Sarum (162 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
Turnpikes: Bristol to Bath; Bath via Warminster down to Wilton; Wilton to Sarum. Put another way: medieval port, to Roman spa, to Saxon capital, to the bishop’s new city, already five centuries old.
Turnpikes: there had been nothing like these broad roads in England since Roman times, fourteen hundred years before. They were installed now on all the main routes between major towns, as hard and smooth as a gravel drive. They supplanted the old cartways and tracks that had been used – except during the more civilised Roman period – as the principal roads since prehistoric times.
They were privately run: each set up with its charter of authority from Parliament, each with its shareholders; and its toll gates. Some of the turnpike trusts owned the right to toll large stretches of highway, some only two or three miles; but they were profitable and efficient. The Forest family was a major shareholder in several of them.
To Adam Shockley, returning after so many years, England was a surprise.
“Why, the whole country,” he remarked, “it’s all fashioned by man!”
For the landscape of England and the landscape of America had nothing in common at all. The latter was virgin forest or open land in which man made his modest habitation. But in England, even on the sweeping empty ridges, the hand of man had cut down, shaped, and rearranged wood, ploughed field and pasture for thousands of years. If there were woods, it was because landowners chose to keep them there for shooting or for timber. If there were wastes, it was because, like as not, human hands had once cut down the forests that covered them and the ancient soil had eroded away. True, there were still prehistoric heaths and ancient forest where the hand of man had left little or no impression – but few if any lay along the route of the Bristol to Bath express. England was a country fashioned by men: he had forgotten.
It was early afternoon when Adam arrived at Bath. He had decided to remain there the night.
And Bath, too, was a revelation.
For thirteen centuries nothing much had been done about the spa town of Aquae Sulis. At the start of the century, in the reign of Queen Anne, the place had been little more than a run-down provincial town with a small trade surrounding its mineral springs. The huge complex of Roman buildings with their magnificent halls and baths had all but disappeared under centuries of mud.
And then that inveterate – and successful – gambler, Richard Nash arrived.
It was the Bath created by Beau Nash that Adam Shockley now entered with wonder.
There were elegant streets, squares and crescents, all built in the classical Georgian style with pediments, urns, pilasters, like so many Greek or Roman temples and all done in the mellow, creamy-grey stone of the region; there were the assembly rooms where, like the great Mr Harris at Sarum, Beau Nash had presided over the exquisite social gatherings he had so carefully fashioned himself, and where the fashionable could gamble when they were not taking the cure. There was the hot bath, the king’s bath, the great pump room where both sexes, discreetly segregated when necessary, immersed themselves in the curative saline springs or drank the mineral waters. There were obelisks to commemorate royal visits. There was even the Royal Mineral Water Hospital where the poor could obtain treatment. And, crowning glory, a quarter of a century ago, a little before the great Beau Nash had died, parts of the old Roman baths themselves had come to light.
Adam walked the streets in a daze. He forgot that his scarlet uniform was unquestionably shabby; that his grey bob wig looked as though the moths, having tasted it once, had left it alone, that his neckcloth was no longer gleaming white and that his shoes had old-fashioned buckles. As he saw the fashionable world pass him by, men carried in sedan chairs, women wearing fantastic piles of hair, with their footmen and flunkeys everywhere in attendance, as he stared at the broad classical vistas of the town, so strange after the long years overseas, he murmured:
“I might be in Rome.”
He might indeed. And it was only because he was now returning home almost as a stranger, that he saw it so clearly.
Not for nothing was the century of elegance known as the Augustan age. For did not Britain, like the Rome of that great emperor, have an empire of which she was the civilised centre? Even if America was almost lost, there was still Canada, India, the West Indian islands, Gibraltar. Were not her Georgian buildings severely classical in design, her country houses modelled on those of the Italian Palladio – and therefore Roman? What did her children study if not Latin and Greek? Young men of means visited Italy on their Grand Tour. And when men of education debated in Parliament, did they not drop Latin tags in their speeches like so many senators, even if they had long since forgotten how to construe? A gentleman not only collected classical busts in his house, like as not he had one made of himself. In literature, the late poet Alexander Pope was as great a master of metre and wit as any Latin poet of the silver age. Had not the elegant periods of Addison’s prose been as well-judged as Cicero’s in the greatest days of Rome?
It seemed to Adam Shockley that they probably had. It was not the Renaissance in England but the eighteenth century that was the true classical age, and poets, architects, painters, and ordinary gentlemen were out to prove it. Why, even the religious tolerance, the easy scepticism of the English Church towards other sects, exactly paralleled the amused tolerance of civilised pagan Rome to the cults of the people they conquered. ‘Rome has seen it all’. So it seemed had England. Rational, sceptical, civilised and fairly tolerant – it seemed to Adam Shockley that he had returned from a new to an ancient world.
He spent one night in the Roman city of Bath, and drank one glass of mineral water in the morning, before taking the coach to Sarum.
How familiar it was, the rolling ridges, the empty spaces filled only with the white dots of sheep. He watched eagerly for the first sight of the spire peeping over the horizon.
When he was still five miles from Sarum he noticed one change in the surroundings: it was the sheep. For contrary to anything he would have expected, they seemed bigger.
Could it really be so? The sheep on the Wiltshire ridges had not changed in centuries – stout, sturdy animals with clumsy heads, moderately fine wool and, both rams and ewes, strong curling horns.
The horns were the same, but the sheep seemed to stand taller and to be more powerfully built in their forequarters. The wool seemed to have disappeared from their bellies. They were better looking than the sheep he remembered, but he was surprised at the change.
Sarum at last. It was late afternoon when he arrived. There was the spire, soaring over the city: the streets with their water channels down the middle seemed the same as ever. How calm it was.
The wars in Europe twenty years before, the present struggle in faraway America: these things had hardly touched the city: why should they? The stately cathedral, its quiet close, the medieval market town beside it – these things did not change with the centuries.
In Sarum, for a century, it had been a period of calm.
He made his way eagerly to the house in the close. He had sent a letter from Bristol before leaving, so that his father should be expecting him. As he came through the stout old gateway into the close he suddenly laughed. It was as though he were a child again.
The door was opened by a pleasant young maid in a modest green and white striped dress, a white apron on which she had spilt some flour, and a mob cap tied round with a kerchief over her hair, from which a roll of brown hair was peeping. She gave him a look of fearful wonder, as though he were General Washington himself, and fled down the hall crying: “’Tis the captain.”
A moment later his father appeared, hastily putting on his wig before holding out his hands.
“The hero returns.”
He was thinner, a little gaunt, and before the wig was on, Adam could see that there were only a few wisps of his own grey hair remaining: but otherwise Jonathan at sixty-seven was astonishingly unchanged. He wore the same long blue frock coat, somewhat frayed, that he remembered, the same white silk stockings and knee breeches of a gentleman.
“Your brother and sister return to the house shortly,” he said. “They are eager to meet you.”
How good it was to be back in the house. Little had changed. The wainscot in the parlour seemed to be stained a little darker; in his bedroom there was a fine new four poster bed and on the walls there was one of the bright new wallpapers that had only just been coming into fashion when he was a boy. He could detect many small changes made by his father’s wife – for Jonathan would certainly never had made any – but as he sat down opposite his father in the comfortable old leather-covered elbow chair, he felt very much at home.
His half brother and sister were a delight. If he had felt any secret jealousy of them before he came, it vanished the moment he saw them.
They both had dark hair, from their mother, but in other respects he saw all the Shockley looks in them – strong, broad faces, light skins, blue eyes. The girl, Frances, was fifteen; her brother Ralph was ten. They looked at him with shining eyes and before he could even rise, Frances ran across the room and kissed him.
He fell in love with her at once.
For the next hour he did nothing but answer their questions: about the war in America, the West Indies, about his whole life it seemed. But the first question of all came from Ralph who, as soon as he heard he had come from Bristol, gazed up at him with large solemn eyes and asked hopefully:
“Did you see the highwayman?”
“It’s all the boy thinks of,” Jonathan explained. It seemed that in recent months a highwayman had been making a point of robbing travellers on the roads around Bath; indeed, he had made such a nuisance of himself that the Forest family, who had shares in so many turnpikes, had even offered the astounding sum of £500 for his capture.
“He stole ten pounds from a coach with a lady in it the other day,” Jonathan told him with a laugh, “and he doffed his hat so politely to the lady that a gentleman riding by at the time supposed him to be her personal acquaintance.”
“I didn’t,” Adam had to confess, “but I’ll look out for him next time I go there.”
“Don’t come here again without seeing him,” Frances cried, “or however you fought in America, Ralph will think nothing of you at all.” And she laughed gaily at her brother.
“But tell us about Washington,” Jonathan continued.
There was so much to tell, and much to hear. Mr Harris was still alive, but very old. Yes, there were still theatricals in the close with the Misses Harris, Miss Poore, and the other young ladies of the close in which Frances Shockley also took part. There had been a great visit from the king and queen last year, and King George had reviewed the local militia on the high ground near the town. Why, to be sure, Frances supposed it was very much the same in the close as it was when he was a boy. When she told him about the school for young ladies she attended, Adam could only smile as he thought of his own easy and genteel days at school there.
His father, too, had news: Sir George Forest had died recently but his son Sir Joshua was as shrewd a man as his father. Jonathan himself had only given up his employment as their steward two years before, despite his advancing years.
“I might have continued longer,” he explained, “but Forest has left Avonsford, and his new estates are too widely scattered for an old man like me.”
The manor house at Avonsford, with its chequerboard stone, flint walls and its modest park, no longer suited young Sir Joshua Forest. It had done so while the family was content to figure as gentry, but Sir Joshua wanted something more.
“You remember the Bouverie family who took over the estates by Clarendon,” his father said. “They’ve become earls of Radnor now: nearly as great as Pembroke himself.” He smiled. “And young Joshua Forest means to do the same thing. He’s kept some of the estates around Sarum, but he’s purchased many more in the north of the county and he’s building himself a great nobleman’s house there. All too much for me to care for.”
“Does he still appear in Salisbury?”
“Oh yes. He has a fine house in the close now for when he comes to visit. You’ll see it, for I’m particularly instructed to inform him when you arrive. ’Tis not every day that Sarum sees a heroic captain back from America, my dear boy. You’re quite a figure you know.”
And so it proved. Despite the fact that he had not yet seen a tailor and cut a sorry figure, his sister Frances proudly conducted him round the close the very next morning. Before they had reached the choristers’ green he found he had four invitations to dine, and the most anxious entreaties from three sets of elderly spinsters to call upon them as soon as possible.
“Why, all the old ladies of the close will gobble you up in a week,” Frances cried in delight.
The cathedral itself was shut that year for repairs, and he saw with sadness that the old belfry had had its tower and most of its bells removed.
“They say it was unsafe,” Frances explained, “but then it took them twenty years to do anything about it. We move slowly here, brother Adam, but we get there in time,” and she happily took his arm.
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