Page 310 of The Pillars of the Earth

They were all the same. He saw his mother in the place of the dead. She was bleeding from her ears and eyes, and when she opened her mouth to speak, more blood came out. The sight filled him with mortal terror. In broad daylight he could not say what it was about the dream that he feared, for she did not threaten him in any way. But at night, when she came to him, the fear possessed him totally, an irrational, hysterical, blind panic. Once as a boy he had waded into a pond that suddenly got deeper, and he had found himself below the surface and unable to breathe; and the overpowering need for air that had possessed him then was one of the indelible memories of his childhood; but this was ten times as bad. Trying to get away from his mother’s bloody face was like trying to sprint in quicksand. He would come awake as if he had been thrown across the room, violently shocked, sweating and moaning, his body taut with agony from the racked-up tension. Walter would be at his bedside with a candle—William slept in the hall, separated from the men by a screen, for there was no bedroom here. “You cried out, lord,” Walter would murmur. William would breathe hard, staring at the real bed and the real wall and the real Walter, while the power of the nightmare slowly faded to the point where he was no longer afraid; and then he would say: “It was nothing, a dream, go away.” But he would be frightened to go back to sleep. And the next day the men would look at him as if he were bewitched.

A few days after his conversation with Remigius, he was sitting in the same hard chair, by the same smoky fire, when Bishop Waleran walked in.

William was startled. He had heard horses, but he had assumed it was Walter, coming back from the mill. He did not know what to do when he saw the bishop. Waleran had always been arrogant and superior, and time and time again he had made William feel foolish, clumsy and coarse. It was humiliating that Waleran should see the humble surroundings in which he now lived.

William did not get up to greet his visitor. “What do you want?” he said curtly. He had no reason to be polite: he wanted Waleran to get out as soon as possible.

The bishop ignored his rudeness. “The sheriff is dead,” he said.

At first William did not see what he was getting at. “What’s that to me?”

“There will be a new sheriff.”

William was about to saySo what?but he stopped himself. Waleran was concerned about who would be the new sheriff. And he had come to talk to William about it. That could only mean one thing, couldn’t it? Hope rose in his breast, but he suppressed it fiercely: where Waleran was involved, high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment. He said: “Who have you got in mind?”

“You.”

It was the answer William had not dared to hope for. He wished he could believe in it. A clever and ruthless sheriff could be almost as important and influential as an earl or a bishop. This could be his way back to wealth and power. He forced himself to consider the snags. “Why would King Stephen appoint me?”

“You supported him against Duke Henry, and as a result you lost your earldom. I imagine he would like to recompense you.”

“Nobody ever does anything out of gratitude,” William said, repeating a saying of his mother’s.

Waleran said: “Stephen can’t be happy that the earl of Shiring is a man who fought against him. He might want his sheriff to be a countervailing force against Richard.”

Now that made more sense. William felt excited against his will. He began to believe that he might actually get out of this hole in the ground called Hamleigh village. He would have a respectable force of knights and men-at-arms again, instead of the pitiful handful he now supported. He would preside over the county court at Shiring, and frustrate Richard’s will. “The sheriff lives at Shiring Castle,” he said longingly.

“You’d be rich again,” Waleran added.

“Yes.” Properly exploited, the sheriffs post could be hugely profitable. William would make almost as much money as he had when he was earl. But he wondered why Waleran had mentioned it.

A moment later Waleran answered the question. “You would be able to finance the new church, after all.”

So that was it. Waleran never did anything without an ulterior motive. He wanted William to be sheriff so that William could build him a church. But William was willing to go along with the plan. If he could finish the church in memory of his mother, perhaps the nightmares would stop. “Do you really think it can be done?” he said eagerly.

Waleran nodded. “It will cost money, of course, but I think it can be done.”

“Money?” William said with sudden anxiety. “How much?”

“It’s hard to say. In somewhere like Lincoln or Bristol, the shrievalty would cost you five or six hundred pounds; but the sheriffs of those towns are richer than cardinals. For a little place such as Shiring, if you’re the candidate the king wants—which I can take care of—you can probably get it for a hundred pounds.”

“A hundred pounds!” William’s hopes collapsed. He had been afraid of disappointment, right from the start. “If I had a hundred pounds I wouldn’t be living like this!” he said bitterly.

“You can get it,” Waleran said lightly.

“Who from?” William was struck by a thought. “Will you give it to me?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Waleran said with infuriating condescension. “That’s what Jews are for.”

William realized, with a familiar mixture of hope and resentment, that once again the bishop was right.

It was two years since the first cracks had appeared, and Jack had not found a solution to the problem. Worse still, identical cracks had appeared in the first bay of the nave. There was something crucially wrong with his design. The structure was strong enough to support the weight of the vault, but not to resist the winds that blew so hard against the high walls.

He stood on the scaffolding far above the ground, staring close-range at the new cracks, brooding. He needed to think of a way of bracing the upper part of the wall so that it would not move with the wind.

He reflected on the way the lower part of the wall was strengthened. In the outer wall of the aisle were strong, thick piers which were connected to the nave wall by half-arches hidden in the aisle roof. The half-arches and the piers propped up the wall at a distance, like remote buttresses. Because the props were hidden, the nave looked light and graceful.

He needed to devise a similar system for the upper part of the wall. He could make a two-story side aisle, and simply repeat the remote buttressing; but that would block the light coming in through the clerestory—and the whole idea of the new style of building was to bring more light into the church.