Ellen, who was probably used to coaxing sense out of him, said: “What’s on your mind, Alfred?”
“How do churches get started, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, if we want a stone church, what do we do?”
Ellen shrugged. “No idea.”
Aliena frowned. “You could form a parish guild,” she suggested. A parish guild was an association of people who held a banquet every now and again and collected money among themselves, usually to buy candles for their local church, or to help widows and orphans in the neighborhood. Small villages never had guilds, but Kingsbridge was no longer a village.
“How would that do it?” Alfred said.
“The members of the guild would pay for the new church,” Aliena said.
“Then we should start a guild,” Alfred said.
Aliena wondered if she had misjudged him. He had never struck her as the pious type, but here he was trying to raise money to build a new church. Perhaps he had hidden depths. Then she realized that Alfred was the only building contractor in Kingsbridge, so he was sure to get the job of building the church. He might not be intelligent, but he was shrewd enough.
Nevertheless she still liked his idea. Kingsbridge was becoming a town, and towns always had more than one church. With an alternative to the cathedral, the town would not be so completely dominated by the monastery. At the moment Philip was the undisputed lord and master here. He was a benevolent tyrant, but she could foresee a time when it might suit the merchants of the town to have an alternative church.
Alfred said: “Would you explain about the guild to some of the others?”
Aliena had recovered her breath after the race. She was reluctant to exchange the company of Ellen and Jack for that of Alfred, but she was quite enthusiastic about his idea, and anyway it would have been a little churlish to refuse. “I’d be glad to,” she said, and she got up and went with him.
The sun was going down. The monks had lit the bonfire and were serving the traditional ale spiced with ginger. Jack wanted to ask his mother a question, now that they were alone, but he was nervous. Then someone started to sing, and he knew she would join in at any moment, so he blurted it out. “Was my father a jongleur?”
She looked at him. She was surprised but not cross. “Who taught you that word?” she said. “You’ve never seen a jongleur.”
“Aliena. She used to go to France with her father.”
Mother gazed across the darkling meadow toward the bonfire. “Yes, he was a jongleur. He told me all those poems, just the way I told them to you. And are you now telling them to Aliena?”
“Yes.” Jack felt a little bashful.
“You really love her, don’t you?”
“Is it so obvious?”
She smiled fondly. “Only to me, I think. She’s a lot older than you.”
“Five years.”
“You’ll get her, though. You’re like your father. He could have any woman he wanted.”
Jack was embarrassed to talk about Aliena but thrilled to hear about his father, and he was eager for more; but to his intense annoyance Tom came up at that moment and sat down with them. He began to speak immediately. “I’ve been talking to Prior Philip about Jack,” he said. His tone was light, but Jack sensed tension underneath, and saw trouble coming. “Philip says the boy should be educated.”
Mother’s response was predictably indignant. “He is educated,” she said. “He can read and write English and French, he knows his numbers, he can recite whole bookfuls of poetry—”
“Now, don’t misunderstand me willfully,” Tom said firmly. “Philip didn’t say that Jack is ignorant. Quite the opposite. He’s saying that Jack is so clever he should havemoreeducation.”
Jack was not pleased by these compliments. He shared his mother’s suspicion of churchmen. There was sure to be a catch in this somewhere.
“More?” Ellen said scornfully. “What more does that monk want him to learn? I’ll tell you. Theology. Latin. Rhetoric. Metaphysics. Cow shit.”
“Don’t dismiss it so quickly,” Tom said mildly. “If Jack takes up Philip’s offer, and goes to school, and learns to write at speed in a good secretary’s hand, and studies Latin and theology and all the other subjects you call cow shit, he could become a clerk to an earl or a bishop, and eventually he could be a wealthy and powerful man. Not all barons are the sons of barons, as the saying goes.”
Ellen’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “If he takes up Philip’s offer, you said. What is Philip’s offer, exactly?”
“That Jack becomes a novice monk—”
“Over my dead body!” Ellen shouted, leaping to her feet. “The damned Church is not having my son! Those treacherous lying priests took his father but they’re not taking him, I’ll put a knife in Philip’s belly first, so help me, I swear by all the gods.”
