Page 122 of The Pillars of the Earth
“Well, I’m going,” she said. “Stay here if you like.” She walked away from him, toward the West Gate. She knew his sulks: they never lasted.
Sure enough, he caught her up before she reached the city. “Don’t be cross, Allie,” he said. “I’ll work. I’m pretty strong, actually—I’ll make a very good laborer.”
She smiled at him. “I’m sure you will.” It was not true, but there was no point in discouraging him.
They walked down the High Street. Aliena recalled that Winchester was laid out and divided up in a very logical way. The southern half, on their right as they walked, was divided into three parts: first there was the castle, then a district of wealthy homes, then the cathedral close and the bishop’s palace in the southeast corner. The northern half, on their left, was also divided into three: the Jews’ neighborhood, the middle part where the shops were, and the manufactories in the northeast corner.
Aliena led the way down the High Street to the eastern end of the city, then they turned left, into a street that had a brook running along it. On one side were normal houses, mostly wooden, a few partly of stone. On the other side was a jumble of improvised buildings, many of them no more than a roof supported by poles, most of them looking as if they might fall down at any minute. In some cases a little bridge, or a few planks, led across the brook to the building, but some of the buildings actually straddled the brook. In every building or yard, men and women were doing something that required large quantities of water: washing wool, tanning leather, fulling and dyeing cloth, brewing ale, and other operations that Aliena did not recognize. A variety of unfamiliar smells pricked her nostrils, acrid and yeasty, sulfurous and smoky, woody and rotten. The people all looked terriblybusy.Of course, peasants also had a great deal to do, and they worked very hard, but they went about their tasks at a measured pace, and they always had time to stop and examine some curiosity or talk to passersby. The people in the manufactories never looked up. Their work seemed to take all their concentration and energy. They moved quickly, whether they were carrying sacks or pouring great buckets of water or pounding leather or cloth. As they went about their mysterious tasks in the gloom of their ramshackle huts, they made Aliena think of the demons stirring their cauldrons in pictures of hell.
She stopped outside a place where they were doing something she understood: fulling cloth. A muscular-looking woman was drawing water from the brook and pouring it into a huge stone trough lined with lead, stopping every now and again to add a measure of fuller’s earth from a sack. Lying in the bottom of the trough, completely submerged, was a length of cloth. Two men with large wooden clubs—called fuller’s bats, Aliena recollected—were pounding the cloth in the trough. The process caused the cloth to shrink and thicken, making it more waterproof; and the fuller’s earth leached out the oils from the wool. At the back of the premises were stacked bales of untreated cloth, new and loosely woven, and sacks of fuller’s earth.
Aliena crossed the brook and approached the people working at the trough. They glanced at her and continued working. The ground was wet all around them, and they worked with their feet bare, she noticed. When she realized they were not going to stop and ask her what she wanted, she said loudly: “Is your master here?”
The woman replied by jerking her head toward the back of the premises.
Aliena beckoned Richard to follow and went through a gate to a yard where lengths of cloth were drying on wooden frames. She saw the figure of a man bent over one of the frames, arranging the cloth. “I’m looking for the master,” she said.
He straightened up and looked at her. He was an ugly man with one eye and a slightly hunched back, as if he had been bending over drying frames for so many years that he could no longer stand quite upright. “What is it?” he said.
“Are you the master fuller?”
“I’ve been working at it nigh on forty year, man and boy, so I hope I’m master,” he said. “What do you want?”
Aliena realized she was dealing with the type of man who always had to prove how smart he was. She adopted a humble tone and said: “My brother and I want to work. Will you employ us?”
There was a pause while he looked her up and down. “Christ Jesus and all the saints, what would I do with you?”
“We’ll do anything,” Aliena said resolutely. “We need some money.”
“You’re no good to me,” the man said contemptuously, and he turned away to resume his work.
Aliena was not going to content herself with that. “Why not?” she said angrily. “We’re not scrounging, we want toearnsomething.”
He turned to her again.
“Please?” she said, although she hated to beg.
He regarded her impatiently, as he might have looked at a dog, wondering whether to make the effort of kicking it; but she could tell that he was tempted to show her how stupid she was being and how clever he was by contrast. “All right,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll explain it to you. Come with me.”
He led them to the trough. The men and the woman were pulling the length of cloth out of the water, rolling it as it emerged. The master spoke to the woman. “Come here, Lizzie. Show us your hands.”
The woman obediently came over and held out her hands. They were rough and red, with open sores where they had got chapped and the skin had broken.
“Feel those,” the master said to Aliena.
Aliena touched the woman’s hands. They were as cold as snow, and very rough, but what was most striking was how hard they were. She looked at her own hands, holding the woman’s: they suddenly looked soft and white and very small.
The master said: “She’s had her hands in water since she was a little ’un, so she’s used to it. You’re different. You wouldn’t last the morning at this work.”
Aliena wanted to argue with him, and say that she would get used to it, but she was not sure it was true. Before she could say anything, Richard spoke up. “What about me?” he said. “I’m bigger than both those men—I could do that work.”
It was true that Richard was actually taller and broader than the men who had been wielding the fuller’s bats. And he could handle a war-horse, Aliena recalled, so he should be able to pound cloth.
The two men finished rolling up the wet cloth, and one of them hoisted the roll onto his shoulder, ready to take it to the yard for drying. The master stopped him. “Let the young lord feel the weight of the cloth, Harry.”
The man called Harry lifted the cloth off his shoulder and put it on Richard’s. Richard sagged under the weight, straightened up with a mighty effort, paled, and then sank to his knees so that the ends of the roll rested on the ground. “I can’t carry it,” he said breathlessly.
The men laughed, the master looked triumphant, and the one called Harry took the cloth back, hoisted it onto his own shoulder with a practiced movement, and carried it away. The master said: “It’s a different kind of strength, one that comes fromhavingto work.”
