Her nose itched and she turned her head

Her nose itched and she turned her head so that she could rub it against the pillow. She was sweating. It was airless and hot in the room. She had on a simple nightdress that was bunching up beneath her. If she moved her hips she could just hold the cloth with her first two fingers and pull the nightdress down on one side, a couple of centimetres at a time. She did the same on the other side. But there was still a fold under the small of her back. He mattress was lumpy. Her isolation sharply amplified all the tiny sensations that she would not otherwise have noticed. The harness was loose enough that she could change position and lie on her side, but that was uncomfortable because then she had to keep one hand behind her, which kept making her arm go to sleep.
She was not afraid . But she did feel a great, pent-up rage.
At the same time she was troubled by unpleasant fantasies about what was going to happen to her. She detested this helplessness. No matter how hard she tried to concentrate on something else – to pass the time and to distract her from the situation she was in – the fear came tricking out. It hovered like a cloud of gas around her, threatening to penetrate her pores and poison her. She had discovered that the most effective method of keeping the fear at bay was to fantasize about something that gave her a feeling of strenth. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of petrol.
He was sitting in a car with the window rolled down. She ran to the car, poured the petrol through the window, and lit a match. It took only a moment. The flames blazed up. He writhed in agony and she heard his screams of terror and pain. She could smell burnt flesh and a more acrid stentch of plastic and upholstery turning to carbon in the seats.
From the book “The girl who played with fire.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

Salander decided that she did not like advocat Bjurman.

Salander decided that she did not like advocat Bjurman. She studied him furtively as he read through her casebook. Age: over fifty. Trim body. Tennis on Tuesdays and Fridays. Blond. Thinning hair. A single cleft in his chin. Hugo Boss aftershave. Blue shuit. Red tie with a gold tiepin and ostentatious cufflinks with the initials N.E.B. Steelrimmed glasses. Grey eyes. To judge by the magazines on the side table, his interes were in hunting and shooting.
During the years she had known Palmgreen, he had always offered her coffee and chatted with her. Not even her worst escapes from foster homes or her regular truancy from school had ever ruffled his composure. The only time Palmgreen had been really upset was when she had been charged with assault and battery after that scumbag had groped her in Gamla Stan. Do you understand wuat you’ve done? You have harmed another human being, Lisbeth. He had sounded like an old teacher ans she had patiently ignored every word of his scolding.
Bjurman did not have time for small talk. He had immediately concluded that here was a discrepancy between Palmgreen’s obligations, according to the regulations of guardianship, and the fact that he had apparently allowed the Salander girl to take charge of her own household and finances. Bjurman started in on a sort of interrogation: How much do you earn? I want a copy of your financial records. Who do you spend time with? Do you pay your rent on time? Do you drink? Did Palmgreen approve of those rings you have on your face? Are you careful about hygiene)
Fuck you.
From the book “The girl with the dragon tattoo.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

At 2.15, a few minutes after Harriet came home

“At 2.15, a few minutes after Harriet came home, a dramatic accident occurred out there on the bridge. A man called Gustav Aronson, brother of a farmer at Östergarden – a smallholding on Hedeby Island – turned on to the bridge and crashed head-on with an oil truck. Evidently both were going too fast and what should have been a minor collision proved a catastrophe. The driver of the truck, presumably instinctively, turned his wheel away from the car, hit the railing of the bridge and the tanker flipped over; it ended up across the bridge with its trailer hanging over the edge. One of the railings had been driven into the oil tank and flammable heating oil began spurting out. In the meantime Aronsson sat pinned inside his car, screaming in pain. The tanker driver was also injured but managed to scramble out of his cabin.”
The old man went back to his chair.
“The accident actually had nothing to do with Harriet. But it was significant in a crucial way. A shambles ensued: people on both sides of the bridge hurried to try to help; the risk of fire was significant and a major alarm was sounded. Police officers, an ambulance, the rescue squad, he fire brigade, reporters and sightseers arrived in rapid succession. Naturally all of them assembled on he mainland side; here on the island side we did what we could to get Aronsson out of the wreck, which proved to be damnably difficult. He was pinned in and seriously injured.
“We tried to prise him loose woith our bae hands, and that didn’t work. He would have to be cut or sawed out, but we couldn’t do anything that risked striking a spark, we were standing in the middle odf a sea of oil next to a tanker truck on its side. If it has exploded we would have all been killed. It took a long time before we could get help from the mainland side; the truck was wedged right across the bridge, and climbing over it would have been the same as climbing over a bomb.”
From the book “The girl with the dragon tattoo.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland

Evening. Driving back to London

Evening. Driving back to London, I pass her old house. I must have done this once a month for fourteen years (whenever I return from seeing my parents) and I have scarcely given it a glance. Her family left it years ago, and in any case the yellow brick façade, with its Victorian windows , is like a theatre set. Its memories lie unseen behind: in he passages, the sitting room, the enclosed garden.
I stop and ring the doorbell. Whoever opens the door will seem an impostor, of course, a caretaker. I ring the bell again. It makes the same noise as fourteen years ago: a dry shrillness in the bowels of the house. I know now that nobody will come, and that seems right.
I walk round to try the garden gate. It opens. In the fragrant enclosure nothing has changed. Two flagstoned steps descend from French windows into a tangle of spring flowering shrubs. The neighbours’ wall at the end shows the same patina of grey blue lichen. The whole garden is barely thirty foot deep, and narrow. Behind my back the house windows hang dark. I close the garden door softly behind and stare down the shrub-avenue. For some reason I’m frightened. Close to where I entered, everything is all right. She is watering plants in a summer dress (it’s always summer), swinging the can back and forth in her long, impatient fingers. But a few paces beyond, just out of sight of the house windows, a grass clearing laps against the patinated wall. I remember it perfectely, although I can’t see it yet. I pause among the sheltering shrubs. I feel cold and slightly sick
From ‘ Nothing has changed’ By Colin Thrubron.

The town of Shiring had a carnival air

The town of Shiring had a carnival air during sessions of the country court. All the inns around the square were busy, their parlours crowed with men and women dressed in their best clothes, all shouting for drinks and food. The town naturally took the opportunity to hold a market, and the square itself was so closely packed with stalls that it took half an hour to move a couple of hundred yards. As well as the legitimate stallholders there were dozens of strolling entrepreneurs: bakers with trays of buns, a busking fiddle player, maimed and blind him beggars, prostitutes showing their breasts, a dancing bear, a preaching friar.
Earl Ralph was one of the few people who could cross the square quickly. He rode with three knights ahead of and a handful of servants behind, and his entourage went through the melee like a ploughshare, turning the crowd aside by the force of their momentum and their carelessness for the safety of people in their way.
They rode on up the hill to the sheriff’s castle. In the courtyard they wheeled with a flourish and dismounted. The servants immediately began shouting for ostlers and porters. Ralph liked people to know he ha arrived.
He handed his reins to a groom and looked around. The castle was not a military fortification. It was more like a tavern with a courtyard, though strongly built and well guarded. The sheriff of Shiring could live here safe from the vengeful relatives of the people he arrested. There were basement dungeons in which to keep prisoners, and guests apartments where visiting judges could stay unmolested.
Sheriff Bernard showed Ralph to his room. The sheriff was the king’s reprentative in the country, responsible for collecting taxes as well as administering justice. The post was lucrative, the salary usefully supplemented by gifts, bribes, and percentatges skimmed off the top of fines and forfeited bail money. The relationship between earl and sheriff could be fractious: the earl ranked higher, but the sheriff’s judicial power was independent. Bernard, a rich wool merchant of about Ralph’s age, treated Ralph with an uneasy mixture of camaraderie and deference.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man Gwenda had ever seen. There were threads of silver now in his tawny hair, but they just made him look wise as well as strong. When he was young his broad shoulders had tapered dramatically to a narrow waist , whereas nowadays the taper was not so sharp nor the waist so slim – but he could still do the work of two men. And he would always be two years younger than she.
She thought she had changed less. She had the kind of dark hair that did not go grey until late in life. She was heavier than she had been twenty years ago, although since having the children her breasts and belly were not quite as taut as formerly.
I was only when she looked at her son Davey, at his smooth skin and the restless spring in his step, that she felt her years. Now twenty, he looked like a male version of herself at that age. She too, had had a face with no lines, and she walked with a jaunty stride. A lifetime of working in the fields in all weathers had wrinkled her hands, and given her cheeks a raw redness just beneath the skin, and taught her to walk slowly and conserve her strength.
Davey was small like her, and shrewd, and secretive: since he was little she had never been sure what he was thinking. Sam was the opposite: big and strong, not clever enough to be deceitful, but with a mean streak that Gwenda blamed on his real father, Ralph Fitzgerald.
For several years now the two boys had been working alongside Wulfric in the fields – until two weeks ago, when Sam had vanished.
They knew why he had gone. All winter long he had been talking about leaving Wigleigh and moving to a village where he could earn higher wages. He had disappeared the moment the spring ploughing began.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Earlscastle has not changed

Earlscastle has not changed. Tywelve years ago, Merthin recalled , he had been asked to demolish the old fortress and build a new one, modern palace fit for an earl in a peaceful country. But he had refused, preferring to design the new bridge at Kingsbridge. Since then, it seemed, the project had languished , for here was the same figure – eight wall with two drawbridges, and the old fashioned keep ensconced in the upper loop, where the family lived like frightened rabbits at the end of the burrow, unaware that there was no longer any danger from the fox. The place must have been much the same in the days of Lady Aliena and Jack Builder.
Merthin was with Caris, who had been summoned hare by the countess, lady philippa, Earl William had fallen sick and Philippa thought her husband had the plague. Caris had been dismayed. She had thought the plague was over. No one had died of it in Kinsbridge for six weeks.
Caris and Merthin had set out immediately. However, the messenger had taken two days to travel from Earlscastle to Kingsbridge, and they had taken the same time to get there, so the likehood was that the earl would now be dead, or nearly so. ‘All I will be able to do is give him so poppy essence to ease the final agony,’ Caris had said as they rode along.
‘You do more than that,’ Merthin had said. ‘Your presence comforts people. You’re calm and knowledgeable, and you talk about things they understand, swelling and confusion and pain – you don’t try to impress them with jargon about humours, which just makes them feel more ignorant and powerless and frightened. When you’re there they feel more ignorant and powerless and frightened . When you’re there, they feel that
everything possible is being done; and that’s what they want.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Soon after Godwyn fled, Elfric died of the plague.

Caris was sorry for Alice, his widow, but aside from that she could hardly help rejoicing he was gone. He had bullied the weak and toadied to the strong, and the lies he had told at her trial almost get her hanged. The world was a better place without him. Even his building business would be better off run by his son-in-law, Harold Mason.
The parish guild elected Merthin as alderman in Elfric’s place. Merthin said it was like being made captain of a sinking ship.
As the deaths went on and on, and people buried their relatives, neighbours, friends, customers and employees, the constant horror seemed to brutalize many of them, until no violence or cruelty seemed shocking. People who thought they were about to die lost all restraint and followed their impulses regardless of the consequences.
Together, Merthin and Caris struggled to preserve something like normal life in Kingsbrige. The orphanage was the most successful part of Carir’s programme. The children were grateful for the security of the nunnery, after the ordeal of losing their parents to the plague. Taking care of them , and teaching them to read and sing hymns, brought out a long suppressed maternal instincts in some of the nuns. There was plenty of food with fewer people competing for the winter stores. And Kings bridge Priory was full of the sound of children.
In the town things were more difficult. There continued to be violent quarrels over the propriety of the dead. People just walked into empty houses and picked up whatever took their fancy. Children who had inherited money, or a warehouse full of cloth or corn, were sometimes adopted by unscrupulous neighbours greedy to get their hands on the legacy. The prospect of something for nothing brought out the worst in people.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Hundreds of people came to marks Webber’s funeral

Hundreds of people came to marks Webber’s funeral. He had been one of the town’s leading citizens, but it was more than that. Poor weavers arrived from the surroundings villages, some of them having walked for hours. He had been unusually well loved, Merthin reflected. The combination of his giant’s body and his gentle temperament cast a spell.
It was a date a wet day, and the bared heads of rich and poor men were soaked as they stood around the grave. Cold rain mingled with hot tears on the faces of the mourners. Madge stood with her arms around the shoulders of her two younger sons, Dennis and Noah. They were flanked by the eldest son, John, and the daughter, Dora, who were both much taller than their mother, and looked as if they might be the parents of the three short people in the middle.
Merthin wondered grimly whether Madge or one of her children would be the next to die.
Six string men grunted with the effort of lowering the extra large coffin into the grave. Madge sobbed helplessly as the monks sang the last hymn. Then the gravediggers started to shovel the sodden earth back into the hole, ant the crowd began to disperse.
That afternoon, Elfric was re-elected alderman of the parish guild. After the meeting Merthin sought out Bill Watkin, the largest builder in town after Elric. ‘Once the foundations of the tower are repaired, it could be built even higher,’ he said.
‘No reason why not,’ Bill agreed. ‘But what would be the point?’
‘So that it could be seen from Mudeford Crossing. Many travellers – pilgrims. Merchants and so on – miss the road for Kingsbridge, and go on to Shiring. The town loses a lot of custom that way’.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

In the spring of 1348

In the spring of 1348, Merthin woke up as if from a nightmare he could not remember. He felt frightened and weak. He opened his eyes to a room lit by bars of bright sunshine coming through half open shutters. He saw a high ceiling, white walls, red tiles. The air was mild. Reality returned slowly. He was in his bedroom, in his house, in Florence. He had been ill.
The illness came back to him first. It had began with a skin rash, purplish black blotches on his chest, then his arms, then everywhere. Soon afterwards he developed a painful lump or bubo in his armpit. He had a fever, sweating in his bed, tangling the sheets as he writhed. He had vomited and coughed blood. He had thought he would die. Worst of all was a terrible unquenchable thirst that had made him want to throw himself into the river Arno with his mouth open.
He was not the only sufferer. Thousands of Italians had fallen ill with this plague, tens of thousands. Half the workmen on his building sites had disappeared, as had most of his household servants. Almost everyone who caught it died within five days. They called it la moria grande, the big death.
But he was alive.
He had a nagging feeling that while ill he ha reached a momentous decision, but he could not remember it. He concentrated for a moment. He harder he thought, the more elusive the memory became, until it vanished.
He sat up in bed. His limbs felt feeble and his head spun for a moment. He was wearing a clean linen nightshirt, and he wondered who had put it on him. After a pause, he stood.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

The deer was a young female

The deer was a young female, a year or two old, sleek across the haunches, well muscled under a soft leather skin.
She was on the far side of a clearing, pushing her long neck through the branches of a bush to reach a patch of scrubby grass. Ralp Tizgerald and Alan Fernhill were on horseback, the hooves of their mounts muffled by the carpet of wet autumn leaves, and their dogs were trained to silence. Because of this, and perhaps because she was concentrating on straining to reach her fodder, the deer did not hear their approach until it was too late.
Ralph saw her first, and pointed across the clearing. Alan was carrying his longbow, grasping it and the reins in his left hand. With the speed of long practice, he fitted an arrow to the string in a heartbeat, and shot.
The dogs were slower. Only when they heard the thrum of the bowstring, and the whistle of the arrow as it flew through the air, did they react. Barley, the bitch, froze in place, head up, ears erect, and Blade, her puppy, now grown larger than his mother, uttered a low, startled woof.
The arrow was a yard long, lighted with swan feathers. Its tip was two inches of solid iron with a socket into which the shaft fitted tightly. It was a hunting arrow, with a sharp point: a battle arrow would have had a square head, so that it would punch through an armour without being deflected.
Alan’s shoot was good, but not perfect. It struck the deer low in the neck. She jumped with all four feet – shocked, presumably by the sudden, agonizing stab. Her head came up out of the bush. For an instant, Ralph thought she was going to fall down dead, but a moment later she bounded away. The arrow was still buried in her neck, but the blood was oozing rather than spurting from the wound, so it must have lodged in her muscles, missing the major blood vessels.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

St John in he Forest was a miniature version of Kingsbridge Priory

St John in he Forest was a miniature version of Kingsbridge Priory. The church was small, as were the stone-built cloisters and dormitory; the rest of the buildings were simple wood- frame structures. They were eight monks and no nuns. In addition to their lives of prayer and meditation, they grew most of their own food and made a goat’s cheese that was famous throughout south west England.
Godwyn and Philemon had been riding for two days an it was early evening when the road emerged from the forest and they saw a wide acreage of cleared land with the church in the middle. Godwyn knew at once that his fears were true, and reports that Saul Whitehead was doing a good job as prior of this cell were, if anything understated. There was a look of order and neatness about everything; the hedges trimmed, the ditches straight, the trees planted at measured intervals in the orchard, the fields of ripening grain free of weeds. He felt sure he would find that the services were held at the correct times and conducted reverently. He had to hope that Saul’s evident fiftness for leadership had not made him ambitious.
Hey rode into the farmyard and dismounted. The horses immediately drank from the through. There was no one but a monk with his robe hitched up mucking aout a pigsty behind the stables. He was sure to be a youngster, doing a job like that. Godwyn called to him. ‘Hey, you, lad! Come and help us with our horses.’
‘Rightho!’ the monk called back. He finished cleaning out the sty with a few more passes of his rake, then leaned the tool up against the stable wall and walked towards the newcomers. Godwyn was about to tell him to get a move on when he recognized the blond fringe of Saul.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

They arrived in Wigleihg early in the evening.

They arrived in Wigleihg early in the evening. The village stood in a rise,its fields sloping away to all sides, and it was always windy. After two weeks in the bustle of Kingsbridge, the familiar place seemed small and quiet, just a scatter of rough dwellings along the road that lead to the manor house and the church. The manor was as large as a Kingsbridge merchant’s home, with bedrooms on an upper floor. The priest’s house was also a fine dwelling, and a few of the peasants houses were substantial. But most of the homes were two-rooms hovels, one room normally being occupied by livestock and the other serving as kitchen and bedroom for all the family. Only he curch was built of stone.
On the far side of the hundred acre field, half hidden in the trees at the edge of he forest, was her home. It was even smaller than the peasant’s hovels, having only one room, which was shared with the cow at night. It was made of wattle and daub: tree branches stuck upright in the ground, with twigs interwoven basket fashion, the gaps plugged with a sticky mixture of mud, straw and cow dung. There was a hole in the thatched roof to let out the smoke of the fire in the middle of the earth floor. Such houses lasted only a few years then had to be rebuilt. It now seemed meaner then ever to Gwenda. She was determined not to spend her life in such aplace, having babies every year or two, most of whom died for lack of food. She would not live like her mother. She would rather die.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

In the west front of the cathedral

In the west front of the cathedral, nearly fitted into one of the towers, was a work room for the master mason. Caris reached it by climbing a narrow spiral staircase in a buttress of the tower. It was a wide room, well lit by tall lancet windows. All along one wall were stacked the beautiful shaped wooden templates used by the original cathedral stone cavers, carefully preserved and used now for repairs.
Underfoot was the tracing floor. The floorboards were covered with a layer of plaster, and the original master mason, Jack the builder, had scratched his plans in the mortar with iron drawing instruments. The marks thus made where white at first, but they faded over time, and new drawings could be scratched on top of the old. When there were so many designs that it became hard to tell the new from the old, a fresh layer of plaster was laid on top, and the process began again.
Parchment, the thin leather on which the monks copied out the books of the Bible, was much too expensive to be used for drawings. In Cari’s lifetime a new writing material had appeared, paper, but it came from the Arabs, so monks rejected it as a heathen Muslim invention. Anyway, it had to be imported from Italy and was no cheaper than parchment. And the tracing floor had another advantage: a carpenter could lay a piece of wood on the floor. On top of the drawing, and carve his template exactly to the lines drawn by the master mason..
Merthin was kneeling on the floor carving a piece of oak in accordance with the drawing, but he was not making a template. He was carving a cog wheel with sixteen teeth. On the floor close by was another, smaller wheel, and Merthin stopped carving for a moment to put the two together and see how well they fitted. Caris had seen such cogs, or gears, in water mills, connecting the mill paddle to the grindstone.
He must have heard her footsteps on the stone staircase, but he was so absorbed in his work to glance up. She regarded him for a second, anger competing with love in her heart. He had the look of total concentration that she knew so well: his slight body bent over his work, his strong hands and dexterous fingers making fine adjustments, his face immobile, his gaze unswavering. He had the perfect grave of a young deer bending its head to drink from a stream. This was what a man looked like, she thought , when he was doing what he was born to do. He was in a state like happiness, but more profound. He was fulfilling his destiny
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

A week after the bridge collapsed

A week after the bridge collapsed, Merthin had built a ferry.
Caris admired Merthin’s work. The raft was large enough to carry a horse and cart without taking the beast out of the shafts, and it had a firm wooden railing to keep sheep from failing overboard. New wooden platforms at water level on both banks made it easy for carts to roll on and off. Passengers paid a penny, collected by a monk – the ferry, like the bridge, belonged to the priory.
Most ingenuous was the system Merthin had devised for moving the raft from one bank to the other. A long rope ran from the south end of the raft across the river, around a post, back across the river, around a drum and back to the raft, were it was attached again to the north end. The drum was connected by wooden gears to a wheel turned by a pacing ox. A lever altered the gears so that the drum turned in either direction, depending on where the raft was going or coming back – and there was no need to take the ox out of its traces and turn it around.
‘It’s quite simple,’Merthin said when she marvelled at it – and it was, when she looked closely. The lever simply lifted one large cog wheel up out of the chain and moved into its place two smaller wheels, the effect being to reverse the direction in which the drum turned. All the same, no one in Kingsbridge had seen anything like it.
During the course of the morning, half the town came to look at Merthin’s amazing new machine. Caris was brsting with pride in him. Elfric stood by, explaining the mechanism to anyone who asked, taking the credit for Merthin’s work.
Caris wondered where Elfric got the nerve. He had destroyed Merthin’s door – an act of violence that would have scandalized the town, had it not been overtaken by the greater tragedy of the bridge collapse. He had beaten Merthin with a stick, and Merthin still had the bruise on his face. And he had colluded in a deception intended to make Merthin marry Griselda and raise another’s man child. Merthin had continued to work with him, feeling that the emergency outweighed their quarrel. But Caris did not know how Elfric could continue to hold his head up.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

The two dogs Skip and Scrap

The two dogs Skip and Scrap, greeted one another with joyful enthusiasm. Hey were from the same litter, though they not look similar: Skip was a brown boy dog and Scrap a small black female. Skip was a typical village dog, lean and suspicious, whereas the city-dwelling Scrap was plump and contended.
It was ten years since Gwenda had picked out of a litter of mongrels puppies, on the floor of Cari’s bedroom in the wool merchant’ big house, the day Cari’s mother died. Since then Gwenda and Caris had become close friends. They met only two or three times a year, but they shared their secrets. Gwenda felt she could tell Caris everything and the information would never get back to her parents or anyone else in Wigleigh. She assumed Caris felt the same: because Gwenda did not talk to any other Kingsbridge girls, here could not be risk of letting something slip in a careless moment.
Gwenda arrived in Kingsbridge on the Friday of Fleece Fair week. Her father, Joby, went to the fairground I front of the cathedral to sell the furs of squirrels he had trapped in the forest near Wigleigh. Gwenda went straight to Cari’s house and the two dogs were reunited.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

It was obviously a miracle that no one died.

The worst of the damage was en the south aisle of the chancel, which had been empty of people during the service. The congregation was not admitted to the chancel, and the clergy had all been in the central part, called the choir. Several monks had had narrow escapes, which only heightened the talk of miracles, and others had had cuts and bruises from flying chips of stone. The congregation suffered no more than a few scratches. Evidently, they all had been supernaturally protected by St Adolphus, whose bones were preserved by the high altar, and whose deeds included many instances of curing the sick and saving people from death. However it was generally agreed that God had sent the people of Kingsbridge a warming. What he was warming them about it was not clear.
An hour later four men were inspecting the damage. Brother Gowdyn, the cousin of Caris, was the sacristy, responsible for the church and all his treasures. Under him as a matricularius, in charge of building operations and repairs was Brother Thomas, who had been Sir Thomas Langley ten years ago. The contract for cathedral maintenance was held by Elfric, a carpenter by training and a general builder by trade. And Merthin tagged along as Elfric’s apprentice.
The east end of the church was divide by pillars into four sections called bays. The collapse had affected the two bays nearest the crossing. The stone vaulting over the south aisle was destroyed completely in the first bay and partially in the second. There were cracks in the tribune gallery, and stone mullions had fallen from the windows of the clerestory.
Elfric said. ‘Some weakness in the mortar allowed the vault to crumble, and that in turn caused the cracks at higher levels’. That did not sound right to Merthin, but he lacked an alternative explanation.
Merthin hated his maser. He had first been apprenticed to Elfric’s father, Joachim, a builder of high experience who had worked on churches and bridges in London and Paris. The old man had delighted in explaining to Merthin the lore of the masons – what they called their ‘mysteries’, which were mostly arithmetical formulas for building, such as the ratio between the height of a building and the depth of its foundations. Merthin liked numbers and lapped up everything Joachim could teach him.
The Joachin died, and Elfric took over. Elfric believed the main thing an apprentice had to learn was obedience. Merhin found this difficult to accept, and Elfric punished him with short rations, thin clothing and outdoor work in frosty weather. To make matters worse, Elfric’s chubby daughter Griselda, the same age as Merthin, was always well fed and warmly dressed.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

On Whit Sunday, a river of rain fell on Kingsbridge Cathedral

On Whit Sunday, a river of rain fell on Kingsbridge Cathedral. Great globules of water bounced off the slate roof; streams flooded the gutters, fountains gushed from the mouths of gargoyles; sheets of water unfolded down the buttresses, and torrents ran over the arches and down the columns, soaking the statues of the saints. The sky, the great church and the town round about all the shades of wet grey paint.
On the broad green to the west of the church hundreds of traders had set out theirs stalls – then hastily covered them with sheets of oiled sacking or felted cloth to keep the rain off. Wool traders were the key figures in the fair, from the small operators who collected the produce of a few scattered villagers, to the big dealers such as Edmund who had a warehouse full of wool sacks to sell. Around clustered subsidiary stalls selling about everything money could buy, sweet wine from Rhineland, silver brocade threaded with gold from Lucca, glass bowls from Venice, ginger and pepper from places in the East that few people could even name. And finally there were the workday trades people, who supplied visitors and stallholders with their commonplace needs. Bakers, brewers, confectioners, fortune tellers and prostitutes.
The stall holders responded bravely to the rain, joking with one another, trying to create the carnival atmosphere, but the weather would be bad for their profits. Some people had to do business, rain or shine: Italian and Flemish buyers needed soft English wool for thousands of busy looms in Florence and Bruges. But more casual costumers would stay at home: a knight’s wife would decided she could manage without nutmeg and cinnamon, a prosperous peasant would make his old coat last another winter, a lawyer would judge that his mistress did not really need a gold bangle.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Caris flushed not knowing what was so funny.

Caris flushed not knowing what was so funny.
Papa took pity and said ’Only men can be doctors. Didn’t you know that buttercup ?’
Caris was bewildered. She turned to Cecilia. ‘But what about you ?’
‘I’m not a physician,’ Cecilia said. ‘We nuns care for the sick, of course, but we follow the instructions of trained men. The monks who had studied under the masters understand the humours of the body, the way they go out of the balance in sickness, and how to bring them back to their correct proportions for good health. They know which vein to bleed for migraine, leprosy, or breathlessness: where to cup or cauterise, whether to poultice or bathe.’
‘Couldn’t a woman learn those things ?’
‘Perhaps, but God has ordained it otherwise.’
Caris felt frustrated with the way adults trotted out this truism every time they were stuck for an answer. Before she could say anything. Brother Saul came downstairs with a bowl of blood, and went through the kitchen to the back yard to get rid of it. The sight made Caris feel weepy. All doctors used bloodletting as a cure, so it must be effective, she supposed, but all the same she hated to see mother’s life force in a bowl to be thrown away.
Saul returned to the sick room, and a few moments later he and Joseph came down. ‘I’ve done what I can for her,’ Joseph said solemnly to Papa. ‘And she has confessed her sins.’
Confessed her sins! Caris knew what that meant. She began to cry.
Papa took six silver pennies from his purse and gave them to the monk. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he said, His voice was hoarse.
As the monks left, the two nuns went back upstairs. Alice sat on Papa’s lap and buried her face in his neck, Caris cried and hugged Scrap. Petronilla ordered Tutty to clear the table. Gwenda watched everything with wide eyes. They sat around the table in silence, waiting.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

The crowd inched through the vestibule

The crowd inched through the vestibule. The restless light of the torches fell on the sculpted figures around the walls, making them dance madly. At he lowest level were demons and monsters: Gwenda stared uneasily at dragons and griffins, a bear with a man’s head, a dog with two bodies and one with muzzle. Some of the demons straggled with humans: a devil put a nooses around a man’s neck, a fox-like monster dragged a woman by her hair, an eagle with hands speared a naked man. Above these scenes the saints stood in a row under sheltering canopies; over them the apostles sat on thrones, then, in the arch over the main door, St Peter with his key and St Paul with a scroll looked adoringly upwards a Jesus Christ .
Gwenda knew that Jesus was telling her not to sin, or she would be tortured by demons, but humans frightened her more than demons. If she failed to steal sir Gerald’s purse, she would be whipped by her father. Worse there would be nothing for the family to eat but soup made with acorns. She and Philemon would be hungry for weeks on end. Ma’s breasts would dry up, and the new baby, would die, as the last two had. Pa would disappear for days, and come back with nothing for the pot but a scrawny heron or a couple of squirrels. Being hungry was worse than being whipped – it hurt longer.
She had been taught to pilfer at a young age: an apple from a stall, a new laid egg from under a neighbour’s hen, a knife dropped carelessly on a tavern table by a drunk. But stealing money was different. If she were caught robbing Sir Gerald it would be no use bursting into tears and hoping to be treated as a naughty child, as she had once after thieving a pair of dainty leather shoes from a soft hearted nun. Cutting the strings of a knight’s purse was not childish peccadillo. It was a real grown-up crime and she would be treated accordingly.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet