Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Hopkins himself was present during the trial, and Forest pointed him out to the boy: a sad-faced but otherwise unremarkable man.

  “But a great servant of God,” Obadiah assured him, and Samuel looked at him curiously.

  Even the revelations about Lambe were nothing to what followed. For next the court learnt that when the servant of a gentleman in the close had called at her door, five spirits had appeared at the old woman’s call, disguised as ragged boys, and then, before his eyes, that she had transformed herself into a cat!

  “I spoke to the servant myself,” Obadiah murmured. “’Tis true.”

  “Margaret says this trial is great nonsense,” Samuel said.

  “She is wrong,” Obadiah replied. “Evil must be rooted out.”

  And Sir Henry Forest, with a grim smile added:

  “Nonsense or not, as a magistrate I’ll tell you, she’s about to be found guilty.”

  She was. And Samuel was furious that Margaret would not allow him to go to see the execution at Fisherton the next day.

  But more important to Samuel Shockley than the trial was the conversation he had with Obadiah afterwards. For the preacher took him to one side and said:

  “I believe, Samuel, you are eager to do God’s work. Have you considered a profession?”

  He had not.

  “If you have the will, I perceive you could be a fair scholar. That opens many doors. Should you like that?”

  He blushed with pleasure that Obadiah had such a good opinion of him.

  “Then you must come to live with me in Salisbury for a time,” the preacher said. “For your schooling has been neglected.”

  Now brother and sister faced each other once again. They had not met since the incident with the Prayer Book.

  For a few minutes he had tried to smile, thinking it would make his task easier; but before long he had given it up.

  “The boy has intelligence. He could be a fine scholar.”

  “I have taught him all he needs to know.”

  In a way, she was right. After a few more years of his desultory lessons with the young clergyman, Samuel would be as educated as most farmers. But was it enough?

  “You have taught him nothing.” He did not even try to humour her.

  She looked at him bitterly. In her heart, she knew that what Obadiah said was true, but she would not concede it.

  She knew only one thing: she did not want to give the boy up.

  She had tried not to notice the years passing. She was a woman of over thirty now, long past the age when she should have married. She had lost her father and two brothers; she had brought the child up during those terrible years as though he had been her own.

  “If I lose him now,” she thought, “then what is left for me?” The farm? Obadiah?

  She was aware that sometimes people laughed at her. The exploits of the young woman in her early twenties, the dashing defence of her farm against the soldiers – these had been long ago. Her forthright ways were only thought eccentric now. She had a favourite cat; she fed birds each morning at the door and gave them names; she talked to the cows in the field above the house. She was becoming an old maid.

  Obadiah was aware of it of course. He never said anything, maintained his customary cold reserve, except when she taunted him. But often in his eyes she could see a faint look of scorn which was painful to her.

  But she still had Samuel.

  Obadiah had appeared at Michaelmas, and come straight to the point.

  “It is time Samuel was put to school in Salisbury,” he told her. “He shall live with me.”

  She understood. It was not only schooling Samuel would receive, but a strict Presbyterian upbringing, away from her Anglican influence and the Prayer Book. If the suggestion had been made by anyone but Obadiah she might have agreed.

  “I refuse.”

  His face was motionless. His hair was all iron grey now. He looked so severe in his plain grey Puritan clothes. His lisp nowadays sounded harsh, adding an extra edge to his words. He had not come to temporise.

  “I can compel thee. I am head of this family now.”

  “Try,” she blazed back. “Will you kidnap the child?”

  He paused, gazing at her thoughtfully.

  “We shall speak of this again.”

  She was not so foolish as to think that she had won.

  He was back a week later.

  “Do you still refuse?”

  In fact, she had considered carefully. She was aware, also, that the boy was excited by the idea. If she tried to hold him back, sooner or later she would lose.

  But the more she considered the business, the more certain she became that she must keep the boy from Obadiah.

  It was not only jealousy, not only her loathing of his dour Puritan ways. It was something else she knew about him, and that she had known ever since she was a child.

  Perhaps Obadiah hardly knew it himself.

  He was cold.

  True, he could sometimes show a passionate anger when he was scorned or crossed. But that was all the emotion he possessed.

  He thinks only of himself, she considered. If he takes the boy, he will train him to be his servant, but nothing more. He will impress him with his learning, but Samuel will live in a tomb. She would not have him take away the boy’s heart.

  And so, when he appeared again, she cried:

  “No. He shall never be thine, Obadiah. Not in a thousand years.”

  “I can claim him,” he warned.

  “You cannot, nor shall you see him any more. If you come near the farm again, I will have the men set the dogs on you.”

  He was ashen with anger.

  “You will regret this folly.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Why are you so wilful, ignorant woman?”

  “Because I know you,” she told him frankly, “and I know your heart is evil.”

  She looked into his eyes, and knew that she was right. For they were not hurt, nor angry, but completely cold.

  From that day began a strange period in Samuel’s life.

  He was forbidden to call on Obadiah. If he went to Salisbury, she accompanied him. He knew that the farmworkers had orders to report at once if the preacher was seen approaching the house. It was like a state of siege.

  The Godfreys or Margaret always seemed to be within sight, wherever he was; and it was clear that Margaret feared that Obadiah might try to kidnap him. When he asked her:

  “But is not Obadiah my friend?” she shook her head and replied:

  “He is no man’s friend. You will see when you are older.”

  Samuel himself was not sure what to do. He had no wish to leave her. Yer surely this strange situation could not continue.

  It was not destined to. For unknown to Samuel and unknown to Obadiah, Margaret Shockley had already made other plans.

  There were, in any case, several other events taking place in the days after Michaelmas which took Samuel’s mind off the quarrel with Obadiah.

  The first concerned the water meadows. For they had to be repaired.

  Samuel Shockley loved his water meadows. He understood their complex workings. For they were not only the glory of the Shockley farm but also brought to its final perfection the system of corn and sheep farming that had been the mainstay of the Sarum area for more than two thousand years.

  The principle of growing corn was simple – one sowed fields, and fertilised them by folding the sheep upon them to manure them. The more sheep, the more corn could be grown, and for many centuries the only limiting factor had been the amount of feeding for the sheep on the Downland. If only more grazing could be found!

  It was there all the time, potentially, in the rich valley bottoms, where for centuries there had been only bog or half-drained meadows. The trouble was, no one, at least since Roman times, had known how to drain them.

  “But now we have the floated meadows,” Samuel would say proudly.

  It was a magnificent system.

>   At the top of the meadows, water was drawn off the river Avon into a channel. This was the main carriage that ran like a raised spine down the centre; off this flowed the carriers – smaller channels that ran along the tops of the meadows’ big furrows and over the sides of which, called the panes, the carefully regulated water supply spilled before being collected in drains that carried the excess water away. At its widest point, the Shockley water meadows were over two hundred yards across; the main carriage was half a mile long, and the whole system was regulated by an elaborate series of hatches – little wooden sluice gates raised and lowered with iron ratchets. That was the main carriage system. But there were dozens of little carriers, each of which could be individually controlled by stops of turf inserted or removed by the controller of the meadows.

  For this was a new and most important figure on the farm, who watched over the operation of the floated meadows as carefully as a shepherd over his flock: indeed, he was second only to the shepherd in the hierarchy of the farm. This was the drowner – a position proudly occupied on the Shockley farm by Jacob Godfrey’s second son William.

  “You see,” William the drowner used to explain to Samuel, “all through the winter and early spring, by controlling each raised channel, I can keep the whole surface of the meadows covered with a thin layer of water, and the water is always moving through the system so it drops its rich mud on to the earth and enriches it. It keeps the earth warm too,” he explained, “like a blanket, so that all the time, underneath the surface, the richest grass is growing. Then when the sheep have taken the best grass from the ridges, we let the water run off and bring them down here – the best grazing in Sarum.” It was indeed – and all over the area others like Lord Pembroke in his meadows in Harnham, were building similar systems.

  Above all, Samuel loved to come and watch the meadows when they were flooded; for then, as William Godfrey would murmur lovingly:

  “See how the water moves over the meadows, never still. You can feel the grasses growing underneath.”

  It had been that year, in late summer, that William the drowner announced that extensive repair work on the channels was needed.

  The meadows at that time of year were high with hay. Margaret had stomped around them thoughtfully.

  “We could extend them too,” she pointed out.

  But where were the hands to do it? The Shockley farm had not enough labour.

  It was just before Michaelmas when she and Samuel had been visiting the city that Margaret had suddenly clapped her hands with delight.

  “I’ll have some of those Dutchmen out of the cloisters,” she said. “Holland is all ditch and dyke – they’ll know how to do the work.” It was an eccentric solution, but sensible.

  In later years Samuel always smiled to remember how she had applied to the city authorities to let her take half a dozen of the men, and how, when they had told her it was impossible since they might escape, she had come back the next day with a sword and pistol in her belt and told them firmly: “You are speaking to a Wiltshire Clubman.”

  The Dutchmen had come. By winter the Shockley’s floated meadows would be better and more extensive than ever.

  And Sir Henry Forest watched with envy.

  The second event was very small and took place on the same day as the hiring of the Dutchmen. Though in a way, as he grew older, it seemed to Samuel Shockley more memorable than many greater happenings.

  For just before visiting the cloisters, as he and Margaret were standing quietly near the huge north transept, they discovered something which only a few people, and certainly not Obadiah, knew at that time.

  They discovered the secret of Salisbury Cathedral.

  He appeared as if from nowhere, from behind a pillar, it seemed in the north aisle of the choir. He had not seen them.

  He shuffled almost silently towards the chapel at the east end, and started when Margaret caught up with him: he was old, perhaps seventy, with a large round head on his small, stooped body, and his grey eyes stared at her defensively. He was carrying a little bag of tools.

  “You work here?” she asked.

  “Perhaps, lady. Perhaps not.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Zachary Mason.”

  She noticed lime and mortar on his hands.

  “Why, you’ve been repairing somewhere here. I’m sure of it.”

  He did not reply.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, lady. You’re the sister of Obadiah Shockley.” There was a hint of bitterness in his voice.

  “True. And my brother’s a fool,” she said impatiently. “I thought this place was neglected. Praise the Lord if it’s not.”

  He looked at her cautiously.

  “Are you the only one?” she asked.

  “Perhaps not.”

  A thought struck her.

  “Who pays you?”

  “We are paid.”

  She reached into her purse and drew out a coin. The old man shook his head.

  “We are paid,” he said quietly, and shuffled away.

  “I believe,” she told Samuel a week later, “that it’s the Hydes who pay them.”

  Certain it was that, throughout the period of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, workmen slipped quietly into the great cathedral and repaired it, almost unseen, thanks to the generosity of a noble local family.

  A third event appeared to have no significance at all.

  It was one day when the Dutchmen were working in the water meadows, guarded by Margaret and Samuel, that a little open carriage came along the lane above and stopped. When the single occupant stepped out however, the Dutchmen became excited and one of them begged Margaret to let them have words with the visitor.

  “Who is he?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “His name is Aaron,” the men told her.

  ‘What is he?”

  “A merchant from our country,” the man explained. “A Jew,” he added.

  Samuel gasped. One of the Biblical people of Israel. He stared at the single figure, fascinated.

  For like most of the population of England, Samuel had never seen a Jew.

  Surprisingly, it was Oliver Cromwell who let them in again, after their almost total absence for three hundred and sixty years. Indeed, it was one of the few complaints Obadiah had against the great leader that, being an army man, he was too tolerant of religious sectaries. Of late there seemed to have been more than ever – Baptists, Anabaptists, Brownists who insisted that each individual congregation received its own divine inspiration without requiring the guidance of any central body; there were the new folk, the followers of the preacher Fox, whom men called Quakers and who claimed an individual divine right. A lucid but infernal preacher called Penn had even had the audacity to preach their nonsense in Wiltshire. “He should have been whipped and bored through the tongue,” Obadiah had explained sadly to Samuel. As for letting in the Jews – that was insufferable.

  They came, often, from Holland, whence they had fled from persecution in Spain. They were not allowed to be English subjects, but were given leave to move about their trading business quietly.

  Aaron had landed recently. It seemed he was known to half of the prisoners already. He brought messages from their families, money, and, of course, the ability to perform any business transactions the prisoners might require.

  He stayed for half an hour, an elderly, bald-headed man, who seemed to regard all around him with a wary amusement.

  Samuel inspected him thoroughly but was rather disappointed. He had not expected a Jew to look like an ordinary man.

  Afterwards, Aaron had returned to his lodgings at Wilton.

  It was a week after her final defiance of Obadiah, that Margaret paid her secret call upon Sir Henry Forest.

  She told no one about it.

  As Forest heard what she had to say, he was astonished, but he listened carefully. Finally he summed up:

  “So you want me to take the boy – in effect as my ward?�
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  She nodded.

  “And you wish him to be educated with my children?”

  “That is the key. They are similar age. I have heard they have a good tutor. He must receive the best education.”

  “My tutor is excellent. A good university man.” He paused. “You think I can keep the boy from Obadiah?”

  “Certainly. He would not dare attack you. And he could hardly complain if his brother were receiving the same education as the children of Sir Henry Forest.”

  For this was the conclusion that Margaret Shockley had reached. She did not suppose any longer that she could hold the boy. She was not even sure that she could deny Obadiah. With Forest, however, Samuel would still be at Avonsford, but quite out of Obadiah’s clutches.

  She could not help smiling to herself at how she was outwitting the dour Presbyterian.

  Forest nodded thoughtfully. His dark, narrow-set eyes were calculating.

  “Obadiah Shockley would not give me much trouble,” he agreed.

  “Will you do it?”

  “I like your boy. He has talent too. It’s right he should be educated,” he told her frankly. Then he smiled. “You have guessed the price of my agreeing?”

  She nodded. Of course. It was worth it.

  The terms were simple. For taking over the complete education of Samuel Shockley, including his time at Oxford and, if he wished, the Inns of Court, Margaret’s water meadows were to pass into his family’s ownership, with the stipulation that Margaret should enjoy the life tenancy of the water meadow for a nominal rent. It was an excellent bargain for both sides.

  Until the deeds were drawn up and sealed, however, they would remain secret.

  Aaron the Jew liked to travel early in the day. This was partly because he normally slept poorly and woke by dawn. It was also that he had found, all his life, a special uplifting of the spirit in the dawn chorus. Even now, despite the fact he was middle-aged, it gave him a thrill about the heart.

  He drove his little carriage himself up the Avon valley, just as the first light was coming over the ridges above. By the time he reached Avonsford, the sky was lightening quickly, but as yet there was no one about.