World Without End (157 page)

She stepped through the door, feeling dread like a cold lump in her heart.

Ten or twelve straw mattresses were lined up on the floor so that the occupants could face the altar, just as in a hospital. About half the patients seemed to be children. There were three grown men. Gwenda scanned their faces fearfully.

None of them was Sam.

She knelt down and said a prayer of thanks.

Outside, she approached the woman she had spoken to earlier. 'I'm looking for Sam from Wigleigh,' she said. 'He's a new squire.'

The woman pointed to the bridge leading to the inner compound. 'Try the keep.'

Gwenda took the route indicated. A sentry at the bridge ignored her. She climbed the steps to the keep.

The great hall was dark and cool. A big dog slept on the cold stones of the fireplace. There were benches around the walls and a pair of large armchairs at the far end of the room. Gwenda noticed that there were no cushions, no upholstered seats, and no wall hangings. She deduced that Lady Philippa spent little time here and took no interest in the furnishings.

Sam was sitting near a window with three younger men. The parts of a suit of armor were laid out on the floor in front of them, arranged in order from faceplate to greaves. Each of the men was cleaning a piece. Sam was rubbing the breastplate with a smooth pebble, trying to remove rust.

She stood watching him for a moment. He wore new clothes in the red-and-black livery of the earl of Shiring. The colors suited his dark good looks. He seemed to be at ease, talking in a desultory way with the others while they all worked. He appeared healthy and well fed. It was what Gwenda had hoped for, but all the same she suffered a perverse pang of disappointment that he was doing so well without her.

He glanced up and saw her. His face registered surprise, then pleasure, then amusement. 'Lads,' he said, 'I am the oldest among you, and you may think I'm capable of looking after myself, but it's not so. My mother follows me everywhere to make sure I'm all right.'

They saw her and laughed. Sam put down his work and came over. Mother and son sat on a bench in a corner near the staircase that led to the upstairs rooms. 'I'm having a wonderful time,' Sam said. 'Everyone plays games here most days. We go hunting and hawking, we have wrestling matches and contests of horsemanship, and we play football. I've learned so much! It's a bit embarrassing to be grouped with these adolescents all the time, but I can put up with that. I just have to master the skill of using a sword and shield while riding a horse at the same time.'

He was already speaking differently, she noticed. He was losing the slow rhythms of village speech. And he used French words for 'hawking' and 'horsemanship.' He was becoming assimilated into the life of the nobility.

'What about the work?' she said. 'It can't be all play.'

'Yes, there's plenty of work.' He gestured at the others cleaning the armor. 'But it's easy by comparison with plowing and harrowing.'

He asked about his brother, and she told him all the news from home: Davey's madder had regenerated, they had dug up the roots, Davey was still involved with Amabel, no one had fallen sick of the plague yet. While they were talking, she began to feel that she was being watched, and she knew her feeling was not fanciful. After a moment, she looked over her shoulder.

Earl Ralph was standing at the top of the staircase in front of an open door, evidently having stepped out of his room. She wondered how long he had been looking at her. She met his gaze. His stare was intense, but she could not read it, did not understand what it meant. She began to feel the look was uncomfortably intimate, and she glanced away.

When she looked back, he had gone.

The next day, when she was on the road and halfway home, a horseman came up behind her, riding fast, then slowed down and stopped.

Her hand went to the long dagger in her belt.

The rider was Sir Alan Fernhill. 'The earl wants to see you,' he said.

'Then he had better come himself, instead of sending you,' she replied.

'You've always got a smart answer, haven't you? Do you imagine it endears you to your superiors?'

He had a point. She was taken aback, perhaps because in all the years he had been Ralph's sidekick she had never known Alan to say anything intelligent. If she was really smart she would suck up to people such as Alan, not poke fun at them. 'All right,' she said wearily. 'The earl bids me to him. Must I walk all the way back to the castle?'

'No. He has a lodge in the forest, not far from here, where he sometimes stops for refreshment during a hunt. He's there now.' He pointed into the woods beside the road.

Gwenda did not much like this but, as a serf, she had no right to decline a summons from her earl. Anyway, if she did refuse she felt sure Alan would knock her down and tie her up and carry her there. 'Very well,' she said.

'Jump up on the saddle in front of me, if you like.'

'No, thanks, I'd rather walk.'

At this time of year the undergrowth was thick. Gwenda followed the horse into the woods, taking advantage of the path it trampled through the nettles and ferns. The road behind them swiftly disappeared into the greenery. Gwenda wondered nervously what whim had caused Ralph to arrange this forest meeting. It could not be good news for her or her family, she felt.

They walked a quarter of a mile and came to a low building with a thatched roof. Gwenda would have assumed it to be a verderer's cottage. Alan looped his reins around a sapling and led the way inside.

The place had about it the same bare, utilitarian look Gwenda had noted at Earlscastle. The floor was beaten earth, the walls unfinished wattle-and-daub, the ceiling nothing more than the underside of the thatch. The furniture was minimal: a table, some benches, and a plain wooden bedstead with a straw mattress. A door at the back stood half-open on a small kitchen where, presumably, Ralph's servants prepared food and drink for him and his fellow huntsmen.

Ralph was sitting at the table with a cup of wine. Gwenda stood in front of him, waiting. Alan leaned against the wall behind her. 'So, Alan found you,' Ralph said.

'Is there no one else here?' Gwenda said nervously.

'Just you, me, and Alan.'

Gwenda's anxiety went up a notch. 'Why do you want to see me?'

'To talk about Sam, of course.'

'You've taken him from me. What else is there to say?'

'He's a good boy, you know...our son.'

'Don't call him that.' She looked at Alan. He showed no surprise: clearly he had been let in on the secret. She was dismayed. Wulfric must never find out. 'Don't call him our son,' she said. 'You've never been a father to him. Wulfric raised him.'

'How could I raise him? I didn't even know he was mine! But I'm making up for lost time. He's doing well, did he tell you?'

'Does he get into fights?'

'Of course. Squires are supposed to fight. It's practice for when they go to war. You should have asked whether he wins.'

'It's not the life I wanted for him.'

'It's the life he was made for.'

'Did you bring me here to gloat?'

'Why don't you sit down?'

Reluctantly, she sat opposite him at the table. He poured wine into a cup and pushed it toward her. She ignored it.

He said: 'Now that I know we have a son together, I think we should be more intimate.'

'No, thank you.'

'You're such a killjoy.'

'Don't you talk to me about joy. You've been a blight on my life. With all my heart I wish I had never set eyes on you. I don't want to be intimate with you, I want to get away from you. If you went to Jerusalem it wouldn't be far enough.'

His face darkened with anger, and she regretted the extravagance of her words. She recalled Alan's rebuke. She wished she could say no simply and calmly, without stinging witticisms. But Ralph aroused her ire like no one else.

'Can't you see?' she said, trying to be reasonable. 'You have hated my husband for, what, a quarter of a century? He broke your nose and you slashed his cheek open. You disinherited him then you were forced to give him back his family's lands. You raped the woman he once loved. He ran away and you dragged him back with a rope around his neck. After all that, even having a son together cannot make you and me friends.'

'I disagree,' he said. 'I think we can be not just friends, but lovers.'

'No!' It was what she had feared, in the back of her mind, ever since Alan had reined in on the road in front of her.

Ralph smiled. 'Why don't you take off your dress?'

She tensed.

Alan leaned over her from behind and slipped the long dagger out of her belt with a smooth motion. He had obviously premeditated the move, and it happened too quickly for her to react.

But Ralph said: 'No, Alan - that won't be necessary. She'll do it willingly.'

'I will not!' she said.

'Give her back the dagger, Alan.'

Reluctantly, Alan reversed the knife, holding it by the blade, and offered it to her.

She snatched it and leaped to her feet. 'You may kill me but I'll take one of you with me, by God,' she said.

She backed away, holding the knife at arm's length, ready to fight.

Alan stepped toward the door, moving to cut her off.

'Leave her be,' Ralph said. 'She's not going anywhere.'

She had no idea why Ralph was so confident, but he was dead wrong. She was getting out of this hut and then she was going to run away as fast as she could, and she would not stop until she dropped.

Alan stayed where he was.

Gwenda got to the door, reached behind her, and lifted the simple wooden latch.

Ralph said: 'Wulfric doesn't know, does he?'

Gwenda froze. 'Doesn't know what?'

'He doesn't know that I'm Sam's father.'

Gwenda's voice fell to a whisper. 'No, he doesn't.'

'I wonder how he would feel if he found out.'

'It would kill him,' she said.

'That's what I thought.'

'Please don't tell him,' she begged.

'I won't...so long as you do as I say.'

What could she do? She knew Ralph was drawn to her sexually. She had used that knowledge, in desperation, to get in to see him at the sheriff's castle. Their encounter at the Bell all those years ago, a vile memory to her, had lived in his recollection as a golden moment, probably much enhanced by the passage of time. And she had put into his head the idea of reliving that moment.

This was her own fault.

Could she somehow disabuse him? 'We aren't the same people we were all those years ago,' she said. 'I will never be an innocent young girl again. You should go back to your serving wenches.'

'I don't want serving girls, I want you.'

'No,' she said. 'Please.' She fought back tears.

He was implacable. 'Take off your dress.'

She sheathed her knife and unbuckled her belt.

89

The moment Merthin woke up, he thought of Lolla.

She had been missing now for three months. He had sent messages to the city authorities in Gloucester, Monmouth, Shaftesbury, Exeter, Winchester, and Salisbury. Letters from him, as alderman of one of the great cities of the land, were treated seriously, and he had received careful replies to them all. Only the mayor of London had been unhelpful, saying in effect that half the girls in the city had run away from their fathers, and it was no business of the mayor's to send them home.

Merthin had made personal inquiries in Shiring, Bristol, and Melcombe. He had spoken to the landlord of every tavern, giving them all a description of Lolla. They had all seen plenty of dark-haired young women, often in the company of handsome rogues called Jake, or Jack, or Jock; but none could say for sure that they had seen Merthin's daughter, or heard the name Lolla.

Some of Jake's friends had also vanished, along with a girlfriend or two, the other missing women all some years older than Lolla.

Lolla might be dead - Merthin knew that - but he refused to give up hope. It was unlikely she had caught the plague. The new outbreak was ravaging towns and villages, and taking away most of the children under ten. But survivors of the first wave, such as Lolla and himself, must have been people who for some reason had the strength to resist the illness, or - in a very few cases, such as his own - to recover from it; and they were not falling sick this time. However, the plague was only one of the hazards to a sixteen-year-old girl running away from home, and Merthin's fertile imagination tortured him, in the small hours of the night, with thoughts of what might have happened to her.

One town not ravaged by the plague was Kingsbridge. The illness had affected about one house in a hundred in the old town, as far as Merthin could tell from the conversations he held, shouted across the city gate, with Madge Webber, who was acting as alderman inside the city walls while Merthin managed affairs outside. The Kingsbridge suburbs, and other towns, were seeing something like one in five afflicted. But had Caris's methods overcome the plague, or merely delayed it? Would the illness persist, and eventually overcome the barriers she had put up? Would the devastation be as bad as last time in the end? They would not know until the outbreak had run its course - which might be months or years.

He sighed and got up out of his lonely bed. He had not seen Caris since the city was closed. She was living at the hospital, a few yards from Merthin's house, but she could not leave the building. People could go in but not come out. Caris had decided she would have no credibility unless she worked side by side with her nuns, so she was stuck.

Merthin had spent half his life separated from her, it seemed. But it did not get any easier. In fact he ached for her more now, in middle age, than he had as a youngster.

His housekeeper, Em, was up before him, and he found her in the kitchen, skinning rabbits. He ate a piece of bread and drank some weak beer, then went outside.

The main road across the island was already crowded with peasants and their carts bringing supplies. Merthin and a team of helpers spoke to each of them. Those bringing standard products with agreed prices were the simplest: Merthin sent them across the inner bridge to deposit their goods at the locked door of the gatehouse, then paid them when they came back empty. With those bringing seasonal produce such as fruits and vegetables he negotiated a price before allowing them to deliver. For some special consignments, a deal had been made days earlier, when he placed the order: hides for the leather trade; stones for the masons, who had recommenced building the spire under Bishop Henri's orders; silver for the jewelers; iron, steel, hemp, and timber for the city's manufacturers, who had to continue working even though they were temporarily cut off from most of their customers. Finally there were the one-off cargoes, for which Merthin would need to take instructions from someone in the city. Today brought a vendor of Italian brocade who wanted to sell it to one of the city's tailors; a year-old ox for the slaughterhouse; and Davey from Wigleigh.