The others murmured agreement.

“We’ll set watches,” Tom said desperately.

Otto shook his head decisively. “We’re leaving tonight. Now.”

Tom looked around at the men and saw that he was defeated. He had set out this morning with such high hopes, and he could hardly believe that his plans had been frustrated by these petty thugs. It was too galling for words. He could not resist a bitter parting shot. “You’re going against the king, and that’s a dangerous business,” he said to Harold. “You tell the earl of Shiring that. And tell him that I’m Tom Builder of Kingsbridge, and if I ever get my hands around his fat neck I might just squeeze it until he chokes.”

Johnny Eightpence made a miniature monk’s robe for little Jonathan, complete with wide sleeves and a hood. The tiny figure looked so fetching in it that he melted everyone’s heart, but it was not very practical: the hood kept falling forward, obscuring his vision, and when he crawled the robe got in the way of his knees.

In the middle of the afternoon, when Jonathan had had his nap (and the monks had had theirs), Prior Philip came across the baby, with Johnny Eightpence, in what had been the nave of the church, and was now the novices’ playground. This was the time of day when the novices were allowed to let off steam, and Johnny was watching them play tag while Jonathan investigated the network of pegs and cord with which Tom Builder had laid out the ground plan of the east end of the new cathedral.

Philip stood beside Johnny for a few moments in companionable silence, watching the youngsters race around. Philip was very fond of Johnny, who made up for his lack of brains by having an extraordinarily good heart.

Jonathan was on his feet now, leaning against a stake Tom had driven into the ground where the north porch would be. He held on to the cord attached to the stake, and with that unsteady support took a couple of awkward, deliberate steps. “He’ll be walking soon,” Philip said to Johnny.

“He keeps trying, Father, but he generally falls on his bottom.”

Philip crouched down and reached out his hands to Jonathan. “Walk to me,” he said. “Come on.”

Jonathan grinned, showing miscellaneous teeth. He took another step holding on to Tom’s cord. Then he pointed at Philip, as if that would help, and with a sudden access of boldness, he crossed the intervening space with three rapid, decisive steps.

Philip caught him in his arms and said: “Well done!” He hugged him, feeling as proud as if the achievement were his, not the baby’s.

Johnny was equally excited. “He walked! He walked!”

Jonathan struggled to be put down. Philip set him on his feet, to see if he would walk again; but he had had enough for one day, and he immediately dropped to his knees and crawled to Johnny.

Some of the monks had been scandalized, Philip recalled, when he had brought Johnny and baby Jonathan to Kingsbridge; but Johnny was easy to deal with so long as you did not forget that he was essentially a child in a man’s body; and Jonathan had overcome all opposition by sheer force of personal charm.

Jonathan had not been the only cause of unrest during that first year. Having voted for a good provider, the monks felt cheated when Philip introduced an austerity drive to reduce the priory’s day-to-day expenses. Philip had been a little hurt: he felt he had made it clear that his top priority would be the new cathedral. The monastic officers had also resisted his plan to take away their financial independence, even though they knew perfectly well that without reforms the priory was headed for ruin. And when he had spent money on enlarging the monastery’s flocks of sheep there had almost been a mutiny. But monks were essentially people who wanted to be told what to do; and Bishop Waleran, who might have encouraged the rebels, had spent most of the year going to Rome and coming back; so in the end muttering was as far as the monks had got.

Philip had suffered some lonely moments, but he was sure results would vindicate him. His policies were already bearing fruit in a very satisfying way. The price of wool had risen again, and Philip had already started shearing: that was why he could afford to hire foresters and quarrymen. As the financial position improved and cathedral building progressed, his position as prior would become unassailable.

He gave Johnny Eightpence an affectionate pat on the head and walked through the building site. With some help from priory servants and younger monks, Tom and Alfred had made a start on digging the foundations. However, they were only five or six feet deep as yet. Tom had told Philip that the foundation holes would have to be twenty-five feet deep in places. He would need a large force of laborers, plus some lifting gear, to dig so far down.

The new church would be bigger than the old one, but it would still be small for a cathedral. A part of Philip wanted it to be the longest, highest, richest and most beautiful cathedral in the kingdom, but he suppressed the wish, and told himself to be grateful for any kind of church.

He went into Tom’s shed and looked at the woodwork on the bench. The builder had spent most of the winter in here, working with an iron measuring stick and a set of fine chisels, making what he called templates-wooden models for the masons to use as guides when they were cutting stones into shape. Philip had watched with admiration while Tom, a big man with big hands, precisely and painstakingly carved the wood into perfect curves and square corners and exact angles. Now Philip picked up one of the templates and examined it. It was shaped like the edge of a daisy, a quarter-circle with several round projections like petals. What sort of stone needed to be that shape? He found that these things were hard to visualize, and he was constantly impressed by the power of Tom’s imagination. He looked at Tom’s drawings, engraved on plaster in wooden frames, and eventually he decided that he was holding a template for the piers of the arcade, which would look like clusters of shafts. Philip had thought they would actually be clusters of shafts, but now he realized that would be an illusion: the piers would be solid stone columns with shaft-like decorations.

Five years, Tom had said, and the east end would be finished. Five years, and Philip would be able to hold services in a cathedral again. All he had to do was find the money. This year it had been hard to scrape together enough cash to make a modest start, because his reforms were slow to take effect; but next year, after he had sold the new spring’s wool, he would be able to hire more craftsmen and begin to build in earnest.

The bell rang for vespers. Philip left the little shed and walked to the crypt entrance. Glancing over at the priory gate, he was astonished to see Tom Builder coming in with all the quarrymen. Why were they back? Tom had said he would be away for a week and the quarrymen were to have stayed there indefinitely. Philip hurried to meet them.

As he came close he saw that they looked tired and dispirited, as if something terribly discouraging had happened. “What is it?” he said. “Why are you here?”

“Bad news,” said Tom Builder.

Philip simmered with fury all through vespers. What Earl Percy had done was outrageous. There was no doubt about the rights and wrongs of the case, no ambiguity about the king’s instructions: the earl had been there himself when the announcement was made, and the priory’s right to mine the quarry was enshrined in a charter. Philip’s right foot tapped the stone floor of the crypt in an urgent, angry rhythm. He was being robbed. Percy might as well steal pennies from a church treasury. There was no shred of an excuse for it. Percy was flagrantly defying both God and the king. But the worst of it was that Philip could not build the new cathedral unless he got the stone for nothing from that quarry. He was already working with a bare-minimum budget, and if he had to pay the market price for his stone, and transport it from even farther away, he could not build at all. He would have to wait another year or more, and then it would be six or seven years before he could hold services in a cathedral again. The thought was too much to bear.