Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  How long ago that seemed. Walter was now a successful royal official at Winchester, where his father’s influence had obtained him the post of aulnager, and in the last two years Peter had watched Alicia grow up and ripen so that now it was no longer his childhood sweetheart who walked beside him but a new, only half familiar young woman, about whom there was a sense of mystery and excitement which sometimes made him tremble when he thought of her.

  It was her eyes above all that he loved. They were not like any others he knew. At one moment they seemed to be hazel, though flecked with green and blue around the irises; a moment later, with a change of light, or perhaps a change in her mood, they were an astonishing violet. It was an inheritance from her mother.

  “Let’s go to the market,” she suggested.

  The big, irregular area was filled with sound and activity.

  On the west side stood the squat new church of St Thomas à Becket, which served as parish church for the trading area; though the town was expanding so fast that soon another church might be needed. Near the church was a cheese market. At the opposite, east end, were pens for livestock. Near the centre, a reminder of the bishop’s authority over criminals, stood the stocks. And along the south side, in several rows, were the stalls.

  There were the wheelwrights’ stalls and next to them Bottle Row, where not only bottles, but crockery and pewter were busily traded. There was Fish Row, Ironmonger Row, Cooks’ Row, and Cordwainers’ Row – this last being where a motley collection of shoemakers and cobblers stitched and tapped behind their tables. There were butchers, bakers, cloth-sellers, tailors, silversmiths, carpenters, leatherworkers, bellows-makers, glovers, hatters, yarnmakers, rabbitsellers, spicers, greengrocers, garlic sellers, and poultry merchants. There were coopers, with their barrels piled in tiers, coalsellers, salt merchants, oatmeal-sellers, dealers in hogs; and by a cross at the south east corner, the all-important wool merchants held their own market. The place was alive with all the colourful profusion of specialist trades that made up the medieval world – and which, at this time, gave family names such as carter, cooper, butcher, or tailor, to so many of its people.

  They spent an hour wandering amongst the brightly coloured stalls. The crowds jostled comfortably, regardless of whether they were merchants or villeins, traders from Wilton or farmers from the outlying villages, rich priests, poor friars, or stonemasons from the cathedral. Grave canons might be seen, while their servants picked out cheeses with care; nuns from Wilton and quiet shepherds with their crooks, majestic as bishops, stood side by side at the spicers’ stalls while urchins ran in the street behind them. And each corner of the market had its own, rich smells, from the soft aroma of the cheese stalls to the sharp, dusty tang of the coalsellers’ quarter.

  It was during their walk that Peter discreetly slipped away to purchase something that caught his eye, while Alicia pretended not to notice.

  At last they moved northwards, and up the street past Blue Boar Row.

  The bishop had laid out his town in roughly rectangular blocks, or chequers, each of which was divided into standard tenements. The tenements were plots of land three perches – about fifteen yards – fronting the street and seven perches deep for which each tenant paid a shilling a year ground rent and upon which he might build as he pleased. Most built houses with stores or workshops on the street level; a few – the rich – constructed purely private homes. South of the market lay New Street chequer; to the north, Blue Boar chequer and several others, still being laid out on as the town expanded.

  Past Blue Boar chequer, on the street that led north towards the old castle, but before the city gate, lay the home of Le Portier the aulnager – a tall three-storey timber and plaster house, with a single steep-gabled roof hung with tiles.

  When Peter and Alicia entered, the aulnager was not there, but Alicia’s mother was. As she watched the two go past, Peter noticed that she gave them a curious, thoughtful look. Perhaps, he supposed, she was wondering how long it would be before he was her son-in-law.

  It pleased him to see Alicia’s mother. As well as her unusual violet eyes, she was one of those fortunate women whose looks, though not beautiful, were somehow so compact that she did not seem to grow old. It was another of the reasons why he had chosen the girl. I want a woman who’ll last, he had always thought. Her mother had only one fault that marred her appearance: a slight stoop that made an unattractive curve at her shoulders. But her father’s as straight as a rod, he had argued to himself; I think she’ll grow straight.

  She had. As he looked at her now, he was sure that his choice of bride was perfect.

  They moved into the area behind the house.

  Unlike most of the spaces at the back of each tenement, the aulnager’s was not used for workshops or storehouses, but contained instead a little garden with a yew hedge, two honeysuckle and half a dozen small rose trees. In the middle of the little garden was a wooden bench.

  Only when she sat down did he produce the present he had bought in the market. It was a tiny silver locket that he had seen on a silversmith’s stall. It hung on a thin silver chain and had been made down at the coast at the mouth of the river, where there were small open silver mines. He produced it with a show of casualness, while she watched him cautiously. They both knew that this was an important moment.

  “It’s for you.” He handed it to her, suddenly feeling awkward.

  As she took it, her eyes were on the ground.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” With a great effort she kept her voice cool, unconcerned.

  “That you’re to wear it because you belong to me.” He said the words with a little too much bluster.

  “Do I?” She was pleased, but she did not want to sound so: she wanted him to say something more.

  “Of course you do.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of an assumption?”

  But young Peter was both awkward and pleased with himself. He only shrugged.

  “Perhaps I may not want to belong to you.” There was a quietness in her voice that was a warning, but he chose to ignore it. Indeed, the half flush on her cheek, which told him she was unhappy, gave him a sense of power. Half man, half boy, he wanted her to give way.

  “I offered you a locket,” he said coolly.

  She had started to put it round her neck. Now she paused.

  “Is that all you have to say?” Why didn’t he say he loved her?

  He knew what she wanted, but now, suddenly the knowledge made him shy.

  “There are plenty of others who’ll wear it if you don’t,” he announced proudly, and stared at her in triumph.

  To her it was like a blow in the stomach. She felt her face go pale. For a moment she could not speak. She summed up her strength and held back the tears she could feel welling up.

  “Take it then!” She could not prevent a sob breaking out. “I don’t want it, or you.”

  He had gone too far. He wondered how to retract; but he was not clever.

  “I’m not a bad catch for you,” he bluffed. “I’m a rich man.”

  The silence that followed seemed to him very long; but her eyes had never been more violet as she controlled her tears and finally gave him a cold and contemptuous stare.

  “You’re not a man, I assure you, you’re a boy. And I don’t want you. Please go away now.” She handed him the locket calmly. “I don’t want to see you any more.”

  There was a sickening feeling in his stomach as Peter took it silently. Then, not knowing what to do, he turned on his heel.

  She would come round.

  But it was that same evening that her mother took Alicia upstairs and began to change her dress, telling the surprised girl with a smile:

  “You must look your best tonight, Alicia.” When she asked why, her mother in turn had asked her, with a thoughtful look: “Who do you expect to marry?” And to that she had replied, not as she would normally have done: “Peter Shockley I suppose,” but instead, since she was still angry: “Who k
nows?”

  Her mother nodded.

  “Shockley’s a nice boy,” she went on quickly, “and I like him. But he’s very young. And he’s only a merchant. He’ll never be anything more.” She pulled Alicia’s hair gently back from her face, pinning it behind. “You’re a woman now, and you need an older man, not a boy.”

  Alicia blushed. The words suited her mood. But she wondered what was coming. Evidently something quite unusual, for she had never seen her mother’s face so concentrated.

  Now to her surprise, her mother slipped off the simple child’s bliaut tunic and linen cotte that Alicia was wearing, and produced a white silk slip which she whisked over her head. Alicia had never worn such a thing before and her eyes opened with delighted surprise as it fell in soft folds over her body.

  “You’ve nice breasts,” her mother told her frankly. “We’ll show them a little.” And from the huge chest by her bed she pulled out a magnificently embroidered blue and gold dress which, after being gently gathered by a golden cord above the waist, fell in long folds to her feet. At the front, where the dress laced across, she left its plunging line as open as possible, so that the form of her young breasts thrust forward tantalisingly under the silk shift, making Alicia blush again. Next her mother folded a fine linen wimple in a band over the top of her head and fitted the linen cap, like a crown, over it.

  Alicia stood in front of the polished bronze mirror in one corner of the room and surveyed herself. She had no idea that she could look like this, and the sight of the new person that her mother had just created made her heart race with excitement.

  “And now, my child, you’re a woman,” she declared.

  “Who is all this in honour of?” she asked.

  “Your father has an important friend at Winchester,” her mother explained. “Your brother is bringing him here tonight. His name is Geoffrey de Whiteheath.” Alicia had heard her father speak of him before, in terms of respect. “It would be a great match for you,” her mother went on. “He’s a knight with a fine estate. He lost his wife and son in a fire last year. Now he wants an heir.”

  “Will father make me marry him?”

  Her mother hesitated.

  “No. But he hopes you will. He and your brother have been to a lot of trouble to arrange it.”

  Alicia admired both the men in her family. She was not sure what to think. She supposed she would like their choice.

  “Is he very old then?” she asked anxiously.

  Her mother laughed.

  “No. A little grey at the temples – but that can improve a man you know.” She smiled. “He’ll be here very shortly.”

  Alicia went down the stairs first. The long dress felt very grown up: too grown up, she thought, for Peter Shockley.

  Perhaps this knight would know how to appreciate her.

  The third of the seven deadly sins which afflicted Osmund the Mason crept up upon him very slowly before it took him by surprise.

  His life as a cathedral mason delighted him. For in entering the quiet close, he discovered another world.

  On the canon’s instructions, he had been taken on as an apprentice, a step above the little army of some two hundred labourers who moved the stones and carted the rubble about, but an insignificant and almost unnoticed figure on the fringe of the fifty masons, of whom the master masons formed a small and dignified elite. Above the master masons were the revered master of masters, Nicholas of Ely and his deputy Robert, whom he often saw directing the work but to whom he had never dared to speak; and most godlike of all, more honoured by the builders than even the bishop himself, Elias de Dereham, the designer of the cathedral. He had designed other buildings, including the hallowed shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury; but Salisbury was known to be his masterpiece. Elias was an old man now, and was at present away from the city; Osmund was not even sure what he looked like.

  The masons had admitted him as an apprentice, but since no one knew anything about him, his existence was almost ignored, even by the other apprentices. It might have been discouraging. But one thing he knew for certain the first day that he began: this was where he wanted to be.

  For the time being he was used as a spare pair of hands and given only the lowliest tasks – sawing the blocks of grey stone and helping to dress them. But he was content. In the long, hot, dusty days under the cathedral’s slowly rising shadow, he was glad to watch the builders go quietly about their work in perfect order, closed off from the rest of the world in their spacious precincts. Several nights a week now he would stay in the masons’ quarters, a long line of sturdy wooden huts along the north and east perimeter of the close, and he was glad to sit deferentially outside the circle of masons and listen to their talk. As for his ambitions, he kept them to himself: the masons’ guild was a tight and secretive fraternity; even a new apprentice the masons knew was expected to attend to his duties patiently and wait to be spoken to.

  There was one object in particular on the building site which fascinated him. In the eastern end of the cathedral, where the first chapel, lower than the main body of the church, was already roofed over, Elias de Dereham had placed a large wooden model on a table. It showed the cathedral in its finished form; any mason or labourer was free to wander in and inspect it, and Osmund used to visit this place each day.

  The cathedral that he saw consisted of a long, narrow building whose simple rectangular line was broken only by the huge transepts at its centre, which gave it the form of a simple cross, and two smaller transepts near the east end. At the central crossing, the long roof line was divided into two equal parts by a low, square tower that rose some twenty feet above it and was topped with a flat roof. This was the standard design for many large churches all over Europe at that period and its plain, long, horizontal lines were the essence of simplicity.

  But how elegant it was! Where the old Norman churches, like the cathedral on the castle hill, had been stout, heavy bastions with rounded arches and narrow windows set in fortress-like walls, this new building was a light and airy shell. Its windows, with their plain, gothic points, rose in two tiers – huge areas of glass that perfectly balanced the high, sheer surfaces of the building’s grey Chilmark stone. Nothing, it seemed to him, could be more pure, and natural.

  It was one day when he was standing beside the model, wholly absorbed in it, that he heard a voice at his side.

  “You like the building?”

  An elderly man with a broad, receding forehead and a hooked nose was standing there, gazing down at him curiously. Osmund wondered who he was.

  “It’s so,” he hesitated: “so simple,” he said honestly.

  To his surprise, the old man smiled.

  “The best things always are. You see those windows: note how there is an absence of any but the simplest tracery. Across the Channel you will find the most elaborate patterns of masonry appearing in windows, and in the vaults,” he added. “But I dislike all that. It’s not Sarum,” he smiled, “not Sarum at all.”

  “I think it must be the greatest cathedral in the world,” Osmund said.

  The designer laughed.

  “Oh no. The cathedral of Amiens in France,” he went on cheerfully, “is twice the volume of our church. But if you stand inside both, you will never be able to tell. And why? Because the proportions are perfect. See,” he became enthusiastic, “these piers of Purbeck marble that support the vaults: the marble is so hard that we can make them thin. And where the transepts cross at the centre, the four great columns at the corners of the crossing – there we have built huge pillars whose columns will fly straight up, with no intervening capitals from floor to vaulting in a single unbroken line. Simple nests of columns. Pure line. They soar.”

  It was obvious to Osmund now who the old man must be. He was astonished that such a great man should speak to him.

  Canon Elias de Dereham gave him a friendly look. “And are you a mason, young man?”

  “No sir,” he answered modestly. “But I hope to be.”
>
  “Can you carve?”

  He knew that he could carve in wood. He was sure he would in stone.

  “Yes,” he replied unhesitatingly.

  The old man nodded, and then moved on.

  It was two days later that one of the masons came up to him when he was working and began to question him.

  “You wish to be a mason?”

  He nodded.

  “If you wish to join our guild and learn the mysteries of the mason’s craft, you must serve our apprentice until we decide you are worthy.”

  The masons’ guild was still a fairly informal organisation, but he knew that usually a boy apprentice might have to serve as long as seven years before being admitted as a journeyman mason. He bowed his head.

  “Very well,” the man said briskly. “See Bartholomew. He’ll be your mentor.” And he walked away.

  And from that moment Osmund knew that his life as a proper mason had begun.

  Bartholomew was an apprentice only two years older than himself: a pale, surly young fellow with a shock of dark hair, already thinning, that fell over his face, and a large, running boil on the right side of his neck. He greeted Osmund without enthusiasm, but told him he might work beside him in future and learn the beginnings of his craft.

  The next day Robert the master mason came to him too, asked him a few questions about himself, and then gave him a curt nod.

  “Learn from Bartholomew,” he ordered.

  There was so much to learn. His surly mentor showed him how to turn his chisel, and explained to him the properties of the different kinds of stone.

  He also showed him the many activities that went into the building, each of them with their own particular workshop.

  It was a world full of wonder. He saw the great drawing board of the head mason, where, with compasses and set squares, he drew the designs for each part of the building on a linen sheet. He was surprised to see that the pencil he used was not made of lead, but of silver.

  “Silver leaves a black line on linen,” Bartholomew informed him curtly. He had not known.