The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett Read Free Book Online

the first word, Alfred ,but not the others, and he felt a fool; then Ellen saved his embarrassment by reading the whole thing aloud: “Alfred is bigger than Jack.” The boy quickly drew two figures, one bigger than the other, and although they were crude, one had broad shoulders and a rather bovine expression and the other was small and grinning. Tom, who himself had a talent for sketching, was astonished at the simplicity and strength of the picture scratched in the dust.
    But the child seemed an idiot.
    Ellen had lately begun to realize this, she confessed, guessing Tom’s thoughts. Jack had never had the company of other children, or indeed of other human beings except for his mother, and the result was that he was growing up like a wild animal. For all his learning he did not know how to behave with people. That was why he was silent, and stared, and snatched.
    As she said this she looked vulnerable for the first time. Her air of impregnable self-sufficiency vanished, and Tom saw her as troubled and rather desperate. For Jack’s sake, she needed to rejoin society; but how? If she had been a man, she might conceivably have persuaded some lord to give her a farm, especially if she had lied convincingly and said she was back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. There were some women farmers, but they were invariably widows with grown sons. No lord would give a farm to a woman with one small child. Nobody would hire her as a laborer, either in town or country; besides, she had no place to live, and unskilled work rarely came with accommodation provided. She had no identity.
    Tom felt for her. She had given her child everything she could, and it was not enough. But he could see no way out of her dilemma. Beautiful, resourceful, and formidable though she was, she was doomed to spend the rest of her days hiding in the forest with her weird son.
     
    Agnes, Martha and Alfred came back. Tom gazed anxiously at Martha, but she looked as if the worst thing that had ever happened to her was having her face scrubbed. For a while Tom had been absorbed in Ellen’s problems, but now he remembered his own plight: he was out of work and his pig had been stolen. The afternoon was wearing on. He began to pick up their remaining possessions.
    Ellen said: “Where are you headed?”
    “Winchester,” Tom told her. Winchester had a castle, a palace, several monasteries, and—most important of all—a cathedral.
    “Salisbury is closer,” Ellen said. “And last time I was there, they were rebuilding the cathedral—making it bigger.”
    Tom’s heart leaped. This was what he was looking for. If only he could get a job on a cathedral building project he believed he had the ability to become master builder eventually. “Which way is Salisbury?” he said eagerly.
    “Back the way you came, for three or four miles. Do you remember a fork in the road, where you went left?”
    “Yes—by a pond of foul water.”
    “That’s it. The right fork leads to Salisbury.”
    They took their leave. Agnes had not liked Ellen, but managed nevertheless to say graciously: “Thank you for helping me take care of Martha.”
    Ellen smiled and looked wistful as they left.
    When they had walked along the road for a few minutes Tom looked back. Ellen was still watching them, standing in the road with her legs apart, shading her eyes with her hand, the peculiar boy standing beside her. Tom waved, and she waved back.
    “An interesting woman,” he said to Agnes.
    Agnes said nothing.
    Alfred said: “That boy was strange .”
    They walked into the low autumn sun. Tom wondered what Salisbury was like: he had never been there. He felt excited. Of course, his dream was to build a new cathedral from the ground up, but that almost never happened: it was much more common to find an old building being improved or extended, or partly rebuilt. But that would be good enough for him, as long as it offered the prospect of building to his own designs