may march me up the aisle," Philippa raged. She pointed at Bishop Henri. "But when the bishop asks me if I take Ralph Fitzgerald to be my husband I will not say yes! I will not! Never, never, never!"
She stormed out of the room, and Odila followed.
When the banquet was over, the townspeople returned to their homes, and the important guests went to their rooms to sleep off the feast. Caris supervised the clearing up. She felt sorry for Philippa, profoundly sorry, knowing - as Philippa did not - that Ralph had killed his first wife. But she was concerned about the fate of an entire town, not just one person. Her mind was on her scheme for Kingsbridge. Things had gone better than she imagined. The townspeople had cheered her, and the bishop had agreed to everything she proposed. Perhaps civilization would return to Kingsbridge, despite the plague.
Outside the back door, where there was a pile of meat bones and crusts of bread, she saw Godwyn's cat, Archbishop, delicately picking at the carcase of a duck. She shooed it away. It scampered a few yards then slowed to a stiff walk, its white-tipped tail arrogantly upstanding.
Deep in thought, she went up the stairs of the palace, thinking of how she would begin implementing the changes agreed to by Henri. Without pausing, she opened the door of the bedroom she shared with Merthin and stepped inside.
For a moment she was disoriented. Two men stood in the middle of the room, and she thought: I must be in the wrong house, and then: I must be in the wrong room, before she remembered that her room, being the best bedroom, had naturally been given to the bishop.
The two men were Henri and his assistant, Canon Claude. It took Caris a moment to realize that they were both naked, with their arms around one another, kissing.
She stared at them in shock. "Oh!" she said.
They had not heard the door. Until she spoke, they did not realize they were observed. When they heard her gasp of surprise they both turned towards her. A look of horrified guilt came over Henri's face, and his mouth fell open.
"I'm sorry!" Caris said.
The men sprang apart, as if hoping they might be able to deny what was going on; then they remembered they were naked. Henri was plump, with a round belly and fat arms and legs, and grey hair on his chest. Claude was younger and slimmer, with very little body hair except for a blaze of chestnut at his groin. Caris had never before looked at two erect penises at the same time.
"I beg your pardon!" she said, mortified with embarrassment. "My mistake. I forgot." She realized that she was babbling and they were dumbstruck. It did not matter: nothing that anyone could say would make the situation any better.
Coming to her senses, she backed out of the room and slammed the door.
Merthin walked away from the banquet with Madge Webber. He was fond of this small, chunky woman, with her chin jutting out in front and her bottom jutting out behind. He admired the way she had carried on after her husband and children had died of the plague. She had continued the enterprise, weaving cloth and dyeing it red according to Caris's recipe. She said to him: "Good for Caris. She's right, as usual. We can't go on like this."
"You've continued normally, despite everything," he said.
"My only problem is finding the people to do the work."
"Everyone is the same. I can't get builders."
"Raw wool is cheap, but rich people will still pay high prices for good scarlet cloth," Madge said. "I could sell more if I could produce more."
Merthin said thoughtfully: "You know, I saw a faster type of loom in Florence - a treadle loom."
"Oh?" She looked at him with alert curiosity. "I never heard of that."
He wondered how to explain. "In any loom, you stretch a number of threads over the frame to form what you call the warp, then you weave another thread crossways through the warp, under one thread and over the next, under and over, from one side to the other and back again, to form the weft."
"That's how simple looms work, yes. Ours are better."
"I know. To make the process quicker, you attach every second warp thread to a movable bar, called a heddle, so that when you shift the heddle, half the threads are lifted away from the rest. Then,