by Ken Follett
And when he understood that, he knew what he had to do next.
He moved in front of the altar and turned to face the crowd. He still had the broken sword in his hand. Everyone stared at him. He suffered a moment of self-doubt. Can I do it? he thought. Can I start a movement, here and now, that will shake the throne of England? He looked at their faces. As well as grief and rage, he saw, in one or two expressions, a hint of hope.
He lifted the sword on high.
"This sword killed a saint," he began.
There was a murmur of agreement.
Encouraged, Philip said: "Here tonight we have witnessed a martyrdom."
The priests and monks looked surprised. Like Philip, they had not immediately seen the real significance of the murder they had witnessed. But the townspeople had, and they voiced their approval.
"Each one of us must go from this place and tell what he has seen." Several people nodded vigorously. They were listening--but Philip wanted more. He wanted to inspire them. Preaching had never been his forte. He was not one of those men who could hold a crowd rapt, make them laugh and cry, and persuade them to follow him anywhere. He did not know how to put a tremor in his voice and make the light of glory shine from his eyes. He was a practical, earthbound man; and right now he needed to speak like an angel.
"Soon every man, woman and child in Canterbury will know that the king's men murdered Archbishop Thomas in the cathedral. But that's just the start. The news will spread all over England, and then all over Christendom."
He was losing them, he could tell. There was dissatisfaction and disappointment on some of the faces. A man called out: "But what shall we do?"
Philip realized they needed to take some kind of concrete action immediately. It was not possible to call for a crusade and then send people to bed.
A crusade, he thought. That was an idea.
He said: "Tomorrow, I will take this sword to Rochester. The day after tomorrow, London. Will you come with me?"
Most of them looked blank, but someone at the back called out: "Yes!" Then one or two others voiced their agreement.
Philip raised his voice a little. "We'll tell our story in every town and village in England. We'll show people the sword that killed Saint Thomas. We'll let them see the bloodstains on his priestly garments." He warmed to his theme, and let his anger show a little. "We'll raise an outcry that will spread throughout Christendom, yes, even as far as Rome. We'll turn the whole of the civilized world against the savages who perpetrated this horrible, blasphemous crime!"
This time most of them called out their assent. They had been waiting for some way of expressing their emotions, and now he was giving it to them.
"This crime," he said slowly, his voice rising to a shout, "will never--never--be--forgotten!"
They roared their approval.
Suddenly he knew where to go from here. "Let us begin our crusade now!" he said.
"Yes!"
"We'll carry this sword along every street in Canterbury!"
"Yes!"
"And we'll tell every citizen within the walls what we have witnessed here tonight!"
"Yes!"
"Bring candles, and follow me!"
Holding the sword high, he marched straight down the middle of the cathedral.
They followed him.
Feeling exultant, he went through the chancel, over the crossing, and down the nave. Some of the monks and priests walked beside him. He did not need to look back: he could hear the footsteps of a hundred people marching behind him. He went out of the main door.
There he had a moment of anxiety. Across the dark orchard he could see men-at-arms ransacking the archbishop's palace. If his followers confronted them, the crusade might turn into a brawl when it had hardly got started. Suddenly afraid, he turned sharply away and led the crowd through the nearest gate into the street.
One of the monks started a hymn. There were lamps and firelight behind the shutters of the houses, but as the procession passed by, people opened their doors to see what was going on. Some of them questioned the marchers. Some joined in.
Philip turned a corner and saw William Hamleigh.
William was standing outside a stable, and looked as if he had just taken off his chain mail prior to mounting a horse and leaving the city. He had a handful of men with him. They were all looking up expectantly, presumably having heard the singing and wondered what was going on.
As the candlelit procession approached, William at first looked mystified. Then he saw the broken sword in Philip's hand, and comprehension dawned. He stared in awestruck silence for a moment more, then he spoke. "Stop this!" he shouted. "I command you to disperse!"
Nobody took any notice. The men with William looked anxious: even with their swords they were vulnerable to a mob of more than a hundred fervent mourners.
William addressed Philip directly. "In the name of the king, I order you to stop this!"
Philip swept past him, borne forward by the press of the crowd. "Too late, William!" he cried over his shoulder. "Too late!"
III
The small boys came early to the hanging.
They were already there, in the market square at Shiring, throwing stones at cats and abusing beggars and fighting one another, when Aliena arrived, alone and on foot, wearing a cheap cloak with a hood to hide her identity.
She stood at a distance, looking at the scaffold. She had not intended to come. She had witnessed too many hangings during the years when she had played the role of earl. Now that she no longer had that responsibility, she had thought she would be happy if she never saw another man hanged for the rest of her life. But this one was different.
She was no longer acting as earl because her brother, Richard, had been killed in Syria--not in battle, ironically, but in an earthquake. The news had taken six months to reach her. She had not seen him for fifteen years, and now she would never see him again.
Up the hill, the castle gates opened, and the prisoner came out with his escort, followed by the new earl of Shiring, Aliena's son, Tommy.
Richard had never had children, so his heir was his nephew. The king, stunned and enfeebled by the Becket scandal, had taken the line of least resistance and rapidly confirmed Tommy as earl. Aliena had handed over to the younger generation readily. She had achieved what she wanted to with the earldom. It was once again a rich, thriving county, a land of fat sheep and green fields and sturdy mills. Some of the larger and more progressive landowners had followed her lead in switching to horse plowing, feeding the horses on oats grown under the three-field system of crop rotation. In consequence the land could feed even more people than it had under her father's enlightened rule.
Tommy would be a good earl. It was what he was born to do. Jack had refused to see it for a long time, wanting his son to be a builder; but eventually he had been forced to admit the truth. Tommy had never been able to cut a stone in a straight line, but he was a natural leader, and at twenty-eight years of age he was decisive, determined, intelligent and fair-minded. He was usually called Thomas now.
When he took over, people expected Aliena to stay at the castle, nag her daughter-in-law and play with her grandchildren. She had laughed at them. She liked Tommy's wife--a pretty girl, one of the younger daughters of the earl of Bedford--and she adored her three grandchildren, but at the age of fifty-two she was not ready to retire. She and Jack had taken a big stone house near the Kingsbridge Priory--in what had once been the poor quarter, although it was no longer--and she had gone back into the wool business, buying and selling, negotiating with all her old energy, and making money hand over fist.
The hanging party came into the square, and Aliena emerged from her reverie. She looked closely at the prisoner, stumbling along at the end of a rope, his hands tied behind his back. It was William Hamleigh.
Someone in the front spat at him. The crowd in the square was large, for a lot of people were happy to see the last of William, and even for those who had no grudge against him it w
as quite something to see a former sheriff hanged. But William had been involved in the most notorious murder anybody could remember.
Aliena had never known or imagined anything like the reaction to the killing of Archbishop Thomas. The news had spread like wildfire through the whole of Christendom, from Dublin to Jerusalem and from Toledo to Oslo. The pope had gone into mourning. The continental half of King Henry's empire had been placed under interdict, which meant the churches were closed and there were no services except baptism. In England, people had started making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, just as if it were a shrine like Santiago de Compostela. And there had been miracles. Water tinctured with the martyr's blood, and shreds of the mantle he had been wearing when he was killed, cured sick people not just in Canterbury but all over England.
William's men had tried to steal the corpse from the cathedral, but the monks had been forewarned and had hidden it; and now it was secure within a stone vault, and pilgrims had to put their heads through a hole in the wall to kiss the marble coffin.
It was William's last crime. He had come scurrying back to Shiring, but Tommy had arrested him, and accused him of sacrilege, and he had been found guilty by Bishop Philip's court. Normally no one would dare to sentence a sheriff, for he was an officer of the Crown, but in this case the reverse was true: no one, not even the king, would dare to defend one of Becket's killers.
William was going to make a bad end.
His eyes were wild and staring, his mouth was open and drooling, he was moaning incoherently, and there was a stain on the front of his tunic where he had wet himself.
Aliena watched her old enemy stagger blindly toward the gallows. She remembered the young, arrogant, heartless lad who had raped her thirty-five years ago. It was hard to believe he had become the moaning, terrified subhuman she saw now. Even the fat, gouty, disappointed old knight he had been in later life was nothing like this. He began to struggle and scream as he got closer to the scaffold. The men-at-arms pulled him along like a pig going to the slaughterhouse. Aliena found no pity in her heart: all she could feel was relief. William would never terrorize anyone again.
He kicked and screamed as he was lifted up onto the ox cart. He looked like an animal, red-faced, wild and filthy; but he sounded like a child as he gibbered and moaned and cried. It took four men to hold him while a fifth put the noose around his neck. He struggled so much that the knot tightened before he dropped, and he began to strangle by his own efforts. The men-at-arms stepped back. William writhed, choking, his fat face turning purple.
Aliena stared aghast. Even at the height of her rage and hatred she had not wished a death like this on him.
There was no noise, now that he was choking; and the crowd stood still. Even the small boys were silenced by the horrible sight.
Someone struck the ox's flank with a switch and the beast moved forward. At last William fell, but the fall did not break his neck, and he dangled at the end of the rope, slowly suffocating. His eyes remained open. Aliena felt he was looking at her. The grimace on his face as he hung there writhing in agony was familiar to Aliena, and she realized that he had looked like that when he was raping her, just before he reached his climax. The memory stabbed her like a knife, but she would not let herself look away.
It took a long time but the crowd remained quiet throughout. His face turned darker and darker. His agonized writhing became a mere twitching. At last his eyes rolled up into his head, his eyelids closed, he became still, and then, gruesomely, his tongue stuck out, black and swollen, between his teeth.
He was dead.
Aliena felt drained. William had changed her life--at one time she would have said he had ruined her life--and now he was dead, powerless to hurt her or anyone else ever again.
The crowd began to move away. The small boys mimicked the death throes to one another, rolling up their eyes and poking out their tongues. A man-at-arms climbed up on the scaffold and cut William down.
Aliena caught her son's eye. He looked surprised to see her. He came over immediately, and bent down to kiss her. My son, she thought; my big son. Jack's son. She remembered how terrified she had been that she might have William's child. Well, some things had turned out right.
"I thought you didn't want to come here today," Tommy said.
"I had to," she said. "I had to see him dead."
He looked startled. He did not understand, not really. She was glad. She hoped he would never have to understand such things.
He put his arm around her and they walked out of the square together.
Aliena did not look back.
On a hot day in high summer, Jack ate dinner with Aliena and Sally in the cool of the north transept, up in the gallery, sitting on the scratched plaster of his tracing floor. The sound of the monks chanting the service of sext in the chancel was a low murmur like the rushing of a distant waterfall. They had cold lamb chops with fresh wheat bread and a stone jug of golden beer. Jack had spent the morning sketching the layout of the new chancel which he would begin building next year. Sally was looking at his drawing while she tore into a chop with her pretty white teeth. In a moment she would say something critical about it, he knew. He glanced at Aliena. She too had read Sally's face and knew what was coming. They exchanged a knowing parental look, and smiled.
"Why do you want the east end to be rounded?" Sally said.
"I based it on the design of Saint-Denis," Jack said.
"But is there any advantage?"
"Yes. You can keep the pilgrims moving."
"So you just have this row of little windows."
Jack had thought windows would come up soon, for Sally was a glazier. "Little windows?" he said, pretending to be indignant. "Those windows are huge! When I first put windows that size into this church the people thought the whole building would fall down for lack of structural support."
"If the chancel were square-ended, you would have an enormous flat wall," Sally persisted. "You could put in really big windows."
She had a point, Jack thought. With the round-ended layout the entire chancel had to have the same continuous elevation, divided into the traditional three layers of arcade, gallery and clerestory, all the way around. A square end offered the chance to change the design. "There might be another way to keep the pilgrims moving," he said thoughtfully.
"And the rising sun would shine through the big windows," Sally said.
Jack could imagine it. "There could be a row of tall lancets, like spears in a rack."
Sally said: "Or one big round window like a rose."
That was a stunning idea. To someone standing in the nave, looking down the length of the church toward the east, the round window would seem like a huge sun exploding into innumerable shards of gorgeous color. Jack could just see it. "I wonder what theme the monks would want."
"The Law and the Prophets," Sally said.
He raised his eyebrows at her. "You sly vixen, you've already discussed this idea with Prior Jonathan, haven't you?"
She looked guilty, but she was saved from answering by the arrival of Peter Chisel, a young stone carver. He was a shy, awkward man with fair hair that fell over his eyes, but his carvings were beautiful, and Jack was glad to have him. "What can I do for you, Peter?" he said.
"Actually, I was looking for Sally," Peter said.
"Well, you've found her."
Sally was getting to her feet, brushing bread crumbs off the front of her tunic. "I'll see you later," she said, and then she and Peter went through the low doorway and down the spiral staircase.
Jack and Aliena looked at one another.
"Was she blushing?" Jack said.
"I hope so," said Aliena. "My goodness, it's about time she fell for someone. She's twenty-six years old!"
"Well, well. I'd given up hope. I thought she was planning to be an old maid."
Aliena shook her head. "Not Sally. She's as lusty as anyone. She's just choosy."
"Is she?" Jack said. "The girls of the county aren't queueing
up to marry Peter Chisel."
"The girls of the county fall for big handsome men like Tommy, who can cut a dash on horseback and have their cloaks lined with red silk. Sally's different. She wants someone clever and sensitive. Peter is just right for her."
Jack nodded. He had never thought of it that way but he felt intuitively that Aliena was right. "She's like her grandmother," he said. "My mother fell in love with an oddity."
"Sally's like your mother, and Tommy is like my father," Aliena said.
Jack smiled at her. She was more beautiful than ever. Her hair was streaked with gray, and the skin of her throat was not as marble-smooth as it used to be, but as she got older, and lost the roundness of motherhood, the fine bones of her lovely face became more prominent, and she took on a spare, almost structural beauty. Jack reached out and traced the line of her jaw. "Like my flying buttresses," he said.
She smiled.
He ran his hand down her neck and across her bosom. Her breasts had changed, too. He remembered when they had stuck out from her chest as if they were weightless, the nipples pointing up. Then, when she was pregnant, they had become even bigger, and the nipples had grown larger. Now they were lower and softer, and they swung delightfully from side to side when she walked. He had loved them through all their changes. He wondered what they would be like when she was old. Would they become shriveled and wrinkled? I'll probably love them even then, he thought. He felt her nipple harden under his touch. He leaned forward to kiss her lips.
"Jack, you're in church," she murmured.
"Never mind," he said, and he ran his hand over her belly to her groin.
There was a footstep on the stair.
He pulled away guiltily.
She grinned at his discomfiture. "That's God's judgment on you," she said irreverently.
"I'll see to you later," he whispered in a mock-threatening tone.
The footsteps reached the top of the stair and Prior Jonathan emerged. He greeted them both solemnly. He looked grave. "There's something I want you to hear, Jack," he said. "Will you come to the cloisters?"
"Of course." Jack got to his feet.
Jonathan went back down the spiral staircase.
Jack paused at the doorway and pointed a threatening finger at Aliena. "Later," he said.