The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [396]
Aliena shyly undid the laced front of her dress and gave her nipple to the baby. She caught Jack looking at her and flushed. She cleared her throat and spoke to cover her embarrassment. “Do you know what you’d like to call him?” she said awkwardly. “Jack, perhaps?”
“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful. “Jack was the father I never knew. It might be bad luck to give our son the same name. The nearest I ever had to a real father was Tom Builder.”
“Would you like to call him Tom?”
“I think I would.”
“Tom was such a big man. How about Tommy?”
Jack nodded. “Tommy it is.”
Oblivious of the significance of the moment, Tommy had fallen asleep, having sucked his fill. Aliena put him down on the ground with a kerchief folded under his head for a pillow. Then she looked at Jack. She felt awkward. She wanted him to make love to her, right here on the grass, but she felt sure he would be shocked if she asked him, so she just looked at him and hoped.
He said: “If I tell you something, will you promise not to think badly of me?”
“All right.”
He looked embarrassed, and said: “Ever since I saw you, I can hardly think of anything but the naked body under your dress.”
She smiled. “I don’t think badly of you,” she said. “I’m glad.”
He stared at her hungrily.
She said: “I love it when you look at me like that.”
He swallowed drily.
She held out her arms, and he came to her and embraced her.
It was almost two years since the one and only time they had made love. That morning they had both been swept away by desire and regret. Now they were just two lovers in a field. Aliena suddenly felt anxious. Would it be all right? How terrible if something went wrong, after all this time.
They lay down on the grass side by side and kissed. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. She felt his eager hand on her body, exploring urgently. There was a quickening in her loins. He kissed her eyelids and the end of her nose, and said: “All this time, I ached for you, every day.”
She hugged him hard. “I’m so glad I found you,” she said.
They made gentle, happy love in the open air, with the sun beating down on them and the stream burbling beside them; and Tommy slept through it all, and woke up when it was over.
The wooden statue of the lady had not wept since it left Spain. Jack did not understand how it worked, so he could not be sure why it would not weep outside its own country. However, he had an idea that the tears that came at nightfall were caused by the sudden cooling of the air, and he had noticed that sunsets were more gradual in northern territories, so he suspected that the problem had to do with the slower nightfall. He still kept the statue, however. It was rather bulky to carry around, but it was a souvenir of Toledo, and it reminded him of Raschid, and (although he did not tell Aliena this) of Aysha as well. But when a stonemason at Saint-Denis wanted a model for a statue of the Virgin, Jack brought the wooden lady to the masons’ lodge, and left it there.
He had been hired by the abbey to work on the rebuilding of the church. The new chancel, which had so devastated him, was not quite complete, and had to be finished in time for the dedication ceremony at midsummer; but the energetic abbot was already preparing to rebuild the nave in the same revolutionary style, and Jack was hired to carve stones in advance for that.
The abbey rented him a house in the village, and he moved in, along with Aliena and Tommy. During the first night they spent in the house they made love five times. Living together as man and wife seemed the most natural thing in the world. After a few days Jack felt as if they had always lived together. Nobody asked whether their union had been blessed by the church.
The master builder at Saint-Denis was the greatest mason Jack had ever met, easily.