World Without End

"Can't get them, Mother."

  Harry interjected again. "Not on the old terms, anyhow."

  Will glared at him, but Caris said: "What do you mean?"

  "Prices have fallen, you see, even though it's spring when corn is usually dear."

  Caris nodded. That was how markets worked, everyone knew: if there were fewer buyers, the price fell. "But people must live somehow."

  "They don't want to grow wheat and barley and oats--but they have to grow what they're told, at least in this valley. So a man looking for a tenancy would rather go elsewhere."

  "And what will he get elsewhere?"

  Will interrupted angrily: "They want to do as they please."

  Harry answered Caris's question. "They want to be free tenants, paying cash rent, rather than serfs working one day a week on the lord's land; and they want to be able to grow different crops."

  "What crops?"

  "Hemp, or flax, or apples and pears--things they know they can sell at the market. Maybe something different every year. But that's never been allowed in Outhenby." Harry seemed to recollect himself, and added: "No offense to your holy order, Mother Prioress, nor to Will Bailiff, an honest man as everyone knows."

  Caris saw how it was. Bailiffs were always conservative. In good times, it hardly mattered: the old ways sufficed. But this was a crisis.

  She assumed her most authoritative manner. "All right, listen carefully, now, Will, and I'll tell you what you're going to do." Will looked startled: he had thought he was being consulted, not commanded. "First, you are to stop plowing the hillsides. It's foolish when we've got good land uncultivated."

  "But--"

  "Be quiet and listen. Offer every tenant an exchange, acre for acre, good valley bottom instead of hillside."

  "Then what will we do with the hillside?"

  "Convert it to grazing, cattle on the lower slopes and sheep on the higher. You don't need many men for that, just a few boys to herd them."

  "Oh," said Will. It was plain that he wanted to argue, but he could not immediately think of an objection.

  Caris went on: "Next, any valley bottomland that is still untenanted should be offered as a free tenancy with cash rent to anyone who will take it on." A free tenancy meant that the tenant was not a serf, and did not have to work on the lord's land, or get his permission to marry or build a house. All he had to do was pay his rent.

  "You're doing away with all the old customs."

  She pointed at the fallow strip. "The old customs are letting my land go to waste. Can you think of another way to stop this happening?"

  "Well," said Will, and there was a long pause; then he shook his head silently.

  "Thirdly, offer wages of twopence a day to anyone who will work the land."

  "Twopence a day!"

  Caris felt she could not rely on Will to implement these changes vigorously. He would drag his feet and invent excuses. She turned to the cocksure plowman. She would make him the champion of her reforms. "Harry, I want you to go to every market in the county over the next few weeks. Spread the word that anyone who is on the move can do well in Outhenby. If there are laborers looking for wages, I want them to come here."

  Harry grinned and nodded, though Will still looked a bit dazed.

  "I want to see all this good land growing crops this summer," she said. "Is that clear?"

  "Yes," said Will. "Thank you, Mother Prioress."

  Caris went through all the charters with Sister Joan, making a note of the date and subject of each. She decided to have them copied, one by one--the idea Godwyn had proposed, though he had only pretended to be copying them as a pretext for taking them away from the nuns. But it was a sound notion. The more copies there were, the harder it was for a valuable document to disappear.

  She was intrigued by a deed dated 1327 which assigned to the monks the large farm near Lynn, in Norfolk, that they called Lynn Grange. The gift was made on condition the priory took on, as a novice monk, a knight called Sir Thomas Langley.

  Caris was taken back to her childhood, and the day she had ventured into the wood with Merthin, Ralph, and Gwenda, and they had seen Thomas receive the wound that had caused him to lose his arm.

  She showed the charter to Joan, who shrugged and said: "It's usual for such a gift to be made when someone from a wealthy family becomes a monk."

  "But look who the donor is."

  Joan looked again. "Queen Isabella!" Isabella was the widow of Edward II and the mother of Edward III. "What's her interest in Kingsbridge?"

  "Or in Thomas?" said Caris.

  A few days later she had a chance to find out. The bailiff of Lynn Grange, Andrew, came to Kingsbridge on his biannual visit. A Norfolk-born man of over fifty, he had been in charge of the grange ever since it was gifted to the priory. He was now white-haired and plump, which led Caris to believe that the grange continued to prosper despite the plague. Because Norfolk was several days' journey away, the grange paid its dues to the priory in coins, rather than drive cattle or cart produce all that way, and Andrew brought the money in gold nobles, the new coin worth a third of a pound, with an image of King Edward standing on the deck of a ship. When Caris had counted the money and given it to Joan to stash in the new treasury, she said to Andrew: "Why did Queen Isabella give us this grange twenty-two years ago, do you know?"

  To her surprise, Andrew's pink face turned pale. He made several false starts at answering, then said: "It's not for me to question Her Majesty's decisions."

  "No, indeed," Caris said in a reassuring tone. "I'm just curious about her motive."

  "She is a holy woman who has performed many pious acts."

  Like murdering her husband, Caris thought; but she said: "However, there must be a reason she named Thomas."

  "He petitioned the queen for a favor, like hundreds of others, and she graciously granted it, as great ladies sometimes do."

  "Usually when they have some connection with the petitioner."

  "No, no, I'm sure there's no connection."

  His anxiety made Caris sure he was lying, and just as sure that he would not tell her the truth, so she dropped the subject, and sent Andrew off to have supper in the hospital.

  Next morning she was accosted in the cloisters by Brother Thomas, the only monk left in the monastery. Looking angry, he said: "Why did you interrogate Andrew Lynn?"

  "Because I was curious," she said, taken aback.

  "What are you trying to do?"

  "I'm not trying to do anything." She was offended by his aggressive manner, but she did not want to quarrel with him. To ease the tension, she sat on the low wall around the edge of the arcade. A spring sun was shining bravely into the quadrangle. She spoke in a conversational tone. "What's this all about?"

  Thomas said stiffly: "Why are you investigating me?"

  "I'm not," she said. "Calm down. I'm going through all the charters, listing them and having them copied. I came across one that puzzled me."

  "You're delving into matters that are none of your business."

  She bridled. "I'm the prioress of Kingsbridge, and the acting prior--nothing here is secret from me."

  "Well, if you start digging up all that old stuff, you'll regret it, I promise you."

  It sounded like a threat, but she decided not to challenge him. She tried a different tack. "Thomas, I thought we were friends. You have no right to forbid me to do anything, and I'm disappointed that you should even try. Don't you trust me?"

  "You don't know what you're asking."

  "Then enlighten me. What does Queen Isabella have to do with you, me, and Kingsbridge?"

  "Nothing. She's an old woman now, living in retirement."

  "She's fifty-three. She's deposed one king, and she could probably depose another if she had a mind to. And she has some long-hidden connection with my priory which you are determined to keep from me."

  "For your own good."

  She ignored that. "Twenty-two years ago someone was trying to kill you. Was it the same person who, having f
ailed to do away with you, paid you off by getting you admitted to the monastery?"

  "Andrew is going to go back to Lynn and tell Isabella that you've been asking these questions--do you realize that?"

  "Why would she care? Why are people so afraid of you, Thomas?"

  "Everything will be answered when I'm dead. None of it will matter then." He turned around and walked away.

  The bell rang for dinner. Caris went to the prior's palace, deep in thought. Godwyn's cat, Archbishop, was sitting on the doorstep. It glared at her and she shooed it away. She would not have it in the house.

  She had got into the habit of dining every day with Merthin. Traditionally the prior regularly dined with the alderman, though to do so every day was unusual--but these were unusual times. That, at any rate, would have been her excuse, had anyone challenged her; but nobody did. Meanwhile they both looked out eagerly for another excuse to go on a trip so that they could again be alone together.

  He came in muddy from his building site on Leper Island. He had stopped asking her to renounce her vows and leave the priory. He seemed content, at least for the moment, to see her every day and hope for future chances to be more intimate.

  A priory employee brought them ham stewed with winter greens. When the servant had gone, Caris told Merthin about the charter and Thomas's reaction. "He knows a secret that could damage the old queen if it got out."

  "I think that must be right," Merthin said thoughtfully.

  "On All Hallows Day in 1327, after I ran away, he caught you, didn't he?"

  "Yes. He made me help him bury a letter. I had to swear to keep it secret--until he dies, then I am to dig it up and give it to a priest."

  "He told me all my questions would be answered when he died."

  "I think the letter is the threat he holds over his enemies. They must know that its contents will be revealed when he dies. So they fear to kill him--in fact they have made sure he remains alive and well by helping him become a monk of Kingsbridge."

  "Can it matter, still?"

  "Ten years after we buried the letter, I told him I hadn't ever let the secret out, and he said: 'If you had, you'd be dead.' That scared me more than the vow."

  "Mother Cecilia told me that Edward II did not die naturally."

  "How would she know a thing like that?"

  "My uncle Anthony told her. So I presume the secret is that Queen Isabella had her husband murdered."

  "Half the country believes that anyway. But if there were proof...Did Cecilia say how he was killed?"

  Caris thought hard. "No. Now that I think of it, what she said was: 'The old king did not die of a fall.' I asked her if he had been murdered--but she died without answering."

  "Still, why put out a false story about his death if not to cover up foul play?"

  "And Thomas's letter must somehow prove that there was foul play, and that the queen was in on it."

  They finished their dinner in thoughtful silence. In the monastery day, the hour after dinner was for rest or reading. Caris and Merthin usually lingered for a while. Today, however, Merthin was anxious about the angles of the roof timbers being erected in the new tavern, The Bridge, that he was building on Leper Island. They kissed hungrily, but he tore himself away and hurried back to the site. Disappointed, Caris opened a book called Ars Medica, a Latin translation of a work by the ancient Greek physician Galen. It was the cornerstone of university medicine, and she was reading it to find out what priests learned at Oxford and Paris; though she had so far found little that would help her.

  The maid came back and cleared the table. "Ask Brother Thomas to come and see me, please," Caris said. She wanted to make sure they were still friends despite their abrasive conversation.

  Before Thomas arrived, there was a commotion outside. She heard several horses and the kind of shouting that indicated a nobleman wanting attention. A few moments later the door was flung open and in walked Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, lord of Tench.

  He looked angry, but Caris pretended not to notice that. "Hello, Ralph," she said as amiably as she could. "This is an unexpected pleasure. Welcome to Kingsbridge."

  "Never mind all that," he said rudely. He walked up to where she sat and stood aggressively close. "Do you realize you're ruining the peasantry of the entire county?"

  Another figure followed him in and stood by the door, a big man with a small head, and Caris recognized his long-time sidekick, Alan Fernhill. Both were armed with swords and daggers. Caris was acutely aware that she was alone in the palace. She tried to defuse the scene. "Would you like some ham, Ralph? I've just finished dinner."

  Ralph was not to be diverted. "You've been stealing my peasants!"

  "Peasants, or pheasants?"

  Alan Fernhill burst out laughing.

  Ralph reddened and looked more dangerous, and Caris wished she had not made that joke. "If you poke fun at me you'll be sorry," he said.

  Caris poured ale into a cup. "I'm not laughing at you," she said. "Tell me exactly what's on your mind." She offered him the ale.

  Her shaking hand betrayed her fear, but he ignored the cup and wagged his finger at her. "Laborers have been disappearing from my villages--and when I inquire after them, I find they have moved to villages belonging to you, where they get higher wages."

  Caris nodded. "If you were selling a horse, and two men wanted to buy it, wouldn't you give it to the one who offered the higher price?"

  "That's not the same."

  "I think it is. Have some ale."

  With a sudden sideswipe of his hand, he knocked the cup from her grasp. It fell to the floor, the ale spilling into the straw. "They're my laborers."

  Her hand was bruised, but she tried to ignore the pain. She bent down, picked up the cup, and set it on the sideboard. "Not really," she said. "If they're laborers, that means you've never given them any land, so they have the right to go elsewhere."

  "I'm still their lord, damn it! And another thing. I offered a tenancy to a free man the other day and he refused it, saying he could get a better bargain from Kingsbridge Priory."

  "Same thing, Ralph. I need all the people I can get, so I give them what they want."

  "You're a woman, you don't think things through. You can't see that it will all end with everyone paying more for the same peasants."

  "Not necessarily. Higher wages might attract some of those who at present do no work at all--outlaws, for example, or those vagabonds who go around living off what they find in plague-emptied villages. And some who are now laborers might become tenants, and work harder because they're cultivating their own land."

  He banged the table with his fist, and she blinked at the sudden noise. "You've no right to change the old ways!"

  "I think I have."

  He grabbed the front of her robe. "Well, I'm not putting up with it!"

  "Take your hands off me, you clumsy oaf," she said.

  At that moment, Brother Thomas came in. "You sent for me--what the devil is going on here?"

  He stepped smartly across the room, and Ralph let go of Caris's robe as if it had suddenly caught fire. Thomas had no weapons and only one arm, but he had got the better of Ralph once before; and Ralph was scared of him.

  Ralph took a step back, then realized he had revealed his fear, and looked ashamed. "We're done here!" he said loudly, and turned to the door.

  Caris said: "What I'm doing in Outhenby and elsewhere is perfectly legitimate, Ralph."

  "It's interfering with the natural order!" he said.

  "There's no law against it."

  Alan opened the door for his master.

  "You wait and see," said Ralph, and he went out.

  67

  In March that year, 1349, Gwenda and Wulfric went with Nathan Reeve to the midweek market at the small town of Northwood.

  They were working for Sir Ralph now. Gwenda and Wulfric had escaped the plague, so far, but several of Ralph's laborers had died of it, so he needed help; and Nate, the bailiff of Wigleigh, had offered to take
them on. He could afford to pay normal wages, whereas Perkin had been giving them nothing more than their food.

  As soon as they announced they were going to work for Ralph, Perkin discovered that he could now afford to pay them normal wages--but he was too late.

  On this day they took a cartload of logs from Ralph's forest to sell in Northwood, a town that had had a timber market since time immemorial. The boys, Sam and David, went with them: there was no one else to look after them. Gwenda did not trust her father, and her mother had died two years ago. Wulfric's parents were long dead.

  Several other Wigleigh folk were at the market. Father Gaspard was buying seeds for his vegetable garden, and Gwenda's father, Joby, was selling freshly killed rabbits.

  Nate, the bailiff, was a stunted man with a twisted back, and he could not lift logs. He dealt with customers while Wulfric and Gwenda did the lifting. At midday he gave them a penny to buy their dinner at the Old Oak, one of the taverns around the square. They got bacon boiled with leeks and shared it with the boys. David, at eight years of age, still had a child's appetite, but Sam was a fast-growing ten and perpetually hungry.

  While they were eating, they overheard a conversation that caught Gwenda's attention.

  There was a group of young men standing in a corner, drinking large tankards of ale. They were all poorly dressed, except one with a bushy blond beard who had the superior clothes of a prosperous peasant or a village craftsman: leather trousers, good boots, and a new hat. The sentence that caused Gwenda to prick up her ears was: "We pay twopence a day for laborers at Outhenby."

  She listened hard, trying to learn more, but caught only scattered words. She had heard that some employers were offering more than the traditional penny a day, because of the shortage of workers caused by the plague. She had hesitated to believe such stories, which sounded too good to be true.

  She said nothing for the moment to Wulfric, who had not heard the magic words, but her heart beat faster. She and her family had endured so many years of poverty. Was it possible that life might get better for them?

  She had to find out more.

  When they had eaten, they sat on a bench outside, watching the boys and some other children running around the broad trunk of the tree that gave the tavern its name. "Wulfric," she said quietly. "What if we could earn twopence a day--each?"

  "How?"

  "By going to Outhenby." She told him what she had overheard. "It could be the beginning of a new life for us," she finished.