The Pillars of the Earth

Chapter 1

(i)

In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.

The walls were already three feet high and rising fast. The two masons Tom had engaged were working steadily in the sunshine, their trowels going scrape, slap and then tap, tap while their labourer sweated under the weight of the big stone blocks. Tom’s son Alfred was mixing mortar, counting aloud as he scooped sand on to a board. There was also a carpenter, working at the bench beside Tom, carefully shaping a length of beech-wood with an adze.

Alfred was fourteen years old, and tall like Tom. Tom was a head higher than most men, and Alfred was only a couple of inches less, and still growing. They looked alike, too: both had light brown hair and greenish eyes with brown flecks. People said they were a handsome pair. The main difference between them was that Tom had a curly brown beard, whereas Alfred had only a fine blond fluff. The hair on Alfred’s head had been that colour once, Tom remembered fondly. Now that Alfred was becoming a man, Tom wished he would take a more intelligent interest in his work, for he had a lot to learn if he was to be a mason like his father; but so far Alfred remained bored and baffled by the principles of building.

When the house was finished it would be the most luxurious home for miles around. The ground floor would be a spacious undercroft, for storage, with a curved vault for a ceiling, so that it would not catch fire. The hall, where people actually lived, would be above, reached by an outside staircase, its height making it hard to attack and easy to defend. Against the hall wall there would be a chimney, to take away the smoke of the fire. This was a radical innovation: Tom had only ever seen one house with a chimney, but it had struck him as such a good idea that he was determined to copy it. At one end of the house, over the hall, there would be a small bedroom, for that was what earls’ daughters demanded nowadays – they were too fine to sleep in the hall with the men and the serving-wenches and the hunting-dogs. The kitchen would be a separate building, for every kitchen caught fire sooner or later, and there was nothing for it but to build them far away from everything else and put up with lukewarm food.

Tom was making the doorway of the house. The doorposts would be rounded to look like columns – a touch of distinction for the noble newly-weds who were to live here. With his eye on the shaped wooden template he was using as a guide, Tom set his iron chisel obliquely against the stone and tapped it gently with the big wooden hammer. A small shower of fragments fell away from the surface, leaving the shape a little rounder. He did it again. Smooth enough for a cathedral.

He had worked on a cathedral once – Exeter. At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been angry and resentful when the master-builder had warned him that his work was not quite up to standard: he knew himself to be rather more careful than the average mason. But then he realised that the walls of a cathedral had to be not just good, but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes to the wonder of his craft. He learned from the Exeter master about the importance of proportion, the symbolism of various numbers, and the almost magical formulas for working out the correct width of a wall or the angle of a step in a spiral staircase. Such things, captivated him. He was surprised to learn that many masons found them incomprehensible.

After a while Tom had become the master-builder’s right-hand man, and that was when he began to see the master’s shortcomings. The man was a great craftsman and an incompetent organiser. He was completely baffled by the problems of obtaining the right quantity of stone to keep pace with the masons, making sure that the blacksmith made enough of the right tools, burning lime and carting sand for the mortar-makers, felling trees for the carpenters, and getting enough money from the cathedral chapter to pay for everything.

If Tom had stayed at Exeter until the master-builder died, he might have become master himself; but the chapter ran out of money – partly because of the master’s mismanagement – and the craftsmen had to move on, looking for work elsewhere. Tom had been offered the post of builder to the Exeter castellan, repairing and improving the city’s fortifications. It would have been a lifetime job, barring accidents. But Tom had turned it down, for he wanted to build another cathedral.

His wife Agnes had never understood that decision. They might have had a good stone house, and servants, and their own stables, and meat on the table every dinner-time; and she had never forgiven Tom for turning down the opportunity. She could not comprehend the irresistible attraction of building a cathedral: the absorbing complexity of organisation, the intellectual challenge of the calculations, the sheer size of the walls, and the breathtaking beauty and grandeur of the finished building. Once he had tasted that wine, Tom was never satisfied with anything less.

That had been ten years ago. Since then they had never stayed anywhere for very long. He would design a new chapter house for a monastery, work for a year or two on a castle, or build a town house for a rich merchant; but as soon as he had some money saved he would leave, with his wife and children, and take to the road, looking for another cathedral.

He glanced up from his bench and saw Agnes standing at the edge of the building site, holding a basket of food in one hand and resting a big jug of beer on the opposite hip. It was midday. He looked at her fondly. No one would ever call her pretty, but her face was full of strength: a broad forehead, large brown eyes, a straight nose, a strong jaw. Her dark, wiry hair was parted in the middle and tied behind. She was Tom’s soul mate.

She poured beer for Tom and Alfred. They stood there for a moment, the two big men and the strong woman, drinking beer from wooden cups; and then the fourth member of the family came skipping out of the wheat-field: Martha, seven years old and as pretty as a daffodil, but a daffodil with a petal missing, for she had a gap where two milk teeth had fallen out and the new ones had not yet grown. She ran to Tom, kissed his dusty beard, and begged a sip of his beer. He hugged her bony body. ‘Don’t drink too much, or you’ll fall into a ditch,’ he said. She staggered around in a circle, pretending to be drunk.

They all sat down on the wood-pile. Agnes handed Tom a hunk of wheat bread, a thick slice of boiled bacon and a small onion. He took a bite of the meat and started to peel the onion. Agnes gave the children food and began to eat her own. Perhaps it was irresponsible, Tom thought, to turn down that dull job in Exeter and go looking for a cathedral to build; but I’ve always been able to feed them all, despite my recklessness.

He took his eating-knife from the front pocket of his leather apron, cut a slice off the onion, and ate it with a bite of bread. The onion was sweet and stinging in his mouth. Agnes said: ‘I’m with child again.’

Tom stopped chewing and stared at her. A thrill of delight took hold of him. Not knowing what to say, he just smiled foolishly at her. After a few moments she blushed, and said: ‘It isn’t that surprising.’

Tom hugged her. ‘Well, well,’ he said, still grinning with pleasure. ‘A babe to pull my beard. And I thought the next would be Alfred’s.’

‘Don’t get too happy yet,’ Agnes cautioned. ‘It’s bad luck to name the child before it’s born.’

Tom nodded assent. Agnes had had several miscarriages and one stillborn baby, and there had been another little girl, Matilda, who had lived only two years. ‘I’d like a boy, though,’ he said. ‘Now that Alfred’s so big. When is it due?’

‘After Christmas.’

Tom began to calculate. The shell of the house would be finished by first frost, then the stonework would have to be covered with straw to protect it through the winter. The masons would spend the cold months cutting stones for windows, vaults, doorcases and the fireplace, while the carpenter made floorboards and doors and shutters and Tom built the scaffolding for the upstairs work. Then in spring they would vault the undercroft, floor the hall above it, and put on the roof. The job would feed the family until Whitsun, by which time the baby would be half a year old. Then they would move on. ‘Good,’ he said contentedly. ‘This is good.’ He ate another slice of onion.

‘I’m too old to bear children,’ Agnes said. ‘This must be my last.’

Tom thought about that. He was not sure how old she was, in numbers, but plenty of women bore children at her time of life. However, it was true they suffered more as they grew older, and the babies were not so strong. No doubt she was right. But how would she make certain that she would not conceive again? he wondered. Then he realised how, and a cloud shadowed his sunny mood.

‘I may get a good job, in a town,’ he said, trying to mollify her. ‘A cathedral, or a palace. Then we might have a big house with wood floors, and a maid to help you with the baby.’

Her face hardened, and she said sceptically: ‘It may be.’ She did not like to hear talk of cathedrals. If Tom had never worked on a cathedral, her face said, she might be living in a town house now, with money saved up and buried under the fireplace, and nothing to worry about.

Tom looked away and took another bite of bacon. They had something to celebrate, but they were in disharmony. He felt let down. He chewed the tough meat for a while, then he heard a horse. He cocked his head to listen. The rider was coming through the trees from the direction of the road, taking a short cut and avoiding the village.

A moment later, a young man on a pony trotted up and dismounted. He looked like a squire, a kind of apprentice knight. ‘Your lord is coming,’ he said.

Tom stood up. ‘You mean Lord Percy?’ Percy Hamleigh was one of the most important men in Wiltshire. He owned this valley, and many others, and he was paying for the house.

‘His son,’ said the squire.

‘Young William.’ Percy’s son William was to occupy this house after his marriage. He was engaged to Lady Aliena, the daughter of the Earl of Shiring.

‘The same,’ said the squire. ‘And in a rage.’

Tom’s heart sank. At the best of times it could be difficult to deal with the owner of a house under construction. An owner in a rage was impossible. ‘What’s he angry about?’

‘His bride rejected him.’

‘The earl’s daughter?’ said Tom in surprise. He felt a pang of fear: he had just been thinking how secure his future was. ‘I thought that was settled.’

‘So did we all – except the Lady Aliena, it seems,’ the squire said. ‘The moment she met him, she announced that she wouldn’t marry him for all the world and a woodcock.’

Tom frowned worriedly. He did not want this to be true. ‘But the boy’s not bad-looking, as I recall.’

Agnes said: ‘As if that made any difference, in her position. If earls’ daughters were allowed to marry whom they please, we’d all be ruled by strolling minstrels and dark-eyed out­laws.’

‘The girl may yet change her mind,’ Tom said hopefully.

‘She will if her mother takes a birch rod to her,’ Agnes said.

The squire said: ‘Her mother’s dead.’

Agnes nodded. ‘That explains why she doesn’t know the facts of life. But I don’t see why her father can’t compel her.’

The squire said: ‘It seems he once promised he would never marry her to someone she hated.’

‘A foolish pledge!’ Tom said angrily. How could a powerful man tie himself to the whim of a girl in that way? Her marriage could affect military alliances, baronial finances . . . even the building of this house.

The squire said: ‘She has a brother, so it’s not so important whom she marries. ’

‘Even so . . .’

‘And the earl is an unbending man,’ the squire went on. ‘He won’t go back on a promise, even one made to a child.’ He shrugged. ‘So they say.’

Tom looked at the low stone walls of the house-to-be. He had not yet saved enough money to keep the family through the winter, he realised with a chill. ‘Perhaps the lad will find another bride to share this place with him. He’s got the whole county to choose from.’

Alfred spoke in a cracked adolescent voice. ‘By Christ, I think this is him.’ Following his gaze, they all looked across the field. A horse was coming from the village at a gallop, kicking up a cloud of dust and earth from the pathway. Alfred’s oath was prompted by the size as well as the speed of the horse: it was huge. Tom had seen beasts like it before, but perhaps Alfred had not. It was a warhorse, as high at the wither as a man’s chin, and broad in proportion. Such warhorses were not bred in England, but came from overseas, and were enormously costly.

Tom dropped the remains of his bread into the pocket of his apron, then narrowed his eyes against the sun and gazed across the field. The horse had its ears back and nostrils flared, but it seemed to Tom that its head was well up, a sign that it was not completely out of control. Sure enough, as it came closer the rider leaned back, hauling on the reins, and the huge animal seemed to slow a little. Now Tom could feel the drumming of its hoofs in the ground beneath his feet. He looked around for Martha, thinking to pick her up and put her out of harm’s way. Agnes had the same thought. But Martha was nowhere to be seen.

‘In the corn,’ Agnes said, but Tom had already figured that out and was striding across the site to the edge of the field. He scanned the waving wheat with fear in his heart but he could not see the child.

The only thing he could think of was to try to slow the horse. He stepped into the path and began to walk toward the charging beast, holding his arms wide. The horse saw him, raised its head for a better look, and slowed perceptibly. Then, to Tom’s horror, the rider spurred it on.

‘You damned fool!’ Tom roared, although the rider could not hear.

That was when Martha stepped out of the field and into the pathway a few yards in front of Tom.

For an instant Tom stood still in a sick panic. Then he leaped forward, shouting and waving his arms; but this was a warhorse, trained to charge at yelling hordes, and it did not flinch. Martha stood in the middle of the narrow path, staring as if transfixed by the huge beast bearing down on her. There was a moment when Tom realised desperately that he could not get to her before the horse did. He swerved to one side, his arm touching the standing wheat; and at the last instant the horse swerved to the other side. The rider’s stirrup brushed Martha’s fine hair; a hoof stamped a round hole in the ground beside her bare foot; then the horse had gone by, spraying them both with dirt, and Tom snatched her up in his arms and held her tight to his pounding heart.

He stood still for a moment, awash with relief, his limbs weak, his insides watery. Then he felt a surge of fury at the recklessness of the stupid youth on his massive warhorse. He looked up angrily. Lord William was slowing the horse now, sitting back in the saddle, with his feet pushed forward in the stirrups, sawing on the reins. The horse swerved to avoid the building site. It tossed its head and then bucked, but William stayed on. He slowed it to a canter and then a trot as he guided it around in a wide circle.

Martha was crying. Tom handed her to Agnes and waited for William. The young lord was a tall, well-built fellow of about twenty years, with yellow hair and narrow eyes which made him look as if he were always peering into the sun. He wore a short black tunic with black hose, and leather shoes with straps criss-crossed up to his knees. He sat well on the horse and did not seem shaken by what had happened. The foolish boy doesn’t even know what he’s done, Tom thought bitterly. I’d like to wring his neck.

William halted the horse in front of the wood-pile and looked down at the builders. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he said.

Tom wanted to say If you had hurt my little girl, I would have killed you, but he suppressed his rage. It was like swallowing a bitter mouthful. He approached the horse and held its bridle. ‘I’m the master-builder,’ he said tightly. ‘My name is Tom.’

‘This house is no longer needed,’ said William. ‘Dismiss your men.’

It was what Tom had been dreading. But he held on to the hope that William was being impetuous in his anger, and might be persuaded to change his mind. With an effort, he made his voice friendly and reasonable. ‘But so much work has been done,’ he said. ‘Why waste what you’ve spent? You’ll need the house one day.’

‘Don’t tell me how to manage my affairs, Tom Builder,’ said William. ‘You’re all dismissed.’ He twitched a rein, but Tom had hold of the bridle. ‘Let go of my horse,’ William said dangerously.

Tom swallowed. In a moment William would try to get the horse’s head up. Tom felt in his apron pocket and brought out the crust of bread he had been eating. He showed it to the horse, which dipped its head and took a bite. ‘There’s more to be said, before you leave, my lord,’ he said mildly.

William said: ‘Let my horse go, or I’ll take your head off.’ Tom looked directly at him, trying not to show his fear. He was bigger than William, but that would make no difference if the young lord drew his sword.

Agnes muttered fearfully: ‘Do as the lord says, husband.’

There was dead silence. The other workmen stood as still as statues, watching. Tom knew that the prudent thing would be to give in. But William had nearly trampled Tom’s little girl, and that made Tom mad, so with a racing heart he said: ‘You have to pay us.’

William pulled on the reins, but Tom held the bridle tight, and the horse was distracted, nuzzling in Tom’s apron pocket for more food. ‘Apply to my father for your wages!’ William said angrily.

Tom heard the carpenter say in a terrified voice: ‘We’ll do that, my lord, thanking you very much.’

Wretched coward, Tom thought, but he was trembling himself. Nevertheless he forced himself to say: ‘If you want to dismiss us, you must pay us, according to the custom. Your father’s house is two days’ walk from here, and when we arrive he may not be there.’

‘Men have died for less than this,’ William said. His cheeks reddened with anger.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw the squire drop his hand to the hilt of his sword. He knew he should give up now, and humble himself, but there was an obstinate knot of anger in his belly, and as scared as he was he could not bring himself to release the bridle. ‘Pay us first, then kill me,’ he said recklessly. ‘You may hang for it, or you may not; but you’ll die sooner or later, and then I will be in heaven and you will be in hell.’

The sneer froze on William’s face and he paled. Tom was surprised: what had frightened the boy? Not the mention of hanging, surely: it was not really likely that the lord would be hanged for the murder of a craftsman. Was he terrified of hell?

They stared at one another for a few moments. Tom watched with amazement and relief as William’s set expression of anger and contempt melted away, to be replaced by a panicky anxiety. At last William took a leather purse from his belt and tossed it to his squire, saying: ‘Pay them.’

At that point Tom pushed his luck. When William pulled on the reins again, and the horse lifted its strong head and stepped sideways, Tom moved with the horse and held on to the bridle, and said: ‘A full week’s wages on dismissal, that is the custom.’ He heard a sharp intake of breath from Agnes, just behind him, and he knew she thought he was crazy to prolong the confrontation. But he ploughed on. ‘That’s six pence for the labourer, twelve for the carpenter and each of the masons, and twenty-four pence for me. Sixty-six pence in all.’ He could add pennies faster than anyone he knew.

The squire was looking inquiringly at his master. William said angrily: ‘Very well.’

Tom released the bridle and stepped back.

William turned the horse and kicked it hard, and it bounded forward on to the path through the wheat-field.

Tom sat down suddenly on the wood-pile. He wondered what had got into him. It had been mad to defy Lord William like that. He felt lucky to be alive.

The hoofbeats of William’s warhorse faded to a distant thunder, and his squire emptied the purse on to a board. Tom felt a surge of triumph as the silver pennies tumbled out into the sunshine. It had been mad, but it had worked: he had secured just payment for himself and the men working under him. ‘Even lords ought to follow the customs,’ he said, half to himself.

Agnes heard him. ‘Just hope you’re never in want of work from Lord William,’ she said sourly.

Tom smiled at her. He understood that she was churlish because she had been frightened. ‘Don’t frown too much, or you’ll have nothing but curdled milk in your breasts when that baby is born.’

‘I won’t be able to feed any of us unless you find work for the winter.’

‘The winter’s a long way off,’ said Tom.

(ii)

They stayed at the village through the summer. Later, they came to regard this decision as a terrible mistake, but at the time it seemed sensible enough, for Tom and Agnes and Alfred could each earn a penny a day working in the fields during the harvest. When autumn came, and they had to move on, they had a heavy bag of silver pennies and a fat pig.

They spent the first night in the porch of a village church, but on the second they found a country priory and took advantage of monastic hospitality. On the third day they found themselves in the heart of the Chute Forest, a vast expanse of scrub and rough woodland, on a road not much broader than the width of an ox-cart, with the luxuriant growth of summer dying between the oaks on either side.

Tom carried his smaller tools in a satchel and slung his hammers from his belt. He had his cloak in a bundle under his left arm and he carried his iron spike in his right hand, using it as a walking-stick. He was happy to be on the road again. His next job might be working on a cathedral. He might become master-mason and stay there the rest of his life, and build a church so wonderful it would guarantee that he went to heaven.

Agnes had their few household possessions inside the cooking-pot which she carried strapped to her back. Alfred carried the tools they would use to make a new home somewhere: an axe, an adze, a saw, a small hammer, a bradawl for making holes in leather and wood, and a spade. Martha was too small to carry anything but her own bowl and eating-knife tied to her belt and her winter cloak strapped to her back. However, she had the duty of driving the pig until they could sell it at a market.

Tom kept a close eye on Agnes as they walked through the endless woods. She was more than half-way through her term now, and carrying a considerable weight in her belly as well as the burden on her back. But she seemed tireless. Alfred, too, was all right: he was at the age when boys have more energy than they know what to do with. Only Martha was tiring. Her thin legs were made for the playful scamper, not the long march, and she dropped behind constantly, so that the others had to stop and wait for her and the pig to catch up.

As he walked Tom thought about the cathedral he would build one day. He began, as always, by picturing an archway. It was very simple: two uprights supporting a semicircle. Then he imagined a second, just the same as the first. He pushed the two together, in his mind, to form one deep archway. Then he added another, and another, then a lot more, until he had a whole row of them, all stuck together, forming a tunnel. This was the essence of a building, for it had a roof to keep the rain off and two walls to hold up the roof. A church was just a tunnel, with refinements.

A tunnel was dark, so the first refinements were windows. If the wall was strong enough, it could have holes in it. The holes would be round at the top, with straight sides and a flat sill – the same shape as the original archway. Using similar shapes for arches and windows and doors was one of the things that made a building beautiful. Regularity was another, and Tom visualised twelve identical windows, evenly spaced, along each wall of the tunnel.

Tom tried to visualise the mouldings over the windows, but his concentration kept slipping because he had the feeling that he was being watched. It was a foolish notion, he thought, if only because of course he was being observed by the birds, foxes, cats, squirrels, rats, mice, weasels, stoats and voles which thronged the forest.

They sat down by a stream at midday. They drank the pure water and ate cold bacon and crab-apples which they picked up from the forest floor.

In the afternoon Martha was tired. At one point she was a hundred yards behind them. Standing waiting for her to catch up, Tom remembered Alfred at that age. He had been a beautiful, golden-haired boy, sturdy and bold. Fondness mingled with irritation in Tom as he watched Martha scolding the pig for being so slow. Then a figure stepped out of the undergrowth just ahead of her. What happened next was so quick that Tom could hardly believe it. The man who had appeared so suddenly on the road raised a club over his shoulder. A horrified shout rose in Tom’s throat, but before he could utter it the man swung the club at Martha. It struck her full on the side of the head, and Tom heard the sickening sound of the blow connecting. She fell to the ground like a dropped doll.

Tom found himself running back along the road toward them, his feet pounding the hard earth like the hoofs of William’s warhorse, willing his legs to carry him faster. As he ran, he watched what was happening, and it was like looking at a picture painted high on a church wall, for he could see it but there was nothing he could do to change it. The attacker was undoubtedly an outlaw. He was a short, thick-set man in a brown tunic with bare feet. For an instant he looked straight at Tom, and Tom could see that the man’s face was hideously mutilated: his lips had been cut off, presumably as a punishment for a crime involving lying, and his mouth was now a repulsive permanent grin surrounded by twisted scar tissue. The horrid sight would have stopped Tom in his tracks, had it not been for the prone body of Martha lying on the ground.

The outlaw looked away from Tom and fixed his gaze on the pig. In a flash he bent down, picked it up, tucked the squirming animal under his arm and darted back into the tangled undergrowth, taking with him Tom’s family’s only valuable possession.

Then Tom was on his knees beside Martha. He put his broad hand on her tiny chest and felt her heartbeat, steady and strong, and his worst fear subsided; but her eyes were closed and there was bright red blood in her blonde hair.

Agnes knelt beside him a moment later. She touched Martha’s chest, wrist and forehead, then she gave Tom a hard, level look. ‘She will live,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘Fetch back that pig.’

Tom quickly unslung his satchel of tools and dropped it on the ground. With his left hand he took his big iron-headed hammer from his belt. He still had his spike in his right. He could see the trampled bushes where the thief had come and gone, and he could hear the pig squealing in the woods. He plunged into the undergrowth.

The trail was easy to follow. The outlaw was a heavily built man, running with a wriggling pig under his arm, and he cut a wide path through the vegetation, flattening flowers and bushes and young trees alike. Tom charged after him, full of a savage desire to get his hands on the man and beat him senseless. He crashed through a thicket of birch saplings, hurtled down a slope, and splashed across a patch of bog to a narrow pathway. There he stopped. The thief might have gone left or right, and now there was no crushed vegetation to show the way; but Tom listened, and heard the pig squealing somewhere to his left. He could also hear someone rushing through the forest behind him – Alfred, presumably. He went after the pig.

The path led him down into a dip, then turned sharply and began to rise. He could hear the pig clearly now. He ran uphill, breathing hard – the years of inhaling stone dust had weakened his lungs. Suddenly the path levelled and he saw the thief, only twenty or thirty yards away, running as if the devil were behind him. Tom put on a spurt and started to gain. He was bound to catch up, if only he could keep going, for a man with a pig cannot run as fast as a man without one. But now his chest hurt. The thief was fifteen yards away, then twelve. Tom raised the spike above his head like a spear. Just a little closer and he would throw it. Eleven yards, ten—

Before the spike left his hand he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a thin face in a green cap emerging from the bushes beside the path. It was too late to swerve. A heavy stick was thrust out in front of him, he stumbled on it as was intended, and he fell to the ground.

He had dropped his spike but he still had hold of the hammer. He rolled over and raised himself on one knee. There were two of them, he saw: the one in the green hat and a bald man with a matted white beard. They ran at Tom.

He stepped to one side and swung his hammer at the green hat. The man dodged, but the big iron hammerhead came down hard on his shoulder and he gave a screech of agony and sank to the ground, holding his arm as if it were broken. Tom did not have time to raise the hammer for another crushing blow before the bald man closed with him, so he thrust the iron head at the man’s face and split his cheek.

Both men backed off clutching their wounds. Tom could see that there was no fight left in either one. He turned around. The thief was still running away along the path. Tom went after him again, ignoring the pain in his chest. But he had covered only a few yards when he heard a shout from behind in a familiar voice.

Alfred.

He stopped and looked back.

Alfred was fighting them both, using his fists and his feet. He punched the one in the green hat about the head three or four times then kicked the bald man’s shins. But the two men swarmed him, getting inside his reach so that he could no longer punch or kick hard enough to hurt. Tom hesitated, torn between chasing the pig and rescuing his son. Then the bald one got his foot behind Alfred’s leg and tripped him, and as the boy hit the ground the two men fell on him, raining blows on his face and body.

Tom ran back. He charged the bald one bodily, sending the man flying into the bushes, then turned and swung his hammer at the green hat. This man had felt the weight of the hammer once before and was still using only one arm. He dodged the first swing, then turned and dived into the undergrowth before Tom could swing again.

Tom turned and saw the bald man running away down the path. He looked in the opposite direction: the thief with the pig was nowhere in sight. He breathed a bitter, blasphemous curse: that pig represented half of what he had saved this summer. He sank to the ground, breathing hard.

‘We beat three of them!’ Alfred said excitedly.

Tom looked at him. ‘But they got our pig,’ he said. Anger burned his stomach like sour cider. They had bought the pig in the spring, as soon as they had saved enough pennies, and they had been fattening it all summer. A fat pig could be sold for sixty pence. With a few cabbages and a sack of grain it could feed a family all winter and make a pair of leather shoes and a purse or two. Its loss was a catastrophe.

Tom looked enviously at Alfred, who had already recovered from the chase and the fight, and was waiting impatiently. How long ago was it, Tom thought, when I could run like the wind and hardly feel my heart race? Since I was that age . . . twenty years. Twenty years. It seemed like yesterday.

He got to his feet.

He put his arm around Alfred’s broad shoulders as they walked back along the path. The boy was still shorter than his father by the span of a man’s hand, but soon he would catch up, and he might grow even bigger. I hope his wit grows too, Tom thought. He said: ‘Any fool can get into a fight, but a wise man knows how to stay out of them.’ Alfred gave him a blank look.

They turned off the path, crossed the boggy patch, and began to climb the slope, following in reverse the trail the thief had made. As they pushed through the birch thicket, Tom thought of Martha, and once again rage curdled in his belly. The outlaw had lashed out at her senselessly, for she had been no threat to him.

Tom quickened his pace, and a moment later he and Alfred emerged on to the road. Martha lay there in the same place, not having moved. Her eyes were closed and the blood was drying in her hair. Agnes knelt beside her – and with them, to Tom’s surprise, were another woman and a boy. The thought struck him that it was no wonder he had felt watched, earlier in the day, for the forest seemed to be teeming with people. He bent down and rested his hand on Martha’s chest again. She was breathing normally.

‘She will wake up soon,’ said the strange woman in an authoritative voice. ‘Then she will puke. After that she’ll be all right.’

Tom looked at her curiously. She was kneeling over Martha. She was quite young, perhaps a dozen years younger than Tom. Her short leather tunic revealed lithe brown limbs. She had a pretty face, with dark brown hair that came to a devil’s peak on her forehead. Tom felt a pang of desire. Then she raised her glance to look at him, and he gave a start: she had intense, deep-set eyes of an unusual honey-gold colour that gave her whole face a magical look, and he felt sure that she knew what he had been thinking.

He looked away from her to cover his embarrassment, and he caught Agnes’s eye. She was looking resentful. She said: ‘Where’s the pig?’

‘There were two more outlaws,’ Tom said.

Alfred said: ‘We beat them, but the one with the pig got away.’

Agnes looked grim, but said nothing more.

The strange woman said: ‘We could move the girl into the shade, if we’re gentle.’ She stood up, and Tom realised that she was quite small, at least a foot shorter than he. He bent down and picked Martha up carefully. Her childish body was almost weightless in his arms. He carried her a few yards along the road and put her down on a patch of grass in the shadow of an old oak. She was still quite limp.

Alfred was picking up the tools that had been scattered on the road during the fracas. The strange woman’s boy was watching, his eyes wide and his mouth open, not speaking. He was about three years younger than Alfred, and a peculiar-looking child, Tom observed, with none of his mother’s sensual beauty. He had very pale skin, orange-red hair, and blue eyes that bulged slightly. He had the alertly stupid look of a dullard, Tom thought; the kind of child that either dies young or grows up to be the village idiot. Alfred was visibly uncomfortable under his stare.

As Tom watched, the child snatched the saw from Alfred’s hand, without saying anything, and examined it as if it were something amazing. Alfred, offended by the discourtesy, snatched it back, and the child let it go with indifference. The mother said: ‘Jack! Behave yourself.’ She seemed embarrassed.

Tom looked at her. The boy did not resemble her at all. ‘Are you his mother?’ Tom asked.

‘Yes. My name is Ellen.’

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘Dead.’

Tom was surprised. ‘You’re travelling alone?’ he said incredulously. The forest was dangerous enough for a man such as he: a woman alone could hardly hope to survive.

‘We’re not travelling,’ said Ellen. ‘We live in the forest.’

Tom was shocked. ‘You mean you’re . . .’ He stopped, not wanting to offend her.

‘Outlaws,’ she said. ‘Yes. Did you think that all outlaws were like Faramond Openmouth, who stole your pig?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom, although what he wanted to say was I never thought an outlaw might be a beautiful woman. Unable to restrain his curiosity, he asked: ‘What was your crime?’

‘I cursed a priest,’ she said, and looked away.

It did not sound like much of a crime to Tom, but perhaps the priest had been very powerful, or very touchy; or perhaps Ellen just did not want to tell the truth.

He looked at Martha. A moment later she opened her eyes. She was confused and a little frightened. Agnes knelt beside her. ‘You’re safe,’ she said. ‘Everything’s all right.’

Martha sat upright and vomited. Agnes hugged her until the spasms passed. Tom was impressed: Ellen’s prediction had come true. She had also said that Martha would be all right, and presumably that was reliable too. Relief washed over him, and he was a little surprised at the strength of his own emotion. I couldn’t bear to lose my little girl, he thought; and he had to fight back tears. He caught a look of sympathy from Ellen, and once again he felt that her pale gold eyes could see into his heart.

He broke off an oak twig, stripped its leaves, and used them to wipe Martha’s face. She still looked pale.

‘She needs to rest,’ said Ellen. ‘Let her lie down for as long as it takes a man to walk three miles.’

Tom glanced at the sun. There was plenty of daylight left. He settled down to wait. Agnes rocked Martha gently in her arms. The boy Jack now switched his attention to Martha, and stared at her with the same idiot intensity. Tom wanted to know more about Ellen. He wondered whether she might be persuaded to tell her story. He did not want her to go away. ‘How did it all come about?’ he asked her vaguely.

She looked into his eyes again, and then she began to talk.

Her father had been a knight, she told them; a big, strong, violent man who wanted sons with whom he could ride and hunt and wrestle, companions to drink and carouse into the night with him. In these matters he was as unlucky as a man could be, for he got Ellen, and then his wife died; and he married again, but his second wife was barren. He came to despise Ellen’s stepmother, and eventually sent her away. He must have been a cruel man, but he never seemed so to Ellen, who adored him and shared his scorn for his second wife. When the stepmother left, Ellen stayed, and grew up in what was almost an all-male household. She cut her hair short and carried a dagger, and learned not to play with kittens or care for blind old dogs. By the time she was Martha’s age she could spit on the ground and eat apple cores and kick a horse in the belly so hard that it would draw in its breath, allowing her to tighten its girth one more notch. She knew that all men who were not part of her father’s band were called cocksuckers and all women who would not go with them were called pigfuckers, although she was not quite sure – and did not much care – what these insults really meant.

Listening to her voice in that mild air of an autumn afternoon, Tom closed his eyes and pictured her as a flat-chested girl with a dirty face, sitting at the long table with her father’s thuggish comrades, drinking strong ale and belching and singing songs about battle and looting and rape, horses and castles and virgins, until she fell asleep with her little cropped head on the rough board.

If only she could have stayed flat-chested for ever, she would have lived a happy life. But the time came when the men looked at her differently. They no longer laughed uproariously when she said: ‘Get out of my way or I’ll cut off your balls and feed them to the pigs.’ Some of them stared at her when she took off her wool tunic and lay down to sleep in her long linen undershirt. When relieving themselves in the woods, they would turn their backs to her, which they never had before.

One day she saw her father deep in conversation with the parish priest – a rare event – and the two of them kept looking at her, as if they were talking about her. On the following morning her father said to her: ‘Go with Henry and Everard and do as they tell you.’ Then he kissed her forehead. She wondered what on earth had come over him – was he going soft in his old age? She saddled her grey courser – she refused to ride the ladylike palfrey or a child’s pony – and set off with the two men-at-arms.

They took her to a nunnery and left her there.

The whole place rang with her obscene curses as the two men rode away. She knifed the abbess and walked all the way back to her father’s house. He sent her back, bound hand and foot and tied to the saddle of a donkey. They put her in the punishment cell until the abbess’s wound healed. It was cold and damp and as black as the night, and there was water to drink but nothing to eat. When they let her out she walked home again. Her father sent her back again, and this time she was flogged before being put in the cell.

They broke her eventually, of course, and she donned the novice’s habit, obeyed the rules and learned the prayers, even if in her heart she hated the nuns and despised the saints and disbelieved everything anyone told her about God on principle. But she learned to read and write, she mastered music and numbers and drawing, and she added Latin to the French and English she had spoken in her father’s household.

Life in the convent was not so bad, in the end. It was a single-sex community with its own peculiar rules and rituals, and that was exactly what she was used to. All the nuns had to do some physical labour, and Ellen soon got assigned to work with the horses. Before long she was in charge of the stables.

Poverty never worried her. Obedience did not come easily, but it did come, eventually. The third rule, chastity, never troubled her much, although now and again, just to spite the abbess, she would introduce one of the other novice nuns to the pleasures of—

Agnes interrupted Ellen’s tale at this point, and, taking Martha with her, went off to find a stream in which to wash the child’s face and clean up her tunic. She took Alfred too, for protection, although she said she would not go out of earshot. Jack got up to follow them, but Agnes told him firmly to stay behind, and he appeared to understand, for he sat down again. Tom noted that Agnes had succeeded in taking her children where they could not hear any more of this impious and indecent story, while leaving Tom chaperoned.

One day, Ellen went on, the abbess’s palfrey went lame when she was several days away from the convent. Kings- bridge Priory happened to be nearby, so the abbess borrowed another horse from the prior there. After she got home, she told Ellen to return the borrowed horse to the priory and bring the lame palfrey back.

There, in the monastery stable within sight of the crumbling old cathedral of Kingsbridge, Ellen met a young man who looked like a whipped puppy. He had the loose-limbed grace of a pup, and the twitching-nosed alertness, but he was cowed and frightened, as if all the playfulness had been beaten out of him. When she spoke to him he did not understand. She tried Latin, but he was not a monk. Finally she said something in French, and his face was suffused with joy and he replied in the same language.

Ellen never went back to the convent.

From that day on she lived in the forest, first in a rough shelter of branches and leaves, later in a dry cave. She had not forgotten the masculine skills she had learned in her father’s house: she could still hunt deer, trap rabbits and shoot swans with a bow; she could gut and clean and cook the meat; and she even knew how to scrape and cure the hides and furs for her clothes. As well as game, she ate wild fruits, nuts and vegetables. Anything else she needed – salt, woollen clothing, an axe or a new knife – she had to steal.

The worst time was when Jack was born . . .

But what about the Frenchman? Tom wanted to ask. Was he Jack’s father? And if so, when did he die? And how? But he could tell, from her face, that she was not going to talk about that part of the story, and she seemed the type of person who would not be persuaded against her will, so he kept his questions to himself.

By this time her father had died and his band of men had dispersed, so she had no relatives or friends in the world. When Jack was about to be born she built an all-night fire at the mouth of her cave. She had food and water on hand, and her bow and arrows and knives to ward off the wolves and wild dogs; and she even had a heavy red cloak, stolen from a bishop, to wrap the baby in. But she had not been prepared for the pain and fear of childbirth, and for a long time she thought she was going to die. Nevertheless the baby was born healthy and strong, and she survived.

Ellen and Jack lived a simple, frugal life for the next eleven years. The forest gave them all they needed, as long as they were careful to store enough apples and nuts and salted or smoked venison for the winter months. Ellen often thought that if there were no kings and lords and bishops and sheriffs, then everyone could live like this and be perfectly happy.

Tom asked her how she dealt with the other outlaws, men such as Faramond Openmouth. What would happen if they crept up on her at night and tried to rape her? he wondered, and his loins stirred at the thought, although he had never taken a woman against her will, not even his wife.

The other outlaws were afraid of Ellen, she told Tom, looking at him with her luminous pale eyes, and he knew why: they thought she was a witch. As for law-abiding people travelling through the forest, people who knew they could rob and rape and murder an outlaw without fear of punishment – Ellen just hid from them. Why then had she not hidden from Tom? Because she had seen a wounded child, and wanted to help. She had a child herself.

She had taught Jack everything she had learned in her father’s household about weapons and hunting. Then she had taught him all she had learned from the nuns: reading and writing, music and numbers, French and Latin, how to draw, even the Bible stories. Finally, in the long winter evenings, she had passed on the legacy of the Frenchman, who knew more stories and poems and songs than anyone else in the world—

Tom did not believe that the boy Jack could read and write. Tom could write his name, and a handful of words such as pence and yards and bushels; and Agnes, being the daughter of a priest, could do more, although she wrote slowly and laboriously with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth; but Alfred could not write a word, and could barely recognise his own name; and Martha could not even do that. Was it possible that this half-witted child was more literate than Tom’s whole family?

Ellen told Jack to write something, and he smoothed a patch of earth and scratched letters in it. Tom recognised the first word, Alfred, but not the others, and he felt a fool; then Ellen saved his embarrassment by reading the whole thing aloud: ‘Alfred is bigger than Jack.’ The boy quickly drew two figures, one bigger than the other, and although they were crude, one had broad shoulders and a rather bovine expression and the other was small and grinning. Tom, who himself had a talent for sketching, was astonished at the simplicity and strength of the picture scratched in the dust.

But the child seemed an idiot.

Ellen had lately begun to realise this, she confessed, guessing Tom’s thoughts. Jack had never had the company of other children, or indeed of other human beings except for his mother, and the result was that he was growing up like a wild animal. For all his learning he did not know how to behave with people. That was why he was silent, and stared, and snatched.

As she said this she looked vulnerable for the first time. Her air of impregnable self-sufficiency vanished, and Tom saw her as troubled and rather desperate. For Jack’s sake, she needed to rejoin society; but how? If she had been a man, she might conceivably have persuaded some lord to give her a farm, especially if she had lied convincingly and said she was back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. There were some women farmers, but they were invariably widows with grown sons. No lord would give a farm to a woman with one small child. Nobody would hire her as a labourer, either in town or country; besides, she had no place to live, and unskilled work rarely came with accommodation provided. She had no identity.

Tom felt for her. She had given her child everything she could, and it was not enough. But he could see no way out of her dilemma. Beautiful, resourceful, and formidable though she was, she was doomed to spend the rest of her days hiding in the forest with her weird son.

Agnes, Martha and Alfred came back. Tom gazed anxiously at Martha, but she looked as if the worst thing that had ever happened to her was having her face scrubbed. For a while Tom had been absorbed in Ellen’s problems, but now he remembered his own plight: he was out of work and his pig had been stolen. The afternoon was wearing on. He began to pick up their remaining possessions.

Ellen said: ‘Where are you headed?’

‘Winchester,’ Tom told her. Winchester had a castle, a palace, several monasteries, and – most important of all – a cathedral.

‘Salisbury is closer,’ Ellen said. ‘And last time I was there, they were rebuilding the cathedral – making it bigger.’

Tom’s heart leaped. This was what he was looking for. If only he could get a job on a cathedral-building project he believed he had the ability to become master-builder eventually. ‘Which way is Salisbury?’ he said eagerly.

‘Back the way you came, for three or four miles. Do you remember a fork in the road, where you went left?’

‘Yes – by a pond of foul water.’

‘That’s it. The right fork leads to Salisbury.’

They took their leave. Agnes had not liked Ellen, but managed nevertheless to say graciously: ‘Thank you for helping me take care of Martha.’

Ellen smiled and looked wistful as they left.

When they had walked along the road for a few minutes, Tom looked back. Ellen was still watching them, standing in the road with her legs apart, shading her eyes with her hand, the peculiar boy standing beside her. Tom waved, and she waved back.

‘An interesting woman,’ he said to Agnes.

Agnes said nothing.

Alfred said: ‘That boy was strange.’

They walked into the low autumn sun. Tom wondered what Salisbury was like: he had never been there. He felt excited. Of course, his dream was to build a new cathedral from the ground up, but that almost never happened: it was much more common to find an old building being improved or extended, or partly rebuilt. But that would be good enough for him, as long as it offered the prospect of building to his own designs eventually.

Martha said: ‘Why did the man hit me?’

‘Because he wanted to steal our pig,’ Agnes told her.

‘He should get his own pig,’ Martha said indignantly, as if she had only just realised that the outlaw had done something wrong.

Ellen’s problem would have been solved if she had had a craft, Tom reflected. A mason, a carpenter, a weaver or a tanner would not have found himself in her position. He could always go to a town and look for work. There were a few craftswomen, but they were generally the wives or widows of craftsmen. ‘What she needs,’ Tom said aloud, ‘is a husband.’

Agnes said crisply: ‘Well, she can’t have mine.’

(iii)

The day they lost the pig was also the last day of mild weather. They spent that night in a barn, and when they came out in the morning the sky was the colour of a lead roof, and there was a cold wind with gusts of driving rain. They unbundled their cloaks of thick, felted cloth and put them on, fastening them tight under their chins and pulling the hoods well forward to keep the rain off their faces. They set off in a grim mood, four gloomy ghosts in a rainstorm, their wooden clogs splashing along the puddled, muddy road.

Tom wondered what Salisbury Cathedral would be like. A cathedral was a church like any other, in principle: it was simply the church where the bishop had his throne. But in practice cathedral churches were the biggest, richest, grandest and most elaborate. A cathedral was rarely a tunnel with windows. Most were three tunnels, a tall one flanked by two smaller ones in a head-and-shoulders shape, forming a nave with side aisles. The side walls of the central tunnel were reduced to two lines of pillars linked by arches, forming an arcade. The aisles were used for processions – which could be spectacular in cathedral churches – and might also provide space for small side chapels dedicated to particular saints, which attracted important extra donations. Cathedrals were the most costly buildings in the world, far more so than palaces or castles, and they had to earn their keep.

Salisbury was closer than Tom had thought. Around mid-morning they crested a rise, and found the road falling away gently before them in a long curve; and across the rainswept fields, rising out of the flat plain like a boat on a lake, they saw the fortified hill town of Salisbury. Its details were veiled by the rain, but Tom could make out several towers, four or five, soaring high above the city walls. His spirits lifted at the sight of so much stonework.

A cold wind whipped across the plain, freezing their faces and hands as they followed the road toward the east gate. Four roads met at the foot of the hill, amid a scatter of houses spilled over from the town, and there they were joined by other travellers, walking with hunched shoulders and lowered heads, butting through the weather to the shelter of the walls.

On the slope leading to the gate they came up with an ox-cart bearing a load of stone – a very hopeful sign for Tom. The carter was bent down behind the crude wooden vehicle, pushing with his shoulder, adding his strength to that of the two oxen as they inched uphill. Tom saw a chance to make a friend. He beckoned to Alfred, and they both put their shoulders to the back of the cart and helped push.

The huge wooden wheels rumbled on to a timber bridge that spanned an enormous dry moat. The earthworks were formidable: digging that moat, and throwing up the soil to form the town wall, must have taken hundreds of men, Tom thought; a much bigger job even than digging the foundations for a cathedral. The bridge that crossed the moat rattled and creaked under the weight of the cart and the two mighty beasts that were pulling it.

The slope levelled and the cart moved more easily as they approached the gateway. The carter straightened up, and Tom and Alfred did likewise. ‘I thank you kindly,’ the carter said.

Tom asked: ‘What’s the stone for?’

‘The new cathedral.’

‘New? I heard they were just enlarging the old one.’

The carter nodded. ‘That’s what they said, ten years ago. But there’s more new than old, now.’

This was further good news. ‘Who’s the master-builder?’

‘John of Shaftesbury, though Bishop Roger has a lot to do with the designs.’

That was normal. Bishops rarely left builders alone to do the job. One of the master-builder’s problems was often to calm the fevered imaginations of the clerics and set practical limits to their soaring fantasies. But it would be John of Shaftesbury who hired men.

The carter nodded at Tom’s satchel of tools. ‘Mason?’

‘Yes. Looking for work.’

‘You may find it,’ the carter said neutrally. ‘If not on the cathedral, perhaps on the castle.’

‘And who governs the castle?’

‘The same Roger is both bishop and castellan.’

Of course, Tom thought. He had heard of the powerful Roger of Salisbury, who had been close to the king for as long as anyone could remember.

They passed through the gateway into the town. The place was crammed so full of buildings, people and animals that it seemed in danger of bursting its circular ramparts and spilling out into the moat. The wooden houses were jammed together shoulder to shoulder, jostling for space like spectators at a hanging. Every tiny piece of land was used for something. Where two houses had been built with an alleyway between them, someone had put up a half-size dwelling in the alley, with no windows because its door took up almost all the frontage. Wherever a site was too small even for the narrowest of houses, there was a stall on it selling ale or bread or apples; and if there was not even room for that, then there would be a stable, a pigsty, a dunghill or a water barrel.

It was noisy, too. The rain did little to deaden the clamour of craftsmen’s workshops, hawkers calling their wares, people greeting one another and bargaining and quarrelling, animals neighing and barking and fighting.

Raising her voice above the noise, Martha said: ‘What’s that stink?’

Tom smiled. She had not been in a town for a couple of years. ‘That’s the smell of people,’ he told her.

The street was only a little wider than the ox-cart, but the carter would not let his beasts stop, for fear they might not start again; so he whipped them on, ignoring all obstacles, and they shouldered their dumb way through the multitude, indiscriminately shoving aside a knight on a warhorse, a forester with a bow, a fat monk on a pony, men-at-arms and beggars and housewives and whores.

The cart came up behind an old shepherd struggling to keep a small flock together. It must be market day, Tom realised. As the cart went by, one of the sheep plunged through the open door of an alehouse, and in a moment the whole flock was in the house, bleating and panicking and upsetting tables and stools and alepots.

The ground underfoot was a sea of mud and rubbish. Tom had an eye for the fall of rain on a roof, and the width of gutter required to take the rain away; and he could see that all the rain falling on all the roofs of this half of the town was draining away through this street. In a bad storm, he thought, you would need a boat to cross the street.

As they approached the castle at the summit of the hill, the street widened. Here there were stone houses, one or two of them in need of a little repair. They belonged to craftsmen and traders, who had their shops and stores on the ground floor and living quarters above. Looking with a practised eye at what was on sale, Tom could tell that this was a prosperous town. Everyone had to have knives and pots, but only prosperous people bought embroidered shawls, decorated belts and silver clasps.

In front of the castle the carter turned his ox-team to the right, and Tom and his family followed. The street led around a quarter-circle, skirting the castle ramparts. Passing through another gate they left the hurly-burly of the town as quickly as they had entered it, and walked into a different kind of maelstrom: the hectic but ordered diversity of a major building site.

They were inside the walled cathedral close, which occupied the entire north-west quarter of the circular town. Tom stood for a moment taking it in. Just seeing and hearing and smelling it gave him a thrill like a sunny day. As they arrived behind the cartload of stone, two more carts were leaving empty. In lean-to sheds all along the side walls of the church, masons could be seen sculpting the stone blocks, with iron chisels and big wooden hammers, into the shapes that would be put together to form plinths, columns, capitals, shafts, buttresses, arches, windows, sills, pinnacles and parapets. In the middle of the close, well away from other buildings, stood the smithy, the glow of its fire visible through the open doorway; and the clang of hammer on anvil carried across the close as the smith made new tools to replace the ones the masons were wearing down. To most people it was a scene of chaos, but Tom saw a large and complex mechanism which he itched to control. He knew what each man was doing and he could see instantly how far the work had progressed. They were building the east façade.

There was a run of scaffolding across the east end at a height of twenty-five or thirty feet. The masons were in the porch, waiting for the rain to ease up, but their labourers were running up and down the ladders with stones on their shoulders. Higher up, on the timber framework of the roof, were the plumbers, like spiders creeping across a giant wooden web, nailing sheets of lead to the struts and installing the drainpipes and gutters.

Tom realised regretfully that the building was almost finished. If he did get hired here the work would not last more than a couple of years – hardly enough time for him to rise to the position of master-mason, let alone master-builder. Nevertheless he would take the job, if he were offered it, for winter was coming. He and his family could have survived a winter without work if they had still had the pig, but without it Tom had to get a job.

They followed the cart across the close to where the stones were stacked. The oxen gratefully dipped their heads to the water-trough. The carter called to a passing mason: ‘Where’s the master-builder?’

‘In the castle,’ the mason replied.

The carter nodded and turned to Tom. ‘You’ll find him in the bishop’s palace, I expect.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Mine to you.’

Tom left the close with Agnes and the children following. They retraced their steps through the thronged, narrow streets to the front of the castle. Here was another dry moat and a second huge earthen rampart surrounding the central stronghold. They walked across the drawbridge. In a guardhouse to one side of the gateway, a thickset man in a leather tunic sat on a stool, looking out at the rain. He was wearing a sword. Tom addressed him. ‘Good day. I’m called Tom Builder. I want to see the master-builder, John of Shaftesbury.’

‘With the bishop,’ the guard said indifferently.

They went inside. Like most castles, this was a collection of miscellaneous buildings inside a wall of earth. The courtyard was about a hundred yards across. Opposite the gateway, on the far side, was the massive keep, the last stronghold in time of attack, rising high above the ramparts to provide a lookout. On their left was a clutter of low buildings, mostly wooden: a long stable, a kitchen, a bakery and several storehouses. There was a well in the middle. On the right, taking up most of the northern half of the compound, was a large stone house that was obviously the palace. It was built in the same style as the new cathedral, with small round-headed doorways and windows, and it had two storeys. It was new – indeed, masons were still working on one corner of it, apparently building a tower. Despite the rain there were plenty of people in the courtyard, coming in and going out or hurrying through the rain from one building to another: men-at-arms, priests, tradesmen, construction workers and palace servants.

Tom could see several doorways in the palace, all open despite the rain. He was not quite sure what to do next. If the master-builder was with the bishop, perhaps he ought not to interrupt. On the other hand, a bishop was not a king; and Tom was a free man and a mason on legitimate business, not some grovelling serf with a complaint. He decided to be bold. Leaving Agnes and Martha, he walked with Alfred across the muddy courtyard to the palace and went through the nearest door.

They found themselves in a small chapel with a vaulted ceiling and a window in the far end over the altar. Near the doorway a priest sat at a high desk, writing rapidly on vellum. He looked up.

Tom said briskly: ‘Where’s Master John?’

‘In the vestry,’ said the priest, jerking his head toward a door in the side wall.

Tom did not ask to see the master. He found that if he acted as if he were expected he was less likely to waste time waiting around. He crossed the little chapel in a couple of strides and entered the vestry.

It was a small, square chamber lit by many candles. Most of the floor space was taken up by a shallow sandpit. The fine sand had been smoothed perfectly level with a rule. There were two men in the room. Both glanced briefly at Tom, then returned their attention to the sand. The bishop, a wrinkled old man with flashing black eyes, was drawing in the sand with a pointed stick. The master-builder, wearing a leather apron, watched him with a patient air and a sceptical expression.

Tom waited in anxious silence. He must make a good impression: be courteous but not grovelling and show his knowledge without being cocky. A master-craftsman wanted his subordinates to be obedient as well as skilful, Tom knew from his own experience of being the hirer.

Bishop Roger was sketching a two-storey building with large windows in three sides. He was a good draughtsman, making straight lines and true right-angles. He drew a plan and a side view of the building. Tom could see that it would never be built.

The bishop finished it and said: ‘There.’

John turned to Tom and said: ‘What is it?’

Tom pretended to think he was being asked for his opinion of the drawing. He said: ‘You can’t have windows that big in an undercroft.’

The bishop looked at him with irritation. ‘It’s a writing- room, not an undercroft.’

‘It will fall down just the same.’

John said: ‘He’s right.’

‘But they must have light to write by.’

John shrugged and turned to Tom. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Tom and I’m a mason.’

‘I guessed that. What brings you here?’

‘I’m looking for work.’ Tom held his breath.

John shook his head immediately. ‘I can’t hire you.’

Tom’s heart sank. He felt like turning on his heel, but he waited politely to hear the reasons.

‘We’ve been building for ten years here,’ John went on. ‘Most of the masons have houses in the town. We’re coming to the end, and now I have more masons on the site than I really need.’

Tom knew it was hopeless, but he said: ‘And the palace?’

‘Same thing,’ said John. ‘This is where I’m using my surplus men. If it weren’t for this, and Bishop Roger’s other castles, I’d be laying masons off already.’

Tom nodded. In a neutral voice, trying not to sound desperate, he said: ‘Do you hear of work anywhere?’

‘They were building at the monastery in Shaftesbury earlier in the year. Perhaps they still are. It’s a day’s journey away.’

‘Thanks.’ Tom turned to go.

‘I’m sorry,’ John called after him. ‘You seem like a good man.’

Tom went out without replying. He felt let down. He had allowed his hopes to rise too early: there was nothing unusual about being turned down. But he had been excited at the prospect of working on a cathedral again. Now he might have to work on a monotonous town wall or an ugly house for a silversmith.

He squared his shoulders as he walked back across the castle courtyard to where Agnes waited with Martha. He never showed his disappointment to her. He always tried to give the impression that all was well, he was in control of the situation, and it was of no great consequence if there was no work here because there was sure to be something in the next town, or the one after that. He knew that if he showed any sign of distress Agnes would urge him to find a place to settle down, and he did not want to do that, not unless he could settle in a town where there was a cathedral to be built.

‘There’s nothing for me here,’ he said to Agnes. ‘Let’s move on.’

She looked crestfallen. ‘You’d think, with a cathedral and a palace under construction, there would be room for one more mason.’

‘Both buildings are almost finished,’ Tom explained. ‘They’ve got more men than they want.’

The family crossed the drawbridge and plunged back into the crowded streets of the town. They had entered Salisbury by the east gate, and they would leave by the west, for that way led to Shaftesbury. Tom turned right, leading them through the part of the town they had not so far seen.

He stopped outside a stone house that looked in dire need of repair. The mortar used in building it had been too weak, and was now crumbling and falling out. Frost had got into the holes, cracking some of the stones. If it were left for another winter the damage would be worse. Tom decided to point this out to the owner.

The ground-floor entrance was a wide arch. The wooden door was open, and in the doorway a craftsman sat with a hammer in his right hand and a bradawl, a small metal tool with a sharp point, in his left. He was carving a complex design on a wooden saddle which sat on the bench before him. In the background Tom could see stores of wood and leather, and a boy with a broom sweeping shavings.

Tom said: ‘Good day, Master Saddler.’

The saddler looked up, classified Tom as the kind of man who would make his own saddle if he needed one, and gave a curt nod.

I’m a builder,’ Tom went on. ‘I see you’re in need of my services.’

‘Why?’

‘Your mortar is crumbling, your stones are cracking and your house may not last another winter.’

The saddler shook his head. ‘This town is full of masons. Why would I employ a stranger?’

‘Very well.’ Tom turned away. ‘God be with you.’

‘I hope so,’ said the saddler.

‘An ill-mannered fellow,’ Agnes muttered to Tom as they walked away.

The street led them to a market-place. Here in a half-acre sea of mud, peasants from the surrounding countryside exchanged what little surplus they might have of meat or corn, milk or eggs, for the things they needed and could not make themselves – pots, ploughshares, ropes and salt. Markets were usually colourful and rather boisterous. There was a lot of good-natured haggling, mock rivalry between adjacent stallholders, cheap cakes for the children, sometimes a minstrel or a group of tumblers, lots of painted whores, and perhaps a crippled soldier with tales of eastern deserts and berserk Saracen hordes. Those who made a good bargain often succumbed to the temptation to celebrate, and spent their profit on strong ale, so that there was always a rowdy atmosphere by midday. Others would lose their pennies at dice, and that led to fighting. But now, on a wet day in the morning, with the year’s harvest sold or stored, the market was subdued. Rain-soaked peasants made taciturn bargains with shivering stallholders, and everyone looked forward to going home to a blazing fireplace.

Tom’s family pushed through the disconsolate crowd, ignoring the half-hearted blandishments of the sausage-seller and the knife-sharpener. They had almost reached the far side of the market-place when Tom saw his pig.

He was so surprised that at first he could not believe his eyes. Then Agnes hissed: ‘Tom! Look!’ and he knew she had seen it too.

There was no doubt about it: he knew that pig as well as he knew Alfred or Martha. It was being held, in an expert grip, by a man who had the florid complexion and broad girth of one who eats as much meat as he needs and then some more: a butcher, without doubt. Both Tom and Agnes stood and stared at him, and since they blocked his path he could not help but notice them.

‘Well?’ he said, puzzled by their stares and impatient to get by.

It was Martha who broke the silence. ‘That’s our pig!’ she said excitedly.

‘So it is,’ said Tom, looking levelly at the butcher.

For an instant a furtive look crossed the man’s face, and Tom realised he knew the pig was stolen. But he said: ‘I’ve just paid fifty pence for it, and that makes it my pig.’ ‘Whoever you gave your money to, the pig was not his to sell. No doubt that was why you got it so cheaply. Who did you buy it from?’

‘A peasant.’

‘One you know?’

‘No. Listen, I’m butcher to the garrison. I can’t ask every farmer who sells me a pig or a cow to produce twelve men to swear the animal is his to sell.’

The man turned aside as if to go away, but Tom caught him by the arm and stopped him. For a moment the man looked angry, but then he realised that if he got into a scuffle he would have to drop the pig, and that if one of Tom’s family managed to pick it up, the balance of power would change and it would be the butcher who had to prove ownership. So he restrained himself and said: ‘If you want to make an accusation, go to the sheriff.’

Tom considered that briefly and dismissed it. He had no proof. Instead he said: ‘What did he look like – the man who sold you my pig?’

The butcher looked shifty and said: ‘Like anyone else.’

‘Did he keep his mouth covered?’

‘Now that I think of it, he did.’

‘He was an outlaw, concealing a mutilation,’ Tom said bitterly. ‘I suppose you didn’t think of that.’

‘It’s pissing with rain!’ the butcher protested. ‘Everyone’s muffled up.’

‘Just tell me how long ago he left you.’

‘Just now.’

‘And where was he headed?’

‘To an alehouse, I’d guess.’

‘To spend my money,’ Tom said disgustedly. ‘Go on, clear off. You may be robbed yourself, one day, and then you’ll wish there were not so many people eager to buy a bargain without asking questions.’

The butcher looked angry, and hesitated as if he wanted to make some rejoinder; then he thought better of it and disappeared.

Agnes said: ‘Why did you let him go?’

‘Because he’s known here and I’m not,’ Tom said. ‘If I fight with him I’ll be blamed. And because the pig doesn’t have my name written on its arse, so who is to say whether it is mine or not?’

‘But all our savings—’

‘We may get the money for the pig, yet,’ said Tom. ‘Shut up and let me think.’ The altercation with the butcher had angered him, and it relieved his frustration to speak harshly to Agnes. ‘Somewhere in this town there is a man with no lips and fifty silver pennies in his pocket. All we have to do is find him and take the money from him.’

‘Right,’ said Agnes determinedly.

‘You walk back the way we’ve come. Go as far as the cathedral close. I’ll walk on, and come to the cathedral from the other direction. Then we’ll return by the next street, and so on. If he’s not on the streets he’s in an alehouse. When you see him, stay by him and send Martha to find me. I’ll take Alfred. Try not to let the outlaw see you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Agnes said grimly. ‘I want that money, to feed my children.’

Tom touched her arm and smiled. ‘You’re a lion, Agnes.’

She looked into his eyes for a moment, then suddenly stood on her toes and kissed his mouth, briefly but hard. Then she turned and went back across the market-place with Martha in tow. Tom watched her out of sight, feeling anxious for her despite her courage; then he went in the opposite direction with Alfred.

The thief seemed to think he was perfectly safe. Of course, when he stole the pig, Tom had been heading for Winchester. The thief had gone in the opposite direction, to sell the pig in Salisbury. But the outlaw woman, Ellen, had told Tom that Salisbury Cathedral was being rebuilt, and he had changed his plans, and inadvertently caught up with the thief. However, the man thought he would never see Tom again, which gave Tom a chance to catch him unawares.

Tom walked slowly along the muddy street, trying to seem casual as he glanced in at open doorways. He wanted to remain unobtrusive, for this episode could end in violence, and he did not want people to remember a tall mason searching the town. Most of the houses were ordinary hovels of wood, mud and thatch, with straw on the floor, a fireplace in the middle, and a few bits of home-made furniture. A barrel and some benches made an alehouse; a bed in the corner with a curtain to screen it meant a whore; a noisy crowd around a single table signified a game of dice.

A woman with red-stained lips bared her breasts to him, and he shook his head and hurried past. He was secretly intrigued by the idea of doing it with a total stranger, in daylight, and paying for it, but in all his life he had never tried it.

He thought again of Ellen, the outlaw woman. There was something intriguing about her, too. She was powerfully attractive, but those deep-set, intense eyes were intimidating. An invitation from a whore made Tom feel discontented for a few moments, but the spell cast by Ellen had not yet worn off, and he had a sudden foolish desire to run back into the forest and find her and fall on her.

He arrived at the cathedral close without seeing the outlaw. He looked at the plumbers nailing the lead to the triangular timber roof over the nave. They had not yet begun to cover the lean-to roofs on the side aisles of the church, and it was still possible to see the supporting half-arches which connected the outside edge of the aisle with the main nave wall, propping up the top half of the church. He pointed them out to Alfred. ‘Without those supports, the nave wall would bow outwards and buckle, because of the weight of the stone vaults inside,’ he explained. ‘See how the half­arches line up with the buttresses in the aisle wall? They also line up with the pillars of the nave arcade inside. And the aisle windows line up with the arches of the arcade. Strong lines up with strong, and weak with weak.’ Alfred looked baffled and resentful. Tom sighed.

He saw Agnes coming from the opposite side, and his mind returned to his immediate problem. Agnes’s hood concealed her face, but he recognised her chin-forward, sure-footed walk. Broad-shouldered labourers stepped aside to let her pass. If she were to run into the outlaw, and there was a fight, he thought grimly, it would be a fairly even match.

‘Did you see him?’ she said.

‘No. Obviously you didn’t either.’ Tom hoped the thief had not left the town already. Surely he would not go without spending some of his pennies? Money was no use in the forest.

Agnes was thinking the same. ‘He’s here somewhere. Let’s keep looking.’

‘We’ll go back by different streets and meet again in the market-place.’

Tom and Alfred retraced their steps across the close and went out through the gateway. The rain was soaking through their cloaks now, and Tom thought fleetingly of a pot of beer and a bowl of beef broth beside an alehouse fire. Then he thought how hard he had worked to buy the pig, and he saw again the man with no lips swinging his club at Martha’s innocent head, and his anger warmed him.

It was difficult to search systematically because there was no order to the streets. They wandered here and there, according to where people had built houses, and there were many sharp turns and blind alleys. The only straight street was the one that led from the east gate to the castle drawbridge. On his first sweep Tom had stayed close to the ramparts of the castle. Now he searched the outskirts, zigzagging to the town wall and back into the interior. These were the poorer quarters, with the most ramshackle buildings, the noisiest alehouses and the oldest whores. The edge of the town was downhill from the centre, so the refuse from the wealthier neighbourhood was washed down the streets to lodge beneath the walls. Something similar seemed to happen to the people, for this district had more than its share of cripples and beggars, hungry children and bruised women and helpless drunks.

But the man with no lips was nowhere to be seen.

Twice Tom spotted a man of about the right build and general appearance, and took a closer look, only to see that the man’s face was normal.

He ended his search at the market-place, and there was Agnes waiting for him impatiently, her body tense and her eyes gleaming. ‘I’ve found him!’ she hissed.

Tom felt a surge of excitement mingled with apprehension. ‘Where?’

‘He went into a cookshop down by the east gate.’

‘Lead me there.’

They circled the castle to the drawbridge, went down the straight street to the east gate, then turned into a maze of alleys beneath the walls. Tom saw the cookshop a moment later. It was not even a house, just a sloping roof on four posts, up against the town wall, with a huge fire at the back over which a sheep turned on a spit and a cauldron bubbled. It was now about noon and the little place was full of people, mostly men. The smell of the meat made Tom’s stomach rumble. He raked the little crowd with his eyes, fearful that the outlaw might have left in the short time it had taken them to get here. He spotted the man immediately, sitting on a stool a little apart from the crowd, eating a bowl of stew with a spoon, holding his scarf in front of his face to hide his mouth.

Tom turned away quickly so that the man should not see him. Now he had to decide how to handle this. He was angry enough to knock the outlaw down and take his purse. But the crowd would not let him walk away. He would have to explain himself, not just to bystanders but to the sheriff. Tom was within his rights, and the fact that the thief was an outlaw meant that he would not have anyone to vouch for his honesty; whereas Tom was evidently a respectable man and a mason. But establishing all that would take time, possibly weeks if the sheriff happened to be away in another part of the country; and there might still be an accusation of breaking the king’s peace, if a brawl should result.

No. It would be wiser to get the thief alone.

The man could not stay in the town overnight, for he had no home here, and he could not get lodgings without establishing himself as a respectable man somehow. Therefore he had to leave before the gates closed at nightfall.

And there were only two gates.

‘He’ll probably go back the way he came,’ Tom said to Agnes. ‘I’ll wait outside the east gate. Let Alfred watch the west gate. You stay in the town and see what the thief does. Keep Martha with you, but don’t let him see her. If you need to send a message to me or Alfred, use Martha.’

‘Right,’ Agnes said tersely.

Alfred said: ‘What should I do if he comes out my way?’ He sounded excited.

‘Nothing,’ Tom said firmly. ‘Watch which road he takes, then wait. Martha will fetch me, and we’ll overtake him together.’ Alfred looked disappointed, and Tom said: ‘You do as I say. I don’t want to lose my son as well as my pig.’

Alfred nodded reluctant assent.

‘Let’s break up, before he notices us huddling together and plotting. Go.’

Tom left them immediately, not looking back. He could rely on Agnes to carry out the plan. He hurried to the east gate and left the town, crossing the rickety wooden bridge over which he had pushed the ox-cart that morning. Directly ahead of him was the Winchester road, going east, dead straight, like a long carpet unrolled over the hills and valleys. To his left, the road by which Tom – and presumably the thief – had come to Salisbury, the Portway, curled up over a hill and disappeared. The thief would almost certainly take the Portway.

Tom went down the hill and through the cluster of houses at the crossroads, then turned on to the Portway. He needed to hide himself. He walked along the road looking for a suitable spot. He went two hundred yards without finding anything. Looking back, he realised that this was too far: he could no longer see the faces of people at the crossroads, so that he would not know if the man with no lips came along and took the Winchester road. He scanned the landscape again. The road was bordered on either side by ditches, which might have offered concealment in dry weather, but today were running with water. Beyond each ditch the land rose in a hump. In the field on the south side of the road a few cows were grazing the stubble. Tom noticed that one of the cows was lying down at the raised edge of the field, overlooking the road, partly concealed by the hump. With a sigh, he retraced his steps. He jumped the ditch and kicked the cow. It got up and went away. Tom lay down in the warm, dry patch it had left. He pulled his hood over his face and settled to wait, wishing he had had the foresight to buy some bread before leaving the town.

He was anxious and a little scared. The outlaw was a smaller man, but he was fast-moving and vicious, as he had shown when he clubbed Martha and stole the pig. Tom was a little afraid of being hurt but much more worried that he might not get his money.

He hoped Agnes and Martha were all right. Agnes could look after herself, he knew; and even if the outlaw spotted her, what could the man do? He would just be on his guard, that was all.

From where he lay Tom could see the towers of the cathedral. He wished he had had a moment to look inside. He was curious about the treatment of the piers of the arcade. These were usually fat pillars, each with arches sprouting from its top: two arches going north and south, to connect with the neighbouring pillars in the arcade; and one going east or west, across the side aisle. It was an ugly effect, for there was something not quite right about an arch that sprang from the top of a round column. When Tom built his cathedral each pier would be a cluster of shafts, with an arch springing from the top of each shaft – an elegantly logical arrangement.

He began to visualise the decoration of the arches. Geometric shapes were the commonest forms – it did not take much skill to carve zig-zags and lozenges – but Tom liked foliage, which lent softness and a touch of nature to the hard regularity of the stones.

The imaginary cathedral occupied his mind until midafternoon, when he saw the slight figure and blonde head of Martha come skipping across the bridge and through the houses. She hesitated at the crossing, then picked the right road. Tom watched her walk behind him, seeing her frown as she began to wonder where he could be. As she drew level with him he called her softly. ‘Martha.’

She gave a little squeal, then saw him and ran to him, jumping over the ditch. ‘Mummy sent you this,’ she said, and took something from inside her cloak.

It was a hot meat pie. ‘By the cross, your mother’s a good woman!’ said Tom, and took a mammoth bite. It was made with beef and onions, and it tasted heavenly.

Martha squatted beside Tom on the grass. ‘This is what happened to the man who stole our pig,’ she said. She screwed up her nose and concentrated on remembering what she had been told to say. She was so sweet that she took Tom’s breath away. ‘He came out of the cookshop and met a lady with a painted face, and went to her house. We waited outside.’

While the outlaw spent our money on a whore, Tom thought bitterly. ‘Go on.’

‘He was not long in the lady’s house, and when he came out he went to an alehouse. He’s there now. He doesn’t drink much but he plays at dice.’

‘I hope he wins,’ Tom said grimly. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘I had a bun.’

‘Have you told Alfred all this?’

‘Not yet. I’m to go to him next.’

‘Tell him he must try to stay dry.’

‘Try to stay dry,’ she repeated. ‘Shall I say that before or after telling him about the man who stole our pig?’

It did not matter, of course. ‘After,’ Tom said, as she wanted a definite answer. He smiled at her. ‘You’re a clever girl. Off you go.’

‘I like this game,’ she said. She waved and left, her girlish legs twinkling as she jumped the ditch daintily and ran back toward the town. Tom watched her with love and anger in his heart. He and Agnes had worked hard to get money to feed their children, and he was ready to kill to get back what had been stolen from them.

Perhaps the outlaw would be ready to kill, too. Outlaws were outside the law, as the name implied: they lived in unconstrained violence. This might not be the first time Faramond Openmouth had come up against one of his victims. He was nothing if not dangerous.

The daylight began to fade surprisingly early, as it sometimes did on wet autumn afternoons. Tom started to worry whether he would recognise the thief in the rain. As evening closed in, the traffic to and from the town thinned out, for most visitors had left in time to reach their own villages by nightfall. The lights of candles and lanterns began to flicker in the higher houses of the town and in the suburban hovels. Tom wondered pessimistically if the thief might stay overnight after all. Perhaps he had dishonest friends in the town who would put him up even though they knew he was an outlaw. Perhaps—

Then Tom saw a man with a scarf across his mouth.

He was walking across the wooden bridge close to two other men. It suddenly occurred to Tom that the thief’s two accomplices, the bald one and the man in the green hat, might have come to Salisbury with him. Tom had not seen either of them in the town but the three might have separated for a while and then joined up again for the return journey. Tom cursed under his breath: he did not think he could fight three men. But as they came closer the group separated, and Tom realised with relief that they were not together after all.

The first two were father and son, two peasants with dark, close-set eyes and hooked noses. They took the Portway, and the man with the scarf followed.

He studied the thief’s gait as he came closer. He appeared sober. That was a pity.

Glancing back to the town he saw a woman and a girl emerge on to the bridge: Agnes and Martha. He was dismayed. He had not envisaged their being present when he confronted the thief. However, he realised that he had given no instructions to the contrary.

He tensed as they all came up the road towards him. Tom was so big that most people gave in to him in a confrontation; but outlaws were desperate, and there was no telling what might happen in a fight.

The two peasants went by, mildly merry, talking about horses. Tom took his iron-headed hammer from his belt and hefted it in his right hand. He hated thieves, who did no work but took the bread from good people. He would have no qualms about hitting this one with a hammer.

The thief seemed to slow down as he came near, almost as if he sensed danger. Tom waited until he was four or five yards away - too near to run back, too far to run past. Then Tom rolled over the bank, sprang across the ditch, and stood in his way.

The man stopped dead and stared at him. ‘What’s this?’ he said nervously.

He doesn’t recognise me, Tom thought. He said: ‘You stole my pig yesterday and sold it to a butcher today.’

‘I never—’

‘Don’t deny it,’ Tom said. ‘Just give me the money you got for it, and I won’t hurt you.’

For a moment he thought the thief was going to do just that. He felt a sense of anti-climax as the man hesitated. Then the thief turned on his heel and ran – straight into Agnes.

He was not travelling fast enough to knock her over – and she was a woman who took a lot of knocking over – and the two of them staggered from side to side for a moment in a clumsy dance. Then he realised she was deliberately obstructing him, and he pushed her aside. She stuck out her leg as he went past her. Her foot got between his knees and both of them fell down.

Tom’s heart was in his mouth as he raced to her side. The thief was getting up with one knee on her back. Tom grabbed his collar and yanked him off her. He hauled him to the side of the road before he could regain his balance, then threw him into the ditch.

Agnes stood up. Martha ran to her. Tom said rapidly: ‘All right?’

‘Yes,’ Agnes answered.

The two peasants had stopped and turned around, and they were staring at the scene, wondering what was going on. The thief was on his knees in the ditch. ‘He’s an outlaw,’ Agnes called out to them, to discourage them from interfering. ‘He stole our pig.’ The peasants made no reply, but waited to see what would happen next.

Tom spoke to the thief again. ‘Give me my money and I’ll let you go.’

The man came up out of the ditch with a knife in his hand, fast as a rat, and went for Tom’s throat. Agnes screamed. Tom dodged. The knife flashed across his face and he felt a burning pain along his jaw.

He stepped back and swung his hammer as the knife flashed again. The thief jumped back, and both knife and hammer swished through the damp evening air without connecting.

For an instant the two men stood still, facing one another, breathing hard. Tom’s cheek hurt. He realised they were evenly matched, for although Tom was bigger, the thief had a knife, which was a deadlier weapon than a mason’s hammer. He felt the cold grasp of fear as he realised he might be about to die. He suddenly felt he could not breathe.

From the corner of his eye he saw a sudden movement. The thief saw it too, and darted a glance at Agnes, then ducked his head as a stone came flying at him from her hand.

Tom reacted with the speed of a man in fear of his life, and swung his hammer at the thief’s bent head.

It connected just as the man was looking up again. The iron hammer struck his forehead at the hairline. It was a hasty blow, and did not have all of Tom’s considerable strength behind it. The thief staggered but did not fall.

Tom hit him again.

This blow was harder. He had time to lift the hammer above his head and aim it, as the dazed thief tried to focus his eyes. Tom thought of Martha as he swung the hammer down. It struck with all his force, and the thief fell to the ground like a dropped doll.

Tom was wound up too tightly to feel any relief. He knelt beside the thief, searching him. ‘Where’s his purse? Where’s his purse, damnation!’ The limp body was difficult to move. Finally Tom laid him flat on his back and opened his cloak. There was a big leather purse hanging from his belt. Tom undid its clasp. Inside was a soft wool bag with a drawstring. Tom pulled it out. It was light. ‘Empty!’ Tom said. ‘He must have another.’

He pulled the cloak from under the man and carefully felt it all over. There were no concealed pockets, no hard parts. He pulled off the boots. There was nothing inside them. He drew his eating-knife from his belt and slit the soles: nothing.

Impatiently, he slipped his knife inside the neck of the thief’s woollen tunic and ripped it to the hem. There was no hidden money-belt.

The thief lay in the middle of the mud road, naked but for his stockings. The two peasants were staring at Tom as if he were mad. Furiously, Tom said to Agnes: ‘He hasn’t any money!’

‘He must have lost it all at dice,’ she said bitterly.

‘I hope he burns in the fires of hell,’ Tom said.

Agnes knelt down and felt the thief’s chest. ‘That’s where he is now,’ she said. ‘You’ve killed him.’

(iv)

By Christmas they were starving.

The winter came early, and it was as cold and hard and unyielding as a stonemason’s iron chisel. There were still apples on the trees when the first frost dusted the fields. People called it a cold snap, thinking it would be brief, but it was not. Villages which left the autumn ploughing a little late broke their ploughshares on the rock-hard earth. The peasants hastened to kill their pigs and salt them for the winter, and the lords slaughtered their cattle, because winter grazing would not support the same number of livestock as summer. But the endless freeze withered the grass, and some of the remaining animals died anyway. Wolves became desperate, and came into villages at dusk to snatch away scraggy chickens and listless children.

On building sites all over the country, as soon as the first frost struck, the walls that had been built that summer were hastily covered with straw and dung, to insulate them from the worst cold; because the mortar in them was not yet completely dry, and if it were to freeze it would crack. No further mortar work would be done until spring. Some of the masons had been hired for the summer only, and they went back to their home villages, where they were known as wrights rather than masons, and they would spend the winter making ploughs, saddles, harness, carts, shovels, doors, and anything else that required a skilled hand with hammer and chisel and saw. The other masons moved into the lean-to lodges on the site and cut stones in intricate shapes all the hours of daylight. But because the frost was early, the work progressed too fast; and because the peasants were starving, the bishops and castellans and lords had less money to spend on building than they had hoped; and so as the winter wore on some of the masons were dismissed.

Tom and his family walked from Salisbury to Shaftesbury, and from there to Sherborne, Wells, Bath, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Wallingford and Windsor. Everywhere the fires inside the lodges burned, and the churchyards and castle walls rang with the song of iron on stone, and the master-builders made small precise models of arches and vaults with their clever hands encased in fingerless gloves. Some masters were impatient, abrupt or discourteous; others looked sadly at Tom’s thin children and pregnant wife and spoke kindly and regretfully; but they all said the same thing: No, there’s no work for you here.

Whenever they could, they imposed upon the hospitality of monasteries, where travellers could always get a meal of some kind and a place to sleep – strictly for one night only. When the blackberries ripened in the bramble thickets they lived on those for days on end, like the birds. In the forest, Agnes would light a fire under the iron cooking-pot and boil porridge. But still, much of the time, they were obliged to buy bread from bakers and pickled herrings from fishmongers, or to eat in alehouses and cookshops, which was more expensive than preparing their own food; and so their money inexorably drained away.

Martha was naturally skinny but she became even thinner. Alfred was still getting taller, like a weed growing in shallow soil, and he became lanky. Agnes ate sparingly, but the baby growing inside her was greedy, and Tom could see that she was tormented by hunger. Sometimes he ordered her to eat more, and then even her iron will yielded to the combined authority of her husband and her unborn child. Still she did not grow plump and rosy, as she had during other pregnancies. Instead she looked gaunt despite her swollen belly, like a starving child in a famine.

Since leaving Salisbury they had walked around three-quarters of a big circle, and by the end of the year they were back in the vast forest that stretched from Windsor to Southampton. They were heading for Winchester. Tom had sold his mason’s tools, and all but a few pennies of that money had been spent: he would have to borrow tools, or the money to buy them, as soon as he found employment. If he did not get work in Winchester he did not know what he would do. He had brothers, back in his home town; but that was in the north, a journey of several weeks, and the family would starve before they got there. Agnes was an only child and her parents were dead. There was no agricultural work in midwinter. Perhaps Agnes could scrape a few pennies as a scullery maid in a rich house in Winchester. She certainly could not tramp the roads much longer, for her time was near.

But Winchester was three days away and they were hungry now. The blackberries were gone, there was no monastery in prospect, and Agnes had no oats left in the cooking-pot which she carried on her back. The previous night they had traded a knife for a loaf of rye bread, four bowls of broth with no meat in it, and a place to sleep by the fire in a peasant’s hovel. They had not seen a village since. But towards the end of the afternoon Tom saw smoke rising above the trees, and they found the home of a solitary verderer, one of the king’s forest police. He gave them a sack of turnips in exchange for Tom’s small axe.

They had walked only three miles farther when Agnes said she was too tired to go on. Tom was surprised. In all their years together he had never known her to say she was too tired for anything.

She sat down in the shelter of a big horse-chestnut tree beside the road. Tom dug a shallow pit for a fire, using a worn wooden shovel – one of the few tools they had left, for nobody would want to buy it. The children gathered twigs and Tom started the fire, then he took the cooking-pot and went to find a stream. He returned with the pot full of icy water and set it at the edge of the fire. Agnes sliced some turnips. Martha collected the conkers that had dropped from the tree, and Agnes showed her how to peel them and grind the soft insides into a coarse flour to thicken the turnip soup. Tom sent Alfred to find more firewood, while he himself took a stick and went poking around in the dead leaves on the forest floor, hoping to find a hibernating hedgehog or squirrel to put in the broth. He was unlucky.

He sat down beside Agnes while darkness fell and the soup cooked. ‘Have we any salt left?’ he asked her.

She shook her head. ‘You’ve been eating porridge without salt for weeks,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

‘No.’

‘Hunger is the best seasoning.’

‘Well, we’ve plenty of that.’ Tom was suddenly terribly tired. He felt the crushing burden of the piled-up disappointments of the last four months and he could not be brave any longer. In a defeated voice he said: ‘What went wrong, Agnes?’

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘You had no work last winter. You got a job in the spring, then the earl’s daughter cancelled the wedding and Lord William cancelled the house. Then we decided to stay and work in the harvest – that was a mistake.’

‘For sure it would have been easier for me to find a building job in the summer than it was in the autumn.’

‘And the winter came early. And for all that, we would still have been all right, but then our pig was stolen.’

Tom nodded wearily. ‘My only consolation is knowing that the thief is even now suffering all the torments of hell.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Do you doubt it?’

‘Priests don’t know as much as they pretend to. My father was one, remember.’

Tom remembered very well. One wall of her father’s parish church had crumbled beyond repair, and Tom had been hired to rebuild it. Priests were not allowed to marry, but this priest had a housekeeper, and the housekeeper had a daughter, and it was an open secret in the village that the priest was the father of the girl. Agnes had not been beautiful, even then, but her skin had had a glow of youth, and she had seemed to be bursting with energy. She would talk to Tom while he was working, and sometimes the wind would flatten her dress against her so that Tom could see the curves of her body, even her navel, almost as clearly as if she had been naked. One night she came to the little hut where he slept, and put a hand over his mouth to tell him not to speak, and pulled off her dress so that he could see her nude in the moonlight, and then he took her strong young body in his arms and they made love.

‘We were both virgins,’ he said aloud.

She knew what he was thinking about. She smiled, then her face saddened again, and she said: ‘It seems so long ago.’

Martha said: ‘Can we eat now?’

The smell of the soup was making Tom’s stomach rumble. He dipped his bowl into the bubbling cauldron and brought out a few slices of turnip in a thin gruel. He used the blunt edge of his knife to test the turnip. It was not cooked all the way through, but he decided not to make them wait. He gave a bowlful to each child, then took one to Agnes.

She looked drawn and thoughtful. She blew on her soup to cool it, then raised the bowl to her lips.

The children quickly drained theirs and wanted more. Tom took the pot out of the fire, using the hem of his cloak to avoid burning his hands, and emptied the remaining soup into the children’s bowls.

When he returned to Agnes’s side she said: ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll eat tomorrow,’ he said.

She seemed too tired to argue.

Tom and Alfred built the fire high and gathered enough wood to last the night. Then they all rolled up in their cloaks and lay down on the leaves to sleep.

Tom slept lightly, and when Agnes groaned he woke up instantly. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

She groaned again. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed. After a moment she said: ‘The baby is coming.’

Tom’s heart missed a beat. Not here, he thought; not here on the frozen ground in the depths of a forest. ‘But it’s not due,’ he said.

‘It’s early.’

Tom made his voice calm. ‘Have the waters broken?’

‘Soon after we left the verderer’s hut,’ Agnes panted, not opening her eyes.

Tom remembered her suddenly diving into the bushes as if to answer an urgent call of nature. ‘And the pains?’

‘Ever since.’

It was like her to keep quiet about it.

Alfred and Martha were awake. Alfred said: ‘What’s happening?’

‘The baby is coming,’ Tom said.

Martha burst into tears.

Tom frowned. ‘Could you make it back to the verderer’s hut?’ he asked Agnes. There they would at least have a roof, and straw to lie on, and someone to help.

Agnes shook her head. ‘The baby has dropped already.’

‘It won’t be long, then!’ They were in the most deserted part of the forest. They had not seen a village since morning, and the verderer had said they would not see one all day tomorrow. That meant there was no possibility of finding a woman to act as midwife. Tom would have to deliver the baby himself, in the cold, with only the children to help, and if anything should go wrong he had no medicines, no knowledge . . .

This is my fault, Tom thought; I got her with child, and I brought her into destitution. She trusted me to provide for her, and now she is giving birth in the open air in the middle of winter. He had always despised men who fathered children and then left them to starve; and now he was no better than they. He felt ashamed.

‘I’m so tired,’ Agnes said. ‘I don’t believe I can bring this baby into the world. I want to rest.’ Her face glistened, in the firelight, with a thin film of sweat.

Tom realised he must pull himself together. He was going to have to give Agnes strength. ‘I’ll help you,’ he said. There was nothing mysterious or complicated about what was going to happen. He had watched the births of several children. The work was normally done by women, for they knew how the mother felt, and that enabled them to be more helpful; but there was no reason why a man should not do it if necessary. He must first make her comfortable; then find out how far advanced the birth was; then make sensible preparations; then calm her and reassure her while they waited.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked her.

‘Cold,’ she replied.

‘Come closer to the fire,’ he said. He took off his cloak and spread it on the ground a yard from the blaze. Agnes tried to struggle to her feet. Tom lifted her easily, and set her down gently on his cloak.

He knelt beside her. The wool tunic she was wearing underneath her own cloak had buttons all the way down the front. He undid two of them and put his hands inside. Agnes gasped.

‘Does it hurt?’ he said, surprised and worried.

‘No,’ she said with a brief smile. ‘Your hands are cold.’

He felt the outline of her belly. The swelling was higher and more pointed than it had been last night, when the two of them had slept together in the straw on the floor of a peasant’s hovel. Tom pressed a little harder, feeling the shape of the unborn baby. He found one end of the body, just beneath Agnes’s navel; but he could not locate the other end. He said: ‘I can feel its bottom, but not its head.’

‘That’s because it’s on the way out,’ she said.

He covered her and tucked her cloak around her. He would need to make his preparations quickly. He looked at the children. Martha was snuffling. Alfred just looked scared. It would be good to give them something to do.

‘Alfred, take that cooking-pot to the stream. Wash it clean and bring it back full of fresh water. Martha, collect some reeds and make me two lengths of string, each big enough for a necklace. Quick, now. You’re going to have another brother or sister by daybreak.’

They went off. Tom took out his eating-knife and a small hard stone and began to sharpen the blade. Agnes groaned again. Tom put down his knife and held her hand.

He had sat with her like this when the others were born: Alfred; then Matilda, who had died after two years; and Martha; and the child who had been born dead, a boy whom Tom had secretly planned to name Harold. But each time there had been someone else to give help and reassurance – Agnes’s mother for Alfred, a village midwife for Matilda and Harold, and the lady of the manor, no less, for Martha. This time he would have to do it alone. But he must not show his anxiety: he must make her feel happy and confident.

She relaxed as the spasm passed. Tom said: ‘Remember when Martha was born, and the Lady Isabella acted as midwife?’

Agnes smiled. ‘You were building a chapel for the lord, and you asked her to send her maid to fetch the midwife from the village—’

‘And she said: “The drunken old witch? I wouldn’t let her deliver a litter of wolfhound pups!” And she took us to her own chamber, and Lord Robert could not go to bed until Martha was born.’

‘She was a good woman.’

‘There aren’t many ladies like her.’

Alfred returned with the pot full of cold water. Tom set it down near the fire, not close enough to boil, so there would be warm water. Agnes reached inside her cloak and took out a small linen bag containing clean rags which she had ready.

Martha came back with her hands full of reeds and sat down to plait them. ‘What do you need strings for?’ she asked.

‘Something very important, you’ll see,’ Tom said. ‘Make them well.’

Alfred looked restless and embarrassed. ‘Go and collect more wood,’ Tom told him. ‘Let’s have a bigger fire.’ The boy went off, glad to have something to do.

Agnes’s face tautened with strain as she began to bear down again, pushing the baby out of her womb, making a low noise like a tree creaking in a gale. Tom could see that the effort was costing her dear, using up her last reserves of strength; and he wished with all his heart that he could bear down for her, and take the strain himself, to give her some relief. At last the pain seemed to ease, and Tom breathed again. Agnes seemed to drift off into a doze.

Alfred returned with his arms full of sticks.

Agnes became alert again and said: ‘I’m so cold.’

Tom said: ‘Alfred, build up the fire. Martha, lie down beside your mother and keep her warm.’ They both obeyed with worried looks. Agnes put her arms around Martha and held her close, shivering.

Tom was sick with worry. The fire was roaring, but the air was getting colder. It might be so cold that it would kill the baby with its first breath. It was not unknown for children to be born out of doors; in fact it happened often at harvest-time, when everyone was so busy and the women worked up until the last minute; but at harvest the ground was dry and the grass was soft and the air was balmy. He had never heard of a woman giving birth outside in winter.

Agnes raised herself on her elbows and spread her legs wider.

‘What is it?’ Tom said in a frightened voice.

She was straining too hard to reply.

Tom said: ‘Alfred, kneel down behind your mother and let her lean on you.’

When Alfred was in position, Tom opened Agnes’s cloak and unbuttoned the skirt of her dress. Kneeling between her legs, he could see that the birth opening was beginning to dilate a little already. ‘Not long now, my darling,’ he murmured, struggling to keep the tremor of fear out of his voice.

She relaxed again, closing her eyes and resting her weight on Alfred. The opening seemed to shrink a little. The forest was silent but for the crackling of the big fire. Suddenly Tom thought of how the outlaw woman, Ellen, had given birth in the forest alone. It must have been terrifying. She had feared that a wolf would come upon her while she was helpless and steal the newborn baby away, she had said. This year the wolves were bolder than usual, people said, but surely they would not attack a group of four people.

Agnes tensed again, and fresh beads of sweat appeared on her contorted face. This is it, thought Tom. He was frightened. He watched the opening widen again, and this time he could see, by the light of the fire, the damp black hair of the baby’s head pushing through. He thought of praying but there was no time now. Agnes began to breathe in short, fast gasps. The opening stretched wider – impossibly wide – and then the head began to come through, face down. A moment later Tom saw the wrinkled ears flat against the side of the baby’s head; then he saw the folded skin of the neck. He could not yet see whether the baby was normal.

‘The head is out,’ he said, but Agnes knew that already, of course, for she could feel it; and she had relaxed again. Slowly the baby turned, so that Tom could see the closed eyes and mouth, wet with blood and the slippery fluids of the womb.

Martha cried: ‘Oh! Look at its little face!’

Agnes heard her and smiled briefly, then began to strain again. Tom leaned forward between her thighs and supported the tiny head with his left hand as the shoulders came out, first one then the other. Then the rest of the body emerged in a rush, and Tom put his right hand under the baby’s hips and held it as the tiny legs slithered into the cold world.

Agnes’s opening immediately started to close around the pulsing blue cord that came from the baby’s navel.

Tom lifted the baby and scrutinised it anxiously. There was a lot of blood, and at first he feared something was terribly wrong; but on closer examination he could see no injury. He looked between its legs. It was a boy.

‘It looks horrible!’ said Martha.

‘He’s perfect,’ Tom said, and he felt weak with relief. ‘A perfect boy.’

The baby opened its mouth and cried.

Tom looked at Agnes. Their eyes met, and they both smiled.

Tom held the tiny baby close to his chest. ‘Martha, fetch me a bowl of water out of that pot.’ She jumped up to do his bidding. ‘Where are those rags, Agnes?’ Agnes pointed to the linen bag lying on the ground beside her shoulder. Alfred passed it to Tom. The boy’s face was running with tears. It was the first time he had seen a child born.

Tom dipped a rag into a bowl of warm water and gently washed the blood and mucus off the baby’s face. Agnes unbuttoned the front of her tunic and Tom put the baby in her arms. He was still squalling. As Tom watched, the blue cord that went from the baby’s belly to Agnes’s groin stopped pulsing and shrivelled, turning white.

Tom said to Martha: ‘Give me those strings you made. Now you’ll see what they’re for.’

She passed him the two lengths of plaited reeds. He tied them around the birth cord in two places, pulling the knots tight. Then he used his knife to cut the cord between the knots.

He sat back on his haunches. They had done it. The worst was over and the baby was well. He felt proud.

Agnes moved the baby so that his face was at her breast. His tiny mouth found her enlarged nipple, and he stopped crying and started to suck.

Martha said in an amazed voice: ‘How does he know he should do that?’

‘It’s a mystery,’ said Tom. He handed the bowl to her and said: ‘Get your mother some fresh water to drink.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Agnes gratefully, as if she had just realised she was desperately thirsty. Martha brought the water and Agnes drank the bowl dry. ‘That was wonderful,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

She looked down at the suckling baby, then up at Tom. ‘You’re a good man,’ she said quietly. ‘I love you.’

Tom felt tears come to his eyes. He smiled at her, then dropped his gaze. He saw that she was still bleeding a lot. The shrivelled birth cord, which was still slowly coming out, lay curled in a pool of blood on Tom’s cloak between Agnes’s legs.

He looked up again. The baby had stopped sucking and fallen asleep. Agnes pulled her cloak over him, then her own eyes closed.

After a moment, Martha said to Tom: ‘Are you waiting for something?’

‘The afterbirth,’ Tom told her.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

Mother and baby dozed for a while, then Agnes opened her eyes again. Her muscles tensed, her opening dilated a little, and the placenta emerged. Tom picked it up in his hands and looked at it. It was like something on a butcher’s slab. Looking more closely, he saw that it seemed to be torn, as if there were a piece missing. But he had never looked this closely at an afterbirth, and he supposed they were always like this, for they must always have broken away from the womb. He put the thing on the fire. It made an unpleasant smell as it burned, but if he had thrown it away it might have attracted foxes, or even a wolf.

Agnes was still bleeding. Tom remembered that there was always a rush of blood with the afterbirth, but he did not recall so much. He realised that the crisis was not yet over. He felt faint for a moment, from strain and lack of food; but the spell passed and he pulled himself together.

‘You’re still bleeding, a little,’ he said to Agnes, trying not to sound as worried as he was.

‘It will stop soon,’ she said. ‘Cover me.’

Tom buttoned the skirt of her dress, then wrapped her cloak around her legs.

Alfred said: ‘Can I have a rest now?’

He was still kneeling behind Agnes, supporting her. He must be numb, Tom thought, from staying so long in the same position. ‘I’ll take your place,’ Tom said. Agnes would be more comfortable with the baby if she could stay half-upright, he thought; and also a body behind her would keep her back warm and shield her from the wind. He changed places with Alfred. Alfred grunted with pain as he stretched his young legs. Tom wrapped his arms around Agnes and the baby. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked her.

‘Just tired.’

The baby cried. Agnes moved him so that he could find her nipple. As he suckled, she seemed to sleep.

Tom was uneasy. It was normal to be tired, but there was a lethargy about Agnes that bothered him. She was too weak.

The baby slept, and after a while the other two children fell asleep, Martha curled up beside Agnes, and Alfred stretched out on the far side of the fire. Tom held Agnes in his arms, stroking her gently. Every now and again he would kiss the top of her head. He felt her body relax as she fell into a deeper and deeper sleep. It was probably the best thing for her, he decided. He touched her cheek. Her skin was clammy, despite all his efforts to keep her warm. He reached inside her cloak and touched the baby’s chest. The child was warm and his heart was beating strongly. Tom smiled. A tough baby, he thought; a survivor.

Agnes stirred. ‘Tom?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember the night I came to you, in your lodge, when you were working on my father’s church?’

‘Of course,’ he said, patting her. ‘How could I ever forget!’

‘I never regretted giving myself to you. Never, for one moment. Every time I think of that night, I feel so glad.’

He smiled. That was good to know. ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you did.’

She dozed for a while, then spoke again. ‘I hope you build your cathedral,’ she said.

He was surprised. ‘I thought you were against it.’

‘I was, but I was wrong. You deserve something beautiful.’

He did not know what she meant.

‘Build a beautiful cathedral for me,’ she said.

She was not making sense. He was glad when she fell asleep again. This time her body went quite limp, and her head leaned sideways. Tom had to support the baby to prevent him falling off her chest.

They lay like that for a long time. Eventually the baby woke again and cried. Agnes did not respond. The crying woke Alfred, and he rolled over and looked at his baby brother.

Tom shook Agnes gently. ‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘The baby wants to feed.’

‘Father!’ said Alfred in a scared voice. ‘Look at her face!’

Tom was filled with foreboding. She had bled too much. ‘Agnes!’ he said. ‘Wake up!’ There was no response. She was unconscious. He got up, easing her back until she lay flat on the ground. Her face was ghastly white.

Dreading what he would see, he unwrapped the folds of the cloak from around her thighs.

There was blood everywhere.

Alfred gasped and turned away.

Tom whispered: ‘Christ Jesus save us.’

The baby’s crying woke Martha. She saw the blood and began to scream. Tom picked her up and smacked her face. She became silent. ‘Don’t scream,’ he said calmly, and put her down again.

Alfred said: ‘Is Mother dying?’

Tom put his hand on Agnes’s chest, just underneath her left breast. There was no heartbeat.

No heartbeat.

He pressed harder. Her flesh was warm, and the underside of her heavy breast touched his hand, but she was not breathing, and there was no heartbeat.

A numb coldness settled over Tom like a fog. She was gone. He stared at her face. How could she not be there? He willed her to move, to open her eyes, to draw breath. He kept his hand on her chest. Sometimes a heart might start again, people said – but she had lost so much blood. . . .

He looked at Alfred. ‘Mother is dead,’ he whispered.

Alfred stared at him dumbly. Martha began to cry. The new baby was crying too. I must take care of them, Tom thought. I must be strong for them.

But he wanted to weep, to put his arms around her and hold her body while it cooled, and remember her as a girl, and laughing, and making love. He wanted to sob with rage and shake his fist at the merciless heavens. He hardened his heart. He had to stay controlled, he had to be strong for the children.

No tears came to his eyes.

He thought: What do I do first?

Dig a grave.

I must dig a deep hole, and lie her in it, to keep the wolves off, and preserve her bones until the Day of Judgement; and then say a prayer for her soul. Oh, Agnes, why have you left me alone?

The new baby was still crying. His eyes were screwed tightly shut and his mouth opened and closed rhythmically, as if he could get sustenance from the air. He needed feeding. Agnes’s breasts were full of warm milk. Why not? thought Tom. He shifted the baby toward her breast. The child found a nipple and sucked. Tom pulled Agnes’s cloak tighter around the baby.

Martha was watching, wide-eyed, sucking her thumb. Tom said to her: ‘Could you hold the baby there, so he doesn’t fall?’

She nodded and knelt beside the dead woman and the baby.

Tom picked up the spade. She had chosen this spot to rest, and she had sat under the branches of the chestnut tree. Let this be her last resting-place, then. He swallowed hard, fighting an urge to sit on the ground and weep. He marked a rectangle on the ground some yards from the trunk of the tree, where there would be no roots near the surface, then he began to dig.

He found it helped. When he concentrated on driving his shovel into the hard ground and lifting the earth, the rest of his mind went blank and he was able to retain his composure. He took turns with Alfred, for he too could take comfort in repetitious physical labour. They dug fast, driving themselves hard, and despite the bitter cold air they both sweated as if it were noon.

A time came when Alfred said: ‘Isn’t this enough?’

Tom realised that he was standing in a hole almost as deep as he was tall. He did not want the job to be finished. He nodded reluctantly. ‘It will do,’ he said. He clambered out.

Dawn had broken while he was digging. Martha had picked up the baby and was sitting by the fire, rocking it. Tom went to Agnes and knelt down. He wrapped her cloak tightly around her, leaving her face visible, then picked her up. He walked over to the grave and put her down beside it. Then he climbed into the hole.

He lifted her down and laid her gently on the earth. He looked at her for a long moment, kneeling there beside her in her cold grave. He kissed her lips once, softly. Then he closed her eyes.

He climbed out of the grave. ‘Come here, children,’ he said. Alfred and Martha came and stood either side of him, Martha holding the baby. Tom put an arm around each of them. They looked into the grave. Tom said: ‘Say: “God bless Mother.” ’

They both said: ‘God bless Mother.’

Martha was sobbing, and there were tears in Alfred’s eyes. Tom hugged them both and swallowed his tears.

He released them and picked up the shovel. Martha screamed when he threw the first shovelful of earth into the grave. Alfred put his arms around his sister. Tom kept on shovelling. He could not bear to throw earth on her face, so he covered her feet, then her legs and body, and piled the earth high so that it formed a mound, and every shovelful slid downward, until at last there was earth on her neck, then over the mouth he had kissed, and finally her face disappeared, never to be seen again.

He filled the grave up quickly.

When it was done he stood looking at the mound. ‘Goodbye, dear,’ he whispered. ‘You were a good wife, and I love you.’

With an effort he turned away.

His cloak was still on the ground where Agnes had lain on it to give birth. The lower half of it was sodden with congealed and drying blood. He took his knife and roughly cut the cloak in half. He threw the bloodied portion on the fire.

Martha was still holding the baby. ‘Give him to me,’ Tom said. She gazed at him with fear in her eyes. He wrapped the naked baby in the clean half of the cloak and laid it on the grave. The baby cried.

He turned to the children. They were staring at him dumbly. He said: ‘We have no milk to keep the baby alive, so he must lie here with his mother.’

Martha said: ‘But he’ll die!’

‘Yes,’ Tom said, controlling his voice tightly. ‘Whatever we do, he will die.’ He wished the baby would stop crying.

He collected their possessions and put them in the cooking-pot, then strapped the pot to his back the way Agnes always did.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Martha began to sob. Alfred was white-faced. They set off down the road in the grey light of a cold morning. Eventually the sound of the baby crying faded to nothing.

It was no good to stay by the grave, for the children would be unable to sleep there and no purpose would be served by an all-night vigil. Besides, it would do them all good to keep moving.

Tom set a fast pace, but his thoughts were now free, and he could no longer control them. There was nothing to do but walk: no arrangements to make, no jobs to do, nothing to be organised, nothing to look at but the gloomy forest and the shadows fidgeting in the light of the torches. He would think of Agnes, and follow the trail of some memory, and smile to himself, then turn to tell her what he had remembered; then the shock of realising that she was dead would strike like a physical pain. He felt bewildered, as if something totally incomprehensible had happened, although of course it was the most ordinary thing in the world for a woman of her age to die in childbirth, and for a man of his age to be left a widower. But the sense of loss was like a wound. He had heard that people who had the toes chopped off one foot could not stand up, but fell over constantly until they learned to walk again. He felt like that, as if part of him had been amputated, and he could not get used to the idea that it was gone for ever.

He tried not to think about her, but he kept remembering how she had looked before she died. It seemed incredible that she had been alive just a few hours ago, and now she was gone. He pictured her face as she strained to give birth, and then her proud smile as she looked at the baby boy. He recalled what she had said to him afterwards: I hope you build your cathedral; and then Build a beautiful cathedral for me. She had spoken as if she knew she was dying.

As he walked on, he thought more and more about the baby he had left, wrapped in half a cloak, lying on top of a new grave. He was probably still alive, unless a fox had smelled him already. He would die before morning, however. He would cry for a while, then close his eyes, and his life would slip away as he grew cold in his sleep.

Unless a fox smelled him.

There was nothing Tom could do for the baby. He needed milk to survive, and there was none: no villages where Tom could seek a wet-nurse, no sheep or goat or cow that could provide the nearest equivalent. All Tom had to give him were turnips, and they would kill him as surely as the fox.

As the night wore on, it seemed to him more and more dreadful that he had abandoned the baby. It was a common enough thing, he knew: peasants with large families and small farms often exposed babies to die, and sometimes the priest turned a blind eye; but Tom did not belong to that kind of people. He should have carried it in his arms until it died, and then buried it. There was no purpose to that, of course, but all the same it would have been the right thing to do.

He realised that it was daylight.

He stopped suddenly.

The children stood still and stared at him, waiting. They were ready for anything; nothing was normal any more.

‘I shouldn’t have left the baby,’ Tom said.

Alfred said: ‘But we can’t feed him. He’s bound to die.’

‘Still I shouldn’t have left him,’ Tom said.

Martha said: ‘Let’s go back.’

Still Tom hesitated. To go back now would be to admit he had done wrong to abandon the baby.

But it was true. He had done wrong.

He turned around. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back.’

Now all the dangers which he had earlier tried to discount suddenly seemed more probable. For sure a fox had smelled the baby by now, and dragged him off to its lair. Or even a wolf. The wild boars were dangerous, even though they did not eat meat. And what about owls? An owl could not carry off a baby, but it might peck out its eyes . . .

He walked faster, feeling light-hearted with exhaustion and starvation. Martha had to run to keep up with him, but she did not complain.

He dreaded what he might see when he returned to the grave. Predators were merciless, and they could tell when a living creature was helpless.

He was not sure how far they had walked: he had lost his sense of time. The forest on either side looked unfamiliar, even though he had just passed through it. He looked anxiously for the place where the grave was. Surely the fire could not have gone out yet – they had built it so high . . . He scrutinised the trees, looking for the distinctive leaves of the horse-chestnut. They passed a side turning which he did not remember, and he began to wonder crazily whether he could possibly have passed the grave already and not seen it; then he thought he saw a faint orange glow ahead.

His heart seemed to falter. He quickened his step and narrowed his eyes. Yes, it was a fire. He broke into a run. He heard Martha cry out, as if she thought he was leaving her, and he called over his shoulder: ‘We’re there!’ and heard the two children running after him.

He drew level with the horse-chestnut tree, his heart pounding in his chest. The fire was burning merrily. There was the pile of firewood. There was the bloodstained patch of ground where Agnes had bled to death. There was the grave, a mound of freshly dug earth, under which she now lay. And on the grave was – nothing.

Tom looked around frantically, his mind in a turmoil. There was no sign of the baby. Tears of frustration came to Tom’s eyes. Even the half a cloak the baby had been wrapped in had disappeared. Yet the grave was undisturbed – there were no animal tracks in the soft earth, no blood, no marks to indicate that the baby had been dragged away . . .

Tom began to feel as if he could not see very clearly. It became difficult to think straight. He knew now that he had done a dreadful thing in leaving the baby while it was still alive. When he knew it was dead he would be able to rest. But it might still be alive somewhere – somewhere nearby. He decided to circle around and look.

Alfred said: ‘Where are you going?’

‘We must search for the baby,’ he said, without looking back. He walked around the edge of the little clearing, looking under the bushes, still feeling slightly dizzy and faint. He saw nothing, not even a clue to the direction in which the wolf might have taken the baby. He was now sure it was a wolf. The creature’s lair might be nearby.

‘We must circle wider,’ he said to the children.

He led them around again, moving farther from the fire, pushing through bushes and undergrowth. He was beginning to feel confused, but he managed to keep his mind focussed on one thing, the imperative need to find the baby. He felt no grief now, just a fierce, raging determination, and in the back of his mind the appalling knowledge that all of this was his fault. He blundered through the forest, raking the ground with his eyes, stopping every few paces to listen for the unmistakable wailing monotone of a newborn baby; but when he and the children were quiet, the forest was silent.

He lost track of time. His ever-increasing circles brought him back to the road at intervals for a while, but later he realised that it seemed a long time since they crossed it. At one point he wondered why he had not come across the verderer’s cottage. It occurred to him vaguely that he had lost his way, and might no longer be circling around the grave, but instead wandering through the forest more or less at random; but it did not really matter, so long as he kept searching.

‘Father,’ Alfred said.

Tom looked at him, irritated by the interruption of his concentration. Alfred was carrying Martha, who appeared to be fast asleep on his back. Tom said: ‘What?’

‘Can we rest?’ Alfred said.

Tom hesitated. He did not want to stop, but Alfred looked about to collapse. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But not for long.’

They were on a slope. There might be a stream at its foot. He was thirsty. He took Martha from Alfred and picked his way down the slope, cradling her in his arms. As he expected he found a small clear stream, with ice at its edges. He put Martha down on the bank. She did not wake. He and Alfred knelt and scooped up the cold water in their hands.

Alfred lay down next to Martha and closed his eyes. Tom looked around him. He was in a clearing carpeted with fallen leaves. The trees all around were low, stout oaks, their bare branches intertwining overhead. Tom crossed the clearing, thinking of looking for the baby behind the trees, but when he reached the other side his legs went weak and he was obliged to sit down abruptly.

It was full daylight now, but misty, and it seemed no warmer than midnight. He was shivering uncontrollably. He realised he had been walking around wearing only his under-tunic. He wondered what had happened to his cloak, but he could not remember. Either the mist thickened, or something strange happened to his vision, for he could not see the children on the far side of the clearing any longer. He wanted to get up and go to them but there was something wrong with his legs.

After a while a weak sun broke through the cloud, and soon after that the angel came.

She walked across the clearing from the east, dressed in a long winter cloak of blanched wool, almost white. He watched her approach without surprise or curiosity. He was beyond wonder or fear. He looked at her with the dull, vacant, emotionless gaze he had bestowed upon the massive trunks of the surrounding oaks. Her oval face was framed with rich dark hair, and her cloak hid her feet, so that she might have been gliding over the dead leaves. She stopped right in front of him, and her pale gold eyes seemed to see into his soul and understand his pain. She looked familiar, as if he might have seen a picture of this very angel in some church he had attended recently. Then she opened her cloak. Underneath it she was naked. She had the body of an earthly woman in her middle twenties, with pale skin and pink nipples. Tom had always assumed angels’ bodies to be immaculately hairless, but this one was not.

She went down on one knee in front of him where he sat cross-legged by the oak tree. Leaning toward him, she kissed his mouth. He was too stunned by previous shocks to feel surprise even at this. She pushed him back gently until he was lying flat, then she opened her cloak and lay on top of him with her naked body pressed against him. He felt the heat of her body through his under-tunic. After a few moments he stopped shivering.

She took his bearded face in her hands and kissed him again, thirstily, like someone drinking cool water after a long, dry day. After a moment she ran her hands down his arms to his wrists, then lifted his hands to her breasts. He grasped them reflexively. They were soft and yielding, and her nipples swelled under his fingertips.

In the back of his mind he conceived the idea that he was dead. Heaven was not supposed to be like this, he knew, but he hardly cared. His critical faculties had been disengaged for hours. What little capacity he had left for rational thought vanished, and he let his body take charge. He strained upward, pressing his body against hers, drawing strength from her heat and her nakedness. She opened her mouth and thrust her tongue inside his mouth, seeking his tongue, and he responded eagerly.

She pulled away from him briefly, raising her body off his. He watched, dazed, as she pushed up the skirt of his under-tunic until it was around his waist, then she straddled his hips. She looked into his eyes, with her all-seeing gaze, as she lowered herself. There was a tantalising moment when their bodies touched, and she hesitated; then he felt himself enter her. The sensation was so thrilling he felt he might burst with pleasure. She moved her hips, smiling at him and kissing his face.

After a while she closed her eyes and started to pant, and he understood that she was losing control. He watched in delighted fascination. She uttered small rhythmic cries, moving faster and faster, and her ecstasy moved Tom to the depths of his wounded soul, so that he did not know whether he wanted to weep with despair or shout for joy or laugh hysterically; and then an explosion of delight shook them both like trees in a gale, again and again; until at last their passion subsided, and she slumped on his chest.

They lay like that for a long time. The heat of her body warmed him right through. He drifted into a kind of light sleep. It seemed short, and more like daydreaming than real sleep; but when he opened his eyes his mind was clear.

He looked at the beautiful young woman lying on top of him, and he knew immediately that she was not an angel, but the outlaw woman Ellen, whom he had met in this part of the forest on the day the pig was stolen. She felt him stir and opened her eyes, regarding him with an expression of mingled affection and anxiety. He suddenly thought of his children. He rolled Ellen off him gently and sat up. Alfred and Martha lay on the leaves, wrapped in their cloaks, with the sun shining on their sleeping faces. Then the events of the night came back to him in a rush of horror, and he remembered that Agnes was dead, and the baby – his son! – was gone; and he buried his face in his hands.

He heard Ellen give a strange two-tone whistle. He looked up. A figure emerged from the forest, and Tom recognised her peculiar-looking son, Jack, with his dead-white skin and orange hair and bright bird-like blue eyes. Tom got up, rearranging his clothing, and Ellen stood and closed up her cloak.

The boy was carrying something, and he brought it across and showed it to Tom. Tom recognised it. It was the half of his cloak in which he had wrapped the baby before placing it on Agnes’s grave.

Uncomprehending, Tom stared at the boy and then at Ellen. She took his hands in hers, looked into his eyes, and said: ‘Your baby is alive.’

Tom did not dare to believe her. It would be too wonderful, too happy for this world. ‘He can’t be,’ he said.

‘He is.’

Tom began to hope. ‘Truly?’ he said. ‘Truly?’

She nodded. ‘Truly. I will take you to him.’

Tom realised she meant it. A flood of relief and happiness washed over him. He fell to his knees on the ground; and then, at last, like the opening of a floodgate, he wept.

(v)

‘Jack heard the baby cry,’ Ellen explained. ‘He was on his way to the river, to a place north of here where you can kill ducks with stones, if you’re a good shot. He didn’t know what to do, so he ran home to fetch me. But while we were on our way back to the spot, we saw a priest, riding a palfrey, carrying the baby.’

Tom said: ‘I must find him—’

‘Don’t panic,’ Ellen said. ‘I know where he is. He took a side turning, quite near the grave; a path that leads to a little monastery hidden in the forest.’

‘The baby needs milk.’

‘The monks have goats.’

‘Thank God,’ Tom said fervently.

‘I’ll take you there, after you’ve had something to eat,’ she said. ‘But . . .’ She frowned. ‘Don’t tell your children about the monastery just yet.’

Tom glanced across the clearing. Alfred and Martha slept on. Jack had drifted across to where they lay, and was staring at them in his vacant way. ‘Why not?’

‘I’m not sure . . . I just think it might be wiser to wait.’

‘But your son will tell them.’

She shook her head. ‘He saw the priest, but I don’t think he’s worked out the rest of it.’

‘All right.’ Tom felt solemn. ‘If I’d known you were nearby, you might have saved my Agnes.’

Ellen shook her head, and her dark hair danced around her face. ‘There’s nothing to be done, except keep the woman warm, and you did that. When a woman is bleeding inside, either it stops, and she gets better, or it doesn’t, and she dies.’ Tears came to Tom’s eyes, and Ellen said: ‘I’m sorry.’

Tom nodded dumbly.

She said: ‘But the living must take care of the living, and you need hot food and a new coat.’ She stood up.

They woke the children. Tom told them that the baby was all right, that Ellen and Jack had seen a priest carrying him; and that Tom and Ellen were going to go looking for the priest later, but first Ellen was going to give them food. They accepted the startling news calmly: nothing could shock them now. Tom was no less bemused. Life was moving too fast for him to take in all the changes. It was like being on the back of a runaway horse: everything happened so quickly that there was no time to react to events, and all he could do was hold on tightly and try to stay sane. Agnes had given birth in the cold night air; the baby had been born miraculously healthy; everything had seemed all right and then Agnes, Tom’s soul mate, had bled to death in his arms, and he had lost his mind; the baby had been doomed, and left for dead; then they had tried to find it, and failed; then Ellen had appeared, and Tom had taken her for an angel, and they had made love as if in a dream; and she had said the baby was alive and well. Would life ever slow down enough to let Tom think about these awful events?

They set off. Tom had always assumed that outlaws lived in squalor, but there was nothing squalid about Ellen, and Tom wondered what her home would be like. She led them on a zig-zag course through the forest. There was no path, but she never hesitated as she stepped over streams, ducked low branches, and negotiated a frozen swamp, a mass of shrubbery, and the enormous trunk of a fallen oak. Finally she walked toward a bramble thicket and seemed to vanish into it. Following her, Tom saw that, contrary to his first impression, there was a narrow passageway winding through the thicket. He followed her. The brambles closed over his head and he found himself in semi-darkness. He stood still, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Gradually he realised he was in a cave.

The air was warm. Ahead of him a fire glowed on a hearth of flat stones. The smoke was going straight upward: there was a natural chimney somewhere. On either side of him were animal skins, a wolf and a deer, fixed to the walls of the cave with wooden pegs. A haunch of smoked venison hung from the roof above him. He saw a home-made box full of crab-apples, rush lights on ledges, and dry reeds on the floor. At the edge of the fire was a cooking-pot, just as there would be in an ordinary household; and, judging by the smell, it contained the same kind of pottage as everyone else ate – vegetables boiled with meat bones and herbs. Tom was astonished. This was a home more comfortable than those of many serfs.

Beyond the fire were two mattresses made of deerskin and stuffed, presumably, with reeds; and neatly rolled on top of each was a wolf fur. Ellen and Jack would sleep there, with the fire between them and the mouth of the cave. At the back of the cave was a formidable collection of weapons and hunting gear: a bow, some arrows, nets, rabbit traps, several wicked daggers, a carefully made wooden lance with its tip sharpened and fire-hardened; and, among all those primitive implements, three books. Tom was flabbergasted: he had never seen books in a house, let alone a cave; books belonged in church.

The boy Jack picked up a wooden bowl, dipped it into the pot, and began to drink. Alfred and Martha watched him hungrily. Ellen gave Tom an apologetic look and said: ‘Jack, when there are strangers, we give them food first, before we eat.’

The boy stared at her, mystified. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a gentle thing to do. Give the children some pottage.’

Jack was not convinced, but he obeyed his mother. Ellen gave some soup to Tom. He sat down on the floor and drank. It tasted meaty, and warmed him from the inside. Ellen put a fur around his shoulders. When he had drunk the juice he fished out the vegetables and meat with his fingers. It was weeks since he had tasted meat. This seemed to be duck – shot by Jack with stones and a sling, presumably.

They ate until the pot was empty, then Alfred and Martha lay down on the rushes. Before they fell asleep, Tom told them that he and Ellen were going to look for the priest, and Ellen said Jack would stay here and take care of them until the parents returned. The two exhausted children nodded assent and closed their eyes.

Tom and Ellen went out, Tom wearing the fur Ellen had given him draped over his shoulders to keep him warm. As soon as they were out of the bramble thicket, Ellen stopped, turned to Tom, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed his mouth.

‘I love you,’ she said fiercely. ‘I loved you from the moment I saw you. I always wanted a man who would be strong and gentle, and I thought there was no such thing. Then I saw you. I wanted you. But I could see you loved your wife. My God, how I envied her. I’m sorry she died, truly sorry, because I can see the grief in your eyes, and all the tears waiting to be shed, and it breaks my heart to see you so sad. But now that she’s gone, I want you for myself.’

Tom did not know what to say. It was hard to believe that a woman so beautiful and resourceful and self-sufficient should have fallen in love with him at first sight; harder still to know how he felt. He was devastated by the loss of Agnes – Ellen was right to say that he had unshed tears, he could feel their weight behind his eyes. But he was also consumed by desire for Ellen, with her wonderful hot body and her golden eyes and her shameless lust. He felt dreadfully guilty about wanting Ellen so badly when Agnes was only hours in her grave.

He stared back at her, and once again her eyes saw into his heart, and she said: ‘Don’t say anything. You don’t have to feel ashamed. I know you loved her. She knew it too, I could tell. You still love her – of course you do. You always will.’

She had told him not to say anything, and in any case he had nothing to say. He was struck dumb by this extraordinary woman. She seemed to make everything all right. Somehow, the fact that she appeared to know everything that was in his heart made him feel better, as if now he had nothing more to be ashamed of. He sighed.

‘That’s better,’ she said. She took him by the hand, and they walked away from the cave together.

They pushed through the virgin forest for almost a mile, then came to the road. As they walked along, Tom kept looking at Ellen’s face beside him. He recalled that when he first met her he had thought she fell short of being beautiful, because of her strange eyes. Now he could not understand how he had ever felt that. He now saw those astonishing eyes as the perfect expression of her unique self. Now she seemed absolutely perfect, and the only puzzle was why she was with him.

They walked for three or four miles. Tom was still tired but the pottage had given him strength; and although he trusted Ellen completely he was still anxious to see the baby with his own eyes.

When they could see the monastery through the trees, Ellen said: ‘Let’s not reveal ourselves to the monks at first.’

Tom was mystified. ‘Why?’

‘You abandoned a baby. It counts as murder. Let’s spy on the place from the woods and see what kind of people they are.’

Tom did not think he was going to be in trouble, given the circumstances, but there was no harm in being cautious, so he nodded assent and followed Ellen into the undergrowth. A few moments later they were lying at the edge of the clearing.

It was a very small monastery. Tom had built monasteries, and he guessed this one must be what they called a cell, a branch or outpost of a large priory or abbey. There were only two stone buildings, the chapel and the dormitory. The rest were made of wood and wattle-and-daub: a kitchen, stables, a barn, and a range of smaller agricultural buildings. The place had a clean, well-kept look, and gave the impression that the monks did as much farming as praying.

There were not many people about. ‘Most of the monks have gone to work,’ Ellen said. ‘They’re building a barn at the top of the hill.’ She glanced up at the sky. ‘They’ll be back around noon for their dinner.’

Tom scanned the clearing. Over to their right, partly concealed by a small herd of tethered goats, he saw two figures. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing. As they studied the two figures he saw something else. ‘The man sitting down is a priest, and—’

‘And he’s holding something in his lap.’

‘Let’s go closer.’

They moved through the woods, skirting the clearing, and emerged at a point close to the goats. Tom’s heart was in his mouth as he looked at the priest sitting on a stool. He had a baby in his lap, and the baby was Tom’s. There was a lump in Tom’s throat. It was true, it really was; the baby had lived. He felt like throwing his arms around the priest and hugging him.

There was a young monk with the priest. Looking closely, Tom saw that the youngster was dipping a rag into a pail of milk – goat’s milk, presumably – and then putting the sodden corner of the rag into the baby’s mouth. That was ingenious.

‘Well,’ Tom said apprehensively, ‘I’d better go and own up to what I’ve done, and take my son back.’

Ellen looked at him levelly. ‘Think for a moment, Tom,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do then?’

He was not sure what she was getting at. ‘Ask the monks for milk,’ he said. ‘They can see I’m poor. They give alms.’

‘And then?

‘Well, I hope they’ll give me enough milk to keep him alive for three days, until I get to Winchester.’

‘And after that?’ she persisted. ‘How will you feed the baby then?’

‘Well, I’ll look for work—’

‘You’ve been looking for work since last time I met you, at the end of the summer,’ she said. She seemed to be a little angry with Tom, he could not see why. ‘You’ve no money and no tools,’ she went on. ‘What will happen to the baby if there’s no work in Winchester?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. He felt hurt that she should speak so harshly to him. ‘What am I to do – live like you? I can’t shoot ducks with a stone – I’m a mason.’

‘You could leave the baby here,’ she said.

Tom was thunderstruck. ‘Leave him?’ he said. ‘When I’ve only just found him?’

‘You’d be sure he’d be warm and fed. You wouldn’t have to carry him while you look for work. And when you do find something, you can come back here and fetch the child.’

Tom’s instinct rebelled against the whole idea. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What would the monks think of my abandoning the baby?’

‘They already know you did that,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s just a question of whether you confess now or later.’

‘Do monks know how to take care of babies?’

‘They know as much about it as you do.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well, they’ve worked out how to feed a newborn who can only suck.’

Tom began to see that she was right. Much as he longed to hold the tiny bundle in his arms, he could not deny that the monks were better able to care for the baby than he was. He had no food and no money and no sure prospect of getting work. ‘Leave him again,’ he said sadly. ‘I suppose I must.’ He stayed where he was, gazing across the clearing at the small figure in the priest’s lap. It had dark hair, like Agnes’s hair. Tom had made up his mind, but now he could not tear himself away.

Then a large group of monks appeared on the far side of the clearing, fifteen or twenty of them, carrying axes and saws, and suddenly there was a danger that Tom and Ellen would be seen. They ducked back into the undergrowth. Now Tom could no longer see the baby.

They crept away through the bushes. When they came to the road they broke into a run. They ran for three or four hundred yards, holding hands, then Tom was exhausted. They were at a safe distance, however. They stepped off the road and found a place to rest out of sight.

They sat down on a grassy bank lit by dappled sunlight. Tom looked at Ellen, lying on her back, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed, her lips smiling up at him. Her robe had fallen open at the neck, revealing her throat and the swell of one breast. Suddenly he felt a compulsion to look at her nakedness again, and the desire was much stronger than the guilt he felt. He leaned over to kiss her, then hesitated, because she was so lovely to look at. When he spoke, it was unpremeditated, and his own words took him by surprise. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘will you be my wife?’