World Without End (29 page)

'Is that the story Merthin's telling you?' Alice laughed sarcastically. 'If a man doesn't want to do it, he doesn't do it - take my word.'

Edmund grunted. 'Men can be tempted,' he said.

'Oh, so you're siding with Caris, are you, Papa?' Alice said. 'I shouldn't be surprised, you usually do.'

'It's not a question of taking sides,' Edmund replied. 'A man may not want to do a thing beforehand, and he may regret it afterward, yet for a brief moment his wishes may change - especially when a woman uses her wiles.'

'Wiles? Why do you assume that she threw herself at him?'

'I didn't say that. But I understand it began when she cried, and he comforted her.'

Caris herself had told him this.

Alice made a disgusted sound. 'You've always had a soft spot for that insubordinate apprentice.'

Caris ate some bread with butter, but she had no appetite. She said: 'I suppose they'll have half a dozen fat children, and Merthin will inherit Elfric's business, and become just another town tradesman, building houses for merchants and fawning on clergymen for contracts, just like his father-in-law.'

Petranilla said: 'And very lucky so to do! He'll be one of the leading men of the town.'

'He's worthy of a better destiny.'

'Is he, really?' Petranilla said in mock amazement. 'And him the son of a knight who fell from grace and hasn't a shilling to buy shoes for his wife! What exactly do you believe him to be destined for?'

Caris was stung by this mockery. It was true that Merthin's parents were poor corrodiaries, dependent on the priory for their food and drink. For him to inherit a successful building business would indeed mean a jump up the social ladder. Yet she still felt he deserved better. She could not say exactly what future she had in mind for him. She just knew that he was different from everyone else in town, and she could not bear the thought of his becoming like the rest.

On Friday, Caris took Gwenda to see Mattie Wise.

Gwenda was still in town because Wulfric was there, attending to the burial of his family. Elaine, Edmund's housemaid, had dried Gwenda's dress in front of the fire, and Caris had bandaged her feet and given her an old pair of shoes.

Caris felt that Gwenda was not telling the full truth about her adventure in the forest. She said that Sim had taken her to the outlaws, and she had escaped; he had chased after her, and he had died in the bridge collapse. John Constable was satisfied with that story: outlaws were outside the law, as their name indicated, so there was no question of Sim bequeathing his property. Gwenda was free. But something else had happened in the forest, Caris felt sure; something Gwenda did not want to talk about. Caris did not press her friend. Some things were best buried.

Funerals were the business of the town this week. The extraordinary manner of the deaths made little difference to the rituals of interment. The bodies had to be washed, the shrouds sewn for the poor, the coffins nailed for the rich, the graves dug, and the priests paid. Not all the monks were qualified as priests, but several were, and they worked in shifts, all day, every day, conducting obsequies in the cemetery on the north side of the cathedral. There were half a dozen small parish churches in Kingsbridge, and their priests were also busy.

Gwenda was helping Wulfric with the arrangements, performing the traditional woman's tasks, washing the bodies and making the shrouds, doing what she could to comfort him. He was in a kind of daze. He managed the details of the burial well enough, but spent hours gazing into space, with a slightly puzzled frown, as if trying to make sense of a massive conundrum.

By Friday the funerals were over, but the acting prior, Carlus, had announced a special service on Sunday for the souls of all those killed, so Wulfric was staying until Monday. Gwenda reported to Caris that he seemed grateful for the company of someone from his own village, but showed animation only when talking about Annet. Caris offered to buy her another love potion.

They found Mattie Wise in her kitchen, brewing medicines. The little house smelled of herbs, oil, and wine. 'I used just about everything I had on Saturday and Sunday,' she said. 'I need to restock.'

'You must have made some money, anyway,' Gwenda said.

'Yes - if I can collect it.'

Caris was shocked. 'Do people welsh on you?'

'Some do. I always try to collect the fee in advance, while they're still in pain. But if they haven't got the money there and then, it's hard to refuse them treatment. Most pay up afterwards, but not all.'

Caris felt indignant on behalf of her friend. 'What do they say?'

'All sorts of things. They can't afford it, the potion did them no good, they were given it against their will, anything. But don't worry. There are enough honest people for me to continue. What's on your mind?'

'Gwenda lost her love potion in the accident.'

'That's easily remedied. Why don't you prepare it for her?'

While Caris was making up the mixture, she asked Mattie: 'How many pregnancies end in a miscarriage?'

Gwenda knew why she was asking. Caris had told her all about Merthin's dilemma. The two girls had spent most of their time together discussing either Wulfric's indifference or Merthin's high principles. Caris had even been tempted to buy a love potion herself, and use it on Merthin; though something held her back.

Mattie gave her a sharp look, but answered noncommittally. 'No one knows. Many times, a woman misses one month but comes on again the next. Did she get pregnant and lose the baby, or was there some other reason? It's impossible to tell.'

'Oh.'

'Neither of you is pregnant, though, if that's what you're worried about.'

Gwenda said quickly: 'How do you know?'

'By looking at you. A woman changes almost immediately. Not just her belly and her breasts, but her complexion, her way of moving, her mood. I see these things better than most people - that's why they call me wise. So who is pregnant?'

'Griselda, Elfric's daughter.'

'Oh, yes, I've seen her. She's three months gone.'

Caris was astonished. 'How long?'

'Three months, or very nearly. Take a look at her. She was never a thin girl, but she's even more voluptuous now. So why are you so shocked? I suppose it's Merthin's baby, is it?'

Mattie always guessed these things.

Gwenda said to Caris: 'I thought you told me it happened recently.'

'Merthin didn't say exactly when, but he gave me the impression it was not long ago, and it only happened once. Now it seems he's been doing it to her for months!'

Mattie frowned. 'Why would he lie?'

'To make himself look not so bad?' Gwenda suggested.

'How could it be worse?'

'Men are peculiar, the way they think.'

'I'm going to ask him,' Caris said. 'Right now.' She put down the jar and the measuring spoon.

Gwenda said: 'What about my love potion?'

'I'll finish making it,' Mattie said. 'Caris is in too much of a hurry.'

'Thank you,' Caris said, and she went out.

She marched down to the riverside, but for once Merthin was not there. She failed to find him at Elfric's house either. She decided he must be in the mason's loft.

In the west front of the cathedral, neatly fitted into one of the towers, was a workroom for the master mason. Caris reached it by climbing a narrow spiral staircase in a buttress of the tower. It was a wide room, well lit by tall lancet windows. All along one wall were stacked the beautifully shaped wooden templates used by the original cathedral stone carvers, carefully preserved and used now for repairs.

Underfoot was the tracing floor. The floorboards were covered with a layer of plaster, and the original master mason, Jack Builder, had scratched his plans in the mortar with iron drawing instruments. The marks thus made were white at first, but they faded over time, and new drawings could be scratched on top of the old. When there were so many designs that it became hard to tell the new from the old, a fresh layer of plaster was laid on top, and the process began again.

Parchment, the thin leather on which monks copied out the books of the Bible, was much too expensive to be used for drawings. In Caris's lifetime a new writing material had appeared, paper, but it came from the Arabs, so monks rejected it as a heathen Muslim invention. Anyway, it had to be imported from Italy and was no cheaper than parchment. And the tracing floor had another advantage: a carpenter could lay a piece of wood on the floor, on top of the drawing, and carve his template exactly to the lines drawn by the master mason.

Merthin was kneeling on the floor, carving a piece of oak in accordance with a drawing, but he was not making a template. He was carving a cogwheel with sixteen teeth. On the floor close by was another, smaller wheel, and Merthin stopped carving for a moment to put the two together and see how well they fitted. Caris had seen such cogs, or gears, in water mills, connecting the mill paddle to the grindstone.

He must have heard her footsteps on the stone staircase, but he was too absorbed in his work to glance up. She regarded him for a second, anger competing with love in her heart. He had the look of total concentration that she knew so well: his slight body bent over his work, his strong hands and dextrous fingers making fine adjustments, his face immobile, his gaze unwavering. He had the perfect grace of a young deer bending its head to drink from a stream. This was what a man looked like, she thought, when he was doing what he was born to do. He was in a state like happiness, but more profound. He was fulfilling his destiny.

She burst out: 'Why did you lie to me?'

His chisel slipped. He cried out in pain and looked at his finger. 'Christ,' he said, and put his finger in his mouth.

'I'm sorry,' Caris said. 'Are you hurt?'

'Nothing much. When did I lie to you?'

'You gave me the impression that Griselda seduced you one time. The truth is that the two of you have been at it for months.'

'No, we haven't.' He sucked his bleeding finger.

'She's three months pregnant.'

'She can't be, it happened two weeks ago.'

'She is, you can tell by her figure.'

'Can you?'

'Mattie Wise told me. Why did you lie?'

He looked her in the eye. 'But I didn't lie,' he said. 'It happened on the Sunday of Fleece Fair week. That was the first and only time.'

'Then how could she be sure she's pregnant, after only two weeks?'

'I don't know. How soon can women tell, anyway?'

'Don't you know?'

'I've never asked. Anyway, three months ago Griselda was still with...'

'Oh, God!' Caris said. A spark of hope flared in her breast. 'She was still with her old boyfriend - Thurstan.' The spark blazed into a flame. 'It must be his baby, Thurstan's - not yours. You're not the father!'

'Is it possible?' Merthin seemed hardly to dare to hope.

'Of course - it explains everything. If she had suddenly fallen in love with you, she'd be after you every chance she gets. But you said she hardly speaks to you.'

'I thought that was because I was reluctant to marry her.'

'She's never liked you. She just needed a father for her baby. Thurstan ran away - probably when she told him she was pregnant - and you were right there in the house, and stupid enough to fall for her trick. Oh, thank God!'

'Thank Mattie Wise,' said Merthin.

She caught sight of his left hand. Blood was welling from a finger. 'Oh, I made you hurt yourself!' she cried. She took his hand and examined the cut. It was small, but deep. 'I'm so sorry.'

'It's not that bad.'

'But it is,' she said, not knowing whether she was talking about the cut or something else. She kissed his hand, feeling his hot blood on her lips. She put his finger in her mouth, sucking the wound clean. It was so intimate that it felt like a sexual act, and she closed her eyes, feeling ecstatic. She swallowed, tasting his blood, and shuddered with pleasure.

A week after the bridge collapsed, Merthin had built a ferry.

It was ready at dawn on Saturday morning, in time for the weekly Kingsbridge market. He had worked on it by lamplight all Friday night, and Caris guessed he had not had time to speak to Griselda and tell her he knew the baby was Thurstan's. Caris and her father came down to the riverside to see the new sensation as the first traders arrived - women from the surrounding villages with baskets of eggs, peasants with cartloads of butter and cheese, and shepherds with flocks of lambs.

Caris admired Merthin's work. The raft was large enough to carry a horse and cart without taking the beast out of the shafts, and it had a firm wooden railing to keep sheep from falling overboard. New wooden platforms at water level on both banks made it easy for carts to roll on and off. Passengers paid a penny, collected by a monk - the ferry, like the bridge, belonged to the priory.

Most ingenious was the system Merthin had devised for moving the raft from one bank to the other. A long rope ran from the south end of the raft across the river, around a post, back across the river, around a drum, and back to the raft, where it was attached again at the north end. The drum was connected by wooden gears to a wheel turned by a pacing ox: Caris had seen Merthin carving the gears yesterday. A lever altered the gears so that the drum turned in either direction, depending on whether the raft was going or coming back - and there was no need to take the ox out of its traces and turn it around.

'It's quite simple,' Merthin said when she marveled at it - and it was, when she looked closely. The lever simply lifted one large cogwheel up out of the chain and moved into its place two smaller wheels, the effect being to reverse the direction in which the drum turned. All the same, no one in Kingsbridge had seen anything like it.

During the course of the morning, half the town came to look at Merthin's amazing new machine. Caris was bursting with pride in him. Elfric stood by, explaining the mechanism to anyone who asked, taking the credit for Merthin's work.

Caris wondered where Elfric got the nerve. He had destroyed Merthin's door - an act of violence that would have scandalized the town, had it not been overtaken by the greater tragedy of the bridge collapse. He had beaten Merthin with a stick, and Merthin still had the bruise on his face. And he had colluded in a deception intended to make Merthin marry Griselda and raise another man's child. Merthin had continued to work with him, feeling that the emergency outweighed their quarrel. But Caris did not know how Elfric could continue to hold his head up.