Godwyn said to Tam: “God forgives those who truly repent.”

“Well, this man’s name is Win Forester, and he truly repents all his many sins. He would like to come into the church to pray for healing or, failing that, to die in a holy place.”

One of the other outlaws sneezed.

Saul came away from his window and stood facing Godwyn, hands on hips. “We cannot turn him away!”

Godwyn tried to make himself calm. “You heard that sneeze – don’t you understand what it means?” He turned to the rest of the monks, to make sure they heard what he said next. “They’ve all got the plague!”

They gave a collective murmur of fear. Godwyn wanted them frightened. That way they would support him if Saul decided to defy him.

Saul said: “We must help them, even if they have got the plague. Our lives are not our own, to be protected like gold hidden under the earth. We have given ourselves to God, to use as he wishes, and he will end our lives when it suits his holy purpose.”

“To let those outlaws in would be suicide. They’ll kill us all!”

“We are men of God. For us, death is the happy reunion with Christ. What do we have to fear, Father Prior?”

Godwyn realized that he was sounding frightened, whereas Saul was speaking reasonably. He forced himself to appear calm and philosophical. “It is a sin to seek our own death.”

“But if death comes to us in the course of our holy duty, we embrace it gladly.”

Godwyn realized he could debate all day with Saul and get nowhere. This was not the way to impose his authority. He closed his shutter. “Shut your window, Brother Saul, and come here to roe,” he said. He looked at Saul, waiting.

After a hesitation, Saul did as he was told.

Godwyn said: “What are your three vows, brother?”

There was a pause. Saul knew what was happening here. Godwyn was refusing to engage with him as an equal. At first, Saul looked as if he might refuse to answer, but his training took over, and he said: “Poverty, chastity, obedience.”

“And who must you obey?”

“God, and the Rule of St Benedict, and my prior.”

“And your prior stands before you now. Do you acknowledge me?”

“Yes.”

“You may say: ‘Yes, Father Prior.’ ”

“Yes, Father Prior.”

“Now I will tell you what you must do, and you will obey.” Godwyn looked around. “All of you – return to your places.”

There was a moment of frozen silence. No one moved and no one spoke. It could go either way, Godwyn thought: compliance or mutiny, order or anarchy, victory or defeat. He held his breath.

At last, Saul moved. He bowed his head and turned away. He walked up the short aisle and resumed his position in front of the altar.

All the others did the same.

There were a few more shouts from outside, but they sounded like parting shots. Perhaps the outlaws had realized they could not force a physician to treat their sick comrade.

Godwyn returned to the altar and turned to face the monks. “We will finish the interrupted psalm,” he said, and he began singing.

The singing was still ragged. The monks were far too excited to adopt the proper attitude. All the same, they were back in their places and following their routine. Godwyn had prevailed.

“Amen,” Godwyn repeated.

One of the monks sneezed.

65

Soon after Godwyn fled, Elfric died of the plague.

Caris was sorry for Alice, his widow; but aside from that she could hardly help rejoicing that he was gone. He had bullied the weak and toadied to the strong, and the lies he had told at her trial almost got her hanged. The world was a better place without him. Even his building business would be better off run by his son-in-law, Harold Mason.

The parish guild elected Merthin as alderman in Elfric’s place. Merthin said it was like being made captain of a sinking ship.

As the deaths went on and on, and people buried their relatives, neighbours, friends, customers and employees, the constant horror seemed to brutalize many of them, until no violence or cruelty seemed shocking. People who thought they were about to die lost all restraint and followed their impulses regardless of the consequences.

Together, Merthin and Caris struggled to preserve something like normal life in Kingsbridge. The orphanage was the most successful part of Caris’s programme. The children were grateful for the security of the nunnery, after the ordeal of losing their parents to the plague. Taking care of them, and teaching them to read and sing hymns, brought out long-suppressed maternal instincts in some of the nuns. There was plenty of food with fewer people competing for the winter stores. And Kingsbridge Priory was full of the sound of children.

In the town things were more difficult. There continued to be violent quarrels over the property of the dead. People just walked into empty houses and picked up whatever took their fancy. Children who had inherited money, or a warehouse full of cloth or corn, were sometimes adopted by unscrupulous neighbours greedy to get their hands on the legacy. The prospect of something for nothing brought out the worst in people, Caris thought despairingly.

Caris and Merthin were only partly successful against the decline in public behaviour. Caris was disappointed with the results of John Constable’s crackdown on drunkenness. The large numbers of new widows and widowers seemed frantic to find partners, and it was not unusual to see middle-aged people in a passionate embrace in a tavern or even a doorway. Caris had no great objection to this sort of thing in itself, but she found that the combination of drunkenness and public licentiousness often led to fighting. However, Merthin and the parish guild were unable to stop it.

Just at the moment when the townspeople needed their spines stiffened, the flight of the monks had the opposite effect. It demoralized everyone. God’s representatives had left: the Almighty had abandoned the town. Some said that the relics of the saint had always brought good fortune, and now that the bones had gone their luck had run out. The lack of precious crucifixes and candlesticks at the Sunday services was a weekly reminder that Kingsbridge was considered doomed. So why not get drunk and fornicate in the street?

Out of a population of about seven thousand, Kingsbridge had lost at least a thousand by mid-January. Other towns were similar. Despite the masks Caris had invented, the death toll was higher among the nuns, no doubt because they were continually in contact with plague victims. There had been thirty-five nuns, and now there were twenty. But they heard of places where almost every monk or nun had died, leaving a handful, or sometimes just one, to carry on the work; so they counted themselves fortunate. Meanwhile, Caris had shortened the period of novitiate and intensified the training so that she would have more help in the hospital.

Merthin hired the barman from the Holly Bush and put him in charge of the Bell. He also took on a sensible seventeen-year-old girl called Martina to nursemaid Lolla.

Then the plague seemed to die down. Having buried a hundred people a week in the run-up to Christmas, Caris found that the number dropped to fifty in January, then twenty in February. She allowed herself to hope that the nightmare might be coming to an end.

One of the unlucky people to fall ill during this period was a dark-haired man in his thirties who might once have been good-looking. He was a visitor to the town. “I thought I had a cold yesterday,” he said when he came through the door. “But now I’ve got this nosebleed that won’t stop.” He was holding a bloody rag to his nostrils.