73
On the morning of Tilly's burial, Caris and Merthin met on the roof of the cathedral at dawn.
The roof was a world apart. Calculating the acreage of slates was a perennial geometry exercise in the advanced mathematics class at the priory school. Workmen needed constant access for repairs and maintenance, so a network of walkways and ladders linked the slopes and ridges, corners and gulleys, turrets and pinnacles, gutters and gargoyles. The crossing tower had not yet been rebuilt, but the view from the top of the west facade was impressive.
The priory was already busy. This would be a big funeral. Tilly had been a nobody in life, but now she was the victim of a notorious murder, a noblewoman killed in a nunnery, and she would be mourned by people who had never spoken three words to her. Caris would have liked to discourage mourners, because of the risk of spreading the plague, but there was nothing she could do.
The bishop was already here, in the best room of the prior's palace - which was why Caris and Merthin had spent the night apart, she in the nuns' dormitory and he and Lolla at the Holly Bush. The grieving widower, Ralph, was in a private room upstairs at the hospital. His baby, Gerry, was being taken care of by the nuns. Lady Philippa and her daughter, Odila, the only other surviving relatives of the dead girl, were also staying at the hospital.
Neither Merthin nor Caris had spoken to Ralph when he arrived yesterday. There was nothing they could do, no way to get justice for Tilly, for they could prove nothing; but all the same they knew the truth. So far they had told no one what they believed: there was no point. During today's obsequies they would have to pretend something like normalcy with Ralph. It was going to be difficult.
While the important personages slept, the nuns and the priory employees were hard at work preparing the funeral dinner. Smoke was rising from the bakery, where dozens of long four-pound loaves of wheat bread were already in the oven. Two men were rolling a new barrel of wine across to the prior's house. Several novice nuns were setting up benches and a trestle table on the green for the common mourners.
As the sun rose beyond the river, throwing a slanting yellow light on the rooftops of Kingsbridge, Caris studied the marks made on the town by nine months of plague. From this height she could see gaps in the rows of houses, like bad teeth. Timber buildings collapsed all the time, of course - because of fire, rain damage, incompetent construction, or just old age. What was different now was that no one bothered to repair them. If your house fell down, you just moved into one of the empty homes in the same street. The only person building anything was Merthin, and he was seen as a mad optimist with too much money.
Across the river, the gravediggers were already at work in another newly consecrated cemetery. The plague showed no signs of relenting. Where would it end? Would the houses just continue to fall down, one at a time, until there was nothing left, and the town was a wasteland of broken tiles and scorched timbers, with a deserted cathedral in the middle and a hundred-acre graveyard at its edge?
'I'm not going to let this happen,' she said.
Merthin did not at first understand. 'The funeral?' he said, frowning.
Caris made a sweeping gesture to take in the city and the world beyond it. 'Everything. Drunks maiming one another. Parents abandoning their sick children on the doorstep of my hospital. Men queuing to fuck a drunken woman on a table outside the White Horse. Livestock dying in the pastures. Half-naked penitents whipping themselves then collecting pennies from bystanders. And, most of all, a young mother brutally murdered here in my nunnery. I don't care if we are all going to die of the plague. As long as we're still alive, I'm not going to let our world fall apart.'
'What are you going to do?'
She smiled gratefully at Merthin. Most people would have told her she was powerless to fight the situation, but he was always ready to believe in her. She looked at the stone angels carved on a pinnacle, their faces blurred by two hundred years of wind and rain, and she thought of the spirit that had moved the cathedral builders. 'We're going to reestablish order and routine here. We're going to force Kingsbridge people to return to normal, whether they like it or not. We're going to rebuild this town and its life, despite the plague.'
'All right,' he said.
'This is the moment to do it.'
'Because everyone is so angry about Tilly?'
'And because they're frightened at the thought that armed men can come into the town at night and murder whomever they will. They think no one's safe.'
'What will you do?'
'I'm going to tell them it must never happen again.'