“You should have shared it with Alfred,” Tom said.

“I would have.”

Alfred said: “Then why did you run away?”

“I was taking it home to Mother,” Jack protested. “Then Alfred ate it all!”

Fourteen years of raising children had taught Tom that there was no prospect of discovering the rights and wrongs of a childish quarrel. “Go to breakfast, all three of you, and if there’s any more fighting today, you, Alfred, will end up with a face like Jack’s, and I’ll be the one who does it to you. Now clear off.”

The children went away.

Tom and Ellen followed at a slower pace. After a moment Ellen said: “Is that all you’re going to say?”

Tom glanced at her. She was still angry, but there was nothing he could do about it. He shrugged. “As usual, both parties are guilty.”

“Tom! How can you say that?”

“One’s as bad as the other.”

“Alfred took their bread. Jack called him a pig. That doesn’t draw blood!”

Tom shook his head. “Boys always fight. You could spend your whole life adjudicating their quarrels. Best to leave them to it.”

“That won’t do, Tom,” she said in a dangerous tone. “Look at Jack’s face, then look at Alfred’s. That’s not the result of a childish fight. That’s a vicious attack by a grown man on a small boy.”

Tom resented her attitude. Alfred was not perfect, he knew, but neither was Jack. Tom did not want Jack to become the pampered favorite in this family. “Alfred’s not a grown man, he’s fourteen years old. But he is working. He’s making a contribution to the support of the family, and Jack isn’t. Jack plays all day, like a child. In my book that means Jack ought to show Alfred respect. He does no such thing, as you will have noticed.”

“I don’t care!” Ellen flared. “You can say what you like, but my son is badly bruised, and might have been seriously injured, and I will not allow it!” She began to cry. In a quieter voice, but still angry, she said: “He’s my child and I can’t bear to see him like that.”

Tom sympathized with her, and he was tempted to comfort her, but he was afraid to give in. He had a feeling that this conversation might be a turning point. Living with his mother and no one else, Jack had always been overprotected. Tom did not want to concede that Jack ought to be cushioned against the normal knocks of everyday life. That would set a precedent that could cause endless trouble in years to come. Tom knew, in truth, that Alfred had gone too far this time, and he was secretly resolved to make the boy leave Jack alone; but it would be a bad thing to say so. “Beatings are a part of life,” he said to Ellen. “Jack must learn to take them or avoid them. I can’t spend my life protecting him.”

“You could protect him from that bullying son of yours!”

Tom winced. He hated to hear her call Alfred a bully. “I might, but I shan’t,” he said angrily. “Jack must learn to protect himself.”

“Oh, go to hell!” Ellen said, and she turned and walked away.

Tom entered the refectory. The wooden hut where the lay workers normally ate had been damaged by the fall of the southwest tower, so they took their meals in the refectory after the monks had finished and gone. Tom sat apart from everyone else, feeling unsociable. A kitchen hand brought him a jug of ale and some slices of bread in a basket. He dipped a piece of bread in the ale to soften it and began to eat.

Alfred was a big lad with too much energy, Tom thought fondly. He sighed into his beer. The boy was something of a bully, Tom knew in his heart; but he would calm down in time. Meanwhile, Tom was not going to make his own children give special treatment to a newcomer. They had had too much to put up with already. They had lost their mother, they had been forced to tramp the roads, they had come near to starving to death. He was not going to impose any more burdens on them if he could help it. They were due for a little indulgence. Jack would just have to keep out of Alfred’s way. It would not kill him.

A disagreement with Ellen always left Tom heavyhearted. They had quarreled several times, usually about the children, although this was their worst dispute so far. When she was hard-faced and hostile he could not remember what it had been like, just a little while earlier, to feel passionately in love with her: she seemed like an angry stranger who had intruded into his peaceful life.

He had never had such furious, bitter quarrels with his first wife. Looking back, it seemed to him that he and Agnes had agreed about everything important, and that when they disagreed it had not made them angry. That was how it should be between man and wife, and Ellen would have to realize that she could not be part of a family and yet have all her own way.

Even when Ellen was at her most infuriating he never quite wished that she would go away, but all the same he often thought of Agnes with regret. Agnes had been with him for most of his adult life, and now he had a constant sense of there being something missing. While she was alive he had never thought that he was particularly fortunate to have her, nor had he felt thankful for her; but now that she was dead he missed her, and he felt ashamed that he had taken her for granted.

At quiet moments in the day, when all his laborers had their instructions and were busy about the site, and Tom was able to get down to a skilled task, rebuilding a bit of wall in the cloisters or repairing a pillar in the crypt, he sometimes held imaginary conversations with Agnes. Mostly he told her about Jonathan, their baby son. Tom saw the child most days, being fed in the kitchen or walked in the cloisters or put to bed in the monks’ dormitory. He seemed perfectly healthy and happy, and no one but Ellen knew or even suspected that Tom had a special interest in him. Tom also talked to Agnes about Alfred and Prior Philip and even Ellen, explaining his feelings about them, just as he would have done (except in the case of Ellen) if Agnes had been alive. He told her of his practical plans for the future, too: his hope that he would be employed here for years to come, and his dream of designing and building the new cathedral himself. In his head he heard her replies and questions. She was at different times pleased, encouraging, fascinated, suspicious, or disapproving. Sometimes he felt she was right, sometimes wrong. If he had told anyone of these conversations, they would have said he was communing with a ghost, and there would have been a flurry of priests and holy water and exorcism; but he knew there was nothing supernatural about what was happening. It was just that he knew her so well that he could imagine how she would feel and what she would say in just about any situation.

She came into his mind unbidden at odd times. When he peeled a pear with his eating knife for little Martha, he remembered how Agnes had always laughed at him because he would take pains to remove the peel in one continuous strip. Whenever he had to write something he would think of her, for she had taught him everything she had learned from her father, the priest; and he would remember her teaching him how to trim a quill or how to spell caementarius, the Latin word for “mason.” As he washed his face on Sundays he would rub soap into his beard and recall how, when they were young, she had taught him that washing his beard would keep his face free from lice and boils. Never a day went by without some such little incident bringing her vividly to mind.

He knew he was lucky to have Ellen. There was no danger of his taking her for granted. She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic. He was grateful to her for consoling him in his grief, the morning after Agnes died; but sometimes he wished he had met her a few days-instead of a few hours-after he had buried his wife, just so that he would have had time to be heartbroken alone. He would not have observed a period of mourning-that was for lords and monks, not ordinary folk-but he would have had time to become accustomed to the absence of Agnes before he started to get used to living with Ellen. Such thoughts had not occurred to him during the early days, when the threat of starvation had combined with the sexual excitement of Ellen to produce a kind of hysterical end-of-the-world elation. But since he had found work and security, he had begun to feel pangs of regret. And sometimes it seemed that when he thought like this about Agnes, he was not only missing her, but mourning the passing of his own youth. Never again would he be as naive, as aggressive, as hungry or as strong as he had been when he had first fallen in love with Agnes.