Ellen reveals to Tom that his baby son was rescued by monks in a small monastery in the same forest. She has a twelve-year-old son, Jack, who is growing up without a father figure or peers. Ellen once cursed a priest who executed her lover, and has had to hide in the forest to avoid his persecution.

Tom soon (very soon, more on that later) takes up with Ellen, a woman who lives in the forest and who nurses him and his two children. Some hours later, though, he regrets it, but when he goes back to find his child, the baby is gone. Without milk the baby will die, and Tom cannot provide for him in any way since he, Alfred and Martha are already starving. On their journey, they run out of food and Agnes, who is pregnant, dies giving birth to her and Tom’s third child. Tom and his family (his wife, Agnes, and his children, fifteen-year-old son Alfred and seven-year-old Martha) are forced to wander in search of other employment for Tom. The marriage falls through though, when sixteen-year-old Aliena announces that she will not marry William, and Tom loses his job. As the book begins, Tom is working on a house for a noble couple about to marry, William Hamleigh and Lady Aliena, the daughter of the earl of Shiring. Tom has dreamed of building a cathedral for years, ever since he apprenticed to a man who did. The novel, at least the part that I read, has two main characters: Tom Builder and Father Phillip, a monk. The story concerns the building of a cathedral in a fictional English town called Kingsbridge. The book had some good qualities but eventually I had to quit for reasons mentioned in this review. I started reading this, your historical saga set in twelfth-century England, because a friend of mine has been mentioning it for years as one of her favorite books by one of her favorite authors.

Pillars of the earth