Ken Follett - World Without End

“The sheriff has announced an inquest, of course,” Gregory said dourly.

“They’ll blame it on outlaws.”

“You were not recognized?”

“We wore hoods.”

Gregory looked at Ralph strangely. “I did not know that your wife was at the nunnery.”

“A useful coincidence,” Ralph said. “It enabled me to kill two birds with one stone.”

The strange look intensified. What was the lawyer thinking? Was he going to pretend to be shocked that Ralph had killed his wife? If so, Ralph was ready to point out that Gregory was complicit in everything that had happened at the nunnery – he had been the instigator. He had no right to judge. Ralph waited for Gregory to speak. But, after a long pause, all he said was: “Let’s have a look at these charters.”

They sent the housekeeper, Vira, on a lengthy errand, and Ralph made Alan stand at the door to keep out casual callers. Then Gregory tipped the charters out of the sack on to the table. He made himself comfortable and began to examine them. Some were rolled and tied with string, others bundled flat, a few sewn together in booklets. He opened one, read a few lines in the strong sunlight coming through the open windows, then threw the charter back into the sack and picked up another.

Ralph had no idea what Gregory was looking for. He had only said that it might embarrass the king. Ralph could not imagine what kind of document Caris might possess that would embarrass a king.

He got bored watching Gregory read, but he was not going to leave. He had delivered what Gregory wanted, and he was going to sit here until Gregory confirmed his half of the deal.

The tall lawyer worked his way patiently through the documents. One caught his attention, and he read it all the way through, but then he threw it in the sack with the others.

Ralph and Alan had spent most of the last week in Bristol. It was not likely that they would be asked to account for their movements, but they had taken precautions anyway. They had caroused at taverns every evening except the night they went to Kingsbridge. Their companions would remember the free drinks, but probably would not recall that on one night of the week Ralph and Alan had been absent – or, if they did, they certainly would not know whether it was the fourth Wednesday after Easter or the Thursday but two before Whitsun.

At last the table was clear and the sack was full again. Ralph said: “Did you not find what you were looking for?”

Gregory did not answer the question. “You brought everything?”

“Everything.”

“Good.”

“So you haven’t found it?”

Gregory chose his words carefully, as always. “The specific item is not here. However, I did come across a deed that may explain why this… issue… has arisen in recent months.”

“So you’re satisfied,” Ralph persisted.

“Yes.”

“And the king need no longer be anxious.”

Gregory looked impatient. “You should not concern yourself with the king’s anxieties. I’ll do that.”

“Then I can expect my reward immediately.”

“Oh, yes,” said Gregory. “You shall be the earl of Shiring by harvest time.”

Ralph felt a glow of satisfaction. The earl of Shiring – at last. He had won the prize he had always longed for, and his father was still alive to hear the news. “Thank you,” he said.

“If I were you,” said Gregory, “I should go and woo Lady Philippa.”

“Woo her?” Ralph was astonished.

Gregory shrugged. “She has no real choice in the matter, of course. But still, the formalities should be observed. Tell her that the king has given you permission to ask for her hand in marriage, and say you hope she will learn to love you as much as you love her.”

“Oh,” said Ralph. “All right.”

“Take her a present,” said Gregory.

On the morning of Tilly’s burial, Caris and Merthin met on the roof of the cathedral at dawn.

The roof was a world apart. Calculating the acreage of slates was a perennial geometry exercise in the advanced mathematics class at the priory school. Workmen needed constant access for repairs and maintenance, so a network of walkways and ladders linked the slopes and ridges, corners and gulleys, turrets and pinnacles, gutters and gargoyles. The crossing tower had not yet been rebuilt, but the view from the top of the west façade was impressive.

The priory was already busy. This would be a big funeral. Tilly had been a nobody in life, but now she was the victim of a notorious murder, a noblewoman killed in a nunnery, and she would be mourned by people who had never spoken three words to her. Caris would have liked to discourage mourners, because of the risk of spreading the plague, but there was nothing she could do.

The bishop was already here, in the best room of the prior’s palace – which was why Caris and Merthin had spent the night apart, she in the nuns’ dormitory and he and Lolla at the Holly Bush. The grieving widower, Ralph, was in a private room upstairs at the hospital. His baby, Gerry, was being taken care of by the nuns. Lady Philippa and her daughter Odila, the only other surviving relatives of the dead girl, were also staying at the hospital.

Neither Merthin nor Caris had spoken to Ralph when he arrived yesterday. There was nothing they could do, no way to get justice for Tilly, for they could prove nothing; but all the same they knew the truth. So far they had told no one what they believed: there was no point. During today’s obsequies they would have to pretend something like normalcy with Ralph. It was going to be difficult.

While the important personages slept, the nuns and the priory employees were hard at work preparing the funeral dinner. Smoke was rising from the bakery, where dozens of long four-pound loaves of wheat bread were already in the oven. Two men were rolling a new barrel of wine across to the prior’s house. Several novice nuns were setting up benches and a trestle table on the green for the common mourners.

As the sun rose beyond the river, throwing a slanting yellow light on the rooftops of Kingsbridge, Caris studied the marks made on the town by nine months of plague. From this height she could see gaps in the rows of houses, like bad teeth. Timber buildings collapsed all the time, of course – because of fire, rain damage, incompetent construction or just old age. What was different now was that no one bothered to repair them. If your house fell down you just moved into one of the empty homes in the same street. The only person building anything was Merthin, and he was seen as a mad optimist with too much money.

Across the river, the gravediggers were already at work in another newly consecrated cemetery. The plague showed no signs of relenting. Where would it end? Would the houses just continue to fall down, one at a time, until there was nothing left, and the town was a wasteland of broken tiles and scorched timbers, with a deserted cathedral in the middle and a hundred-acre graveyard at its edge?

“I’m not going to let this happen,” she said.

Merthin did not at first understand. “The funeral?” he said, frowning.

Caris made a sweeping gesture to take in the city and the world beyond it. “Everything. Drunks maiming one another. Parents abandoning their sick children on the doorstep of my hospital. Men queuing to fuck a drunken woman on a table outside the White Horse. Livestock dying in the pastures. Half-naked penitents whipping themselves then collecting pennies from bystanders. And, most of all, a young mother brutally murdered here in my nunnery. I don’t care if we are all going to die of the plague. As long as we’re still alive, I’m not going to let our world fall apart.”

“What are you going to do?”