Page 240 of The Pillars of the Earth

“I think he loves you,” the girl said.

“What makes you say that?”

The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “I wanted him for myself. And I nearly got him.” She looked at the baby. “Red hair and blue eyes.” The tears ran down her smooth brown cheeks.

Aliena stared at her. This explained her hostile reception. The mother had wanted Jack to marry this girl. She could not have been more than sixteen, but she had a sensual look that made her seem older. Aliena wondered exactly what had happened between them. She said: “You ‘nearly’ got him?”

“Yes,” the girl said defiantly. “I knew he liked me. It broke my heart when he went away. But now I understand.” She lost her composure, and her face crumpled in grief.

Aliena could feel for a woman who had loved Jack and lost him. She touched the girl’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. But there was something more important than compassion. “Listen,” she said urgently. “Do you know where he went?”

The girl looked up and nodded, sobbing.

“Tell me!”

“Paris,” she said.

Paris!

Aliena was jubilant. She was back on the trail. Paris was a long way, but the journey would be mostly over familiar ground. And Jack was only a month ahead of her. She felt rejuvenated. I’ll find him, in the end, she thought; I know I will!

“Are you going to Paris now?” the girl said.

“Oh, yes,” Aliena said. “I’ve come this far—I won’t stop now. Thank you for telling me—thank you.”

“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.