And so it was that now Will knelt before the gleaming shrine of Salisbury’s saint and prayed fervently:
“Which way shall I go? Guide me, Osmund. Send me a sign.”
He stayed there some time. The shrine glittered in the half light; and in the end, though no sign had yet come, he felt comforted. “I will watch for the sign,” he thought. “Osmund will send it.” And he made his way out.
It was while he was walking along the edge of the market place that his attention was distracted from his journey for a time by a curious sight.
It was a little procession: a priest, two acolytes carrying lighted tapers and six choirboys were solemnly leading a stiff old man round St Thomas’s churchyard. Behind the old man walked a little group of people who appeared to be family and friends, amongst whom he recognised the burly form of Benedict Mason the bellmaker. The choirboys sang a psalm while the old man, dressed in a coarse wool habit, like that of a friar, and with simple sandals on his feet, followed silently, his bald head bowed.
“What is it?” he asked a bystander.
“An enclosure,” the man told him, and seeing the boy’s look of puzzlement he explained: “He’s going to be a hermit. They’re taking him to his cell.”
Will had never seen such a thing before.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Eustace Godfrey.”
Will had never heard of him.
The ceremony of enclosure, as opposed to the agricultural practice of that name, was a grim and stately affair. First the priest had recited a mass for the dead in the church, at which Eustace had made his vows and put on the coarse woollen habit he was henceforward to wear. Now he was making the slow procession to his cell. Will watched, fascinated.
At the north door of the church, the little group stopped. In the recent rebuilding, a large porch had been added to this side of the church and over it was a large chamber that was reached by a staircase. This was to be Eustace’s cell, inside which he would remain in prayer and meditation until the day he died. Now, while Eustace waited below, the priest and his acolytes went up the stairs to bless the cell.
Will was not able to see the part of the ceremony which followed, since it took place inside. Its symbolism was gruesome.
First Eustace was summoned up the stairs. Inside the chamber he was ordered to lie down on the hard wooden board he was to sleep on in future and then, while he folded his hands as though he were dead, the priest said over him the funeral rites. One of the two acolytes swung a censer, the other held out a bag of earth from which the priest scooped up handfuls and scattered them over Eustace’s body. Then he sprinkled holy water over him.
“Eustace Godfrey,” he announced when it was done. “You are dead to the world. Eustace Godfrey,” he continued, “you are alive only unto God.”
Then he turned and all three came down the stairs, closing the door and ceremonially locking it behind them.
“Eustace Godfrey has entered his tomb,” he cried to the crowd of watchers. “Pray for his soul.”
In fact, his enclosure was not as complete as the ceremony suggested. Before being licensed to become a hermit, Eustace had had to satisfy the archdeacon at the cathedral not only that his desire and vocation for the spiritual life was genuine, but also that he could support himself in a decent state in the place chosen for him. Entombed though he was, a servant would bring him food and clean his chamber every day; his son and daughter could visit him. The retirement into a life of solitary prayer was not, at least in England, uncomfortable. On the other hand, he must stay where he was, perhaps for many years, until he died.
With this arrangement Eustace was quite content. Indeed, the step he was taking that day was not illogical. His attempts to come to terms with the busy city, attempts that he had made as conscientiously and valiantly as any of his ancestors had gone to war or ridden in the lists, had all ended in failure. His lovely daughter had finally, at the age of twenty-eight, married an elderly farmer from Townton. There were no children. His son had not gone to the Inns of Court or made his way in London: he had settled in a modest house in the Blue Boar chequer where he traded unsuccessfully in wool, and drank more than he should. Eustace had continued to invest his dwindling resources, sinking nearly half of what he had in a venture with a Scandinavian merchant while England was in dispute with the merchants of the German Hanseatic League. In 1474 a peace had been signed with the Hansa: the Germans had regained their trade, and Godfrey and his Scandinavian partner had been almost ruined.
It was the combination of these disasters working upon his own natural inclinations that had turned his mind finally to the mystical world. Year by year, he had gone to hear more masses each day; his readings had for a long time been confined to the works of the mystics: Thomas à Kempis, The Cloud of Unknowing and his favourite Julian of Norwich.
By the turn of the year he had no more desire to live in the house near St Ann’s Gate.
“I have done with the world,” he told his children. And it was true.
Nor was it unusual. There were hermits in most dioceses: it was a natural path for a man like Eustace to choose. If he could no longer be a courtly knight at Avonsford, if the busy, noisy merchants of Salisbury would not help him regain his fortune, God at least would accept him, in understanding silence, as a Christian gentleman. When the priest had left, he got up slowly and smiled. For the first time in many years he was happy.
One other figure who had watched the ceremony with particular approval was Benedict Mason.
The bellmaker, in his last years, had become successful, and also amazingly stout. Because he considered Godfrey to be a pillar of the church, Benedict had always felt there was a bond between them and he had bustled across the market that morning to make sure that he was present to witness such an important event. To do so, he had put on his brightest blue hose and red jerkin the combination of which gave him the appearance of a well fattened turkey cock. He crossed himself repeatedly during the mass and glowered at any of the others in the crowd who were not doing so too.
When the service was over and Godfrey was safely in his cell, he did not immediately depart, but lingered a few moments by the door. Then he went back into the church: there was something he wanted to look at, just once more.
Will followed him in.
The new church of St Thomas the Martyr was the showpiece of the town, and the town had much to be proud about. For never had the citizens of Salisbury been so wealthy.
York and Lancaster were still disputing for the throne; but while the great nobles like Warwick the Kingmaker might cynically change sides, the mayor and corporation of Salisbury had calmly sent money and troops to both sides at once. One by one the mighty feudal figures fell. The king’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, with his great park at Wardour just fifteen miles to the west, had been killed only recently – drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine it was rumoured. Another brother, the deformed Richard of Gloucester, who now held many of the old Earldom of Salisbury’s estates, was lurking in the wings. And Salisbury still cared not one jot for any of them.
The present king, Edward IV, was of the house of York. All that mattered to the citizens of Salisbury was that he was rich – both with land from magnates who had fallen in the feudal war, and with a huge payment from the French king, after he had threatened to invade France. Consequently he had no need to summon parliaments and demand taxes. Which was just what the citizens of Salisbury liked.
And Sarum, left in peace, grew rich. True, in the ten-year battle between Halle and the bishop, the townsmen had been forced in the end to give in. The bishop remained their feudal overlord. But no one else had bothered them.
The church of St Thomas the Martyr contained everything the townsmen could wish. There was the splendid chapel of the fraternity of St George; there were the chantries of Swayne and other leading families, and the chantry of the Tailors’ Guild. The other parish churches in the city, too, had similar memorials to their burgesses’ pride and weal
th, but none were more lavish than those of the new church of St Thomas. Its staff of clergy was huge: over twenty priests, sixteen deacons, ten subdeacons, ten chantry priests – nearly sixty men in all, to serve a parish of two or three thousand souls. It seemed to Will, whenever he went past, that there was always a mass or obit being said – sometimes several at once, and when the offices were not being said, then candles were being lit.
The style of the new building was the so-called perpendicular – with thin spreading arches and broad windows. The roof did not have the sophisticated fan vaulting to be found in the greater churches like the new King’s College chapel at Cambridge or its sister church at Eton; instead it had a handsome wooden-beamed roof, from every joint of which there seemed to be staring a broad-cheeked angel; the walls were decorated with bright floral motifs. Everywhere there were little painted shields, some bearing the escutcheon of a local family, others the red cross of St George, and still more with the arms of one of the guilds on them. It was here that the mayor and corporation had their seats reserved, and here that the ceremony of making a new mayor was religiously performed.
But its greatest and most striking glory had only just been completed: this was the huge painting that spread from one side of the nave to the other above the chancel arch.
It was the painting of Doom.
Will was afraid of the Doom painting – with good reason. He could not read or write. He knew little even of religion except for what he had picked up from the occasional mumbled sermons of the priest at Avonsford or the knockabout religious mystery plays that the mummers sometimes performed in the city after Christmas. These plays, where one of the actors took the part of the devil, and another of his victim, were not unlike a Punch and Judy show; they reminded him that he would be soundly punished for his sins; but they were hardly frightening.
What he saw before him now was very frightening: for he had no doubt that it was an accurate picture of the terrible Day of Judgement. On the big wall over the arch that led to the choirstalls, towering over him and staring down into the nave, was the figure of Christ himself, seated on a rainbow, his hands raised and outstretched. Behind him were the splendid towers of the heavenly city. On his right hand, the naked dead were being raised by angels from their graves; some were escorted to the heavenly city: but many more were passing to the space on Christ’s left hand, the infernal regions where a great beast with a savage, gaping mouth was devouring them. It reminded Will of the ceremony he had seen one Whitsun at St Edmunds, where a huge painting, vividly depicting a skeleton in a grotesque, macabre dance, had been carried round the church to remind the people that they were soon to die. He would die soon – he knew that, and when he did, he would be shoved down the beast’s gaping mouth to the fires of hell; he was sure of it.
At one side of the Doom painting there was a full length, life-sized portrait of St Osmund. Assuming that this was exactly what Salisbury’s saint must have looked like, he gazed at it with awe.
The painting disturbed him too much; it was overpowering, and a few minutes later he was outside, on his way out of the town.
But the painting did not disturb Benedict Mason the bell-founder at all. As far as he was concerned, the more colour and ornament in the church the better.
It was one feature in particular that he had gone inside to look at: a small window on the south side – or to be exact, the lower portion of the right hand light of one window. For here, only a week before, he had installed at his own expense about a yard of stained glass. Will had not even noticed it when he went in, but Benedict stared at it with pride. It depicted in orange, red and blue, the figure of St Christopher who was blessing two small standing figures below him which, though they were crudely formed, could be recognised as the stout bell-founder and his wife. Underneath them in a clumsy gothic script were the words:
Gloria Dei. Benedict Mason et uxor suis Margery.
It was a modest memorial, nothing like the fine chantries of the nobles of the richer merchants, just as year after year his gifts of candles, wool and cheese for the church had been modest. But together with the obits which would be said for his soul by the priests when he died and the bells in Wiltshire churches which bore his name, the little stained-glass window would ensure his immortality, and the thickset craftsman was satisfied.
Of his ancestor Osmund the Mason who had carved such wonders in the cathedral he knew nothing at all. And so it was with genuine pride that he told his wife:
“I’m the first of our family to leave his mark in this city.”
He did not notice young Will at all.
The dark thunderclouds that had appeared from the west had already gathered overhead as Will passed the deserted castle hill of Old Sarum.
They did not bother him.
But still he had not solved his problem: which way should he go? He had been watching carefully but there had been no sign.
The sun, shining through the thickening veils of brownish cloud, was filling the huge landscape with a threatening orange glow. The atmosphere was growing close and heavy, building up the trembling, almost tangible tension that presages the great electric release of a thunderstorm.
In front of him, as far as the eye could see, lay the bare rolling ridges of Salisbury Plain. The scene was varied: from where he stood, into the middle distance, cleared ground was interspersed with fields of growing corn. Further away, however, there was no corn, only a bare grey-green expanse like a sea, on which he could see the myriad tiny white dots of the distant sheep.
The sky itself seemed to be growing closer to the land, as though it was about to envelop it, take the whole rolling plateau in vast unseen hands and shake it to and fro.
He stood in front of the ancient dune, a pathetic, diminutive figure, homeless, orphaned, friendless, with two shillings and the gold coin to his name in the whole world. His long thin fingers grasped a stick he had broken from a tree on the way up to the high ground; his thin face with its small, narrow-set eyes, stared over the huge, threatening landscape ahead. He might indeed have been a wandering figure from an earlier age, when men still hunted for their food; and still he had no idea where to go.
And then he grinned.
The storm that was about to break did not bother him. The weather was not too cold. If he got wet, his clothes would dry on him. Empty and uninviting though the landscape looked, he knew that, if one searched carefully, there were always ways to survive. There were shelters built for sheep; there were farms, villages, hamlets where a boy could usually scrounge a meal. Better yet, there were religious houses – monasteries, priories, small granges – where the monks, for all the jokes people made about their easy life, never refused food and shelter to a stranger.
He had asked St Osmund for guidance. It had yet to come. But even so, though he could not say why, some ancient instinct deep inside him knew, with an infallible certainty, that he was a survivor.
In the absence of any sign, he must make a choice: there were several alternatives. He could head towards the north western settlements of Bradford or Trowbridge – both thriving cloth towns. Beyond, a few days’ journey further, lay the Severn river and the mighty port of Bristol. Or he could turn south east instead and make for Winchester or the port of Southampton. Further still, to the east, lay London itself. That was too far, he thought, though its unknown possibilities tempted him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he had turned his back on Sarum.
“I’ll try Bristol,” he finally decided; and began to walk.
The roadway, like most of England’s roads, was in reality no more than a recognised route over which people travelled. It had no surface, it was not marked out in any way: it was simply a broad path stretching across the high ground, trodden down by foot and scored with the marks of hoof prints and cartwheels which had passed that way over the centuries. In some places, where the ground was soft and travellers had fanned out to find a firmer surface, the trackways might spread hundreds of yards across; in others, a har
d ridge between escarpments might narrow the road naturally to only a few. Ancient, as primitive as it had been in prehistoric times, this was the road.
He had gone a mile and was beside the last of the cornfields before the storm broke; when it did, it was not what he expected.
Will knew two kinds of storm at Sarum. The first, the more usual, was when the sky cracked and split open – with thunder and lightning, sheet or forked, that might seem like crashes and flashes of fury but which carried with them also a sense of relief. “The ground’s waiting for it,” he would say, to express the feeling that between sky and earth there was a complicity, as if the bare high ground willingly bore the powerful fury of the storm, its flashes of lightning and torrents of rain for a space, before it moved, with a departing rumble, to some other quarter of the distant ridges, or to the wooded valley in the south. He liked these storms. He enjoyed the noise and the thrill of the lightning, sensing the relief in the sky as the whole atmosphere concentrated itself to release its pent-up tension. He would grin with pleasure as, accompanied by the faraway muttering and distant flashing of the storm, the swollen rivulets and streams poured off the chalk ridges into the valley below.
But there was another, mercifully rarer kind of storm. And today, when he was a mile from cover of any kind, it was one of these that broke.
He thought, for nearly an hour, that he would die. It did not seem possible that any rage in the heavens could be so great. It seemed that the sky, the whole lowering dome of the universe about the high ground had come together not to release, but to destroy. The lightning did not crack nor the thunder roar: they came together with a single huge bang as though the world were staring up into the mouth of a cannon. And, scarcely pausing, this terrible assault of sky upon earth crashed again and again. Worse: the storm did not move, it stayed where it was, an electric maelstrom, directly above him, pouring its rage down upon him while the whole plateau trembled.