The Pillars of the Earth (139 page)

Everyone stood stock-still, listening to the thunder as Richard’s army pounded closer. Michael’s men-at-arms looked confused and uncertain, but none of them did anything: their leader had fallen, and their countess had told them to surrender. The castle servants were paralyzed by the rapidity of events.

Then Richard came through the gateway on his war-horse.

It was a great moment, and Aliena’s heart swelled with pride. Richard was handsome, smiling, and triumphant. Aliena shouted: “The rightful earl!” The men entering the castle behind Richard took up the cry, and it was repeated by some of the crowd in the courtyard—most of them had no love for William. Richard rode around the compound at a slow walk, waving and acknowledging the cheers.

Aliena thought about all she had gone through for the sake of this moment. She was thirty-four years old and she had spent half of those years fighting for this. The whole of my adult life, she thought; that’s what I gave. She remembered stuffing wool into sacks until her hands were red and swollen and bleeding. She recalled the faces she had seen on the road, greedy and cruel and lascivious faces of men who would have killed her if she had given the least sign of weakness. She thought of how she had hardened her heart against dear Jack, and married Alfred instead; and she thought of the months during which she had slept on the floor at the foot of his bed like a dog; and all because he had promised to pay for weapons and armor so that Richard could fight to win back this castle. “There it is, Father,” she said aloud. Nobody heard her: they were cheering too loud. “This is what you wanted,” she said to her dead father, and there was bitterness as well as triumph in her heart. “I promised you this, and I kept my promise. I took care of Richard, and he fought all these years, and now we’re home again at last, and Richard is the earl. Now ...” Her voice rose to a shout, but everyone was shouting, and no one noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Now, Father, I’ve done with you, so go to your grave, and let me live in peace!”

REMIGIUS WAS ARROGANT, even in penury. He entered the wooden manor house at Hamleigh village with his head held high, and looked down his long nose at the huge, roughhewn wooden crucks supporting the roof, the wattle-and-daub walls, and the chimneyless open fire in the middle of the beaten-earth floor.

William watched him walk in. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not as far down as you, he thought, noting the monk’s much-repaired sandals, the grubby robe, the unshaven chin and the unkempt hair. Remigius had never been a fat man but now he was thinner than ever. The haughty expression fixed on his face failed to conceal the lines of exhaustion or the purplish folds of defeat under his eyes. Remigius was not yet bowed, but he was very badly beaten.

“Bless you, my son,” he said to William.

William was not having any of that. “What do you want, Remigius?” he said, deliberately insulting the monk by not calling him “Father” or “Brother.”

Remigius flinched as if he had been struck. William guessed he had received a few taunts of that kind since he came down in the world. Remigius said: “The lands you gave to me as dean of the chapter at Shiring have been repossessed by Earl Richard.”

“I’m not surprised,” William replied. “Everything is to be returned to those who possessed it in the time of the old King Henry.”

“But that leaves me with no means of support.”

“You and a lot of other people,” William said carelessly. “You’ll have to go back to Kingsbridge.”

Remigius’s face paled with anger. “I can’t do that,” he said in a low voice.

“Why not?” said William, tormenting him.

“You know why not.”

“Would Philip say you shouldn’t prise secrets out of little girls? Does he think you betrayed him, by telling me where the outlaws’ hideout was? Would he be angry with you for becoming the dean of a church that was to take the place of his own cathedral? Well, then I suppose you can’t go back.”

“Give me
something
,”
Remigius pleaded. “One village. A farm. A little church!”

“There are no rewards for losing, monk,” William said harshly. He was enjoying this. “In the world outside the monastery, nobody looks after you. The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men.”

Remigius’s voice sank to a whisper. “What am I to do?”

William smiled and said: “Beg.”

Remigius turned on his heel and left the house.

Still proud, William thought, but not for long. You’ll beg.

It pleased him to see someone who had fallen harder than he himself. He would never forget the excruciating agony of standing outside the gate of his own castle and being refused admittance. He had been suspicious when he heard that Richard and some of his men had left Winchester; then when the peace pact was announced his unease had turned to alarm, and he had taken his knights and men and ridden hard to Earlscastle. There was a skeleton force guarding the castle, so he expected to find Richard camped in the fields, laying siege. When all appeared peaceful he had been relieved, and berated himself for overreacting to Richard’s sudden disappearance.

When he got closer he saw that the drawbridge was up. He had reined in at the edge of the moat and shouted: “Open up for the earl!”

That was when Richard had appeared on the battlements and said: “The earl is inside.”

It was like the ground falling away from under William’s feet. He had always been afraid of Richard, always aware of him as a dangerous rival, but he had not felt himself especially vulnerable at this moment in time. He had thought the real danger would come when Stephen died and Henry came to the throne, which might be ten years away. Now, as he sat in a mean manor house brooding over his mistakes, he realized bitterly that Richard had in fact been very clever. He had slipped through a narrow gap. He could not be accused of breaching the king’s peace, as the war was still on. His claim to the earldom had been legitimized by the terms of the peace treaty. And Stephen, aging and tired and defeated, had no energy left for further battles.

Richard had magnanimously released those of William’s men-at-arms who wanted to continue in William’s service. Waldo One-eye had told William how the castle had been taken. The treachery of Elizabeth was maddening, but for William it was the part played by Aliena that was most humiliating. The helpless little girl he had raped and tormented and thrown out of her home all those years ago had come back and taken her revenge. Every time he thought of that his stomach burned with bitterness as if he had drunk vinegar.

His first inclination had been to fight Richard. William could have kept his army, lived off the country side, and extorted taxes and supplies from the peasants, fighting a running battle with his rival. But Richard held the castle, and he had time on his side, for William’s supporter Stephen was old and beaten, and Richard was backed by the young Duke Henry, who would eventually become the second King Henry.

So William had decided to cut his losses. He had retired to the village of Hamleigh and moved back into the manor house where he had been brought up. Hamleigh, and the villages surrounding it, had been granted to his father thirty years ago. It was a holding that had never been part of the earldom, so Richard had no claim to it.

William hoped that if he kept his head down Richard would be satisfied with the revenge he had already taken, and would leave him alone. So far it had worked. However, William hated the village of Hamleigh. He hated the small neat houses, the excitable ducks on the pond, the pale gray stone church, the apple-cheeked children, the broad-hipped women and the strong, resentful men. He hated it for being humble, plain and poor, and he hated it because it symbolized his family’s fall from power. He watched the plodding peasants begin the spring plowing, and estimated what his share of their crop would be that summer, and he found it meager. He went hunting in his few acres of forest and failed to start a single deer, and the forester said to him: “The boar is all you can hunt now, lord—the outlaws had the deer in the famine.” He held court in the great hall of the manor house, with the wind whistling through the holes in its wattle-and-daub walls; and he gave harsh judgments and imposed large fines and ruled according to his whim; but it brought him little satisfaction.

He had abandoned the building of the grand new church at Shiring, of course. He could not afford to build a stone house for himself, let alone a church. The builders had stopped work when he had stopped paying them, and what had happened to them he did not know: perhaps they had all gone back to Kingsbridge to work for Prior Philip.

But now he was having nightmares.

They were all the same. He saw his mother in the place of the dead. She was bleeding from her ears and eyes, and when she opened her mouth to speak, more blood came out. The sight filled him with mortal terror. In broad daylight he could not say what it was about the dream that he feared, for she did not threaten him in any way. But at night, when she came to him, the fear possessed him totally, an irrational, hysterical, blind panic. Once as a boy he had waded into a pond that suddenly got deeper, and he had found himself below the surface and unable to breathe; and the overpowering need for air that had possessed him then was one of the indelible memories of his childhood; but this was ten times as bad. Trying to get away from his mother’s bloody face was like trying to sprint in quicksand. He would come awake as if he had been thrown across the room, violently shocked, sweating and moaning, his body taut with agony from the racked-up tension. Walter would be at his bedside with a candle—William slept in the hall, separated from the men by a screen, for there was no bedroom here. “You cried out, lord,” Walter would murmur. William would breathe hard, staring at the real bed and the real wall and the real Walter, while the power of the nightmare slowly faded to the point where he was no longer afraid; and then he would say: “It was nothing, a dream, go away.” But he would be frightened to go back to sleep. And the next day the men would look at him as if he were bewitched.

A few days after his conversation with Remigius, he was sitting in the same hard chair, by the same smoky fire, when Bishop Waleran walked in.

William was startled. He had heard horses, but he had assumed it was Walter, coming back from the mill. He did not know what to do when he saw the bishop. Waleran had always been arrogant and superior, and time and time again he had made William feel foolish, clumsy and coarse. It was humiliating that Waleran should see the humble surroundings in which he now lived.

William did not get up to greet his visitor. “What do you want?” he said curtly. He had no reason to be polite: he wanted Waleran to get out as soon as possible.

The bishop ignored his rudeness. “The sheriff is dead,” he said.

At first William did not see what he was getting at. “What’s that to me?”

“There will be a new sheriff.”

William was about to say
So what
?
but he stopped himself. Waleran was concerned about who would be the new sheriff. And he had come to talk to William about it. That could only mean one thing, couldn’t it? Hope rose in his breast, but he suppressed it fiercely: where Waleran was involved, high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment. He said: “Who have you got in mind?”

“You.”

It was the answer William had not dared to hope for. He wished he could believe in it. A clever and ruthless sheriff could be almost as important and influential as an earl or a bishop. This could be his way back to wealth and power. He forced himself to consider the snags. “Why would King Stephen appoint me?”

“You supported him against Duke Henry, and as a result you lost your earldom. I imagine he would like to recompense you.”

“Nobody ever does anything out of gratitude,” William said, repeating a saying of his mother’s.

Waleran said: “Stephen can’t be happy that the earl of Shiring is a man who fought against him. He might want his sheriff to be a countervailing force against Richard.”

Now that made more sense. William felt excited against his will. He began to believe that he might actually get out of this hole in the ground called Hamleigh village. He would have a respectable force of knights and men-at-arms again, instead of the pitiful handful he now supported. He would preside over the county court at Shiring, and frustrate Richard’s will. “The sheriff lives at Shiring Castle,” he said longingly.

“You’d be rich again,” Waleran added.

“Yes.” Properly exploited, the sheriffs post could be hugely profitable. William would make almost as much money as he had when he was earl. But he wondered why Waleran had mentioned it.

A moment later Waleran answered the question. “You would be able to finance the new church, after all.”

So that was it. Waleran never did anything without an ulterior motive. He wanted William to be sheriff so that William could build him a church. But William was willing to go along with the plan. If he could finish the church in memory of his mother, perhaps the nightmares would stop. “Do you really think it can be done?” he said eagerly.

Waleran nodded. “It will cost money, of course, but I think it can be done.”

“Money?” William said with sudden anxiety. “How much?”

“It’s hard to say. In somewhere like Lincoln or Bristol, the shrievalty would cost you five or six hundred pounds; but the sheriffs of those towns are richer than cardinals. For a little place such as Shiring, if you’re the candidate the king wants—which I can take care of—you can probably get it for a hundred pounds.”

“A hundred pounds!” William’s hopes collapsed. He had been afraid of disappointment, right from the start. “If I had a hundred pounds I wouldn’t be living like this!” he said bitterly.

“You can get it,” Waleran said lightly.

“Who from?” William was struck by a thought. “Will you give it to me?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Waleran said with infuriating condescension. “That’s what Jews are for.”

William realized, with a familiar mixture of hope and resentment, that once again the bishop was right.