The Pillars of the Earth (113 page)

“I’m glad he threw us out. It was because of that that I came looking for you. And now I’ve found you. I’m so happy I don’t know what to do.”

“You were very brave,” Jack said. “I still can’t take it in. You followed me all that way!”

“I’d do it all again,” she said fervently.

He kissed her again. A voice said in French: “If you insist on behaving lewdly in church, please remain in the nave.”

It was a young monk. Jack said: “I’m sorry, Father.” He took Aliena’s arm. They went down the steps and across the south transept. Jack said: “I was a monk for a while—I know how hard it is for them to look at happy lovers kissing.”

Happy lovers, Aliena thought. That’s what we are.

They walked the length of the church and stepped out into the busy market square. Aliena could hardly believe that she was standing in the sunshine with Jack by her side. It was almost too much happiness to bear.

“Well,” he said, “what shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling.

“Let’s get a loaf of bread and a flask of wine, and ride out into the fields to eat our dinner.”

“It sounds like paradise.”

They went to the baker and the vintner, and then they got a wedge of cheese from a dairywoman in the marketplace. In no time at all they were riding out of the village into the fields. Aliena had to keep looking at Jack to make sure he really was there, riding along beside her, breathing and smiling.

He said: “How is Alfred managing the building site?”

“Oh! I haven’t told you!” Aliena had forgotten how long he had been away. “There was a terrible disaster. The roof fell in.”

“What!” Jack’s loud exclamation startled his horse, and it did a skittish little dance. He calmed it. “How did that happen?”

“Nobody knows. They had three bays vaulted in time for Whitsunday, and then it all fell down during the service. It was dreadful—seventy-nine people were killed.”

“That’s terrible.” Jack was shaken. “How did Prior Philip take it?”

“Badly. He’s given up building altogether. He seems to have lost all his energy. He does nothing nowadays.”

Jack found it hard to imagine Philip in that state—he had always seemed so full of enthusiasm and determination. “So what happened to the craftsmen?”

“They all drifted away. Alfred lives in Shiring now, and builds houses.”

“Kingsbridge must be half empty.”

“It’s turning back into a village, like it used to be.”

“I wonder what Alfred did wrong?” Jack said half to himself. “That stone vault was never in Tom’s original plans; but Alfred made the buttresses bigger to take the weight, so it should have been all right.”

He was sobered by the news, and they rode on in silence. A mile or so out of Saint-Denis they tied up the horses in the shade of an elm tree and sat down in a corner of a field of green wheat, beside a little brook, to eat their dinner. Jack took a draft of the wine and smacked his lips. “England has nothing to compare with French wine,” he said. He broke the loaf and gave Aliena some.

Aliena shyly undid the laced front of her dress and gave her nipple to the baby. She caught Jack looking at her and flushed. She cleared her throat and spoke to cover her embarrassment. “Do you know what you’d like to call him?” she said awkwardly. “Jack, perhaps?”

“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful. “Jack was the father I never knew. It might be bad luck to give our son the same name. The nearest I ever had to a real father was Tom Builder.”

“Would you like to call him Tom?”

“I think I would.”

“Tom was such a big man. How about Tommy?”

Jack nodded. “Tommy it is.”

Oblivious of the significance of the moment, Tommy had fallen asleep, having sucked his fill. Aliena put him down on the ground with a kerchief folded under his head for a pillow. Then she looked at Jack. She felt awkward. She wanted him to make love to her, right here on the grass, but she felt sure he would be shocked if she asked him, so she just looked at him and hoped.

He said: “If I tell you something, will you promise not to think badly of me?”

“All right.”

He looked embarrassed, and said: “Ever since I saw you, I can hardly think of anything but the naked body under your dress.”

She smiled. “I don’t think badly of you,” she said. “I’m glad.”

He stared at her hungrily.

She said: “I love it when you look at me like that.”

He swallowed drily.

She held out her arms, and he came to her and embraced her.

It was almost two years since the one and only time they had made love. That morning they had both been swept away by desire and regret. Now they were just two lovers in a field. Aliena suddenly felt anxious. Would it be all right? How terrible if something went wrong, after all this time.

They lay down on the grass side by side and kissed. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. She felt his eager hand on her body, exploring urgently. There was a quickening in her loins. He kissed her eyelids and the end of her nose, and said: “All this time, I ached for you, every day.”

She hugged him hard. “I’m so glad I found you,” she said.

They made gentle, happy love in the open air, with the sun beating down on them and the stream burbling beside them; and Tommy slept through it all, and woke up when it was over.

The wooden statue of the lady had not wept since it left Spain. Jack did not understand how it worked, so he could not be sure why it would not weep outside its own country. However, he had an idea that the. tears that came at nightfall were caused by the sudden cooling of the air, and he had noticed that sunsets were more gradual in northern territories, so he suspected that the problem had to do with the slower nightfall. He still kept the statue, however. It was rather bulky to carry around, but it was a souvenir of Toledo, and it reminded him of Raschid, and (although he did not tell Aliena this) of Aysha as well. But when a stonemason at Saint-Denis wanted a model for a statue of the Virgin, Jack brought the wooden lady to the masons’ lodge, and left it there.

He had been hired by the abbey to work on the rebuilding of the church. The new chancel, which had so devastated him, was not quite complete, and had to be finished in time for the dedication ceremony at midsummer; but the energetic abbot was already preparing to rebuild the nave in the same revolutionary style, and Jack was hired to carve stones in advance for that.

The abbey rented him a house in the village, and he moved in, along with Aliena and Tommy. During the first night they spent in the house they made love five times. Living together as man and wife seemed the most natural thing in the world. After a few days Jack felt as if they had always lived together. Nobody asked whether their union had been blessed by the church.

The master builder at Saint-Denis was the greatest mason Jack had ever met, easily. As they finished the new chancel and prepared to rebuild the nave, Jack watched the master and absorbed everything he did. The technical advances here were his, not the abbot’s. Suger was in favor of new ideas, in a general way, but he was more interested in ornament than structure. His pet project was the new tomb for the remains of Saint Denis and his two companions, Rusticus and Eleutherius. The relics were kept in the crypt, but Suger planned to bring them up into the new chancel, so the whole world could see them. The three caskets would rest in a stone tomb veneered with black-marble. The top of the tomb was a miniature church made of gilded wood; and in the nave and side aisles of the miniature were three empty coffins, one for each of the martyrs. The tomb would stand in the middle of the new chancel, attached to the back of the new high altar. Both the altar and the base of the tomb were already in place, and the miniature church was in the carpenters’ lodge, where a painstaking craftsman was carefully gilding the wood with priceless gold paint. Suger was not a man to do things by halves.

The abbot was a formidable organizer, Jack observed as preparations for the dedication ceremony accelerated. Suger invited everybody who was anybody, and most of them accepted, notably the king and queen of France, and nineteen archbishops and bishops including the archbishop of Canterbury. Such morsels of news were picked up by the craftsmen as they worked in and on the church. Jack often saw Suger himself, in his homespun habit, striding around the monastery giving instructions to a flock of monks who followed him like ducklings. He reminded Jack of Philip of Kingsbridge. Like Philip, Suger came from a poor background and had been brought up in the monastery. Like Philip, he had reorganized the finances and tightened up the management of the monastery’s property so that it produced much more income; and like Philip he was spending the extra money on building. Like Philip, he was busy, energetic and decisive.

Except that Philip was none of these things anymore, according to Aliena.

Jack found that hard to imagine. A quiescent Philip seemed as unlikely as a kindly Waleran Bigod. However, Philip had suffered a series of terrible disappointments. First there had been the burning of the town. Jack shuddered when he recalled that awful day: the smoke, the fear, the dreadful horsemen with their flaming torches, and the blind panic of the hysterical mob. Perhaps the heart had gone out of Philip then. Certainly the town had lost its nerve afterward. Jack remembered it well: the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty had pervaded the place like a faint but unmistakable odor of decay. No doubt Philip had wanted the opening ceremony for the new chancel to be a symbol of new hope. Then, when it turned into another disaster, he must have given up.

Now the builders had gone away, the market had declined, and the population was shrinking. Young people were beginning to move to Shiring, Aliena said. It was only a problem of morale, of course: the priory still had all its property, including the vast flocks of sheep which brought in hundreds of pounds every year. If it were only a question of money, Philip could surely afford to recommence building, on some scale. It would not be easy, certainly: masons would be superstitious about working on a church that had already fallen down once; and it would be difficult to whip up the enthusiasm of the local people yet again. But the main problem, judging by what Aliena said, was that Philip had lost the will. Jack wished he could do something to help bring it back.

Meanwhile, the bishops, archbishops, dukes and counts began arriving at Saint-Denis two or three days before the ceremony. All the notables were taken on a conducted tour of the building. Suger himself escorted the most distinguished visitors, and lesser dignitaries were taken around by monks or craftsmen. They were all awestruck by the lightness of the new construction and the sunny effect of the huge windows of colored glass. As just about every important church leader in France was seeing this, it struck Jack that the new style was likely to be widely imitated; indeed, masons who could say they had actually worked on Saint-Denis would be in great demand. Coming here had been a clever move, cleverer than he had imagined: it had greatly improved his chances of designing and building a cathedral himself.

King Louis arrived on the Saturday, with his wife and his mother, and they moved into the abbot’s house. That night matins were sung from dusk to dawn. By sunrise there was a crowd of peasants and Parisian citizens outside the church, waiting for what promised to be the greatest assemblage of holy and powerful men that most of them would ever see. Jack and Aliena joined the crowd as soon as Tommy had been fed. One day, Jack thought, I’ll say to Tommy: “You don’t remember it, but when you were just a year old you saw the king of France.”

They bought bread and cider for their breakfast and ate while they were waiting for the show to begin. The public was not allowed into the church, of course, and the king’s men-at-arms kept them at a distance; but all the doors were open, and people clustered in knots where they could see in. The nave was packed with the lords and ladies of the nobility. Fortunately the chancel was raised several feet, because of the large crypt under it, so Jack could still see the ceremony.

There was a flurry of activity at the far end of the nave, and suddenly all the nobles bowed. Over their lowered heads, Jack saw the king enter the church from the south. He could not see the king’s face to make out his features, but his purple tunic made a vivid splash of color as he moved into the center of the crossing and knelt before the main altar.

The bishops and archbishops came in immediately afterward. They were all dressed in dazzling white robes with gold embroidery, and each bishop carried his ceremonial crozier. The crozier was supposed to be a simple shepherd’s crook, but so many of them were ornamented with fabulous jewels that the whole procession glittered like a mountain stream in the sunlight.

They all walked slowly across the church and up the steps into the chancel, then took prearranged places around the font in which—Jack knew because he had observed the preparations—there were several gallons of holy water. There followed a lull during which prayers were said and hymns were sung. The crowd became restless, and Tommy got bored. Then the bishops moved off in procession again.

They left the church by the south door and disappeared into the cloisters, much to the disappointment of the spectators; but then they emerged from the monastic buildings and filed across the front of the church. Each bishop carried a small brush called an aspergillum and a vessel of holy water, and as they marched, singing, they dipped the brushes in the water and sprinkled the walls of the church. The crowd surged forward, people begging for a blessing and trying to touch the snow-white robes of the holy men. The king’s men-at-arms beat the people back with sticks. Jack stayed well back in the crowd. He did not want a blessing and he preferred to stay away from those sticks.

The procession made its stately way along the north side of the church, and the crowd followed, trampling over the graves in the cemetery. Some spectators had taken up positions here in anticipation, and they resisted the pressure from the newcomers. One or two fights broke out.

The bishops passed the north porch and continued around the half circle of the east end, the new part. This was where the craftsmen’s workshops had been built, and now the crowd surged around the huts, threatening to flatten the light wooden buildings. As the leaders of the procession began to disappear back into the abbey, the more hysterical members of the crowd became desperate, and pushed forward more determinedly. The king’s men responded with increased violence.