World Without End

After the service, Merthin, Ralph, Caris, and Gwenda play in in the woods. Ralph kills Hop with a bow Merthin made. Thomas Langley runs into the woods, and he is pursued by some men serving Earl Roland of Shiring on behalf of Queen Isabella. The men want a letter Thomas is carrying. The letter is evidence that Edward II is actually alive and in exile. Ralph kills one of the men, and Thomas kills the other. After the other children flee, Merthin aids Thomas in hiding the bodies of the two men in the brush and burying the letter. Thomas swears Merthin to secrecy about the letter and asks him to take it to a priest if Thomas dies. Later, Caris takes Gwenda to her house to give Gwenda her pick of a new litter of puppies. Meanwhile, Ralph and Merthin’s lives as the son of knights end when their family goes bankrupt due to Gwenda’s theft of Sir Gerald’s money. Ralph becomes a squire to Roland of Shiring, and Merthin becomes a carpenter’s apprentice to Elfric Builder.

The Wooler household is somber when Caris and Gwenda show up to choose Gwenda’s new puppy. Rose Wooler, Edmund’s wife, is very ill. The direness of her situation becomes clear when Mother Cecilia, a nurse-nun and prioress of Kingsbridge, arrives but sends for Saul Whitehead, a physician-monk of Kingsbridge. During the wait, Cecilia, Edmund, and Petranilla (Edmund’s sister and the manager of the household) debate what Caris should be as an adult. Caris finds none of their choices—a nun, a helpmeet to her father in the wool business, or a rich merchant’s wife—attractive. All these discussions end when Saul arrives to bleed Rose. He tells them he has administered the last rites, an indication that he believes Rose is near death.

Gwenda rejoins her father and confesses her bumbling in the church and the confrontation between the two men with Thomas so he can strip the corpses of money, weapons, and clothes. When he tries to sell the weapons later, Roland of Shiring’s men hunt him down. They beat him and force him and Gwenda to take them to the field. They seem aware that Thomas is hidden away in the monastery, which frustrates them since they can’t get at him in the sanctuary of the church. Joby runs away. The men leave Gwenda alive because she is a little girl. Meanwhile, Rose Wooler dies, leaving Petranilla as the sole woman authority in the Wooler household.

At Kingsbridge Priory, Brother Godwyn, ambitious nephew of Prior Anthony and son of Petranilla, fails to convince the prior to award him one of the slots available to study medicine at Kingsbridge College at Oxford. The monks are too poor to pay for him, and the nuns are already paying for two other slots. Godwyn serves dinner when Mother Cecilia, head of the nunnery, joins the prior for a meal. He listens in as the prior and Cecilia discuss what really happened to Edward II after his wife stripped him of the kingship. Some say she killed him, while others claim he died of a fall.

The meal ends when Saul Whitehead calls them to the bedside of Thomas Langley, who has a grievous wound to his arm after the fight in the forest. Saul shines in this setting when he advises they listen to Matthew Barber, an experienced battlefield surgeon, instead of erudite Brother Joseph, an Oxford-trained monk-physician. Cecilia approves of this response, and Godwyn realizes that Saul is the likely recipient of one of the college slots. Everyone is surprised when the bishop, Richard of Shiring (youngest son of the earl) arrives to arrange for Thomas to become a monk. Thomas is clearly a soldier and doesn’t seem to be a person who should excite such interest from an earl. Petranilla, who has much experience in politics after having helped her father build the Wooler family business from scratch, scolds Godwyn later for failing to discover whom his rival was before approaching the prior and Cecilia about the scholarship.