The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [328]
The sun was edging over the east wall of the priory close. Everything was in order on the site. The stall holders who had spent the night with their goods were beginning to fold away their bedding and put out their wares. The first customers would be here soon. A baker walked past Jack carrying a tray of new loaves on her head. The smell of hot fresh bread made Jack’s mouth water. He turned and went back to the monastery, heading for the refectory, where they would soon be serving breakfast.
The first customers were the families of the stall holders and the townspeople, all curious to look at the first Kingsbridge Fleece Fair, none very interested in buying. Thrifty people had filled their bellies with horsebread and porridge before leaving home, so that they would not be tempted by the highly spiced and garishly colored confections on the food stalls. The children wandered around wide-eyed, dazzled by the display of desirable things. An optimistic early-rising whore with red lips and red boots sauntered along, smiling hopefully at middle-aged men, but there were no takers at this hour.
Aliena watched it all from her stall, which was one of the biggest. In the last few weeks she had taken delivery of Kingsbridge Priory’s entire output of fleece for the year; the wool for which she had paid a hundred and seven pounds last summer. She had also been buying from farmers, as she always did; and this year there had been more sellers than usual, because William Hamleigh had forbidden his tenants to sell at the Kingsbridge fair, so they had all sold to merchants. And of all the merchants, Aliena had got the most business, because she was based at Kingsbridge where the fair was to be held. She had done so well that she had run out of money for buying, and had borrowed forty pounds from Malachi to keep her going. Now, in the warehouse that formed the rear half of her stall, she had a hundred and sixty sacks of raw wool, the product of forty thousand sheep, and it had cost her more than two hundred pounds, but she would sell it for three hundred, which was enough money to pay the wages of a skilled mason for over a century. The sheer scale of her own business amazed her whenever she thought of the numbers.
She did not expect to see her buyers until midday. There would be only five or six of them. They would all know each other, and she would know most of them from previous years. She would give each one a cup of wine, and sit and talk for a while. Then she would show him her wool. He would ask her to open a sack or two—never the top one on the pile, of course. He would plunge his hand deep into the sack and bring out a handful of wool. He would tease out the strands to determine their length, rub them between finger and thumb to test their softness, and sniff them. Finally he would offer to buy her entire stock at a ridiculously low price, and Aliena would refuse him. She would tell him her asking price, and he would shake his head. They would take another glass of wine.
Aliena would go through the same ritual with another buyer. She would give dinner to as many of them as were there at midday. Someone would offer to take a large quantity of wool at a price not much above what Aliena had paid for it. She would counter by dropping her asking price a shade. In the early afternoon she would begin closing deals. Her first deal would be at a lowish price. The other merchants would demand that she deal with them at the same price, but she would refuse. Her price would go up during the course of the afternoon. If it went up too fast, business would be slow, while the merchants calculated how soon they could fill their quotas elsewhere. If she was asking less than they were willing to pay, she would know by the relative haste with which they reached agreement. She would close deals one by one, and their servants would begin