The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [436]
Jack looked affectionately at the two offspring of Aliena’s body: nine-year-old Tommy, a healthy red-haired boy, big for his age, shoveling lamb stew into his mouth as if he had not eaten for a week; and Sally, age seven, with dark curls like her mother’s, smiling happily and showing a gap between her front teeth just like the one Martha had had when Jack first saw her seventeen years ago. Tommy went to the school in the priory every morning to learn to read and write, but the monks would not take girls, so Aliena was teaching Sally.
Jack sat down, and Martha took the pot off the fire and set it on the table. Martha was a strange girl. She was past twenty years old, but she showed no interest in getting married. She had always been attached to Jack, and now she seemed perfectly content to be his housekeeper.
Jack presided over the oddest household in the county, without a doubt. He and Aliena were two of the leading citizens of the town: he the master builder at the cathedral and she the largest manufacturer of cloth outside Winchester. Everyone treated them as man and wife, yet they were forbidden to spend nights together, and they lived in separate houses, Aliena with her brother and Jack with his stepsister. Every Sunday afternoon, and on every holiday, they would disappear, and everyone knew what they were doing except, of course, Prior Philip. Meanwhile, Jack’s mother lived in a cave in the forest because she was supposed to be a witch.
Every now and again Jack got angry about not being allowed to marry Aliena. He would lie awake, listening to Martha snoring in the next room, and think: I’m twenty-eight years old—why am I sleeping alone? The next day he would be bad-tempered with Prior Philip, rejecting all the chapter’s suggestions and requests as impracticable or overexpensive, refusing to discuss alternatives or compromises, as if there were only one way to build a cathedral and that was Jack’s way. Then Philip would steer clear of him for a few days and let the storm blow over.
Aliena, too, was unhappy, and she took it out on Jack. She would become impatient and intolerant, criticizing everything he did, putting the children to bed as soon as he came in, saying she was not hungry when he ate. After a day or two of this mood she would burst into tears and say she was sorry, and they would be happy again, until the next time the strain became too much for her.
Jack ladled some stew into a bowl and began to eat. “Guess who came to the site this morning,” he said. “Alfred.”
Martha dropped an iron pot lid on the hearthstone with a loud clang. Jack looked at her and saw fear on her face. He turned to Aliena and saw that she had turned white.
Aliena said: “What’s he doing in Kingsbridge?”
“Looking for work. The famine has impoverished the merchants of Shiring, I guess, and they aren’t building stone houses like they used to. He’s dismissed his gang and he can’t find work.”
“I hope you threw him out on his tail,” Aliena said.
“He said I should give him a job for Tom’s sake,” Jack said nervously. He had not anticipated such a strong reaction from the two women. “After all, I owe everything to Tom.”
“Cow shit,” Aliena said, and Jack thought: she got that expression from my mother.
“Well, I hired him anyway,” he said.
“Jack!” Aliena screamed. “How could you? You can’t let him come back to Kingsbridge—that devil!”
Sally began to cry. Tommy stared wide-eyed at his mother. Jack said: “Alfred isn’t a devil. He’s hungry and penniless. I saved him, for the sake of his father’s memory.”
“You wouldn’t feel sorry for him if he’d forced you to sleep on the floor at the foot of his bed like a dog for nine months.”
“He’s done worse things to me—ask Martha.”
Martha said: “And to me.”
Jack said: “I just decided that seeing him like that was enough revenge for me.”
“Well it’s not