World Without End

Caris takes Gwenda to the hospital at the priory, where Sister Julie delivers the baby with Sister Mair’s help. Caris is shocked by how bloody, painful, and arduous birthing is. Gwenda finally delivers her baby, a little boy she names Samuel in honor of Wulfric’s father. When Gwenda continues to bleed after the delivery—a death sentence for many laboring women—Caris brings Mattie to help, much to the disapproval of the nuns, who believe it is in God’s hands. Mattie manages to stop the bleeding. Caris can tell the baby looks like Merthin and assumes the baby must be Ralph’s. A pleading look from Gwenda stops her from blurting out what she sees. 

Godwyn sulks when Cecilia refuses to give him money to build a much finer prior’s palace for himself. She claims all the building she has had to fund to put into effect Godwyn’s requirement that the nuns be segregated from the monks is the problem. She will have the money in three years. Her response is as good as a refusal, and Godwyn feels humiliated. When he asks why he can’t just have the money now, she tells him she has a budget and sticks to it, with the implication that Godwyn and the monks haven’t learned this simple lesson in economy. He recognizes that despite her seeming compliance, she doesn’t completely support him.

Philemon encourages Godwyn to revive the practice of forcing people to pay fines for using hand mills, their own facilities to process fibers, and fishing their own ponds. The charter that made Kingsbridge the overlord of the town granted the priory this right, but a previous prior gifted the mills and ponds to the town in perpetuity. The mills are in disrepair, but people grind their grain at home in hand mills and fish local ponds. Godwyn agrees and announces the new policy from the pulpit to quell rebellion.

Using experimentation with dye recipes and help from Mattie and Buonaventura, Caris creates Kingsbridge scarlet, a cheaper version of the more expensive woolen cloth sold by Florentine merchants. She works out her dye recipe in her yard, drawing odd looks from the neighbors as she talks to herself and anger from Alice, who offends Edmund by arguing Caris is spending what Alice expects to inherit after Edmund dies. Edmund is not impressed with her presumptuousness and tells her to leave Caris to her efforts to expand the family’s business. Caris is forced to confront Godwyn when he tries to impose his tax scheme on people who use the stomping method to process the cloth. The Kingsbridge charter never mentioned such a fee, so Godwyn is on shaky legal ground, so Caris and Merthin decide to sue him. Merthin convinces Ralph to allow the building of a mill in Wigleigh to do this work.

With the help of his bailiff, Alan Fernhill, Ralph rapes Annet one day after she is the last woman down at the stream on wash day. Violating her buffs his ego, bruised after a failed hunt, the death of his favorite hunting dog, and being thrown from his horse Griff. He is especially eager to assault her because he knows doing so will anger Wulfric. He mostly does it because he is bored without a war to fight and because being a lord gives him the power to get away with it.

Gwenda takes Annet to Peg for care. Annet reluctantly reveals what Ralph and Alan did. To prevent Wulfric from attacking Ralph, Gwenda takes a false message to Ralph that Roland of Shiring wants Ralph to appear before Roland in Shiring. When Wulfric leads the angry villages to Ralph’s manor, Ralph hasn’t left yet. Gwenda trips Wulfric to prevent him from pursuing Ralph, earning Wulfric’s anger for weeks after. Gwenda later apologizes to him for taking away his autonomy, and the two reconcile. Roland finally does call Ralph to his manor. He tells Ralph to rape elsewhere and to pick women who are not wives because the men in their families are more likely to accept payoffs. Roland tells Ralph that Lady Phillipa warned him that giving Ralph Wigleigh would cause trouble, and she was right. Roland doesn’t care how Ralph fixes this problem, but he doesn’t want to hear of any more such complaints from Wigleigh. Ralph knows he has gotten away with his crime. So do the villagers of Wigleigh. Gwenda thinks they should appeal to William of Shiring, Roland’s son, the next most powerful lord over Ralph, and technically the overlord of the land where the rape occurred.

The next day, a delegation that includes Wulfric, Annet, Gwenda, and Father Gaspard (Wigleigh’s priest), and others goes to William of Shiring’s manor to plead for justice. Gwenda first talks with Phillipa, who assures her she will do all she can to see Ralph, whose open leering at her makes her fearful. With Phillipa beside him, William accepts that Ralph is guilty of rape. He tells the villagers to file a civil suit to hold Ralph accountable. He explains the process and warns Annet that there is no stopping the process once it begins. If they win, Ralph will hang. If they pull out, Ralph might do anything he wants as revenge, and Annet will be severely punished by the court. Annet agrees to proceed.

The town loses the case over the fines against Godwyn. Gregory Longfellow, the priory’s lawyer, successfully argues that the townspeople are serfs with no right to sue in a royal court. It is true: the town lacks a borough charter, making the prior their overlord. Caris and Merthin find a way around this defeat by making a success of the mill on Ralph’s land. Godwyn counters them again by having Merthin fired as builder of the bridge. Merthin realizes he has been defeated because he assumed Godwyn would not let injured pride stand in the way of the good of the town and the priory. Meanwhile, news of Ralph’s crimes reaches his brother and parents. Sir Gerald shames Ralph for unknightly behavior, and Merthin suggests a payoff to Annet to avoid trial. He fears his brother’s violence now that no one is around to restrain him, however.

Merthin’s attempt to bribe Annet fails. Ralph is found guilty and sentenced to death. Roland’s priest, Jerome, helps Ralph escape. Ralph stabs Wulfric and the jury foreman during the escape attempt. Ralph is excited by the violence and manages to escape with Alan Fernhill. He is now an outlaw and a man with no plan for what is next.

Up until this point, Merthin has maintained a cordial, platonic relationship with Elizabeth Clerk. She and her mother arrange for Elizabeth to be alone with Merthin one night. Merthin feels unmoved by her subtle overtures and rejects her. She is a very private woman who rarely makes herself vulnerable, so his rebuff angers her. She accuses Caris of being evil and of having bewitched him.

Later, Merthin is eating dinner with Edmund at the Bell Inn. He is just telling Edmund he intends to move away from Kingsbridge when Caris barrels into the conversation. The two get into a loud, angry conversation when Caris demands to know why he is leaving town. He says he has no prospects, especially not with her, and he wants marriage and his own business. He refuses to wait around for her any longer. Everyone is shocked when Caris meekly agrees that she will marry him. A disappointed Elizabeth Clerk becomes a nun at the priory.

Ralph and Alan are hungry as outlaws, but they set up shop as robbers and murderers on the outskirts of Kingsbridge. They stay in shepherds’ huts, now empty for the season. They rob and kill people headed to the market. Their takings increase when they join up with Tam Hiding, the leader of an established band of outlaws. Tired of losing business because of the outlaws, the parish guild organizes a militia with Brother Thomas’s help. Merthin tells Thomas where Ralph is likely hiding in exchange for Thomas’s promise not to kill Ralph during the hunt. The militia captures Ralph and Alan, who are already under sentence of death for their actions at Ralph’s trial. At the last minute, Roland conscripts all the prisoners to fight in the war against France (later known as the Hundred Years’ War). Ralph escapes justice again, and he feels aggrieved that Merthin betrayed him.

Gregory Longfellow, the lawyer for Godwyn and the priory, tells Godwyn that the town will likely be granted a charter to make them a borough because the king needs their increased tax revenue to fight his war in France. With a temporary road atop it, the new bridge is already bringing in more trade than years past. Caris is the prime seller of scarlet cloth now, so her business is booming. Her marriage is a week away when Edmund has a stroke. When Caris runs to Mattie for help, Mattie is gone and all her belongings with her. Rumors are that church is investigating Mattie for practicing witchcraft. Caris wants to be a wise woman, too, so she can help people like her father.

Edmund recovers but encourages Caris to run to lead the parish guild, even though she is young and a woman. Caris is unaware that a plot hatched by Godwyn and in which Philemon and Elfric, a potential rival for the alderman’s seat, are conniving. They aim to neutralize Caris by accusing her of witchcraft. Her trial would be in an ecclesiastical court where there will be no jury, only the church. Godwyn intends to have Bishop Richard preside over the trial so he can blackmail Richard to condemn Caris. Godwyn will also keep his hands clean in Caris’s likely death sentence. Using Elfric’s false testimony that he saw Caris performing witchcraft (in reality, she was perfecting her dye recipe and talking aloud to herself), Godwyn has Caris arrested.

Caris uses reason and all her persuasive powers to answer the charges when she is brought to trail, but she knows she is unlikely to win. The most damning evidence is that she has a mole on her vulva (considered to be evidence of witchcraft). She can only save her life by confessing to Joffroi, a poor but independent priest of St. Mark and taking vows to become a nun. Richard of Shiring agrees to this compromise to avoid condemning a well-liked businesswoman who is nonetheless confronting the hierarchy of the church. He gives Caris a suspended death sentence: she will be executed if she leaves the nunnery. Caris will not even see Merthin afterward because she knows marrying her will end his dream of being a builder. Merthin departs for Florence.