Sarum (99 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“I don’t know what you mean.” He felt himself blushing furiously, but he could not move.
“Yes you do,” she taunted gently. “Been watching me ever since last summer. Every time I go through the church. Seen you go by my house too. Quite a few times.”
Now the poor mason flushed scarlet. He opened his mouth to protest but the girl broke into a soft laugh.
“I don’t mind.” And she smiled: not the smile of a child, he noted, but that of an experienced woman; her eyes ran up and down his stocky frame. She shifted her position, pushing her legs out so that she was leaning back even further against the tree, and her blue eyes looked straight into his.
Then, to his astonishment, she said calmly and quietly: “You can kiss me if you want.”
He stared at her. She was no older than his own daughter – he knew; yet now it was he, the master mason, who felt like a foolish boy. What game was she playing, he asked himself, what witchcraft? He must leave her at once.
But still he could not.
She did not move; she gazed up at him. Her face seemed so soft, and her eyes had a look of hurt, almost reproach in them.
“Not if you don’t want to,” she murmured.
He stood very still. The wood seemed unnaturally silent. Then, hardly knowing what he was doing, whether he was awake or whether, after all, this was some dream sent by the Devil, the mason forgot all caution, stepped forward, lowered his large head to kiss her lips, and was astonished as the child threw her soft arms around his neck and pulled him to her.
How sweet her lips tasted. Her young body pressed urgently against him and the little mason trembled.
In an ecstasy of excitement, he felt himself falling to the ground with her.
Moments later, he did not even protest as, still murmuring softly, she began to tug at his clothes. Osmund the Mason forgot his fear and caution. With a cry he rose, tore his clothes off, and flushing this time with pride, stood before her naked. Now, he knew, now he would have her at last. His hands reached out.
But suddenly, with a little peal of laughter, she slipped from his grasp and darted away from him. He stared at her in astonishment.
Ten feet away, she turned, and he saw that she was smiling.
“Catch me, then,” she cried. And before he could protest, she was running lightly away down the path between the trees.
His stocky, hirsute body with its small paunch bounded along the path behind her. For fifty yards he followed, conscious only of the twists in the path, the flickering light through the trees and the fact that her form, in its single white shift, was only a few tantalising yards ahead of him. The leaves and branches flicked into his face; his feet stumbled over the hard roots that lay across the path; but he hardly noticed them as he panted forward, his round face and his grey eyes shining.
They were getting near the river. But before reaching it the path passed through an open glade of grass about thirty yards long. That, he thought, was where he would catch her, and as they reached it, he hurled himself forward.
She was ahead of him, almost at the far end of the glade. She had stopped. She was turning. His face lit up in a smile of triumph.
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.
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