“You fool,” the earl said. “You traitor. You-”
Philippa interrupted him. “Who else knows?”
That stopped the tirade. They all looked at her.
“Perhaps the wedding may still take place,” she said. “Thank God, the earl of Monmouth isn’t here.” She looked at Godwyn. “Who knows about this, other than the people here now, and the two men of the priory who witnessed the act?”
Godwyn tried to calm his thudding heart. He was so close to success that he seemed to taste it. “No one else knows, my lady,” he said.
“All of us on the earl’s side can keep the secret,” she said. “What about your men?”
“They will obey their elected prior,” he said, with the slightest emphasis on the word ‘elected’.
Philippa turned to Roland. “Then the wedding can take place.”
Godwyn added: “Provided the inauguration ceremony is held first.”
Everyone looked at the earl.
He took a step forward and suddenly hit Richard in the face. It was a powerful blow struck by a soldier who knew how to put all his weight into it. Although he used his open hand, Richard was knocked to the ground.
Richard lay still, looking terrified, blood trickling from his mouth.
Earl Roland’s face was white and sweating: the blow had used up all his reserves, and he now looked shaky. Several silent seconds passed. At last he seemed to recover his strength. With a contemptuous glance at the purple-robed figure cowering on the floor, he turned on his heel and walked, slowly but steadily, out of the church.
24
Caris stood on the green in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral, along with at least half the population of the town, waiting for the bride and groom to emerge from the great west door of the church.
Caris was not sure why she was here. She had been feeling negative about marriage ever since the day Merthin had finished his hoist and they had had an abrasive conversation about their future. She felt angry with him, even though everything he had said made perfect sense. Of course he wanted to have his own house and live with her in it; of course he wanted to sleep with her every night and have children. That was what everyone wanted – everyone, it seemed, except Caris.
And in fact she wanted all those things too, in a way. She would have liked to lie down beside him every evening, and put her arms around his slim body any time she wanted, and feel his clever hands on her skin when she woke up in the morning, and give birth to a miniature version of him that they could both love and care for. But she did not want the things that went with marriage. She wanted a lover, not a master; she wanted to live with him, not dedicate her life to him. And she was angry with Merthin for forcing her to face up to the dilemma. Why could they not go on just as they were?
For three weeks she had hardly spoken to him. She pretended to have a summer cold, and in fact she developed a painful sore on her lip that gave her an excuse not to kiss him. He still took his meals at her house, and talked amiably with her father; but he did not linger after Edmund and Petranilla went to bed.
Now Caris’s sore had healed and her anger had cooled. She still did not want to become Merthin’s property, but she wished he would start kissing her again. However, he was not with her now. He was in the crowd, some distance away, talking to Bessie Bell, daughter of the landlord of the Bell inn. She was a small girl with a curvy body and the kind of grin that men called saucy and women called tarty. Merthin was making her laugh. Caris looked away.
The big wooden church door opened. A cheer went up from the crowd, and the bride emerged. Margery was a pretty girl of sixteen, dressed in white, with flowers in her hair. The groom followed her out, a tall, serious-looking man about ten years older than she.
They both looked completely miserable.
They hardly knew each other. Until this week, they had met only once, six months ago, when the two earls had arranged the marriage. There was a rumour that Margery loved someone else, but of course there was no question of her disobeying Earl Roland. And her new husband had a studious air, as if he would prefer to be in a library somewhere, reading a book about geometry. What would their life together be like? It was hard to imagine their developing the kind of passion for one another that Caris and Merthin enjoyed.
She saw Merthin coming towards her through the crowd, and suddenly she was struck by the thought that she was ungrateful. How lucky she was not to be the niece of an earl! No one was going to force her into an arranged marriage. She was free to marry the man she loved – and all she could do was find reasons not to.
She greeted him with a hug and a kiss on the lips. He looked surprised, but made no comment. Some men would have been unnerved by her change of mood, but Merthin had a bedrock equanimity that was hard to shake.
They stood together and watched as Earl Roland came out of the church, followed by the earl and countess of Monmouth, then Bishop Richard and Prior Godwyn. Caris noticed that her cousin Godwyn looked both pleased and apprehensive – almost as if he were the groom. The reason, no doubt, was that he had just been inaugurated as prior.
An escort of knights formed up, the Shiring men in Roland’s red-and-black livery, the Monmouth men in yellow and green. The procession moved off, heading for the guild hall. There Earl Roland was giving a banquet for the wedding guests. Edmund was going, but Caris had managed to get out of it, and Petranilla was to accompany him.
As the bridal party left the precincts, a light shower of rain began to fall. Caris and Merthin took shelter in the cathedral porch. “Come with me to the chancel,” Merthin said. “I want to look at Elfric’s repairs.”
The wedding guests were still leaving the church. Moving against the flow, Merthin and Caris pushed through the crowd in the nave and went to the south aisle of the chancel. This part of the church was reserved for the clergy, and they would have disapproved of Caris’s being there, but the monks and nuns had already left. Caris glanced around, but there was no one to see her except one unfamiliar woman, a well-dressed redhead of about thirty, presumably a wedding guest, apparently waiting for someone.
Merthin craned his neck to look up at the vaulted ceiling over the aisle. The repairs were not quite finished: a small section of the vault was still open, and a sheet of canvas, painted white, was stretched across the gap, so that the ceiling looked complete to a casual glance.
“He’s doing a decent job,” Merthin said. “I wonder how long it will last?”
“Why wouldn’t it last indefinitely?” Caris asked.
“Because we don’t know why the vault crumbled. These things don’t happen for no reason – they’re not acts of God, regardless of what the priests may say. Whatever caused the stonework to collapse once will, presumably, do so again.”
“Is it possible to discover the cause?”
“It’s not easy. Elfric certainly can’t do it. I might.”
“But you’ve been sacked.”
“Exactly.” He stood there for a few moments, head tilted back, then said: “I want to see this from above. I’m going into the loft.”
“I’ll come with you,”
They both looked around, but there was no one nearby except for the red-haired wedding guest, who was still loitering in the south transept. Merthin led Caris to a small door that opened on a narrow spiral staircase. She followed him up, wondering what the monks would think if they knew a woman was exploring their secret passageways. The staircase emerged into an attic over the south aisle.
Caris was intrigued to see the vault from the other side. “What you’re looking at is called the extrados,” Merthin said. She liked the casual way he gave her architectural information, assuming she would be interested and knowing she would understand. He never made stupid jokes about women not grasping technicalities.
He moved along the narrow walkway then lay down to examine the new stonework closely. Mischievously, she lay beside him and put her arm around him, as if they were in bed. Merthin touched the mortar between the new stones then put his finger on his tongue. “It’s drying out quite quickly,” he said.