The Pillars of the Earth (154 page)

The thought that had been hovering uncertainly in the back of Philip’s mind now came to the foreground in an inspirational flash. The citizens were treating Thomas like a martyr, eagerly collecting his blood and his clothes as if they had the supernatural powers of saints’ relics. Philip had been regarding the murder as a political defeat for the Church, but the people here did not see it that way: they saw a martyrdom. And the death of a martyr, while it might look like a defeat, never failed to provide inspiration and strength to the Church in the end.

Philip thought again of the hundreds of people who had flocked to Kingsbridge to build the cathedral, and of the men, women and children who had worked together half the night to put up the town wall. If such people could be mobilized now, he thought with a mounting sense of excitement, they might raise a cry of outrage so loud it would be heard all over the world.

Looking at the men and women gathered around the body, their faces suffused with grief and horror, Philip realized that they only wanted a leader.

Was it possible?

There was something familiar about this situation, he realized. A mutilated corpse, a crowd of onlookers, and some soldiers in the distance: where had he seen this before? What should happen next, he felt, was that a small group of followers of the dead man would range themselves against all the power and authority of a mighty empire.

Of course. That was how Christianity started.

And when he understood that, he knew what he had to do next.

He moved in front of the altar and turned to face the crowd. He still had the broken sword in his hand. Everyone stared at him. He suffered a moment of self-doubt. Can I do it? he thought. Can I start a movement, here and now, that will shake the throne of England? He looked at their faces. As well as grief and rage, he saw, in one or two expressions, a hint of hope.

He lifted the sword on high.

“This sword killed a saint,” he began.

There was a murmur of agreement.

Encouraged, Philip said: “Here tonight we have witnessed a martyrdom.”

The priests and monks looked surprised. Like Philip, they had not immediately seen the real significance of the murder they had witnessed. But the townspeople had, and they voiced their approval.

“Each one of us must go from this place and tell what he has seen.” Several people nodded vigorously. They were listening—but Philip wanted more. He wanted to inspire them. Preaching had never been his forte. He was not one of those men who could hold a crowd rapt, make them laugh and cry, and persuade them to follow him anywhere. He did not know how to put a tremor in his voice and make the light of glory shine from his eyes. He was a practical, earth-bound man; and right now he needed to speak like an angel.

“Soon every man, woman and child in Canterbury will know that the king’s men murdered Archbishop Thomas in the cathedral. But that’s just the start. The news will spread all over England, and then all over Christendom.”

He was losing them, he could tell. There was dissatisfaction and disappointment on some of the faces. A man called out: “But what shall we
do
?”

Philip realized they needed to take some kind of concrete action immediately. It was not possible to call for a crusade and then send people to bed.

A crusade, he thought. That was an idea.

He said: “Tomorrow, I will take this sword to Rochester. The day after tomorrow, London. Will you come with me?”

Most of them looked blank, but someone at the back called out: “Yes!” Then one or two others voiced their agreement.

Philip raised his voice a little. “We’ll tell our story in every town and village in England. We’ll show people the sword that killed Saint Thomas. We’ll let them see the bloodstains on his priestly garments.” He warmed to his theme, and let his anger show a little. “We’ll raise an outcry that will spread throughout Christendom, yes, even as far as Rome. We’ll turn the whole of the civilized world against the savages who perpetrated this horrible, blasphemous crime!”

This time most of them called out their assent. They had been waiting for some way of expressing their emotions, and now he was giving it to them.

“This crime,” he said slowly, his voice rising to a shout, “will never—never—be—forgotten!”

They roared their approval.

Suddenly he knew where to go from here. “Let us begin our crusade now!” he said.

“Yes!”

“We’ll carry this sword along every street in Canterbury!”

“Yes!”

“And we’ll tell every citizen within the walls what we have witnessed here tonight!”

“Yes!”

“Bring candles, and follow me!”

Holding the sword high, he marched straight down the middle of the cathedral.

They followed him.

Feeling exultant, he went through the chancel, over the crossing, and down the nave. Some of the monks and priests walked beside him. He did not need to look back: he could hear the footsteps of a hundred people marching behind him. He went out of the main door.

There he had a moment of anxiety. Across the dark orchard he could see men-at-arms ransacking the archbishop’s palace. If his followers confronted them, the crusade might turn into a brawl when it had hardly got started. Suddenly afraid, he turned sharply away and led the crowd through the nearest gate into the street.

One of the monks started a hymn. There were lamps and firelight behind the shutters of the houses, but as the procession passed by, people opened their doors to see what was going on. Some of them questioned the marchers. Some joined in.

Philip turned a corner and saw William Hamleigh.

William was standing outside a stable, and looked as if he had just taken off his chain mail prior to mounting a horse and leaving the city. He had a handful of men with him. They were all looking up expectantly, presumably having heard the singing and wondered what was going on.

As the candlelit procession approached, William at first looked mystified. Then he saw the broken sword in Philip’s hand, and comprehension dawned. He stared in awestruck silence for a moment more, then he spoke. “Stop this!” he shouted. “I command you to disperse!”

Nobody took any notice. The men with William looked anxious: even with their swords they were vulnerable to a mob of more than a hundred fervent mourners.

William addressed Philip directly. “In the name of the king, I order you to stop this!”

Philip swept past him, borne forward by the press of the crowd. “Too late, William!” he cried over his shoulder. “Too late!”

The small boys came early to the hanging.

They were already there, in the market square at Shiring, throwing stones at cats and abusing beggars and fighting one another, when Aliena arrived, alone and on foot, wearing a cheap cloak with a hood to hide her identity.

She stood at a distance, looking at the scaffold. She had not intended to come. She had witnessed too many hangings during the years when she had played the role of earl. Now that she no longer had that responsibility, she had thought she would be happy if she never saw another man hanged for the rest of her life. But this one was different.

She was no longer acting as earl because her brother, Richard, had been killed in Syria—not in battle, ironically, but in an earthquake. The news had taken six months to reach her. She had not seen him for fifteen years, and now she would never see him again.

Up the hill, the castle gates opened, and the prisoner came out with his escort, followed by the new earl of Shiring, Aliena’s son, Tommy.

Richard had never had children, so his heir was his nephew. The king, stunned and enfeebled by the Becket scandal, had taken the line of least resistance and rapidly confirmed Tommy as earl. Aliena had handed over to the younger generation readily. She had achieved what she wanted to with the earldom. It was once again a rich, thriving county, a land of fat sheep and green fields and sturdy mills. Some of the larger and more progressive landowners had followed her lead in switching to horse plowing, feeding the horses on oats grown under the three-field system of crop rotation. In consequence the land could feed even more people than it had under her father’s enlightened rule.

Tommy would be a good earl. It was what he was born to do. Jack had refused to see it for a long time, wanting his son to be a builder; but eventually he had been forced to admit the truth. Tommy had never been able to cut a stone in a straight line, but he was a natural leader, and at twenty-eight years of age he was decisive, determined, intelligent and fair-minded. He was usually called Thomas now.

When he took over, people expected Aliena to stay at the castle, nag her daughter-in-law and play with her grandchildren. She had laughed at them. She liked Tommy’s wife—a pretty girl, one of the younger daughters of the earl of Bedford—and she adored her three grandchildren, but at the age of fifty-two she was not ready to retire. She and Jack had taken a big stone house near the Kingsbridge Priory—in what had once been the poor quarter, although it was no longer—and she had gone back into the wool business, buying and selling, negotiating with all her old energy, and making money hand over fist.

The hanging party came into the square, and Aliena emerged from her reverie. She looked closely at the prisoner, stumbling along at the end of a rope, his hands tied behind his back. It was William Hamleigh.

Someone in the front spat at him. The crowd in the square was large, for a lot of people were happy to see the last of William, and even for those who had no grudge against him it was quite something to see a former sheriff hanged. But William had been involved in the most notorious murder anybody could remember.

Aliena had never known or imagined anything like the reaction to the killing of Archbishop Thomas. The news had spread like wildfire through the whole of Christendom, from Dublin to Jerusalem and from Toledo to Oslo. The pope had gone into mourning. The continental half of King Henry’s empire had been placed under interdict, which meant the churches were closed and there were no services except baptism. In England, people had started making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, just as if it were a shrine like Santiago de Compostela. And there had been miracles. Water tinctured with the martyr’s blood, and shreds of the mantle he had been wearing when he was killed, cured sick people not just in Canterbury but all over England.

William’s men had tried to steal the corpse from the cathedral, but the monks had been forewarned and had hidden it; and now it was secure within a stone vault, and pilgrims had to put their heads through a hole in the wall to kiss the marble coffin.

It was William’s last crime. He had come scurrying back to Shiring, but Tommy had arrested him, and accused him of sacrilege, and he had been found guilty by Bishop Philip’s court. Normally no one would dare to sentence a sheriff, for he was an officer of the Crown, but in this case the reverse was true: no one, not even the king, would dare to defend one of Becket’s killers.

William was going to make a bad end.

His eyes were wild and staring, his mouth was open and drooling, he was moaning incoherently, and there was a stain on the front of his tunic where he had wet himself.

Aliena watched her old enemy stagger blindly toward the gallows. She remembered the young, arrogant, heartless lad who had raped her thirty-five years ago. It was hard to believe he had become the moaning, terrified subhuman she saw now. Even the fat, gouty, disappointed old knight he had been in later life was nothing like this. He began to struggle and scream as he got closer to the scaffold. The men-at-arms pulled him along like a pig going to the slaughterhouse. Aliena found no pity in her heart: all she could feel was relief. William would never terrorize anyone again.

He kicked and screamed as he was lifted up onto the ox cart. He looked like an animal, red-faced, wild and filthy; but he sounded like a child as he gibbered and moaned and cried. It took four men to hold him while a fifth put the noose around his neck. He struggled so much that the knot tightened before he dropped, and he began to strangle by his own efforts. The men-at-arms stepped back. William writhed, choking, his fat face turning purple.

Aliena stared aghast. Even at the height of her rage and hatred she had not wished a death like this on him.

There was no noise, now that he was choking; and the crowd stood still. Even the small boys were silenced by the horrible sight.

Someone struck the ox’s flank with a switch and the beast moved forward. At last William fell, but the fall did not break his neck, and he dangled at the end of the rope, slowly suffocating. His eyes remained open. Aliena felt he was looking at her. The grimace on his face as he hung there writhing in agony was familiar to Aliena, and she realized that he had looked like that when he was raping her, just before he reached his climax. The memory stabbed her like a knife, but she would not let herself look away.

It took a long time but the crowd remained quiet throughout. His face turned darker and darker. His agonized writhing became a mere twitching. At last his eyes rolled up into his head, his eyelids closed, he became still, and then, gruesomely, his tongue stuck out, black and swollen, between his teeth.

He was dead.

Aliena felt drained. William had changed her life—at one time she would have said he had ruined her life—and now he was dead, powerless to hurt her or anyone else ever again.

The crowd began to move away. The small boys mimicked the death throes to one another, rolling up their eyes and poking out their tongues. A man-at-arms climbed up on the scaffold and cut William down.

Aliena caught her son’s eye. He looked surprised to see her. He came over immediately, and bent down to kiss her. My son, she thought; my big son. Jack’s son. She remembered how terrified she had been that she might have William’s child. Well, some things had turned out right.

“I thought you didn’t want to come here today,” Tommy said.

“I had to,” she said. “I had to see him dead.”

He looked startled. He did not understand, not really. She was glad. She hoped he would never have to understand such things.