Page 345 of The Pillars of the Earth

Suddenly he knew where to go from here. “Let us begin our crusade now!” he said.

“Yes!”

“We’ll carry this sword along every street in Canterbury!”

“Yes!”

“And we’ll tell every citizen within the walls what we have witnessed here tonight!”

“Yes!”

“Bring candles, and follow me!”

Holding the sword high, he marched straight down the middle of the cathedral.

They followed him.

Feeling exultant, he went through the chancel, over the crossing, and down the nave. Some of the monks and priests walked beside him. He did not need to look back: he could hear the footsteps of a hundred people marching behind him. He went out of the main door.

There he had a moment of anxiety. Across the dark orchard he could see men-at-arms ransacking the archbishop’s palace. If his followers confronted them, the crusade might turn into a brawl when it had hardly got started. Suddenly afraid, he turned sharply away and led the crowd through the nearest gate into the street.

One of the monks started a hymn. There were lamps and firelight behind the shutters of the houses, but as the procession passed by, people opened their doors to see what was going on. Some of them questioned the marchers. Some joined in.

Philip turned a corner and saw William Hamleigh.

William was standing outside a stable, and looked as if he had just taken off his chain mail prior to mounting a horse and leaving the city. He had a handful of men with him. They were all looking up expectantly, presumably having heard the singing and wondered what was going on.

As the candlelit procession approached, William at first looked mystified. Then he saw the broken sword in Philip’s hand, and comprehension dawned. He stared in awestruck silence for a moment more, then he spoke. “Stop this!” he shouted. “I command you to disperse!”

Nobody took any notice. The men with William looked anxious: even with their swords they were vulnerable to a mob of more than a hundred fervent mourners.

William addressed Philip directly. “In the name of the king, I order you to stop this!”

Philip swept past him, borne forward by the press of the crowd. “Too late, William!” he cried over his shoulder. “Too late!”

III

The small boys came early to the hanging.

They were already there, in the market square at Shiring, throwing stones at cats and abusing beggars and fighting one another, when Aliena arrived, alone and on foot, wearing a cheap cloak with a hood to hide her identity.

She stood at a distance, looking at the scaffold. She had not intended to come. She had witnessed too many hangings during the years when she had played the role of earl. Now that she no longer had that responsibility, she had thought she would be happy if she never saw another man hanged for the rest of her life. But this one was different.

She was no longer acting as earl because her brother, Richard, had been killed in Syria—not in battle, ironically, but in an earthquake. The news had taken six months to reach her. She had not seen him for fifteen years, and now she would never see him again.

Up the hill, the castle gates opened, and the prisoner came out with his escort, followed by the new earl of Shiring, Aliena’s son, Tommy.

Richard had never had children, so his heir was his nephew. The king, stunned and enfeebled by the Becket scandal, had taken the line of least resistance and rapidly confirmed Tommy as earl. Aliena had handed over to the younger generation readily. She had achieved what she wanted to with the earldom. It was once again a rich, thriving county, a land of fat sheep and green fields and sturdy mills. Some of the larger and more progressive landowners had followed her lead in switching to horse plowing, feeding the horses on oats grown under the three-field system of crop rotation. In consequence the land could feed even more people than it had under her father’s enlightened rule.

Tommy would be a good earl. It was what he was born to do. Jack had refused to see it for a long time, wanting his son to be a builder; but eventually he had been forced to admit the truth. Tommy had never been able to cut a stone in a straight line, but he was a natural leader, and at twenty-eight years of age he was decisive, determined, intelligent and fair-minded. He was usually called Thomas now.

When he took over, people expected Aliena to stay at the castle, nag her daughter-in-law and play with her grandchildren. She had laughed at them. She liked Tommy’s wife—a pretty girl, one of the younger daughters of the earl of Bedford—and she adored her three grandchildren, but at the age of fifty-two she was not ready to retire. She and Jack had taken a big stone house near the Kingsbridge Priory—in what had once been the poor quarter, although it was no longer—and she had gone back into the wool business, buying and selling, negotiating with all her old energy, and making money hand over fist.

The hanging party came into the square, and Aliena emerged from her reverie. She looked closely at the prisoner, stumbling along at the end of a rope, his hands tied behind his back. It was William Hamleigh.

Someone in the front spat at him. The crowd in the square was large, for a lot of people were happy to see the last of William, and even for those who had no grudge against him it was quite something to see a former sheriff hanged. But William had been involved in the most notorious murder anybody could remember.

Aliena had never known or imagined anything like the reaction to the killing of Archbishop Thomas. The news had spread like wildfire through the whole of Christendom, from Dublin to Jerusalem and from Toledo to Oslo. The pope had gone into mourning. The continental half of King Henry’s empire had been placed under interdict, which meant the churches were closed and there were no services except baptism. In England, people had started making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, just as if it were a shrine like Santiago de Compostela. And there had been miracles. Water tinctured with the martyr’s blood, and shreds of the mantle he had been wearing when he was killed, cured sick people not just in Canterbury but all over England.