Ken Follett - World Without End

When she got home, the smell of roasting pork in the house nauseated her, and she went out again. She did not want to gossip with other women in the main street or talk business with the men at the guild hall, so she drifted into the priory grounds, her heavy wool cloak wrapped around her for warmth, and sat on a tombstone in the graveyard, looking at the north wall of the cathedral, marvelling at the perfection of its carved mouldings and the grace of its flying buttresses.

It was not long before she felt ill.

She puked on a grave, but her stomach was empty, and nothing came up except a sour fluid. Her head began to ache. She wanted to lie down, but she was reluctant to go home because of the kitchen smell. She decided to go to the priory hospital. The nuns would let her lie down for a minute. She left the graveyard, crossed the green in front of the cathedral and entered the hospital. Suddenly she was terribly thirsty.

She was greeted by the kindly, podgy face of Old Julie. “Oh, Sister Juliana,” Caris said gratefully. “Would you bring me a cup of water?” The priory had water piped from upstream, cool and clear and safe to drink.

“Are you ill, child?” said Old Julie anxiously.

“A little nauseated. If I may, I’ll just lie down for a moment.”

“Of course. I’ll fetch Mother Cecilia.”

Caris lay down on one of the straw mattresses lined up neatly on the floor. For a few moments she felt better, then the headache became worse. Julie returned with a jug and a cup, and Mother Cecilia. Caris drank some water, threw up, and drank some more.

Cecilia asked her some questions then said: “You’ve eaten something corrupt. You need to be purged.”

Caris hurt so much she could make no response. Cecilia left and returned moments later with a bottle and a spoon. She gave Caris a spoonful of treacly medicine that tasted of cloves.

Caris lay back with her eyes closed and longed for the pain to go away. After a while, she was afflicted with stomach cramps, followed by uncontrollable diarrhoea. She assumed vaguely that it had been brought on by the treacle. After an hour it went away. Julie undressed her, washed her, gave her a nun’s robe instead of her own soiled dress, and put her on a clean mattress. She lay down and closed her eyes, exhausted.

Prior Godwyn came to see her and said she must be bled. Another monk came to do the job. He made her sit up and stretch out her arm with her elbow over a large bowl. Then he took a sharp knife and opened the vein in the crook of her arm. She hardly noticed the pain of the cut or the slow throb of the bleeding. After a while the monk put a dressing on the cut and told her to hold it there firmly. He took away the bowl of blood.

She was vaguely conscious of people coming to see her: her father, Petranilla, Merthin. Old Julie put a cup to her lips from time to time and she always drank, for she was insatiably thirsty. At some point she noticed candles, and realized it must be night. Eventually she fell into a troubled sleep, and had terrifying dreams about blood. Every time she woke, Julie gave her water.

At last she woke to daylight. The pain had receded, leaving only a dull headache. The next thing she realized was that someone was washing her thighs. She raised herself on her elbow.

A novice nun with the face of an angel crouched beside the mattress. Caris’s dress was up around her waist, and the nun was bathing her with a cloth dipped in warm water. After a moment, she remembered the girl’s name. “Mair,” she said.

“Yes,” the novice answered with a smile.

As she squeezed out the cloth into a bowl, Caris was frightened to see that it was red. “Blood!” she said fearfully.

“Don’t worry,” said Mair. “It’s just your monthly cycle. Heavy, but normal.”

Caris saw that her dress and the mattress were soaked with blood.

She lay back, looking up at the ceiling. Tears came to her eyes, but she did not know whether she was crying out of relief or sadness.

She was no longer pregnant.

The June of 1338 was dry and sunny, but the Fleece Fair was a catastrophe – for Kingsbridge in general, and for Edmund Wooler in particular. By the middle of the week, Caris knew that her father was bankrupt.

The townspeople had expected that it would be difficult, and had done all they could to prepare. They commissioned Merthin to build three large rafts that could be poled across the river, to supplement the ferry and Ian’s boat. He could have built more, but there was no room to land them on the banks. The priory’s grounds were opened a day early, and the ferry operated all night, by torchlight. They persuaded Godwyn to give permission for Kingsbridge shopkeepers to cross to the suburban side and sell to the queue, in the hope that Dick Brewer’s ale and Betty Baxter’s buns would mollify the people waiting.

It was not enough.

Fewer people than usual came to the fair, but the queues were worse than ever. The extra rafts were insufficient but, even so, the shore on both sides became so swampy that carts were constantly getting stuck in the mud and having to be towed out by teams of oxen. Worse, the rafts were difficult to steer, and on two occasions there were collisions that threw passengers into the water, though fortunately no one drowned.

Some traders anticipated these problems and stayed away. Others turned back when they saw the length of the queue. Of those willing to wait half a day to get into the city, some then did such paltry business that they left after a day or two. By Wednesday the ferry was taking more people away than it was bringing in.

That morning, Caris and Edmund made a tour of the bridge works with Guillaume of London. Guillaume was not as big a customer as Buonaventura Caroli, but he was the best they had this year, and they were making a fuss of him. He was a tall, beefy man in a cloak of expensive Italian cloth, bright red.

They borrowed Merthin’s raft, which had a raised deck and a built-in hoist for transporting building materials. His young assistant, Jimmie, poled them out into the river.

The midstream piers that Merthin had constructed in such a rush last December were still surrounded by their coffer dams. He had explained to Edmund and Caris that he would leave the dams in place until the bridge was almost finished to protect the stonework from accidental damage by his own workmen. When he demolished them he would put in their place a pile of loose large stones, the riprap, which he said would prevent the current undermining the piers.

The massive stone columns had now grown, like trees, spreading their arches sideways towards smaller piers built in the shallower water near the banks. These in turn were growing arches, on one side towards the central piers and on the other towards abutments on the bank. A dozen or more masons were busy on the elaborate scaffolding that clung to the stonework like gulls’ nests on a cliff.

They landed on Leper Island and found Merthin with Brother Thomas, supervising the masons building the abutment from which the bridge would spring across the northern branch of the river. The priory still owned and controlled the bridge, even though the land was leased to the parish guild and the construction was financed by loans from individual townspeople. Thomas was often on site. Prior Godwyn took a proprietorial interest in the work, and especially in how the bridge would look, evidently feeling it was going to be some kind of monument to him.

Merthin looked up at the visitors with his golden-brown eyes, and Caris’s heart seemed to beat faster. She hardly saw him, these days, and when they spoke it was always about business; but she still felt strange in his presence. She had to make an effort to breathe normally, to meet his eye with feigned indifference, and to slow her speech to a moderate speed.