading, and walked toward his new house. He was limping: his injured leg always hurt after a long ride. Tench Hall was a stone-built manor house. It was impressive, he noted with satisfaction, though it needed repairs—not surprisingly, for it had remained unoccupied since Lady Matilda’s father died. However, it was modern in design. In old-fashioned houses, the lord’s private chamber was an afterthought stuck on to the end of the all-important great hall, but Ralph could see, from the outside, that here the domestic apartments took up half the building.

He entered the hall, and was annoyed to find Earl William there.

At the far end of the room was a large chair made of dark wood, elaborately carved with powerful symbols: angels and lions on the back and arms, snakes and monsters on the legs. It was obviously the chair of the lord of the manor. But William was sitting in it.

Much of Ralph’s pleasure evaporated. He could not enjoy his mastery of the new manor under the scrutiny of his own overlord. It would be like going to bed with a woman while her husband listened outside the door.

He masked his displeasure and formally greeted Earl William. The earl introduced the man standing next to him. “This is Daniel, who has been bailiff here for twenty years, and has taken good care of the place, on my father’s behalf, during Tilly’s minority.”

Ralph acknowledged the bailiff stiffly. William’s message was clear: he wanted Ralph to let Daniel continue in the job. But Daniel had been Earl Roland’s man and now he would be Earl William’s. Ralph had no intention of letting his domain be managed by the earl’s man. His bailiff would be loyal to him alone.

William waited expectantly for Ralph to say something about Daniel. However, Ralph was not going to have that discussion. Ten years ago he would have jumped feet first into an argument, but he had learned a lot in the time he had spent with the king. He was not obliged to get his earl’s approval for his choice of bailiff, so he would not seek it. He would say nothing until William had gone, then he would tell Daniel he was being assigned to other duties.

Both William and Ralph remained stubbornly silent for a few moments, then the deadlock was broken. A large door opened at the domestic end of the hall and the tall, elegant figure of Lady Philippa came in. It was many years since Ralph had seen her, but his youthful passion returned with a shock that felt like a punch, leaving him breathless. She was older—she had to be forty, he guessed—but she was in her prime. Perhaps she was a little heavier than he remembered, her hips more rounded, her breasts fuller, but that only added to her allure. She still walked like a queen. As always, the sight of her made him ask resentfully why he could not have a wife like that.

In the past she had barely deigned to notice his presence, but today she smiled and shook his hand and said: “Are you getting to know Daniel?”

She, too, wanted him to continue to employ the earl’s retainer—that was why she was being courteous. All the more reason to get rid of the man, he thought with secret relish. “I’ve just arrived,” he said noncommittally.

Philippa explained their presence. “We wanted to be here when you met young Tilly—she’s part of our family.”

Ralph had commanded the nuns of Kingsbridge Priory to bring his fiancée here to meet him today. Interfering busybodies, the nuns had obviously told Earl William what was happening. “Lady Matilda was the ward of Earl Roland, rest his soul,” Ralph said, emphasizing that the wardship had ended with Roland’s death.

“Yes—and I would have expected the king to transfer her wardship to my husband, as Roland’s heir.” Clearly Philippa would have preferred that.

“But he did not,” Ralph said. “He gave her to me to wed.” Although no ceremony had yet taken place, the girl had immediately become Ralph’s responsibility. Strictly speaking, William and Philippa had no business to invite themselves here today, as if playing the role of Tilly’s parents. But William was Ralph’s overlord, so he could visit whenever he pleased.

Ralph did not want to quarrel with William. It was too easy for William to make Ralph’s life difficult. On the other hand, the new earl was overreaching his authority here—probably under pressure from his wife. But Ralph was not going to be bullied. The last seven years had given him the confidence to defend such independence as he was entitled to.

Anyway, he was enjoying crossing swords with Philippa. It gave him an excuse to stare at her. He rested his gaze on the assertive line of her jaw and the fullness of her lips. Despite her hauteur, she was forced to engage with him. This was the longest conversation he had ever had with her.

“Tilly is very young,” said Philippa.

“She will be fourteen this year,” Ralph said. “That’s the age our queen was when she married our king—as the king himself pointed out, to me and to Earl William, after the battle of Crécy.”

“The aftermath of a battle is not necessarily the best moment to decide the fate of a young girl,” Philippa said in a lowered voice.

Ralph was not going to let that pass. “Speaking for myself, I feel obliged to comply with the decisions of His Majesty.”

“As do we all,” she muttered.

Ralph felt he had vanquished her. It was a sexual feeling, almost as if he had lain with her. Satisfied, he turned to Daniel. “My wife-to-be should arrive in time for dinner,” he said. “Make sure we have a feast.”

Philippa said: “I have already seen to that.”

Ralph slowly turned his head until his eyes were on her again. She had overstepped the bounds of courtesy by going into his kitchen and giving orders.

She knew it, and reddened. “I didn’t know what time you would get here,” she said.

Ralph said nothing. She would not apologize, but he was content in having forced her to explain herself—a climb-down for a woman as proud as she.

For a short while there had been the noise of horses outside, and now Ralph’s parents came in. He had not seen them for some years, and he hurried to embrace them.

They were both in their fifties, but his mother had aged faster, it seemed to him. Her hair was white and her face was lined. She had the slight stoop of elderly women. His father seemed more vigorous. It was partly the excitement of the moment: he was flushed with pride, and shook Ralph’s hand as if pumping water from a well. But there was no gray in his red beard, and his slim figure still appeared spry. They were both wearing new clothes—Ralph had sent the money. Sir Gerald had a heavy wool surcoat and Lady Maud a fur cloak.

Ralph snapped his fingers at Daniel. “Bring wine,” he said. For an instant, the bailiff looked as though he might protest at being treated like a maidservant; then he swallowed his pride and hurried off to the kitchen.

Ralph said: “Earl William, Lady Philippa, may I present my father, Sir Gerald, and my mother, Lady Maud.”

He was afraid that William and Philippa would look down their noses at his parents, but they acknowledged them courteously enough.

Gerald said to William: “I was a comrade-in-arms of your father, may he rest in peace. In fact, Earl William, I knew you as a boy, though you won’t remember me.”

Ralph wished his father would not call attention to his glorious past. It only emphasized how far he had fallen.

But William seemed not to notice. “Well, d’you know, I think I do remember,” he said. He was probably just being kind, but Gerald was pleased. “Of course,” William added, “I recall you as a giant at least seven feet tall.”

Gerald, who was short in stature, laughed delightedly.

Maud looked around and said: “My, this is a fine house, Ralph.”

“I wanted to decorate it with all the treasures I’ve brought back from France,” he said. “But I’ve only just got here.”

A kitchen girl brought a jug of wine and goblets on a tray, and they all took some refreshment. The wine was good Bordeaux, Ralph noticed, clear and sweet. Due credit to Daniel for keeping the house well supplied, he thought at first; then he reflected that for many years no one had been here to drink it—except, of course, Daniel.

He said to his mother: “Any news of my brother, Merthin?”

“He’s doing very well,” she said proudly. “Married with a daughter, and rich. He’s building a palace for the family of Buonaventura Caroli.”

“But they haven’t made him a conte yet, I suppose?” Ralph pretended to be joking, but he was pointing out that Merthin, for all his success, had not gained a noble title; and that it was he, Ralph, who had fulfilled their father’s hopes by taking the family back into the nobility.

“Not yet,” said his father gaily, as if it were a real possibility that Merthin might become an Italian count; which annoyed Ralph, but only momentarily.

His mother said: “Could we see our rooms?”

Ralph hesitated. What did she mean by “our rooms”? The dreadful thought crossed his mind that his parents might think they were going to live here. He could not have that: they would be a constant reminder of the family’s years of shame. Besides, they would cramp his style. On the other hand, he now realized, it was also shameful for a nobleman to let his parents live in a one-room house as pensioners of a priory.

He would have to think more about that. For now he said: “I haven’t had a chance to look at the private quarters myself yet. I hope I can make you comfortable for a few nights.”

“A few nights?” his mother said quickly. “Are you going to send us back to our hovel in Kingsbridge?”

Ralph was mortified that she should mention that in front of William and Philippa. “I don’t think there’s room for you to live here.”

“How do you know, if you haven’t yet looked at the chambers?”

Daniel interrupted. “There’s a villager here from Wigleigh, Sir Ralph—name of Perkin. Wants to pay his respects and discuss an urgent matter.”

Ralph would normally have told the man off for butting into a conversation, but on this occasion he was grateful for the diversion. “Have a look at the rooms, Mother,” he said. “I’ll deal with this peasant.”

William and Philippa went off with his parents to inspect the domestic quarters, and Daniel brought Perkin to the table. Perkin was as obsequious as ever. “So happy to see your lordship safe and whole after the French wars,” he said.

Ralph looked at his left hand, with three fingers missing. “Well, almost whole,” he said.

“All the people of Wigleigh are sorry for your wounds, lord, but the rewards! A knighthood, and three more villages, and Lady Matilda to wed!”

“Thank you for your felicitations, but what was the urgent matter you needed to discuss?”

“Lord, it doesn’t take long to tell. Alfred Shorthouse died without a natural heir to his ten acres, and I offered to take on the land, even though times have been very hard, after this year’s thunderstorms in August—”

“Never mind the weather.”

“Of course. In brief, Nathan Reeve made a decision that I feel you would not approve.”

Ralph felt impatient. He really did not care which peasant farmed Alfred’s ten acres. “Whatever Nathan decided—”

“He gave the land to Wulfric.”

“Ah.”

“Some of the villagers said Wulfric deserved it, as he had no land; but he can’t pay the entry fee, and anyway—”

“You don’t need to convince me,” Ralph said. “I will not allow that troublemaker to hold land in my territory.”

“Thank you, lord. Shall I tell Nathan Reeve that you wish me to have the ten acres?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. He saw the earl and countess emerge from the private quarters, with his parents in tow. “I’ll be there to confirm it in person within the next two weeks.” He dismissed Perkin with a wave.

At that moment, Lady Matilda arrived.

She entered the hall with a nun on either side of her. One was Merthin’s old girlfriend, Caris, who had tried to tell the king that Tilly was too young to marry. On the other side was the nun who had traveled to Crécy with Caris, an angel-faced woman whose name Ralph did not know. Behind them, presumably acting as their bodyguard, was the one-armed monk who had captured Ralph so cleverly nine years ago, Brother Thomas.

And in the center was Tilly. Ralph saw immediately why the nuns wanted to protect her from marriage. Her face had a look of childish innocence. She had freckles on her nose and a gap between her two front teeth. She stared about her with frightened eyes. Caris had heightened the childish look by dressing her in a plain white nun’s robe and a simple cap, but the clothing failed to hide the womanly curves of the body underneath. Caris had obviously wanted to make Tilly seem too young for wedlock. The effect on Ralph was the opposite of what was intended.

One of the things Ralph had learned in the king’s service was that, in many situations, a man could take charge simply by speaking first. He said loudly: “Come here, Tilly.”

The girl stepped forward and came to him. Her escort hesitated, then stayed where they were.

“I am your husband,” Ralph said to her. “My name is Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, Lord of Tench.”

She looked terrified. “I’m happy to meet you, sir.”

“This is your home now, as it was when you were a child and your father was lord here. You are now the Lady of Tench, as your mother once was. Are you happy to be back in your family home?”

“Yes, lord.” She looked anything but happy.

“I’m sure the nuns have told you that you must be an obedient wife, and do all you can to please your husband, who is your lord and master.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And here are my mother and father, who are your parents, too, now.”

She made a little curtsey to Gerald and Maud.

Ralph said: “Come here.” He held out his hands.

Automatically, Tilly reached out, then she saw his maimed left hand. She made a disgusted sound and flinched back.

An angry curse came to Ralph’s lips, but he suppressed it. With some difficulty he forced himself to speak in a light tone of voice. “Don’t be afraid of my wounded hand,” he said. “You should be proud of it. I lost those fingers in the service of the king.” He kept both arms stretched out expectantly.

With an effort, she took his hands.

“Now you can kiss me, Tilly.”

He was seated, and she was standing in front of him. She leaned forward and offered her cheek. He put his wounded hand at the back of her head and turned her face, then he kissed her lips. He sensed her uncertainty and guessed that she had not been kissed by a man before. He let his mouth linger on hers, partly because it was so sweet, and partly to enrage those watching. Then, with slow deliberation, he pressed his good hand against her chest, and felt her breasts. They were full and round. She was no child.

He released her and sighed with satisfaction. “We must get married soon,” he said. He turned to Caris, who was visibly suppressing anger. “In Kingsbridge Cathedral, four weeks from Sunday,” he said. He looked at Philippa but addressed William. “As we’re getting married by the express wish of His Majesty King Edward, I would be honored if you would attend, Earl William.”

William nodded curtly.

Caris spoke for the first time. “Sir Ralph, the prior of Kingsbridge sends you greetings, and says he will be honored to perform the ceremony, unless of course the new bishop wishes to do so.”

Ralph nodded graciously.

She then added: “But those of us who have had charge of this child believe she is still too young to live with her husband conjugally.”

Philippa said: “I concur.”

Ralph’s father spoke. “You know, son, I waited years to marry your mother.”

Ralph did not want to hear that story all over again. “Unlike you, Father, I have been ordered by the king to marry Lady Matilda.”

His mother said: “Perhaps you should wait, son.”

“I have waited more than a year! She was twelve when the king gave her to me.”

Caris said: “Marry the child, yes, with all due ceremony—but then let her return to the nunnery for a year. Let her grow fully into her womanhood. Then bring her to your home.”

Ralph snorted scornfully. “I could be dead in a year, especially if the king decides to go back to France. Meanwhile, the Fitzgeralds need an heir.”

“She is a child—”

Ralph interrupted, raising his voice. “She is no child—look at her! That stupid nun’s habit can’t disguise her breasts.”

“Puppy fat—”

“Does she have a woman’s hair?” Ralph demanded.

Tilly gasped at his crude frankness, and her cheeks reddened with shame.

Caris hesitated.

Ralph said: “Perhaps my mother should examine her on my behalf and tell me.”

Caris shook her head. “That won’t be necessary. Tilly has hair where a woman has it and a child does not.”

“I knew as much. I have seen—” Ralph stopped, realizing that he did not want everyone here to know in what circumstances he had seen the naked bodies of girls of Tilly’s age. “I guessed, from her figure,” he amended, avoiding his mother’s eye.

A rarely heard pleading tone entered Caris’s voice. “But, Ralph, in her mind she is still a child.”

I don’t care about her mind, Ralph thought, but he did not say so. “She has four weeks to learn what she does not know,” he said. He gave Caris a knowing look. “I’m sure you can teach her everything.”

Caris flushed. Nuns were not supposed to know about marital intimacy, of course, but she had been his brother’s girlfriend.

His mother said: “Perhaps a compromise—”

“You just don’t understand, Mother, do you?” he said, rudely interrupting her. “No one is really concerned about her age. If I were going to marry the daughter of a Kingsbridge butcher, they wouldn’t care if she was nine. It’s because Tilly is noble-born, don’t you see that? They think they’re superior to us!” He knew he was shouting, and he could see the amazed expressions of everyone around him, but he did not care. “They don’t want a cousin of the earl of Shiring to marry the son of an impoverished knight. They want to put off the marriage in the hope that I’ll be killed in battle before it’s consummated.” He wiped his mouth. “But this son of an impoverished knight fought at the battle of Crécy, and saved the life of the prince of Wales. That’s what matters to the king.” He looked at each of them in turn: haughty William, scornful Philippa, furious Caris, and his astonished parents. “So you might as well accept the facts. Ralph Fitzgerald is a knight and a lord, and a comrade-in-arms of the king. And he’s going to marry Lady Matilda, the cousin of the earl—whether you like it or not!”

There was a shocked silence for several moments.

At last Ralph turned to Daniel. “You can serve dinner now,” he said.

53

In the spring of 1348, Merthin woke up as if from a nightmare he could not quite remember. He felt frightened and weak. He opened his eyes to a room lit by bars of bright sunshine coming through half-open shutters. He saw a high ceiling, white walls, red tiles. The air was mild. Reality returned slowly. He was in his bedroom, in his house, in Florence. He had been ill.

The illness came back to him first. It had begun with a skin rash, purplish-black blotches on his chest, then his arms, then everywhere. Soon afterward he developed a painful lump or bubo in his armpit. He had a fever, sweating in his bed, tangling the sheets as he writhed. He had vomited and coughed blood. He had thought he would die. Worst of all was a terrible, unquenchable thirst that had made him want to throw himself into the River Arno with his mouth open.

He was not the only sufferer. Thousands of Italians had fallen ill with this plague, tens of thousands. Half the workmen on his building sites had disappeared, as had most of his household servants. Almost everyone who caught it died within five days. They called it la moria grande, the big death.

But he was alive.

He had a nagging feeling that while ill he had reached a momentous decision, but he could not remember it. He concentrated for a moment. The harder he thought, the more elusive the memory became, until it vanished.

He sat up in bed. His limbs felt feeble and his head spun for a moment. He was wearing a clean linen nightshirt, and he wondered who had put it on him. After a pause, he stood.

He had a four-story house with a courtyard. He had designed and built it himself, with a flat facade instead of the traditional overhanging floors, and architectural features such as round window arches and classical columns. The neighbors had called it a palagetto, a mini-palace. That was seven years ago. Several prosperous Florentine merchants had asked him to build palagetti for them, and that had got his career here started.

Florence was a republic, with no ruling prince or duke, dominated by an elite of squabbling merchant families. The city was populated by thousands of weavers, but it was the merchants who made fortunes. They spent their money building grand houses, which made the city a perfect place for a talented young architect to prosper.

He went to the bedroom door and called his wife. “Silvia! Where are you?” It came naturally to him to speak the Tuscan dialect now, after nine years.

Then he remembered. Silvia had been ill, too. So had their daughter, who was three years old. Her name was Laura, but they had adopted her childish pronunciation, Lolla. His heart was gripped by a terrible fear. Was Silvia alive? Was Lolla?

The house was quiet. So was the city, he realized suddenly. The angle of the sunlight slanting into the rooms told him it was mid-morning. He should have been hearing the cries of street hawkers, the clop of horses and the rumble of wooden cartwheels, the background murmur of a thousand conversations—but there was nothing.

He went up the stairs. In his weakness, the effort made him breathless. He pushed open the door to the nursery. The room looked empty. He broke out in a sweat of fear. There was Lolla’s cot, a small chest for her clothes, a box of toys, a miniature table with two tiny chairs. Then he heard a noise. There in the corner was Lolla, sitting on the floor in a clean dress, playing with a small wooden horse with articulated legs. Merthin gave a strangled cry of relief. She heard him and looked up. “Papa,” she observed in a matter-of-fact tone.

Merthin picked her up and hugged her. “You’re alive,” he said in English.

There was a sound from the next room, and Maria walked in. A gray-haired woman in her fifties, she was Lolla’s nurse. “Master!” she said. “You got up—are you better?”

“Where is your mistress?” he said.

Maria’s face fell. “I’m so sorry, master,” she said. “The mistress died.”

Lolla said: “Mama’s gone.”

Merthin felt the shock like a blow. Stunned, he handed Lolla to Maria. Moving slowly and carefully, he turned away and walked out of the room, then down the stairs to the piano nobile, the principal floor. He stared at the long table, the empty chairs, the rugs on the floor, and the pictures on the walls. It looked like someone else’s home.

He stood in front of a painting of the Virgin Mary with her mother. Italian painters were superior to the English or any others, and this artist had given Saint Anne the face of Silvia. She was a proud beauty, with flawless olive skin and noble features, but the painter had seen the sexual passion smoldering in those aloof brown eyes.

It was hard to comprehend that Silvia no longer existed. He thought of her slim body, and remembered how he had marveled, again and again, at her perfect breasts. That body, with which he had been so completely intimate, now lay in the ground somewhere. When he imagined that, tears came to his eyes at last, and he sobbed with grief.

Where was her grave? he wondered in his misery. He remembered that funerals had ceased in Florence: people were terrified to leave their houses. They simply dragged the bodies outside and laid them on the street. The city’s thieves, beggars, and drunks had acquired a new profession: they were called corpse carriers or becchini, and they charged exorbitant fees to take the bodies away and put them in mass graves. Merthin might never know where Silvia lay.

They had been married four years. Looking at her picture, garbed in St. Anne’s conventional red dress, Merthin suffered an access of painful honesty, and asked himself whether he had really loved her. He was very fond of her, but it was not an all-consuming passion. She had an independent spirit and a sharp tongue, and he was the only man in Florence with the nerve to woo her, despite her father’s wealth. In return, she had given him complete devotion. But she had accurately gauged the quality of his love. “What are you thinking about?” she used to say sometimes, and he would give a guilty start, because he had been remembering Kingsbridge. Soon she changed it to: “Who are you thinking about?” He never spoke Caris’s name, but Silvia said: “It must be a woman, I can tell by the look on your face.” Eventually she began to talk about “your English girl.” She would say: “You’re remembering your English girl,” and she was always right. But she seemed to accept it. Merthin was faithful to her. And he adored Lolla.

After a while, Maria brought him soup and bread. “What day is it?” he asked her.

“Tuesday.”

“How long was I in bed?”

“Two weeks. You were so ill.”

He wondered why he had survived. Some people never succumbed to the disease, as if they had natural protection; but those who caught it nearly always died. However, the tiny minority who recovered were doubly fortunate, for no one had ever caught the illness a second time.

When he had eaten, he felt stronger. He had to rebuild his life, he realized. He suspected that he had already made this decision once, when he was ill, but again he was tantalized by the thread of a memory slipping from his grasp.

His first task was to find out how much of his family was left.

He took his dishes to the kitchen, where Maria was feeding Lolla bread dipped in goat’s milk. He asked her: “What about Silvia’s parents? Are they alive?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t heard. I go out only to buy food.”

“I’d better find out.”

He got dressed and went downstairs. The ground floor of the house was a workshop, with the yard at the rear used for storing wood and stone. No one was at work, either inside or out.

He left the house. The buildings around him were mostly stone-built, some of them very grand: Kingsbridge had no houses to compare with these. The richest man in Kingsbridge, Edmund Wooler, had lived in a timber house. Here in Florence, only the poor lived in such places.

The street was deserted. He had never seen it this way, not even in the middle of the night. The effect was eerie. He wondered how many people had died: a third of the population? Half? Were their ghosts still lingering in alleyways and shadowed corners, enviously watching the lucky survivors?

The Christi house was on the next street. Merthin’s father-in-law, Alessandro Christi, had been his first and best friend in Florence. A schoolmate of Buonaventura Caroli, Alessandro had given Merthin his first commission, a simple warehouse building. He was, of course, Lolla’s grandpa.

The door of Alessandro’s palagetto was locked. That was unusual in itself. Merthin banged on the woodwork and waited. Eventually it was opened by Elizabetta, a small, plump woman who was Alessandro’s laundress. She stared at him in shock. “You’re alive!” she said.

“Hello, Betta,” he said. “I’m glad to see that you’re alive, too.”

She turned and called back into the house: “It’s the English lord!”

He had told them he was not a lord, but the servants did not believe him. He stepped inside. “Alessandro?” he said.

She shook her head and began to cry.

“And your mistress?”

“Both dead.”

The stairs led from the entrance hall to the main floor. Merthin walked up slowly, surprised by how weak he still felt. In the main room he sat down to catch his breath. Alessandro had been wealthy, and the room was a showplace of rugs and hangings, paintings and jeweled ornaments and books.

“Who else is here?” he asked Elizabetta.

“Just Lena and her children.” Lena was an Asiatic slave, unusual but by no means unique in prosperous Florentine households. She had two small children by Alessandro, a boy and a girl, and he had treated them just like his legitimate offspring; in fact Silvia had said acidly that he doted on them more than he ever had on her and her brother. The arrangement was considered eccentric rather than scandalous by the sophisticated Florentines.

Merthin said: “What about Signor Gianni?” Gianni was Silvia’s brother.

“Dead. And his wife. The baby is here with me.”

“Dear God.”

Betta said tentatively: “And your family, lord?”

“My wife is dead.”

“I am so sorry.”

“But Lolla is alive.”

“Thank God!”

“Maria is taking care of her.”

“Maria is a good woman. Would you like some refreshment?”

Merthin nodded, and she went away.

Lena’s children came to stare at him: a dark-eyed boy of seven who looked like Alessandro, and a pretty four-year-old with her mother’s Asiatic eyes. Then Lena herself came in, a beautiful woman in her twenties with golden skin and high cheekbones. She brought him a silver goblet of dark red Tuscan wine and a tray of almonds and olives.

She said: “Will you come to live here, lord?”

Merthin was surprised. “I don’t think so—why?”

“The house is yours now.” She waved a hand to indicate the Christi family’s wealth. “Everything is yours.”

Merthin realized she was right. He was Alessandro Christi’s only surviving adult relative. That made him the heir—and the guardian of three children in addition to Lolla.

“Everything,” Lena repeated, giving him a direct look.

Merthin met her candid gaze, and realized that she was offering herself.

He considered the prospect. The house was beautiful. It was home to Lena’s children, and a familiar place to Lolla, and even to Gianni’s baby: all the children would be happy here. He had inherited enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Lena was a woman of intelligence and experience, and he could readily imagine the pleasures of becoming intimate with her.

She read his mind. She took his hand and pressed it to her bosom. Her breasts felt soft and warm through the light wool dress.

But this was not what he wanted. He drew Lena’s hand to him and kissed it. “I will provide for you and your children,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“Thank you, lord,” she said, but she looked disappointed, and something in her eyes told Merthin that her offer had not been merely practical. She had genuinely hoped he might be more to her than just her new owner. But that was part of the problem. He could not imagine sex with someone he owned. The idea was distasteful to the point of revulsion.

He sipped his wine and felt stronger. If he was not drawn to an easy life of luxury and sensual gratification, what did he want? His family was almost gone: only Lolla was left. But he still had his work. Around the city were three sites where designs of his were under construction. He was not going to give up the job he loved. He had not survived the great death to become an idler. He recalled his youthful ambition to build the tallest building in England. He would pick up where he had left off. He would recover from the loss of Silvia by throwing himself into his building projects.

He got up to leave. Lena flung her arms around him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying you will take care of my children.”

He patted her back. “They are Alessandro’s grandchildren,” he said. In Florence, the children of slaves were not themselves enslaved. “When they grow up they will be rich.” He detached her arms gently and went down the stairs.

All the houses were locked and shuttered. On some doorsteps he saw a shrouded form that he presumed was a dead body. There were a few people on the streets, but mostly the poorer sort. The desolation was unnerving. Florence was the greatest city in the Christian world, a noisy commercial metropolis producing thousands of yards of fine woolen cloth every day, a market where vast sums of money were paid over on no more security than a letter from Antwerp or the verbal promise of a prince. Walking through these silent, empty streets was like seeing an injured horse that has fallen and cannot get up: immense strength was suddenly brought to nothing. He saw no one from his circle of acquaintance. His friends were keeping indoors, he presumed—those that were still alive.

He went first to a square nearby, in the old Roman city, where he was building a fountain for the municipality. He had devised an elaborate system to recycle almost all the water during Florence’s long, dry summers.

But, when he reached the square, he could see immediately that no one was working on the site. The underground pipes had been put in and covered over before he fell ill, and the first course of masonry for the stepped plinth around the pool had been laid. However, the dusty, neglected look of the stones told him that no work had been done for days. Worse, a small pyramid of mortar on a wooden board had hardened into a solid mass that gave off a puff of dust when he kicked it. There were even some tools lying on the ground. It was a miracle they had not been stolen.

The fountain was going to be stunning. In Merthin’s workshop, the best stone carver in the city was sculpting the centerpiece—or had been. Merthin was disappointed that work had stopped. Surely not all the builders had died? Perhaps they were waiting to see whether Merthin would recover.

This was the smallest of his three projects, albeit a prestigious one. He left the square and headed north to inspect another one. But as he walked he worried. He had not yet met anyone knowledgeable enough to give him a wider perspective. What was left of the city government? Was the plague easing off or getting worse? What about the rest of Italy?

One thing at a time, he told himself.

He was building a home for Giulielmo Caroli, the older brother of Buonaventura. It was to be a real palazzo, a high double-fronted house designed around a grand staircase wider than some of the city’s streets. The ground-floor wall was already up. The facade was battered, or inclined, at ground level, the slight protrusion giving an impression of fortification; but above were elegant pointed-arch two-light windows with a trefoil. The design said that the people inside were both powerful and refined, which was what the Caroli family wanted.

The scaffolding had been erected for the second floor, but no one was working. There should have been five masons laying stones. The only person on-site was a elderly man who acted as caretaker and lived in a wooden hut at the back. Merthin found him cooking a chicken over a fire. The fool had used costly marble slabs for his hearth. “Where is everyone?” Merthin said abruptly.

The caretaker leaped to his feet. “Signor Caroli died, and his son Agostino wouldn’t pay the men, so they left, those that weren’t already dead themselves.”

That was a blow. The Caroli family was one of the richest in Florence. If they felt they could no longer afford to build, the crisis was severe indeed.

“So Agostino is alive?”

“Yes, master, I saw him this morning.”

Merthin knew young Agostino. He was not as clever as his father or his uncle Buonaventura, so he compensated by being extremely cautious and conservative. He would not recommence building until he was sure the family finances had recovered from the effects of the plague.

However, Merthin felt confident his third and largest project would continue. He was building a church for an order of friars much favored by the city’s merchants. The site was south of the river, so he crossed the new bridge.

This bridge had been finished only two years ago. In fact Merthin had done some work on it, under the leading designer, the painter Taddeo Gaddi. The bridge had to withstand fast-flowing water when the winter snows melted, and Merthin had helped with the design of the piers. Now, as he crossed, he was dismayed to see that all the little goldsmiths’ shops on the bridge were closed—another bad sign.

The Church of Sant’ Anna dei Frari was his most ambitious project to date. It was a big church, more like a cathedral—the friars were rich—though nothing like the cathedral at Kingsbridge. Italy had Gothic cathedrals, Milan being one of the greatest, but modern-minded Italians did not like the architecture of France and England: they regarded huge windows and flying buttresses as a foreign fetish. The obsession with light, which made sense in the gloomy northwest of Europe, seemed perverse in sunny Italy, where people sought shade and coolness. Italians identified with the classical architecture of ancient Rome, the ruins of which were all around them. They liked gable ends and round arches, and they rejected ornate exterior sculpture in favor of decorative patterns of different-colored stone and marble.

But Merthin was going to surprise even the Florentines with this church. The plan was a series of squares, each topped by a dome—five in a row, and two either side of the crossing. He had heard about domes back in England, but had never seen one until he visited Siena Cathedral. There were none in Florence. The clerestory would be a row of round windows, or oculi. Instead of narrow pillars that reached yearningly for Heaven, this church would have circles, complete in themselves, with the air of earthbound self-sufficiency that characterized the commercial people of Florence.

He was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that there were no masons on the scaffolding, no laborers moving the great stones, no mortar-making women stirring with their giant paddles. This site was as quiet as the other two. However, in this case he felt confident he could get the project restarted. A religious order had a life of its own, independent of individuals. He walked around the site and entered the friary.

The place was silent. Monasteries were supposed to be so, of course, but there was a quality to this silence that unnerved him. He passed from the vestibule into the waiting room. There was usually a brother on duty here, studying the scriptures in between attending to visitors, but today the room was empty. With grim apprehension, Merthin went through another door and found himself in the cloisters. The quadrangle was deserted. “Hello!” he called out. “Is anyone there?” His voice echoed around the stone arcades.

He searched the place. All the friars were gone. In the kitchen he found three men sitting at the table, eating ham and drinking wine. They wore the costly clothes of merchants, but they had matted hair, untrimmed beards, and dirty hands: they were paupers wearing dead men’s garments. When he walked in, they looked guilty but defiant. He said: “Where are the holy brothers?”

“All dead,” said one of the men.

“All?”

“Every one. They took care of the sick, you see, and so they caught the disease.”

The man was drunk, Merthin could see. However, he seemed to be telling the truth. These three were too comfortable, sitting in the monastery, eating the friars’ food and drinking their wine. They clearly knew there was no one left to object.

Merthin returned to the site of the new church. The walls of the choir and transepts were up, and the oculi in the clerestory were visible. He sat in the middle of the crossing, amid stacks of stones, looking at his work. For how long would the project be stalled? If all the friars were dead, who would get their money? As far as he knew, they were not part of a larger order. The bishop might claim the inheritance, and so might the pope. There was a legal tangle here that could take years to resolve.

This morning he had resolved to throw himself into his work as a way of healing the wound of Silvia’s death. Now it was clear that, at least for the present, he had no work. Ever since he began to repair the roof of St. Mark’s church in Kingsbridge, ten years ago, he had had at least one building project on the go. Without one, he was lost. It made him feel panicky.

He had woken up to find his whole life in ruins. The fact that he was suddenly very rich only heightened the sense of nightmare. Lolla was the only part of his life he had left.

He did not even know where to go next. He would go home, eventually, but he could not spend all day playing with his three-year-old and talking to Maria. So he stayed where he was, sitting on a carved stone disc intended for a column, looking along what would be the nave.

As the sun rolled down the curve of the afternoon, he began to remember his illness. He had felt sure he would die. So few survived that he did not expect to be among the lucky ones. In his more lucid moments, he had reviewed his life as if it were over. He had come to some grand realization, he knew, but since recovering he had been unable to recall what it was. Now, in the tranquility of the unfinished church, he recalled concluding that he had made one huge mistake in his life. What was it? He had quarreled with Elfric, he had had sex with Griselda, he had rejected Elizabeth Clerk…All these decisions had caused trouble, but none counted as the mistake of a lifetime.

Lying on the bed, sweating, coughing, tormented by thirst, he had almost wanted to die; but not quite. Something had kept him alive—and now it came back to him.

He had wanted to see Caris again.

That was his reason for living. In his delirium he had seen her face, and had wept with grief that he might die here, thousands of miles away from her. The mistake of his life had been to leave her.

As he at last retrieved that elusive memory, and realized the blinding truth of the revelation, he was filled with an odd kind of happiness.

It did not make sense, he reflected. She had joined the nunnery. She had refused to see him and explain herself. But his soul was not rational, and it was telling him that he should be where she was.

He wondered what she was doing now, while he sat in a half-built church in a city nearly destroyed by a plague. The last he had heard was that she had been consecrated by the bishop. That decision was irrevocable—or so they said: Caris had never accepted what other people told her were the rules. On the other hand, once she had made her own decision, it was generally impossible to change her mind. There was no doubt she was strongly committed to her new life.

It made no difference. He wanted to see her again. Not to do so would be the second biggest mistake of his life.

And now he was free. His ties with Florence were all broken. His wife was dead, and so were all his relations by marriage except for three children. The only family he had here was his daughter, Lolla, and he would take her with him. She was so young he felt she would hardly notice that they had left.

It was a momentous move, he told himself. He would first have to prove Alessandro’s will, and make arrangements for the children—Agostino Caroli would help him with that. Then he would have to turn his wealth into gold and arrange for it to be transferred to England. The Caroli family could do that, too, if their international network was still intact. Most daunting, he would have to undertake the thousand-mile journey from Florence across Europe to Kingsbridge. And all that without having any idea how Caris would receive him when at last he arrived.

It was a decision that required long and careful thought, obviously.

He made up his mind in a few moments.

He was going home.

54

Merthin left Italy in company with a dozen merchants from Florence and Lucca. They took a ship from Genoa to the ancient French port of Marseilles. From there they traveled overland to Avignon, home of the pope for the last forty years or more, and the most lavish court in Europe—as well as the smelliest city Merthin had ever known. There they joined a large group of clergymen and returning pilgrims heading north.

Everyone traveled in groups, the larger the better. The merchants were carrying money and expensive trading goods, and they had men-at-arms to protect them from outlaws. They were happy to have company: priestly robes and pilgrim badges might deter robbers, and even ordinary travelers such as Merthin helped just by swelling the numbers.

Merthin had entrusted most of his fortune to the Caroli family in Florence. Their relatives in England would give him cash. The Carolis carried on this kind of international transaction all the time, and indeed Merthin had used their services nine years ago to transfer a smaller fortune from Kingsbridge to Florence. All the same, he knew that the system was not completely infallible—such families sometimes went bankrupt, especially if they got involved in lending money to untrustworthy types such as kings and princes. That was why he had a large sum in gold florins sewn into his undershirt.

Lolla enjoyed the journey. As the only child in the caravan, she was much fussed over. During the long days on horseback, she sat on the saddle in front of Merthin, his arms holding her safe while his hands held the reins. He sang songs, repeated rhymes, told stories, and talked to her about the things they saw—trees, mills, bridges, churches. She probably did not understand half of what he said, but the sound of his voice kept her happy.

He had never before spent this much time with his daughter. They were together all day, every day, week after week. He hoped the intimacy would make up, in part, for the loss of her mother. It certainly worked the other way around: he would have been terribly lonely without her. She no longer spoke about Mama, but every now and then she would put her arms around his neck and cling to him with desperation, as if frightened to let him go.

He felt regret only when he stood in front of the great cathedral at Chartres, sixty miles outside Paris. There were two towers at its west end. The north tower was unfinished, but the south tower was three hundred and fifty feet high. It reminded him that he had once yearned to design such buildings. He was unlikely to achieve that ambition in Kingsbridge.

He lingered in Paris for two weeks. The plague had not reached here, and it was an immense relief to see the normal life of a great city, with people buying and selling and walking around, instead of empty streets with corpses on the doorsteps. His spirits lifted, and it was only then that he realized how stricken he had been by the horror he had left behind in Florence. He looked at Paris’s cathedrals and palaces, making sketches of details that interested him. He had a small notebook made of paper, a new writing material popular in Italy.

Leaving Paris, he teamed up with a noble family returning to Cherbourg. Hearing Lolla talk, the people assumed Merthin was Italian, and he did not disabuse them, for the English were hated passionately in northern France. With the family and their entourage, Merthin crossed Normandy at a leisurely pace, with Lolla on the saddle in front of him and their packhorse following on a leading rein, looking at those churches and abbeys that had survived the devastation of King Edward’s invasion almost two years ago.

He could have moved faster, but he told himself he was making the most of an opportunity that might not come again, the chance to see a rich variety of architecture. However, when he was honest with himself he had to admit that he was afraid of what he might find when he reached Kingsbridge.

He was going home to Caris, but she would not be the same Caris he had left behind nine years ago. She might have changed, physically and mentally. Some nuns became grossly fat, their only pleasure in life being food. More likely, Caris might have become ethereally thin, starving herself in an ecstasy of self-denial. By now she could be obsessed with religion, praying all day and flagellating herself for imaginary sins. Or she might be dead.

Those were his wildest nightmares. In his heart he knew she would not be enormously fat or a religious fanatic. And if she were dead he would have heard, as he had heard of the death of her father, Edmund. She was going to be the same Caris, small and neat, quick-witted, organized, and determined. But he was seriously concerned about how she would receive him. How did she feel about him after nine years? Did she think of him with indifference, as a part of her past too remote to care about, the way he thought of, say, Griselda? Or did she still long for him, somewhere deep in her soul? He had no idea, and that was the true cause of his anxiety.

They sailed to Portsmouth and traveled with a party of traders. They left the group at Mudeford Crossing, the traders going on to Shiring while Merthin and Lolla forded the shallow river on horseback and took the Kingsbridge road. It was a pity, Merthin thought, that there was no visible sign of the way to Kingsbridge. He wondered how many traders continued on to Shiring simply because they did not realize that Kingsbridge was nearer.

It was a warm summer day, and the sun was shining when they came within sight of their destination. The first thing he saw was the top of the cathedral tower, visible over the trees. At least it had not fallen down, Merthin thought: Elfric’s repairs had held for eleven years. It was a pity the tower could not be seen from Mudeford Crossing—what a difference that would make to the numbers visiting the town.

As they came closer, he began to suffer a strange mixture of excitement and fear that made him feel nauseous. For a few moments he was afraid he would have to dismount and throw up. He tried to make himself calm. What could happen? Even if Caris proved to have become indifferent to him, he would not die.

He saw several new buildings on the outskirts of the suburb of Newtown. The splendid new home he had built for Dick Brewer was no longer on the edge of Kingsbridge, for the town had grown past it.

He momentarily forgot his apprehension when he saw his bridge. It rose in an elegant curve from the riverbank and landed gracefully on the midstream island. On the far side of the island, the bridge sprang again to span the second channel. Its white stone gleamed in the sun. People and carts were crossing in both directions. The sight made his heart swell with pride. It was everything he had hoped it would be: beautiful, useful, and strong. I did that, he thought, and it’s good.

But he suffered a shock when he got closer. The masonry of the nearer span was damaged around the central pier. He could see cracks in the stonework, repaired with iron braces in a clumsy fashion that bore the hallmark of Elfric. He was appalled. Brown dribbles of rust dripped from the nails that fixed the ugly braces in the stonework. The sight took him back eleven years, to Elfric’s repairs to the old wooden bridge. Everyone can make mistakes, he thought, but people who don’t learn from their mistakes just make the same ones again. “Bloody fools,” he said aloud.

“Bloody fools,” Lolla repeated. She was learning English.

He rode on to the bridge. The roadbed had been finished properly, he was happy to see, and he was pleased with the design of the parapet, a sturdy barrier with a carved capstone that recalled the moldings in the cathedral.

Leper Island was still overrun with rabbits. Merthin continued to hold a lease on the island. In his absence, Mark Webber had been collecting rents from tenants, paying the nominal rent due to the priory every year, subtracting an agreed collection fee, and sending the balance annually to Merthin in Florence via the Caroli family. After all the deductions it was a small sum, but it grew a little every year.

Merthin’s house on the island had an occupied look, the shutters open, the doorstep swept. He had arranged for Jimmie to live there. The boy must now be a man, he thought.

At the near end of the second span, an old man Merthin did not recognize sat in the sun collecting the tolls. Merthin paid him a penny. The man gave him a hard stare, as if trying to recall where he had seen him before, but he said nothing.

The town was both familiar and strange. Because it was almost the same, the changes struck Merthin as miraculous, as if they had happened overnight: a row of hovels knocked down and replaced by fine houses; a busy inn where once there had been a big gloomy house occupied by a wealthy widow; a well dried up and paved over; a gray house painted white.

He went to the Bell Inn on the main street, next to the priory gates. It was unchanged: a tavern in such a good location would probably last hundreds of years. He left his horses and baggage with a hostler and went inside, holding hands with Lolla.

The Bell was like taverns everywhere: a big front room furnished with rough tables and benches, and a back area where the barrels of beer and wine were racked and food was cooked. Because it was popular and profitable, the straw on the floor was changed frequently and the walls were freshly whitewashed, and in winter a huge fire blazed. Now, in the heat of summer, all the windows were open, and a mild breeze blew through the front room.

After a moment, Bessie Bell came out from the back. Nine years ago she had been a curvy girl; now she was a voluptuous woman. She looked at him without recognition, but he saw her appraise his clothes and judge him an affluent customer. “Good day to you, traveler,” she said. “What can we do to make you and your child comfortable?”

Merthin grinned. “I’d like to take your private room, please, Bessie.”

She knew him as soon as he spoke. “My soul!” she cried. “It’s Merthin Bridger!” He put out his hand to shake, but she threw her arms around him and hugged him. She had always had a soft spot for him. She released him and studied his face. “Such a beard you’ve grown! I would have recognized you sooner otherwise. Is this your little girl?”

“Her name is Lolla.”

“Well, aren’t you a pretty thing! Your mother must be beautiful.”

Merthin said: “My wife died.”

“How sad. But Lolla is young enough to forget. My husband died, too.”

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“I met him after you left. Richard Brown, from Gloucester. I lost him a year ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“My father’s gone to Canterbury, on a pilgrimage, so I’m running this tavern all on my own at the moment.”

“I always liked your father.”

“He was fond of you, too. He always takes to men with a bit of spirit. He was never very keen on my Richard.”

“Ah.” Merthin felt the conversation had become too intimate, too fast. “What news of my parents?”

“They’re not here in Kingsbridge. They’re staying at your brother’s new home in Tench.”

Merthin had heard, through Buonaventura, that Ralph had become lord of Tench. “My father must be very pleased.”

“Proud as a peacock.” She smiled, then looked concerned. “You must be hungry and tired. I’ll tell the boys to take your bags upstairs, then I’ll bring you a tankard of ale and some pottage.” She turned to go into the back room.

“That’s kind, but…”

Bessie paused at the door.

“If you would give Lolla some soup, I’d be grateful. There’s something I have to do.”

Bessie nodded. “Of course.” She bent down to Lolla. “Do you want to come with Auntie Bessie? I expect you could eat a piece of bread. Do you like new bread?”

Merthin translated the question into Italian, and Lolla nodded happily.

Bessie looked at Merthin. “Going to see Sister Caris, are you?”

Absurdly, he felt guilty. “Yes,” he said. “She’s still here, then?”

“Oh, yes. She’s guest master at the nunnery now. I’ll be surprised if she isn’t prioress one day.” She took Lolla’s hand and led her into the back room. “Good luck,” she called over her shoulder.

Merthin went out. Bessie could be a little suffocating, but her affection was sincere, and it warmed his heart to be welcomed back with such enthusiasm. He entered the priory grounds. He paused to look at the soaring west front of the cathedral, almost two hundred years old now and as awe-inspiring as ever.

He noticed a new stone building to the north of the church, beyond the graveyard. It was a medium-size palace, with an imposing entrance and an upper story. It had been built close to where the old timber prior’s house used to be, so presumably it had replaced that modest building as the residence of Godwyn. He wondered where Godwyn had found the money.

He went closer. The palace was very grand, but Merthin did not like the design. None of the levels related in any way to the cathedral that loomed over it. The details were careless. The top of the ostentatious doorcase blocked part of an upper-story window. Worst of all, the palace was built on a different axis from that of the church, so that it stood at an awkward angle.

It was Elfric’s work, no doubt of that.

A plump cat sat on the doorstep in the sun. It was black with a white tip to its tail. It glared malevolently at Merthin.

He turned away and walked slowly to the hospital. The cathedral green was quiet and deserted: there was no market today. The excitement and apprehension rose again in his stomach. He might see Caris at any moment. He reached the entrance and went in. The long room looked brighter and smelled fresher than he remembered: everything had a scrubbed look. There were a few people lying on mattresses on the floor, most of them elderly. At the altar a young novice was saying prayers aloud. He waited for her to finish. He was so anxious that he was sure he felt more ill than the patients on the beds. He had come a thousand miles for this moment. Was it a wasted journey?

At last the nun said “Amen” for the last time and turned around. He did not know her. She approached him and said politely: “May God bless you, stranger.”

Merthin took a deep breath. “I’ve come to see Sister Caris,” he said.

 

The nuns’ chapter meetings now took place in the refectory. In the past they had shared with the monks the elegant octagonal chapter house at the northeast corner of the cathedral. Sadly, mistrust between monks and nuns was now so great that the nuns did not want to risk the monks’ eavesdropping on their deliberations. So they met in the long bare room where they took their meals.

The nunnery officials sat behind a table, Mother Cecilia in the middle. There was no subprioress: Natalie had died a few weeks ago, at the age of fifty-seven, and Cecilia had not yet replaced her. On Cecilia’s right was the treasurer, Beth, and her matricularius, Elizabeth, formerly Elizabeth Clerk. On Cecilia’s left were the cellarer, Margaret, in charge of all supplies, and her subordinate Caris, the guest master. Thirty nuns sat on rows of benches facing the senior officials.

After the prayer and the reading, Mother Cecilia made her announcements. “We have received a letter from our lord bishop in response to our complaint about Prior Godwyn stealing our money,” she said. There was a murmur of anticipation from the nuns.

The reply had been a long time coming. King Edward had taken almost a year to replace Bishop Richard. Earl William had lobbied hard for Jerome, his father’s able administrator, but in the end Edward had chosen Henri of Mons, a relative of his wife’s from Hainault in northern France. Bishop Henri had come to England for the ceremony, then traveled to Rome to be confirmed by the pope, then returned and settled into his palace at Shiring, before replying to Cecilia’s formal letter of complaint.

Cecilia went on: “The bishop declines to take any action over the theft, saying that the events took place during the time of Bishop Richard, and the past is past.”

The nuns gasped. They had accepted the delay patiently, feeling confident they would get justice in the end. This was a shocking rejection.

Caris had seen the letter earlier. She was not as astonished as the rest of the nuns. It was not so remarkable that the new bishop did not wish to begin his period of office by quarreling with the prior of Kingsbridge. The letter told her that Henri would be a pragmatic ruler, not a man of principle. He was no different, in that respect, from the majority of men who were successful in church politics.

However, she was no less disappointed for being unsurprised. The decision meant that she had to abandon, for the foreseeable future, her dream of building a new hospital where sick people could be isolated from healthy guests. She told herself she should not grieve: the priory had existed for hundreds of years without such a luxury, so it could wait another decade or more. On the other hand, it angered her to see the rapid spread of diseases like the vomiting sickness that Maldwyn Cook had brought to the Fleece Fair the year before last. No one understood exactly how these things were transmitted—by looking at a sick person, by touching him, or just by being in the same room—but there could be no doubt that many illnesses did hop from one victim to the next, and proximity was a factor. However, she had to forget all that for now.

A rumble of resentful muttering came from the nuns on the benches. Mair’s voice rose above the others, saying: “The monks will be cock-a-hoop.”

She was right, Caris thought. Godwyn and Philemon had got away with daylight robbery. They had always argued that it was not theft for the monks to use the nuns’ money, since it was all for the glory of God in the end; and they would now consider that the bishop had vindicated them. It was a bitter defeat, especially for Caris and Mair.

But Mother Cecilia was not going to waste time on regrets. “This is not the fault of any of us, except perhaps me,” she said. “We have simply been too trusting.”

You trusted Godwyn, but I did not, Caris thought, but she kept her mouth clamped shut. She waited to hear what Cecilia would say next. She knew that the prioress was going to make changes among the nunnery officials, but no one knew what had been decided.

“However, we must be more careful in the future. We will build a treasury of our own, to which the monks will not have access; indeed, I hope they will not even know where it is. Sister Beth will retire as treasurer, with our thanks for long and faithful service, and Sister Elizabeth will take her place. I have complete faith in Elizabeth.”

Caris tried to control her face so that her disgust would not be seen. Elizabeth had testified that Caris was a witch. It was nine years ago, and Cecilia had forgiven Elizabeth, but Caris never would. However, that was not the only reason for Caris’s antipathy. Elizabeth was sour and twisted, and her resentments interfered with her judgment. Such people could never be trusted, in Caris’s opinion: they were always liable to make decisions based on their prejudices.

Cecilia went on: “Sister Margaret has asked permission to step down from her duties, and Sister Caris will take her place as cellarer.”

Caris was disappointed. She had hoped to be made subprioress, Cecilia’s deputy. She tried to smile as if pleased, but she found it difficult. Cecilia was obviously not going to appoint a subprioress. She would have two rival subordinates, Caris and Elizabeth, and let them fight it out. Caris caught Elizabeth’s eye, and saw barely suppressed hatred in her look.

Cecilia went on: “Under Caris’s supervision, Sister Mair will become guest master.”

Mair beamed with pleasure. She was glad to be promoted and even happier that she would be working under Caris. Caris, too, liked the decision. Mair shared her obsession with cleanliness and her mistrust of priests’ remedies such as bleeding.

Caris had not got what she wanted, but she tried to look happy as Cecilia announced a handful of lesser appointments. When the meeting closed, she went to Cecilia and thanked her.

“Don’t imagine it was an easy decision,” the prioress said. “Elizabeth has brains and determination, and she’s steady where you’re volatile. But you’re imaginative, and you get the best out of people. I need you both.”

Caris could not argue with Cecilia’s analysis of her. She really knows me, Caris thought ruefully; better than anyone else in the world, now that my father is dead and Merthin has gone. She felt a surge of affection. Cecilia was like a mother bird, always moving, always busy, taking care of her fledglings. “I’ll do everything I can to live up to your expectations,” Caris vowed.

She left the room. She needed to check on Old Julie. No matter what she said to the younger nuns, no one looked after Julie the way she did. It was as if they believed that a helpless old person did not need to be kept comfortable. Only Caris made sure Julie was given a blanket in cool weather, and got something to drink when she was thirsty, and was helped to the latrine at those times of day when habitually she needed to go. Caris decided to take her a hot drink, an infusion of herbs that seemed to cheer the old nun up. She went to her pharmacy and put a small pan of water on the fire to boil.

Mair came in and closed the door. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she said. “We’ll still be working together!” She threw her arms around Caris and kissed her lips.

Caris hugged her, then detached herself from the embrace. “Don’t kiss me like that,” she said.

“It’s because I love you.”

“And I love you, too, but not in the same way.”

It was true. Caris was very fond of Mair. They had become highly intimate in France, when they had risked their lives together. Caris had even found herself attracted by Mair’s beauty. One night in a tavern in Calais, when the two of them had had a room with a door that could be locked, Caris had at last succumbed to Mair’s advances. Mair had fondled and kissed Caris in all her most private places, and Caris had done the same to Mair. Mair had said it was the happiest day of her life. Unfortunately, Caris had not felt the same. For her the experience was pleasant but not thrilling, and she had not wanted to repeat it.

“That’s all right,” Mair said. “As long as you love me, even just a little bit, I’m happy. You won’t ever stop, will you?”

Caris poured boiling water on the herbs. “When you’re as old as Julie, I promise I’ll bring you an infusion to keep you healthy.”

Tears came to Mair’s eyes. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Caris had not meant it to be a vow of eternal love. “Don’t be sentimental,” she said gently. She strained the infusion into a wooden cup. “Let’s go and check on Julie.”

They crossed the cloisters and entered the hospital. A man with a bushy red beard was standing near the altar. “God bless you, stranger,” Caris said. The man seemed familiar. He did not reply to her greeting, but looked hard at her with intense golden brown eyes. Then she recognized him. She dropped the cup. “Oh, God!” she said. “You!”

 

The few moments before she saw him were exquisite, and Merthin knew he would treasure them all his life, whatever else happened. He stared hungrily at the face he had not seen for nine years, and remembered, with a shock that was like plunging into a cold river on a hot day, how dear that face had been to him. She had hardly changed at all: his fears had been groundless. She did not even look older. She would be thirty now, he calculated, but she was as slim and perky as she had been at twenty. She walked quickly into the hospital with an air of brisk authority, carrying a wooden cup full of some medicine; then she looked at him, paused, and dropped the cup.

He grinned at her, feeling happy.

“You’re here!” she said. “I thought you were in Florence!”

“I’m very pleased to be back,” he replied.

She looked at the liquid on the floor. The nun with her said: “Don’t worry about this, I’ll clear up. Go and talk to him.” The second nun was pretty, and had tears in her eyes, Merthin noticed, but he was too excited to pay much attention.

Caris said: “When did you come back?”

“I arrived an hour ago. You look well.”

“And you look…such a man.”

Merthin laughed.

She said: “What made you decide to return?”

“It’s a long story,” he replied. “But I’d love to tell it to you.”

“We’ll step outside.” She touched his arm lightly and led him out of the building. Nuns were not supposed to touch people, or to have private conversations with men, but for her such rules had always been optional. He was glad she had not acquired a respect for authority in the last nine years.

Merthin pointed to the bench by the vegetable garden. “I sat on that seat with Mark and Madge Webber, the day you entered the convent, nine years ago. Madge told me you had refused to see me.”

She nodded. “It was the most unhappy day of my life—but I knew that seeing you would make it even worse.”

“I felt the same way, except that I wanted to see you, no matter how miserable it made me.”

She gave him a direct look, her gold-flecked green eyes as candid as ever. “That sounds a bit like a reproach.”

“Perhaps it is. I was very angry with you. Whatever you decided to do, I felt you owed me an explanation.” He had not intended the conversation to go this way, but he found he could not help himself.

She was unapologetic. “It’s really quite simple. I could hardly bear to leave you. If I had been forced to speak to you, I think I would have killed myself.”

He was taken aback. For nine years he had thought she had been selfish on that day of parting. Now it looked as if he had been the selfish one, in making such demands on her. She had always had this ability to make him revise his attitudes, he recalled. It was an uncomfortable process, but she was often right.

They did not sit on the bench, but turned away and walked across the cathedral green. The sky had clouded over, and the sun had gone. “There is a terrible plague in Italy,” he said. “They call it la moria grande.”

“I’ve heard about it,” she said. “Isn’t it in southern France, too? It sounds dreadful.”

“I caught the disease. I recovered, which is unusual. My wife, Silvia, died.”

She looked shocked. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You must feel terribly sad.”

“All her family died, and so did all my clients. It seemed like a good moment to come home. And you?”

“I’ve just been made cellarer,” she said with evident pride.

To Merthin that seemed somewhat trivial, especially after the slaughter he had seen. However, such things were important in the life of the nunnery. He looked up at the great church. “Florence has a magnificent cathedral,” he said. “Lots of patterns in colored stone. But I prefer this: carved shapes, all the same shade.” As he studied the tower, gray stone against gray sky, it started to rain.

They went inside the church for shelter. A dozen or so people were scattered around the nave: visitors to the town looking at the architecture, devout locals praying, a couple of novice monks sweeping. “I remember feeling you up behind that pillar,” Merthin said with a grin.

“I remember it, too,” she said, but she did not meet his eye.

“I still feel the same about you as I did on that day. That’s the real reason I came home.”

She turned and looked at him with anger in her eyes. “But you got married.”

“And you became a nun.”

“But how could you marry her—Silvia—if you loved me?”

“I thought I could forget you. But I never did. Then, when I thought I was dying, I realized I would never get over you.”

Her anger vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and tears came to her eyes. “I know,” she said, looking away.

“You feel the same.”

“I never changed.”

“Did you try?”

She met his eye. “There’s a nun…”

“The pretty one who was with you in the hospital?”

“How did you guess?”

“She cried when she saw me. I wondered why.”

Caris looked guilty, and Merthin guessed she was feeling the way he had felt when Silvia used to say: “You’re thinking about your English girl.”

“Mair is dear to me,” Caris said. “And she loves me. But…”

“But you didn’t forget me.”

“No.”

Merthin felt triumphant, but he tried not to let it show. “In that case,” he said, “you should renounce your vows, leave the nunnery, and marry me.”

“Leave the nunnery?”

“You’ll need first to get a pardon for the witchcraft conviction, I realize that, but I’m sure it can be done—we’ll bribe the bishop and the archbishop and even the pope if necessary. I can afford it—”

She was not sure it would be as easy as he thought. But that was not her main problem. “It’s not that I’m not tempted,” she said. “But I promised Cecilia I would vindicate her faith in me…I have to help Mair take over as guest master…we need to build a new treasury…and I’m the only one who takes care of Old Julie properly…”

He was bewildered. “Is all that so important?”

“Of course it is!” she said angrily.

“I thought the nunnery was just old women saying prayers.”

“And healing the sick, and feeding the poor, and managing thousands of acres of land. It’s at least as important as building bridges and churches.”

He had not anticipated this. She had always been skeptical of religious observance. She had gone into the nunnery under duress, when it was the only way to save her own life. But now she seemed to have grown to love her punishment. “You’re like a prisoner who is reluctant to leave the dungeon, even when the door is opened wide,” he said.

“The door isn’t open wide. I would have to renounce my vows. Mother Cecilia—”

“We’ll have to work on all these problems. Let’s begin right away.”

She looked miserable. “I’m not sure.”

She was torn, he could see. It amazed him. “Is this you?” he said incredulously. “You used to hate the hypocrisy and falsehood that you saw in the priory. Lazy, greedy, dishonest, tyrannical—”

“That’s still true of Godwyn and Philemon.”

“Then leave.”

“And do what?”

“Marry me, of course.”

“Is that all?”

Once again he was bewildered. “It’s all I want.”

“No, it’s not. You want to design palaces and castles. You want to build the tallest building in England.”

“If you need someone to take care of…”

“What?”

“I’ve got a little girl. Her name is Lolla. She’s three.”

That seemed to settle Caris’s mind. She sighed. “I’m a senior official in a convent of thirty-five nuns, ten novices, and twenty-five employees, with a school and a hospital and a pharmacy—and you’re asking me to throw all that up to nursemaid one little girl I’ve never met.”

He gave up arguing. “All I know is that I love you and I want to be with you.”

She laughed humorlessly. “If you had said that and nothing else, you might have talked me into it.”

“I’m confused,” he said. “Are you refusing me, or not?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

55

Merthin lay awake much of the night. He was accustomed to bedding down in taverns, and the sounds Lolla made in her sleep only soothed him; but tonight he could not stop thinking about Caris. He was shocked by her reaction to his return. He realized, now, that he had never thought logically about how she would feel when he reappeared. He had indulged in unrealistic nightmares about how she might have changed, and in his heart he had hoped for a joyous reconciliation. Of course she had not forgotten him; but he could have figured out that she would not have spent nine years moping for him: she was not the type.

All the same, he would never have guessed that she would be so committed to her work as a nun. She had always been more or less hostile to the church. Given how dangerous it was to criticize religion in any way, she might well have concealed the true depth of her skepticism even from him. So it was a terrible shock to find her reluctant to leave the nunnery. He had anticipated fear of Bishop Richard’s death sentence, or anxiety about being permitted to renounce her vows, but he had not suspected she might have found life in the priory so fulfilling that she hesitated to leave it to become his wife.

He felt angry with her. He wished he had said: “I’ve traveled a thousand miles to ask you to marry me—how can you say you’re not sure?” He thought of a lot of biting remarks he might have made. Perhaps it was a good thing they had not occurred to him then. Their conversation had ended with her asking him to give her time to get over the shock of his sudden return and think about what she wanted to do. He had consented—he had no alternative—but it had left him hanging in agony like a man crucified.

Eventually he drifted into a troubled sleep.

Lolla woke him early, as usual, and they went down to the parlor for porridge. He repressed the impulse to go straight to the hospital and speak to Caris again. She had asked for time, and it would do his cause no good to pester her. It occurred to him that there might be more shocks in store for him, and that he had better try to catch up with what had been happening in Kingsbridge. So after breakfast he went to see Mark Webber.

The Webber family lived on the main street in a large house they had bought soon after Caris got them started in the cloth business. Merthin remembered the days when they and their four children had lived in one room that was not much bigger than the loom on which Mark worked. Their new house had a large stone-built ground floor used as a storeroom and shop. The living quarters were in the timber-built upper story. Merthin found Madge in the shop, checking a cartload of scarlet cloth that had just arrived from one of their out-of-town mills. She was almost forty now, with strands of gray in her dark hair. A short woman, she had become quite plump, with a prominent bosom and a vast behind. She made Merthin think of a pigeon, but an aggressive one, because of her jutting chin and assertive manner.

With her were two youngsters, a beautiful girl of about seventeen and a strapping boy a couple of years older. Merthin recalled her two older children—Dora, a thin girl in a ragged dress, and John, a shy boy—and realized that these were the same, grown up. Now John was effortlessly lifting the heavy bales of cloth while Dora counted them by notching a stick. It made Merthin feel old. I’m only thirty-two, he thought; but that seemed old when he looked at John.

Madge gave a cry of surprise and pleasure when she saw him. She hugged him and kissed his bearded cheeks, then made a fuss over Lolla. “I thought she could come and play with your children,” Merthin said ruefully. “Of course they’re much too old.”

“Dennis and Noah are at the priory school,” she said. “They’re thirteen and eleven. But Dora will entertain Lolla—she loves children.”

The young woman picked Lolla up. “The cat next door has kittens,” she said. “Do you want to see them?”

Lolla replied with a stream of Italian, which Dora took for assent, and they went off.

Madge left John to finish unloading the cart and took Merthin upstairs. “Mark has gone to Melcombe,” she said. “We export some of our cloth to Brittany and Gascony. He should be back today or tomorrow.”

Merthin sat in her parlor and accepted a cup of ale. “Kingsbridge seems to be prospering,” he said.

“The trade in fleeces has declined,” she said. “It’s because of war taxes. Everything has to be sold through a handful of large traders so that the king can collect his share. There are still a few dealers here in Kingsbridge—Petranilla carries on the business Edmund left—but it’s nothing like it used to be. Luckily, the trade in finished cloth has grown to replace it, in this town at least.”

“Is Godwyn still prior?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Is he still making difficulties?”

“He’s so conservative. He objects to any change and vetoes all progress. For example, Mark proposed opening the market on Saturday as well as Sunday, as an experiment.”

“What possible objection could Godwyn have to that?”

“He said it would enable people to come to market without going to church, which would be a bad thing.”

“Some of them might have gone to church on Saturday, too.”

“Godwyn’s cup is always half-empty, never half-full.”

“Surely the parish guild opposes him?”

“Not very often. Elfric is alderman now. He and Alice got almost everything Edmund left.”

“The alderman doesn’t have to be the richest man in town.”

“But he usually is. Remember, Elfric employs lots of craftsmen—carpenters, stonemasons, mortar makers, scaffolders—and buys from everyone who trades in building materials. The town is full of people who are more or less bound to support him.”

“And Elfric has always been close to Godwyn.”

“Exactly. He gets all the priory’s building work—which means every public project.”

“And he’s such a shoddy builder!”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Madge said in a musing tone. “You’d think Godwyn would want the best man for the job. But he doesn’t. For him, it’s all about who will be compliant, who will obey his wishes unquestioningly.”

Merthin felt a bit depressed. Nothing had changed: his enemies were still in power. It might prove difficult for him to resume his old life. “No good news for me there, then.” He stood up. “I’d better take a look at my island.”

“I’m sure Mark will seek you out as soon as he returns from Melcombe.”

Merthin went next door for Lolla, but she was having such a good time that he left her with Dora, and strolled through the town to the riverside. He took another look at the cracks in his bridge, but he did not need to study them long: the cause was obvious. He made a tour of Leper Island. Little had changed: there were a few wharves and storehouses at the west end and just one house, the one he had lent to Jimmie, at the east end, beside the road that led from one span of the bridge to the other.

When he first took possession of the island, he had had ambitious plans for developing it. Nothing had happened, of course, during his exile. Now he thought he could do something. He paced the ground, making rough measurements and visualizing buildings and even streets, until it was time for the midday meal.

He picked Lolla up and returned to the Bell. Bessie served a tasty pork stew thickened with barley. The tavern was quiet, and Bessie joined them for dinner, bringing a jug of her best red wine. When they had eaten, she poured him another cup, and he told her about his ideas. “The road across the island, from one bridge to the other, is an ideal place to put shops,” he said.

“And taverns,” she pointed out. “This place and the Holly Bush are the busiest inns in town simply because they are close to the cathedral. Any place where people are continually passing by is a good location for a tavern.”

“If I built a tavern on Leper Island, you could run it.”

She gave him a direct look. “We could run it together.”

He smiled at her. He was full of her good food and wine, and any man would have loved to tumble into bed with her and enjoy her soft, round body; but it was not to be. “I was very fond of my wife, Silvia,” he said. “But, all the time we were married, I kept thinking about Caris. And Silvia knew it.”

Betty looked away. “That’s sad.”

“I know. And I’ll never do it to another woman. I won’t get married again, unless it’s to Caris. I’m not a good man, but I’m not that bad.”

“Caris may never marry you.”

“I know.”

She stood up, picking up their bowls. “You are a good man,” she said. “Too good.” She returned to the kitchen.

Merthin put Lolla to bed for a nap, then sat on a bench in front of the tavern, looking down the hillside at Leper Island, sketching on a big slate, enjoying the September sunshine. He did not get much work done because every other person who walked past wanted to welcome him home and ask what he had been doing for the last nine years.

Late in the afternoon he saw the massive figure of Mark Webber coming up the hill driving a cart bearing a barrel. Mark had always been a giant but now, Merthin observed, he was a plump giant.

Merthin shook his enormous hand. “I’ve been to Melcombe,” Mark said. “I go every few weeks.”

“What’s in the barrel?”

“Wine from Bordeaux, straight off the ship—which also brought news. You know that Princess Joan was on her way to Spain?”

“Yes.” Every well-informed person in Europe knew that the fifteen-year-old daughter of King Edward was to marry Prince Pedro, heir to the throne of Castile. The marriage would forge an alliance between England and the largest of the Iberian kingdoms, ensuring that Edward could concentrate on his interminable war against France without worrying about interference from the south.

“Well,” said Mark, “Joan died of the plague in Bordeaux.”

Merthin was doubly shocked: partly because Edward’s position in France had suddenly become shaky, but mainly because the plague had spread so far. “They have the plague in Bordeaux?”

“Bodies piled in the streets, the French sailors told me.”

Merthin was unnerved. He had thought he had left la moria grande behind him. Surely it would not come as far as England? He did not fear it personally: no one had ever caught it twice, so he was safe, and Lolla was among those who for some reason did not succumb to it. But he was afraid for everyone else—especially Caris.

Mark had other things on his mind. “You’ve returned at just the right time. Some of the younger merchants are getting fed up with Elfric as alderman. A lot of the time he’s just a dogsbody for Godwyn. I’m planning to challenge him. You could be influential. There’s a meeting of the parish guild tonight—come along and we’ll get you admitted right away.”

“Won’t it matter that I never finished my apprenticeship?”

“After what you’ve built, here and abroad? Hardly.”

“All right.” Merthin needed to be a guild member if he was going to develop the island. People always found reasons to object to new buildings, and he might need support himself. But he was not as confident of his acceptance as Mark.

Mark took his barrel home and Merthin went inside to give Lolla her supper. At sundown Mark returned to the Bell, and Merthin walked with him up the main street as the warm afternoon turned into a chilly evening.

The guildhall had seemed like a fine building to Merthin years ago, when he had stood here and presented his bridge design to the parish guild. But it appeared awkward and shabby now that he had seen the grand public buildings of Italy. He wondered what men such as Buonaventura Caroli and Loro Fiorentino must think of its rough stone undercroft, with the prison and the kitchen, and its main hall with a row of pillars running awkwardly down the middle to support the roof.

Mark introduced him to a handful of men who had arrived in Kingsbridge, or had come to prominence, in Merthin’s absence. However, most of the faces were familiar, albeit a little older. Merthin greeted those few he had not already encountered in the last two days. Among these was Elfric, ostentatiously dressed in a brocade surcoat made with silver thread. He showed no surprise—someone had obviously told him Merthin was back—but glared with undisguised hostility.

Also present were Prior Godwyn and his subprior, Brother Philemon. Godwyn at forty-two was looking more like his uncle Anthony, Merthin observed, with downsloping lines of querulous discontent around his mouth. He put on a pretense of affability that might have fooled someone who did not know him. Philemon, too, had changed. He was no longer lean and awkward. He had filled out like a prosperous merchant, and carried himself with an air of arrogant self-assurance—although Merthin fancied he could still see, underneath the facade, the anxiety and self-hatred of the fawning toady. Philemon shook his hand as if touching a snake. It was depressing to realize that old hatreds were so long-lived.

A handsome, dark-haired young man crossed himself when he saw Merthin, then revealed that he was Merthin’s former protégé, Jimmie, now known as Jeremiah Builder. Merthin was delighted to find that he was doing well enough to belong to the parish guild. However, it seemed he was still as superstitious as ever.

Mark mentioned the news about Princess Joan to everyone he spoke to. Merthin answered one or two anxious questions about the plague, but the Kingsbridge merchants were more concerned that the collapse of the alliance with Castile would prolong the French war, which was bad for business.

Elfric sat on the big chair in front of the giant woolsack scales and opened the meeting. Mark immediately proposed that Merthin should be admitted as a member.

Not surprisingly, Elfric objected. “He was never a member of the guild because he did not finish his apprenticeship.”

“Because he wouldn’t marry your daughter, you mean,” said one of the men, and they all laughed. Merthin took a few moments to identify the speaker: it was Bill Watkin, the house builder, the black hair around his bald dome now turning gray.

“Because he is not a craftsman of the required standard,” Elfric persisted stubbornly.

“How can you say that?” Mark protested. “He has built houses, churches, palaces—”

“And our bridge, which is cracking after only eight years.”

“You built that, Elfric.”

“I followed Merthin’s design exactly. Clearly the arches are not strong enough to bear the weight of the roadbed and the traffic upon it. The iron braces I have installed have not been sufficient to prevent the cracks widening. Therefore I propose to reinforce the arches either side of the central pier, on both bridges, with a second course of masonry, doubling their thickness. I thought this subject might come up tonight, so I have prepared estimates of the cost.”

Elfric must have started to plan this attack the moment he heard that Merthin was back in town. He had always seen Merthin as an enemy: nothing had changed. However, he had failed to understand the problem with the bridge, and that gave Merthin his chance.

He spoke to Jeremiah in a low voice. “Would you do something for me?”

“After all you did for me? Anything!”

“Run to the priory now and ask to speak to Sister Caris urgently. Tell her to find the original drawing I made for the bridge. It should be in the priory library. Bring it here right away.”

Jeremiah slipped out of the room.

Elfric went on: “I must tell guildsmen that I have already spoken to Prior Godwyn, who says the priory cannot afford to pay for this repair. We will have to finance it, as we financed the original cost of building the bridge, and be repaid out of penny tolls.”

They all groaned. There followed a long and bad-tempered discussion about how much money each member of the guild should put up. Merthin felt animosity building up toward him in the room. This was undoubtedly what Elfric had intended. Merthin kept looking at the door, willing Jeremiah to reappear.

Bill Watkin said: “Maybe Merthin should pay for the repairs, if it’s his design that’s at fault.”

Merthin could not stay out of the discussion any longer. He threw caution to the winds. “I agree,” he said.

There was a startled silence.

“If my design has caused the cracks, I’ll repair the bridge at my own expense,” he went on recklessly. Bridges were costly: if he was wrong about the problem, it could cost half his fortune.

Bill said: “Handsomely said, I’m sure.”

Merthin said: “But I have something to say, first, if guildsmen will permit.” He looked at Elfric.

Elfric hesitated, obviously trying to think of a reason for refusing; but Bill said: “Let him speak,” and there was a chorus of assent.

Elfric nodded reluctantly.

“Thank you,” said Merthin. “When an arch is weak, it cracks in a characteristic pattern. The stones at the top of the arch are pressed downwards, so that their lower edges splay apart, and a crack appears at the crown of the arch on the intrados—the underside.”

“That’s true,” said Bill Watkin. “I’ve seen that sort of crack many a time. It’s not usually fatal.”

Merthin went on: “This is not the type of cracking you’re seeing on the bridge. Contrary to what Elfric said, those arches are strong enough: the thickness of the arch is one-twentieth of its diameter at the base, which is the standard proportion, in every country.”

The builders in the room nodded. They all knew that ratio.

“The crown is intact. However, there are horizontal cracks at the springing of the arch either side of the central pier.”

Bill spoke again. “You sometimes see that in a quadripartite vault.”

“Which this bridge is not,” Merthin pointed out. “The vaults are simple.”

“What’s causing it, then?”

“Elfric did not follow my original design.”

Elfric said: “I did!”

“I specified a pile of large, loose stones at both ends of the piers.”

“A pile of stones?” Elfric said mockingly. “And you say that’s what was going to keep your bridge upright?”

“Yes, I do,” Merthin said. He could tell that even the builders in the room agreed with Elfric’s skepticism. But they did not know about bridges, which were different from any other kind of building because they stood in water. “The piles of stones were an essential part of the design.”

“They were never in the drawings.”

“Would you like to show us my drawings, Elfric, to prove your point?”

“The tracing floor is long gone.”

“I did a drawing on parchment. It should be in the priory library.”

Elfric looked at Godwyn. At that moment the complicity between the two men was blatant, and Merthin hoped the rest of the guild could see it. Godwyn said: “Parchment is costly. That drawing was scraped and reused long ago.”

Merthin nodded as if he believed Godwyn. There was still no sign of Jeremiah. Merthin might have to win the argument without the help of the original plans. “The stones would have prevented the problem that is now causing the cracks,” he said.

Philemon put in: “You would say that, wouldn’t you? But why should we believe you? It’s just your word against Elfric’s.”

Merthin realized he would have to stick his neck out. All or nothing, he thought. “I will tell you what the problem is, and prove it to you, in daylight, if you will meet me at the riverside tomorrow at dawn.”

Elfric’s face showed that he wanted to refuse this challenge, but Bill Watkin said: “Fair enough! We’ll be there.”

“Bill, can you bring two sensible boys who are good swimmers and divers?”

“Easy.”

Elfric had lost control of the meeting, and Godwyn intervened, revealing himself as the puppet master. “What kind of a mockery are you planning?” he said angrily.

But it was too late. The others were curious now. “Let him make his point,” said Bill. “If it’s a mockery, we’ll all know soon enough.”

Just then, Jeremiah came in. Merthin was pleased to see that he was carrying a wooden frame with a large sheet of parchment stretched across it. Elfric stared at Jeremiah, shocked.

Godwyn looked pale and said: “Who gave you that?”

“A revealing question,” Merthin commented. “The lord prior doesn’t ask what the drawing shows, nor where it came from—he seems to know all that already. He just wonders who handed it over.”

Bill said: “Never mind all that. Show us the drawing, Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah stood in front of the scales and turned the frame around so that everyone could see the drawing. There at the ends of the piers were the piles of stones Merthin had spoken of.

Merthin stood up. “In the morning, I’ll explain how they work.”

 

Summer was turning into autumn, and it was chilly on the riverbank at dawn. News had somehow got around that a drama would take place and, as well as the members of the parish guild, there were two or three hundred people waiting to see the clash between Merthin and Elfric. Even Caris was there. This was no longer merely an argument about an engineering problem, Merthin realized. He was the youngster challenging the authority of the old bull, and the herd understood that.

Bill Watkin produced two lads of twelve or thirteen, stripped to their undershorts and shivering. It turned out they were Mark Webber’s younger sons, Dennis and Noah. Dennis, the thirteen-year-old, was short and chunky, like his mother. He had red-brown hair the color of leaves in autumn. Noah, the younger by two years, was taller, and would probably grow up to be as big as Mark. Merthin identified with the short redhead. He wondered whether Dennis was embarrassed, as Merthin himself had been at that age, to have a younger brother who was bigger and stronger.

Merthin thought Elfric might object to Mark’s sons being the divers, on the grounds that they might have been briefed in advance by their father and told what to say. However, Elfric said nothing. Mark was too transparently honest for anyone to suspect him of such duplicity, and perhaps Elfric realized that—or, more likely, Godwyn realized it.

Merthin told the boys what to do. “Swim out to the central pier, then dive. You’ll find the pier is smooth for a long way down. Then there’s the foundation, a great lump of stones held together with mortar. When you reach the riverbed, feel underneath the foundation. You probably won’t be able to see anything—the water will be too muddy. But hold your breath for as long as you can and investigate thoroughly all around the base. Then come up to the surface and tell us exactly what you find.”

They both jumped into the water and swam out. Merthin spoke to the assembled townspeople. “The bed of this river is not rock but mud. The current swirls around the piers of a bridge and scours the mud out from underneath the pillars, leaving a depression filled only with water. This happened to the old wooden bridge. The oak piers were not resting on the riverbed at all, but hanging from the superstructure. That’s why the bridge collapsed. To prevent the same thing happening to the new bridge, I specified piles of large rough stones around the feet of the piers. Such piles break up the current so that its action is haphazard and weak. However, the piles were not installed and so the piers have been undermined. They are no longer supporting the bridge, but hanging from it—and that’s why there are cracks where the pier joins the arch.”

Elfric snorted skeptically, but the other builders looked intrigued. The two boys reached midstream, touched the central pier, took deep breaths, and disappeared.

Merthin said: “When they come back, they will tell us that the pier is not resting on the riverbed, but hanging over a depression, filled with water, large enough for a man to climb into.”

He hoped he was right.

Both boys stayed under water for a surprisingly long time. Merthin found himself feeling breathless, as it were, in sympathy with them. At last a wet head of red hair broke the surface, then a brown one. The two boys conversed briefly, nodding, as if establishing that they had both observed the same thing. Then they struck out for the shore.

Merthin was not completely sure of his diagnosis, but he could think of no other explanation for the cracks. And he had felt the need to appear supremely confident. If he now turned out to be wrong, he would look all the more foolish.

The boys reached the bank and waded out of the water, panting. Madge gave them blankets which they pulled around their shaking shoulders. Merthin allowed them a few moments to catch their breath, then said: “Well? What did you find?”

“Nothing,” said Dennis, the elder.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“There’s nothing there, at the bottom of the pillar.”

Elfric looked triumphant. “Just the mud of the riverbed, you mean.”

“No!” said Dennis. “No mud—just water.”

Noah put in: “There’s a hole you could climb into—easily! That big pillar is just hanging in the water, with nothing under it.”

Merthin tried not to look relieved.

Elfric blustered: “There’s still no authority for saying a pile of loose stones would have solved the problem.” But no one was listening to him. In the eyes of the crowd, Merthin had proved his point. They gathered around him, commenting and questioning. After a few moments, Elfric walked away alone.

Merthin felt a momentary pang of compassion. Then he recalled how, when he was an apprentice, Elfric had hit him across the face with a length of timber; and his pity evaporated into the cold morning air.

56

The following morning, a monk came to see Merthin at the Bell. When he pulled back his hood, Merthin did not at first recognize him. Then he saw that the monk’s left arm was cut off at the elbow, and he realized it was Brother Thomas, now in his forties, with a gray beard and deep-set lines around his eyes and mouth. Was his secret still dangerous after all these years? Merthin wondered. Would Thomas’s life be in danger, even now, if the truth came out?

But Thomas had not come to talk about that. “You were right about the bridge,” he said.

Merthin nodded. There was a sour satisfaction in it. He had been right, but Prior Godwyn had fired him, and in consequence his bridge would never be perfect. “I wanted to explain the importance of the rough stones, back then,” he said. “But I knew Elfric and Godwyn would never listen to me. So I told Edmund Wooler, then he died.”

“You should have told me.”

“I wish I had.”

“Come with me to the church,” Thomas said. “Since you can read so much from a few cracks, I’d like to show you something, if I may.”

He led Merthin to the south transept. Here and in the south aisle of the choir Elfric had rebuilt the arches, following the partial collapse eleven years ago. Merthin saw immediately what Thomas was worrying about: the cracks had reappeared.

“You said they would come back,” Thomas said.

“Unless you discovered the root cause of the problem, yes.”

“You were right. Elfric was wrong twice.”

Merthin felt a spark of excitement. If the tower needed to be rebuilt…“You understand that, but does Godwyn?”

Thomas did not answer the question. “What do you think the root cause might be?”

Merthin concentrated on the immediate problem. He had thought about this, on and off, for years. “This is not the original tower, is it?” he said. “According to Timothy’s Book, it has been rebuilt, and made higher.”

“About a hundred years ago, yes—when the raw wool business was booming. Do you think they made it too high?”

“It depends on the foundations.” The site of the cathedral sloped gently to the south, toward the river, and that might be a factor. He walked through the crossing, under the tower, to the north transept. He stood at the foot of the massive pillar at the northeast corner of the crossing and looked up at the arch that stretched over his head, across the north aisle of the choir, to the wall.

“It’s the south aisle I’m worried about,” Thomas said, slightly peevishly. “There are no problems here.”

Merthin pointed up. “There’s a crack on the underside of the arch—the intrados—at the crown,” he said. “You get that in a bridge, when the piers are inadequately grounded, and start to splay apart.”

“What are you saying—that the tower is moving away from the north transept?”

Merthin went back through the crossing and looked at the matching arch on the south side. “This one is cracked, too, but on the upper side, the extrados, do you see? The wall above it is cracked, too.”

“They aren’t very big cracks.”

“But they tell us what is happening. On the north side, the arch is being stretched; on the south side, it’s being pinched. That means the tower is moving south.”

Thomas looked up warily. “It seems straight.”

“You can’t see it with the eye. But if you climb up into the tower, and drop a plumb line from the top of one of the columns of the crossing, just below the springing of the arch, you will see that by the time the line touches the floor it will be adrift of the column to the south by several inches. And, as the tower leans, it’s separating from the wall of the choir, which is where the damage shows worst.”

“What can be done?”

Merthin wanted to say: You have to commission me to build a new tower. But that would have been premature. “A lot more investigation, before any building,” he said, suppressing his excitement. “We have established that the cracks have appeared because the tower is moving—but why is it moving?”

“And how will we learn that?”

“Dig a hole,” Merthin said.

In the end Jeremiah dug the hole. Thomas did not want to employ Merthin directly. It was difficult enough as it was, he said, to get the money for the investigation out of Godwyn, who seemed never to have any money to spare. But he could not give the job to Elfric, who would have said there was nothing to investigate. So the compromise was Merthin’s old apprentice.

Jeremiah had learned from his master and liked to work fast. On the first day, he lifted the paving stones in the south transept. Next day, his men started excavating the earth around the huge southeast pier of the crossing.

As the hole got deeper, Jeremiah built a timber hoist for lifting out loads of earth. By the second week he had to build wooden ladders down the sides of the hole so that the laborers could get to the bottom.

Meanwhile, the parish guild gave Merthin the contract for the repair of the bridge. Elfric was against the decision, of course, but he was in no position to claim that he was the best man for the job, and he hardly bothered to argue.

Merthin went to work with speed and energy. He built cofferdams around the two problem piers, drained the dams, and began to fill the holes under the piers with rubble and mortar. Next he would surround the piers with the piles of large rough stones he had envisaged from the start. Finally, he would remove Elfric’s ugly iron braces and fill the cracks with mortar. Provided the repaired foundations were sound, the cracks would not reopen.

But the job he really wanted was the rebuilding of the tower.

It would not be easy. He would have to get his design accepted by the priory and the parish guild, currently run by his two worst enemies, Godwyn and Elfric. And Godwyn would have to find the money.

As a first step, Merthin encouraged Mark to put himself forward for election as alderman, to replace Elfric. The alderman was elected once a year, on All Hallows Day, the first of November. In practice, most aldermen were reelected unopposed until they retired or died. However, there was no doubt that a contest was permitted. Indeed, Elfric himself had put his name forward while Edmund Wooler was still in office.

Mark required little prompting. He was itching to put an end to Elfric’s rule. Elfric was so close to Godwyn that there was not much point in having a parish guild at all. The town was in effect run by the priory—narrow, conservative, mistrustful of new ideas, careless of the interests of the townspeople.

So the two candidates began drumming up support. Elfric had his followers, mainly people he either employed or bought materials from. However, he had lost face badly in the argument over the bridge, and those who took his side were downcast. Mark’s supporters, by contrast, were ebullient.

Merthin visited the cathedral every day and examined the foundations of the mighty column as they were exposed by Jeremiah’s digging. The foundations were made of the same stone as the rest of the church, laid in mortared courses, but less carefully trimmed, as they would not be visible. Each course was a little wider than the one above, in a pyramid shape. As the excavation went deeper, he examined every layer for weakness, and found none. But he felt confident that eventually he would.

Merthin told no one what was in his mind. If his suspicions were correct, and the thirteenth-century tower was simply too heavy for the twelfth-century foundations, the solution would be drastic: the tower would have to be demolished—and a new one built. And the new tower could be the tallest in England…

One day in the middle of October, Caris appeared at the digging. It was early in the morning, and a winter sun was shining through the great east window. She stood on the edge of the hole with her hood around her head like a halo. Merthin’s heart beat faster. Perhaps she had an answer for him. He climbed up the ladder eagerly.

She was as beautiful as ever, though in the strong sunlight he could see the little differences that nine years had made to her face. Her skin was not quite as smooth, and there were now the tiniest of creases at the corners of her lips. But her green eyes still shone with that alert intelligence that he loved so much.

They walked together down the south aisle of the nave and stopped near the pillar that always reminded him of how he had once felt her up here. “I’m happy to see you,” he said. “You’ve been hiding away.”

“I’m a nun, I’m supposed to hide away.”

“But you’re thinking about renouncing your vows.”

“I haven’t made a decision.”

He was crestfallen. “How much time do you need?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked away. He did not want to show her how badly he was hurt by her hesitation. He said nothing. He could have told her she was being unreasonable, but what was the point?

“You’ll be going to visit your parents in Tench at some point, I suppose,” she said.

He nodded. “Quite soon—they will want to see Lolla.” He was eager to see them, too, and had delayed only because he had become so deeply involved in his work on the bridge and the tower.

“In that case, I wish you would talk to your brother about Wulfric in Wigleigh.”

Merthin wanted to talk about himself and Caris, not Wulfric and Gwenda. His response was cool. “What do you want me to say to Ralph?”

“Wulfric is laboring for no money—just food—because Ralph won’t give him even a small acreage to farm.”

Merthin shrugged. “Wulfric broke Ralph’s nose.” He felt the conversation begin to descend into a quarrel, and he asked himself why he was angry. Caris had not spoken to him for weeks, but she had broken her silence for the sake of Gwenda. He resented Gwenda’s place in her heart, he realized. That was an unworthy emotion, he told himself; but he could not shake it.

Caris flushed with annoyance. “That was twelve years ago! Isn’t it time Ralph stopped punishing him?”

Merthin had forgotten the abrasive disagreements he and Caris used to have, but now he recognized this friction as familiar. He spoke dismissively. “Of course he should stop—in my opinion. But Ralph’s opinion is the one that counts.”

“Then see if you can change his mind,” she said.

He resented her imperious attitude. “I’m yours to command,” he said facetiously.

“Why the irony?”

“Because I’m not yours to command, of course, but you seem to think I am. And I feel a bit foolish for going along with you.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “You’re offended that I’ve asked you?”

For some reason, he felt sure she had made up her mind to reject him, and stay in the nunnery. He tried to control his emotions. “If we were a couple, you could ask me anything. But while you’re keeping open the option of rejecting me, it seems a bit presumptuous of you.” He knew he was sounding pompous, but he could not stop. If he revealed his true feelings he would burst into tears.

She was too wrapped up in her indignation to notice his distress. “But it’s not even for myself!” she protested.

“I realize it’s your generosity of spirit that makes you do it, but I still feel you’re using me.”

“All right, then, don’t do it.”

“Of course I’ll do it.” Suddenly he could no longer contain himself. He turned and walked away from her. He was shaking with some passion he could not identify. As he strode up the aisle of the great church, he struggled to get himself under control. He reached the excavation. This was stupid, he thought. He turned and looked back, but Caris had vanished.

He stood at the lip of the hole, looking down, waiting for the storm inside him to subside.

After a while he realized that the excavation had reached a crucial stage. Thirty feet below him, the men had dug down past the masonry foundations and were beginning to reveal what was beneath. There was nothing more he could do about Caris right now. It would be best to concentrate on his work. He took a deep breath, swallowed, and went down the ladder.

This was the moment of truth. His distress over Caris began to ease as he watched the men dig farther down. Shovelful after shovelful of heavy mud was dug up and taken away. Merthin studied the stratum of earth that was revealed below the foundations. It looked like a mixture of sand and small stones. As the men removed the mud, the sandy stuff dribbled into the hole they were making.

Merthin ordered them to stop.

He knelt down and picked up a handful of the sandy material. It was nothing like the soil all around. It was not natural to the site, therefore it must be something that had been put there by builders. The excitement of discovery rose inside him, overmastering his grief about Caris. “Jeremiah!” he called. “See if you can find Brother Thomas—quick as you like.”

He told the men to carry on digging, but to make a narrower hole: at this point the excavation itself could be dangerous to the structure. After a while Jeremiah returned with Thomas, and the three of them watched as the men took the hole farther down. Eventually the sandy layer came to an end, and the next stratum was revealed to be the natural muddy earth.

“I wonder what that sandy stuff is,” Thomas said.

“I think I know,” Merthin said. He tried not to look triumphant. He had predicted, years ago, that Elfric’s repairs would not work unless the root of the problem was discovered, and he had been right—but it was never wise to say “I told you so.”

Thomas and Jeremiah looked at him in anticipation.

He explained. “When you’ve dug a foundation hole, you cover the bottom with a mixture of rubble and mortar. Then you lay the masonry on top of that. It’s a perfectly good system, as long as the foundations are proportional to the building above.”

Thomas said impatiently: “We both know this.”

“What happened here was that a much higher tower was erected on foundations that were not designed for it. The extra weight, acting over a hundred years, has crushed that layer of rubble-and-mortar to sand. The sand has no cohesion, and under pressure it has spread outward into the surrounding soil, allowing the masonry above it to sink down. The effect is worse on the south side simply because the site naturally slopes that way.” He felt a profound satisfaction at having figured this out.

The other two looked thoughtful. Thomas said: “I suppose we will have to reinforce the foundations.”

Jeremiah shook his head. “Before we can put any reinforcement under the stonework, we’d have to remove the sandy stuff, and that would leave the foundations unsupported. The tower would fall down.”

Thomas was perplexed. “So what can we do?”

They both looked at Merthin. He said: “Build a temporary roof over the crossing, erect scaffolding, and take down the tower, stone by stone. Then reinforce the foundations.”

“Then we’d have to build a new tower.”

That was what Merthin wanted, but he did not say so. Thomas might suspect that his judgment had been colored by his aspiration. “I’m afraid so,” he said with feigned regret.

“Prior Godwyn won’t like that.”

“I know,” Merthin said. “But I don’t think he’s got any choice.”

 

Next day Merthin rode out of Kingsbridge with Lolla on the saddle in front of him. As they traveled through the forest, he obsessively ran over his fraught exchange with Caris. He knew he had been ungenerous. How foolish that was, when he was trying to win back her love. What had got into him? Caris’s request was perfectly reasonable. Why would he not wish to perform a small service for the woman he wanted to marry?

But she had not agreed to marry him. She was still reserving the right to reject him. That was the source of his anger. She was exercising the privileges of a fiancée without making the commitment.

He could see now that it was petty of him to object on these grounds. He had been stupid, and turned what could have been a delightful moment of intimacy into a squabble.

On the other hand, the underlying cause of his distress was all too real. How long did Caris expect him to wait for an answer? How long was he prepared to wait? He did not like to think about that.

Anyway, it would do him nothing but good if he could persuade Ralph to stop persecuting poor Wulfric.

Tench was on the far side of the county, and on the way Merthin spent a night at windy Wigleigh. He found Gwenda and Wulfric thin after a rainy summer and the second poor harvest in a row. Wulfric’s scar seemed to stand out more on a hollowed cheek. Their two small sons looked pale, and had runny noses and sores on their lips.

Merthin gave them a leg of mutton, a small barrel of wine, and a gold florin that he pretended were gifts from Caris. Gwenda cooked the mutton over the fire. She was possessed by rage, and she hissed and spat like the turning meat as she talked of the injustice that had been done to them. “Perkin has almost half the land in the village!” she said. “The only reason he can manage it all is that he’s got Wulfric, who does the work of three men. Yet he must demand more, and keep us in poverty.”

“I’m sorry that Ralph still bears a grudge,” Merthin said.

“Ralph himself provoked that fight!” Gwenda said. “Even Lady Philippa said so.”

“Old quarrels,” Wulfric said philosophically.

“I’ll try to get him to see reason,” Merthin said. “In the unlikely event that he listens to me, what do you really want from him?”

“Ah,” said Wulfric, and he got a faraway look in his eyes, which was unusual for him. “What I pray for every Sunday is to get back the lands that my father farmed.”

“That will never happen,” Gwenda said quickly. “Perkin is too well entrenched. And, if he should die, he has a son and a married daughter waiting to inherit, and a couple of grandsons growing taller every day. But we’d like a piece of land of our own. For the last eleven years Wulfric has been working hard to feed other men’s children. It’s time he got some of the benefit of his strength.”

“I’ll tell my brother he has punished you long enough,” Merthin said.

Next day he and Lolla rode from Wigleigh to Tench. Merthin was even more resolved to do something for Wulfric. It was not just that he wanted to please Caris, and atone for his curmudgeonly attitude. He also felt sad and indignant that two such honest and hardworking people as Wulfric and Gwenda should be poor and thin, and their children sickly, just because of Ralph’s vindictiveness.

His parents were living in a house in the village, not in Tench Hall itself. Merthin was shocked by how much his mother had aged, though she perked up when she saw Lolla. His father looked better. “Ralph is very good to us,” Gerald said in a defensive way that made Merthin think the opposite. The house was pleasant enough, but they would have preferred to live at the hall with Ralph. Merthin guessed that Ralph did not want his mother watching everything he did.

They showed him around their home, and Gerald asked Merthin how things were in Kingsbridge. “The town is still prospering, despite the effects of the king’s French war,” Merthin replied.

“Ah—but Edward must fight for his birthright,” his father said. “He is the legitimate heir to the throne of France, after all.”

“I think that’s a dream, Father,” said Merthin. “No matter how many times the king invades, the French nobility will not accept an Englishman as their king. And a king can’t rule without the support of his earls.”

“But we had to stop the French raids on our south coast ports.”

“That hasn’t been a major problem since the battle of Sluys, when we destroyed the French fleet—which was eight years ago. Anyway, burning the crops of the peasants won’t stop pirates—it might even add to their numbers.”

“The French support the Scots, who keep invading our northern counties.”

“Don’t you think the king would be better able to deal with Scottish incursions if he were in the north of England rather than the north of France?”

Gerald looked baffled. It had probably never occurred to him to question the wisdom of the war. “Well, Ralph has been knighted,” he said. “And he brought your mother a silver candlestick from Calais.”

That was about the size of it, Merthin thought. The real reason for the war was booty and glory.

They all walked to the manor house. Ralph was out hunting with Alan Fernhill. In the great hall was a huge carved wooden chair, obviously the lord’s. Merthin saw what he thought was a young servant girl, heavily pregnant, and was dismayed to be introduced to her as Ralph’s wife, Tilly. She went to the kitchen to fetch wine.

“How old is she?” Merthin said to his mother while she was gone.

“Fourteen.”

It was not unknown for girls to become pregnant at fourteen, but all the same Merthin felt that decent people behaved otherwise. Such early pregnancies usually happened in royal families, for whom there was intense political pressure to produce heirs, and among the lowest and most ignorant of peasants, who knew no better. The middle classes maintained higher standards. “She’s a bit young, isn’t she?” he said quietly.

Maud replied: “We all asked Ralph to wait, but he would not.” Clearly she, too, disapproved.

Tilly returned with a servant carrying a jug of wine and a bowl of apples. She might have been pretty, Merthin thought, but she looked worn out. His father addressed her with forced jollity. “Cheer up, Tilly! Your husband will be home soon—you don’t want to greet him with a long face.”

“I’m fed up with being pregnant,” she said. “I just wish the baby would come as soon as possible.”

“It won’t be long now,” Maud said. “Three or four weeks, I’d say.”

“It seems like forever.”

They heard horses outside. Maud said: “That sounds like Ralph.”

Waiting for the brother he had not seen for nine years, Merthin had mixed feelings, as ever. His affection for Ralph was always contaminated by his knowledge of the evil Ralph had done. The rape of Annet had been only the beginning. During his days as an outlaw Ralph had murdered innocent men, women, and children. Merthin had heard, traveling through Normandy, of the atrocities perpetrated by King Edward’s army and, while he did not know specifically what Ralph had done, it would have been foolish to hope that Ralph had held himself aloof from that orgy of rape, burning, looting, and slaughter. But Ralph was his brother.

Ralph, too, would have mixed feelings, Merthin was sure. He might not have forgiven Merthin for giving away the location of his outlaw hideout. And, although Merthin had made Brother Thomas promise not to kill Ralph, he had known that Ralph, once captured, was likely to be hanged. The last words Ralph had spoken to Merthin, in the jail in the basement of the guildhall at Kingsbridge, were: “You betrayed me.”

Ralph came in with Alan, both muddy from the hunt. Merthin was shocked to see that he walked with a limp. Ralph took a moment to recognize Merthin. Then he smiled broadly. “My big brother!” he said heartily. It was an old joke: Merthin was the elder, but had long been smaller.

They embraced. Merthin felt a surge of warmth, despite everything. At least we’re both alive, he thought, despite war and plague. When they had parted, he had wondered whether they would ever meet again.

Ralph threw himself into the big chair. “Bring some beer, we’re thirsty!” he said to Tilly.

There were to be no recriminations, Merthin gathered.

He studied his brother. Ralph had changed since that day in 1339 when he had ridden off to war. He had lost some of the fingers of his left hand, presumably in battle. He had a dissipated look: his face was veined from drink and his skin seemed dry and flaky. “Did you have good hunting?” Merthin asked.

“We brought home a roe deer as fat as a cow,” he replied with satisfaction. “You shall have her liver for supper.”

Merthin asked him about fighting in the army of the king, and Ralph related some of the highlights of the war. Their father was enthusiastic. “An English knight is worth ten of the French!” he said. “The battle of Crécy proved that.”

Ralph’s response was surprisingly measured. “An English knight is not much different from a French knight, in my opinion,” he said. “But the French haven’t yet understood the harrow formation in which we line up, with archers either side of dismounted knights and men-at-arms. They are still charging us suicidally, and long may they continue. But they will figure it out one day, and then they will change their tactics. Meanwhile, we are almost unbeatable in defense. Unfortunately, the harrow formation is irrelevant to attack, so we have ended up winning very little.”

Merthin was struck by how his brother had grown up. Warfare had given him a depth and subtlety he had never previously possessed.

In turn, Merthin talked about Florence: the incredible size of the city, the wealth of the merchants, the churches and palaces. Ralph was particularly fascinated by the notion of slave girls.

Darkness fell and the servants brought lamps and candles, then supper. Ralph drank a lot of wine. Merthin noticed that he hardly spoke to Tilly. Perhaps it was not surprising. Ralph was a thirty-one-year-old soldier who had spent half his adult life in an army, and Tilly was a girl of fourteen who had been educated in a nunnery. What would they have to talk about?

Late in the evening, when Gerald and Maud had returned to their own house and Tilly had gone to bed, Merthin broached the subject Caris had asked him to raise. He felt more optimistic than previously. Ralph was showing signs of maturity. He had forgiven Merthin for what had happened in 1339, and his cool analysis of English and French tactics had been impressively free from tribal chauvinism.

Merthin said: “On my way here, I spent a night in Wigleigh.”

“I see that fulling mill stays busy.”

“The scarlet cloth has become a good business for Kingsbridge.”

Ralph shrugged. “Mark Webber pays the rent on time.” It was beneath the dignity of noblemen to discuss business.

“I stayed with Gwenda and Wulfric,” Merthin went on. “You know that Gwenda has been Caris’s friend since childhood.”

“I remember the day we all met Sir Thomas Langley in the forest.”

Merthin shot a quick glance at Alan Fernhill. They had all kept their childish vows and had not told anyone about that incident. Merthin wanted the secrecy to continue, for he sensed it was still important to Thomas, though he had no idea why. But Alan showed no reaction: he had drunk a lot of wine, and had no ear for hints.

Merthin moved on quickly. “Caris asked me to speak to you about Wulfric. She thinks you’ve punished him enough for that fight. And I agree.”

“He broke my nose!”

“I was there, remember? You weren’t an innocent party.” Merthin tried to make light of it. “You did feel up his fiancée. What was her name?”

“Annet.”

“If her tits weren’t worth a broken nose, you’ve only got yourself to blame.”

Alan laughed, but Ralph was not amused. “Wulfric almost got me hanged, by stirring Lord William up after Annet pretended I’d raped her.”

“But you weren’t hanged. And you cut Wulfric’s cheek open with your sword when you escaped from the courthouse. It was a terrible wound—you could see his back teeth through it. He’ll never lose the scar.”

“Good.”

“You’ve punished Wulfric for eleven years. His wife is thin and his children are ill. Haven’t you done enough, Ralph?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not enough.”

“Why?” Merthin cried in frustration. “I don’t understand you.”

“I will continue to punish Wulfric and hold him back, and humiliate him and his women.”

Merthin was startled by Ralph’s frankness. “For heaven’s sake, to what end?”

“I wouldn’t normally answer that question. I’ve learned that it rarely does you any good to explain yourself. But you’re my big brother, and from childhood I’ve always needed your approval.”

Ralph had not really changed, Merthin realized, except insofar as he seemed to know and understand himself in a way he never had when younger.

“The reason is simple,” Ralph went on. “Wulfric is not afraid of me. He wasn’t scared that day at the Fleece Fair, and he’s still not scared of me, even after all I’ve done to him. That’s why he must continue to suffer.”

Merthin was horrified. “That’s a life sentence.”

“The day I see fear in his eyes when he looks at me, he shall have anything he likes.”

“Is that so important to you?” Merthin said incredulously. “That people fear you?”

“It’s the most important thing in the world,” said Ralph.

57

Merthin’s return affected the whole town. Caris observed the changes with amazement and admiration. It started with his victory over Elfric in the parish guild. People realized the town could have lost its bridge because of Elfric’s incompetence, and that jolted them out of their apathy. But everyone knew that Elfric was a tool of Godwyn, so the priory was the ultimate focus of their resentment.

And people’s attitude to the priory was changing. There was a mood of defiance. Caris felt optimistic. Mark Webber had a good chance of winning the election on the first day of November and becoming alderman. If that happened, Prior Godwyn would no longer have things all his own way, and perhaps the town could begin to grow: markets on Saturdays, new mills, independent courts that traders could have faith in.

But she spent most of her time thinking about her own position. Merthin’s return was an earthquake that shook the foundations of her life. Her first reaction had been horror at the prospect of abandoning all that she had worked for over the last nine years; her position in the convent hierarchy; maternal Cecilia and affectionate Mair and ailing Old Julie; and most of all her hospital, so much more clean and efficient and welcoming than it had been before.

But as the days became shorter and colder, and Merthin repaired his bridge and began laying out the foundations of the street of new buildings he wanted to create on Leper Island, Caris’s resolve to remain a nun weakened. Monastic restrictions that she had stopped noticing began to chafe again. The devotion of Mair, which had been a pleasant romantic diversion, now became irritating. She started to think about what kind of life she might lead as Merthin’s wife.

She thought a lot about Lolla, and about the child she might have had with Merthin. Lolla was dark-eyed and black-haired, presumably like her Italian mother. Caris’s daughter might have had the green eyes of the Wooler family. The idea of giving up everything to take care of another woman’s daughter had appalled Caris in theory, but as soon as she met the little girl she softened.

She could not talk to anyone in the priory about this, of course. Mother Cecilia would tell her she must keep her vows; Mair would beg her to stay. So she agonized alone at night.

Her quarrel with Merthin over Wulfric made her despair. After he walked away from her, she had gone back to her pharmacy and cried. Why were things so difficult? All she wanted was to do the right thing.

While Merthin was at Tench, she confided in Madge Webber.

Two days after Merthin left, Madge came into the hospital soon after dawn, when Caris and Mair were doing their rounds. “I’m worried about my Mark,” she said.

Mair said to Caris: “I went to see him yesterday. He had been to Melcombe and come back with a fever and an upset stomach. I didn’t tell you because it didn’t seem serious.”

“Now he’s coughing blood,” Madge said.

“I’ll go,” Caris said. The Webbers were old friends: she preferred to attend Mark herself. She picked up a bag containing some basic medicines and went with Madge to her house in the main street.

The living area was upstairs, over the shop. Mark’s three sons loitered anxiously in the dining hall. Madge took Caris into a bedroom that smelled bad. Caris was used to the odor of a sick room, a mixture of sweat, vomit, and human waste. Mark lay on a straw mattress, perspiring. His huge belly stuck up in the air as if he were pregnant. The daughter, Dora, stood by the bed.

Caris knelt beside Mark and said: “How do you feel?”

“Rough,” Mark said in a croaky voice. “Can I have something to drink?”

Dora handed Caris a cup of wine, and Caris held it to Mark’s lips. She found it strange to see a big man helpless. Mark had always seemed invulnerable. It was unnerving, like finding an oak tree that has been there all your life suddenly felled by lightning.

She touched his forehead. He was burning up: no wonder he was thirsty. “Let him have as much to drink as he wants,” she said. “Weak beer is better than wine.”

She did not tell Madge that she was puzzled and worried by Mark’s illness. The fever and the stomach upset were routine, but his coughing blood was a dangerous sign.

She took a vial of rose water from her bag, soaked a small piece of woolen cloth, and bathed his face and neck. The action soothed him immediately. The water would cool him a little, and the perfume masked the bad smells in the room. “I’ll give you some of this from my pharmacy,” she said to Madge. “The physicians prescribe it for an inflamed brain. A fever is hot and humid, and roses are cool and dry, so the monks say. Whatever the reason, it will give him some ease.”

“Thank you.”

But Caris knew of no effective treatment for bloody sputum. The monk-physicians would diagnose an excess of blood, and recommend bleeding, but they prescribed that for almost everything, and Caris did not believe in it.

As she bathed Mark’s throat, she noticed a symptom Madge had not mentioned. There was a rash of purple black spots on Mark’s neck and chest.

This was an illness she had not come across before, and she was mystified, but she did not let Madge know that. “Come back with me, and I’ll give you the rose water.”

The sun was rising as they walked from the house to the hospital. “You’ve been very good to my family,” Madge said. “We were the poorest people in town, until you started the scarlet business.”

“It was your energy and industry that made it work.”

Madge nodded. She knew what she had done. “All the same, it wouldn’t have happened without you.”

On impulse, Caris decided to take Madge through the nuns’ cloisters to her pharmacy so that they could talk privately. Laypeople were not normally allowed inside, but there were exceptions, and Caris was now senior enough to decide when the rules could be broken.

They were alone in the cramped little room. Caris filled a pottery bottle with rose water and asked Madge for sixpence. Then she said: “I’m thinking of renouncing my vows.”

Madge nodded, unsurprised. “Everybody’s wondering what you’re going to do.”

Caris was shocked that the townspeople had guessed her thoughts. “How do they know?”

“It doesn’t take a clairvoyant. You entered the nunnery only to escape a death sentence for witchcraft. After the work you’ve done here, you should be able to get a pardon. You and Merthin were in love, and always seemed so right for one another. Now he’s come back. You must at least be thinking about marrying him.”

“I just don’t know what my life would be like as someone’s wife.”

Madge shrugged. “A bit like mine, perhaps. Mark and I run the cloth business together. I have to organize the household as well—all husbands expect that—but it’s not so difficult, especially if you have the money for servants. And the children will always be your responsibility rather than his. But I manage, and so would you.”

“You don’t make it sound very exciting.”

She smiled. “I assume you already know about the good parts: feeling loved and adored; knowing there’s one person in the world who will always be on your side; getting into bed every night with someone strong and tender who wants to fuck you…that’s happiness, for me.”

Madge’s simple words painted a vivid picture, and Caris was suddenly filled with a longing that was almost unbearable. She felt she could hardly wait to quit the cold, hard, loveless life of the priory, in which the greatest sin was to touch another human being. If Merthin had walked into the room at that moment she would have torn off his clothes and taken him there on the floor.

She saw that Madge was watching her with a little smile, reading her thoughts, and she blushed.

“It’s all right,” Madge said. “I understand.” She put six silver pennies down on the bench and picked up the bottle. “I’d better go home and look after my man.”

Caris recovered her composure. “Try to keep him comfortable, and come and fetch me immediately there’s any change.”

“Thank you, Sister,” said Madge. “I don’t know what we’ll do without you.”

 

Merthin was thoughtful on the journey back to Kingsbridge. Even Lolla’s bright, meaningless chatter did not bring him out of his mood. Ralph had learned a lot, but he had not changed deep down. He was still a cruel man. He neglected his child-wife, barely tolerated his parents, and was vengeful to the point of mania. He enjoyed being a lord, but felt little obligation to care for the peasants in his power. He saw everything around him, people included, as being there for his gratification.

However, Merthin felt optimistic about Kingsbridge. All the signs were that Mark would become alderman on All Hallows Day, and that could be the start of a boom.

Merthin got back on the last day of October, All Hallows Eve. It was a Friday this year, so there was not the influx of crowds that came when the night of evil spirits fell on a Saturday, as it had in the year that Merthin was eleven, and he met the ten-year-old Caris. All the same the people were nervous, and everyone planned to be in bed by nightfall.

On the main street he saw Mark Webber’s eldest son, John. “My father is in the hospital,” the boy said. “He has a fever.”

“This is a bad time for him to fall sick,” Merthin said.

“It’s an ill-starred day.”

“I didn’t mean because of the date. He has to be present at the parish guild meeting tomorrow. An alderman can’t be elected in his absence.”

“I don’t think he’ll be going to any meetings tomorrow.”

That was worrying. Merthin took his horses to the Bell and left Lolla in the care of Betty.

Entering the priory grounds, he ran into Godwyn with his mother. He guessed they had dined together and now Godwyn was walking her to the gate. They were deep in an anxious conversation, and Merthin guessed they were worried about the prospect of their placeman Elfric losing the post of alderman. They stopped abruptly when they saw him. Petranilla said unctuously: “I’m sorry to hear that Mark is unwell.”

Forcing himself to be civil, Merthin replied: “It’s just a fever.”

“We will pray that he gets well quickly.”

“Thank you.”

Merthin entered the hospital. He found Madge distraught. “He’s been coughing blood,” she said. “And I can’t quench his thirst.” She held a cup of ale to Mark’s lips.

Mark had a rash of purple blotches on his face and arms. He was perspiring, and his nose was bleeding.

Merthin said: “Not so good today, Mark?”

Mark did not seem to see him, but he croaked: “I’m very thirsty.” Madge gave him the cup again. She said: “No matter how much he drinks, he’s always thirsty.” She spoke with a note of panic that Merthin had never heard in her voice before.

Merthin was filled with dread. Mark made frequent trips to Melcombe, where he talked to sailors from plague-ridden Bordeaux.

Tomorrow’s meeting of the parish guild was the least of Mark’s worries now. And the least of Merthin’s, too.

Merthin’s first impulse was to cry out to everyone the news that they were in mortal danger. But he clamped his mouth shut. No one listened to a man in a panic, and besides he was not yet sure. There was a small chance Mark’s illness was not what he feared. When he was certain, he would get Caris alone and speak to her calmly and logically. But it would have to be soon.

Caris was bathing Mark’s face with a sweet-smelling fluid. She wore a stony expression that Merthin recognized: she was hiding her feelings. She obviously had some idea of how serious Mark’s illness was.

Mark was clutching something that looked like a scrap of parchment. Merthin guessed it would have a prayer written on it, or a verse of the Bible, or perhaps a magic spell. That would be Madge’s idea—Caris had no faith in writing as a remedy.

Prior Godwyn came into the hospital, trailed as usual by Philemon. “Stand away from the bed!” Philemon said immediately. “How will the man get well if he cannot see the altar?”

Merthin and the two women stood back, and Godwyn bent over the patient. He touched Mark’s forehead and neck, then felt his pulse. “Show me the urine,” he said.

The monk-physicians set great store by examination of the patient’s urine. The hospital had special glass bottles, called urinals, for the purpose. Caris handed one to Godwyn. It did not take an expert to see that there was blood in Mark’s urine.

Godwyn handed it back. “This man is suffering from overheated blood,” he said. “He must be bled, then fed sour apples and tripes.”

Merthin knew, from his experience of the plague in Florence, that Godwyn was talking rubbish, but he made no comment. In his mind there was no longer much room for doubt about what was wrong with Mark. The skin rash, the bleeding, the thirst: this was the illness he himself had suffered in Florence, the one that had killed Silvia and all her family. This was la moria grande.

The plague had come to Kingsbridge.

 

As darkness fell on All Hallows Eve, Mark Webber’s breathing became more difficult. Caris watched him weaken. She felt the angry impotence that possessed her when she was unable to help a patient. Mark passed into a state of troubled unconsciousness, sweating and gasping although his eyes were closed and he showed no awareness. At Merthin’s quiet suggestion, Caris felt in Mark’s armpits, and found large boil-like swellings there. She did not ask Merthin the significance of this: she would question him later. The nuns prayed and sang hymns while Madge and her four children stood around, helplessly distraught.

At the end Mark convulsed, and blood jetted from his mouth in a sudden flood. Then he fell back, lay still, and stopped breathing.

Dora wailed loudly. The three sons looked bewildered, and struggled to hold back unmanly tears. Madge wept bitterly. “He was the best man in the world,” she said to Caris. “Why did God have to take him?”

Caris had to fight back her own grief. Her loss was nothing compared with theirs. She did not know why God so often took the best people and left the wicked alive to do more wrong. The whole idea of a benevolent deity watching over everyone seemed unbelievable at moments such as this. The priests said sickness was a punishment for sin. Mark and Madge loved one another, cared for their children, and worked hard: why should they be punished?

There were no answers to religious questions, but Caris had some urgent practical inquiries to make. She was deeply worried by Mark’s illness, and she could guess that Merthin knew something about it. She swallowed her tears.

First she sent Madge and her children home to rest, and told the nuns to prepare the body for burial. Then she said to Merthin: “I want to talk to you.”

“And I to you,” he said.

She noticed that he looked frightened. That was rare. Her fear deepened. “Come to the church,” she said. “We can talk privately there.”

A wintry wind swept across the cathedral green. It was a clear night, and they could see by starlight. In the chancel, monks were preparing for the All Hallows dawn service. Caris and Merthin stood in the northwest corner of the nave, away from the monks, so that they could not be overheard. Caris shivered and pulled her robe closer around her. She said: “Do you know what killed Mark?”

Merthin took a shaky breath. “It’s the plague,” he said. “La moria grande.”

She nodded. This was what she had feared. But all the same she challenged him. “How do you know?”

“Mark goes to Melcombe and talks to sailors from Bordeaux, where the bodies are piled in the streets.”

She nodded. “He’s just back.” But she did not want to believe Merthin. “All the same, can you be sure it’s the plague?”

“The symptoms are the same: fever, purple-black spots, bleeding, buboes in the armpits, and most of all the thirst. I remember it, by Christ. I was one of the few to recover. Almost everyone dies within five days, often less.”

She felt as if doomsday had come. She had heard the terrible stories from Italy and southern France: entire families wiped out, unburied bodies rotting in empty palaces, orphaned toddlers wandering the streets crying, livestock dying untended in ghost villages. Was this to happen to Kingsbridge? “What did the Italian doctors do?”

“Prayed, sang hymns, took blood, prescribed their favorite nostrums, and charged a fortune. Everything they tried was useless.”

They were standing close together and speaking in low tones. She could see his face by the faint light of the monks’ distant candles. He was staring at her with a strange intensity. He was deeply moved, she could tell, but it did not seem to be grief for Mark that possessed him. He was focused on her.

She asked: “What are the Italian doctors like, compared with our English physicians?”

“After the Muslims, the Italian doctors are supposed to be the most knowledgeable in the world. They even cut up dead bodies to learn more about sickness. But they never cured a single sufferer from this plague.”

Caris refused to accept such complete hopelessness. “We can’t be utterly helpless.”

“No. We can’t cure it, but some people think you can escape it.”

Caris said eagerly: “How?”

“It seems to spread from one person to another.”

She nodded. “Lots of diseases do that.”

“Usually, when one in a family gets it, they all do. Proximity is the key factor.”

“That makes sense. Some say you fall ill from looking at sick people.”

“In Florence, the nuns counseled us to stay at home as much as possible, and avoid social gatherings, markets, and meetings of guilds and councils.”

“And church services?”

“No, they didn’t say that, though lots of people stayed home from church too.”

This chimed with what Caris had been thinking for years. She felt renewed hope: perhaps her methods could stave off the plague. “What about the nuns themselves, and the physicians, people who have to meet the sick and touch them?”

“Priests refused to hear confessions in whispers, so that they did not have to get too near. Nuns wore linen masks over their mouths and noses so that they would not breathe the same air. Some washed their hands in vinegar every time they touched a patient. The priest-physicians said none of this would do any good, but most of them left the city anyway.”

“And did these precautions help?”

“It’s hard to say. None of this was done until the plague was rampant. And it wasn’t systematic—just everyone trying different things.”

“All the same, we must make the effort.”

He nodded. After a pause he said: “However, there is one precaution that is sure.”

“What’s that?”

“Run away.”

This was what he had been waiting to say, she realized.

He went on: “The saying goes: ‘Leave early, go far, and stay long.’ People who did that escaped the sickness.”

“We can’t go away.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t be silly. There are six or seven thousand people in Kingsbridge—they can’t all leave town. Where would they go?”

“I’m not talking about them—just you. Listen, you may not have caught the plague from Mark. Madge and the children almost certainly have, but you spent less time close to him. If you’re still all right, we could escape. We could leave today, you and me and Lolla.”

Caris was appalled by the way he assumed it had spread by now. Was she doomed already? “And…and go where?”

“To Wales, or Ireland. We need to find a remote village where they don’t see a stranger from one year to the next.”

“You’ve had the sickness. You told me people don’t get it twice.”

“Never. And some people don’t catch it at all. Lolla must be like that. If she didn’t pick it up from her mother, she’s not likely to get it from anyone else.”

“So why do you want to go to Wales?”

He just stared at her with that intense look, and she realized that the fear she had detected in him was for her. He was terrified that she would die. Tears came to her eyes. She remembered what Madge had said: “Knowing there’s one person in the world who will always be on your side.” Merthin tried to look after her, no matter what she did. She thought of poor Madge, blasted by grief at the loss of the one who was always on her side. How could she, Caris, even think of rejecting Merthin?

But she did. “I can’t leave Kingsbridge,” she said. “Of all times, not now. They rely on me if someone is sick. When the plague strikes, I’m the one they will turn to for help. If I were to flee…well, I don’t know how to explain this.”

“I think I understand,” Merthin said. “You’d be like a soldier who runs away as soon as the first arrow is shot. You’d feel a coward.”

“Yes—and a cheat, after all these years of being a nun, and saying that I live to serve others.”

“I knew you would feel this way,” Merthin said. “But I had to try.” The sadness in his voice nearly broke her heart as he added: “And I suppose this means you won’t be renouncing your vows in the foreseeable future.”

“No. The hospital is where they come for help. I have to be here at the priory, to play my role. I have to be a nun.”

“All right, then.”

“Don’t be too downhearted.”

With wry sorrow he said: “And why should I not be downhearted?”

“You said that it killed half the population of Florence?”

“Something like that.”

“So at least half the people just didn’t catch it.”

“Like Lolla. No one knows why. Perhaps they have some special strength. Or maybe the disease strikes at random, like arrows fired into the enemy ranks, killing some and missing others.”

“Either way, there’s a good chance I’ll escape the illness.”

“One chance in two.”

“Like the toss of a coin.”

“Heads or tails,” he said. “Life or death.”

58

Hundreds of people came to Mark Webber’s funeral. He had been one of the town’s leading citizens, but it was more than that. Poor weavers arrived from the surrounding villages, some of them having walked for hours. He had been unusually well loved, Merthin reflected. The combination of his giant’s body and his gentle temperament cast a spell.

It was a wet day, and the bared heads of rich and poor men were soaked as they stood around the grave. Cold rain mingled with hot tears on the faces of the mourners. Madge stood with her arms around the shoulders of her two younger sons, Dennis and Noah. They were flanked by the eldest son, John, and the daughter, Dora, who were both much taller than their mother, and looked as if they might be the parents of the three short people in the middle.

Merthin wondered grimly whether Madge or one of her children would be the next to die.

Six strong men grunted with the effort of lowering the extra-large coffin into the grave. Madge sobbed helplessly as the monks sang the last hymn. Then the gravediggers started to shovel the sodden earth back into the hole, and the crowd began to disperse.

Brother Thomas approached Merthin, pulling up his hood to keep the rain off. “The priory has no money to rebuild the tower,” he said. “Godwyn has commissioned Elfric to demolish the old tower and just roof the crossing.”

Merthin tore his mind away from apocalyptic thoughts of the plague. “How will Godwyn pay Elfric for that?”

“The nuns are putting up the money.”

“I thought they hated Godwyn.”

“Sister Elizabeth is the treasurer. Godwyn is careful to be kind to her family, who are tenants of the priory. Most of the other nuns do hate him, it’s true—but they need a church.”

Merthin had not given up his hope of rebuilding the tower higher than before. “If I could find the money, would the priory build a new tower?”

Thomas shrugged. “Hard to say.”

That afternoon, Elfric was reelected alderman of the parish guild. After the meeting Merthin sought out Bill Watkin, the largest builder in town after Elfric. “Once the foundations of the tower are repaired, it could be built even higher,” he said.

“No reason why not,” Bill agreed. “But what would be the point?”

“So that it could be seen from Mudeford Crossing. Many travelers—pilgrims, merchants, and so on—miss the road for Kingsbridge and go on to Shiring. The town loses a lot of custom that way.”

“Godwyn will say he can’t afford it.”

“Consider this,” Merthin said. “Suppose the new tower could be financed the same way as the bridge? The town merchants could lend the money and be repaid out of bridge tolls.”

Bill scratched his monklike fringe of gray hair. This was an unfamiliar concept. “But the tower is nothing to do with the bridge.”

“Does that matter?”

“I suppose not.”

“The bridge tolls are just a way of guaranteeing that the loan is repaid.”

Bill considered his self-interest. “Would I be commissioned to do any of the work?”

“It would be a big project—every builder in town would get a piece of it.”

“That would be useful.”

“All right. Listen, if I design a large tower, will you back me, here at the parish guild, at the next meeting?”

Bill looked dubious. “The guild members aren’t likely to approve of extravagance.”

“I don’t think it needs to be extravagant, just high. If we put a domed ceiling over the crossing, I can build that with no centering.”

“A dome? That’s a new idea.”

“I saw domes in Italy.”

“I can see how it would save money.”

“And the tower can be topped by a slender wooden spire, which will save money and look wonderful.”

“You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?”

“Not really. But it’s been at the back of my mind ever since I returned from Florence.”

“Well, it sounds good to me—good for business, good for the town.”

“And good for our eternal souls.”

“I’ll do my best to help you push it through.”

“Thank you.”

Merthin mulled over the design of the tower as he went about his more mundane work, repairing the bridge and building new houses on Leper Island. It helped turn his mind away from dreadful, obsessive visions of Caris ill with the plague. He thought a lot about the south tower at Chartres. It was a masterpiece, albeit a little old-fashioned, having been built about two hundred years ago.

What Merthin had liked about it, he recalled very clearly, was the transition from the square tower to the octagonal spire above. At the top of the tower, perched on each of the four corners, were pinnacles facing diagonally outward. On the same level, at the midpoint of each side of the square, were dormer windows similar in shape to the pinnacles. These eight structures matched the eight sloping sides of the tower rising behind them, so that the eye hardly noticed the change of shape from square to octagon.

However, Chartres was unnecessarily chunky by the standards of the fourteenth century. Merthin’s tower would have slender columns and large window openings, to lighten the weight on the pillars below, and to reduce stress by allowing the wind to blow through.

He made his own tracing floor at his workshop on the island. He enjoyed himself planning the details, doubling and quadrupling the narrow lancets of the old cathedral to make the large windows of the new tower, updating the clusters of columns and the capitals.

He hesitated over the height. He had no way to calculate how high it had to be in order to be visible from Mudeford Crossing. That could be done only by trial and error. When he had finished the stone tower he would have to erect a temporary spire, then go to Mudeford on a clear day and determine whether it could be seen. The cathedral was built on elevated ground, and at Mudeford the road breasted a rise just before descending to the river crossing. His instinct told him that if he went a little higher than Chartres—say about four hundred feet—that would be sufficient.

The tower at Salisbury Cathedral was four hundred and four feet high.

Merthin planned his to be four hundred and five.

While he was bent over the tracing floor, drawing the roof pinnacles, Bill Watkin appeared. “What do you think of this?” Merthin said to him. “Does it need a cross on top, to point to heaven? Or an angel, to watch over us?”

“Neither,” said Bill. “It’s not going to get built.”

Merthin stood up, holding a straightedge in his left hand and a sharpened iron drawing needle in his right. “What makes you say that?”

“I’ve had a visit from Brother Philemon. I thought I might as well let you know as soon as possible.”

“What did that snake have to say?”

“He pretended to be friendly. He wanted to give me a piece of advice for my own good. He said it wouldn’t be wise of me to support any plan for a tower designed by you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would annoy Prior Godwyn, who was not going to approve your plans, regardless.”

Merthin could hardly be surprised. If Mark Webber had become alderman, the balance of power in the town would have changed, and Merthin might have won the commission to build the new tower. But Mark’s death meant the odds were against him. He had clung to hope, however, and now he felt the deep ache of heavy disappointment. “I suppose he’ll commission Elfric?”

“That was the implication.”

“Will he never learn?”

“When a man is proud, that counts for more than common sense.”

“Will the parish guild pay for a stumpy little tower designed by Elfric?”

“Probably. They may not get excited about it, but they’ll find the money. They are proud of their cathedral, despite everything.”

“Elfric’s incompetence almost cost them the bridge!” Merthin said indignantly.

“They know that.”

He allowed his wounded feelings to show. “If I hadn’t diagnosed the problem with the tower, it would have collapsed—and it might have brought down the entire cathedral.”

“They know that, too. But they’re not going to fight with the prior just because he’s treated you badly.”

“Of course not,” said Merthin, as if he thought that was perfectly reasonable; but he was hiding his bitterness. He had done more for Kingsbridge than Godwyn, and he was hurt that the townspeople had not put up more of a fight for him. But he also knew that most people most of the time acted in their own immediate self-interest.

“People are ungrateful,” Bill said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” Merthin said. “That’s all right.” He looked at Bill, then looked away; and then he threw down his drawing implements and walked off.

 

During the predawn service of Lauds, Caris was surprised to look down the nave and see a woman in the north aisle, on her knees, in front of a wall painting of Christ Risen. She had a candle by her side and, in its unsteady light, Caris made out the chunky body and jutting chin of Madge Webber.

Madge stayed there throughout the service, not paying any attention to the psalms, apparently deep in prayer. Perhaps she was asking God to forgive Mark’s sins and let him rest in peace—not that Mark had committed many sins, as far as Caris knew. More likely, Madge was asking Mark to send her good fortune from the spirit world. Madge was going to carry on the cloth business with the help of her two older children. It was the usual thing, when a trader died leaving a widow and a thriving enterprise. Still, no doubt she felt the need of her dead husband’s blessing on her efforts.

But this explanation did not quite satisfy Caris. There was something intense in Madge’s posture, something about her stillness that suggested great passion, as if she were begging Heaven to grant her some terribly important boon.

When the service ended, and the monks and nuns began to file out, Caris broke away from the procession and walked through the vast gloom of the nave toward the candle’s glow.

Madge stood up at the sound of her footsteps. When she recognized Caris’s face, she spoke with a note of accusation. “Mark died of the plague, didn’t he?”

So that was it. “I think so,” said Caris.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I’m not sure, and I didn’t want to frighten you—not to mention the whole town—on the basis of a guess.”

“I’ve heard it’s come to Bristol.”

So the townspeople had been talking about it. “And London,” Caris said. She had heard this from a pilgrim.

“What will happen to us all?”

Sorrow stabbed Caris like a pain in the heart. “I don’t know,” she lied.

“It spreads from one to another, I hear.”

“Many illnesses do.”

The aggression went out of Madge, and her face took on a pleading look that broke Caris’s heart. In a near-whisper she asked: “Will my children die?”

“Merthin’s wife got it,” Caris said. “She died, and so did all her family, but Merthin recovered, and Lolla didn’t catch it at all.”

“So my children will be all right?”

That was not what Caris had said. “They may be. Or some may catch it and others escape.”

That did not satisfy Madge. Like most patients, she wanted certainties, not possibilities. “What can I do to protect them?”

Caris looked at the painting of Christ. “You’re doing all you can,” she said. She began to lose control. As a sob rose in her throat, she turned away to hide her feelings, and walked quickly out of the cathedral.

She sat in the nuns’ cloisters for a few minutes, pulling herself together, then went to the hospital, as usual at this hour.

Mair was not there. She had probably been called to attend a sick person in the town. Caris took charge, overseeing the serving of breakfast to guests and patients, making sure the place was cleaned thoroughly, checking on those who were sick. The work eased her distress about Madge. She read a psalm to Old Julie. When all the chores were done, Mair still had not appeared, so Caris went in search of her.

She found her in the dormitory, lying facedown on her bed. Caris’s heart quickened. “Mair! Are you all right?” she said.

Mair rolled over. She was pale and sweating. She coughed, but did not speak.

Caris knelt beside her and placed a hand on her forehead. “You’ve got a fever,” she said, suppressing the dread that rose in her belly like nausea. “When did it begin?”

“I was coughing yesterday,” Mair said. “But I slept all right, and got up this morning. Then, when I went in to breakfast, I suddenly felt I was going to throw up. I went to the latrine, then came here and lay down. I think I might have been sleeping…What time is it?”

“The bell is about to ring for Terce. But you’re excused.” It could just be an ordinary illness, Caris told herself. She touched Mair’s neck, then pulled the cowl of her robe down.

Mair smiled weakly. “Are you trying to look at my chest?”

“Yes.”

“You nuns are all the same.”

There was no rash, as far as Caris could see. Perhaps it was just a cold. “Any pains?”

“There’s a dreadfully tender place in my armpit.”

That did not tell Caris much. Painful swellings in the armpits or groin were a feature of other illnesses as well as the plague. “Let’s get you down to the hospital,” she said.

As Mair lifted her head, Caris saw bloodstains on the pillow.

She felt the shock like a blow. Mark Webber had coughed blood. And Mair had been the first person to attend Mark at the start of his illness—she had gone to the house the day before Caris did.

Caris hid her fear and helped Mair up. Tears came to her eyes, but she controlled herself. Mair put her arm around Caris’s waist and her head on her shoulder, as if she needed support walking. Caris put her arm around Mair’s shoulder. Together they walked down the stairs and through the nuns’ cloisters to the hospital.

Caris took Mair to a mattress near the altar. She fetched a cup of cold water from the fountain in the cloisters. Mair drank thirstily. Caris bathed her face and neck with rose water. After a while, Mair seemed to sleep.

The bell rang for Terce. Caris was normally excused this service, but today she felt the need for a few moments of quiet. She joined the file of nuns walking into the church. The old gray stones seemed cold and hard today. She chanted automatically, while in her heart a storm raged.

Mair had the plague. There was no rash, but she had the fever, she was thirsty, and she had coughed blood. She would probably die.

Caris felt a terrible guilt. Mair loved her devotedly. Caris had never been able to return Mair’s love, not in the way Mair longed for. Now Mair was dying. Caris wished she could have been different. She ought to have been able to make Mair happy. She should be able to save her life. She cried as she sang the psalm, hoping that anyone who noticed her tears would assume she was moved by religious ecstasy.

At the end of the service, a novice nun was waiting anxiously for her outside the south transept door. “There’s someone asking for you urgently in the hospital,” the girl said.

Caris found Madge Webber there, her face white with fear.

Caris did not need to ask what Madge wanted. She picked up her medical bag and the two of them rushed out. They crossed the cathedral green in a biting November wind and went to the Webber house in the main street. Upstairs, Madge’s children were waiting in the living room. The two older children were sitting at the table, looking frightened; the young boys were both lying on the floor.

Caris examined them quickly. All four were feverish. The girl had a nosebleed. The three boys were coughing.

They all had a rash of purplish black spots on their shoulders and necks.

Madge said: “It’s the same, isn’t it? This is what Mark died of. They’ve got the plague.”

Caris nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I hope I die, too,” Madge said. “Then we can all be together in Heaven.”

59

In the hospital, Caris instituted the precautions Merthin had told her about. She cut up strips of linen for the nuns to tie over their mouths and noses while they were dealing with people who had the plague. And she compelled everyone to wash their hands in vinegar and water every time they touched a patient. The nuns all got chapped hands.

Madge brought her four children in, then fell ill herself. Old Julie, whose bed had been next to Mark Webber’s while he was dying, also succumbed. There was little Caris could do for any of them. She bathed their faces to cool them, gave them cold clear water to drink from the fountain in the cloisters, cleaned up their bloody vomit, and waited for them to die.

She was too busy to think about her own death. She observed a kind of fearful admiration in the townspeople’s eyes when they saw her soothing the brows of infectious plague victims, but she did not feel like a selfless martyr. She saw herself as the kind of person who disliked brooding and preferred to act. Like everyone else, she was haunted by the question: Who’s next? But she firmly put it out of her mind.

Prior Godwyn came in to see the patients. He refused to wear the face mask, saying it was women’s nonsense. He made the same diagnosis as before, overheated blood, and prescribed bleeding and a diet of sour apples and ram’s tripe.

It did not matter much what the patients ate, as they threw everything up toward the end; but Caris felt sure that taking blood from them made the illness worse. They were already bleeding too much: they coughed blood, vomited blood, and pissed blood. But the monks were the trained physicians, so she had to follow their instructions. She did not have time to be angry whenever she saw a monk or nun kneeling at the bedside of a patient, holding an arm out straight, cutting into a vein with a small sharp knife, and supporting the arm while a pint or more of precious blood dripped into a bowl on the floor.

Caris sat with Mair at the end, holding her hand, not caring if anyone disapproved. To ease her torment, she gave her a tiny amount of the euphoric drug Mattie had taught her to make from poppies. Mair still coughed, but it did not hurt her so much. After a coughing fit, her breathing would be easier for a short while, and she could talk. “Thank you for that night in Calais,” she whispered. “I know you didn’t really enjoy it, but I was in heaven.”

Caris tried not to cry. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted.”

“You loved me, though, in your own way. I know that.”

She coughed again. When the fit ended, Caris wiped the blood from her lips.

“I love you,” Mair said, and closed her eyes.

Caris let the tears come, then, not caring who saw or what they thought. She watched Mair, through a watery film, as she grew paler and breathed more shallowly, until at last her breathing stopped.

Caris remained where she was, on the floor beside the mattress, holding the hand of the corpse. Mair was still beautiful, even like this, white and forever still. It occurred to Caris that one other person loved her as Mair had, and that was Merthin. How strange that she had rejected his love, too. There was something wrong with her, she thought; some malformation of the soul that prevented her from being like other women and embracing love gladly.

Later that night, the four children of Mark Webber died; and so did Old Julie.

Caris was distraught. Was there nothing she could do? The plague was spreading fast and killing everyone. It was like living in a prison and wondering which of the inmates would be next to go to the gallows. Was Kingsbridge to be like Florence and Bordeaux, with bodies in the streets? Next Sunday there would be a market on the green outside the cathedral. Hundreds of people from every village within walking distance would come to buy and sell and mingle with the townspeople in churches and taverns. How many would go home fatally ill? When she felt like this, excruciatingly helpless up against terrible forces, she understood why people threw up their hands and said everything was controlled by the spirit world. But that had never been her way.

Whenever a member of the priory died there was always a special burial service, involving all the monks and nuns, with extra prayers for the departed soul. Both Mair and Old Julie had been well loved, Julie for her kind heart and Mair for her beauty, and many of the nuns wept. Madge’s children were included in the funeral, with the result that several hundred townspeople came. Madge herself was too ill to leave the hospital.

They all gathered in the graveyard under a slate-gray sky. Caris thought she could smell snow in the cold north wind. Brother Joseph said the graveside prayers, and six coffins were lowered into the ground.

A voice in the crowd asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “Are we all going to die, Brother Joseph?”

Joseph was the most popular of the monk-physicians. Now close to sixty years old and with no teeth, he was intellectual but had a warm bedside manner. Now he said: “We’re all going to die, friend, but none of us knows when. That’s why we must always be prepared to meet God.”

Betty Baxter spoke up, ever the probing questioner. “What can we do about the plague?” she said. “It is the plague, isn’t it?”

“The best protection is prayer,” Joseph said. “And, in case God has decided to take you regardless, come to church and confess your sins.”

Betty was not so easily fobbed off. “Merthin says that in Florence people stayed in their homes to avoid contact with the sick. Is that a good idea?”

“I don’t think so. Did the Florentines escape the plague?”

Everyone looked at Merthin, standing with Lolla in his arms. “No, they didn’t escape,” he said. “But perhaps even more would have died if they had done otherwise.”

Joseph shook his head. “If you stay at home, you can’t go to church. Holiness is the best medicine.”

Caris could not remain silent. “The plague spreads from one person to another,” she said angrily. “If you stay away from other people, you’ve got a better chance of escaping infection.”

Prior Godwyn spoke up. “So the women are the physicians now, are they?”

Caris ignored him. “We should cancel the market,” she said. “It would save lives.”

“Cancel the market!” he said scornfully. “And how would we do that? Send messengers to every village?”

“Shut the city gates,” she replied. “Block the bridge. Keep all strangers out of the town.”

“But there are already sick people in town.”

“Close all taverns. Cancel meetings of all guilds. Prohibit guests at weddings.”

Merthin said: “In Florence they even abandoned meetings of the city council.”

Elfric spoke up. “Then how are people to do business?”

“If you do business, you’ll die,” Caris said. “And you’ll kill your wife and children, too. So choose.”

Betty Baxter said: “I don’t want to close my shop—I’d lose a lot of money. But I’ll do it to save my life.” Caris’s hopes lifted at this, but then Betty dashed them again. “What do the doctors say? They know best.” Caris groaned aloud.

Prior Godwyn said: “The plague has been sent by God to punish us for our sins. The world has become wicked. Heresy, lasciviousness, and disrespect are rife. Men question authority, women flaunt their bodies, children disobey their parents. God is angry, and His rage is fearsome. Don’t try to run from His justice! It will find you, no matter where you hide.”

“What should we do?”

“If you want to live, you should go to church, confess your sins, pray, and lead a better life.”

Caris knew it was useless to argue, but all the same she said: “A starving man should go to church, but he should also eat.”

Mother Cecilia said: “Sister Caris, you need say no more.”

“But we could save so many—”

“That will do.”

“This is life and death!”

Cecilia lowered her voice. “But no one is listening to you. Drop it.”

Caris knew Cecilia was right. No matter how long she argued, people would believe the priests, not her. She bit her lip and said no more.

Blind Carlus started a hymn, and the monks began to process back into the church. The nuns followed, and the crowd dispersed.

As they passed from the church into the cloisters, Mother Cecilia sneezed.

 

Every evening Merthin put Lolla to bed in the room at the Bell. He would sing to her, or recite poems, or tell her stories. This was the time when she talked to him, asking him the strangely unexpected questions of a three-year-old, some childish, some profound, some hilarious.

Tonight, while he was singing a lullaby, she burst into tears.

He asked her what the trouble was.

“Why did Dora die?” she wailed.

So that was it. Madge’s daughter, Dora, had taken to Lolla. They had spent time together, playing counting games and plaiting one another’s hair. “She had the plague,” Merthin said.

“My mama had the plague,” Lolla said. She switched to the Italian she had not quite forgotten. “La moria grande.”

“I had it, too, but I got better.”

“So did Libia.” Libia was the wooden doll she had carried all the way from Florence.

“Did Libia have the plague?”

“Yes. She sneezed, felt hot, and had spots, but a nun made her better.”

“I’m very pleased. That means she’s safe. Nobody gets it twice.”

“You’re safe, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” That seemed like a good note on which to end. “Go to sleep now.”

“Good night,” she said.

He went to the door.

“Is Bessie safe?” she said.

“Go to sleep.”

“I love Bessie.”

“That’s nice. Good night.” He closed the door.

Downstairs, the parlor was empty. People were nervous about going to crowded places. Despite what Godwyn said, Caris’s message had gone home.

He could smell a savory soup. Following his nose, he went into the kitchen. Bessie was stirring a pot on the fire. “Bean soup with ham,” she said.

Merthin sat at the table with her father, Paul, a big man in his fifties. He helped himself to bread while Paul poured him a tankard of ale. Bessie served the soup.

Bessie and Lolla were becoming fond of one another, he realized. He had employed a nanny to take care of Lolla during the day, but Bessie often watched Lolla in the evening, and Lolla preferred her.

Merthin owned a house on Leper Island, but it was a small place, especially by comparison with the palagetto he had become used to in Florence. He was happy to let Jimmie go on living there. Merthin was comfortable here at the Bell. The place was warm and clean, and there was plenty of hearty food and good drink. He paid his bill every Saturday, but in other respects he was treated like a member of the family. He was in no hurry to move into a place of his own.

On the other hand, he could not live here forever. And when he did move out, Lolla might be upset to leave Bessie behind. Too many of the people in her life had left it. She needed stability. Perhaps he should move out now, before she became too attached to Bessie.

When they had eaten, Paul retired to bed. Bessie gave Merthin another cup of ale, and they sat by the fire. “How many people died in Florence?” she said.

“Thousands. Tens of thousands, probably. No one could keep count.”

“I wonder who’s next in Kingsbridge.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“It might be me.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’d like to lie with a man one more time, before I die.”

Merthin smiled, but said nothing.

“I haven’t been with a man since my Richard passed away, and that’s more than a year.”

“You miss him.”

“How about you? How long is it since you had a woman?”

Merthin had not had sex since Silvia fell ill. Remembering her, he felt a stab of grief. He had been insufficiently grateful for her love. “About the same,” he said.

“Your wife?”

“Yes, rest her soul.”

“It’s a long time to go without loving.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not the type to go with just anybody. You want someone to love.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m the same. It’s wonderful to lie with a man, the best thing in the world, but only if you love one another truly. I’ve only ever had one man, my husband. I never went with anyone else.”

Merthin wondered if that was true. He could not be sure. Bessie seemed sincere. But it was the kind of thing a woman would say anyway.

“What about you?” she said. “How many women?”

“Three.”

“Your wife, and before that Caris, and…who else? Oh, I remember—Griselda.”

“I’m not saying who they were.”

“Don’t worry, everyone knows.”

Merthin smiled ruefully. Of course, everyone did know. Perhaps they could not be sure, but they guessed, and they usually guessed right.

“How old is Griselda’s little Merthin now—seven? Eight?”

“Ten.”

“I’ve got fat knees,” Bessie said. She pulled up the skirt of her dress to show him. “I’ve always hated my knees, but Richard used to like them.”

Merthin looked. Her knees were plump and dimpled. He could see her white thighs.

“He would kiss my knees,” she said. “He was a sweet man.” She adjusted her dress, as if straightening it, but she lifted it, and for a moment he glimpsed the dark inviting patch of hair at her groin. “He would kiss me all over, sometimes, especially after bathing. I used to like that. I liked everything. A man can do what he likes to a woman who loves him. Don’t you agree?”

This had gone far enough. Merthin stood up. “I think you’re probably right, but this kind of talk leads only one way, so I’m going to bed before I commit a sin.”

She gave him a sad smile. “Sleep well,” she said. “If you get lonely, I’ll be here by the fire.”

“I’ll remember that.”

 

They put Mother Cecilia on a bedstead, not a mattress, and placed it immediately in front of the altar, the holiest place in the hospital. Nuns sang and prayed around her bed all day and all night, in shifts. There was always someone to bathe her face with cool rose water, always a cup of clear fountain water at her side. None of it made any difference. She declined as fast as the others, bleeding from her nose and her vagina, her breathing becoming more and more labored, her thirst unquenchable.

On the fourth night after she sneezed, she sent for Caris.

Caris was heavily asleep. Her days were exhausting: the hospital was overflowing. She was deep in a dream in which all the children in Kingsbridge had the plague, and as she rushed around the hospital trying to care for them all she suddenly realized that she, too, had caught it. One of the children was tugging at her sleeve, but she was ignoring it and desperately trying to figure out how she would cope with all these patients while she was so ill—and then she realized someone was shaking her shoulder with increasing urgency, saying: “Wake up, Sister, please, the mother prioress needs you!”

She came awake. A novice knelt by her bed with a candle. “How is she?” Caris asked.

“She’s sinking, but she can still speak, and she wants you.”

Caris got out of bed and put on her sandals. It was a bitterly cold night. She was wearing her nun’s robe, and she took the blanket from her bed and pulled it around her shoulders. Then she ran down the stone stairs.

The hospital was full of dying people. The mattresses on the floor were lined up like fish bones, so that those patients who were able to sit upright could see the altar. Families clustered around the beds. There was a smell of blood. Caris took a clean length of linen from a basket by the door and tied it over her mouth and nose.

Four nuns knelt beside Cecilia’s bed, singing. Cecilia lay back with her eyes closed, and at first Caris was afraid she had arrived too late. Then the old prioress seemed to sense her presence. She turned her head and opened her eyes.

Caris sat on the edge of the bed. She dipped a rag in a bowl of rose water and wiped a smear of blood from Cecilia’s upper lip.

Cecilia’s breathing was tortured. In between gasps, she said: “Has anyone survived this terrible illness?”

“Only Madge Webber.”

“The one who didn’t want to live.”

“All her children died.”

“I’m going to die soon.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You forget yourself. We nuns have no fear of death. All our lives we long to be united with Jesus in Heaven. When death comes, we welcome it.” The long speech exhausted her. She coughed convulsively.

Caris wiped blood from her chin. “Yes, Mother Prioress. But those who are left behind may weep.” Tears came to her eyes. She had lost Mair and Old Julie, and now she was about to lose Cecilia.

“Don’t cry. That’s for the others. You have to be strong.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I think God has you in mind to take my place, and become prioress.”

In that case he has made a very odd choice, Caris thought. He usually picks people whose view of Him is more orthodox. But she had long ago learned that there was no point in saying these things. “If the sisters choose me, I’ll do my best.”

“I think they’ll choose you.”

“I’m sure Sister Elizabeth will want to be considered.”

“Elizabeth is clever, but you’re loving.”

Caris bowed her head. Cecilia was probably right. Elizabeth would be too harsh. Caris was the best person to run the nunnery, even though she was skeptical of lives spent in prayer and hymn singing. She did believe in the school and the hospital. Heaven forbid that Elizabeth should end up running the hospital.