Then the captain swung himself up into the boat, turning to face his passengers, still obediently waiting on the sandbank.
“How do we board?” one of the men cried.
The captain grinned.
“You don’t.”
The passengers looked at each other, bemused. Was this a strange joke of some kind?
“You don’t board, Jew,” the captain cried. “You stay on the sandbank.”
“But we paid our fares.”
“And this is where they get you,” he chuckled.
And now, suddenly his two sons pushed off with their oars, sending the boat skidding out into the deep water.
“Tide’s coming up,” the captain shouted. He looked at Aaron. “Remember Moses, old man, and you can part the waters!” He roared with laughter at this excellent joke. His sons swung the boat round, caught the wind, and as the sail filled out with a snap, the boat began to tack away towards the harbour.
Only now did the little group understand that the manoeuvre with the sandbank had been a trick. They gazed at the departing boat in astonishment, scarcely able to believe what was happening.
There was a shocked silence.
“What shall we do?” The younger of the two men turned to Aaron.
“Can you swim?”
“No.”
There were two men and a woman, none of them in condition to attempt any feats of physical endurance, even if they could swim. The three children were thin and silent, in a state of shock. Aaron looked around him. It was a mile to the headland and perhaps a mile and a half to the main line of the shore. The water was already over his knees.
“We’ll have to try to swim,” he said finally. He knew it was useless, but if they stayed there, it was obvious they would drown. No one responded.
“Perhaps someone will see us,” one of the men suggested.
The coastline was bare. By the sand bar at the end of the headland, he could see the fishermen were still there. But would they rescue them? Christchurch itself was far away, hidden from view by the headland.
“Perhaps the sailors will change their minds.”
Aaron did not reply.
“Better try to swim,” he suggested. Still nobody moved.
The woman began to cry for help.
It was only then that he saw the storm.
The black clouds that came over the bay had seemed insignificant when they appeared on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand. But then they had arisen suddenly and within minutes had spread out, blackening the west and rushing forward over the waters with terrible swiftness, like ominous birds of prey. The storm came in a fury. Its winds whipped the sea into a wild spray, hurling it against the headland and sending the grey black waves buffeting and thumping their weight onto the shingle shore with a crash and rattle. As the boat rounded the headland and reached the safety of the harbour, the group of fishermen who had watched the pathetic little party stranded on their sandbank and heard the faint cries across the water, had gone at last to their boat with the idea of rescuing them. But when they saw how fast the black clouds were coming, they realised that it was wiser not.
As the clouds streamed across the bay, they retired to a little hut they had built in the lee of a sand dune, and waited out the rage of the storm.
An hour later, as the winter skies began to clear, they ventured out of their shelter again.
There was no sign of Aaron and his party.
Sometimes, in later years, the fishermen at the harbour would point out from the headland to the spot where the sandbank lay, and tell their children:
“That’s where they stood. That’s where the Jews were drowned.”
And it was said, for a generation or more:
“When a storm’s about to blow, if you listen carefully, you can hear their voices, crying in the waves.”
The expulsion of the Jews from England took place swiftly and quietly. Apart from a few isolated incidents, for which the culprits were mostly punished by the authorities, they were not molested.
The Church, it was agreed by everyone, had triumphed.
To mark this triumph in Sarum, the dean and chapter declared that a fine statue should be erected – a figure representing the True Church with an infidel blindfold beneath.
Osmund the Mason was briefly considered for this work; but after his outburst about the tower, it was decided to give it to another.
Mary Shockley did not hear about the death of Aaron until several days later, and when she did, she only shrugged.
“He’s lost his soul anyway,” she stated flatly. “I tried to save him,” she explained, “so I know.”
Only one matter continued to puzzle her. A week after her journey to Christchurch, the Shockley family went to the Saturday market in Salisbury, and after she had refused to buy some brightly coloured silk slippers that Alicia had pointed out, on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with her boots, she noticed a figure standing by the sheep market that she had never seen before. He was dressed in a long black robe edged with fur; his head was bald and he was more wonderfully stout than any man she had ever seen before. His flowing robe stretched out over his huge stomach and reached to the ground in such ample curves that he resembled nothing so much as one of the mighty cathedral bells. His clean-shaven face appeared to be built up in layers of polished fat out of which his small black eyes shone and his full lips were formed into an expression of perfect serenity.
She strode across to him.
“What are you, fat man?” she enquired pleasantly.
“A merchant, lady,” he replied. His voice was a rich, melodious tenor, heavily accented.
“You’re from Italy,” she guessed.
He inclined his head. “From Lombardy.”
“What do you sell?”
“Money, my lady, only money. It’s what everybody wants.” His eyes had already taken her in at a glance and now flicked back and forth across the market place.
She frowned.
“Does the Church allow you to sell money?”
“Of course,” he answered serenely. “I am an agent, lady, for a great Lombardy money house. The pope blesses us every day, for his Church is our greatest customer. We make many loans,” he added dreamily, “many loans. Do you wish a loan?”
She stood in front of him with her arms akimbo, looking at him severely.
“Tell me your terms, fat man.”
“They are easy, lady.” His eyes rested on her for only a moment. “If you borrow twelve marks, I will advance you ten now. In a year, you will repay me the twelve.”
She glared at him.
“And the other two?”
“My fee.”
“It’s interest.”
For a second his smile departed and he looked pained.
“We call it a fee.”
“Call it what you like. Same thing. It’s usury.”
He shook his head, then recovered his beatific smile.
“Money must work, lady. Money always works.”
She remembered where she had heard that expression before.
“Then what’s the difference between you and a Jew?” she demanded.
And now, just for an instant, the man from Lombardy allowed himself to chuckle.
“The difference,” he smiled sweetly, “is that I am here.”
Mary turned away, with a sense that she was being made a fool of; but for years afterwards, her face darkened if either the Jews or moneylending were mentioned: for it was the one area where her simple and unquestioning faith had been undermined.
There was at this time a man in Sarum who was generally agreed to be a nuisance.
He was an old Franciscan friar – a harmless eccentric who some claimed to be a hundred – who irritated the priests in the close considerably. A lifetime of hard labour and ascetic living had certainly taken their toll on him physically: his back was bent, his teeth gone, and his eyes were deeply sunken. The fellow was often to be seen sitting near the entranc
e of the close and would not have excited any attention if he had not, several times a day, risen up and begun to preach.
When he did so, the effect upon him was remarkable. His back would straighten, his voice, high-pitched though it was, would carry across the close, and his eyes would gleam with a piercing brightness that was disturbing.
His sermon was always the same.
“Beware you burgesses – and you priests. This city is swollen with pride,” he would cry. “But I tell you, your pride will be cast down unless you return to humility and repent.” Each time he preached, his voice would grow in strength and passion. “You build a great tower into the sky, like the Tower of Babel,” he would shout. “You build a church of stone, but you forget God.” And then he would point with outstretched arm at the great tower above the city. “Pride and vanity are building that tower,” he would proclaim. “Pride and your tower will fall.”
It was not a message the canons wished to hear. Although its mighty pillars were bending, the huge tower was still to be surmounted by a slender spire which, all knew, was for the glory of God, and though they did not like to move the preacher on, they took as little notice of him as possible. Unfortunately there were a few poor souls in the city, not to speak of the urchins in the streets, who took his preachings too literally and who would sometimes follow one of the canons up the street crying “Pride, pride.”
It was irritating.
Despite his deranged preaching, people often gave him alms, though he never asked for any; but even so, most passers-by preferred not to get too close. Only Peter Shockley, for some reason, used to stop and converse with him; but when he once remarked that the friar was hardly older than he was, people smiled and supposed the old fellow had told him some fantastic story. The friar had a long scar running down his forehead.
It was the following spring that Osmund the mason made his last contribution to the great cathedral. It was a contribution that gave him a strange satisfaction, partly because no one ever knew about it.
The castle of Old Sarum on its bare chalk promontory had become a place apart. It was not deserted, for the garrison remained there, so did a gaol. The little town still held its small market and sent burgesses to parliament whenever burgesses were summoned. But few people from outside went to the windy promontory on the edge of the high ground for choice. The clergy were glad to be out of the place, and although small services were still held in the old Norman cathedral building of Bishop Roger, they often referred to the old town as the castle of Caesar in the mistaken belief that the dune, rather than the vanished Sorviodunum below, had been a Roman settlement.
But Osmund liked to visit the place. He had finished the carvings at Clarendon – a pleasing set of animal heads around a door. But since then, no one had offered him any work. The bleak emptiness of the castle suited his mood. He would trudge up the steep hill from the river and stare out over the new city from its battlements. It was here one day, passing a small stone building near the gates that had recently been demolished, that his sculptor’s eye picked out a little grey object in a heap of rubble. Walking over to the spot he reached down and pulled out a piece of carved stone, no bigger than his fist, over whose curves he ran his stubby fingers and which caused his solemn face to break into a smile.
It was a strange little figure, of a naked woman with big breasts and strong, muscular hips; it fitted neatly into the palm of his hand and the feel of it gave him a strange sense of pleasure.
It was eight hundred years since the little figure of Akun, the hunter’s woman, had last been seen; yet her presence there was not so strange. She had travelled up river with Tarquinus the heathen, and then been discreetly returned by him one day and secreted in a hidden niche in a wall in Sorviodunum where she belonged. Sorviodunum had been deserted; its buildings had tumbled down, and over the centuries its stones had been dispersed until no visible trace of them remained. Some of them had been carried up the hill, and later Norman builders had unwittingly moved the little figure, in a heap of other assorted rubble to be used as in-fill, and dropped her into a cavity in the walls of a house on the castle hill. In her eight-thousand-five-hundred-year journey, she had therefore never travelled far from the little northern valley, and now, delighted with her shape, the old mason carried her back to Avonsford.
For several days he wondered what to do with the little figure; and then a thought occurred to him that made him smile.
The tower of the great cathedral had not collapsed: he had been wrong. Though the cathedral continued to settle, it seemed that, after all, it would hold up. And though he continued to criticise the building, he secretly rejoiced that the noble structure and its many carvings were safe after all. It was thinking about the tower that gave him the idea.
It was a few evenings later that Osmund walked slowly into the cathedral close just as dusk was falling. The masons in the tower had already left for the day and the place was almost deserted so that no one saw him as he quietly entered the cathedral and moved to the staircase which led to the upper storey. It was a long climb: first to the top of the main arches then to the clerestory above them, until finally he reached the level of the vaulting. Below him in the cavernous spaces of the nave, half lit by a dim glow from the great windows, he could nor hear anyone moving about. As he had hoped, the door to one of the four staircases to the tower was open. He climbed the narrow spiral: twenty feet, forty feet, up to the first landing with its parapet and sweeping views over the city. The first stars were beginning to glimmer but set in the wall above, despite the dim light, he noticed one of the dog’s heads he had carved.
“They don’t want me in the tower, but they’re glad enough to use my carvings,” he muttered.
He climbed again, breathing heavily, and this time he came out at the top of the tower. The work on the spire had not yet begun and there was nothing above him but the open sky. He was two hundred and twenty feet above the ground.
Everywhere the stars were appearing; they seemed brighter and more plentiful than the little lights of the city below. The great stone tower thrust so high above the other buildings, belonged more to the world of the stars than the world of man.
Osmund moved around the parapet, inspecting it. There were dozens of small niches in the masonry, some containing figures, some empty, and finally he found one on the outer edge of the parapet into which a tiny head would neatly fit. From his pouch he drew a little chisel and hammer and, disregarding the height, he leaned out over the edge of the parapet and hollowed a deeper recess in the niche; when this was done, he dropped the little figure of Akun into the hollow so that just her head appeared, looking out of the lip, while her squat body was concealed. Glancing about, he saw some mortar and a bucket of water, left by the masons at the end of the day, and a few moments later the little figure was permanently fixed in place.
He grinned. The head was so small that it would probably never be noticed; but there it was, gazing northwards towards the high ground, a last contribution from the master mason, despite the wishes of the guild, to the cathedral that had been his life. He gave the tiny head a pat.
“If this tower stands up, you’ll stay here now,” he said.
And so it was that Akun found a new resting place in the tower of stone, high above the bowl of land where the five rivers met.
And now at last the great work was almost completed.
The final addition to the new cathedral was its most dramatic feature – the crowning glory that transformed it from a splendid church into a wonder: there was nothing else like it on the island, hardly, indeed, in all Europe.
For the tapering octagonal spire, that ineffable narrow grey cone that rested on top of the tower, soared a further, astounding hundred and eighty feet. It almost doubled the height of the cathedral to over four hundred feet. Year after year it had gently risen over the stately mass of the tower, aweing even the masons who were building it.
None had been more fascinated than old Osmund. Time had taken
away some of the pain of the events of 1289, and although for some years he was not a popular figure with the other masons, they tolerated his presence when, once or twice a year Edward had taken him up the tower to show him the progress on the spire. In the early years of the building, Edward had always explained: “He’s getting old. This may be the last time he sees the spire before he dies.” But as the years passed, this excuse became a sort of joke with the little band still working in the spire’s upper reaches.
For Osmund, having passed through the grand climacteric of his life, seemed to have settled quietly into an indestructible old age. Thin and bent, his shuffle a little slower, he seemed always to be in motion, and even as he neared his eightieth year, he still walked the few miles from Avonsford to the new city at least once a week if he could not get a ride in a cart. “We’ll be building another cathedral before that old man dies,” the masons began to joke, as he gamely pulled himself up the tall staircases that led to the spire.
Year by year it slowly rose, and year by year Osmund climbed up to inspect it, gazing carefully at the bending pillars. The buttresses that had been added seemed to be taking the strain of the arcades; the soaring purbeck shafts, miraculously, seemed to be holding in place.
The construction of the spire fascinated him, for there were several new technical problems to surmount. The first was how to fit an octagonal spire on to a square tower – a problem which fell into two parts: how to support its eight corners’ vertical thrusts, and how to counteract the eight horizontal thrusts that accompanied them. To support them, arches had to be constructed across the four corners of the tower, subdividing the area into eight bases. But now the weight of the spire was pushing upon not only the tower’s corners but the middle of the walls as well, where the new arches met, forcing them outwards and threatening to split the tower apart.
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