The Pillars of the Earth (63 page)

Aliena’s plan was then to go out again and buy another sackful of fleeces, and to do the same again and again until all the sheep were shorn. By the end of the summer she wanted to have the money to buy a strong horse and a new cart.

She felt very excited as she led their old nag through the streets toward Meg’s house. By the end of the day she would have proved that she could take care of herself and her brother without any help from anyone. It made her feel very mature and independent. She was in charge of her own destiny. She had had nothing from the king, she did not need relatives, and she had no use for a husband.

She was looking forward to seeing Meg, who had been her inspiration. Meg was one of the few people who had helped Aliena without trying to rob, rape or exploit her. Aliena had a lot of questions to ask her about business in general and the wool trade in particular.

It was market day, so it took them some time to drive their cart through the crowded city to Meg’s street. At last they arrived at her house. Aliena stepped into the hall. A woman she had never seen before was standing there. “Oh!” said Aliena, and she stopped short.

“What is it?” said the woman.

“I’m a friend of Meg’s.”

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” the woman said curtly.

“Oh, dear.” Aliena saw no need for her to be so brusque. “Where has she moved to?”

“She’s gone with her husband, who left this city in disgrace,” the woman said.

Aliena was disappointed and afraid. She had been counting on Meg to make the sale of the wool easy. “That’s terrible news!”

“He was a dishonest tradesman, and if I were you I wouldn’t boast about being a friend of hers. Now clear off.”

Aliena was outraged that someone should speak ill of Meg. “I don’t care what her husband may have done, Meg was a fine woman and greatly superior to the thieves and whores that inhabit this stinking city,” she said, and she went out before the woman could think of a rejoinder.

Her verbal victory gave her only momentary consolation. “Bad news,” she said to Richard. “Meg has left Winchester.”

“Is the person who lives there now a wool merchant?” he said.

“I didn’t ask. I was too busy telling her off.” Now she felt foolish.

“What shall we do, Allie?”

“We’ve got to sell these fleeces,” she said anxiously. “We’d better go to the marketplace.”

They turned the horse around and retraced their steps to the High Street, then threaded their way through the crowds to the market, which was between the High Street and the cathedral. Aliena led the horse and Richard walked behind the cart, pushing it when the horse needed help, which was most of the time. The marketplace was a seething mass of people squeezing along the narrow aisles between the stalls, their progress constantly delayed by carts such as Aliena’s. She stopped and stood on top of her sack of wool and looked for wool merchants. She could see only one. She got down and headed the horse in that direction.

The man was doing good business. He had a large space roped off with a shed behind it. The shed was made of hurdles, light timber frames filled in with woven twigs and reeds, and it was obviously a temporary structure erected each market day. The merchant was a swarthy man whose left arm ended at the elbow. Attached to his stump he had a wooden comb, and whenever a fleece was offered to him he would put his arm into the wool, tease out a portion with the comb, and feel it with his right hand before giving a price. Then he would use the comb and his right hand together to count out the number of pennies he had agreed to pay. For large purchases he weighed the pennies in a balance.

Aliena pushed her way through the crowd to the bench. A peasant offered the merchant three rather thin fleeces tied together with a
leather belt. “A bit sparse,” said the merchant. “Three farthings each.” A farthing was a quarter of a penny. He counted out two pennies, then took a small hatchet and with a quick, practiced stroke cut a third penny into quarters. He gave the peasant the two pennies and one of the quarters. “Three times three farthings is twopence and a farthing.” The peasant took the belt off the fleeces and handed them over.

Next, two young men dragged a whole sack of wool up to the counter. The merchant examined it carefully. “It’s a full sack, but the quality’s poor,” he said. “I’ll give you a pound.”

Aliena wondered how he could be so sure the sack was full. Perhaps you could tell with practice. She watched him weigh out a pound of silver pennies.

Some monks were approaching with a huge cart piled high with sacks of wool. Aliena decided to get her business done before the monks. She beckoned to Richard, and he dragged their sack of wool off the cart and brought it up to the counter.

The merchant examined the wool. “Mixed quality,” he said. “Half a pound.”

“What?” Aliena said incredulously.

“A hundred and twenty pennies,” he said.

Aliena was horrified. “But you just paid a pound for a sack!”

“It’s because of the quality.”

“You paid a pound for poor quality!”

“Half a pound,” he repeated stubbornly.

The monks arrived and crowded the stall, but Aliena was not going to move: her livelihood was at stake, and she was more frightened of destitution than she was of the merchant. “Tell me why,” she insisted. “There’s nothing wrong with the wool, is there?”

“No.”

“Then give me what you paid those two men.”

“No.”

“Why not?” she almost screamed.

“Because nobody pays a girl what they would pay a man.”

She wanted to strangle him. He was offering her less than she had paid. It was outrageous. If she accepted his price, all her work would have been for nothing. Worse than that, her scheme for providing a livelihood for herself and her brother would have failed, and her brief period of independence and self-sufficiency would be over. And why? Because he would not pay a girl the same as he paid a man!

The leader of the monks was looking at her. She hated people to stare at her. “Stop staring!” she said rudely. “Just do your business with this godless peasant.”

“All right,” the monk said mildly. He beckoned to his colleagues and they dragged up a sack.

Richard said: “Take the ten shillings, Allie. Otherwise we’ll have nothing but a sack of wool!”

Aliena stared angrily at the merchant as he examined the monks’ wool. “Mixed quality,” he said. She wondered if he ever pronounced wool good quality. “A pound and twelvepence a sack.”

Why did it have to happen that Meg went away? thought Aliena bitterly. Everything would have been all right if she had stayed.

“How many sacks have you got?” said the merchant.

A young monk in novice’s robes said: “Ten,” but the leader said: “No, eleven.” The novice looked as if he was inclined to argue, but he said nothing.

“That’s eleven and a half pounds of silver, plus twelvepence.” The merchant began to weigh out the money.

“I won’t give in,” Aliena said to Richard. “We’ll take the wool somewhere else—Shiring, perhaps, or Gloucester.”

“All that way! And what if we can’t sell it there?”

He was right—they might have the same trouble elsewhere. The real difficulty was that they had no status, no support, no protection. The merchant would not dare to insult the monks, and even the poor peasants could probably cause trouble for him if he dealt unfairly with them, but there was no risk to a man who tried to cheat two children with nobody in the world to help them.

The monks were dragging their sacks into the merchant’s shed. As each one was stashed, the merchant handed to the chief monk a weighed pound of silver and twelve pennies. When all the sacks were in, there was a bag of silver still on the counter.

“That’s only ten sacks,” said the merchant.

“I told you there was only ten,” the novice said to the chief monk.

“This is the eleventh,” said the chief monk, and he put his hand on Aliena’s sack.

She stared at him in astonishment.

The merchant was equally surprised. “I’ve offered her half a pound,” he said.

“I’ve bought it from her,” the monk said. “And I’ve sold it to you.” He nodded to the other monks and they dragged Aliena’s sack into the shed.

The merchant looked disgruntled, but he handed over the last pound bag and twelve more pennies. The monk gave the money to Aliena.

She was dumbstruck. Everything had been going wrong and now this complete stranger had rescued her—after she had been rude to him, too!

Richard said: “Thank you for helping us, Father.”

“Give thanks to God,” said the monk.

Aliena did not know what to say. She was thrilled. She hugged the money to her chest. How could she thank him? She stared at her savior. He was a small, slight, intense-looking man. His movements were quick and he looked alert, like a small bird with dull plumage but bright eyes. His eyes were blue, in fact. The fringe of hair around his shaved pate was black streaked with gray, but his face was young. Aliena began to realize that he was vaguely familiar. Where had she seen him before?

The monk’s mind was going along the same path. “You don’t remember me, but I know you,” he said. “You’re the children of Bartholomew, the former earl of Shiring. I know you’ve suffered great misfortunes, and I’m glad to have a chance to help you. I’ll buy your wool anytime.”

Aliena wanted to kiss him. Not only had he saved her today, he was prepared to guarantee her future! She found her tongue at last. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. “God knows, we need a protector.”

“Well, now you have two,” he said. “God, and me.”

Aliena was profoundly moved. “You’ve saved my life, and I don’t even know who you are,” she said.

“My name is Philip,” he said. “I’m the prior of Kingsbridge.”

IT WAS A GREAT DAY when Tom Builder took the stonecutters to the quarry.

They went a few days before Easter, fifteen months after the old cathedral burned down. It had taken this long for Prior Philip to amass enough cash to hire craftsmen.

Tom had found a forester and a master quarryman in Salisbury, where the Bishop Roger’s palace was almost complete. The forester and his men had now been at work for two weeks, finding and felling tall pine trees and mature oaks. They were concentrating their efforts on the woods near the river, upstream from Kingsbridge, for it was very costly to transport materials on the winding mud roads, and a lot of money could be saved by simply floating the wood downstream to the building site. The timber would be roughly lopped for scaffolding poles, carefully shaped into templates to guide the masons and stonecarvers, or—in the case of the tallest trees—set aside for future use as roof beams. Good wood was now arriving in Kingsbridge at a steady rate and all Tom had to do was pay the foresters every Saturday evening.

The quarrymen had arrived over the last few days. The master quarryman, Otto Blackface, had brought with him his two sons, both of whom were stonecutters; four grandsons, all apprentices; and two laborers, one his cousin and the other his brother-in-law. Such nepotism was normal, and Tom had no objection to it: a family group usually made a good team.

As yet there were no craftsmen working in Kingsbridge, on the site itself, other than Tom and the priory’s carpenter. It was a good idea to stockpile some materials. But soon Tom would hire the people who formed the backbone of the building team, the masons. They were the men who put one stone on another and made the walls rise. Then the great enterprise would begin. Tom walked with a spring in his step: this was what he had hoped for and worked toward for ten years.

The first mason to be hired, he had decided, would be his own son Alfred. Alfred was sixteen years old, approximately, and had acquired the basic skills of a mason: he could cut stones square and build a true wall. As soon as hiring began, Alfred would get full wages.

Tom’s other son, Jonathan, was fifteen months old and growing fast. A sturdy child, he was the pampered pet of the whole monastery. Tom had worried a little, at first, about the baby being looked after by the half-witted Johnny Eightpence, but Johnny was as attentive as any mother and had more time than most mothers to devote to his charge. The monks still did not suspect that Tom was Jonathan’s father, and now they probably never would.

Seven-year-old Martha had a gap in her front teeth and she missed Jack. She was the one who worried Tom most, for she needed a mother.

There was no shortage of women who would like to marry Tom and take care of his little daughter. He was not an unattractive man, he knew, and his livelihood looked secure now that Prior Philip was starting to build in earnest. Tom had moved out of the guesthouse and had built himself a fine two-room house, with a chimney, in the village. Eventually, as master builder in charge of the whole project, he could expect a salary and benefits that would be the envy of many minor gentry. But he could not conceive of marrying anyone but Ellen. He was like a man who has got used to drinking the finest wine, and now finds that everyday wine tastes like vinegar. There was a widow in the village, a plump, pretty woman with a smiling face and a generous bosom and two well-behaved children, who had baked several pies for him and kissed him longingly at the Christmas feast, and would marry him as quick as he liked. But he knew that he would be unhappy with her, for he would always hanker after the excitement of being married to the unpredictable, infuriating, bewitching, passionate Ellen.

Ellen had promised to come back, one day, to visit. Tom felt fiercely certain that she would keep that promise, and he clung to it stubbornly, even though it was more than a year since she had walked out. And when she did come back he was going to ask her to marry him.

He thought she might accept him now. He was no longer destitute: he could feed his own family and hers too. He felt that Alfred and Jack could be prevented from fighting, if they were handled right. If Jack were made to work, Alfred would not resent him so badly, Tom thought. He was going to offer to take Jack as an apprentice. The lad had shown an interest in building, he was as bright as a button, and in a year or so he would be big enough for the heavy work. Then Alfred would not be able to say that Jack was idle. The other problem was that Jack could read and Alfred could not. Tom was going to ask Ellen to teach Alfred to read and write. She could give him lessons every Sunday. Then Alfred would be able to feel every bit as good as Jack. The boys would be equal, both educated, both working, and before long much the same size.