“I don’t think so,” Madge said with conviction. “She’s terribly sad, but I don’t see her taking that way out.”

“She might kill someone else.”

“That’s more likely.”

“Then again,” Merthin said slowly and reluctantly, “she might find a kind of happiness.”

Madge said nothing. Merthin looked hard at her. She nodded.

That was the terrible truth, he realized. Caris might be happy. She was losing her home, her freedom and her husband-to-be; but she might still be happy, in the end.

There was nothing more to say.

Merthin stood up. “Thank you for being my friends,” he said. He began to walk away.

Mark said: “Where are you going?”

Merthin stopped and turned back. There was a thought spinning in his head, and he waited for it to become clear. When it did, he was astonished. But he saw immediately that the idea was right. It was not merely right, it was perfect.

He wiped the tears from his face and looked at Mark and Madge in the red light of the dying sun.

“I’m going to Florence,” he said. “Goodbye.”

Part Five. March 1346 to December 1348

43

Sister Caris left the nuns’ cloisters and walked briskly into the hospital. There were three patients lying in beds. Old Julie was now too infirm to attend services or climb the stairs to the nuns’ dormitory. Bella Brewer, the wife of Dick Brewer’s son Danny, was recovering from a complicated birth. And Rickie Silvers, aged thirteen, had a broken arm which Matthew Barber had set. Two other people sat on a bench to one side, talking: a novice nun called Nellie, and a priory servant, Bob.

Caris’s experienced gaze swept the room. Beside each bed was a dirty dinner plate. The dinner hour was long over. “Bob!” she said. He leaped to his feet. “Take away these plates. This is a monastery, and cleanliness is a virtue. Jump to it!”

“Sorry, sister,” he said.

“Nellie, have you taken Old Julie to the latrine?”

“Not yet, sister.”

“She always needs to go after dinner. My mother was the same. Take her quick, before she has an accident.”

Nellie began to get the old nun up.

Caris was trying to develop the quality of patience, but after seven years as a nun she still had not succeeded, and she became frustrated by having to repeat instructions again and again. Bob knew he should clear away as soon as dinner was over – Caris had told him often. Nellie knew Julie’s needs. Yet they sat on a bench gossiping until Caris surprised tnem with a lightning inspection.

She picked up the bowl of water that had been used for hand washing and walked the length of the room to throw it outside. A man she did not know was relieving himself against the outside wall. She guessed he was a traveller hoping for a bed. “Next time, use the latrine behind the stable,” she snapped.

He leered at her, holding his penis in his hand. “And who are you?” he said insolently.

“I’m in charge of this hospital, and if you want to stay here tonight you’ll have to improve your manners.”

“Oh!” he said. “The bossy type, eh?” He took his time shaking the drops off.

“Put away your pathetic prick, or you won’t be allowed to spend a night in this town, let alone at the priory.” Caris threw the bowl of water at his middle. He jumped back, shocked, his hose soaked.

She went back inside and refilled the bowl at the fountain. There was an underground pipe running through the priory that brought clean water from upstream of the town and fed fountains in the cloisters, the kitchens and the hospital. A separate branch of the subterranean stream flushed the latrines. One day, Caris wanted to build a new latrine adjacent to the hospital, so that senile patients such as Julie would not have to go so far.

The stranger followed her in. “Wash your hands,” she said, handing him the bowl.

He hesitated, then took the bowl from her.

She looked at him. He was about her own age, twenty-nine. “Who are you?” she said.

“Gilbert of Hereford, a pilgrim,” he said. “I’ve come to reverence the relics of St Adolphus.”

“In that case, you’ll be welcome to stay a night here at the hospital, provided you speak respectfully to me – and to anyone else here, for that matter.”

“Yes, sister.”

Caris returned to the cloisters. It was a mild spring day, and the sun shone on the smooth old stones of the courtyard. Along the west walk, Sister Mair was teaching the girls’ school a new hymn, and Caris paused to observe. People said that Mair looked like an angel: she had clear skin, bright eyes and a mouth shaped like a bow. The school was technically one of Caris’s responsibilities – she was guest master, in charge of everyone who came into the nunnery from the outside world. She had attended this school herself, almost twenty years ago.

There were ten pupils, aged from nine to fifteen. Some were the daughters of Kingsbridge merchants, others were noblemen’s children. The hymn, on the theme that God is good, came to an end, and one ox the girls asked: “Sister Mair, if God is good, why did he let my parents die?”

It was the child’s personal version of a classic question, one asked by all intelligent youngsters sooner or later: How can bad things happen? Caris had asked it herself. She looked with interest at the questioner. She was Tilly Shiring, twelve-year-old niece of Earl Roland, a girl with an impish look that Caris liked. Tilly’s mother had bled to death after giving birth to her, and her father had broken his neck in a hunting accident not long afterwards, so she had been brought up in the earl’s household.

Mair gave a bland answer about God’s mysterious ways. Tilly clearly was not satisfied, but was unable to articulate her misgivings, and fell silent. The question would come up again, Caris felt sure.

Mair started them singing the hymn again, then stepped over to speak to Caris.

“A bright girl,” Caris said.

“The best in the class. In a year or two she’ll be arguing with me fiercely.”

“She reminds me of someone,” Caris said, frowning. “I’m trying to remember her mother…”

Mair touched Caris’s arm lightly. Gestures of affection were prohibited between nuns, but Caris was not strict about such things. “She reminds you of yourself,” Mair said.

Caris laughed. “I was never that pretty.”

But Mair was right: even as a child, Caris had asked sceptical questions. Later, when she became a novice nun, she had started an argument at every theology class. Within a week, Mother Cecilia had been obliged to order her to be silent during lessons. Then Caris had begun breaking the nunnery rules, and responding to correction by questioning the rationale behind convent discipline. Once again she had been enjoined to silence.

Before long, Mother Cecilia had offered her a deal. Caris could spend most of her time in the hospital – a part of the nuns’ work she did believe in – and skip services whenever necessary. In exchange, Caris had to stop flouting discipline and keep her theological ideas to herself. Caris had agreed, reluctantly and sulkily, but Cecilia was wise, and the arrangement had worked. It was still working, for Caris now spent most of her time supervising the hospital. She missed more than half the services, and rarely said or did anything openly subversive.

Mair smiled. “You’re pretty now,” she said. “Especially when you laugh.”

Caris found herself momentarily spellbound by Mair’s blue eyes. Then she heard a child scream.

She turned away. The scream had come, not from the group in the cloisters, but from the hospital. She hurried through the little lobby. Christopher Blacksmith was carrying a girl of about eight into the hospital. The child, whom Caris recognized as his daughter Minnie, was screaming in pain.

“Lay her on a mattress,” Caris said.