The Pillars of the Earth

by Ken Follett

  Remigius took him by the left arm. Jack cried out in pain. Remigius ignored him and grabbed Alfred's ear. He would probably issue some dire punishment to both of them, Jack thought. Jack hurt too much to care.

  Remigius spoke to Alfred. "Now, my lad, why are you trying to kill your brother?"

  "He's not my brother," Alfred said.

  Remigius's expression changed. "Not your brother?" he said. "Don't you have the same mother and father?"

  "She's not my mother," Alfred said. "My mother's dead."

  A crafty look came over Remigius's face. "When did your mother die?"

  "At Christmas."

  "Last Christmas?"

  "Yes."

  Despite his pain, Jack could see that Remigius was intensely interested in this, for some reason. The monk's voice quivered with suppressed excitement as he said: "So your father has only lately met this boy's mother?"

  "Yes."

  "And since they have been ... together, have they been to see a priest, to have their union solemnized?"

  "Uh ... I don't know." Alfred did not understand the words being used, Jack could tell. For that matter neither did Jack.

  Remigius said impatiently: "Well, have they had a wedding?"

  "No."

  "I see." Remigius looked pleased about this, although Jack would have thought he would be cross. There was a rather satisfied look on the monk's face. He was silent and thoughtful for a moment, then he seemed to remember the two boys. "Well, if you want to stay in the priory and eat the monks' bread, don't fight, even if you aren't brothers. We men of God must not see bloodshed--that is one of the reasons we live a life of withdrawal from the world." With that little speech Remigius released them both and turned away, and at last Jack could run to his mother.

  It had taken three weeks, not two, but Tom had got the crypt ready for use as a makeshift church, and today the bishop-elect was coming to hold the first service in it. The cloisters had been cleared of rubble, and Tom had repaired the damaged parts: cloisters were simple structures, just covered walkways, and the work had been easy. Most of the rest of the church was just heaps of ruins, and some of the walls that were still standing were in danger of falling, but Tom had cleared a passage from the cloisters, through what had been the south transept, to the crypt stairs.

  Tom looked around him. The crypt was a good size, about fifty feet square, plenty big enough for the monks' services. It was a rather dark room, with heavy pillars and a low vaulted ceiling, but it was stoutly constructed, which was why it had survived the fire. They had brought in a trestle table to be used as an altar, and the benches from the refectory would serve as stalls for the monks. When the sacrist brought in his embroidered altar cloths and jeweled candlesticks, it would look just fine.

  With the resumption of services Tom's work force would shrink. Most of the monks would return to their lives of worship, and many of those who did labor would resume their agricultural or administrative tasks. Tom would still have about half the priory servants as laborers, however. Prior Philip had taken a tough line with them. He felt there had been too many of them, and if any were unwilling to transfer from their duties as grooms or kitchen hands he was quite ready to dismiss them. A few had gone, but most remained.

  The priory already owed Tom three weeks' wages. At the full master builder's rate of fourpence a day, that came to seventy-two pence. As each day went by the debt mounted, and it would become more and more difficult for Prior Philip to pay Tom off. After about half a year Tom would ask the prior to start paying him. By then he would be owed two and a half pounds of silver, which Philip would have to find before he could dismiss Tom. The debt made Tom feel secure.

  There was even a chance--he hardly dared to think it--that this job would last him the rest of his life. It was, after all, a cathedral church; and if the powers-that-be were to decide to commission a prestigious new building, and if they could find the money to pay for it, it could be the largest construction project in the kingdom, employing dozens of masons for several decades.

  This was too much to hope for, really. Talking to the monks and the villagers, Tom had learned that Kingsbridge had never been an important cathedral. Tucked away in a quiet village, it had had a series of unambitious bishops and was clearly undergoing a slow decline. The priory was undistinguished and penniless. Some monasteries attracted the attention of kings and archbishops by their lavish hospitality, their excellent schools, their great libraries, the researches of their philosopher-monks or the erudition of their priors and abbots; but Kingsbridge had none of those marks. The likelihood was that Prior Philip would build a small church, constructed simply and fitted out modestly; and that might take no more than ten years.

  However, that suited Tom perfectly.

  He had realized, even before the fire-blackened ruins were cold, that this was his chance to build his own cathedral.

  Prior Philip was already convinced that God had sent Tom to Kingsbridge. Tom knew he had won Philip's trust by the efficient way he had begun the process of clearing up and made the priory viable again. When the moment was right he would begin talking to Philip about designs for the new building. If he handled the situation carefully, there was every chance that Philip would ask him to draw the designs. The fact that the new church was likely to be fairly modest made it more probable that the planning might be entrusted to Tom, rather than to a master with more experience of cathedral building. Tom's hopes were high.

  The bell rang for chapter. This was also the sign that the lay workers should go in for breakfast. Tom left the crypt and headed for the refectory. On his way he was confronted by Ellen.

  She stood aggressively in front of him, as if to bar his way, and there was an odd look in her eye. Martha and Jack were with her. Jack looked terrible: one eye was closed, the left side of his face was bruised and swollen, and he leaned on his right leg, as if his left could not take any weight. Tom felt sorry for the little chap. "What happened to you?" he said.

  Ellen said: "Alfred did this."

  Tom groaned inwardly. For a moment he felt ashamed of Alfred, who was so much bigger than Jack. But Jack was no angel. Perhaps Alfred had been provoked. Tom looked around for his son, and caught sight of him walking toward the refectory, covered with dust. "Alfred!" he bellowed. "Come here."

  Alfred turned around, saw the family group, and approached slowly, looking guilty.

  Tom said to him: "Did you do this?"

  "He fell off a wall," Alfred said sullenly.

  "Did you push him?"

  "I was chasing him."

  "Who started it?"

  "Jack called me a name."

  Jack, speaking through swollen lips, said: "I called him a pig because he took our bread."

  "Bread?" said Tom. "Where did you get bread before breakfast?"

  "Bernard Baker gave it to us. We fetched firewood for him."

  "You should have shared it with Alfred," Tom said.

  "I would have."

  Alfred said: "Then why did you run away?"

  "I was taking it home to Mother," Jack protested. "Then Alfred ate it all!"

  Fourteen years of raising children had taught Tom that there was no prospect of discovering the rights and wrongs of a childish quarrel. "Go to breakfast, all three of you, and if there's any more fighting today, you, Alfred, will end up with a face like Jack's, and I'll be the one who does it to you. Now clear off."

  The children went away.

  Tom and Ellen followed at a slower pace. After a moment Ellen said: "Is that all you're going to say?"

  Tom glanced at her. She was still angry, but there was nothing he could do about it. He shrugged. "As usual, both parties are guilty."

  "Tom! How can you say that?"

  "One's as bad as the other."

  "Alfred took their bread. Jack called him a pig. That doesn't draw blood!"

  Tom shook his head. "Boys always fight. You could spend your whole life adjudicating their quarrels. Best to leave them to it." />
  "That won't do, Tom," she said in a dangerous tone. "Look at Jack's face, then look at Alfred's. That's not the result of a childish fight. That's a vicious attack by a grown man on a small boy."

  Tom resented her attitude. Alfred was not perfect, he knew, but neither was Jack. Tom did not want Jack to become the pampered favorite in this family. "Alfred's not a grown man, he's fourteen years old. But he is working. He's making a contribution to the support of the family, and Jack isn't. Jack plays all day, like a child. In my book that means Jack ought to show Alfred respect. He does no such thing, as you will have noticed."

  "I don't care!" Ellen flared. "You can say what you like, but my son is badly bruised, and might have been seriously injured, and I will not allow it!" She began to cry. In a quieter voice, but still angry, she said: "He's my child and I can't bear to see him like that."

  Tom sympathized with her, and he was tempted to comfort her, but he was afraid to give in. He had a feeling that this conversation might be a turning point. Living with his mother and no one else, Jack had always been overprotected. Tom did not want to concede that Jack ought to be cushioned against the normal knocks of everyday life. That would set a precedent that could cause endless trouble in years to come. Tom knew, in truth, that Alfred had gone too far this time, and he was secretly resolved to make the boy leave Jack alone; but it would be a bad thing to say so. "Beatings are a part of life," he said to Ellen. "Jack must learn to take them or avoid them. I can't spend my life protecting him."

  "You could protect him from that bullying son of yours!"

  Tom winced. He hated to hear her call Alfred a bully. "I might, but I shan't," he said angrily. "Jack must learn to protect himself."

  "Oh, go to hell!" Ellen said, and she turned and walked away.

  Tom entered the refectory. The wooden hut where the lay workers normally ate had been damaged by the fall of the southwest tower, so they took their meals in the refectory after the monks had finished and gone. Tom sat apart from everyone else, feeling unsociable. A kitchen hand brought him a jug of ale and some slices of bread in a basket. He dipped a piece of bread in the ale to soften it and began to eat.

  Alfred was a big lad with too much energy, Tom thought fondly. He sighed into his beer. The boy was something of a bully, Tom knew in his heart; but he would calm down in time. Meanwhile, Tom was not going to make his own children give special treatment to a newcomer. They had had too much to put up with already. They had lost their mother, they had been forced to tramp the roads, they had come near to starving to death. He was not going to impose any more burdens on them if he could help it. They were due for a little indulgence. Jack would just have to keep out of Alfred's way. It would not kill him.

  A disagreement with Ellen always left Tom heavyhearted. They had quarreled several times, usually about the children, although this was their worst dispute so far. When she was hard-faced and hostile he could not remember what it had been like, just a little while earlier, to feel passionately in love with her: she seemed like an angry stranger who had intruded into his peaceful life.

  He had never had such furious, bitter quarrels with his first wife. Looking back, it seemed to him that he and Agnes had agreed about everything important, and that when they disagreed it had not made them angry. That was how it should be between man and wife, and Ellen would have to realize that she could not be part of a family and yet have all her own way.

  Even when Ellen was at her most infuriating he never quite wished that she would go away, but all the same he often thought of Agnes with regret. Agnes had been with him for most of his adult life, and now he had a constant sense of there being something missing. While she was alive he had never thought that he was particularly fortunate to have her, nor had he felt thankful for her; but now that she was dead he missed her, and he felt ashamed that he had taken her for granted.

  At quiet moments in the day, when all his laborers had their instructions and were busy about the site, and Tom was able to get down to a skilled task, rebuilding a bit of wall in the cloisters or repairing a pillar in the crypt, he sometimes held imaginary conversations with Agnes. Mostly he told her about Jonathan, their baby son. Tom saw the child most days, being fed in the kitchen or walked in the cloisters or put to bed in the monks' dormitory. He seemed perfectly healthy and happy, and no one but Ellen knew or even suspected that Tom had a special interest in him. Tom also talked to Agnes about Alfred and Prior Philip and even Ellen, explaining his feelings about them, just as he would have done (except in the case of Ellen) if Agnes had been alive. He told her of his practical plans for the future, too: his hope that he would be employed here for years to come, and his dream of designing and building the new cathedral himself. In his head he heard her replies and questions. She was at different times pleased, encouraging, fascinated, suspicious, or disapproving. Sometimes he felt she was right, sometimes wrong. If he had told anyone of these conversations, they would have said he was communing with a ghost, and there would have been a flurry of priests and holy water and exorcism; but he knew there was nothing supernatural about what was happening. It was just that he knew her so well that he could imagine how she would feel and what she would say in just about any situation.

  She came into his mind unbidden at odd times. When he peeled a pear with his eating knife for little Martha, he remembered how Agnes had always laughed at him because he would take pains to remove the peel in one continuous strip. Whenever he had to write something he would think of her, for she had taught him everything she had learned from her father, the priest; and he would remember her teaching him how to trim a quill or how to spell caementarius, the Latin word for "mason." As he washed his face on Sundays he would rub soap into his beard and recall how, when they were young, she had taught him that washing his beard would keep his face free from lice and boils. Never a day went by without some such little incident bringing her vividly to mind.

  He knew he was lucky to have Ellen. There was no danger of his taking her for granted. She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic. He was grateful to her for consoling him in his grief, the morning after Agnes died; but sometimes he wished he had met her a few days--instead of a few hours--after he had buried his wife, just so that he would have had time to be heartbroken alone. He would not have observed a period of mourning--that was for lords and monks, not ordinary folk--but he would have had time to become accustomed to the absence of Agnes before he started to get used to living with Ellen. Such thoughts had not occurred to him during the early days, when the threat of starvation had combined with the sexual excitement of Ellen to produce a kind of hysterical end-of-the-world elation. But since he had found work and security, he had begun to feel pangs of regret. And sometimes it seemed that when he thought like this about Agnes, he was not only missing her, but mourning the passing of his own youth. Never again would he be as naive, as aggressive, as hungry or as strong as he had been when he had first fallen in love with Agnes.

  He finished his bread and left the refectory ahead of the others. He went into the cloisters. He was pleased with his work here: it was now hard to imagine that the quadrangle had been buried under a mass of rubble three weeks earlier. The only remaining signs of the catastrophe were some cracked paving stones for which he had been unable to find replacements.

  There was a lot of dust about, though. He would have the cloisters swept again and then sprinkled with water. He walked through the ruined church. In the north transept he saw a blackened beam with words written in the soot. Tom read it slowly. It said: "Alfred is a pig." So that was what had infuriated Alfred. Quite a lot of the wood from the roof had not burned to ashes, and there were blackened beams like this lying all around. Tom decided he would detail a group of workers to collect all the timber and take it to the firewood store. "Make the site look tidy," Agnes would say when someone important was coming to visit. "You want them to feel glad that Tom's in charge." Yes, dear, Tom th
ought, and he smiled to himself as he went about his work.

  Waleran Bigod's party was sighted a mile or so away across the fields. There were three of them, riding quite hard. Waleran himself was in the lead, on a black horse, his black cloak flying behind. Philip and the senior monastic officials waited by the stable to welcome them.

  Philip was not sure how to treat Waleran. Waleran had deceived him, indisputably, by not telling him that the bishop was dead; but when the truth came out Waleran had not appeared in the least ashamed; and Philip had not known what to say to him. He still did not know, but he suspected that there was nothing to be gained by complaining. Anyway, that whole episode had been overshadowed by the catastrophe of the fire. Philip would just be extremely wary of Waleran in future.

  Waleran's horse was a stallion, skittish and excitable despite having been ridden several miles. He held its head down hard as he walked it to the stable. Philip disapproved: there was no need for a clergyman to cut a dash on horseback, and most men of God chose quieter mounts.

  Waleran swung off the horse with a fluid motion and gave the reins to a stable hand. Philip greeted him formally. Waleran turned and surveyed the ruins. A bleak look came into his eyes, and he said: "This was an expensive fire, Philip." He seemed genuinely distressed, somewhat to Philip's surprise.

  Before Philip could reply, Remigius spoke up. "The devil's work, my lord bishop," he said.

  "Was it, now?" said Waleran. "In my experience, the devil is usually assisted in such work by monks who light fires in church to take the chill off matins, or carelessly leave burning candles in the bell tower."

  Philip was amused to see Remigius crushed, but he could not let Waleran's insinuations pass. "I've held an investigation into possible causes of the conflagration," he said. "No one lit a fire in the church that night--I can be sure because I was present at matins myself. And no one had been up in the roof for months beforehand."