Sarum (168 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
In fact, the smuggling business was pestilential to the government for reasons which had little to do with the contraband itself, or the charming sideline of taking eloping couples to be married in the island of Jersey. For the smugglers exported gold, of which England was running perilously short, to pay for the contraband from France: the fantastic sum of over ten thousand guineas a week was leaving the island this way. And the smuggling sailors did not hesitate to sell information to the French about England’s naval and shore defences.
But Peter Wilson knew nothing of that. Tomorrow, at Sarum, he would be handsomely paid. Then he would buy a wedding ring. For the very next week, on his nineteenth birthday, Peter Wilson was going to be married. He smiled to himself contentedly as they began the run into the moonraker country.
No one knew when the men of Wiltshire first came to be called moonrakers; but it was smuggling that gave them the name.
A party of Wiltshire smugglers, hearing the excise men approaching one night, had pushed their load into a pond. Later, thinking the coast was clear, they had begun to try to get the barrels out again with poles and rakes. They had just started, however, when the excise men returned. It was then, when the excise men demanded to know what they were about that one of the men, pointing to the reflection of the full moon in the water explained: “See that cheese – we’re trying to pull it over here,” and he began slowly to rake the water. Slow and simple these Wiltshire men, the excise men had concluded as they rode away. And slow and simple, when it suited them, the Wiltshire men had always been, especially when it came to getting the better of interfering government officials.
Peter Wilson liked the run into moonraker country.
“I’ll buy that ring tomorrow,” he thought.
Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel paused before the door.
Could he go in?
Of course he could. He must. He had particularly been asked to come on urgent business, by the owner of the house.
He looked at the door worriedly. If only he could trust himself not to give everything away; if only he did not blush; if only at this moment he were not trembling.
He had been particularly summoned, on a matter of delicacy. Discretion was required. He was a doctor.
Still he paused.
It was pleasantly warm. The morning mist, hours ago, had given way to a mellow autumn sun. All around the close the yellowing leaves were gently falling in the faint northern breeze. They rustled along the north walk, gathered along the edge of the choristers’ green, piled into the stone corner of the little lodge by the south gate that led to the old bridge.
The cloistered seclusion of Salisbury close, with its cathedral rising like a stately tree, its sweeping lawns, and its low, receding lines of gracious houses, always seemed to Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel to have a poignant melancholy all its own in the Michaelmas season when the leaves were falling. But perhaps it was just his mood. The summer birds that infested its gracious old houses – the swallows, swifts, martins and the small company of starlings in the trees, had all long since risen with their shrill, busy cries and wheeled away, leaving the precincts to its year-round inhabitants – a few sparrows and thrushes, the daws who were sombrely picking over the green by the plane trees, the rooks in the elms, gazing down like so many black-robed canons in their stalls, and lastly a pair of kestrels who nested in the cathedral tower and from time to time circled the spire in a manner plainly suggesting that they were the true owners of the ancient building.
Only half the leaves were down, and the sun found warm and subtle colours everywhere upon the precinct’s crumbling surfaces. It was not only the green and moss in the crevices, not only the tawny and golden leaves, nor the grey green Chilmark stone, the long-leaded roof of the cathedral or the delicate shades of the red brick, red tile and the stuccoed fronts of the houses; no, the joy of the cathedral close was in the lichen. It was everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on great stone surfaces or the uneven churchyard wall: greens, yellows, rusty reds, ochres, creamy blues, light browns: the living lichen with its subtle colours grew everywhere.
He knew why he was summoned.
Had she not come to him privately, three months before, and begged him to speak to the young man?
He had done so.
It was a long interview. He made the position very plain. He warned, persuaded, even begged. And it had been useless. First the fellow rambled, then laughed at him, finally told him, in a friendly way, to mind his own business.
“Can you see no danger?”
“Frankly Doctor, no.”
“But what of your wife, man?” he had burst out. “Do you not realise you are giving her pain, and anxiety?”
“She has been to you?” The young man looked at him shrewdly.
“It would have been through concern for you if she had,” he replied.
“Doctor,” there was a trace of anger in his voice now. “There is nothing about which you need concern yourself, and nothing to fear.”
What more could he have done?
The house before which Doctor Barnikel stood was a handsome brick and stone fronted building on the northern side of the close.
The house belonged to Canon Porteus, who lived there with his wife Frances. He was not afraid of either of them. He was certainly not afraid of the young man. No, he hesitated because she would also be there.
He stood by the gate for a full minute.
It was while he did so that, from the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear, the small figure of Peter Wilson emerged and walked away. Barnikel smiled. He had only to look at the scruffy young fellow to guess that he had been with the housekeeper delivering contraband.
“After all,” he murmured, “even the clergy must have their brandy, too.”
It seemed to break the spell. He went in.
It was ten years since Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel had come to Sarum from a village north of Oxford.
He was thirty-five, an excellent and respected doctor and he had soon built a solid reputation in the city. He lived in a pleasant, modest, white-fronted house in St Ann Street.
He was a kindly man. No one in Sarum had ever seen him say a cruel word, or lose his temper: indeed, the last time he had done that was twenty years ago, and even then, it had been because he saw a man in Oxford whipping his dog so viciously he thought it would be maimed. At that moment, to his own surprise, he had been suddenly transformed into a state of towering rage. A minute later, when the dog’s master picked himself up off the ground, he found that his dog was no longer in his possession but being carried away in the arms of a slightly chubby, red faced but determined fifteen-year-old. And the boy’s attack had been so sudden and so devastating that the fellow had not cared to argue but had slunk away.
Thaddeus kept the dog, named Spot, which had lived on for ten years.
He was now a well-built, broad-chested man, just over average height, with thinning hair and, despite the fact that he was a respected doctor, a tendency to blush sometimes in the company of women. Surprisingly he was still unmarried.
“A strange name, Barnikel,” old Bishop Douglas once remarked to him. “What’s its origin?”
“Danish, I believe,” he replied. He had heard of the legend of the Danish warrior who cried. ‘Bairn-ni-kel’; but he smiled at this as no more than a charming myth.
She was there.
She was sitting quietly beside Frances Porteus in the drawing-room, working on a piece of embroidery, and she looked up as he came in.
“I fear my husband has not yet returned, Doctor Barnikel,” Frances Porteus said politely. “But we expect him presently. Pray sit with us until then.”
Barnikel bowed.
He tried to keep his attention on the older woman.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Frances Shockley had been a gay young woman. Many in Salisbury could remember it. But that was before she had married Mr Porteus.
“You must marry, I’ve no doubt,” her father had told her. “But you’ll never change him – make no mistake about that. I only pray he may not change you too much.”
By the time Barnikel arrived at Sarum she had already been married four years; and whenever he met her it had seemed to him that there was an unhappiness in her eyes, as though her natural gaiety had been trapped. Ten years later, that look, too, had completely vanished and he did not know whether to be sorry or glad. For Frances Porteus, though she had no children, was now a most staid and proper matron.
“I trust Porteus is not harsh to you,” old Jonathan Shockley said, just before he died.
“Oh no,” she answered. “Never. But,” she had allowed herself to sigh, “he is very correct and – he is sombre.”
She sat on her chair now, bolt upright, stitching.
But it was to her companion that Barnikel’s eyes kept straying. He could not help it.
Agnes Bracewell was not beautiful. She was a quiet, pleasant, dark brunette with a face that was a little too broad across the brow, lightly freckled, and cheeks that dimpled just above the corners of her mouth when she smiled. Her front teeth pointed slightly inwards, but this was not unattractive. On her wrists the dark hairs grew slightly more thickly than one expected. Her father had been a major in a good line regiment; she was his favourite and never much displeased him. She was twenty-five. She wore spectacles to do her embroidery.
Agnes had first come to Sarum three years before; and there was only, for poor Barnikel, one tragedy in this.
For Agnes had come as young Ralph Shockley’s wife.
Young Ralph Shockley. He was in fact the same age as himself, and for over a decade now he had been a schoolmaster, but his manner was still so boyish, his enthusiasms and flights of fancy so sudden, that Thaddeus still thought of him as young. It was Ralph’s boyish good looks and infectious humour that had first attracted Agnes. Thaddeus sometimes found them tiresome. But then, he considered ruefully, he was prejudiced.
It was because Ralph and Agnes’s own little house in New Street was being redecorated that Frances and Porteus had invited them to spend a month in their house in the close until the work was completed. Perversely, it was Ralph who insisted they accept the invitation.
Knowing what he did, Barnikel had felt a sense of foreboding ever since he heard of it; and he had no doubt that was why Porteus wanted to see him.
He glanced at the two women. Did they know why he was there this time? It was impossible to tell.
He sat politely, making demure conversation.
He was conscious of the long case clock ticking softly in the hallway outside; of the shaft of afternoon sunlight in one corner of the room, of the tiny particles of dust spiralling in the sunbeams; he was conscious of the dark, solemn portrait of Canon Porteus staring bleakly down from the wall opposite. He was conscious of the needles of the two women rising and plunging with a tiny tick through the canvas of their embroidery, and of Agnes Shockley’s breast quietly rising and falling.
She was nothing exceptional.
“But then,” he reflected with typical modesty, “nor am I.”
Why was it that, whenever he saw her he was filled with protective urge? Why was it that, when they spoke, there fell between them that wonderful silence of perfect understanding, the silence that made him yearn to take her in his arms and kiss her?
“Ah, if only,” he often thought. If only it had not been that pleasant, self-centred young fellow with his boyish good looks that she had met. “I should have known how to treat her,” he thought.
He saw her often in that small, genteel community. And the passion, which he strove so hard to conceal, only grew worse.
“I am constant,” he laughed at himself ruefully. “And quite without hope.”
There was nothing he could do about it.
Ten slow minutes passed. Then the canon arrived.
“Ah doctor,” he bowed gravely. “You are most kind to come. Let us speak in my study.”
Barnikel rose.
“I do not wish to be harsh.” Porteus fixed him with his black eyes. “I must show charity.” The last word sounded like the tolling of a dismal bell.
Nicodemus Porteus was a pillar of the community – straight and narrow. His thin hair, grey at the temples, was cut short on top but allowed to blossom out in curls at the sides, and it was a great pity that some fifteen years earlier, gentlemen had ceased to wear wigs or even to powder their hair; for Porteus’s high narrow head was made to wear a wig, and his hair, such as it was, would have looked better powdered. But since the French Revolution both these fashions had passed leaving Porteus, so to speak, stranded on his own. His appearance was as bleak as a winter tree. His clerical black silk stockings and black knee-breeches hugged the thinnest legs in Salisbury close; his black frock coat was tightly buttoned up the front, and the two starched white tabs of his clerical cravat poked over the top of it.
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