World Without End (139 page)

He closed the window and waited. No tap came. He was wishfully a little ahead of schedule.

He was tempted to drink some wine, but he did not: a ritual had developed, and he did not want to change the order of events.

The knock came a few moments later. He opened the door. She stepped inside, threw back her hood, and dropped the heavy gray cloak from her shoulders.

She was taller than he by an inch or more, and a few years older. Her face was proud, and could be haughty, although now her smile radiated warmth like the sun. She wore a robe of bright Kingsbridge scarlet. He put his arms around her, pressing her voluptuous body to his own, and kissed her wide mouth. 'My darling,' he said. 'Philippa.'

They made love immediately, there on the floor, hardly undressing. He was hungry for her, and she was if anything more eager. He spread her cloak on the straw, and she lifted the skirt of her robe and lay down. She clung to him like one drowning, her legs wrapped around his, her arms crushing him to her soft body, her face buried in his neck.

She had told him that, after she left Ralph and moved into the priory, she had thought no one would ever touch her again until the nuns laid out her cold body for burial. The thought almost made Merthin cry.

For his part, he had loved Caris so much that he felt no other woman would ever arouse his affection. For him as well as Philippa, this love had come as an unexpected gift, a spring of cold water bubbling up in a baking-hot desert, and they both drank from it as if they were dying of thirst.

Afterward they lay entwined by the fire, panting, and he recalled the first time. Soon after she moved to the priory, she had taken an interest in the building of the new tower. A practical woman, she had trouble filling the long hours that were supposed to be spent in prayer and meditation. She enjoyed the library but could not read all day. She came to see him in the mason's loft, and he showed her the plans. She quickly got into the habit of visiting every day, talking to him while he worked. He had always admired her intelligence and strength, and in the intimacy of the loft he came to know the warm, generous spirit beneath her stately manner. He discovered that she had a lively sense of humor, and he learned how to make her laugh. She responded with a rich, throaty chuckle that, somehow, led him to think of making love to her. One day she had paid him a compliment. 'You're a kind man,' she had said. 'There aren't enough of them.' Her sincerity had touched him, and he had kissed her hand. It was a gesture of affection, but one she could reject, if she wished, without drama: she simply had to withdraw her hand and take a step back, and he would have known he had gone a little too far. But she had not rejected it. On the contrary, she had held his hand and looked at him with something like love in her eyes, and he had wrapped his arms around her and kissed her lips.

They had made love on the mattress in the loft, and he had not remembered until afterward that Caris had encouraged him to put the mattress there, with a joke about masons needing a soft place for their tools.

Caris did not know about him and Philippa. No one did except Philippa's maid and Arn and Em. She went to bed in her private room on the upper floor of the hospital soon after nightfall, at the same time as the nuns retired to their dormitory. She slipped out while they were asleep, using the outside steps that permitted important guests to come and go without passing through the common people's quarters. She returned by the same route before dawn, while the nuns were singing Matins, and appeared at breakfast as if she had been in her room all night.

He was surprised to find that he could love another woman less than a year after Caris had left him for the final time. He certainly had not forgotten Caris. On the contrary, he thought about her every day. He felt the urge to tell her about something amusing that had happened, or he wanted her opinion on a knotty problem, or he found himself performing some task the way she would want it done, such as carefully bathing Lolla's grazed knee with warm wine. And then he saw her most days. The new hospital was almost finished, but the cathedral tower was barely begun, and Caris kept a close eye on both building projects. The priory had lost its power to control the town merchants, but nevertheless Caris took an interest in the work Merthin and the guild were doing to create all the institutions of a borough - establishing new courts, planning a wool exchange, and encouraging the craft guilds to codify standards and measures. But his thoughts about her always had an unpleasant aftertaste, like the bitterness left at the back of the throat by sour beer. He had loved her totally, and she had, in the end, rejected him. It was like remembering a happy day that had ended with a fight.

'Do you think I'm peculiarly attracted to women who aren't free?' he said idly to Philippa.

'No, why?'

'It does seem odd that after twelve years of loving a nun, and nine months of celibacy, I should fall for my brother's wife.'

'Don't call me that,' she said quickly. 'It was no marriage. I was wedded against my will, I shared his bed for no more than a few days, and he will be happy if he never sees me again.'

He patted her shoulder apologetically. 'But still, we have to be secretive, just as I did with Caris.' What he was not saying was that a man was entitled, by law, to kill his wife if he caught her committing adultery. Merthin had never known it to happen, certainly not among the nobility, but Ralph's pride was a terrible thing. Merthin knew, and had told Philippa, that Ralph had killed his first wife, Tilly.

She said: 'Your father loved your mother hopelessly for a long time, didn't he?'

'So he did!' Merthin had almost forgotten that old story.

'And you fell for a nun.'

'And my brother spent years pining for you, the happily married wife of a nobleman. As the priests say, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. But enough of this. Do you want some supper?'

'In a moment.'

'There's something you want to do first?'

'You know.'

He did know. He knelt between her legs and kissed her belly and her thighs. It was a peculiarity of hers that she always wanted to come twice. He began to tease her with his tongue. She groaned, and pressed the back of his head. 'Yes,' she said. 'You know how I like that, especially when I'm full of your seed.'

He lifted his head. 'I do,' he said. Then he bent again to his task.

The spring brought a respite in the plague. People were still dying, but fewer were falling ill. On Easter Sunday, Bishop Henri announced that the Fleece Fair would take place as usual this year.

At the same service, six novices took their vows and so became full-fledged monks. They had all had an extraordinarily short novitiate, but Henri was keen to raise the number of monks at Kingsbridge, and he said the same thing was going on all over the country. In addition five priests were ordained - they, too, benefiting from an accelerated training program - and sent to replace plague victims in the surrounding countryside. And two Kingsbridge monks came down from university, having received their degrees as physicians in three years instead of the usual five or seven.

The new doctors were Austin and Sime. Caris remembered both of them rather vaguely: she had been guest master when they left, three years ago, to go to Kingsbridge College in Oxford. On the afternoon of Easter Monday she showed them around the almost-completed new hospital. No builders were at work as it was a holiday.

Both had the bumptious self-confidence that the university seemed to instill in its graduates along with medical theories and a taste for Gascon wine. However, years of dealing with patients had given Caris a confidence of her own, and she described the hospital's facilities and the way she planned to run it with brisk assurance.

Austin was a slim, intense young man with thinning fair hair. He was impressed with the innovative new cloisterlike layout of the rooms. Sime, a little older and round-faced, did not seem eager to learn from Caris's experience: she noticed that he always looked away when she was talking.

'I believe a hospital should always be clean,' she said.

'On what grounds?' Sime inquired in a condescending tone, as if asking a little girl why Dolly had to be spanked.

'Cleanliness is a virtue.'

'Ah. So it has nothing to do with the balance of humors in the body.'

'I have no idea. We don't pay too much attention to the humors. That approach has failed spectacularly against the plague.'

'And sweeping the floor has succeeded?'

'At a minimum, a clean room lifts patients' spirits.'

Austin put in: 'You must admit, Sime, that some of the masters at Oxford share the mother prioress's new ideas.'

'A small group of the heterodox.'

Caris said: 'The main point is to take patients suffering from the type of illnesses that are transmitted from the sick to the well and isolate them from the rest.'

'To what end?' said Sime.

'To restrict the spread of such diseases.'

'And how is it that they are transmitted?'

'No one knows.'

A little smile of triumph twitched Sime's mouth. 'Then how do you know by what means to restrict their spread, may I ask?'

He thought he had trumped her in argument - it was the main thing they learned at Oxford - but she knew better. 'From experience,' she said. 'A shepherd doesn't understand the miracle by which lambs grow in the womb of a ewe, but he knows it won't happen if he keeps the ram out of the field.'

'Hm.'

Caris disliked the way he said: 'Hm.' He was clever, she thought, but his cleverness never touched the world. She was struck by the contrast between this kind of intellectual and Merthin's kind. Merthin's learning was wide, and the power of his mind to grasp complexities was remarkable - but his wisdom never strayed far from the realities of the material world, for he knew that if he went wrong his buildings would fall down. Her father, Edmund, had been like that, clever but practical. Sime, like Godwyn and Anthony, would cling to his faith in the humors of the body regardless of whether his patients lived or died.

Austin was smiling broadly. 'She's got you there, Sime,' he said, evidently amused that his smug friend had failed to overwhelm this uneducated woman. 'We may not know exactly how illnesses spread, but it can't do any harm to separate the sick from the well.'

Sister Joan, the nuns' treasurer, interrupted their conversation. 'The bailiff of Outhenby is asking for you, Mother Caris.'

'Did he bring a herd of calves?' Outhenby was obliged to supply the nuns with twelve one-year-old calves every Easter.

'Yes.'

'Pen the beasts and ask the bailiff to come here, please.'

Sime and Austin took their leave, and Caris went to inspect the tiled floor in the latrines. The bailiff found her there. It was Harry Plowman. She had sacked the old bailiff, who was too slow to respond to change, and she had promoted the brightest young man in the village.

He shook her hand, which was overfamiliar of him, but Caris liked him and did not mind.

She said: 'It must be a nuisance, your having to drive a herd all the way here, especially when the spring plowing is under way.'

'It is that,' he said. Like most plowmen, he was broad-shouldered and strong-armed. Strength as well as skill was required for driving the communal eight-ox team as they pulled the heavy plow through wet clay soil. He seemed to carry with him the air of the healthy outdoors.

'Wouldn't you rather make a money payment?' Caris said. 'Most manorial dues are paid in cash these days.'

'It would be more convenient.' His eyes narrowed with peasant shrewdness. 'But how much?'

'A year-old calf normally fetches ten to twelve shillings at market, though prices are down this season.'

'They are - by half. You can buy twelve calves for three pounds.'

'Or six pounds in a good year.'

He grinned, enjoying the negotiation. 'There's your problem.'

'But you would prefer to pay cash.'

'If we can agree the amount.'

'Make it eight shillings.'

'But then, if the price of a calf is only five shillings, where do we villagers get the extra money?'

'I tell you what. In future, Outhenby can pay the nunnery either five pounds or twelve calves - the choice is yours.'

Harry considered that, looking for snags, but could find none. 'All right,' he said. 'Shall we seal the bargain?'

'How should we do that?'

To her surprise, he kissed her.

He held her slender shoulders in his rough hands, bent his head, and pressed his lips to hers. If Brother Sime had done this she would have recoiled. But Harry was different, and perhaps she had been titillated by his air of vigorous masculinity. Whatever the reason, she submitted to the kiss, letting him pull her unresisting body to his own, and moving her lips against his bearded mouth. He pressed up against her so that she could feel his erection. She realized that he would cheerfully take her here on the newly laid tiles of the latrine floor, and that thought brought her to her senses. She broke the kiss and pushed him away. 'Stop!' she said. 'What do you think you're doing?'

He was unabashed. 'Kissing you, my dear,' he said.

She realized that she had a problem. No doubt gossip about her and Merthin was widespread: they were probably the two best-known people in Shiring. While Harry surely did not know the truth, the rumors had been enough to embolden him. This kind of thing could undermine her authority. She must squash it now. 'You must never do anything like that again,' she said as severely as she could.

'You seemed to like it!'

'Then your sin is all the greater, for you have tempted a weak woman to perjure her holy vows.'

'But I love you.'

It was true, she realized, and she could guess why. She had swept into his village, reorganized everything, and bent the peasants to her will. She had recognized Harry's potential and elevated him above his fellows. He must think of her as a goddess. It was not surprising that he had fallen in love with her. He had better fall out of love as soon as possible. 'If you ever speak to me like that again, I'll have to get another bailiff in Outhenby.'