The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [392]
“I want him to be happy,” she said simply.
The servant fidgeted discontentedly. He looked as if he thought he might get into trouble over this. Aliena said to the girl: “Did he say anything else? Which road he would take, or anything that might help me?”
“He wants to go to Paris because someone told him they are building beautiful churches there.”
Aliena nodded. She could have guessed that.
“And he took the weeping lady.”
Aliena did not know what she meant. “The weeping lady?”
“My father gave him the weeping lady.”
“A lady?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know the right words. A lady. She weeps. From the eyes.”
“You mean a picture? A painted lady?”
“I don’t understand,” the girl said. She looked over her shoulder anxiously. “I have to go.”
Whatever the weeping lady was, it did not sound very important. “Thank you for helping me,” Aliena said.
The girl bent down and kissed the baby’s forehead. Her tears fell on his plump cheeks. She looked up at Aliena. “I wish I were you,” she said. Then she turned away and ran back into the house.
Jack’s lodgings were in the rue de la Boucherie, in a suburb of Paris on the left bank of the Seine. He saddled his horse at daybreak. At the end of the street he turned right and passed through the tower gate that guarded the Petit Pont, the bridge that led to the island city in the middle of the river.
The wooden houses on either side projected over the edges of the bridge. In the gaps between the houses were stone benches where, later in the morning, famous teachers would hold open-air classes. The bridge took Jack into the Juiverie, the island’s main street. The bakeries along the street were packed with students buying their breakfast. Jack got a pastry filled with cooked eel.
He turned left opposite the synagogue, then right at the king’s palace, and crossed the Grand Pont, the bridge that led to the right bank. The small, well-built shops of the moneychangers and goldsmiths on either side were beginning to open for business. At the end of the bridge he passed through another gatehouse and entered the fish market, where business was already brisk. He pushed through the crowds and started along the muddy road that led to the town of Saint-Denis.
When he was still in Spain he had heard, from a traveling mason, about Abbot Suger and the new church he was building at Saint-Denis. As he made his way northward through France that spring, working for a few days whenever he needed money, he heard Saint-Denis mentioned often. It seemed the builders were using both of the new techniques, rib-vaulting and pointed arches, and the combination was rather striking.
He rode for more than an hour through fields and vineyards. The road was not paved but it had milestones. It passed the hill of Montmartre, with a ruined Roman temple at its summit, and went through the village of Clignancourt. Three miles after Clignancourt he reached the small walled town of Saint-Denis.
Denis had been the first bishop of Paris. He had been decapitated at Montmartre and then had walked, carrying his severed head in his hands, out into the countryside to this spot, where at last he fell. A pious woman had buried him and a monastery had been erected over his grave. The church had become the burying place for the kings of France. The current abbot, Suger, was a powerful and ambitious man who had reformed the monastery and was now modernizing the church.
Jack entered the town and reined in his horse in the middle of the marketplace to look up at the west front of the church. There was nothing revolutionary here. It was a straightforward old-fashioned facade with twin towers and three round-arched doorways. He rather liked the aggressive way the piers thrust out from the wall, but he would not have ridden five miles to see that.
He tied his horse to a rail in front of the church and went closer. The sculpture around the three portals was quite good: lively subjects, precisely chiseled. Jack went in.
Inside there was an