by Ken Follett
She was thinner and stronger than she had been a year ago, thanks to tramping the roads and lifting heavy loads of raw wool, but now she found that digging could still make her back ache. She was grateful when Prior Philip rang a bell and declared a break. Monks brought hot bread from the kitchen and served weak beer. The sun was growing stronger, and some of the men stripped to the waist.
While they were resting, a group of strangers came through the gate. Aliena looked at them hopefully. There were just a handful of them, but perhaps they were the forerunners of a large crowd. They came over to the table where the bread and beer was being handed out, and Prior Philip welcomed them.
"Where are you from?" he asked as they gulped gratefully at their pots of beer.
"From Horsted," one of them replied, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. That was promising: Horsted was a village of two or three hundred people a few miles west of Kingsbridge. They might hope for another hundred volunteers from there, with luck.
"And how many of you are coming, in all?" Philip asked. The man looked surprised at the question. "Just us four," he replied.
During the next hour people trickled through the priory gate until, by midmorning, there were seventy or eighty volunteers at work, including the villagers. Then the flow stopped altogether.
It was not enough.
Philip stood at the east end, watching Tom build a wall. He had already constructed the bases of two buttresses up to the level of the third course of stones, and now he was building the wall between. It would probably never be finished, Philip thought despondently.
The first thing Tom did, when the laborers brought him a stone, was to take out an iron instrument shaped like the letter L and use it to check that the edges of the stone were square. Then he would shovel a layer of mortar on to the wall, furrow the mortar with the point of his trowel, put the new stone on, and scrape off the surplus mortar. In placing the stone he was guided by a taut string which was stretched between the two buttresses.
Philip noticed that the stone was almost as smooth on the top and bottom, where the mortar was, as on the side that would show. This surprised him, and he asked Tom the reason. "A stone must never touch the ones above or below," Tom replied. "That's what the mortar's for."
"Why must they not touch?"
"It causes cracks." Tom stood upright to explain. "If you tread on a slate roof, your foot will go through it; but if you put a plank across the roof, you can walk on it without damaging the slates. The plank spreads the weight, and that's what mortar does."
Philip had never thought of that. Building was an intriguing business, especially with someone like Tom, who was able to explain what he was doing.
The roughest face of the stone was the back. Surely, Philip thought, that face would be visible from inside the church? Then he recalled that Tom was in fact building a double-skinned wall with a cavity between, so that the back of each stone would be hidden.
When Tom had laid the stone on the bed of mortar, he picked up his level. This was an iron triangle with a leather thong attached to its apex and some markings on its base. The thong had a lead weight attached to it so that it always hung straight down. He put the base of the instrument on the stone and watched how the leather thong fell. If it hung to one side or the other of the center line, he would tap the stone with his hammer until it was exactly level. Then he would move the instrument until it straddled the join between the two adjacent stones, to check that the tops of the stones were exactly in line. Finally he turned the instrument sideways on the stone to make sure it was not leaning one way or the other. Before picking up a new stone he would snap the taut string to satisfy himself that the faces of the stones were in a straight line. Philip had not realized it was so important that stone walls should be precisely straight and true.
He lifted his gaze to the rest of the building site. It was so big that eighty men and women and a few children were lost in it. They were working away cheerfully in the sunshine, but they were so few that it seemed to him there was an air of futility about their efforts. He had originally hoped for a hundred people, but now he saw that even that would not have been enough.
Another little group came through the gateway, and Philip forced himself to go to greet them with a smile. There was no need for them to know that their efforts would be wasted. They would gain forgiveness for their sins, anyway.
It was a large group, he saw as he approached them. He counted twelve, and then two more came in. Perhaps after all he would have a hundred people by midday, when the bishop was expected. "God bless you all," he said to them. He was about to tell them where to start digging when he was interrupted by a loud shout. "Philip!"
He frowned disapprovingly. The voice belonged to Brother Milius. Even Milius was supposed to call Philip "Father" in public. Philip looked in the direction from which the voice came. Milius was balancing on the priory wall in a somewhat undignified stance. In a calm but carrying voice, Philip said: "Brother Milius, get off the wall."
To his astonishment Milius stayed there and shouted: "Come and look at this!"
The new arrivals were getting a poor impression of monastic obedience, Philip thought, but he could not help wondering what it was that had got Milius so excited that he had forgotten all his manners. "Come here and tell me about it, Milius," he said in a voice he normally reserved for noisy novices.
"You must look!" Milius yelled.
He'd better have a very good reason for this, Philip thought crossly; but since he did not want to give his closest colleague a telling-off in front of all these strangers, he was obliged to smile and do as Milius asked. Feeling irritated to the point of anger, he walked across the muddy ground in front of the stable and jumped up onto the low wall. "What is the meaning of this behavior?" he hissed.
"Just look!" Milius said, pointing.
Following his gesture, Philip looked out, over the roofs of the village, past the river, to the road that followed the rise and fall of the land to the west. At first he could not believe his eyes. Between the fields of green crops, the undulating road was a solid mass of people, hundreds of them, all walking toward Kingsbridge. "What is it?" he said uncomprehendingly. "An army?" And then he realized that, of course, they were his volunteers. His heart leaped for joy. "Look at them!" he shouted. "There must be five hundred--a thousand--more!"
"That's right!" Milius said happily. "They came, after all!"
"We're saved." Philip was too thrilled to remember why he was supposed to be angry with Milius. The mass of people filled the road all the way to the bridge, and the line wound through the village all the way to the priory gate. The people he had greeted were the head of a phalanx. They were pouring through the gate now, and milling about at the western end of the building site, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. "Hallelujah!" he yelled recklessly.
It was not enough to rejoice--he had to use these people. He jumped down off the wall. "Come on!" he shouted to Milius. "Call all the monks off laboring--we're going to need them as marshals. Tell the kitchener to bake all the bread he can and roll out some more barrels of beer. We'll need more buckets and shovels. We must get all these people working before Bishop Henry arrives!"
For the next hour Philip was frantically busy. At first, just to get people out of the way, he assigned a hundred or more to the task of bringing materials up from the riverbank. As soon as Milius had assembled a supervisory group of monks, he began sending the volunteers down into the foundations. They soon ran out of shovels, barrels and buckets. Philip ordered all the cooking pots brought from the kitchen, and set some of the volunteers to making rough timber boxes and basketwork platters for carrying earth. There were not enough ladders or lifting devices, so they made a long slope at one end of the largest foundation hole so that people could walk into and out of it. He realized he had not given sufficient thought to the question of where he was going to put the vast quantity of earth that was coming out of the foundations. Now it was too late to mull it over:
he made a snap decision, and ordered the earth dumped on a patch of rocky ground near the river. Perhaps it might become cultivable. While he was giving that order, Bernard Kitchener came to him in a panic, saying he had only catered for two hundred people at most, and there seemed to be at least a thousand here. "Build a fire in the kitchen courtyard and make soup in an iron bath," Philip said. "Water the beer. Use all the stores. Get some of the villagers to prepare food on their own hearths. Improvise!" He turned away from the kitchener and resumed organizing laborers.
He was still giving orders when someone tapped him on the shoulder and said in French: "Prior Philip, may I have your attention for a moment?" It was Dean Baldwin, Waleran Bigod's associate.
Philip turned around and saw the entire visiting party, all on horseback and gorgeously dressed, gazing in astonishment at the scene around them. There was Bishop Henry, a short, thickset man with a pugnacious look about him, his monkish haircut contrasting strangely with his embroidered scarlet coat. Beside him was Bishop Waleran, dressed in black as always, his dismay not quite concealed by his habitual look of frozen disdain. There was fat Percy Hamleigh, his strapping son, William, and his hideous wife, Regan: Percy and William were looking bemused, but Regan understood exactly what Philip had done and she was furious.
Philip returned his attention to Bishop Henry, and found to his surprise that the bishop was favoring him with a look of intense interest. Philip returned his gaze frankly. Bishop Henry's expression showed surprise, curiosity and a kind of amused respect. After a moment Philip approached the bishop, held his horse's head, and kissed the beringed hand that Henry proffered.
Henry dismounted with a smooth, agile movement, and the rest of his party followed suit. Philip called a couple of monks to stable the horses. Henry was the same age as Philip, approximately, but his florid complexion and well-covered frame made him look older. "Well, Father Philip," he said. "I came to verify reports that you were not capable of getting a new cathedral built here at Kingsbridge." He paused, looked around at the hundreds of workers, then returned his gaze to Philip. "It seems I was misinformed."
Philip's heart missed a beat. Henry could hardly make it plainer: Philip had won.
Philip turned to Bishop Waleran. Waleran's face was a mask of suppressed fury. He knew he had been defeated again. Philip knelt, bowing his head to hide the look of triumphant delight on his face, and kissed Waleran's hand.
Tom was enjoying building the wall. It was so long since he had done this that he had forgotten the deep tranquillity that came from laying one stone upon another in perfect straight lines and watching the structure grow.
When the volunteers started to arrive by the hundred, and he realized that Philip's scheme was going to work, he enjoyed it all the more. These stones would be part of Tom's cathedral; and this wall that was now only a foot high would eventually reach for the sky. Tom felt he was at the beginning of the rest of his life.
He knew when Bishop Henry arrived. Like a stone dropped into a pond, the bishop sent a ripple through the mass of laborers, as people stopped work for a moment to look up at the richly dressed figures picking their dainty way through the mud. Tom continued to lay stones. The bishop must be bowled over by the sight of a thousand volunteers cheerfully and enthusiastically laboring to build their new cathedral. Now Tom needed to make an equally good impression. He was never at ease with well-dressed people, but he needed to appear competent and wise, calm and self-assured, the kind of man to whom you would gratefully entrust the worrisome complexities of a vast and costly building project.
He kept a lookout for the visitors and put down his trowel as the party approached him. Prior Philip led Bishop Henry up to Tom, and Tom knelt and kissed the bishop's hand. Philip said: "Tom is our builder, sent to us by God on the day the old church burned down."
Tom knelt again to Bishop Waleran, then looked at the rest of the party. He reminded himself that he was the master builder, and should not be overly subservient. He recognized Percy Hamleigh, for whom he had once built half a house. "My Lord Percy," he said with a small bow. He spotted Percy's hideous wife. "My Lady Regan." Then his eye fell on the son. He remembered how William had almost run Martha down on his great war-horse; and how William had tried to buy Ellen in the forest. That young man was a nasty piece of work. But Tom made his face a polite mask. "And young Lord William. Greetings."
Bishop Henry was looking keenly at Tom. "Have you drawn your plans, Tom Builder?"
"Yes, my lord bishop. Would you like to see them?"
"Most certainly."
"Perhaps you will step this way."
Henry nodded, and Tom led the way to his shed, a few yards away. He stepped inside the little wooden building and brought out the ground plan, drawn in plaster on a large wooden frame four feet long. He leaned it against the wall of the shed and stepped back.
This was a delicate moment. Most people could not read a plan, but bishops and lords hated to admit it, so it was necessary to explain the concept to them in a way that did not reveal their ignorance to the rest of the world. Some bishops did understand it, of course, and then they were insulted when a mere builder presumed to instruct them.
Nervously, Tom pointed at the plan and said: "This is the wall I'm building."
"Yes, the eastern facade, obviously," said Henry. That answered the question: he could read a plan perfectly well. "Why aren't the transepts aisled?"
"For economy," Tom answered promptly. "However, we won't start building them for another five years, and if the monastery continues to prosper as it has done in the first year under Prior Philip, it may well be that by then we will be able to afford aisled transepts." He had praised Philip and answered the question at the same time, and he felt rather clever.
Henry nodded approval. "Sensible to plan modestly and leave room for expansion. Show me the elevation."
Tom got out the elevation. He made no comment on it, now that he knew Henry was able to understand what he was looking at. This was confirmed when Henry said: "The proportions are pleasing."
"Thank you," Tom said. The bishop seemed pleased with everything. Tom added: "It's a modest cathedral, but it will be lighter and more beautiful than the old one."
"And how long will it take to complete?"
"Fifteen years, if the work is uninterrupted."
"Which it never is. However. Can you show us what it will look like--I mean, to someone standing outside?"
Tom understood him. "You want to see a sketch."
"Yes."
"Certainly." Tom returned to his wall, with the bishop's party in tow. He knelt over his mortarboard and spread the mortar in a uniform layer, smoothing the surface. Then, with the point of his trowel, he drew a sketch of the west end of the church in the mortar. He knew he was good at this. The bishop, his party, and all the monks and volunteer workers nearby watched in fascination. Drawing always seemed a miracle to people who could not do it. In a few moments Tom had created a line drawing of the west facade, with its three arched doorways, its big window, and its flanking turrets. It was a simple trick, but it never failed to impress.
"Remarkable," said Bishop Henry when the drawing was done. "May God's blessing be added to your skill."
Tom smiled. That amounted to a powerful endorsement of his appointment.
Prior Philip said: "My lord bishop, will you take some refreshment before you conduct the service?"
"Gladly."
Tom was relieved. His test was over and he had passed it.
"Perhaps you would step into the prior's house, just across here," Philip said to the bishop. The party began to move off. Philip squeezed Tom's arm and said in a murmur of restrained jubilation: "We've done it!"
Tom breathed a sigh of relief as the dignitaries left him. He felt pleased and proud. Yes, he thought, we've done it. Bishop Henry was more than impressed: he was flabbergasted, despite his composure. Obviously Waleran had primed him to expect a scene of lethargy and inactivity, so the reality had been even more
striking. In the end Waleran's malice had worked against him and heightened the triumph of Philip and Tom.
Just as he was basking in the glow of an honest victory, he heard a familiar voice. "Hello, Tom Builder."
He turned around and saw Ellen.
It was Tom's turn to be flabbergasted. The cathedral crisis had so filled his mind that he had not thought about her all day. He gazed at her happily. She looked just the same as the day she had walked away: slender, brown-skinned, with dark hair that moved like waves on a beach, and those deep-set luminous golden eyes. She smiled at him with that full-lipped mouth that always made him think of kissing.
He was seized by an urge to take her in his arms but he fought it down. With some difficulty he managed to say:
"Hello, Ellen."
A young man beside her said: "Hello, Tom."
Tom looked at him curiously.
Ellen said: "Don't you remember Jack?"
"Jack!" he said, startled. The lad had changed. He was a little taller than his mother now, and he had the bony physique that made grandmothers say that a boy had outgrown his strength. He still had bright red hair, white skin and blue eyes, but his features had resolved into more attractive proportions, and one day he might even be handsome.
Tom looked back at Ellen. For a moment he just enjoyed staring at her. He wanted to say I've missed you, I can't tell you how much I've missed you, and he almost did, but then he lost his nerve, and instead he said: "Well, where have you been?"
"We've been living where we always lived, in the forest," she said.
"And what made you come back today, of all days?"
"We heard about the appeal for volunteers, and we were curious to know how you were getting along. And I haven't forgotten that I promised to come back one day."
"I'm so glad you did," Tom said. "I've been longing to see you."
She looked guarded. "Oh?"
This was the moment for which he had been waiting and planning for a year, and now that it had come he was scared. Until now he had been able to live in hope, but if she turned him down today he would know he had lost her forever. He was frightened to begin. The silence dragged out. He took a deep breath. "Listen," he said. "I want you to come back to me. Now, please don't say anything until you've heard what I have to say--please?"