The bishop and his colleagues were staying in the prior’s palace, and the Monmouth entourage filled the priory’s guest rooms, so Ralph and Philippa and their servants were lodging at an inn. Ralph had chosen the Bell, the rebuilt tavern owned by his brother. It was the only three-story house in Kingsbridge, with a big open room at ground level, male and female dormitories above, and a top floor with six expensive individual guest rooms. When the banquet was over, Ralph and his men removed to the tavern, where they installed themselves in front of the fire, called for more wine, and began to play at dice. Philippa remained behind, talking to Caris and chaperoning Odila with Earl David.

Ralph and his companions attracted a crowd of admiring young men and women such as always gathered around free-spending noblemen. Ralph gradually forgot his troubles in the euphoria of drink and the thrill of gambling.

He noticed a young fair-haired woman watching him with a yearning expression as he cheerfully lost stacks of silver pennies on the throw of the dice. He beckoned her to sit beside him on the bench, and she told him her name was Ella. At moments of tension she grabbed his thigh, as if captured by the suspense, though she probably knew exactly what she was doing—women usually did.

He gradually lost interest in the game and transferred his attention to her. His men carried on betting while he got to know Ella. She was everything Philippa was not: happy, sexy, and fascinated by Ralph. She touched him and herself a lot—she would push her hair off her face, then pat his arm, then hold her hand to her throat, then push his shoulder playfully. She seemed very interested in his experiences in France.

To Ralph’s annoyance, Merthin came into the tavern and sat down with him. Merthin was not running the Bell himself—he had rented it to the youngest daughter of Betty Baxter—but he was keen that the tenant should make a success of it, and he asked Ralph if everything was to his satisfaction. Ralph introduced his companion, and Merthin said, “Yes, I know Ella,” in a dismissive tone that was uncharacteristically discourteous.

Today was only the third or fourth time the two brothers had met since the death of Tilly. On previous occasions, such as Ralph’s wedding to Philippa, there had hardly been time to talk. All the same Ralph knew, from the way his brother looked at him, that Merthin suspected him of being Tilly’s killer. The unspoken thought was a looming presence, never addressed but impossible to ignore, like the cow in the cramped one-room hovel of a poor peasant. If it was mentioned, Ralph felt that would be the last time they ever spoke.

So tonight, as if by mutual consent, they once again exchanged a few meaningless platitudes, then Merthin left, saying he had work to do. Ralph wondered briefly what work he was going to do at dusk on a December evening. He really had no idea how Merthin spent his time. He did not hunt, or hold court, or attend on the king. Was it possible to spend all day, every day, making drawings and supervising builders? Such a life would have driven Ralph mad. And he was baffled by how much money Merthin seemed to make from his enterprises. Ralph himself had been short of money even when he had been lord of Tench. Merthin never seemed to lack it.

Ralph turned his attention back to Ella. “My brother’s a bit grumpy,” he said apologetically.

“It’s because he hasn’t had a woman for half a year.” She giggled. “He used to shag the prioress, but she had to throw him out after Philemon came back.”

Ralph pretended to be shocked. “Nuns aren’t supposed to be shagged.”

“Mother Caris is a wonderful woman—but she’s got the itch, you can tell by the way she walks.”

Ralph was aroused by such frank talk from a woman. “It’s very bad for a man,” he said, playing along. “To go for so long without a woman.”

“I think so, too.”

“It leads to…swelling.”

She put her head on one side and raised her eyebrows. He glanced down at his own lap. She followed his gaze. “Oh, dear,” she said. “That looks uncomfortable.” She put her hand on his erect penis.

At that moment, Philippa appeared

Ralph froze. He felt guilty and scared, and at the same time he was furious with himself for caring whether Philippa saw what he was doing or not.

She said: “I’m going upstairs—oh.”

Ella did not release her hold. In fact she squeezed Ralph’s penis gently, while looking up at Philippa and smiling triumphantly.

Philippa flushed red, her face registering shame and distaste.

Ralph opened his mouth to speak, then did not know what to say. He was not willing to apologize to his virago of a wife, feeling that she had brought this humiliation on herself. But he also felt somewhat foolish, sitting there with a tavern tart holding his prick while his wife, the countess, stood in front of them looking embarrassed.

The tableau lasted only a moment. Ralph made a strangled sound, Ella giggled, and Philippa said, “Oh!” in a tone of exasperation and disgust. Then Philippa turned and walked away, head held unnaturally high. She approached the broad staircase and went up, as graceful as a deer on a hillside, and disappeared without looking back.

Ralph felt both angry and ashamed, though he reasoned that he had no need to feel either. However, his interest in Ella diminished visibly, and he took her hand away.

“Have some more wine,” she said, pouring from the jug on the table, but Ralph felt the onset of a headache, and pushed the wooden cup away.

Ella put a restraining hand on his arm and said in a low, warm voice: “Don’t leave me in the lurch now that you’ve got me all, you know, excited.”

He shook her off and stood up.

Her face hardened and she said: “Well, you’d better give me something by way of compensation.”

He dipped into his purse and took out a handful of silver pennies. Without looking at Ella, he dumped the money on the table, not caring whether it was too much or too little.

She began to scoop up the coins hastily.

Ralph left her and went upstairs.

Philippa was on the bed, sitting upright with her back against the headboard. She had taken off her shoes but was otherwise fully dressed. She stared accusingly at Ralph as he walked in.

He said: “You have no right to be angry with me!”

“I’m not angry,” she said. “But you are.”

She could always twist words around so that she was in the right and he in the wrong.

Before he could think of a reply, she said: “Wouldn’t you like me to leave you?”

He stared at her, astonished. This was the last thing he had expected. “Where would you go?”

“Here,” she said. “I won’t become a nun, but I could live in the convent nevertheless. I would bring just a few servants: a maid, a clerk, and my confessor. I’ve already spoken to Mother Caris, and she is willing.”

“My last wife did that. What will people think?”

“A lot of noblewomen retire to nunneries, either temporarily or permanently, at some point in their lives. People will think you’ve rejected me because I’m past the age for conceiving children—which I probably am. Anyway, do you care what people say?”

The thought briefly flashed across his mind that he would be sorry to see Gerry lose Odila. But the prospect of being free of Philippa’s proud, disapproving presence was irresistible. “All right, what’s stopping you? Tilly never asked permission.”

“I want to see Odila married first.”

“Who to?”

She looked at him as if he were stupid.

“Oh,” he said. “Young David, I suppose.”

“He is in love with her, and I think they would be well suited.”

“He’s underage—he’ll have to ask the king.”

“That’s why I’ve raised it with you. Will you go with him to see the king, and speak in support of the marriage? If you do this for me, I swear I will never ask you for anything ever again. I will leave you in peace.”

She was not asking him to make any sacrifices. An alliance with Monmouth could do Ralph nothing but good. “And you’ll leave Earlscastle, and move into the nunnery?”

“Yes, as soon as Odila is married.”

It was the end of a dream, Ralph realized, but a dream that had turned into a sour, bleak reality. He might as well acknowledge the failure and start again.

“All right,” he said, feeling regret mingled with liberation. “It’s a bargain.”

77

Easter came early in the year 1350, and there was a big fire blazing in Merthin’s hearth on the evening of Good Friday. The table was laid with a cold supper: smoked fish, soft cheese, new bread, pears, and a flagon of Rhenish wine. Merthin was wearing clean underclothes and a new yellow robe. The house had been swept, and there were daffodils in a jug on the sideboard.

Merthin was alone. Lolla was with his servants, Arn and Em. Their cottage was at the end of the garden but Lolla, who was five, loved to stay there overnight. She called it going on pilgrimage, and took a traveling bag containing her hairbrush and a favorite doll.

Merthin opened a window and looked out. A cold breeze blew across the river from the meadow on the south side. The last of the evening was fading, the light seeming to fall out of the sky and sink into the water, where it disappeared in the blackness.

He visualized a hooded figure emerging from the nunnery. He saw it tread a worn diagonal across the cathedral green, hurry past the lights of the Bell, and descend the muddy main street, the face shadowed, speaking to no one. He imagined it reaching the foreshore. Did it glance sideways into the cold, black river, and remember a moment of despair so great as to give rise to thoughts of self-destruction? If so, the recollection was quickly dismissed, and it stepped forward onto the cobbled roadbed of his bridge. It crossed the span and made landfall again on Leper Island. There it diverted from the main road and passed through low shrubbery, across scrubby grass cropped by rabbits, and around the ruins of the old lazar house until it came to the southwest shore. Then it tapped on Merthin’s door.

He closed the window and waited. No tap came. He was wishfully a little ahead of schedule.

He was tempted to drink some wine, but he did not: a ritual had developed, and he did not want to change the order of events.

The knock came a few moments later. He opened the door. She stepped inside, threw back her hood, and dropped the heavy gray cloak from her shoulders.

She was taller than he by an inch or more, and a few years older. Her face was proud, and could be haughty, although now her smile radiated warmth like the sun. She wore a robe of bright Kingsbridge scarlet. He put his arms around her, pressing her voluptuous body to his own, and kissed her wide mouth. “My darling,” he said. “Philippa.”

They made love immediately, there on the floor, hardly undressing. He was hungry for her, and she was if anything more eager. He spread her cloak on the straw, and she lifted the skirt of her robe and lay down. She clung to him like one drowning, her legs wrapped around his, her arms crushing him to her soft body, her face buried in his neck.

She had told him that, after she left Ralph and moved into the priory, she had thought no one would ever touch her again until the nuns laid out her cold body for burial. The thought almost made Merthin cry.

For his part, he had loved Caris so much that he felt no other woman would ever arouse his affection. For him as well as Philippa, this love had come as an unexpected gift, a spring of cold water bubbling up in a baking-hot desert, and they both drank from it as if they were dying of thirst.

Afterward they lay entwined by the fire, panting, and he recalled the first time. Soon after she moved to the priory, she had taken an interest in the building of the new tower. A practical woman, she had trouble filling the long hours that were supposed to be spent in prayer and meditation. She enjoyed the library but could not read all day. She came to see him in the mason’s loft, and he showed her the plans. She quickly got into the habit of visiting every day, talking to him while he worked. He had always admired her intelligence and strength, and in the intimacy of the loft he came to know the warm, generous spirit beneath her stately manner. He discovered that she had a lively sense of humor, and he learned how to make her laugh. She responded with a rich, throaty chuckle that, somehow, led him to think of making love to her. One day she had paid him a compliment. “You’re a kind man,” she had said. “There aren’t enough of them.” Her sincerity had touched him, and he had kissed her hand. It was a gesture of affection, but one she could reject, if she wished, without drama: she simply had to withdraw her hand and take a step back, and he would have known he had gone a little too far. But she had not rejected it. On the contrary, she had held his hand and looked at him with something like love in her eyes, and he had wrapped his arms around her and kissed her lips.

They had made love on the mattress in the loft, and he had not remembered until afterward that Caris had encouraged him to put the mattress there, with a joke about masons needing a soft place for their tools.

Caris did not know about him and Philippa. No one did except Philippa’s maid and Arn and Em. She went to bed in her private room on the upper floor of the hospital soon after nightfall, at the same time as the nuns retired to their dormitory. She slipped out while they were asleep, using the outside steps that permitted important guests to come and go without passing through the common people’s quarters. She returned by the same route before dawn, while the nuns were singing Matins, and appeared at breakfast as if she had been in her room all night.

He was surprised to find that he could love another woman less than a year after Caris had left him for the final time. He certainly had not forgotten Caris. On the contrary, he thought about her every day. He felt the urge to tell her about something amusing that had happened, or he wanted her opinion on a knotty problem, or he found himself performing some task the way she would want it done, such as carefully bathing Lolla’s grazed knee with warm wine. And then he saw her most days. The new hospital was almost finished, but the cathedral tower was barely begun, and Caris kept a close eye on both building projects. The priory had lost its power to control the town merchants, but nevertheless Caris took an interest in the work Merthin and the guild were doing to create all the institutions of a borough—establishing new courts, planning a wool exchange, and encouraging the craft guilds to codify standards and measures. But his thoughts about her always had an unpleasant aftertaste, like the bitterness left at the back of the throat by sour beer. He had loved her totally, and she had, in the end, rejected him. It was like remembering a happy day that had ended with a fight.

“Do you think I’m peculiarly attracted to women who aren’t free?” he said idly to Philippa.

“No, why?”

“It does seem odd that after twelve years of loving a nun, and nine months of celibacy, I should fall for my brother’s wife.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said quickly. “It was no marriage. I was wedded against my will, I shared his bed for no more than a few days, and he will be happy if he never sees me again.”

He patted her shoulder apologetically. “But still, we have to be secretive, just as I did with Caris.” What he was not saying was that a man was entitled, by law, to kill his wife if he caught her committing adultery. Merthin had never known it to happen, certainly not among the nobility, but Ralph’s pride was a terrible thing. Merthin knew, and had told Philippa, that Ralph had killed his first wife, Tilly.

She said: “Your father loved your mother hopelessly for a long time, didn’t he?”

“So he did!” Merthin had almost forgotten that old story.

“And you fell for a nun.”

“And my brother spent years pining for you, the happily married wife of a nobleman. As the priests say, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. But enough of this. Do you want some supper?”

“In a moment.”

“There’s something you want to do first?”

“You know.”

He did know. He knelt between her legs and kissed her belly and her thighs. It was a peculiarity of hers that she always wanted to come twice. He began to tease her with his tongue. She groaned, and pressed the back of his head. “Yes,” she said. “You know how I like that, especially when I’m full of your seed.”

He lifted his head. “I do,” he said. Then he bent again to his task.

 

The spring brought a respite in the plague. People were still dying, but fewer were falling ill. On Easter Sunday, Bishop Henri announced that the Fleece Fair would take place as usual this year.

At the same service, six novices took their vows and so became full-fledged monks. They had all had an extraordinarily short novitiate, but Henri was keen to raise the number of monks at Kingsbridge, and he said the same thing was going on all over the country. In addition five priests were ordained—they, too, benefiting from an accelerated training program—and sent to replace plague victims in the surrounding countryside. And two Kingsbridge monks came down from university, having received their degrees as physicians in three years instead of the usual five or seven.

The new doctors were Austin and Sime. Caris remembered both of them rather vaguely: she had been guest master when they left, three years ago, to go to Kingsbridge College in Oxford. On the afternoon of Easter Monday she showed them around the almost-completed new hospital. No builders were at work as it was a holiday.

Both had the bumptious self-confidence that the university seemed to instill in its graduates along with medical theories and a taste for Gascon wine. However, years of dealing with patients had given Caris a confidence of her own, and she described the hospital’s facilities and the way she planned to run it with brisk assurance.

Austin was a slim, intense young man with thinning fair hair. He was impressed with the innovative new cloisterlike layout of the rooms. Sime, a little older and round-faced, did not seem eager to learn from Caris’s experience: she noticed that he always looked away when she was talking.

“I believe a hospital should always be clean,” she said.

“On what grounds?” Sime inquired in a condescending tone, as if asking a little girl why Dolly had to be spanked.

“Cleanliness is a virtue.”

“Ah. So it has nothing to do with the balance of humors in the body.”

“I have no idea. We don’t pay too much attention to the humors. That approach has failed spectacularly against the plague.”

“And sweeping the floor has succeeded?”

“At a minimum, a clean room lifts patients’ spirits.”

Austin put in: “You must admit, Sime, that some of the masters at Oxford share the mother prioress’s new ideas.”

“A small group of the heterodox.”

Caris said: “The main point is to take patients suffering from the type of illnesses that are transmitted from the sick to the well and isolate them from the rest.”

“To what end?” said Sime.

“To restrict the spread of such diseases.”

“And how is it that they are transmitted?”

“No one knows.”

A little smile of triumph twitched Sime’s mouth. “Then how do you know by what means to restrict their spread, may I ask?”

He thought he had trumped her in argument—it was the main thing they learned at Oxford—but she knew better. “From experience,” she said. “A shepherd doesn’t understand the miracle by which lambs grow in the womb of a ewe, but he knows it won’t happen if he keeps the ram out of the field.”

“Hm.”

Caris disliked the way he said: “Hm.” He was clever, she thought, but his cleverness never touched the world. She was struck by the contrast between this kind of intellectual and Merthin’s kind. Merthin’s learning was wide, and the power of his mind to grasp complexities was remarkable—but his wisdom never strayed far from the realities of the material world, for he knew that if he went wrong his buildings would fall down. Her father, Edmund, had been like that, clever but practical. Sime, like Godwyn and Anthony, would cling to his faith in the humors of the body regardless of whether his patients lived or died.

Austin was smiling broadly. “She’s got you there, Sime,” he said, evidently amused that his smug friend had failed to overwhelm this uneducated woman. “We may not know exactly how illnesses spread, but it can’t do any harm to separate the sick from the well.”

Sister Joan, the nuns’ treasurer, interrupted their conversation. “The bailiff of Outhenby is asking for you, Mother Caris.”

“Did he bring a herd of calves?” Outhenby was obliged to supply the nuns with twelve one-year-old calves every Easter.

“Yes.”

“Pen the beasts and ask the bailiff to come here, please.”

Sime and Austin took their leave, and Caris went to inspect the tiled floor in the latrines. The bailiff found her there. It was Harry Plowman. She had sacked the old bailiff, who was too slow to respond to change, and she had promoted the brightest young man in the village.

He shook her hand, which was overfamiliar of him, but Caris liked him and did not mind.

She said: “It must be a nuisance, your having to drive a herd all the way here, especially when the spring plowing is under way.”

“It is that,” he said. Like most plowmen, he was broad-shouldered and strong-armed. Strength as well as skill was required for driving the communal eight-ox team as they pulled the heavy plow through wet clay soil. He seemed to carry with him the air of the healthy outdoors.

“Wouldn’t you rather make a money payment?” Caris said. “Most manorial dues are paid in cash these days.”

“It would be more convenient.” His eyes narrowed with peasant shrewdness. “But how much?”

“A year-old calf normally fetches ten to twelve shillings at market, though prices are down this season.”

“They are—by half. You can buy twelve calves for three pounds.”

“Or six pounds in a good year.”

He grinned, enjoying the negotiation. “There’s your problem.”

“But you would prefer to pay cash.”

“If we can agree the amount.”

“Make it eight shillings.”

“But then, if the price of a calf is only five shillings, where do we villagers get the extra money?”

“I tell you what. In future, Outhenby can pay the nunnery either five pounds or twelve calves—the choice is yours.”

Harry considered that, looking for snags, but could find none. “All right,” he said. “Shall we seal the bargain?”

“How should we do that?”

To her surprise, he kissed her.

He held her slender shoulders in his rough hands, bent his head, and pressed his lips to hers. If Brother Sime had done this she would have recoiled. But Harry was different, and perhaps she had been titillated by his air of vigorous masculinity. Whatever the reason, she submitted to the kiss, letting him pull her unresisting body to his own, and moving her lips against his bearded mouth. He pressed up against her so that she could feel his erection. She realized that he would cheerfully take her here on the newly laid tiles of the latrine floor, and that thought brought her to her senses. She broke the kiss and pushed him away. “Stop!” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He was unabashed. “Kissing you, my dear,” he said.

She realized that she had a problem. No doubt gossip about her and Merthin was widespread: they were probably the two best-known people in Shiring. While Harry surely did not know the truth, the rumors had been enough to embolden him. This kind of thing could undermine her authority. She must squash it now. “You must never do anything like that again,” she said as severely as she could.

“You seemed to like it!”

“Then your sin is all the greater, for you have tempted a weak woman to perjure her holy vows.”

“But I love you.”

It was true, she realized, and she could guess why. She had swept into his village, reorganized everything, and bent the peasants to her will. She had recognized Harry’s potential and elevated him above his fellows. He must think of her as a goddess. It was not surprising that he had fallen in love with her. He had better fall out of love as soon as possible. “If you ever speak to me like that again, I’ll have to get another bailiff in Outhenby.”

“Oh,” he said. That stopped him short more effectively than the accusation of sin.

“Now, go home.”

“Very well, Mother Caris.”

“And find yourself another woman—preferably one who has not taken a vow of chastity.”

“Never,” he said, but she did not believe him.

He left, but she stayed where she was. She felt restless and lustful. If she could have felt sure of being alone for a while, she would have touched herself. This was the first time in nine months that she had been bothered by physical desire. After finally splitting up with Merthin she had fallen into a kind of neutered state, in which she did not think about sex. Her relationships with other nuns gave her warmth and affection: she was fond of both Joan and Oonagh, though neither loved her in the physical way Mair had. Her heart beat with other passions: the new hospital, the tower, and the rebirth of the town.

Thinking of the tower, she left the hospital and walked across the green to the cathedral. Merthin had dug four enormous holes, the deepest anyone had ever seen, outside the church around the foundations of the old tower. He had built great cranes to lift the earth out. Throughout the wet autumn months, oxcarts had lumbered all day long down the main street and across the first span of the bridge to dump the mud on rocky Leper Island. There they had picked up building stones from Merthin’s wharf, then climbed the street again, to stack the stones around the grounds of the church in ever-growing piles.

As soon as the winter frost was over, his masons had begun laying the foundations. Caris went to the north side of the cathedral and looked into the hole in the angle formed by the outside wall of the nave and the outside wall of the north transept. It was dizzyingly deep. The bottom was already covered with neat masonry, the squared-off stones laid in straight lines and joined by thin layers of mortar. Because the old foundations were inadequate, the tower was being built on its own new, independent foundations. It would rise outside the existing walls of the church, so no demolition would be needed over and above what Elfric had already done in taking down the upper levels of the old tower. Only when it was finished would Merthin remove the temporary roof Elfric had built over the crossing. It was a typical Merthin design: simple yet radical, a brilliant solution to the unique problems of the site.

As at the hospital, no builders were at work on Easter Monday, but she saw movement in the hole and realized someone was walking around on the foundations. A moment later she recognized Merthin. She went to one of the surprisingly flimsy rope-and-branch ladders the masons used, and clambered shakily down.

She was glad to reach the bottom. Merthin helped her off the ladder, smiling. “You look a little pale,” he said.

“It’s a long way down. How are you getting on?”

“Fine. It will take many years.”

“Why? The hospital seems more complicated, and that’s finished.”

“Two reasons. The higher we go, the fewer masons will be able to work on it. Right now I’ve got twelve men laying the foundations. But as it rises it will get narrower, and there just won’t be room for them all. The other reason is that mortar takes so long to set. We have to let it harden over a winter before we put too much weight on it.”

She was hardly listening. Watching his face, she was remembering making love to him in the prior’s palace, between Matins and Lauds, with the first gleam of daylight coming in through the open window and falling over their naked bodies like a blessing.

She patted his arm. “Well, the hospital isn’t taking so long.”

“You should be able to move in by Whitsun.”

“I’m glad. Although we’re having a slight respite from the plague: fewer people are dying.”

“Thank God,” he said fervently. “Perhaps it may be coming to an end.”

She shook her head bleakly. “We thought it was over once before, remember? About this time last year. Then it came back worse.”

“Heaven forbid.”

She touched his cheek with her palm, feeling his wiry beard. “At least you’re safe.”

He looked faintly displeased. “As soon as the hospital is finished we can start on the wool exchange.”

“I hope you’re right to think that business must pick up soon.”

“If it doesn’t, we’ll all be dead anyway.”

“Don’t say that.” She kissed his cheek.

“We have to act on the assumption that we’re going to live.” He said it irritably, as if she had annoyed him. “But the truth is that we don’t know.”

“Let’s not think about the worst.” She put her arms around his waist and hugged him, pressing her breasts against his thin body, feeling his hard bones against her yielding flesh.

He pushed her away violently. She stumbled backward and almost fell. “Don’t do that!” he shouted.

She was as shocked as if he had slapped her. “What’s the matter?”

“Stop touching me!”

“I only…”

“Just don’t do it! You ended our relationship nine months ago. I said it was the last time, and I meant it.”

She could not understand his anger. “But I only hugged you.”

“Well, don’t. I’m not your lover. You have no right.”

“I have no right to touch you?”

“No!”

“I didn’t think I needed some kind of permission.”

“Of course you knew. You don’t let people touch you.”

“You’re not people. We’re not strangers.” But as she said these things she knew she was wrong and he was right. She had rejected him, but she had not accepted the consequences. The encounter with Harry from Outhenby had fired her lust, and she had come to Merthin looking for release. She had told herself she was touching him in affectionate friendship, but that was a lie. She had treated him as if he were still available to her, as a rich and idle lady might put down a book and pick it up again. Having denied him the right to touch her all this time, it was wrong of her to try to reinstate the privilege just because a muscular young plowman had kissed her.

All the same, she would have expected Merthin to point this out in a gentle and affectionate way. But he had been hostile and brutal. Had she thrown away his friendship as well as his love? Tears came to her eyes. She turned away from him and went back to the ladder.

She found it hard to climb up. It was tiring, and she seemed to have lost her energy. She stopped for a rest, and looked down. Merthin was standing on the bottom of the ladder, steadying it with his weight.

When she was almost at the top, she looked down again. He was still there. It occurred to her that her unhappiness would be over if she fell. It was a long drop to those unforgiving stones. She would die instantly.

Merthin seemed to sense what she was thinking, for he gave an impatient wave, indicating that she should hurry up and get off the ladder. She thought of how devastated he would be if she killed herself, and for a moment she enjoyed imagining his misery and guilt. She felt sure God would not punish her in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife.

Then she climbed the last few rungs and stood on solid ground. How foolish she had been, just for a moment. She was not going to end her life. She had too much to do.

She returned to the nunnery. It was time for Evensong, and she led the procession into the cathedral. As a young novice she had resented the time wasted in services. In fact Mother Cecilia had taken care to give her work that permitted her to be excused for much of the time. Now she welcomed the chance to rest and reflect.

This afternoon had been a low moment, she decided, but she would recover. All the same she found herself fighting back tears as she sang the psalms.

For supper the nuns had smoked eel. Chewy and strongly flavored, it was not Caris’s favorite dish. Tonight she was not hungry, anyway. She ate some bread.

After the meal she retired to her pharmacy. Two novices were there, copying out Caris’s book. She had finished it soon after Christmas. Many people had asked for copies: apothecaries, prioresses, barbers, even one or two physicians. Copying the book had become part of the training of nuns who wanted to work in the hospital. The copies were cheap—the book was short, and there were no elaborate drawings or costly inks—and the demand seemed never-ending.

Three people made the room feel crowded. Caris was looking forward to the space and light of the pharmacy in the new hospital.

She wanted to be alone, so she sent the novices away. However, she was not destined to get her wish. A few moments later Lady Philippa came in.

Caris had never warmed to the reserved countess, but sympathized with her plight, and was glad to give sanctuary to any woman fleeing from a husband such as Ralph. Philippa was an easy guest, making few demands, spending a lot of time in her room. She had only a limited interest in sharing the nuns’ life of prayer and self-denial—but Caris of all people could understand that.

Caris invited her to sit on a stool at the bench.

Philippa was a remarkably direct woman, despite her courtly manners. Without preamble, she said: “I want you to leave Merthin alone.”

“What?” Caris was astonished and offended.

“Of course you have to talk to him, but you should not kiss or touch him.”

“How dare you.” What did Philippa know—and why did she care?

“He’s not your lover anymore. Stop bothering him.”

Merthin must have told her about their quarrel this afternoon. “But why would he tell you…?” Before the question was out of her mouth, she guessed the answer.

Philippa confirmed it with her next utterance. “He’s not yours, now—he’s mine.”

“Oh, my soul!” Caris was flabbergasted. “You and Merthin?”

“Yes.”

“Are you…Have you actually…”

“Yes.”

“I had no idea!” She felt betrayed, though she knew she had no right. When had this happened? “But how…where…?”

“You don’t need to know the details.”

“Of course not.” At his house on Leper Island, she supposed. At night, probably. “How long…?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Caris could work it out. Philippa had been here less than a month. “You moved fast.”

It was an unworthy jibe, and Philippa had the grace to ignore it. “He would have done anything to keep you. But you threw him over. Now let him go. It’s been difficult for him to love anyone else, after you—but he has managed it. Don’t you dare interfere.”

Caris wanted to rebuff her furiously, tell her angrily that she had no right to give orders and make moral demands—but the trouble was that Philippa was in the right. Caris had to let Merthin go, forever.

She did not want to show her heartbreak in front of Philippa. “Would you leave me now, please?” she said with an attempt at Philippa’s style of dignity. “I would like to be alone.”

Philippa was not easily pushed around. “Will you do as I say?” she persisted.

Caris did not like to be cornered, but she had no spirit left. “Yes, of course,” she said.

“Thank you.” Philippa left.

When she was sure Philippa was out of earshot, Caris began to cry.

78

Philemon as prior was no better than Godwyn. He was overwhelmed by the challenge of managing the assets of the priory. Caris had made a list, during her spell as acting prior, of the monks’ main sources of income:

1. Rents
2. A share of profits from commerce and industry (tithing)
3. Agricultural profits on land not rented out
4. Profits from grain mills and other, industrial mills
5. Waterway tolls and a share of all fish landed
6. Stallage in markets
7. Proceeds of justice—fees and fines from courts
8. Pious gifts from pilgrims and others
9. Sale of books, holy water, candles, etc.

She had given the list to Philemon, and he had thrown it back at her as if insulted. Godwyn, better than Philemon only in that he had a certain superficial charm, would have thanked her and quietly ignored her list.

In the nunnery, she had introduced a new method of keeping accounts, one she had learned from Buonaventura Caroli when she was working for her father. The old method was simply to write in a parchment roll a short note of every transaction, so that you could always go back and check. The Italian system was to record income on the left-hand side and expenditure on the right, and add them up at the foot of the page. The difference between the two totals showed whether the institution was gaining or losing money. Sister Joan had taken this up with enthusiasm, but when she offered to explain it to Philemon he refused curtly. He regarded offers of help as insults to his competence.

He had only one talent, and it was the same as Godwyn’s: a flair for manipulating people. He had shrewdly weeded the new intake of monks, sending the modern-minded physician, Brother Austin, and two other bright young men to St.-John-in-the-Forest, where they would be too far away to challenge his authority.

But Philemon was the bishop’s problem now. Henri had appointed him and Henri would have to deal with him. The town was independent, and Caris had her new hospital.

The hospital was to be consecrated by the bishop on Whitsunday, which was always seven weeks after Easter. A few days beforehand, Caris moved her equipment and supplies into the new pharmacy. There was plenty of room for two people to work at the bench, preparing medicines, and a third to sit at a writing desk.

Caris was preparing an emetic, Oonagh was grinding dried herbs, and a novice, Greta, was copying out Caris’s book, when a novice monk came in with a small wooden chest. It was Josiah, a teenage boy usually called Joshie. He was embarrassed to be in the presence of three women. “Where shall I put this?” he said.

Caris looked at him. “What is it?”

“A chest.”

“I can see that,” she said patiently. The fact that someone was capable of learning to read and write did not, unfortunately, make him intelligent. “What does the chest contain?”

“Books.”

“And why have you brought me a chest of books?”

“I was told to.” Realizing, after a moment, that this answer was insufficiently informative, he added: “By Brother Sime.”

Caris raised her eyebrows. “Is Sime making me a gift of books?” She opened the chest.

Joshie made his escape without answering the question.

The books were medical texts, all in Latin. Caris looked through them. They were the classics: Avicenna’s Poem on Medicine, Hippocrates’ Diet and Hygiene, Galen’s On the Parts of Medicine, and De Urinis by Isaac Judaeus. All had been written more than three hundred years ago.

Joshie reappeared with another chest.

“What now?” said Caris.

“Medical instruments. Brother Sime says you are not to touch them. He will come and put them in their proper places.”

Caris was dismayed. “Sime wants to keep his books and instruments here? Is he planning to work here?”

Joshie did not know anything about Sime’s intentions, of course.

Before Caris could say any more, Sime appeared, accompanied by Philemon. Sime looked around the room then, without explanation, began unpacking his things. He moved some of Caris’s vessels from a shelf and replaced them with his books. He took out sharp knives for opening veins, and the teardrop-shaped glass flasks used for examining urine samples.

Caris said neutrally: “Are you planning to spend a great deal of time here in the hospital, Brother Sime?”

Philemon answered for him, clearly having anticipated the question with relish. “Where else?” he said. His tone was indignant, as if Caris had challenged him already. “This is the hospital, is it not? And Sime is the only physician in the priory. How shall people be treated, if not by him?”

Suddenly the pharmacy did not seem so spacious anymore.

Before Caris could say anything, a stranger appeared. “Brother Thomas told me to come here,” he said. “I am Jonas Powderer, from London.”

The visitor was a man of about fifty dressed in an embroidered coat and a fur hat. Caris noted his ready smile and affable manner, and guessed that he made his living by selling things. He shook hands, then looked around the room, nodding with apparent approval at Caris’s neat rows of labeled jars and vials. “Remarkable,” he said. “I have never seen such a sophisticated pharmacy outside London.”

“Are you a physician, sir?” Philemon asked. His tone was cautious: he was not sure of Jonas’s status.

“Apothecary. I have a shop in Smithfield, next to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I shouldn’t boast, but it is the largest such business in the city.”

Philemon relaxed. An apothecary was a mere merchant, well below a prior in the pecking order. With a hint of a sneer he said: “And what brings the biggest apothecary in London all the way down here?”

“I was hoping to acquire a copy of The Kingsbridge Panacea.”

“The what?”

Jonas smiled knowingly. “You cultivate humility, Father Prior, but I see this novice nun making a copy right here in your pharmacy.”

Caris said: “The book? It’s not called a panacea.”

“Yet it contains cures for all ills.”

There was a certain logic to that, she realized. “But how do you know of it?”

“I travel a good deal, searching for rare herbs and other ingredients, while my sons take care of the shop. I met a nun of Southampton who showed me a copy. She called it a panacea, and told me it was written in Kingsbridge.”

“Was the nun Sister Claudia?”

“Yes. I begged her to lend me the book just long enough to make a copy, but she would not be parted from it.”

“I remember her.” Claudia had made a pilgrimage to Kingsbridge, stayed in the nunnery, and nursed plague victims with no thought for her own safety. Caris had given her the book in thanks.

“A remarkable work,” Jonas said warmly. “And in English!”

“It’s for healers who aren’t priests, and therefore don’t speak much Latin.”

“There is no other book of its kind in any language.”

“Is it so unusual?”

“The arrangement of subjects!” Jonas enthused. “Instead of the humors of the body, or the classes of illness, the chapters refer to the pains of the patient. So, whether the customer’s complaint is stomachache, or bleeding, or fever, or diarrhea, or sneezing, you can just go to the relevant page!”

Philemon said impatiently: “Suitable enough for apothecaries and their customers, I am sure.”

Jonas appeared not to hear the note of derision. “I assume, Father Prior, that you are the author of this invaluable book.”

“Certainly not!” he said.

“Then who…?”

“I wrote it,” Caris said.

“A woman!” Jonas marveled. “But where did you get all the information? Virtually none of it appears in other texts.”

“The old texts have never proved very useful to me, Jonas. I was first taught how to make medicines by a wise woman of Kingsbridge, called Mattie, who sadly left town for fear of being persecuted as a witch. I learned more from Mother Cecilia, who was prioress here before me. But gathering the recipes and treatments is not difficult. Everyone knows a hundred of them. The difficulty is to identify the few effective ones in all the dross. What I did was to keep a diary, over the years, of the effects of every cure I tried. In my book, I included only those I have seen working, with my own eyes, time after time.”

“I am awestruck to be speaking to you in person.”

“Well, you shall have a copy of my book. I’m flattered that someone should come such a long way for it!” She opened a cupboard. “This was intended for our priory of St.-John-in-the-Forest, but they can wait for another copy.”

Jonas handled it as if it were a holy object. “I am most grateful.” He produced a bag of soft leather and gave it to Caris. “And, in token of my gratitude, accept a modest gift from my family to the nuns of Kingsbridge.”

Caris opened the bag and took out a small object swathed in wool. When she unwrapped the material she found a gold crucifix embedded with precious stones.

Philemon’s eyes glittered with greed.

Caris was startled. “This is a costly present!” she exclaimed. That was less than charming, she realized. She added: “Extraordinarily generous of your family, Jonas.”

He made a deprecatory gesture. “We are prosperous, thanks be to God.”

Philemon said enviously: “That—for a book of old women’s nostrums!”

Jonas said: “Ah, Father Prior, you are above such things, of course. We do not aspire to your intellectual heights. We do not try to understand the body’s humors. Just as a child sucks on a cut finger because that eases the pain, so we administer cures only because they work. As to why and how these things happen, we leave that to greater minds than ours. God’s creation is too mysterious for the likes of us to comprehend.”

Caris thought Jonas was speaking with barely concealed irony. She saw Oonagh smother a grin. Sime, too, picked up the undertone of mockery, and his eyes flashed anger. But Philemon did not notice, and he seemed mollified by the flattery. A sly look came over his face, and Caris guessed he was wondering how he could share in the credit for the book—and get some jeweled crucifixes for himself.

 

The Fleece Fair opened on Whitsunday, as always. It was traditionally a busy day for the hospital, and this year was no exception. Elderly folk fell ill after making a long journey to the fair; babies and children got diarrhea from strange food and foreign water; men and women drank too much in the taverns and injured themselves and each other.

For the first time, Caris was able to separate the patients into two categories. The rapidly diminishing number of plague victims, and others who had catching illnesses such as stomach upsets and poxes, went into the new building, which was officially blessed by the bishop early in the day. Victims of accidents and fights were treated in the old hospital, safe from the risk of infection. Gone were the days when someone would come into the priory with a dislocated thumb and die there of pneumonia.

The crisis came on Whitmonday.

Early in the afternoon Caris happened to be at the fair, taking a stroll after dinner, looking around. It was quiet by comparison with the old days, when hundreds of visitors and thousands of townspeople thronged not just the cathedral green but all the principal streets. Nevertheless, this year’s fair was better than expected after last year’s cancellation. Caris figured that people had noticed how the grip of the plague seemed to be weakening. Those who had survived so far thought they must be invulnerable—and some were, though others were not, for it continued to kill people.

Madge Webber’s cloth was the talking point of the fair. The new looms designed by Merthin were not just faster—they also made it easier to produce complex patterns in the weave. She had sold half her stock already.

Caris was talking to Madge when the fight started. Madge was embarrassing her by saying, as she had often said before, that without Caris she would still be a penniless weaver. Caris was about to give her customary denial when they heard shouts.

Caris recognized immediately the deep-chested sound of aggressive young men. It came from the neighborhood of an ale barrel thirty yards away. The shouts increased rapidly, and a young woman screamed. Caris hurried over to the place, hoping to stop the fight before it got out of control.

She was a little too late.

The fracas was well under way. Four of the town’s young tearaways were fighting fiercely with a group of peasants, identifiable as such by their rustic clothing, and probably all from the same village. A pretty girl, no doubt the one who had screamed, was struggling to separate two men who were punching one another mercilessly. One of the town boys had drawn a knife, and the peasants had heavy wooden shovels. As Caris arrived, more people were joining in on both sides.

She turned to Madge, who had followed her. “Send someone to fetch Mungo Constable, quick as you can. He’s probably in the basement of the guildhall.” Madge hurried off.

The fight was getting nastier. Several town boys had knives out. A peasant lad was lying on the ground bleeding copiously from his arm, and another was fighting on despite a gash in his face. As Caris watched, two more townies started kicking the peasant on the ground.

Caris hesitated another moment, then stepped forward. She grabbed the nearest fighter by the shirt. “Willie Bakerson, stop this right now!” she shouted in her most authoritative voice.

It almost worked.

Willie stepped back from his opponent, startled, and looked at Caris guiltily. She opened her mouth to speak again, but at that instant a shovel struck her a violent blow on the head that had surely been intended for Willie.

It hurt like hell. Her vision blurred, she lost her balance, and the next thing she knew she hit the ground. She lay there dazed, trying to recover her wits, while the world seemed to sway around her. Then someone grabbed her under the arms and dragged her away.

“Are you hurt, Mother Caris?” The voice was familiar, though she could not place it.

Her head cleared at last, and she struggled to her feet with the help of her rescuer, whom she now identified as the muscular corn merchant Megg Robbins. “I’m just a bit stunned,” Caris said. “We have to stop these boys killing each other.”

“Here come the constables. Let’s leave it to them.”

Sure enough, Mungo and six or seven deputies appeared, all wielding clubs. They waded into the fight, cracking heads indiscriminately. They were doing as much damage as the original fighters, but their presence confused the battleground. The boys looked bewildered, and some ran off. In a remarkably few moments the fight was over.

Caris said: “Megg, run to the nunnery and fetch Sister Oonagh, and tell her to bring bandages.”

Megg hurried away.

The walking wounded quickly disappeared. Caris began to examine those who were left. A peasant boy who had been knifed in the stomach was trying to hold his guts in: there was little hope for him. The one with the gashed arm would live if Caris could stop the bleeding. She took off his belt, wound it around his upper arm, and tightened it until the flow of blood slowed to a trickle. “Hold that there,” she told him, and moved on to a town boy who seemed to have broken some bones in his hand. Her head was still hurting but she ignored it.

Oonagh and several more nuns appeared. A moment later, Matthew Barber arrived with his bag. Between them they patched up the wounded. Under Caris’s instructions, volunteers picked up the worst victims and carried them to the nunnery. “Take them to the old hospital, not the new one,” she said.

She stood up from a kneeling position and felt dizzy. She grabbed Oonagh to steady herself. “What’s the matter?” said Oonagh.

“I’ll be all right. We’d better get to the hospital.”

They threaded their way through the market stalls to the old hospital. When they went in, they saw immediately that none of the wounded were here. Caris cursed. “The fools have taken them all to the wrong place,” she said. It was going to take a while for people to learn the importance of the difference, she concluded.

She and Oonagh went to the new building. The cloister was entered through a wide archway. As they went in, they met the volunteers coming out. “You brought them to the wrong place!” Caris said crossly.

One said: “But, Mother Caris—”

“Don’t argue, there’s no time,” she said impatiently. “Just carry them to the old hospital.”

Stepping into the cloisters, she saw the boy with the gashed arm being carried into a room where, she knew, there were five plague victims. She rushed across the quadrangle. “Stop!” she yelled furiously. “What do you think you’re doing?”

A man’s voice said: “They are carrying out my instructions.”

Caris stopped and looked around. It was Brother Sime. “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “He’s got a knife wound—do you want him to die of the plague?”

His round face turned pink. “I don’t propose to submit my decision to you for approval, Mother Caris.”

That was stupid and she ignored it. “All these injured boys must be kept away from plague victims, or they’ll catch it!”

“I think you’re overwrought. I suggest you go and lie down.”

“Lie down?” She was outraged. “I’ve just patched up all these men—now I’ve got to look at them properly. But not here!”

“Thank you for your emergency work, Mother. You can now leave me to examine the patients thoroughly.”

“You idiot, you’ll kill them!”

“Please leave the hospital until you have calmed down.”

“You can’t throw me out of here, you stupid boy! I built this hospital with the nuns’ money. I’m in charge here.”

“Are you?” he said coolly.

Caris realized that, although she had not anticipated this moment, he almost certainly had. He was flushed, but he had his feelings under control. He was a man with a plan. She paused, thinking fast. Looking around, she saw that the nuns and volunteers were all watching, waiting to see how this would turn out.

“We have to attend to these boys,” she said. “While we’re standing here arguing, they’re bleeding to death. We’ll compromise, for now.” She raised her voice. “Put every one down exactly where they are, please.” The weather was warm, there was no need for the patients to be indoors. “We’ll see to their needs first, then decide later where they are to be bedded.”

The volunteers and nuns knew and respected Caris, whereas Sime was new to them; and they obeyed her with alacrity.

Sime saw that he was beaten, and a look of utter fury came over his face. “I cannot treat patients in these circumstances,” he said, and he stalked out.

Caris was shocked. She had tried to save his pride with her compromise, and she had not thought he would walk away from sick people in a fit of petulance.

She quickly put him out of her mind as she began to look again at the injured.

For the next couple of hours she was busy bathing wounds, sewing up gashes, and administering soothing herbs and comforting drinks. Matthew Barber worked alongside her, setting broken bones and fixing dislocated joints. Matthew was in his fifties now, but his son Luke assisted him with equal skill.

The afternoon was cooling into evening when they finished. They sat on the cloister wall to rest. Sister Joan brought them tankards of cool cider. Caris still had a headache. She had been able to ignore it while she was busy, but now it bothered her. She would go to bed early, she decided.

While they were drinking their cider, young Joshie appeared. “The lord bishop asks you to attend on him in the prior’s palace at your convenience, Mother Prioress.”

She grunted irritably. No doubt Sime had complained. This was the last thing she needed. “Tell him I’ll come immediately,” she said. In a lower voice she added: “Might as well get it over with.” She drained her tankard and left.

Wearily she walked across the green. The stallholders were packing up for the night, covering their goods and locking their boxes. She passed through the graveyard and entered the palace.

Bishop Henri sat at the head of the table. Canon Claude and Archdeacon Lloyd were with him. Philemon and Sime were also there. Godwyn’s cat, Archbishop, was sitting on Henri’s lap, looking smug. The bishop said: “Please sit down.”

She sat beside Claude. He said kindly: “You look tired, Mother Caris.”

“I’ve spent the afternoon patching up stupid boys who got into a big fight. Also, I got a bang on the head myself.”

“We heard about the fight.”

Henri added: “And about the argument in the new hospital.”

“I assume that’s why I’m here.”

“Yes.”

“The whole idea of the new place is to separate patients with infectious illnesses—”

“I know what the argument is about,” Henri interrupted. He addressed the group. “Caris ordered that those injured in the fight be taken to the old hospital. Sime countermanded her orders. They had an unseemly row in front of everyone.”

Sime said: “I apologize for that, my lord bishop.”

Henri ignored that. “Before we go any farther, I want to get something clear.” He looked from Sime to Caris and back again. “I am your bishop and, ex officio, the abbot of Kingsbridge Priory. I have the right and power to command you all, and it is your duty to obey me. Do you accept that, Brother Sime?”

Sime bowed his head. “I do.”

Henri turned to Caris. “Do you, Mother Prioress?”

There was no argument, of course. Henri was completely in the right. “Yes,” she said. She felt confident that Henri was not stupid enough to force injured hooligans to catch the plague.

Henri said: “Allow me to state the arguments. The new hospital was built with the nuns’ money, to the specifications of Mother Caris. She intended it to provide a place for plague victims and others whose illnesses may, according to her, be spread from the sick to the well. She believes it is essential to compartmentalize the two types of patient. She feels she is entitled, in all the circumstances, to insist that her plan be carried out. Is that fair, Mother?”

“Yes.”

“Brother Sime was not here when Caris conceived her plan, so he could not be consulted. However, he has spent three years studying medicine at the university, and has been awarded a degree. He points out that Caris has no training and, apart from what she has picked up by practical experience, little understanding of the nature of disease. He is a qualified physician, and more than that, he is the only one in the priory, or indeed in Kingsbridge.”

“Exactly,” said Sime.

“How can you say I have no training?” Caris burst out. “After all the years I’ve cared for patients—”

“Be quiet, please,” Henri said, hardly raising his voice; and something in his quiet tone caused Caris to shut up. “I was about to mention your history of service. Your work here has been invaluable. You are known far and wide for your dedication during the plague that is still with us. Your experience and practical knowledge are priceless.”

“Thank you, Bishop.”

“On the other hand, Sime is a priest, a university graduate…and a man. The learning he brings with him is essential to the proper running of a priory hospital. We do not want to lose him.”

Caris said: “Some of the masters at the university agree with my methods—ask Brother Austin.”

Philemon said: “Brother Austin has been sent to St.-John-in-the-Forest.”

“And now we know why,” Caris said.

The bishop said: “I have to make this decision, not Austin or the masters at the university.”

Caris realized that she had not prepared for this showdown. She was exhausted, she had a headache, and she could hardly think straight. She was in the middle of a power struggle, and she had no strategy. If she had been fully alert, she would not have come when the bishop called. She would have gone to bed and got over her bad head and woken up refreshed in the morning, and she would not have met with Henri until she had worked out her battle plan.

Was it yet too late for that?

She said: “Bishop, I don’t feel adequate to this discussion tonight. Perhaps we could postpone it until tomorrow, when I’m feeling better.”

“No need,” said Henri. “I’ve heard Sime’s complaint, and I know your views. Besides, I will be leaving at sunrise.”

He had made up his mind, Caris realized. Nothing she said would make any difference. But what had he decided? Which way would he jump? She really had no idea. And she was too tired to do anything but sit and listen to her fate.

“Humankind is weak,” Henri said. “We see, as the apostle Paul puts it, as through a glass, darkly. We err, we go astray, we reason poorly. We need help. That is why God gave us His church, and the pope, and the priesthood—to guide us, because our own resources are fallible and inadequate. If we follow our own way of thinking, we will fail. We must consult the authorities.”

It looked as if he was going to back Sime, Caris concluded. How could he be so stupid?

But he was. “Brother Sime has studied the ancient texts of medical literature, under the supervision of the masters at the university. His course of study is endorsed by the church. We must accept its authority, and therefore his. His judgment cannot be subordinated to that of an uneducated person, no matter how brave and admirable she may be. His decisions must prevail.”

Caris felt so weary and ill that she was almost glad the interview was over. Sime had won; she had lost; and all she wanted to do was sleep. She stood up.

Henri said: “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mother Caris…”

His voice tailed off as she walked away.

She heard Philemon say: “Insolent behavior.”

Henri said quietly: “Let her go.”

She reached the door and went out without turning back.

The full meaning of what had happened became clear to her as she walked slowly through the graveyard. Sime was in charge of the hospital. She would have to follow his orders. There would be no separation of different categories of patient. There would be no face masks or hand washing in vinegar. Weak people would be made weaker by bleeding; starved people would be made thinner by purging; wounds would be covered with poultices made of animal dung to encourage the body to produce pus. No one would care about cleanliness or fresh air.

She spoke to nobody as she walked across the cloisters, up the stairs, and through the dormitory to her own room. She lay facedown on her bed, her head pounding.

She had lost Merthin, she had lost her hospital, she had lost everything.

Head injuries could be fatal, she knew. Perhaps she would go to sleep now and never wake up.

Perhaps that would be for the best.

79

Merthin’s orchard had been planted in the spring of 1349. A year later most of the trees were established and came out in a scatter of brave leaves. Two or three were struggling, and only one was inarguably dead. He did not expect any of them to bear fruit yet, but by July, to his surprise, one precocious sapling had a dozen or so tiny dark green pears, small as yet and as hard as stones, but promising ripeness in the autumn.

One Sunday afternoon he showed them to Lolla, who refused to believe that they would grow into the tangy, juicy fruits she loved. She thought—or pretended to think—that he was playing one of his teasing games. When he asked her where she imagined ripe pears came from, she looked at him reproachfully and said: “The market, silly!”

She, too, would ripen one day, he thought, although it was hard to imagine her bony body rounding out into the soft shape of a woman. He wondered whether she would bear him grandchildren. She was five years old, so that day might be only a decade or so away.

His thoughts were on ripeness when he saw Philippa coming toward him through the garden, and it struck him how round and full her breasts were. It was unusual for her to visit him in daylight, and he wondered what had brought her here. In case they were observed, he greeted her with only a chaste kiss on the cheek, such as a brother-in-law might give without arousing comment.

She looked troubled, and he realized that for a few days now she had been more reserved and thoughtful than usual. As she sat beside him on the grass he said: “Something on your mind?”

“I’ve never been good at breaking news gently,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

“Good God!” He was too shocked to hold back his reaction. “I’m surprised because you told me…”

“I know. I was sure I was too old. For a couple of years my monthly cycle was irregular, and then it stopped altogether—I thought. But I’ve been vomiting in the morning, and my nipples hurt.”

“I noticed your breasts as you came into the garden. But can you be sure?”

“I’ve been pregnant six times previously—three children and three miscarriages—and I know the feeling. There’s really no doubt.”

He smiled. “Well, we’re going to have a child.”

She did not return the smile. “Don’t look pleased. You haven’t thought through the implications. I’m the wife of the earl of Shiring. I haven’t slept with him since October, haven’t lived with him since February, yet in July I’m two or at most three months pregnant. He and the whole world will know that the baby is not his, and that the countess of Shiring has committed adultery.”

“But he wouldn’t…”

“Kill me? He killed Tilly, didn’t he?”

“Oh, my God. Yes, he did. But…”

“And if he killed me, he might kill my baby, too.”

Merthin wanted to say it was not possible, that Ralph would not do such a thing—but he knew otherwise.

“I have to decide what to do,” said Philippa.

“I don’t think you should try to end the pregnancy with potions—it’s too dangerous.”

“I won’t do that.”

“So you’ll have the baby.”

“Yes. But then what?”

“Suppose you stayed in the nunnery, and kept the baby secret? The place is full of children orphaned by the plague.”

“But what couldn’t be kept secret is a mother’s love. Everyone would know that the child was my particular care. And then Ralph would find out.”

“You’re right.”

“I could go away—vanish. London, York, Paris, Avignon. Not tell anyone where I was going, so that Ralph could never come after me.”

“And I could go with you.”

“But then you wouldn’t finish your tower.”

“And you would miss Odila.”

Philippa’s daughter had been married to Earl David for six months. Merthin could imagine how hard it would be for Philippa to leave her. And the truth was that he would find it agony to abandon his tower. All his adult life he had wanted to build the tallest building in England. Now that he had at last begun, it would break his heart to abandon the project.

Thinking of the tower brought Caris to mind. He knew, intuitively, that she would be devastated by this news. He had not seen her for weeks: she had been ill in bed after suffering a blow on the head at the Fleece Fair, and now, though she was completely recovered, she rarely emerged from the priory. He guessed that she had lost some kind of power struggle, for the hospital was being run by Brother Sime. Philippa’s pregnancy would be another shattering blow for Caris.

Philippa added: “And Odila, too, is pregnant.”

“So soon! That’s good news. But even more reason why you can’t go into exile and never see her, or your grandchild.”

“I can’t run, and I can’t hide. But, if I do nothing, Ralph will kill me.”

“There must be a way out of this,” Merthin said.

“I can think of only one answer.”

He looked at her. She had thought this out already, he realized. She had not told him about the problem until she had the solution. But she had been careful to show him that all the obvious answers were wrong. That meant he was not going to like the plan she had settled on.

“Tell me,” he said.

“We have to make Ralph think the baby is his.”

“But then you’d have to…”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

The thought of Philippa sleeping with Ralph was loathsome to Merthin. This was not so much jealousy, though that was a factor. What weighed most with him was how terrible she would feel about it. She had a physical and emotional revulsion toward Ralph. Merthin understood the revulsion, though he did not share it. He had lived with Ralph’s brutishness all his life, and the brute was his brother, and somehow that fact remained no matter what Ralph did. All the same, it made him sick to think that Philippa would have to force herself to have sex with the man she hated most in the world.

“I wish I could think of a better way,” he said.

“So do I.”

He looked hard at her. “You’ve already decided.”

“Yes.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“So am I.”

“But will it even work? Can you…seduce him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll just have to try.”

 

The cathedral was symmetrical. The mason’s loft was at the west end in the low north tower, overlooking the north porch. In the matching southwest tower was a room of similar size and shape that looked over the cloisters. It was used to store items of small value that were used only rarely. All the costumes and symbolic objects employed in the mystery plays were there, together with an assortment of not-quite-useless things: wooden candlesticks, rusty chains, cracked pots, and a book whose vellum pages had rotted with age so that the words penned so painstakingly were no longer legible.

Merthin went there to check how upright the wall was, by dangling a lead pointer on a long string from the window; and while there he made a discovery.

There were cracks in the wall. Cracks were not necessarily a sign of weakness: their meaning had to be interpreted by an experienced eye. All buildings moved, and cracks might simply show how a structure was adjusting to accommodate change. Merthin judged that most of the cracks in the wall of this storeroom were benign. But there was one that puzzled him by its shape. It did not look normal. A second glance told him that someone had taken advantage of a natural crack to loosen a small stone. He removed the stone.

He realized immediately that he had found someone’s secret hiding place. The space behind the stone was a thief’s stash. He took the objects out one by one. There was a woman’s brooch with a large green stone; a silver buckle; a silk shawl; and a scroll with a psalm written on it. Right at the back he found the object that gave him the clue to the identity of the thief. It was the only thing in the hole that had no monetary value. A simple piece of polished wood, it had letters carved into its surface that read: “M:Phmn:AMAT.”

M was just an initial. Amat was the Latin for “loves.” And Phmnn was surely Philemon.

Someone whose name began with M, boy or girl, had once loved Philemon and given him this; and he had hidden it with his stolen treasures.

Since childhood Philemon had been rumored to be light-fingered. Around him, things went missing. It seemed that this was where he hid them. Merthin imagined him coming up here alone, perhaps at night, to pull out the stone and gloat over his loot. No doubt it was a kind of sickness.

There had never been any rumors about Philemon having lovers. Like his mentor Godwyn, he seemed to be one of that small minority of men in whom the need for sexual love was weak. But someone had fallen for him, at some time, and he cherished the memory.

Merthin replaced the objects, putting them back exactly the way he had found them—he had a good memory for that sort of thing. He replaced the loose stone. Then, thoughtfully, he left the room and went back down the spiral staircase.

 

Ralph was surprised when Philippa came home.

It was a rare fine day in a wet summer, and he would have liked to be out hawking, but to his anger he was not able to go. The harvest was about to begin, and most of the twenty or thirty stewards, bailiffs, and reeves in the earldom needed to see him urgently. They all had the same problem: crops ripening in the fields and insufficient men and woman to harvest them.

He could do nothing to help. He had taken every opportunity to prosecute laborers who defied the ordinance by leaving their villages in search of higher wages—but those few who could be caught just paid the fine out of their earnings and ran off again. So his bailiffs had to make do. However, they all wanted to explain their difficulties to him, and he had no choice but to listen and give his approval to their makeshift plans.

The hall was full of people: bailiffs, knights and men-at-arms, a couple of priests, and a dozen or more loitering servants. When they all went quiet, Ralph suddenly heard the rooks outside, their harsh call sounding like a warning. He looked up and saw Philippa in the doorway.

She spoke first to the servants. “Martha! This table is still dirty from dinner. Fetch hot water and scrub it, now. Dickie—I’ve just seen the earl’s favorite courser covered with what looks like yesterday’s mud, and you’re here whittling a stick. Get back to the stables where you belong and clean up that horse. You, boy, put that puppy outside, it’s just pissed on the floor. The only dog allowed in the hall is the earl’s mastiff, you know that.” The servants were galvanized into action, even those to whom she had not spoken suddenly finding work to do.

Ralph did not mind Philippa issuing orders to the domestic servants. They got lazy without a mistress to harry them.

She came up to him and made a deep curtsy, as was only appropriate after a long absence. She did not offer to kiss him.

He said neutrally: “This is…unexpected.”

Philippa said irritably: “I shouldn’t have had to make the journey at all.”

Ralph groaned inwardly. “What brings you here?” he said. Whatever it was, there would be trouble, he felt sure.

“My manor of Ingsby.”

Philippa had a small number of properties of her own, a few villages in Gloucestershire that paid tribute to her rather than to the earl. Since she had gone to live at the nunnery, the bailiffs from these villages had been visiting her at Kingsbridge Priory, Ralph knew, and accounting to her directly for their dues. But Ingsby was an awkward exception. The manor paid tribute to him and he passed it on to her—which he had forgotten to do since she left. “Damn,” he said. “It slipped my mind.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “You’ve got a lot to think about.”

That was surprisingly conciliatory.

She went upstairs to the private chamber, and he returned to his work. Half a year of separation had improved her a little, he thought as another bailiff enumerated the fields of ripening corn and bemoaned the shortage of reapers. Still, he hoped she did not plan to stay long. Lying beside her at night was like sleeping with a dead cow.

She reappeared at suppertime. She sat next to Ralph and spoke politely to several visiting knights during the meal. She was as cool and reserved as ever—there was no affection, not even any humor—but he saw no sign of the implacable, icy hatred she had shown after their wedding. It was gone, or at least deeply hidden. When the meal was over, she retired again, leaving him to drink with the knights.

He considered the possibility that she was planning to come back permanently, but in the end he dismissed the idea. She would never love him or even like him. It was just that a long absence had blunted the edge of her resentment. The underlying feeling would probably never leave her.

He assumed she would be asleep when he went upstairs but, to his surprise, she was at the writing desk, in an ivory-colored linen nightgown, a single candle throwing a soft light over her proud features and thick dark hair. In front of her was a long letter in a girlish hand, which he guessed was from Odila, now the countess of Monmouth. Philippa was penning a reply. Like most aristocrats, she dictated business letters to a clerk, but wrote personal ones herself.

He stepped into the garderobe, then came out and took off his outer clothing. It was summer, and he normally slept in his underdrawers.

Philippa finished her letter, stood up—and knocked over the jar of ink on the desk. She jumped back, too late. Somehow it fell toward her, disfiguring her white nightdress with a broad black stain. She cursed. He was mildly amused: she was so prissily particular that it was funny to see her splashed with ink.

She hesitated for a moment, then pulled the nightdress off over her head.

He was startled. She was not normally quick to take off her clothes. She had been disconcerted by the ink, he realized. He stared at her naked body. She had put on a little weight at the nunnery: her breasts seemed larger and rounder than before, her belly had a slight but discernible bulge, and her hips had an attractive swelling curve. To his surprise, he felt aroused.

She bent down to mop the ink off the tiled floor with her bundled-up nightgown. Her breasts swayed as she rubbed the tiles. She turned, and he got a full view of her generous behind. If he had not known her better, he would have suspected her of trying to inflame him. But Philippa had never tried to inflame anyone, let alone him. She was just awkward and embarrassed. And that made it even more stimulating to stare at her exposed nakedness while she wiped the floor.

It was several weeks since he had been with a woman, and the last one had been a very unsatisfactory whore in Salisbury.

By the time Philippa stood up, he had an erection.

She saw him staring. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “Go to bed.” She threw the soiled garment into the laundry hamper.

She went to the clothespress and lifted its lid. She had left most of her clothes here when she went to Kingsbridge: it was not considered seemly to dress richly when living in a nunnery, even for noble guests. She found another nightdress. Ralph raked her with his eyes as she lifted it out. He stared at her uplifted breasts, and the mound of her sex with its dark hair, and his mouth went dry.

She caught his look. “Don’t you touch me,” she said.

If she had not said that, he would probably have lain down and gone to sleep. But her swift rejection stung him. “I’m the earl of Shiring and you’re my wife,” he said. “I’ll touch you anytime I like.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, and she turned away to put on the gown.

That angered him. As she lifted the garment to put it on over her head, he slapped her bottom. It was a hard slap on bare skin, and he could tell that it hurt her. She jumped and cried out. “So much for not daring,” he said. She turned to him, a protest on her lips, and on impulse he punched her in the mouth. She was knocked back and fell to the floor. Her hands flew to her mouth, and blood seeped through her fingers. But she was on her back, naked, with her legs spread, and he could see the triangle of hair at the fork of her thighs, with its cleft slightly parted in what looked like an invitation.

He fell on her.

She wriggled furiously, but he was bigger than she, and strong. He overcame her resistance effortlessly. A moment later he was inside her. She was dry, but somehow that excited him.

It was all over quite quickly. He rolled off her, panting. After a few moments he looked at her. There was blood on her mouth. She did not look back at him: her eyes were closed. Yet it seemed to him that there was a curious expression on her face. He thought about it for a while until he worked it out; then he was even more puzzled than before.

She looked triumphant.

 

Merthin knew that Philippa had returned to Kingsbridge, because he saw her maid in the Bell. He expected his lover to come to his house that night, and was disappointed when she did not. No doubt she felt awkward, he thought. No lady would be comfortable with what she had done, even though the reasons were compelling, even though the man she loved knew and understood.

Another night went by without her appearing, then it was Sunday and he felt sure he would see her in church. But she did not come to the service. It was almost unheard of for the nobility to miss Sunday mass. What had kept her away?

After the service he sent Lolla home with Arn and Em, then went across the green to the old hospital. On the upper floor were three rooms for important guests. He took the outside staircase.

In the corridor he came face-to-face with Caris.

She did not bother to ask what he was doing here. “The countess doesn’t want you to see her, but you probably should,” she said.

Merthin noted the odd turn of phrase: Not “The countess doesn’t want to see you,” but “The countess doesn’t want you to see her.” He looked at the bowl Caris was carrying. It contained a bloodstained rag. Fear struck his heart. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing too serious,” Caris said. “The baby is unharmed.”

“Thank God.”

“You’re the father, of course?”

“Please don’t ever let anyone hear you say that.”

She looked sad. “All the years you and I were together, and I only conceived that one time.”

He looked away. “Which room is she in?”

“Sorry to talk about myself. I’m the last thing you’re interested in. Lady Philippa is in the middle room.”

He caught the poorly suppressed grief in her voice and paused, despite his anxiety for Philippa. He touched Caris’s arm. “Please don’t believe I’m not interested in you,” he said. “I’ll always care what happens to you, and whether you’re happy.”

She nodded, and tears came to her eyes. “I know,” she said. “I’m being selfish. Go and see Philippa.”

He left Caris and entered the middle room. Philippa was kneeling on the prie-dieu with her back to him. He interrupted her prayers. “Are you all right?”

She stood up and turned to him. Her face was a mess. Her lips were swollen to three times their normal size and badly scabbed.

He guessed that Caris had been bathing the wound—hence the bloody rag. “What happened?” he said. “Can you speak?”

She nodded. “I sound queer, but I can talk.” Her voice was a mumble, but comprehensible.

“How badly are you hurt?”

“My face looks awful, but it’s not serious. Other than that, I’m fine.”

He put his arms around her. She laid her head on his shoulder. He waited, holding her. After a while, she began to cry. He stroked her hair and her back while she shook with sobs. He said: “There, there,” and kissed her forehead, but he did not try to silence her.

Slowly, her weeping subsided.

He said: “Can I kiss your lips?”

She nodded. “Gently.”

He brushed them with his own. He tasted almonds: Caris had smeared the cuts with oil. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

“It worked. He was fooled. He will be sure it’s his baby.”

He touched her mouth with his fingertip. “And he did this?”

“Don’t be angry. I tried to provoke him, and I succeeded. Be glad he hit me.”

“Glad! Why?”

“Because he thinks he had to force me. He believes I would not have submitted without violence. He has no inkling that I intended to seduce him. He will never suspect the truth. Which means I’m safe—and so is our baby.”

He put his hand on her belly. “But why didn’t you come and see me?”

“Looking like this?”

“I want to be with you even more when you’re hurt.” He moved his hand to her breast. “Besides, I’ve missed you.”

She took his hand away. “I can’t go from one to the other like a whore.”

“Oh.” He had not thought of it that way.

“Do you understand?”

“I think so.” He could see that a woman would feel cheap—although a man might be proud of doing exactly the same thing. “But how long…?”

She sighed, and moved away. “It’s not how long.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve agreed to tell the world that this is Ralph’s baby, and I’ve made sure he’ll believe that. Now he’s going to want to raise it.”

Merthin was dismayed. “I hadn’t thought about the details, but I imagined you would continue to live in the priory.”

“Ralph won’t allow his child to be raised in a nunnery, especially if it’s a boy.”

“So what will you do, go back to Earlscastle?”

“Yes.”

The child was nothing yet, of course; not a person, not even a baby, just a swelling in Philippa’s belly. But all the same Merthin felt a stab of grief. Lolla had become the great joy of his life, and he had been looking forward eagerly to another child.

But at least he had Philippa for a little while longer. “When will you go?” he asked.

“Immediately,” she said. She saw the look on his face, and tears came to her eyes. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am—but I would just feel wrong, making love to you and planning to return to Ralph. It would be the same with any two men. The fact that you’re brothers just makes it uglier.”

His eyes blurred with tears. “So it’s over with us already? Now?”

She nodded. “And there’s another thing I have to tell you, one more reason why we can never be lovers again. I’ve confessed my adultery.”

Merthin knew that Philippa had her own personal confessor, as was appropriate for a high-ranking noblewoman. Since she came to Kingsbridge, he had been living with the monks, a welcome addition to their thinned ranks. So now she had told him of her affair. Merthin hoped he could keep the secrets of the confessional.

Philippa said: “I have received absolution, but I must not continue the sin.”

Merthin nodded. She was right. They had both sinned. She had betrayed her husband, and he had betrayed his brother. She had an excuse: she had been forced into the marriage. He had none. A beautiful woman had fallen in love with him and he had loved her back, even though he had no right. The yearning ache of grief and loss he was feeling now was the natural consequence of such behavior.

He looked at her—the cool gray-green eyes, the smashed mouth, the ripe body—and realized that he had lost her. Perhaps he had never really had her. In any case it had always been wrong, and now it was over. He tried to speak, to say good-bye, but his throat seemed to seize up, and nothing came out. He could hardly see for crying. He turned away, fumbled for the door, and somehow got out of the room.

A nun was coming along the corridor carrying a jug. He could not see who it was, but he recognized Caris’s voice when she said: “Merthin? Are you all right?”

He made no reply. He went in the opposite direction and passed through the door and down the outside staircase. Weeping openly, not caring who saw, he walked across the cathedral green, down the main street, and across the bridge to his island.

80

September 1350 was cold and wet, but all the same there was a sense of euphoria. As damp sheaves of wheat were gathered in the surrounding countryside, only one person died of the plague in Kingsbridge: Marge Taylor, a dressmaker of sixty years old. No one caught the disease in October, November, or December. It seemed to have vanished, Merthin thought gratefully—at least for the time being.

The age-old migration of enterprising, restless people from countryside to town had been reversed during the plague, but now it recommenced. They came to Kingsbridge, moved into empty houses, fixed them up, and paid rent to the priory. Some started new businesses—bakeries, breweries, candle manufactories—to replace the old ones that had disappeared when the owners and all their heirs died off. Merthin, as alderman, had made it easier to open a shop or a market stall, sweeping away the lengthy process of obtaining permission that had been imposed by the priory. The weekly market grew busier.

One by one Merthin rented out the shops, houses, and taverns he had built on Leper Island, his tenants either enterprising newcomers or existing tradesmen who wanted a better location. The road across the island, between the two bridges, had become an extension of the main street, and therefore prime commercial property—as Merthin had foreseen, twelve years ago, when people had thought he was mad to take the barren rock as payment for his work on the bridge.

Winter drew in, and once again the smoke from thousands of fires hung over the town in a low, brown cloud; but the people still worked and shopped, ate and drank, played dice in taverns and went to church on Sundays. The guildhall saw the first Christmas Eve banquet since the parish guild had become a borough guild.

Merthin invited the prior and prioress. They no longer had the power to overrule the merchants, but they were still among the most important people in town. Philemon came, but Caris declined the invitation: she had become worryingly withdrawn.

Merthin sat next to Madge Webber. She was now the richest merchant and the largest employer in Kingsbridge, perhaps in the whole county. She was deputy alderman, and probably should have been alderman but for the fact that it was unusual to have a woman in that position.

Among Merthin’s many enterprises was a workshop turning out the treadle looms that had improved the quality of Kingsbridge Scarlet. Madge bought more than half his production, but enterprising merchants came from as far away as London to place orders for the rest. The looms were complex pieces of machinery that had to be made accurately and assembled with precision, so Merthin had to employ the best carpenters available; but he priced the finished product at more than double what it cost him to make, and still people could hardly wait to give him the money.

Several people had hinted that he should marry Madge, but the idea did not tempt him or her. She had never been able to find a man to match Mark, who had had the physique of a giant and the disposition of a saint. She had always been chunky, but these days she was quite fat. Now in her forties, she was growing into one of those women who looked like barrels, almost the same width all the way from shoulders to bottom. Eating and drinking well were now her chief pleasures, Merthin thought as he watched her tuck into gingered ham with a sauce made of apples and cloves. That and making money.

At the end of the meal they had a mulled wine called hippocras. Madge took a long draft, belched, and moved closer to Merthin on the bench. “We have to do something about the hospital,” she said.

“Oh?” He was not aware of a problem. “Now that the plague has ended, I would have thought people didn’t have much need of a hospital.”

“Of course they do,” she said briskly. “They still get fevers and bellyaches and cancer. Women want to get pregnant and can’t, or they suffer complications giving birth. Children burn themselves and fall out of trees. Men are thrown by their horses or knifed by their enemies or have their heads broken by angry wives—”

“Yes, I get the picture,” Merthin said, amused by her garrulousness. “What’s the problem?”

“Nobody will go to the hospital anymore. They don’t like Brother Sime and, more importantly, they don’t trust his learning. While we were all coping with the plague, he was at Oxford reading ancient textbooks, and he still prescribes remedies such as bleeding and cupping that no one believes in anymore. They want Caris—but she never appears.”

“What do people do when they’re sick, if they don’t go to the hospital?”

“They see Matthew Barber, or Silas Pothecary, or a newcomer called Marla Wisdom who specializes in women’s problems.”

“So what’s worrying you?”

“They’re starting to mutter about the priory. If they don’t get help from the monks and nuns, they say, why should they pay toward building the tower?”

“Oh.” The tower was a huge project. No individual could possibly finance it. A combination of monastery, nunnery, and city funds was the only way to pay for it. If the town defaulted, the project could be threatened. “Yes, I see,” said Merthin worriedly. “That is a problem.”

 

It had been a good year for most people, Caris thought as she sat through the Christmas Day service. People were adjusting to the devastation of the plague with astonishing speed. As well as bringing terrible suffering and a near-breakdown of civilized life, the disease had provided the opportunity for a shake-up. Almost half the population had died, by her calculations; but one effect was that her remaining peasants were farming only the most fertile soils, so each man produced more. Despite the Ordinance of Laborers, and the efforts of noblemen such as Earl Ralph to enforce it, she was gratified to see that people continued to move to where the pay was highest, which was usually where the land was most productive. Grain was plentiful and herds of cattle and sheep were growing again. The nunnery was thriving and, because Caris had reorganized the monks’ affairs as well as the nuns’ after the flight of Godwyn, the monastery was now more prosperous than it had been for a hundred years. Wealth created wealth, and good times in the countryside brought more business to the towns, so Kingsbridge craftsmen and shopkeepers were beginning to return to their former affluence.

As the nuns left the church at the end of the service, Prior Philemon spoke to her. “I need to talk to you, Mother Prioress. Would you come to my house?”

There had been a time when she would have politely acceded to such a request without hesitation, but those days were over. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

He reddened immediately. “You can’t refuse to speak to me!”

“I didn’t. I refused to go to your palace. I decline to be summoned before you like a subordinate. What do you want to talk about?”

“The hospital. There have been complaints.”

“Speak to Brother Sime—he’s in charge of it, as you well know.”

“Is there no reasoning with you?” he said exasperatedly. “If Sime could solve the problem I would be talking to him, not you.”

By now they were in the monks’ cloisters. Caris sat on the low wall around the quadrangle. The stone was cold. “We can talk here. What do you have to say to me?”

Philemon was annoyed, but he gave in. He stood in front of her, and now he was the one who seemed like a subordinate. He said. “The townspeople are unhappy about the hospital.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Merthin complained to me at the guild’s Christmas dinner. They don’t come here anymore, but see charlatans like Silas Pothecary.”

“He’s no more of a charlatan than Sime.”

Philemon realized that several novices were standing nearby, listening to the argument. “Go away, all of you,” he said. “Get to your studies.”

They scurried off.

Philemon said to Caris: “The townspeople think you ought to be at the hospital.”

“So do I. But I won’t follow Sime’s methods. At best, his cures have no effect. Much of the time they make patients worse. That’s why people no longer come here when they’re ill.”

“Your new hospital has so few patients that we’re using it as a guest house. Doesn’t that bother you?”

That jibe went home. Caris swallowed and looked away. “It breaks my heart,” she said quietly.

“Then come back. Figure out a compromise with Sime. You worked under monk-physicians in the early days, when you first came here. Brother Joseph was the senior doctor then. He had the same training as Sime.”

“You’re right. In those days, we felt that the monks sometimes did more harm than good, but we could work with them. Most of the time we didn’t call them in at all, we just did what we thought best. When they did attend, we didn’t always follow their instructions exactly.”

“You can’t believe they were always wrong.”

“No. Sometimes they cured people. I remember Joseph opening a man’s skull and draining accumulated fluid that had been causing unbearable headaches—it was very impressive.”

“So do the same now.”

“It’s no longer possible. Sime put an end to that, didn’t he? He moved his books and equipment into the pharmacy and took charge of the hospital. And I’m sure he did so with your encouragement. In fact it was probably your idea.” She could tell from Philemon’s expression that she was right. “You and he plotted to push me out. You succeeded—and now you’re suffering the consequences.”

“We could go back to the old system. I’ll make Sime move out.”

She shook her head. “There have been other changes. I’ve learned a lot from the plague. I’m surer than ever that the physicians’ methods can be fatal. I won’t kill people for the sake of a compromise with you.”

“You don’t realize how much is at stake.” He had a faintly smug look.

So, there was something else. She had been wondering why he had brought this up. It was not like him to fret about the hospital: he had never cared much for the work of healing. He was interested only in what would raise his status and defend his fragile pride. “All right,” she said. “What have you got up your sleeve?”

“The townspeople are talking about cutting off funds for the new tower. Why should they pay extra to the cathedral, they say, when they’re not getting what they want from us? And now that the town is a borough, I as prior can no longer enforce the payment.”

“And if they don’t pay…?”

“Your beloved Merthin will have to abandon his pet project,” Philemon said triumphantly.

Caris could see that he thought this was his trump card. And, indeed, there had been a time when the revelation would have jolted her. But no longer. “Merthin isn’t my beloved anymore, is he,” she said. “You put a stop to that, too.”

A look of panic crossed his face. “But the bishop has set his heart on this tower—you can’t put that at risk!”

Caris stood up. “Can’t I?” she said. “Why not?” She turned away, heading for the nunnery.

He was flabbergasted. He called after her: “How can you be so reckless?”

She was going to ignore him, then she changed her mind and decided to explain. She turned back. “You see, all that I ever held dear has been taken from me,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “And when you’ve lost everything—” Her facade began to crumble, and her voice broke, but she made herself carry on. “When you’ve lost everything, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

 

The first snow fell in January. It formed a thick blanket on the roof of the cathedral, smoothed out the delicate carving of the spires, and masked the faces of the angels and saints sculpted over the west door. The new masonry of the tower foundations had been covered with straw to insulate the new mortar against winter frost, and now the snow overlaid the straw.

There were few fireplaces in a priory. The kitchen had fires, of course, which was why work in kitchens was always popular with novices. But there was no fire in the cathedral, where the monks and nuns spent seven or eight hours every day. When churches burned down, it was usually because some desperate monk had brought a charcoal brazier into the building, and a spark had flown from the fire to the timber ceiling. When not in church or laboring, the monks and nuns were supposed to walk and read in the cloisters, which were out of doors. The only concession to their comfort was the warming room, a small chamber off the cloisters where a fire was lit in the most severe weather. They were allowed to come into the warming room from the cloisters for short periods.

As usual, Caris ignored rules and traditions, and permitted nuns to wear woolen hose in the winter. She did not believe that God needed his servants to get chilblains.

Bishop Henri was so worried about the hospital—or rather, about the threat to his tower—that he drove from Shiring to Kingsbridge through the snow. He came in a charette, a heavy wooden cart with a waxed canvas cover and cushioned seats. Canon Claude and Archdeacon Lloyd came with him. They paused at the prior’s palace only long enough to dry their clothes and drink a warming cup of wine before summoning a crisis meeting with Philemon, Sime, Caris, Oonagh, Merthin, and Madge.

Caris knew it would be a waste of time, but she went anyway: it was easier than refusing, which would have required her to sit in the nunnery and deal with endless messages begging, commanding, and threatening her.

She looked at the snowflakes falling past the glazed windows as the bishop drearily summarized a quarrel in which she really had no interest. “This crisis has been brought about by the disloyal and disobedient attitude of Mother Caris,” Henri said.

That stung her into a response. “I worked in the hospital here for ten years,” she said. “My work, and the work of Mother Cecilia before me, are what made it so popular with the townspeople.” She pointed a rude finger at the bishop. “You changed it. Don’t try to blame others. You sat in that chair and announced that Brother Sime would henceforth be in charge. Now you should take responsibility for the consequences of your foolish decision.”

“You must obey me!” he said, his voice rising to a screech in frustration. “You are a nun—you have taken a vow.” The grating sound disturbed the cat, Archbishop, and it stood up and walked out of the room.

“I realize that,” Caris said. “It puts me in an intolerable position.” She spoke without forethought, but as the words came out she realized they were not really ill-considered. In fact they were the fruit of months of brooding. “I can no longer serve God in this way,” she went on, her voice calm but her heart pounding. “That is why I have decided to renounce my vows and leave the nunnery.”

Henri actually stood up. “You will not!” he shouted. “I will not release you from your holy vows.”

“I expect God will, though,” she said, scarcely disguising her contempt.

That made him angrier. “This notion that individuals can deal with God is wicked heresy. There has been too much of such loose talk since the plague.”

“Do you think that might have happened because, when people approached the church for help during the plague, they so often found that its priest and monks…,” here she looked at Philemon, “…had fled like cowards?”

Henri held up a hand to stifle Philemon’s indignant response. “We may be fallible but, all the same, it is only through the church and its priests that men and women may approach God.”

“You would think that, of course,” Caris said. “But that doesn’t make it right.”

“You’re a devil!”

Canon Claude intervened. “All things considered, my lord bishop, a public quarrel between yourself and Caris would not be helpful.” He gave her a friendly smile. He had been well disposed toward her ever since the day she had caught him and the bishop kissing and had said nothing about it. “Her present noncooperation must be set against many years of dedicated, sometimes heroic service. And the people love her.”

Henri said: “But what if we do release her from her vows? How would that solve the problem?”

At this point, Merthin spoke for the first time. “I have a suggestion,” he said.

Everyone looked at him.

He said: “Let the town build a new hospital. I will donate a large site on Leper Island. Let it be staffed by a convent of nuns quite separate from the priory, a new group. They will be under the spiritual authority of the bishop of Shiring, of course, but have no connection with the prior of Kingsbridge or any of the physicians at the monastery. Let the new hospital have a lay patron, who would be a leading citizen of the town, chosen by the guild, and would appoint the prioress.”

They were all quiet for a long moment, letting this radical proposal sink in. Caris was thunderstruck. A new hospital…on Leper Island…paid for by the townspeople…staffed by a new order of nuns…having no connection with the priory…

She looked around the group. Philemon and Sime clearly hated the idea. Henri, Claude, and Lloyd just looked bemused.

At last the bishop said: “The patron will be very powerful—representing the townspeople, paying the bills, and appointing the prioress. Whoever plays that role will control the hospital.”

“Yes,” said Merthin.

“If I authorize a new hospital, will the townspeople be willing to resume paying for the tower?”

Madge Webber spoke for the first time. “If the right patron is appointed, yes.”

“And who should it be?” said Henri.

Caris realized that everyone was looking at her.

 

A few hours later, Caris and Merthin wrapped themselves in heavy cloaks, put on boots, and walked through the snow to the island, where he showed her the site he had in mind. It was on the west side, not far from his house, overlooking the river.

She was still dizzy from the sudden change in her life. She was to be released from her vows as a nun. She would become a normal citizen again, after almost twelve years. She found she could contemplate leaving the priory without anguish. The people she had loved were all dead: Mother Cecilia, Old Julie, Mair, Tilly. She liked Sister Joan and Sister Oonagh well enough, but it was not the same.

And she would still be in charge of a hospital. Having the right to appoint and dismiss the prioress of the new institution, she would be able to run the place according to the new thinking that had grown out of the plague. The bishop had agreed to everything.

“I think we should use the cloister layout again,” Merthin said. “It seemed to work really well for the short time you were in charge.”

She stared at the sheet of unmarked snow and marveled at his ability to imagine walls and rooms where she could see only whiteness. “The entrance arch was used almost like a hall,” she said. “It was the place where people waited, and where the nuns first examined the patients before deciding what to do with them.”

“You would like it larger?”

“I think it should be a real reception hall.”

“All right.”

She was bemused. “This is hard to believe. Everything has turned out just as I would have wanted it.”

He nodded. “That’s how I worked it out.”

“Really?”

“I asked myself what you would wish for, then I figured out how to achieve it.”

She stared at him. He had said it lightly, as if merely explaining the reasoning process that had led him to his conclusions. He seemed to have no idea how momentous it was to her that he should be thinking about her wishes and how to achieve them.

She said: “Has Philippa had the baby yet?”

“Yes, a week ago.”

“What did she have?”

“A boy.”

“Congratulations. Have you seen him?”

“No. As far as the world is concerned, I’m only his uncle. But Ralph sent me a letter.”

“Have they named him?”

“Roland, after the old earl.”

Caris changed the subject. “The river water isn’t very pure this far downstream. A hospital really needs clean water.”

“I’ll lay a pipe to bring you water from farther upstream.”

The snowfall eased and then stopped, and they had a clear view of the island.

She smiled at him. “You have the answer to everything.”

He shook his head. “These are the easy questions: clean water, airy rooms, a reception hall.”

“And what are the difficult ones?”

He turned to face her. There were snowflakes in his red beard. He said: “Questions like: Does she still love me?”

They stared at one another for a long moment.

Caris was happy.