World Without End

by Ken Follett

  Ralph felt that his life was all aspiration. When would he actually achieve something? He and his father walked the length of the yard then turned and came back.

  He saw a one-armed monk come out of the kitchen and cross the yard, and was struck by how familiar the man looked. A moment later, he remembered how he knew the face. This was Thomas Langley, the knight who had killed two men-at-arms in the forest ten years ago. Ralph had not seen the man since that day, but his brother Merthin had, for the knight-become-monk was now responsible for supervising repairs to the priory buildings. Thomas wore a drab robe instead of the fine clothes of a knight, and had his head shaved in the monkish tonsure. He was heavier around the waist, but still carried himself like a fighting man.

  As Thomas walked past, Ralph said casually to Lord William: "There he goes--the mystery monk."

  William said sharply: "What do you mean?"

  "Brother Thomas. He used to be a knight, and no one knows why he joined the monastery."

  "What the devil do you know of him?" William's tone showed anger, although Ralph had said nothing offensive. Perhaps he was in a bad mood, despite the affectionate smiles of his beautiful wife.

  Ralph wished he had not begun the conversation. "I was here the day he came to Kingsbridge," he said. He hesitated, recalling the oath the children had sworn that afternoon. Because of that, and because of William's inexplicable annoyance, Ralph did not tell the whole story. "He staggered into town bleeding from a sword wound," he went on. "A boy remembers such things."

  Philippa said: "How curious." She looked at her husband. "Do you know what Brother Thomas's story is?"

  "Certainly not," William snapped. "How would I know a thing like that?"

  She shrugged and turned away.

  Ralph walked on, glad to get away. "Lord William was lying," he said to his father in a low voice. "I wonder why."

  "Don't ask any more questions about that monk," Father said anxiously. "It's obviously a touchy subject."

  At last Earl Roland appeared. Prior Anthony was with him. The knights and squires mounted up. Ralph kissed his parents and swung himself into the saddle. Griff danced sideways, eager to be off. The motion made Ralph's broken nose hurt like fire. He gritted his teeth: there was nothing he could do but endure it.

  Roland went up to his horse, Victory, a black stallion with a white patch over one eye. He did not mount, but took the bridle and began to walk, still in conversation with the prior. William called out: "Sir Stephen Wigleigh and Ralph Fitzgerald, ride ahead and clear the bridge."

  Ralph and Stephen rode across the cathedral green. The grass was trampled and the ground muddy from the Fleece Fair. A few stalls were still doing business, but most were closing, and many had already gone. They passed out through the priory gates.

  On the main street, Ralph saw the boy who had given him a broken nose. Wulfric, his name was, and he came from Stephen's village of Wigleigh. The left side of his face was bruised and swollen where Ralph had repeatedly punched him. Wulfric was outside the Bell Inn with his father, mother, and brother. They appeared to be about to leave.

  You'd better hope you never meet me again, Ralph thought.

  He tried to think of some insult to shout, but he was distracted by the sound of a crowd.

  As he and Stephen rode down the main street, their horses stepping adroitly through the mud, they saw ahead of them a mob of people. Halfway down the hill, they were forced to stop.

  The street was jammed by hundreds of men, women, and children shouting, laughing, and jostling for space. They all had their backs to Ralph. He looked over their heads.

  At the front of this unruly procession was a cart drawn by an ox. Tied to the back of the cart was a half-naked woman. Ralph had seen this kind of thing before: to be whipped through the town was a common punishment. The woman wore only a skirt of rough wool secured at the waist by a cord. Her face, when he could see it, was begrimed, and her hair was filthy, so that at first he thought she was old. Then he saw her breasts and realized she was only in her twenties.

  Her hands were bound together and attached by the same rope to the back end of the cart. She stumbled along behind it, sometimes falling and being dragged writhing through the mud until she managed to get back on her feet. The town constable followed, vigorously lashing her bare back with a bullwhip, a strip of leather at the end of a stick.

  The crowd, led by a knot of young men, were taunting the woman, shouting insults, laughing, and throwing mud and rubbish. She delighted them by responding, screaming imprecations and spitting at anyone who got near her.

  Ralph and Stephen urged their horses into the crowd. Ralph raised his voice. "Clear the way!" he shouted at the top of his voice. "Make way for the earl!"

  Stephen did the same.

  No one took any notice.

  To the south of the priory, the ground sloped steeply down to the river. The bank on that side was rocky, unsuitable for loading barges and rafts, so all the wharves were on the more accessible south side, in the suburb of Newtown. The quiet north side bloomed at this time of year with shrubbery and wildflowers. Merthin and Caris sat on a low bluff overlooking the water.

  The river was swollen with rain. It moved faster than it used to, Merthin noticed, and he could see why: the channel was narrower than formerly. That was because of the development of the riverside. When he was a child, most of the south bank had been a wide, muddy beach with a swampy field beyond. The river then had flowed at a stately pace, and as a boy he had floated on his back from one side to the other. But the new wharves, protected from flooding by stone walls, squeezed the same quantity of water into a smaller funnel, through which it hurried as if eager to get past the bridge. Beyond the bridge, the river widened and slowed around Leper Island.

  "I've done something terrible," Merthin said to Caris.

  Unfortunately, she looked particularly lovely today. She wore a dark red linen dress, and her skin seemed to glow with vitality. She had been angry at the trial of Crazy Nell, but now she just seemed worried, and that gave her a vulnerable look that tugged at Merthin's heart. She must have noticed how he had been unable to meet her eye all week. But what he had to tell her was probably worse than anything she had imagined.

  He had spoken to no one about this since the row with Griselda, Elfric, and Alice. No one even knew that his door had been destroyed. He was longing to unburden himself, but he had held back. He did not want to talk to his parents: his mother would be judgmental and his father would just tell him to be a man. He might have talked to Ralph, but there had been a coolness between them since the fight with Wulfric: Merthin thought Ralph had behaved like a bully, and Ralph knew it.

  He dreaded telling Caris the truth. For a moment he asked himself why. It was not that he was afraid of what she would do. She might be scornful--she was good at that--but she could not say anything worse than the things he said to himself constantly.

  What he truly feared, he realized, was hurting her. He could bear her anger: it was her pain he could not face.

  She said: "Do you still love me?"

  He was not expecting the question, but he answered without hesitation. "Yes."

  "And I love you. Anything else is just a problem we can solve together."

  He wished she were right. He wished it so badly that tears came to his eyes. He looked away so that she would not see. A mob of people was moving onto the bridge, following a slow-moving cart, and he realized this must be Crazy Nell being whipped through the town on her way to Gallows Cross in Newtown. The bridge was already crowded with departing stallholders and their carts, and the traffic was almost at a standstill.

  "What's the matter?" Caris said. "Are you crying?"

  "I lay with Griselda," Merthin said abruptly.

  Caris's mouth dropped open. "Griselda?" she said unbelievingly.

  "I'm so ashamed."

  "I thought it must be Elizabeth Clerk."

  "She's too proud to offer herself."

  Caris's reacti
on to that surprised him. "Oh, so you would have done it with her, too, if she'd suggested it?"

  "That's not what I meant!"

  "Griselda! Dear Saint Mary, I thought I was worth more than that."

  "You are."

  "Lupa," she said, using the Latin word for a whore.

  "I don't even like her. I hated it."

  "Is that supposed to make me feel better? Are you saying you wouldn't be so sorry if you'd enjoyed it?"

  "No!" Merthin was dismayed. Caris seemed determined to misinterpret everything he said.

  "Whatever got into you?"

  "She was crying."

  "Oh, for God's sake! Do you do that to every girl you see crying?"

  "Of course not! I was just trying to explain to you how it happened even though I really didn't want it to."

  Her scorn got worse with everything he said. "Don't talk rubbish," she said. "If you hadn't wanted it to happen, it wouldn't have."

  "Listen to me, please," he said frustratedly. "She asked me, and I said no. Then she cried, and I put my arm around her to comfort her, then--"

  "Oh, spare me the sickening details--I don't want to know."

  He began to feel resentful. He knew he had done wrong, and he expected her to be angry, but her contempt stung. "All right," he said, and he shut up.

  But silence was not what she wanted. She stared at him in dissatisfaction, then said: "What else?"

  He shrugged. "What's the point in my speaking? You just pour scorn on everything I say."

  "I don't want to listen to pathetic excuses. But there's something you haven't told me--I can feel it."

  He sighed. "She's pregnant."

  Caris's reaction surprised him again. All the anger left her. Her face, until now taut with indignation, seemed to collapse. Only sadness remained. "A baby," she said. "Griselda is going to have your baby."

  "It may not happen," he said. "Sometimes..."

  Caris shook her head. "Griselda is a healthy girl, well fed. There's no reason she should miscarry."

  "Not that I'd wish it," he said, though he was not quite sure that was true.

  "But what will you do?" she said. "It will be your child. You will love it, even if you hate its mother."

  "I've got to marry her."

  Caris gasped. "Marry! But that would be forever."

  "I've fathered a child, so I should take care of it."

  "But to spend your whole life with Griselda!"

  "I know."

  "You don't have to," she said decisively. "Think. Elizabeth Clerk's father didn't marry her mother."

  "He was a bishop."

  "There's Maud Roberts, in Slaughterhouse Ditch--she has three children, and everyone knows the father is Edward Butcher."

  "He's already married, and has four other children with his wife."

  "I'm saying they don't always force people to marry. You could just carry on as you are."

  "No, I couldn't. Elfric would throw me out."

  She looked thoughtful. "So, you've already talked to Elfric?"

  "Talked?" Merthin touched his bruised cheek. "I thought he was going to kill me."

  "And his wife--my sister?"

  "She screamed at me."

  "So she knows."

  "Yes. She said I have to marry Griselda. She never wanted me to be with you, anyway. I don't know why."

  Caris muttered: "She wanted you for herself."

  That was news to Merthin. It seemed unlikely that the haughty Alice would be attracted to a lowly apprentice. "I never saw any sign of that."

  "Only because you never looked at her. That's what made her so cross. She married Elfric in frustration. You broke my sister's heart--and now you're breaking mine."

  Merthin looked away. He barely recognized this picture of himself as a heartbreaker. How had things gone so wrong? Caris went quiet. Merthin stared moodily along the river to the bridge.

  The crowd had come to a standstill, he saw. A heavy cart loaded with woolsacks was stuck at the southern end, probably with a broken wheel. The cart pulling Nell had stopped, unable to pass. The crowd was swarming around both carts, and some people had climbed onto the woolsacks for a better view. Earl Roland was also trying to leave. He was at the town end of the bridge, on horseback, with his entourage; but even they were having trouble getting the citizens to give way. Merthin spotted his brother, Ralph, on his horse, chestnut colored with a black mane and tail. Prior Anthony, who had evidently come to see the earl off, stood wringing his hands with anxiety while Roland's men forced their horses into the mob, trying in vain to clear a passage.

  Merthin's intuition rang an alarm. Something was badly wrong, he felt sure, though at first he did not know what. He looked more closely at the bridge. He had noticed, on Monday, that the massive oak beams stretching from one piling to another across the length of the bridge were showing cracks on the upstream side; and that the beams had been strengthened with iron braces nailed across the cracks. Merthin had not been involved in this job, which was why he had not previously looked hard at the work. On Monday he had wondered why the beams were cracking. The weakness was not halfway between the uprights, as he would have expected if the timbers had simply deteriorated over time. Rather, the cracks were near the central pier, where the strain should have been less.

  He had not thought about it since Monday--there was too much else on his mind--but now an explanation occurred to him. It was almost as if that central pier was not supporting the beams, but dragging them down. That would mean that something had undermined the foundation beneath the pier--and, as soon as that thought occurred to him, he realized how it could have happened. It must be the faster flow of the river, scouring the river bed from under the pier.

  He remembered walking barefoot on a sandy beach, as a child, and noticing that when he stood at the sea's edge, letting the water wash over his feet, the outgoing waves would suck the sand from under his toes. That kind of phenomenon had always fascinated him.

  If he was right, the central pier, with nothing underneath to support it, was now hanging from the bridge--hence the cracks. Elfric's iron braces had not helped; in fact, they might have worsened the problem, by making it impossible for the bridge to settle slowly into a new, stable position.

  Merthin guessed that the other pier of the pair--on the farther, downstream side of the bridge--was still grounded. The current surely spent most of its force on the upstream pier, and attacked the second of the pair with reduced violence. Only one pier was affected; and it seemed that the rest of the structure was knitted together strongly enough for the entire bridge to stay upright--as long as it was not subjected to extraordinary strain.

  But the cracks seemed wider today than on Monday. And it was not difficult to guess why. Hundreds of people were on the bridge, a much greater load than it normally took; and there was a heavily laden wool cart, with twenty or thirty people sitting on the sacks of wool to add to the burden.

  Fear gripped Merthin's heart. He did not think the bridge could withstand that level of strain for long.

  He was vaguely aware that Caris was speaking, but her meaning did not penetrate his thoughts until she raised her voice and said: "You're not even listening!"

  "There's going to be a terrible accident," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "We have to get everyone off the bridge."

  "Are you mad? They're all tormenting Crazy Nell. Even Earl Roland can't get them to move. They're not going to listen to you."

  "I think it could collapse."

  "Oh, look!" said Caris, pointing. "Can you see someone running along the road from the forest, approaching the south end of the bridge?"

  Merthin wondered what that had to do with anything, but he followed her pointing finger. Sure enough, he saw the figure of a young woman running, her hair flying.

  Caris said: "It looks like Gwenda."

  Behind her, in hot pursuit, was a man in a yellow tunic.

  Gwenda was more tired than she had ever been
in her life.

  She knew that the fastest way to cover a long distance was to run twenty paces then walk twenty paces. She had started to do that half a day ago, when she spotted Sim Chapman a mile behind her. For a while she lost sight of him but, when once again the road provided her with a long rearward view, she saw that he, too, was walking and running alternately. As mile succeeded mile and hour followed hour he gained on her. By mid-morning she had known that at this rate he would catch her before she reached Kingsbridge.

  In desperation, she had taken to the forest. But she could not stray far from the road for fear of losing her way. Eventually she heard running steps and heavy breathing, and peered through the undergrowth to see Sim go by on the road. She realized that as soon as he came to a long clear stretch he would guess what she had done. Sure enough, some time later she saw him come back.

  She had pressed on through the forest, stopping every few minutes to stand in silence and listen. For a long time she had evaded him, and she knew he would have to search the woods on both sides of the road to make sure she was not in hiding. But her progress was also slow, for she had to fight her way through the summer undergrowth, and keep checking that she had not strayed too far from the road.

  When she heard the sound of a distant crowd, she knew she could not be far from the city, and she thought she was going to escape after all. She made her way to the road and cautiously looked out from a bush. The way was clear in both directions--and, a quarter of a mile to the north, she could see the tower of the cathedral.

  She was almost there.

  She heard a familiar bark, and her dog, Skip, emerged from the bushes at the side of the road. She bent to pat him, and he wagged joyfully, licking her hands. Tears came to her eyes.

  Sim was not in sight, so she risked the open road. She wearily resumed her twenty paces of running and twenty of walking, now with Skip trotting happily beside her, thinking this was a new game. Each time she switched, she looked back over her shoulder. The third time she did so, she saw Sim.

  He was only a couple of hundred yards behind.

  Despair washed over her like a tidal wave. She wanted to lie down and die. But she was in the suburbs now, and the bridge was only a quarter of a mile away. She forced herself to keep going.