Thomas put his hand into another bag. When he looked at what he had got hold of, it was a skull. He gave a fearful cry and dropped it.

“St Adolphus,” Merthin said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Pilgrims travel hundreds of miles to touch the box that holds his bones.” He picked up the skull. “Lucky us,” he said, and put it back into the bag.

“If I may make a suggestion?” said Caris. “We have to carry this stuff all the way back to Kingsbridge in a cart. Why don’t we leave it in the coffin? It’s packed already, and the casket may serve to deter thieves.”

“Good idea,” Merthin said. “We’ll just lift the coffin out of the grave.”

Thomas returned to the priory and brought ropes, and they lifted the coffin out of the hole. They re-fixed the lid, then tied the ropes around the box in order to drag it across the ground and into the church.

As they were about to start, they heard a scream.

Caris let out a cry of fear.

They all looked towards the church. A figure was running towards them, eyes staring, blood coming from its mouth. Caris suffered a moment of utter terror when she suddenly believed every foolish superstition she had ever heard about spirits. Then she realized she was looking at Godwyn. Somehow he had found the strength to rise from his death bed. He had staggered out of the church and seen their torches, and now in his madness he was running towards them.

They watched him, transfixed.

He stopped and looked at the coffin, then at the empty grave, and in the restless torchlight Caris thought she saw a glimmer of understanding on his grimacing face. Then he seemed to lose his strength, and he collapsed. He fell on the mound of earth beside Jonquil’s empty grave, then he rolled down the mound and into the pit.

They all stepped forward and looked into the grave.

Godwyn lay there on his back, looking up at them with open, sightless eyes.

66

As soon as Caris got back to Kingsbridge, she decided to leave again.

The image of St-John-in-the-Forest that stayed with her was not the graveyard, nor the corpses Merthin and Thomas had dug up, but the neat fields with no one tilling them. As she rode home, with Merthin beside her and Thomas driving the cart, she saw a lot of land in the same state, and she foresaw a crisis.

The monks and nuns got most of their income from rents. Serfs grew crops and raised livestock on land belonging to the priory and, instead of paying a knight or an earl for the privilege, they paid the prior or prioress. Traditionally they brought a portion of their harvest to the cathedral – a dozen sacks of flour, three sheep, a calf, a cartload of onions – but nowadays most people paid cash.

If no one was cultivating the land, there would be no rent paid, obviously. And then what would the nuns eat?

The cathedral ornaments, the money and the charters she had retrieved from St-John-in-the-Forest were stashed safely in the new, secret treasury that Mother Cecilia had commissioned Jeremiah to build in a place where no one could easily find it. All the ornaments had been found except one, a gold candlestick given by the chandlers’ guild, the group that represented the wax-candle makers of Kingsbridge. That had disappeared.

Caris held a triumphant Sunday service featuring the rescued bones of the saint. She put Thomas in charge of the boys in the orphanage – some of them were old enough to require a strong male presence. She herself moved into the prior’s palace, thinking with pleasure how appalled the late Godwyn would be that it was occupied by a woman. Then, as soon as she had dealt with these details, she went to Outhenby.

The vale of Outhen was a fertile valley of heavy clay soil a day’s journey from Kingsbridge. It had been given to the nuns a hundred years ago by a wicked old knight making a last-gasp attempt to win forgiveness for a lifetime of sins. Five villages stood at intervals along the banks of the river Outhen. On either side the great fields covered the land and the lower slopes of the hills.

The fields were divided into strips allocated to different families. As she had feared, many strips were not being cultivated. The plague had changed everything, but no one had had the brains – or perhaps the courage – to reorganize farming in the light of the new circumstances. Caris herself would have to do that. She had a rough idea of what was required, and she would work out the details as she went along.

With her was Sister Joan, a young nun recently out of her novitiate. Joan was a bright girl who reminded Caris of herself ten years ago – not in appearance, for she was black-haired and blue-eyed, but in her questioning mind and brisk scepticism.

They rode to the largest of the villages, Outhenby. The bailiff for the whole valley, Will, lived there in a large timber house next to the church. He was not at home, but they found him in the farthest field, sowing oats; a big, slow-moving man. The next strip had been left fallow, and wild grass and weeds were poking up, grazed by a few sheep.

Will Bailiff visited the priory several times a year, usually to bring the rents from the villages, so he knew Caris; but he was disconcerted to meet her on his home ground. “Sister Caris!” he exclaimed when he recognized her. “What brings you here?”

“I’m Mother Caris now, Will, and I’ve come to make sure the nuns’ lands are being properly husbanded.”

“Ah.” He shook his head. “We’re doing our best, as you see, but we’ve lost so many men that it’s very, very difficult.”

Bailiffs always said that times were difficult – but in this case it was true.

Caris dismounted. “Walk with me and tell me about it.” A few hundred yards away, on the gentle slope of a hillside, she saw a peasant ploughing with a team of eight oxen. He halted the team and looked at her curiously, so she headed that way.

Will began to recover his composure. Walking alongside her, he said: “A woman of God, such as yourself, can’t be expected to know much about tilling the soil, of course; but I’ll do my best to explain the finer points.”

“That would be kind.” She was used to being condescended to by men of Will’s type. She had found that it was best not to challenge them, but rather to lull them into a false sense of security. That way, she learned more. “How many men have you lost to the plague?”

“Oh, many men.”

“How many?”

“Well, now, let me see, there was William Jones, and his two sons; then Richard Carpenter, and his wife-”

“I don’t need to know their names,” she said, controlling her exasperation. “How many, roughly speaking?”

“I’d have to think about that.”

They had reached the plough. Managing the eight-ox team was a skilled job, and ploughmen were often among the more intelligent villagers. Caris addressed the young man. “How many people in Outhenby have died of the plague?”

“About two hundred, I’d say.”

Caris studied him. He was short but muscular, with a bushy blond beard. He had a cocksure look, as young men often did. “Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Harry, and my father was Richard, holy sister.”

“I am Mother Caris. How do you work out that figure of two hundred?”

“There’s forty-two dead here in Outhenby, by my reckoning. It’s just as bad in Ham and Shortacre, making about a hundred and twenty. Longwater escaped completely, but every soul in Oldchurch is dead but old Roger Breton, which is about eighty people, making two hundred.”

She turned to Will. “Out of about how many in the whole valley?”

“Ah, now, let me see…”

Harry Ploughman said: “A thousand, near enough, before the plague.”

Will said: “That’s why you see me sowing my own strip, which should be done by labourers – but I have no labourers. They’ve all died.”

Harry said: “Or they’ve gone to work elsewhere for higher wages.”