close eye on both building projects. The priory had lost its power to control the town merchants, but nevertheless Caris took an interest in the work Merthin and the guild were doing to create all the institutions of a borough - establishing new courts, planning a wool exchange and encouraging the craft guilds to codify standards and measures. But his thoughts about her always had an unpleasant aftertaste, like the bitterness left at the back of the throat by sour beer. He had loved her totally, and she had, in the end, rejected him. It was like remembering a happy day that had ended with a fight.
"Do you think I'm peculiarly attracted to women who aren't free?" he said idly to Philippa.
"No, why?"
"It does seem odd that after twelve years of loving a nun, and nine months of celibacy, I should fall for my brother's wife."
"Don't call me that," she said quickly. "It was no marriage. I was wedded against my will, I shared his bed for no more than a few days, and he will be happy if he never sees me again."
He patted her shoulder apologetically. "But still, we have to be secretive, just as I did with Caris." What he was not saying was that a man was entitled, by law, to kill his wife if he caught her committing adultery. Merthin had never known it happen, certainly among the nobility, but Ralph's pride was a terrible thing. Merthin knew, and had told Philippa, that Ralph had killed his first wife, Tilly.
She said: "Your father loved your mother hopelessly for a long time, didn't he?"
"So he did!" Merthin had almost forgotten that old story.
"And you fell for a nun."
"And my brother spent years pining for you, the happily married wife of a nobleman. As the priests say, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. But enough of this. Do you want some supper?"
"In a moment."
"There's something you want to do first?"
"You know."
He did know. He knelt between her legs and kissed her belly and her thighs. It was a peculiarity of hers that she always wanted to come twice. He began to tease her with his tongue. She groaned, and pressed the back of his head. "Yes," she said. "You know how I like that, especially when I'm full of your seed."
He lifted his head. "I do," he said. Then he bent again to his task.
The spring brought a respite in the plague. People were still dying, but fewer were falling ill. On Easter Sunday, Bishop Henri announced that the Fleece Fair would take place as usual this year.
At the same service, six novices took their vows and so became full-fledged monks. They had all had an extraordinarily short novitiate, but Henri was keen to raise the number of monks at Kingsbridge, and he said the same thing was going on all over the country. In addition five priests were ordained - they, too, benefiting from an accelerated training programme - and sent to replace plague victims in the surrounding countryside. And two Kingsbridge monks came down from university, having received their degrees as physicians in three years instead of the usual five or seven.
The new doctors were Austin and Sime. Caris remembered both of them rather vaguely: she had been guest master when they left, three years ago, to go to Kingsbridge College in Oxford. On the afternoon of Easter Monday she showed them around the almost-completed new hospital. No builders were at work as it was a holiday.
Both had the bumptious self-confidence that the university seemed to instil in its graduates along with medical theories and a taste for Gascon wine. However, years of dealing with patients had given Caris a confidence of her own, and she described the hospital's facilities and the way she planned to run it with brisk assurance.
Austin was a slim, intense young man with thinning fair hair. He was impressed with the innovative new cloister-like layout of the rooms. Sime, a little older and round-faced, did not seem eager to learn from Caris's experience: she noticed that he always looked away when she was talking.
"I believe a hospital should always be clean," she said.
"On what grounds?" Sime inquired in a condescending tone, as if asking a little girl why Dolly had to be spanked.
"Cleanliness is a virtue."
"Ah. So it has nothing to do with the balance of humours in the body."
"I have no idea. We don't pay too much attention to