Pillars of the Earth, book 2 77 страница

The boy spoke fast. “My father and mother are ill and so is my brother, and my mother heard someone say you were at the bishop’s palace and said to fetch you, and she knows you help the poor but she can pay, but will you please come, please?”

This type of request was not unusual, and Caris carried a leather case of medical supplies with her wherever she went. “Of course I’ll come, lad,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Giles Spicers, mother, and I’m to wait and bring you.”

“All right.” Caris turned to the bishop. “Go ahead with your dinner, please. I’ll join you as soon as I can.” She picked up her case and followed the boy out.

Shiring owed its existence to the sheriff’s castle on the hill, just as Kingsbridge did to the priory. Near the market square were the grand houses of the leading citizens, the wool merchants and sheriff’s deputies and royal officials such as the coroner. A little farther out were the homes of moderately prosperous traders and craftsmen, goldsmiths and tailors and apothecaries. Giles’s father was a dealer in spices, as his name indicated, and Giles led Caris to a street in this neighbourhood. Like most houses of this class, it had a stone-built ground floor that served as warehouse and shop, and flimsier timber living quarters above. Today the shop was closed and locked. Giles led Caris up the outside staircase.

She smelled the familiar odour of sickness as soon as she walked in. Then she hesitated. There was something special about the smell, something that struck a chord in her memory that for some reason made her feel very frightened.

Rather than ponder it, she walked through the living room into the bedroom, and there she found the dreadful answer.

Three people lay on mattresses around the room: a woman of her own age, a slightly older man and an adolescent boy. The man was farthest gone in sickness. He lay moaning and sweating in a fever. The open neck of his shirt showed that he had a rash of purple-black spots on his chest and throat. There was blood on his lips and nostrils.

He had the plague.

“It’s come back,” said Caris. “God help me.”

For a moment fear paralysed her. She stood motionless, staring at the scene, feeling powerless. She had always known, in theory, that the plague might return – that was half the reason she had written her book – but even so she was not prepared for the shock of once again seeing that rash, that fever, that nosebleed.

The woman lifted herself on one elbow. She was not so far gone: she had the rash and the fever, but did not appear to be bleeding. “Give me something to drink, for the love of God,” she said.

Giles picked up a jug of wine, and at last Caris’s mind started to work and her body unfroze. “Don’t give her wine – it will make her thirstier,” she said. “I saw a barrel of ale in the other room – draw her a cup of that.”

The woman focused on Caris. “You’re the prioress, aren’t you?” she said. Caris did not correct her. “People say you’re a saint. Can you make my family well?”

“I’ll try, but I’m not a saint, just a woman who has observed people in sickness and health.” Caris took from her bag a strip of linen and tied it over her mouth and nose. She had not seen a case of the plague for ten years, but she had got into the habit of taking this precaution whenever she dealt with patients whose illness might be catching. She moistened a clean rag with rose water and bathed the woman’s face. As always, the action soothed the patient.

Giles came back with a cup of ale, and the woman drank. Caris said to him: “Let them have as much to drink as they want, but give them ale or watered wine.”

She moved to the father, who did not have long to live. He was not speaking coherently and his eyes failed to focus on Caris. She bathed his face, cleaning the dried blood from around his nose and mouth. Finally she attended to Giles’s elder brother. He had only recently succumbed, and was still sneezing, but he was old enough to realize how seriously ill he was, and he looked terrified.

When she had finished she said to Giles: “Try to keep them comfortable and give them drinks. There’s nothing else you can do. Do you have any relations? Uncles or cousins?”

“They’re all in Wales.”

She made a mental note to warn Bishop Henri that he might need to make arrangements for an orphan boy.

“Mother said to pay you,” the boy said.

“I haven’t done much for you,” Caris said. “You can pay me sixpence.”

There was a leather purse beside his mother’s bed. He took out six silver pennies.

The woman raised herself again. Speaking more calmly now, she said: “What’s wrong with us?”

“I’m sorry,” said Caris. “It’s the plague.”

The woman nodded fatalistically. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Don’t you recognize the symptoms from last time?”

“We were living in a small town in Wales – we escaped it. Are we all going to die?”

Caris did not believe in deceiving people about such important questions. “A few people survive it,” she said. “Not many, though.”

“May God have mercy on us, then,” said the woman.

Caris said: “Amen.”

*

All the way back to Kingsbridge, Caris brooded on the plague. It would spread, of course, just as fast as last time. It would kill thousands. The prospect filled her with rage. It was like the senseless carnage of war, except that war was caused by men, and the plague was not. What was she going to do? She could not sit back and watch as the events of thirteen years ago were cruelly repeated.

There was no cure for the plague, but she had discovered ways to slow its murderous progress. As her horse jogged the well-worn road through the forest, she thought over what she knew about the illness and how to combat it. Merthin was quiet, recognizing her mood, probably guessing accurately what she was thinking about.

When they got home, she explained to him what she wanted to do. “There will be opposition,” he warned. “Your plan is drastic. Those who did not lose family and friends last time may imagine they are invulnerable, and say you’re overreacting.”

“That’s where you can help me,” she said.

“In that case, I recommend we divide up the potential objectors and deal with them separately.”

“All right.”

“You have three groups to win over: the guild, the monks and the nuns. Let’s start with the guild. I’ll call a meeting – and I won’t invite Philemon.”

Nowadays the guild met in the Cloth Exchange, a large new stone building on the main street. It enabled traders to do business even in bad weather. It had been paid for by profits from Kingsbridge Scarlet.

But before the guild convened, Caris and Merthin met individually with the leading members, to win their support in advance, a technique Merthin had developed long ago. His motto was: “Never call a meeting until the result is a foregone conclusion.”

Caris herself went to see Madge Webber.

Madge had married again. Much to everyone’s amusement, she had enchanted a villager as handsome as her first husband and fifteen years her junior. His name was Anselm, and he seemed to adore her, though she was as plump as ever and covered her grey hair with a selection of exotic caps. Even more surprising, in her forties she had conceived again and given birth to a healthy baby girl, Selma, now eight years old and attending the nuns’ school. Motherhood had never kept Madge from doing business, and she continued to dominate the market in Kingsbridge Scarlet, with Anselm as her lieutenant.

Her home was still the large house on the main street that she and Mark had moved into when she first began to profit from weaving and dyeing. Caris found her and Anselm taking delivery of a consignment of red cloth, trying to find room for it in the overcrowded storeroom on the ground floor. “I’m stocking up for the Fleece Fair,” Madge explained.

Caris waited while she checked the delivery, then they went upstairs, leaving Anselm in charge of the shop. As Caris entered the living room she was vividly reminded of the day, thirteen years ago, when she had been summoned here to see Mark – the first Kingsbridge victim of the plague. She suddenly felt depressed.

Madge noticed her expression. “What is it?” she said.

You could not hide things from women the way you could from men. “I walked in here thirteen years ago because Mark was ill,” Caris said.

Madge nodded. “That was the beginning of the worst time of my life,” she said in her matter-of-fact voice. “That day, I had a wonderful husband and four healthy children. Three months later I was a childless widow with nothing to live for.”

“Days of grief,” Caris said.

Madge went to the sideboard, where there were cups and a jug, but instead of offering Caris a drink she stood staring at the wall. “Shall I tell you something strange?” she said. “After they died, I couldn’t say Amen to the paternoster.” She swallowed, and her voice went quieter. “I know what the Latin means, you see. My father taught me. ‘Fiat voluntas tua: Thy will be done.’ I couldn’t say that. God had taken my family, and that was sufficient torture – I would not acquiesce in it.” Tears came to her eyes as she remembered. “I didn’t want God’s will to prevail, I wanted my children back. ‘Thy will be done.’ I knew I’d go to hell, but still I couldn’t say Amen.”

Caris said. “The plague has come back.”

Madge staggered, and clutched the sideboard for support. Her solid figure suddenly looked frail, and as the confidence went from her face she appeared old. “No,” she said.

Caris pulled a bench forward and held Madge’s arm while she sat on it. “I’m sorry to shock you,” she said.

“No,” Madge said again. “It can’t come back. I can’t lose Anselm and Selma. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.” She looked so white and drawn that Caris began to fear she might suffer some kind of attack.

Caris poured wine from the jug into a cup. She gave it to Madge, who drank it automatically. A little of her colour came back.

“We understand it better now,” Caris said. “Perhaps we can fight it.”

“Fight it? How can we do that?”

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you. Are you feeling a little better?”

Madge met Caris’s eye at last. “Fight it,” she said. “Of course that’s what we must do. Tell me how.”

“We have to close the city. Shut the gates, man the walls, prevent anyone coming in.”

“But the city has to eat.”

“People will bring supplies to Leper Island. Merthin will act as middleman, and pay them – he contracted the plague last time and survived, and no one has ever got it twice. Traders will leave their goods on the bridge. Then, when they have gone, people will come out from the city and get the food.”

“Could people leave the city?”

“Yes, but they couldn’t come back.”

“What about the Fleece Fair?”

“That may be the hardest part,” Caris said. “It must be cancelled.”

“But Kingsbridge merchants will lose hundreds of pounds!”

“It’s better than dying.”

“If we do as you say, will we avoid the plague? Will my family survive?”

Caris hesitated, resisting the temptation to tell a reassuring lie. “I can’t promise,” she said. “The plague may already have reached us. There may be someone right now dying alone in a hovel near the waterfront, with nobody to get help. So I fear we may not escape entirely. But I believe my plan gives you the best chance of still having Anselm and Selma by your side at Christmas.”

“Then we’ll do it,” Madge said decisively.

“Your support is crucial,” Caris said. “Frankly, you will lose more money than anyone else from the cancellation of the fair. For that reason, people are more likely to believe you. I need you to say how serious it is.”

“Don’t worry,” said Madge. “I’ll tell them.”

*

“A very sound idea,” said Prior Philemon.

Merthin was surprised. He could not remember a time when Philemon had agreed readily with a proposal of the guild’s. “Then you will support it,” he said, to make sure he had heard aright.

“Yes, indeed,” said the prior. He was eating a bowl of raisins, stuffing handfuls into his mouth as fast as he could chew them. He did not offer Merthin any. “Of course,” he said, “it wouldn’t apply to monks.”

Merthin sighed. He might have known better. “On the contrary, it applies to everyone,” he said.

“No, no,” said Philemon, in the tone of one who instructs a child. “The guild has no power to restrict the movements of monks.”

Merthin noticed a cat at Philemon’s feet. It was fat, like him, with a mean face. It looked just like Godwyn’s cat, Archbishop, though that creature must be long dead. Perhaps it was a descendant. Merthin said: “The guild has the power to close the city gates.”

“But we have the right to come and go as we please. We’re not subject to the authority of the guild – that would be ridiculous.”

“All the same, the guild controls the city, and we have decided that no one can enter while the plague is rife.”

“You cannot make rules for the priory.”

“But I can for the city, and the priory happens to be in the city.”

“Are you telling me that if I leave Kingsbridge today, you will refuse me admission tomorrow?”

Merthin was not sure. It would be highly embarrassing, at a minimum, to have the prior of Kingsbridge standing outside the gate demanding admission. He had been hoping to persuade Philemon to accept the restriction. He did not want to put the resolve of the guild to the test quite so dramatically. However, he tried to make his answer sound confident. “Absolutely.”

“I shall complain to the bishop.”

“Tell him he can’t enter Kingsbridge.”

*

The personnel of the nunnery had hardly changed in ten years, Caris realized. Nunneries were like that, of course: you were supposed to stay for ever. Mother Joan was still prioress, and Sister Oonagh ran the hospital under the supervision of Brother Sime. Few people came here for medical care, now: most preferred Caris’s hospital on the island. Those patients Sime did have, devoutly religious for the most part, were cared for in the old hospital, next to the kitchens, while the new building was used for guests.

Caris sat down with Joan, Oonagh and Sime in the old pharmacy, now used as the prioress’s private office, and explained her plan. “People outside the walls of the old city who fall victim to the plague will be admitted to my hospital on the island,” she said. “While the plague lasts, the nuns and I will stay within the building night and day. Nobody will leave, except those lucky few who recover.”

Joan asked: “What about here in the old city?”

“If the plague gets into the city despite our precautions, there may be too many victims for the accommodation you have. The guild has ruled that plague victims and their families will be confined to their homes. The rule applies to anyone who lives in a house struck by plague: parents, children, grandparents, servants, apprentices. Anyone caught leaving such a house will be hanged.”

“It’s very harsh,” Joan said. “But if it prevents the awful slaughter of the last plague, it’s worth while.”

“I knew you’d see that.”

Sime was saying nothing. The news of the plague seemed to have deflated his arrogance.

Oonagh said: “How will the victims eat, if they’re imprisoned in their homes?”

“Neighbours can leave food on the doorstep. No one may go in – except monk-physicians and nuns. They will visit the sick, but they must have no contact with the healthy. They will go from the priory to the home, and from the home back to the priory, without entering any other building or even speaking to anyone on the street. They should wear masks at all times, and wash their hands in vinegar each time they touch a patient.”

Sime was looking terrified. “Will that protect us?” he said.

“To some degree,” Caris said. “Not completely.”

“But then it will be highly dangerous for us to attend the sick!”

Oonagh answered him. “We have no fear,” she said. “We look forward to death. For us, it is the longed-for reunion with Christ.”

“Yes, of course,” said Sime.

The next day, all the monks left Kingsbridge.

Gwenda felt murderously angry when she saw what Ralph had done to Davey’s madder plants. Wanton destruction of crops was a sin. There should be a special place in hell for noblemen who despoiled what peasants had sweated to grow.

But Davey was not dismayed. “I don’t think it matters,” he said. “The value is in the roots, and he hasn’t touched them.”

“That would have been too much like work,” Gwenda said sourly, but she cheered up.

In fact the shrubs recovered remarkably quickly. Ralph probably did not know that madder propagated underground. Throughout May and June, as reports began to reach Wigleigh of an outbreak of the plague, the roots sent up new shoots and, at the beginning of July, Davey decided it was time to harvest the crop. One Sunday Gwenda, Wulfric and Davey spent the afternoon digging up the roots. They would first loosen the soil around the plant, then pull it out of the ground, then strip its foliage, leaving the root attached to a short stem. It was back-aching work of the kind Gwenda had done all her life.

They left half the plantation untouched, in the hope that it would regenerate itself next year.

They pulled a handcart piled with madder roots back through the woods to Wigleigh, then unloaded the roots into the barn and spread them in the hayloft to dry.

Davey did not know when he would be able to sell his crop. Kingsbridge was a closed city. The people still bought supplies, of course, but only through brokers. Davey was doing something new, and he would need to explain the situation to his buyer. It would be awkward to do that through an intermediary. But perhaps he would have to try. He had to dry the roots first, then grind them to a powder, and that would take time anyway.

Davey had said no more about Amabel, but Gwenda felt sure he was still seeing the girl. He pretended to be cheerfully resigned to his fate. If he had really given her up, he would have moped resentfully.

All Gwenda could do was hope he would get over her before he was old enough to marry without permission. She still could hardly bear even to think of her family being joined to Annet’s. Annet had never ceased to humiliate her by flirting with Wulfric, who continued to grin foolishly at every stupid coquettish remark. Now that Annet was in her forties, with broken veins in her rosy cheeks and grey streaks among her fair ringlets, her behaviour was not just embarrassing but grotesque; yet Wulfric reacted as if she were still a girl.

And now, Gwenda thought, my son has fallen into the same trap. It made her want to spit. Amabel looked just like Annet twenty-five years ago, a pretty face with flyaway curls, a long neck and narrow white shoulders, and small breasts like the eggs that mother and daughter sold at markets. She had the same way of tossing her hair, the same trick of looking at a man with mock reproach and hitting his chest with the back of her hand in a gesture that pretended to be a smack but was in fact a caress.

However, Davey was at least physically safe and well. Gwenda was more worried about Sam, living now with Earl Ralph at the castle, learning to be a fighting man. In church she prayed he would not be injured hunting, or learning to use a sword, or fighting in a tournament. She had seen him every day for twenty-two years, then suddenly he had been taken from her. It’s hard to be a woman, she thought. You love your baby with all your heart and soul, and then one day he just leaves.

For several weeks she looked for an excuse to travel to Earlscastle and check on Sam. Then she heard that the plague had struck there, and that decided her. She would go before the harvest got under way. Wulfric would not go with her: he had too much to do on the land. Anyway, she had no fear of travelling alone. “Too poor to be robbed, too old to be raped,” she joked. The truth was that she was too tough for either. And she carried a long knife.

She walked across the drawbridge at Earlscastle on a hot July day. On the battlements of the gatehouse a rook stood like a sentry, the sun glinting off his glossy black feathers. He cawed a warning at her. It sounded like: “Go, go!” She had escaped the plague once, of course; but that might have been luck: she was risking her life by coming here.

The scene in the lower compound was normal, if a little quiet. A woodcutter was unloading a cart full of firewood outside the bakehouse, and a groom was unsaddling a dusty horse in front of the stables, but there was no great bustle of activity. She noticed a small group of men and women outside the west entrance of the little church, and crossed the baked-earth ground to investigate. “Plague victims inside,” a maidservant said in answer to her inquiry.

She stepped through the door, feeling dread like a cold lump in her heart.

Ten or twelve straw mattresses were lined up on the floor so that the occupants could face the altar, just as in a hospital. About half the patients seemed to be children. There were three grown men. Gwenda scanned their faces fearfully.

None of them was Sam.

She knelt down and said a prayer of thanks.

Outside, she approached the woman she had spoken to earlier. “I’m looking for Sam from Wigleigh,” she said. “He’s a new squire.”

The woman pointed to the bridge leading to the inner compound. “Try the keep.”

Gwenda took the route indicated. A sentry at the bridge ignored her. She climbed the steps to the keep.

The great hall was dark and cool. A big dog slept on the cold stones of the fireplace. There were benches around the walls and a pair of large armchairs at the far end of the room. Gwenda noticed that there were no cushions, no upholstered seats and no wall hangings. She deduced that Lady Philippa spent little time here and took no interest in the furnishings.

Sam was sitting near a window with three younger men. The parts of a suit of armour were laid out on the floor in front of them, arranged in order from faceplate to greaves. Each of the men was cleaning a piece. Sam was rubbing the breastplate with a smooth pebble, trying to remove rust.

She stood watching him for a moment. He wore new clothes in the red-and-black livery of the earl of Shiring. The colours suited his dark good looks. He seemed to be at ease, talking in a desultory way with the others while they all worked. He appeared healthy and well fed. It was what Gwenda had hoped for, but all the same she suffered a perverse pang of disappointment that he was doing so well without her.

He glanced up and saw her. His face registered surprise, then pleasure, then amusement. “Lads,” he said, “I am the oldest among you, and you may think I’m capable of looking after myself, but it’s not so. My mother follows me everywhere to make sure I’m all right.”

They saw her and laughed. Sam put down his work and came over. Mother and son sat on a bench in a corner near the staircase that led to the upstairs rooms. “I’m having a wonderful time,” Sam said. “Everyone plays games here most days. We go hunting and hawking, we have wrestling matches and contests of horsemanship, and we play football. I’ve learned so much! It’s a bit embarrassing to be grouped with these adolescents all the time, but I can put up with that. I just have to master the skill of using a sword and shield while riding a horse at the same time.”

He was already speaking differently, she noticed. He was losing the slow rhythms of village speech. And he used French words for ‘hawking’ and ‘horsemanship’. He was becoming assimilated into the life of the nobility.

“What about the work?” she said. “It can’t be all play.”

“Yes, there’s plenty of work.” He gestured at the others cleaning the armour. “But it’s easy by comparison with ploughing and harrowing.”

He asked about his brother, and she told him all the news from home: Davey’s madder had regenerated, they had dug up the roots, Davey was still involved with Amabel, no one had fallen sick of the plague yet. While they were talking, she began to feel that she was being watched, and she knew her feeling was not fanciful. After a moment, she looked over her shoulder.

Earl Ralph was standing at the top of the staircase in front of an open door, evidently having stepped out of his room. She wondered how long he had been looking at her. She met his gaze. His stare was intense, but she could not read it, did not understand what it meant. She began to feel the look was uncomfortably intimate, and she glanced away.

When she looked back, he had gone.

*

The next day, when she was on the road and half way home, a horseman came up behind her, riding fast, then slowed down and stopped.

Her hand went to the long dagger in her belt.

The rider was Sir Alan Fernhill. “The earl wants to see you,” he said.

“Then he had better come himself, instead of sending you,” she replied.

“You’ve always got a smart answer, haven’t you? Do you imagine it endears you to your superiors?”

He had a point. She was taken aback, perhaps because in all the years he had been Ralph’s sidekick she had never known Alan to say anything intelligent. If she was really smart she would suck up to people such as Alan, not poke fun at them. “All right,” she said wearily. “The earl bids me to him. Must I walk all the way back to the castle?”

“No. He has a lodge in the forest, not far from here, where he sometimes stops for refreshment during a hunt. He’s there now.” He pointed into the woods beside the road.

Gwenda did not much like this but, as a serf, she had no right to decline a summons from her earl. Anyway, if she did refuse she felt sure Alan would knock her down and tie her up and carry her there. “Very well,” she said.

“Jump up on the saddle in front of me, if you like.”

“No, thanks, I’d rather walk.”

At this time of year the undergrowth was thick. Gwenda followed the horse into the woods, taking advantage of the path it trampled through the nettles and ferns. The road behind them swiftly disappeared into the greenery. Gwenda wondered nervously what whim had caused Ralph to arrange this forest meeting. It could not be good news for her or her family, she felt.

They walked a quarter of a mile and came to a low building with a thatched roof. Gwenda would have assumed it to be a verderer’s cottage. Alan looped his reins around a sapling and led the way inside.

The place had about it the same bare utilitarian look Gwenda had noted at Earlscastle. The floor was beaten earth, the walls unfinished wattle-and-daub, the ceiling nothing more than the underside of the thatch. The furniture was minimal: a table, some benches and a plain wooden bedstead with a straw mattress, A door at the back stood half open on a small kitchen where, presumably, Ralph’s servants prepared food and drink for him and his fellow huntsmen.

Ralph was sitting at the table with a cup of wine. Gwenda stood in front of him, waiting. Alan leaned against the wall behind her. “So, Alan found you,” Ralph said.

“Is there no one else here?” Gwenda said nervously.

“Just you, me and Alan.”

Gwenda’s anxiety went up a notch. “Why do you want to see me?”

“To talk about Sam, of course.”

“You’ve taken him from me. What else is there to say?”

“He’s a good boy, you know… our son.”

“Don’t call him that.” She looked at Alan. He showed no surprise: clearly he had been let in on the secret. She was dismayed. Wulfric must never find out. “Don’t call him our son,” she said. “You’ve never been a father to him. Wulfric raised him.”

“How could I raise him? I didn’t even know he was mine! But I’m making up for lost time. He’s doing well, did he tell you?”

“Does he get into fights?”

“Of course. Squires are supposed to fight. It’s practice for when they go to war. You should have asked whether he wins.”

“It’s not the life I wanted for him.”

“It’s the life he was made for.”

“Did you bring me here to gloat?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

Reluctantly, she sat opposite him at the table. He poured wine into a cup and pushed it towards her. She ignored it.

He said: “Now that I know we have a son together, I think we should be more intimate.”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re such a killjoy.”

“Don’t you talk to me about joy. You’ve been a blight on my life. With all my heart I wish I had never set eyes on you. I don’t want to be intimate with you, I want to get away from you. If you went to Jerusalem it wouldn’t be far enough.”

His face darkened with anger, and she regretted the extravagance of her words. She recalled Alan’s rebuke. She wished she could say no simply and calmly, without stinging witticisms. But Ralph aroused her ire like no one else.

“Can’t you see?” she said, trying to be reasonable. “You have hated my husband for, what, a quarter of a century? He broke your nose and you slashed his cheek open. You disinherited him, then you were forced to give him back his family’s lands. You raped the woman he once loved. He ran away and you dragged him back with a rope around his neck. After all tnat, even having a son together cannot make you and me friends.”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04