She would not come out while the bishop and the monk were here, of course. Fortunately they did not stay long. They left the battlements quite quickly, and a few moments later they and their attendants rode out of the castle. Had they come here just to see the view from the battlements? If so, they had been somewhat frustrated by the weather.
The steward had come out for firewood earlier, before the visitors arrived. He did the cooking in the keep. Soon he would come out again and fetch water from the well. William guessed they ate porridge, for they had no oven to bake bread. Later in the day the steward would leave the castle, sometimes taking the boy with him. Once they had gone it was only a matter of time before Aliena emerged.
When he got bored with waiting, William would conjure up the vision of her washing herself. The memory was almost as good as the real thing. But today he was unsettled. The visit of the bishop and the prior seemed to have tainted the atmosphere. Until today there had been an enchanted air about the castle and its three inhabitants, but the arrival of those thoroughly unmagical men on their muddy horses had broken the spell. It was like being disturbed by a noise when in the middle of a wonderful dream: try as he might, he could not stay asleep.
For a while he tried guessing what the visitors had been up to, but he could not fathom it. Nevertheless he felt sure they were scheming something. There was one person who probably could work it out: his mother. He decided to abandon Aliena for today, and ride home to report what he had seen.
They arrived in Winchester at nightfall on the second day. They entered by the King’s Gate, in the south wall of the city, and went directly into the cathedral close. There they parted company. Waleran went to the residence of the bishop of Winchester, a palace in its own grounds adjacent to the cathedral close. Philip went to pay his respects to the prior and beg for a mattress in the monks’ dormitory.
After three days on the road, Philip found the calm and quiet of the monastery as refreshing as a fountain on a hot day. The Winchester prior was a plump, easygoing man with pink skin and white hair. He invited Philip to have supper with him in his house. While they ate they talked about their respective bishops. The Winchester prior was clearly in awe of Bishop Henry and completely subservient to him. Philip surmised that when your bishop was as wealthy and powerful as Henry, there was nothing to be gained by quarreling with him. All the same, Philip did not intend to be so much under the thumb of his bishop.
He slept like a top and got up at midnight for matins.
When he went into Winchester Cathedral for the first time he began to feel intimidated.
The prior had told him that it was the biggest church in the world, and when he saw it he believed it was. It was an eighth of a mile long: Philip had seen villages that could fit inside it. It had two great towers, one over the crossing and the other at the west end. The central tower had collapsed, thirty years earlier, onto the tomb of William Rufus, an ungodly king who probably should not have been buried in a church in the first place; but it had since been rebuilt. Standing directly beneath the new tower, singing matins, Philip felt the whole building had an air of immense dignity and strength. The cathedral Tom had designed would be modest by comparison-if it got built at all. He now realized that he was moving in the very highest of circles, and he felt nervous. He was only a boy from a Welsh hill village who had had the good fortune to become a monk. Today he would speak to the king. What gave him the right?
He went back to bed with the other monks, but he lay awake worrying. He was afraid he might say or do something that would offend King Stephen or Bishop Henry and turn them against Kingsbridge. French-born people often mocked the way the English spoke their language: what would they think of a Welsh accent? In the monastic world, Philip had always been judged by his piety, obedience, and devotion to God’s work. Those things counted for nothing here, in the capital city of one of the greatest kingdoms in the world. Philip was out of his depth. He became oppressed by the feeling that he was some kind of impostor, a nobody pretending to be a somebody, and that he was sure to be found out in no time and sent home in disgrace.
He got up at dawn, went to prime, then took breakfast in the refectory. The monks had strong beer and white bread: this was a wealthy monastery. After breakfast, when the monks went in to chapter, Philip walked over to the bishop’s palace, a fine stone building with large windows, surrounded by several acres of walled garden.
Waleran was confident of getting Bishop Henry’s support in his outrageous scheme. Henry was so powerful that his help might even make the whole thing possible. He was Henry of Blois, the king’s younger brother. As well as being the most well-connected clergyman in England, he was the richest, for he was also abbot of the wealthy monastery of Glastonbury. He was expected to be the next archbishop of Canterbury. Kingsbridge could not have a more powerful ally. Perhaps it really will happen, Philip thought; perhaps the king will enable us to build a new cathedral. When he thought about that he felt as if his heart would burst with hope.
A household steward told Philip that Bishop Henry was not likely to appear before midmorning. Philip was much too wound up to return to the monastery. Feeling impatient, he set out to look at the biggest town he had ever seen.
The bishop’s palace was in the southeast corner of the city. Philip walked along the east wall, through the grounds of yet another monastery, St. Mary’s Abbey, and emerged in a neighborhood that appeared to be devoted to leather and wool. The area was crisscrossed with little streams. Looking closely, Philip realized they were not natural, but man-made channels, diverting part of the River Itchen to flow through the streets and supply the great quantities of water needed for tanning hides and washing fleeces. Such industries were normally established beside a river, and Philip marveled at the audacity of men who could bring the river to their workshops instead of the other way around.
Despite the industry, the town was quieter and less crowded than any other Philip had seen. A place such as Salisbury, or Hereford, seemed constricted by its walls, like a fat man in a tight tunic: the houses were too close together, the backyards too small, the marketplace too crowded, the streets too narrow; and as people and animals jostled for space, there was a feeling that fights could break out at any moment. But Winchester was so big that there seemed to be room for everyone. As he walked around, Philip gradually realized that part of the reason for the spacious feel was that the streets were laid out on a square grid pattern. They were mostly straight and intersected at right angles. He had never seen that before. The town must have been built according to a plan.
There were dozens of churches. They were all shapes and sizes, some of wood and others of stone, each serving its own small neighborhood. The city had to be very rich to support so many priests.
Walking along Fleshmonger Street made him feel faintly ill. He had never seen so much raw meat all in one place. Blood flowed out of the butchers’ shops into the street, and fat rats dodged between the feet of the people who came to buy.
The south end of Fleshmonger Street opened out on to the middle of the High Street, opposite the old royal palace. The palace had not been used by kings since the new keep had been built in the castle, Philip had been told, but the royal moneyers still minted silver pennies in the undercroft of the building, protected by thick walls and iron-barred gates. Philip stood at the bars for a while, watching the sparks fly as the hammers pounded the dies, awestruck by the sheer wealth in front of his eyes.