It was when he was halfway along the glade that he heard the childrens’ voices. They were laughing. And they came from both sides of the glade.
Before he reached her he stopped and turned to look at them.
There were more than twenty children. He recognised most of them, for they were the children of Avonsford. They were standing all round the little glade beside the trees and he knew at once that they had been concealed there deliberately, waiting for him. They were laughing and several of them were pointing at his nakedness.
He looked at Cristina. She was gazing back at him, and he saw that she, too, was shaking with laughter. Then, turning quickly, she vanished into the trees, leaving him alone to stand there, in his absurd nakedness, in the middle of the circle of children.
There was nothing to do but go back the way he came.
As he made his way back along the path, the laughter of the children was ringing in his ears. He wondered how long the girl had planned this cruel practical joke, so perfectly designed to humiliate him. Was it her own idea? Had, possibly, her father’s jealous mind had some part in it? He would never know. But as the full implication of what had just taken place unfolded in a terrible vision before his eyes, he broke out in a cold sweat and his little hands clenched and unclenched in impotent fury. He saw exactly what it would mean: within an hour, all Avonsford would know; by the end of the morning, the whole of Sarum. The respected master mason in his leather apron would be transformed, probably for the rest of his life, into a figure of fun. People in the street would point at him and laugh as he passed; children – the children for whom he had so often carved little presents – would giggle when his name was spoken. As for his family . . .
He came to the place where he had stripped off his clothes. They were gone.
He was naked; now he would have to stay that way as he walked back to the village. It was the final humiliation. They had made sure that all his dignity was gone. As he considered the thought, the deliberate planning which must have gone into the morning’s episode, and the way that the children had been so carefully taken into the wood to witness it, he almost broke down. Keeping close to the edge of the trees, he began his slow walk home.
In the days that followed, the consequences were everything that he had foreseen. But there were some surprises. He had guessed that his two daughters would turn angrily against him; he had foreseen their looks of disgust and their angry silences if he entered the house, but he had not foreseen the shocked, only half-comprehending face of his little son, who knew only that his father had committed a terrible crime that he did not understand, and who now – encouraged by his elder sisters – stared at him with large, frightened eyes and refused to come near him.
Unexpectedly, his wife was kinder.
Ignoring completely the rage of her daughters or the expressive silences that greeted her in the village, she looked at the squat little mason, stripped of all his hard-won dignity, and she felt sorry for him. She knew that her pale, thin form held little excitement for him; their long marriage had held little hope of passion on either side, she would almost have been glad if, for a moment, one of them had found it. She did not reproach him but when she moved to his side to comfort him, she found that, after the long, blank, untroubled years of their life together, she did not know how. Her hand rested on his arm, and she knew that he felt it; it was all that either of them could do.
But it was when he returned to work the next day that Osmund suffered worse.
As he made his way through the city gates, he heard the utters as he passed; when he arrived in the cathedral close, he noticed that the priests gave him contemptuous looks. Once in the cathedral itself, though he tried not to look into their faces, he knew that the masons were smirking, and as he reached his workbench, he saw the tall figure of Bartholomew standing nearby, grinning broadly. He pretended not to notice; but he felt himself blushing, and more than once during the morning he thought – or did he imagine it? – that he heard voices near him whispering the name Cristina.
The hours passed and mercifully he was left alone, but although he tried to concentrate, it was impossible not to think about his misery, and by the end of the morning he was in a black depression.
“Truly,” he thought, “I am being punished for my sins.”
The same thing happened the next day and the next. After four days he realised with disgust that he had achieved almost nothing at his work.
It was five days after the incident that by chance Osmund saw the girl again. This time, their encounter was not planned; she did not even know that he had seen her.
It happened just outside the city, when the mason was returning home at the end of the day. As he passed the old castle, he suddenly caught sight of her on the little lane that led down to the valley bottom. To his surprise he saw that she was not alone, but walking demurely hand in hand with a boy. Involuntarily he stopped and stared down at them. He knew the boy; he was young John, the son of the merchant William atte Brigge. Neither of the young people realised they were being watched. Half way down the lane they paused, and kissed.
He watched, transfixed.
But then, to his own surprise, Osmund the Mason found that he did not care. He felt no anger, no jealousy, hardly even lust. He shrugged. She’s out of my life now, he told himself.
But she was not. Despite the fact that he had come to hate Cristina, despite his misery, the haunting vision of a naked girl with cascading golden hair would still suddenly rise before him in his degradation, sending an unwanted spasm of lust through his body that left him shaking and despising himself more than ever. When, a week later, he reached his workbench and looked at the pitiful results of the previous days’ work, he fell on his knees and cried in despair: “Lord have mercy on me: you have cast me down and I am sunk in sin.”
He remembered the words of the priest, spoken to him so many years before and he moaned: “Truly, Lord, I am less, far less, even than the dust.” Was there to be no respite from this terrible malady? As he considered the matter and it seemed to him that there was not, he felt the hot tears spring to his eyes. “Lord, I am unworthy to serve you,” he murmured. “Let me die.”
It was now, at this final crisis of his humiliation, that his eyes happened to turn to the unfinished scene of the creation of Adam and Eve. And hardly thinking about what he was doing, without any hope that he would be able to make anything of the task he had given up so many times before, he began sadly to carve the little figure of Adam. As he did so, he gradually became aware that he was giving it his own squat body, with its large head and short legs. Not only that, the manly little fellow he was depicting, half solemn and half eager before his God, was an all too accurate representation of his own character, stripped so naked that for a moment he paused in embarrassment. But then he shrugged. He had already been as humiliated as it was possible to be; he had no further dignity to lose, and to his own surprise, he found the almost comic little figure rather engaging. There was something, he realised, rather touching in the little man’s naked pretension as he stared solemnly past God to where the future of mankind, in the form of Eve, was rising before him. As his chisel worked faster and more easily, the mason began to smile, and half an hour later, satisfied with the main outline of the first man, he turned to Eve.
Now at last he saw exactly what to do. Deftly, suddenly gifted with a knowledge he had not possessed before, he drew the outlines of Eve’s body, and by the end of that day, rising from the rib cage of the first man, came in perfect detail, the form of the girl Cristina. Her body was perfect – for did not every line of it haunt his imagination? Her long hair was swept back, just as it had been when she came out of the river, and in her face – though he himself could not say how he had done it – was to be found the look of innocence and knowledge, purity and lasciviousness, the necessary but impossible combination that had defeated him for so many months.
It took him six weeks to complete the carvings of the Garden of Eden.
The scene where Adam takes the apple from the tree of knowledge was the perfect representation of the master mason’s proud self-importance before his humiliation; the expulsion from Eden showed Adam with head bowed, just as his own had been when he made his way shamefacedly to his work after his own fall.
If Sarum was still laughing at him, Osmund was hardly aware of it. He worked from dawn until dusk, half abstracted, in a contented passion, realising as each day passed that God, having first humiliated him, was now creating a little masterpiece through his hands.
And in this manner, he completed the spandrel carvings of the chapter house.
1289
Even before the year of Our Lord 1289, the new tower had begun to dominate the city. It seemed to be rising out of a table set in the sky.
This impression was quite correct. At the crossing of the nave and transepts, where the marble pillars soared into the roof like four legs of a table, the masons had now in effect begun a second building – a massive square grey tower rising nearly a hundred feet over the roof. It rose in two huge tiers, its walls elegantly broken by tall lancet arches. From all five rivers it could be seen, a stately presence in the sky and when the tower was completed, yet another tall structure – a slender spire – was to be set upon it, so that Osmund the mason had remarked to his son:
“They’ll build the cathedral into the clouds.”
It was a noble conception, and no one approaching the new city now could help looking up in admiration at the stones above.
But on a warm September morning in 1289, it was not the tower that a little party entering the city over Fisherton Bridge stopped and stared at. Their eyes instead were fixed downwards, at a crumpled figure lying by the roadside.
It was the stout old burgess Peter Shockley who got slowly from his cart, went forward and made the identification.
“Is he alive?” Jocelin de Godefroi looked down sadly from his horse.
Shockley nodded. “Just.”
A light wind by the river stirred the dust that had gathered in the fallen man’s clothes.
The bridge was a busy, pleasant spot. Below its narrow arches, the river with its long green weeds flowed smoothly and strongly. Just above, on the city side, the bishop’s mills ground corn for the new city’s bread; a little below, the stream was briefly split by a narrow bar of land before it curved round the edge of the close, and here the poorer pilgrims on their journey east and local vagabonds, both wanting to escape the modest tolls on the bridge, would often try to ford it. The current was a little stronger than it looked and it was a favourite pastime for the city children to gather on the bridge, where they were tolerated, to watch the pilgrims downstream lose half their possessions in the water. Ducks and moorhens favoured the ford. The swans liked to nest a little below it. To the west of the bridge, a few dozen cottages straggled beside the road towards Wilton.
The figure huddled by the roadside was dressed in black. His feet were dirty and bare; his hood, which Peter Shockley had just lifted, had been pulled down over his face so that only the end of his stained and matted grey beard was visible; on his chest, the tabula sign that proclaimed him to be a Jew was, at the king’s orders, coloured bright yellow and considerably larger than it had been in earlier decades. Flies buzzed unchecked about his head and he was only semi-conscious.
The ruin of Aaron of Wilton had taken forty years to accomplish, but the process was now complete and represented a triumph of the God-fearing over the infidel. In a long series of edicts that otherwise enlightened monarch Edward I had followed the sporadic persecutions of his pious father Henry to their logical conclusion. The Jewish community had been taxed, forbidden to practise money-lending, forbidden to trade except on impossible terms, taxed yet again; and when a few years previously almost every active Jewish trader had been thrown into jail until he had paid another, stupendous fine, Aaron of Wilton had at last been successfully ruined.
He was too old to seek his fortune elsewhere. He had no family left. Together with the few others remaining in the little Wilton community, he had sometimes been able to scrape a miserable existence out of tiny trades in wool; more recently he had been reduced to begging. He had walked from Wilton at dawn that morning and collapsed by the bridge from sheer fatigue, and for several hours no one had cared to touch him.
The little party that stared down at him represented three generations. Frail, but still upright in the saddle, Jocelin de Godefroi had survived, carefully preserving the two estates in the valley for his grandson, for longer than he had dared to hope. And Roger de Godefroi was everything his grandfather might have hoped for: at twenty-seven he was a splendid representative of the knightly class, like his father before him, and the darling of the lists. That summer, when Jocelin had noticed that the tips of his fingers were turning blue, the knowledge that his grandson would soon inherit had only caused him to smile. The estates were in excellent condition, and not even the dry summer of the year before, when many of the sheep had contracted scab, nor the poor grain harvest of that summer could make more than a small dent in the prosperity that he had built up. He had even improved the manor house in a modest way, adding a small wing to the hall and enclosing the place with a courtyard wall. The old generation had done their work well.
Between these two in age was Peter Shockley; his large, stout, grizzled figure exuded authority; only the pressure of his constantly expanding business had prevented him from representing the borough as a burgess in the several parliaments of Edward’s reign. Since his marriage to Alicia, the merchant had known contentment. Though his wife was grey, her freckled skin had stayed almost miraculously young, and only small lines of contentment filled the corners of her face.
“I’m sixty, but she makes me feel half my age,” he would proudly announce.
Beside him in his cart sat two fair young people: his son Christopher and his daughter Mary.
All five gazed at the Jew, but they did so with very different feelings. Jocelin remembered the courtly aristocrat with whom he and old Edward Shockley had done business in their youth. Peter remember a middle-aged moneylender whom he had wanted to defend at the Parliament of Montfort. Young Roger de Godefroi saw an infidel whom his knightly class was supposed to despise, and the two Shockley children saw only an old tramp, whom they had never known, but whose misfortune they knew must be his own fault, for obstinately denying the true God.
And so the Shockley children gasped with horror when they heard Jocelin de Godefroi’s next words to his grandson.
“Pick him up and put him in the cart. We’ll take him to Avonsford.”
Roger frowned and hesitated. Must he touch this repulsive old figure? But a look from his grandfather was enough; he bowed his head respectfully and went forward. Peter Shockley helped him.
Slowly they raised him, still unconscious, and laid him in the back of the cart. The two Shockley children edged forward, so that he should not touch them.
As they completed the task, Roger allowed himself one questioning look at old Jocelin.
“Is this wise?” His grandfather was a respected knight of the shire, who had acted as a local coroner and as one of the crown escheators, and whose duty was to support the king in all things; and since it was well known that the king’s policy was now to harass the Jewish community as much as possible, surely they should leave the old man where he was. But the knight only shook his head.
“To Avonsford,” he ordered curtly. “He can recover or die there.” And the reluctant little procession moved on.
As it did so, no one noticed that, when they had lifted the old man into the cart, the seal with which he signed his documents had slipped out from the folds of his clothes and tumbled onto the dusty road.
It was John, son of William atte Brigge, who noticed it half an hour later. He stoooped and picked it up then put it carefully into the pouch that hung from his belt.
He did not yet know what, but he would find a use for it, he was sure.
While the ca
rt bumped along from Salisbury into the courtyard of Avonsford manor, and while Aaron was carried into the house, Mary Shockley said nothing. But as soon as they were clear of Avonsford and rattling down the valley towards the city, she burst out: “Why does the knight pick up that old Jew? And why should we carry him?”
“Aaron helped my father start the mill,” Peter reminded her calmly.
“Then we should be ashamed,” she replied hotly. “He’s a usurer.”
Peter shrugged.
“I’d have thrown the old Jew in the river,” she added defiantly; at which her brother Christopher grinned. For Mary’s outbursts were well known.
She was a splendid figure – a twenty-year-old girl as big as her brother and probably stronger. With her fine, athletic body and her long flaxen hair she was a perfect throwback to her Saxon forebears, except in one respect. For from her mother she had taken two features: a band of light freckles across her forehead, and her extraordinary violet eyes. Unlike her mother, Mary’s eyes never varied: they were always violet and they were dazzling. As a child, she had been a tomboy, outrunning and outwrestling all the other children; and now, though she was a striking, blonde young woman, her father had to confess: “She’s a beauty, but she’s still like a man – and as obstinate as a donkey.” Even Alicia, with all her determination, had long since given up trying to make her daughter dress and behave in the demure manner proper to a young woman.
“If we ever find her a husband, he’ll have to take her as she is,” she admitted ruefully.
And when old Jocelin, chiding his handsome grandson for not yet having taken a wife, laughingly remarked that the merchant’s daughter, though hardly noble, was still a fine-looking girl, Roger, the hero of the joust, protested: “Why grandfather, she’d break me over her knee.”
At least her character made the settling of the Shockley properties very simple. “She’ll have the farm, of course,” Peter had said. “And Christopher will run the business.” Both children were content with this: for Christopher was already showing a quick grasp of the expanding Shockley affairs, whereas Mary was only happy when she was overseeing – or more likely working beside – the labourers on the farm.