by Ken Follett
The girl stepped forward and came to him. Her escort hesitated, then stayed where they were.
"I am your husband," Ralph said to her. "My name is Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, Lord of Tench."
She looked terrified. "I'm happy to meet you, sir."
"This is your home now, as it was when you were a child and your father was lord here. You are now the Lady of Tench, as your mother once was. Are you happy to be back in your family home?"
"Yes, lord." She looked anything but happy.
"I'm sure the nuns have told you that you must be an obedient wife, and do all you can to please your husband, who is your lord and master."
"Yes, lord."
"And here are my mother and father, who are your parents, too, now."
She made a little curtsey to Gerald and Maud.
Ralph said: "Come here." He held out his hands.
Automatically, Tilly reached out, then she saw his maimed left hand. She made a disgusted sound and flinched back.
An angry curse came to Ralph's lips, but he suppressed it. With some difficulty he forced himself to speak in a light tone of voice. "Don't be afraid of my wounded hand," he said. "You should be proud of it. I lost those fingers in the service of the king." He kept both arms stretched out expectantly.
With an effort, she took his hands.
"Now you can kiss me, Tilly."
He was seated, and she was standing in front of him. She leaned forward and offered her cheek. He put his wounded hand at the back of her head and turned her face, then he kissed her lips. He sensed her uncertainty and guessed that she had not been kissed by a man before. He let his mouth linger on hers, partly because it was so sweet, and partly to enrage those watching. Then, with slow deliberation, he pressed his good hand against her chest, and felt her breasts. They were full and round. She was no child.
He released her and sighed with satisfaction. "We must get married soon," he said. He turned to Caris, who was visibly suppressing anger. "In Kingsbridge Cathedral, four weeks from Sunday," he said. He looked at Philippa but addressed William. "As we're getting married by the express wish of His Majesty King Edward, I would be honored if you would attend, Earl William."
William nodded curtly.
Caris spoke for the first time. "Sir Ralph, the prior of Kingsbridge sends you greetings, and says he will be honored to perform the ceremony, unless of course the new bishop wishes to do so."
Ralph nodded graciously.
She then added: "But those of us who have had charge of this child believe she is still too young to live with her husband conjugally."
Philippa said: "I concur."
Ralph's father spoke. "You know, son, I waited years to marry your mother."
Ralph did not want to hear that story all over again. "Unlike you, Father, I have been ordered by the king to marry Lady Matilda."
His mother said: "Perhaps you should wait, son."
"I have waited more than a year! She was twelve when the king gave her to me."
Caris said: "Marry the child, yes, with all due ceremony--but then let her return to the nunnery for a year. Let her grow fully into her womanhood. Then bring her to your home."
Ralph snorted scornfully. "I could be dead in a year, especially if the king decides to go back to France. Meanwhile, the Fitzgeralds need an heir."
"She is a child--"
Ralph interrupted, raising his voice. "She is no child--look at her! That stupid nun's habit can't disguise her breasts."
"Puppy fat--"
"Does she have a woman's hair?" Ralph demanded.
Tilly gasped at his crude frankness, and her cheeks reddened with shame.
Caris hesitated.
Ralph said: "Perhaps my mother should examine her on my behalf and tell me."
Caris shook her head. "That won't be necessary. Tilly has hair where a woman has it and a child does not."
"I knew as much. I have seen--" Ralph stopped, realizing that he did not want everyone here to know in what circumstances he had seen the naked bodies of girls of Tilly's age. "I guessed, from her figure," he amended, avoiding his mother's eye.
A rarely heard pleading tone entered Caris's voice. "But, Ralph, in her mind she is still a child."
I don't care about her mind, Ralph thought, but he did not say so. "She has four weeks to learn what she does not know," he said. He gave Caris a knowing look. "I'm sure you can teach her everything."
Caris flushed. Nuns were not supposed to know about marital intimacy, of course, but she had been his brother's girlfriend.
His mother said: "Perhaps a compromise--"
"You just don't understand, Mother, do you?" he said, rudely interrupting her. "No one is really concerned about her age. If I were going to marry the daughter of a Kingsbridge butcher, they wouldn't care if she was nine. It's because Tilly is noble-born, don't you see that? They think they're superior to us!" He knew he was shouting, and he could see the amazed expressions of everyone around him, but he did not care. "They don't want a cousin of the earl of Shiring to marry the son of an impoverished knight. They want to put off the marriage in the hope that I'll be killed in battle before it's consummated." He wiped his mouth. "But this son of an impoverished knight fought at the battle of Crecy, and saved the life of the prince of Wales. That's what matters to the king." He looked at each of them in turn: haughty William, scornful Philippa, furious Caris, and his astonished parents. "So you might as well accept the facts. Ralph Fitzgerald is a knight and a lord, and a comrade-in-arms of the king. And he's going to marry Lady Matilda, the cousin of the earl--whether you like it or not!"
There was a shocked silence for several moments.
At last Ralph turned to Daniel. "You can serve dinner now," he said.
53
In the spring of 1348, Merthin woke up as if from a nightmare he could not quite remember. He felt frightened and weak. He opened his eyes to a room lit by bars of bright sunshine coming through half-open shutters. He saw a high ceiling, white walls, red tiles. The air was mild. Reality returned slowly. He was in his bedroom, in his house, in Florence. He had been ill.
The illness came back to him first. It had begun with a skin rash, purplish-black blotches on his chest, then his arms, then everywhere. Soon afterward he developed a painful lump or bubo in his armpit. He had a fever, sweating in his bed, tangling the sheets as he writhed. He had vomited and coughed blood. He had thought he would die. Worst of all was a terrible, unquenchable thirst that had made him want to throw himself into the River Arno with his mouth open.
He was not the only sufferer. Thousands of Italians had fallen ill with this plague, tens of thousands. Half the workmen on his building sites had disappeared, as had most of his household servants. Almost everyone who caught it died within five days. They called it la moria grande, the big death.
But he was alive.
He had a nagging feeling that while ill he had reached a momentous decision, but he could not remember it. He concentrated for a moment. The harder he thought, the more elusive the memory became, until it vanished.
He sat up in bed. His limbs felt feeble and his head spun for a moment. He was wearing a clean linen nightshirt, and he wondered who had put it on him. After a pause, he stood.
He had a four-story house with a courtyard. He had designed and built it himself, with a flat facade instead of the traditional overhanging floors, and architectural features such as round window arches and classical columns. The neighbors had called it a palagetto, a mini-palace. That was seven years ago. Several prosperous Florentine merchants had asked him to build palagetti for them, and that had got his career here started.
Florence was a republic, with no ruling prince or duke, dominated by an elite of squabbling merchant families. The city was populated by thousands of weavers, but it was the merchants who made fortunes. They spent their money building grand houses, which made the city a perfect place for a talented young architect to prosper.
He went to the bedroom door and called his
wife. "Silvia! Where are you?" It came naturally to him to speak the Tuscan dialect now, after nine years.
Then he remembered. Silvia had been ill, too. So had their daughter, who was three years old. Her name was Laura, but they had adopted her childish pronunciation, Lolla. His heart was gripped by a terrible fear. Was Silvia alive? Was Lolla?
The house was quiet. So was the city, he realized suddenly. The angle of the sunlight slanting into the rooms told him it was mid-morning. He should have been hearing the cries of street hawkers, the clop of horses and the rumble of wooden cartwheels, the background murmur of a thousand conversations--but there was nothing.
He went up the stairs. In his weakness, the effort made him breathless. He pushed open the door to the nursery. The room looked empty. He broke out in a sweat of fear. There was Lolla's cot, a small chest for her clothes, a box of toys, a miniature table with two tiny chairs. Then he heard a noise. There in the corner was Lolla, sitting on the floor in a clean dress, playing with a small wooden horse with articulated legs. Merthin gave a strangled cry of relief. She heard him and looked up. "Papa," she observed in a matter-of-fact tone.
Merthin picked her up and hugged her. "You're alive," he said in English.
There was a sound from the next room, and Maria walked in. A gray-haired woman in her fifties, she was Lolla's nurse. "Master!" she said. "You got up--are you better?"
"Where is your mistress?" he said.
Maria's face fell. "I'm so sorry, master," she said. "The mistress died."
Lolla said: "Mama's gone."
Merthin felt the shock like a blow. Stunned, he handed Lolla to Maria. Moving slowly and carefully, he turned away and walked out of the room, then down the stairs to the piano nobile, the principal floor. He stared at the long table, the empty chairs, the rugs on the floor, and the pictures on the walls. It looked like someone else's home.
He stood in front of a painting of the Virgin Mary with her mother. Italian painters were superior to the English or any others, and this artist had given Saint Anne the face of Silvia. She was a proud beauty, with flawless olive skin and noble features, but the painter had seen the sexual passion smoldering in those aloof brown eyes.
It was hard to comprehend that Silvia no longer existed. He thought of her slim body, and remembered how he had marveled, again and again, at her perfect breasts. That body, with which he had been so completely intimate, now lay in the ground somewhere. When he imagined that, tears came to his eyes at last, and he sobbed with grief.
Where was her grave? he wondered in his misery. He remembered that funerals had ceased in Florence: people were terrified to leave their houses. They simply dragged the bodies outside and laid them on the street. The city's thieves, beggars, and drunks had acquired a new profession: they were called corpse carriers or becchini, and they charged exorbitant fees to take the bodies away and put them in mass graves. Merthin might never know where Silvia lay.
They had been married four years. Looking at her picture, garbed in St. Anne's conventional red dress, Merthin suffered an access of painful honesty, and asked himself whether he had really loved her. He was very fond of her, but it was not an all-consuming passion. She had an independent spirit and a sharp tongue, and he was the only man in Florence with the nerve to woo her, despite her father's wealth. In return, she had given him complete devotion. But she had accurately gauged the quality of his love. "What are you thinking about?" she used to say sometimes, and he would give a guilty start, because he had been remembering Kingsbridge. Soon she changed it to: "Who are you thinking about?" He never spoke Caris's name, but Silvia said: "It must be a woman, I can tell by the look on your face." Eventually she began to talk about "your English girl." She would say: "You're remembering your English girl," and she was always right. But she seemed to accept it. Merthin was faithful to her. And he adored Lolla.
After a while, Maria brought him soup and bread. "What day is it?" he asked her.
"Tuesday."
"How long was I in bed?"
"Two weeks. You were so ill."
He wondered why he had survived. Some people never succumbed to the disease, as if they had natural protection; but those who caught it nearly always died. However, the tiny minority who recovered were doubly fortunate, for no one had ever caught the illness a second time.
When he had eaten, he felt stronger. He had to rebuild his life, he realized. He suspected that he had already made this decision once, when he was ill, but again he was tantalized by the thread of a memory slipping from his grasp.
His first task was to find out how much of his family was left.
He took his dishes to the kitchen, where Maria was feeding Lolla bread dipped in goat's milk. He asked her: "What about Silvia's parents? Are they alive?"
"I don't know," she said. "I haven't heard. I go out only to buy food."
"I'd better find out."
He got dressed and went downstairs. The ground floor of the house was a workshop, with the yard at the rear used for storing wood and stone. No one was at work, either inside or out.
He left the house. The buildings around him were mostly stone-built, some of them very grand: Kingsbridge had no houses to compare with these. The richest man in Kingsbridge, Edmund Wooler, had lived in a timber house. Here in Florence, only the poor lived in such places.
The street was deserted. He had never seen it this way, not even in the middle of the night. The effect was eerie. He wondered how many people had died: a third of the population? Half? Were their ghosts still lingering in alleyways and shadowed corners, enviously watching the lucky survivors?
The Christi house was on the next street. Merthin's father-in-law, Alessandro Christi, had been his first and best friend in Florence. A schoolmate of Buonaventura Caroli, Alessandro had given Merthin his first commission, a simple warehouse building. He was, of course, Lolla's grandpa.
The door of Alessandro's palagetto was locked. That was unusual in itself. Merthin banged on the woodwork and waited. Eventually it was opened by Elizabetta, a small, plump woman who was Alessandro's laundress. She stared at him in shock. "You're alive!" she said.
"Hello, Betta," he said. "I'm glad to see that you're alive, too."
She turned and called back into the house: "It's the English lord!"
He had told them he was not a lord, but the servants did not believe him. He stepped inside. "Alessandro?" he said.
She shook her head and began to cry.
"And your mistress?"
"Both dead."
The stairs led from the entrance hall to the main floor. Merthin walked up slowly, surprised by how weak he still felt. In the main room he sat down to catch his breath. Alessandro had been wealthy, and the room was a showplace of rugs and hangings, paintings and jeweled ornaments and books.
"Who else is here?" he asked Elizabetta.
"Just Lena and her children." Lena was an Asiatic slave, unusual but by no means unique in prosperous Florentine households. She had two small children by Alessandro, a boy and a girl, and he had treated them just like his legitimate offspring; in fact Silvia had said acidly that he doted on them more than he ever had on her and her brother. The arrangement was considered eccentric rather than scandalous by the sophisticated Florentines.
Merthin said: "What about Signor Gianni?" Gianni was Silvia's brother.
"Dead. And his wife. The baby is here with me."
"Dear God."
Betta said tentatively: "And your family, lord?"
"My wife is dead."
"I am so sorry."
"But Lolla is alive."
"Thank God!"
"Maria is taking care of her."
"Maria is a good woman. Would you like some refreshment?"
Merthin nodded, and she went away.
Lena's children came to stare at him: a dark-eyed boy of seven who looked like Alessandro, and a pretty four-year-old with her mother's Asiatic eyes. Then Lena herself came in, a beautiful woman in her twenties with golden skin and
high cheekbones. She brought him a silver goblet of dark red Tuscan wine and a tray of almonds and olives.
She said: "Will you come to live here, lord?"
Merthin was surprised. "I don't think so--why?"
"The house is yours now." She waved a hand to indicate the Christi family's wealth. "Everything is yours."
Merthin realized she was right. He was Alessandro Christi's only surviving adult relative. That made him the heir--and the guardian of three children in addition to Lolla.
"Everything," Lena repeated, giving him a direct look.
Merthin met her candid gaze, and realized that she was offering herself.
He considered the prospect. The house was beautiful. It was home to Lena's children, and a familiar place to Lolla, and even to Gianni's baby: all the children would be happy here. He had inherited enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Lena was a woman of intelligence and experience, and he could readily imagine the pleasures of becoming intimate with her.
She read his mind. She took his hand and pressed it to her bosom. Her breasts felt soft and warm through the light wool dress.
But this was not what he wanted. He drew Lena's hand to him and kissed it. "I will provide for you and your children," he said. "Don't worry."
"Thank you, lord," she said, but she looked disappointed, and something in her eyes told Merthin that her offer had not been merely practical. She had genuinely hoped he might be more to her than just her new owner. But that was part of the problem. He could not imagine sex with someone he owned. The idea was distasteful to the point of revulsion.
He sipped his wine and felt stronger. If he was not drawn to an easy life of luxury and sensual gratification, what did he want? His family was almost gone: only Lolla was left. But he still had his work. Around the city were three sites where designs of his were under construction. He was not going to give up the job he loved. He had not survived the great death to become an idler. He recalled his youthful ambition to build the tallest building in England. He would pick up where he had left off. He would recover from the loss of Silvia by throwing himself into his building projects.
He got up to leave. Lena flung her arms around him. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for saying you will take care of my children."
He patted her back. "They are Alessandro's grandchildren," he said. In Florence, the children of slaves were not themselves enslaved. "When they grow up they will be rich." He detached her arms gently and went down the stairs.