The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [126]
The monk at the head of the procession unlocked the door to the church with a huge iron key. The monks filed in. No one turned around to look in Jack’s direction. Most of them appeared to be half asleep. They did not close the church door behind them.
When he had recovered his composure Jack realized that now he could get into the church.
His legs felt too weak to walk.
I could just go in, he thought. I don’t have to do anything when I’m inside. I’ll look and see whether it is possible to get up to the roof. I might not set fire to it. I’ll just take a look.
He took a deep breath, then stepped out of the archway and padded across the quadrangle. He hesitated at the open door and peeped in. There were candles on the altar, and in the quire where the monks stood in their stalls, but the light merely made small pools in the middle of the big empty space, leaving the walls and the aisles in deep gloom. One of the monks was doing something incomprehensible at the altar, and the others would occasionally chant a few phrases of mumbo jumbo. It seemed incredible to Jack that people should get up out of warm beds in the middle of the night to do something like this.
He slipped through the door and stood close to the wall.
He was inside. The darkness concealed him. However, he could not stay right there, for they would see him on their way out. He sidled farther in. The flickering candles threw restless shadows. The monk at the altar might have seen Jack, if he had looked up, but he seemed completely absorbed in what he was doing. Jack moved quickly from the cover of one mighty pillar to the next, pausing in between so that his movements would be irregular, like the shifting of the shadows. The light became brighter as he neared the crossing. He was afraid the monk at the altar would look up suddenly, see him, bound across to the transept, pick him up by the scruff of the neck—
He reached the corner and turned gratefully into the deeper shadows of the nave.
He paused for a moment, feeling relieved. Then he retreated along the aisle toward the west end of the church, still pausing irregularly, as he would if he were stalking a deer. When he was in the farthest, darkest part of the church, he sat down on the plinth of a column to wait for the service to end.
He put his chin down inside his cloak and breathed on his chest to warm himself. His life had changed so much in the last two weeks that it seemed years ago that he had lived contentedly in the forest with his mother. He knew he would never feel as safe again. Now that he knew about hunger, and cold, and danger, and desperation, he would always be afraid of them.
He peeped around the pillar. Above the altar, where the candles were brightest, he could just make out the high wooden ceiling. Newer churches had stone vaults, he knew, but Kingsbridge was old. That wooden ceiling would burn well.
I’m not going to do it, he thought.
Tom would be so happy if the cathedral burned down. Jack was not sure he liked Tom—he was too forceful, commanding and harsh. Jack was used to his mother’s milder ways. But Jack was impressed by Tom, even awestruck. The only other men Jack had come across were outlaws; dangerous, brutish men who respected only violence and cunning, men for whom the ultimate achievement was to knife someone in the back. Tom was a new type of being, proud and fearless even without a weapon. Jack would never forget the way Tom had faced up to William Hamleigh, the time when Lord William had offered to buy Mother for a pound. What struck Jack so vividly was that Lord William had been scared. Jack told his mother that he had never imagined a man could be as brave as Tom was, and she said: “That was why we had to leave the forest. You need a man to look up to.”
Jack was puzzled by that remark, but it was true that he would like to do something to impress Tom. Setting fire to the cathedral was not the thing, though. It would be better if nobody knew