Epic Historial Collection (96 page)

Now, with the sky growing perceptibly lighter in the east on the morning of the big day, William could do no more. The sellers were here with their wares, and in a little while the buyers would begin to arrive. Philip thought William would find that in the end the Kingsbridge Fleece Fair damaged the Shiring fair less than he feared. Sales of wool seemed to go up every year without fail: there was enough business for two fairs anyway.

He had walked all the way around the close to the southwest corner, where the mills and the fishpond were. He stood there for a while, watching the water flow past the two silent mills. One was now used exclusively for felting cloth, and it made a lot of money. Young Jack was responsible for that. He had an ingenious mind. He was going to be a tremendous asset to the priory. He seemed to have settled quite well as a novice, although he tended to regard the services as a distraction from cathedral building, rather than the other way around. However, he would learn. The monastic life was a sanctifying influence. Philip thought God had a purpose for Jack. In the very back of Philip's mind was a secret long-term hope: that one day Jack would take his place as prior of Kingsbridge.

 

Jack got up at dawn and slipped out of the dormitory before the service of prime to make one last inspection tour of the building site. The morning air was cool and clear, like pure water from a spring. It would be a warm, sunny day, good for business, good for the priory.

He walked around the cathedral walls, making sure that all the tools and work-in-progress were safely locked inside the lodges. Tom had built light wooden fences around the stockpiles of timber and stone, to guard the raw materials against accidental damage by careless or drunken visitors. They did not want any daredevils climbing the structure, so all the ladders were safely hidden away, the spiral staircases in the thickness of the walls were closed off with temporary doors, and the stepped ends of the part-built walls were obstructed by wooden blocks. Some of the master craftsmen would be patrolling the site throughout the day to make sure there was no damage.

Jack managed to skip quite a lot of the services, one way or another. There was always something to be done on site. He did not have his mother's hatred of the Christian religion, but he was more or less indifferent to it. He had no enthusiasm for it, but he was willing to go through the motions if it suited his purpose. He made sure to go to one service every day, usually one that was attended either by Prior Philip or the novice-master, who were the two senior monks most likely to notice his presence or absence. He could not have borne it if he had to attend them all. Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches at all hours of the day and night. They deliberately shunned anything good—girls, sports, feasting and family life. However, Jack had noted, the happiest among them had usually found some pursuit that gave deep satisfaction: illustrating manuscripts, writing history, cooking, studying philosophy, or—like Philip—changing Kingsbridge from a sleepy village into a thriving cathedral city.

Jack did not like Philip but he liked working with him. Jack did not warm to professional men of God any more than his mother did. He was embarrassed by Philip's piety; he disliked his singleminded sinlessness; and he mistrusted his tendency to believe that God would take care of anything that he, Philip, could not cope with. Nevertheless, Philip was good to work for. His orders were clear, he left Jack room to make decisions for himself, and he never blamed his servants for his own mistakes.

Jack had been a novice only three months, so he would not be asked to take vows for another nine months. The three vows were poverty, celibacy and obedience. The vow of poverty was not all it seemed. Monks had no personal possessions and no money of their own, but they lived more like lords than like peasants—they had good food, warm clothes and fine stone buildings to live in. Celibacy was no problem, Jack thought bitterly. He had gained a certain cold satisfaction from telling Aliena personally that he was entering the monastery. She had looked shocked and guilty. Now, whenever he felt the restless irritability that came from the lack of female companionship, he would think of how Aliena had treated him—their secret assignations in the forest, their winter evenings, the two times he had kissed her—and then he would recall how she had suddenly turned as cold and hard as a rock; and thinking of that made him feel that he never wanted to have anything more to do with women. However, the vow of obedience would be difficult to keep, he could tell already. He was happy to take orders from Philip, who was intelligent and organized; but it was hard to obey the foolish sub-prior, Remigius, or the drunken guest-master, or the pompous sacrist.

Nevertheless, he was contemplating taking the vows. He did not have to keep them. All he cared about was building the cathedral. The problems of supply, construction and management were endlessly absorbing. One day he might have to help Tom devise a method of checking that the number of stones arriving at the site was the same as the number leaving the quarry—a complex problem, for the journey time varied between two days and four, so it was not possible to have a simple daily tally. Another day the masons might complain that the carpenters were not making the falsework properly. Most challenging of all were the engineering problems, such as how to lift tons of stone to the top of the walls using makeshift machinery fixed to flimsy scaffolding. Tom Builder discussed these problems with Jack as with an equal. He seemed to have forgiven Jack for that angry speech, in which Jack said that Tom had never done anything for him. And Tom acted as if he had forgotten the revelation that Jack had set fire to the old cathedral. They worked together cheerfully, and the days flew by. Even during the tedious services Jack's mind was occupied by some knotty question of construction or planning. His knowledge was increasing fast. Instead of spending years carving stones, he was learning cathedral design. There could hardly have been a better training for someone who wanted to be a master builder. For that, Jack was prepared to yawn through any number of midnight matins.

The sun was edging over the east wall of the priory close. Everything was in order on the site. The stall holders who had spent the night with their goods were beginning to fold away their bedding and put out their wares. The first customers would be here soon. A baker walked past Jack carrying a tray of new loaves on her head. The smell of hot fresh bread made Jack's mouth water. He turned and went back to the monastery, heading for the refectory, where they would soon be serving breakfast.

 

The first customers were the families of the stall holders and the townspeople, all curious to look at the first Kingsbridge Fleece Fair, none very interested in buying. Thrifty people had filled their bellies with horsebread and porridge before leaving home, so that they would not be tempted by the highly spiced and garishly colored confections on the food stalls. The children wandered around wide-eyed, dazzled by the display of desirable things. An optimistic early-rising whore with red lips and red boots sauntered along, smiling hopefully at middle-aged men, but there were no takers at this hour.

Aliena watched it all from her stall, which was one of the biggest. In the last few weeks she had taken delivery of Kingsbridge Priory's entire output of fleece for the year; the wool for which she had paid a hundred and seven pounds last summer. She had also been buying from farmers, as she always did; and this year there had been more sellers than usual, because William Hamleigh had forbidden his tenants to sell at the Kingsbridge fair, so they had all sold to merchants. And of all the merchants, Aliena had got the most business, because she was based at Kingsbridge where the fair was to be held. She had done so well that she had run out of money for buying, and had borrowed forty pounds from Malachi to keep her going. Now, in the warehouse that formed the rear half of her stall, she had a hundred and sixty sacks of raw wool, the product of forty thousand sheep, and it had cost her more than two hundred pounds, but she would sell it for three hundred, which was enough money to pay the wages of a skilled mason for over a century. The sheer scale of her own business amazed her whenever she thought of the numbers.

She did not expect to see her buyers until midday. There would be only five or six of them. They would all know each other, and she would know most of them from previous years. She would give each one a cup of wine, and sit and talk for a while. Then she would show him her wool. He would ask her to open a sack or two—never the top one on the pile, of course. He would plunge his hand deep into the sack and bring out a handful of wool. He would tease out the strands to determine their length, rub them between finger and thumb to test their softness, and sniff them. Finally he would offer to buy her entire stock at a ridiculously low price, and Aliena would refuse him. She would tell him her asking price, and he would shake his head. They would take another glass of wine.

Aliena would go through the same ritual with another buyer. She would give dinner to as many of them as were there at midday. Someone would offer to take a large quantity of wool at a price not much above what Aliena had paid for it. She would counter by dropping her asking price a shade. In the early afternoon she would begin closing deals. Her first deal would be at a lowish price. The other merchants would demand that she deal with them at the same price, but she would refuse. Her price would go up during the course of the afternoon. If it went up too fast, business would be slow, while the merchants calculated how soon they could fill their quotas elsewhere. If she was asking less than they were willing to pay, she would know by the relative haste with which they reached agreement. She would close deals one by one, and their servants would begin loading the huge sacks of wool onto the ox wagons with their enormous wooden wheels, while Aliena weighed the pound bags of silver pennies and guilders.

There was no doubt that today she would rake in more money than ever before. She had twice as much to sell, and wool prices were up. She planned to buy Philip's output a year in advance again, and she had a secret scheme to build herself a stone house, with spacious cellars for storage of wool, an elegant and comfortable hall, and a pretty upstairs bedroom just for herself. Her future was secure, and she was confident of being able to support Richard as long as he needed her. Everything was perfect.

That was why it was so strange that she was completely and utterly miserable.

 

It was four years, almost to the day, since Ellen had returned to Kingsbridge, and they had been the best four years of Tom's life.

The pain of Agnes's death had dulled to an ache. It was still with him, but he no longer got that embarrassing feeling that he was about to burst into tears every now and again for no apparent reason. He still held imaginary conversations with her, in which he told her about the children, and Prior Philip, and the cathedral; but the conversations were less frequent. The bittersweet memory of her had not blighted his love for Ellen. He was able to live in the present. Seeing Ellen and touching her, talking to her and sleeping with her were daily joys.

He had been deeply wounded, on the day of the fight between Jack and Alfred, by Jack's saying that Tom had never looked after him; and that accusation had overshadowed even the appalling revelation that Jack had set fire to the old cathedral. He had agonized over it for several weeks, but in the end he had decided that Jack was wrong. Tom had done his best, and no man could do any more. Having reached that conclusion he had stopped worrying.

Building Kingsbridge Cathedral was the most profoundly satisfying work he had ever done. He was responsible for the design and the execution. No one interfered with him, and there was no one else to blame if things went wrong. As the mighty walls rose, with their rhythmic arches, their graceful moldings, and their individual carvings, he could look around and think: I did all this, and I did it well.

His nightmare, that one day he would again find himself on the road with no work, no money and no way of feeding his children, seemed very far away, now that there was a stout money chest full to bursting with silver pennies buried under the straw in his kitchen. He still shuddered when he remembered that cold, cold night when Agnes had given birth to Jonathan and died; but he felt sure nothing that bad would ever happen again.

He sometimes wondered why Ellen and he had not had children. They had both been proved fertile in the past, and there was no shortage of opportunities for her to get pregnant—they still made love almost every night, even after four years. However, it was not a cause of deep regret to him. Little Jonathan was the apple of his eye.

He knew, from past experience, that the best way to enjoy a fair was with a small child, so he sought Jonathan out around midmorning, when the crowds began to arrive. Jonathan was almost an attraction in his own right, dressed as he was in his miniature habit. He had lately conceived a desire to have his head shaved, and Philip had indulged him—Philip was as fond of the child as Tom was—with the result that he looked more than ever like a tiny little monk. There were several real midgets in the crowd, performing tricks and begging, and they fascinated Jonathan. Tom had to hurry him away from one who drew a crowd by exposing his full-size penis. There were jugglers, acrobats and musicians performing and passing a hat round; soothsayers and surgeons and whores touting for business; trials of strength, wrestling contests and games of chance. People were wearing their most colorful clothes, and those who could afford it had doused themselves with scent and oiled their hair. Everyone seemed to have money to spend, and the air was full of the jingle of silver.