Epic Historial Collection (264 page)

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

“It's because I love you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

He grinned at her, feeling happy.

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

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

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

Caris said: “When did you come back?”

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

“And you look…such a man.”

Merthin laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you became a nun.”

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

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

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

“You feel the same.”

“I never changed.”

“Did you try?”

She met his eye. “There's a nun…”

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

“How did you guess?”

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

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

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

“But you didn't forget me.”

“No.”

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

“Leave the nunnery?”

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

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

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

“Of course it is!” she said angrily.

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

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

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

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

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

She looked miserable. “I'm not sure.”

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

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

“Then leave.”

“And do what?”

“Marry me, of course.”

“Is that all?”

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

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

“If you need someone to take care of…”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I don't know,” she said.

55

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

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

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

Eventually he drifted into a troubled sleep.

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

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