Merthin watched. Everyone was soaking wet in a few minutes. He could see no apparent fall in the level of the water. It was going to be a long job.
He climbed over the side and into Ian’s boat.
By the time he reached the bank there were thirty more volunteers with buckets.
He got the second coffer dam started, with Mark Webber as foreman, then doubled the numbers in both locations, then started replacing tired workers with fresh ones. Ian Boatman became exhausted and handed the oars over to his son. The water inside the dams fell inch by wearisome inch. As the level fell, the work went ever more slowly, for the buckets had to be lifted greater and greater distances to the rim.
Megg was the first to discover that a person cannot hold a full bucket in one hand and an empty one in the other and still keep balance on a ladder. She devised a one-way bucket chain, with full buckets going up one ladder and empty ones down another. Mark instituted the same system in his dam.
The volunteers worked an hour and rested an hour, but Merthin did not stop. He was organizing the teams, supervising the transport of volunteers to and from the dams, replacing buckets that broke. Most of the men drank ale during their rest periods, and in consequence there were several accidents during the afternoon, with people dropping buckets and falling off ladders. Mother Cecilia came to take care of the injured, with the help of Mattie Wise and Caris.
Too soon, the light began to fail, and they had to stop. But both coffers were more than half empty. Merthin asked everyone to come back in the morning, then went home. After a few spoonfuls of his mother’s soup he fell asleep at the table, waking only long enough to wrap a blanket around himself and lie down in the straw. When he woke the next morning, his first thought was to wonder whether any of the volunteers would show up for the second day.
He hurried down to the river at first light with an anxious heart. Both Mark Webber and Megg Robbins were there already, Mark eating his way through a doorstep of bread and Megg lacing a pair of high boots in the hope of keeping her feet dry. No one else showed up for the next half hour, and Merthin began to wonder what he would do with no volunteers. Then some of the young men arrived, carrying their breakfast with them, followed by the novice monks, then a whole crowd.
Ian Boatman turned up, and Merthin got him to row Megg out with some volunteers, and they began again.
The work was harder today. Everyone was aching from yesterday’s efforts. Every bucket had to be lifted ten feet or more. But the end was in sight. The levels continued to drop, and the volunteers began to glimpse the river bed.
In the middle of the afternoon, the first of the carts arrived back from the quarry. Merthin directed the owner to unload his stone in the pasture and ferry his cart back across the river to the town. A short while later, in Megg’s coffer, the raft bumped the river bed.
There was more to be done. When the last of the water was lifted out, the raft itself had to be dismantled and raised, plank by plank, up the ladders and out. Then dozens of fish were revealed, flapping in muddy pools on the bottom, and they had to be netted and shared out among the volunteers. But, when that was finished, Merthin stood on the ledge, weary but jubilant, and looked down a twenty-foot hole at the flat mud of the river bed.
Tomorrow he would drop several tons of rubble into each hole, and drench the rubble with mortar, forming a massive, immovable foundation.
Then he would start building the bridge.
Wulfric was in a depression.
He ate almost nothing and forgot to wash himself. He got up automatically at daybreak and lay down again when it got dark, but he did not work, and he did not make love to Gwenda in the night. When she asked him what was the matter, he would say: “I don’t know, really.” He answered all questions with such uninformative replies, or just with grunts.
There was little to do in the fields anyway. This was the season when villagers sat by their fires, sewing leather shoes and carving oak shovels, eating salt pork and soft apples and cabbage preserved in vinegar. Gwenda was not worried about how they were going to feed themselves: Wulfric still had money from the sale of his crops. But she was desperately anxious about him.
Wulfric had always lived for his work. Some villagers grumbled constantly and were happy only on rest days, but he was not like that. The fields, the crops, the beasts and the weather were what he cared about. On Sundays he had always been restless until he found some occupation that was not forbidden, and on holidays he had done all he could to circumvent the rules.
She knew she had to get him to return to his normal state of mind. Otherwise he might fall sick with some physical illness. And his money would not last for ever. Sooner or later they must both work.
However, she did not give him her news until two full moons had passed, and she was sure.
Then, one morning in December, she said: “I have something to tell you.”
He grunted. He was sitting at the kitchen table, whittling a stick, and he did not look up from this idle occupation.
She reached across the table and held his wrists, stopping the whittling. “Wulfric, would you please look at me?”
He did so with a surly expression on his face, resentful at being ordered but too lethargic to defy her.
“It’s important,” she said.
He looked at her in silence.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.
His expression did not change, but he dropped the knife and stick.
She looked back at him for a long moment. “Do you understand me?” she said.
He nodded. “A baby,” he said.
“Yes. We will have a child.”
“When?”
She smiled. It was the first question he had asked for two months. “Next summer, before the harvest.”
“The child must be cared for,” he said. “You, too.”
“Yes.”
“I must work.” He looked depressed again.
She held her breath. What was coming?
He sighed, then set his jaw. “I’ll go and see Perkin,” he said. “He’ll need help with his winter ploughing.”
“And manuring,” she said happily. “I’ll come with you. He offered to hire us both.”
“All right.” He was still staring at her. “A child,” he said, as if it were a marvel. “Boy or girl, I wonder?”
She got up and walked around the table to sit on the bench next to him. “Which would you prefer?”
“A little girl. It was all boys in my family.”
“I want a boy, a miniature version of you.”
“We might have twins.”
“One of each.”
He put his arm around her. “We should get Father Gaspard to marry us properly.”
Gwenda sighed contentedly and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps we should.”
Merthin moved out of his parents’ house just before Christmas. He had built a one-room house for himself on Leper Island, which was now his land. He said he needed to guard the growing stockpile of valuable building materials he was keeping on the island – timber, stones, lime, ropes and iron tools.
At the same time, he stopped coming to Caris’s house for meals.
On the last but one day of December, she went to see Mattie Wise.
“No need to tell me why you’re here,” said Mattie. “Three months gone?”
Caris nodded and avoided her eye. She looked around the little kitchen, with its bottles and jars. Mattie was heating something in a small iron pot, and it gave off an acrid smell that made Caris want to sneeze.
“I don’t want to have a baby,” Caris said.
“I wish I had a chicken for every time I’ve heard that said.”
“Am I wicked?”
Mattie shrugged. “I make potions, not judgements. People know the difference between right and wrong – and if they don’t, that’s what priests are for.”
Caris was disappointed. She had been hoping for sympathy. More coolly, she said: “Do you have a potion to get rid of this pregnancy?”