Epic Historial Collection by Ken Follett

with no meat in it, and a place to sleep by the fire in a peasant’s hovel. They had not seen a village since. But toward the end of the afternoon Tom saw smoke rising above the trees, and they found the home of a solitary verderer, one of the king’s forest police. He gave them a sack of turnips in exchange for Tom’s small ax.
    They had walked only three miles farther when Agnes said she was too tired to go on. Tom was surprised. In all their years together he had never known her to say she was too tired for anything.
    She sat down in the shelter of a big horse-chestnut tree beside the road. Tom dug a shallow pit for a fire, using a worn wooden shovel—one of the few tools they had left, for nobody would want to buy it. The children gathered twigs and Tom started the fire, then he took the cooking pot and went to find a stream. He returned with the pot full of icy water and set it at the edge of the fire. Agnes sliced some turnips. Martha collected the conkers that had dropped from the tree, and Agnes showed her how to peel them and grind the soft insides into a coarse flour to thicken the turnip soup. Tom sent Alfred to find more firewood, while he himself took a stick and went poking around in the dead leaves on the forest floor, hoping to find a hibernating hedgehog or squirrel to put in the broth. He was unlucky.
    He sat down beside Agnes while darkness fell and the soup cooked. “Have we any salt left?” he asked her.
    She shook her head. “You’ve been eating porridge without salt for weeks,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHunger is the best seasoning.”
    â€œWell, we’ve plenty of that.” Tom was suddenly terribly tired. He felt the crushing burden of the piled-up disappointments of the last four months and he could not be brave any longer. In a defeated voice he said: “What went wrong, Agnes?”
    â€œEverything,” she said. “You had no work last winter. You got a job in the spring; then the earl’s daughter canceled the wedding and Lord William canceled the house. Then we decided to stay and work in the harvest—that was a mistake.”
    â€œFor sure it would have been easier for me to find a building job in the summer than it was in the autumn.”
    â€œAnd the winter came early. And for all that, we would still have been all right, but then our pig was stolen.”
    Tom nodded wearily. “My only consolation is knowing that the thief is even now suffering all the torments of hell.”
    â€œI hope so.”
    â€œDo you doubt it?”
    â€œPriests don’t know as much as they pretend to. My father was one, remember.”
    Tom remembered very well. One wall of her father’s parish church had crumbled beyond repair, and Tom had been hired to rebuild it. Priests were not allowed to marry, but this priest had a housekeeper, and the housekeeper had a daughter, and it was an open secret in the village that the priest was the father of the girl. Agnes had not been beautiful, even then, but her skin had had a glow of youth, and she had seemed to be bursting with energy. She would talk to Tom while he was working, and sometimes the wind would flatten her dress against her so that Tom could see the curves of her body, even her navel, almost as clearly as if she had been naked. One night she came to the little hut where he slept, and put a hand over his mouth to tell him not to speak, and pulled off her dress so that he could see her nude in the moonlight, and then he took her strong young body in his arms and they made love.
    â€œWe were both virgins,” he said aloud.
    She knew what he was thinking about. She smiled, then her face saddened again, and she said: “It seems so long ago.”
    Martha said: “Can we eat now?”
    The smell of the soup was making Tom’s stomach rumble. He dipped his bowl into the bubbling cauldron and brought out a few slices of