"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 Bro
ther 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.