Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “I think your brother is a man of passion too,” he replied.

  But she shook her head.

  “Ralph has sudden enthusiasms, which pass. That is not passion. He knows nothing of passion.”

  He wondered what else her strange life with Porteus behind the closed doors of his house, and his mind, had taught Frances; he wondered if there lay in her words a message of understanding for him too.

  For the passion of Thaddeus Barnikel for Agnes, like a charcoal fire, gave little outward sign, but it burned all the same with a steady, relentless heat, as fierce as any furnace.

  “The truth of the matter is,” he confessed to himself, “she is my whole life.”

  Ralph wrote frequently: usually to Agnes, once or twice to Mason.

  He told Mason of his visit to the cotton factory and received a depressing letter in reply.

  The terrible machines you describe still, thank God, have scarcely appeared in Wiltshire and I see no prospect of such things at Salisbury.

  Our own broadcloth industry continues very weak. Two more poor weavers went out of business last month. It is sad to see that old Sarum broadcloth trade entering its final decline.

  To Agnes he wrote tenderly, and told her his return could not be long delayed.

  Apart from his work as tutor, he was not idle. The horror of what he had seen at the cotton mill drew him back to the city again and again. He would take a horse and ride over there on a spare day; or he would go further and visit the port beyond. He soon discovered that what Lord Forest had told him was perfectly true: there were far worse places than his mill.

  But worst of all, he visited the mines, where the precious coal to fuel the great machines was dragged up, “As though,” he wrote to Agnes, “from the infernal regions themselves.” To Mason he wrote:

  I have seen mines, three hundred feet deep, lit by candles – and considered safe until the gasses snuff the candle out. Safe that is, unless there is an explosion below, from which the other day I saw bodies brought out with no more concern than if they had been so many rats killed down their holes by terriers.

  Worse even than the dead, are the living. In some mines they still use little boys to open and shut the ventilation doors below ground, and I have frequently seen little girls, harnessed like mules, dragging baskets of coal up ladders, for ten hours a day.

  Yesterday, at one such infamous place, I saw what I took to be a small black dog emerging from a mine shaft. I went over to it to find that the black creature, though it went on all fours and could indeed have been taken for an animal, so utterly degraded was its filthy condition, was not a dog but a child, sent by its parents down to work. It – I say it – was four years old.

  We know poverty at Sarum; but we have nothing, I thank God, like this.

  These conditions, in England, were to persist for some time.

  To his wife, however, Ralph, through delicacy did not think it proper to describe such terrible particulars. He wrote only in general terms.

  There are things here that seem to me, more than ever, to be a crime against human freedom and dignity: I see conditions that are worse, I believe, than slavery. Porteus himself would agree with me I think, but it is useless, I suppose, for me to communicate with him at present.

  And Agnes, seeing nothing of her husband, and like most well-meaning folk at Sarum, knowing nothing about the conditions to which he was referring, assumed that he spoke of conditions on the estate or his relationship with the Forest household, and shaking her head sadly, wondered if he would ever grow up to be a mature man. So that when Frances tentatively asked her: “Do you think Ralph is growing any wiser in his absence?” she could only reply, “I trust so,” without much conviction.

  The resistance of Canon Porteus to Ralph’s return took everyone by surprise. It was awesome.

  “And the devil of it is,” Barnikel confessed after a year had passed, “he’s only to stir up trouble at the school and in the close, for his position here to be quite untenable. He must either return with Porteus’s blessing or not at all.”

  He thought the triumph of Trafalgar, which the town celebrated joyfully, might provoke a change of mood. But the gloom of Ulm and Austerlitz and the death of Pitt made the canon sourer still and the mood of the town more conservative than ever.

  By the end of summer 1806, Ralph was reaching another conclusion. He wrote to Agnes.

  Since it seems the vindictiveness of Canon Porteus has closed Sarum to me, I have asked Lord Forest if he will help me find a post elsewhere, if possible in London, where there are many schools and where I may be reunited with my wife. He has engaged, if I will tutor the two boys until next summer, to find me a good post with a generous salary by next September.

  The letter arrived on the day that Thaddeus Barnikel was to escort Agnes to an open air entertainment.

  The sport of single-stick combat was similar to fencing except that the weapons in question were sticks rather than pointed swords, so that the worst injury a man was likely to get was a bruise or two. Unlike the great bare-fisted prize fights that took place occasionally on the downs, single-stick combat was, in Barnikel’s opinion, fit for a woman to see. The purse was handsome and they saw some excellent contests. It was afterwards, as they walked through the town, that Agnes told Thaddeus about Ralph’s letter, and his plans for her to leave Sarum.

  “To London?” He swallowed. For a moment he could not speak.

  For it was only then that he realised how much a part of his life she had become. “Though we have never even touched,” he realised sadly, “it’s as though we were married.”

  “I should be sorry if you left,” he said at last, and they walked in silence for a little time.

  They were outside the door of her house in New Street. There were no people about at that moment. She stopped.

  “I fear that in London, my husband would soon cause as much trouble for himself and his family as he has caused in Sarum,” she said with a gentle smile. It was the first time in two years that she had said a word to him against Ralph. He looked down. “Besides,” she went on steadily, “I have no wish to leave Sarum – or my good friends.”

  Then, before she left him and went through her door, she reached out and gently touched his arm.

  He did not move for some time. By that tiny sign of affection she had told him that, although neither of them could ever mention the subject, she loved him. This moment was the crowning glory of Thaddeus Barnikel’s passion. He turned into the close and watched the soft rays of the sunset fall on the cathedral.

  Ralph was surprised, a few days later, to receive a letter from Agnes saying that she did not wish to leave Sarum.

  The years 1806 and 1807 brought two events that made Ralph Shockley more optimistic.

  The first was that, after the tragic death of Pitt, and in an attempt to unite every shade of opinion in the country behind the government, Charles James Fox, his radical hero, was brought into the ministry. He was to die within the year, but before he did, he championed through Parliament that most noble piece of legislation, prepared by Wilberforce and other good men, the Act that prohibited British participation in the slave trade.

  “England has turned her back on slavery. Perhaps soon she will stop the terrible traffic in children too,” he exclaimed hopefully.

  Perhaps with this change of heart in the ministry, there would be a change of spirit in the country and in Sarum too.

  There was not. By 1807, Fox had gone and the mood of the country was as belligerent and reactionary as ever.

  “It is Bonaparte, by threatening us, who stops all change in England,” he concluded.

  And still he had not solved the question – “how was he to get back to Sarum?”

  In the year of Our Lord 1807, the old Bishop of Salisbury at last died. Canon Porteus was apprehensive.

  “When a bishop dies,” he confessed to Frances, “one is always afraid there may be change.”

  In July, the new bishop was enth
roned. He was a pleasant-faced, intelligent, active man named John Fisher; he was destined to be one of Sarum’s finest bishops, and Mrs Porteus, Agnes and Doctor Barnikel were all given excellent seats to view the splendid ceremony in the cathedral.

  It was in the Porteuses’ house afterwards, thinking himself alone, and overcome with love for the woman who sat quietly on the sofa beside him, that Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel committed his indiscretion.

  Porteus was in his study; Frances had left the room for a moment. He looked across at her. When she smiled, as she did now, her smile was so gentle, so easy that he could not help thinking, “She is really, if the truth be told, mine.” And in an access of love, he allowed himself to reach out, take her hand, and kiss it. She did not stop him: how could she, after all his years of devotion? Their backs were to the door; and so they did not see that it had opened and that Frances was silently watching them.

  She closed the door again. She did not blame either of them. But suddenly she knew what she must do.

  “It is time for Ralph to return,” she murmured.

  The next day, she went to see the new bishop. She was with him for nearly half an hour, and when she quietly emerged from the bishop’s palace, it might have been noticed that she was smiling – or to be exact, she was almost grinning, as she had not done since she was a girl.

  That very evening, an extraordinary interview took place in Canon Porteus’s study.

  There in the door, stood Frances. It seemed to Porteus that she looked different: her face was relaxed, fuller, somehow than he remembered seeing it of late. It reminded him of the rather wayward girl he had married all those years before. He frowned.

  “It is time, Canon, that my brother came home.”

  What was this?

  “I prefer, Mrs Porteus, not to discuss the matter.”

  “I must insist.”

  He sighed. He must be reasonable. Taking off his spectacles he explained to her, quietly but with remorseless logic why, at present, such a thing was impossible. The political situation; the reputation of the family; the new bishop.

  “You surely would not have me do something so . . . reckless to my reputation at the very moment when a new bishop has been installed. A bishop who,” the thought appalled him, “may wish to make changes.”

  “Yet I must insist.”

  She was leaning against the doorpost. The posture, he could not help thinking, seemed unladylike. And was there a glint of amusement in her eye?

  “I have seen the bishop,” she said quietly.

  He started violently in his chair.

  “You have spoken to him, you mean, Mrs Porteus.”

  She nodded.

  “Without my permission? Without consulting me?”

  “Yes.”

  He put his spectacles on again and peered at her. Was such a thing possible?

  “You need not concern yourself on his account,” she went on. “The bishop is quite of my opinion. He thinks Ralph should return.”

  “But I, Mrs Porteus,” he replied with asperity, “may think otherwise.”

  “I hope you will reconsider, then. For if you do not, then I shall leave this house and ask my sister-in-law to take me in at New Street.”

  He could not believe his ears. Yet he could see she was serious.

  “But . . . my position.”

  “Your position, Canon, would only be improved in every way by my brother’s return. I will even,” she added drily, “say you are forgiving and generous. That might secure us another prebend.”

  He looked at her cautiously.

  “I find your conduct towards me has greatly changed, Mrs Porteus.”

  She understood him.

  “If you show leniency towards Ralph, Canon, my conduct will always henceforward be as you would wish – as it has been until now,” she said.

  “I will consider the matter carefully.”

  “Thank you.”

  She closed the door quietly as she left. Suddenly she felt very tired. She wondered, idly, if Ralph was worth it.

  Another small interview took place in Mr Porteus’s drawing-room a week later. It was between Agnes and Doctor Barnikel. This time it was she who took his hand.

  “I am aware, doctor, that you have an attachment to me.”

  He did not blush. He bowed his head in silent acknowledgement.

  “And before my husband returns,” she went on gently, “I wish you to know that, had circumstances been otherwise,” she gave him an affectionate smile, “had I not been married already, that attachment would have been returned.”

  “You honour me.” His voice was husky.

  “Thank you, doctor, for always behaving to me not only with such kindness, but with such propriety.”

  He was about to speak, when there was a noise at the door.

  “Ah.” She smiled. “And now here come the children.”

  1830

  It was Agnes who made the bargain, and Ralph who honoured it.

  “You may think what you like about reform; but I will not go through such trouble again, nor must your children. You must promise me to be patient.”

  On his return from exile, Ralph had promised.

  “But I never thought,” he said ruefully, “that there’d be no reforms in England for twenty years.”

  The first quarter of the nineteenth century was a strange and unhappy period. Afterwards, men liked to remember it for Wellington’s great victories over the French, for the colourful extravagance of the Regency and reign of George IV; for its poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and strange, saturnine Byron, for its novelists: Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But these were the rays of sunlight in a world that was mainly dark.

  Ralph had promised. He returned to his work at the school, and gradually, as the months passed, a stiff but polite relationship between him and his brother-in-law was established. They could even disagree.

  And there was much to disagree about.

  From the battle of Trafalgar, the defeat of Napoleon had taken a decade. At first it had seemed that, like another Caesar, he would rule all Europe.

  “He has made a pact with the Czar of Russia,” Barnikel said: “he will rule all Europe and the Czar will rule all the east, including India. Surely now you agree he is a tyrant.”

  “I agree that England must oppose him,” Ralph said. “But it is also true that he brings civil and religious freedoms to the countries he conquers when before some of them knew only despotic kings.”

  He never allowed himself to say such things to Porteus however.

  For years England stood alone: only her navy saved her. Then, slowly the tide began to turn as Arthur Wellesley won the title Wellington by pushing the French out of Portugal and Spain, and Napoleon made the fatal mistake of invading Russia. When he was finally defeated, the people of Sarum wore white cockades in their hats to celebrate the return of the Bourbon kings to France. And when Ralph declined to celebrate the return of the old regime to France, Porteus contented himself with rebuking him mildly.

  “You have seen how the Revolution and Napoleon have turned poor Europe upside down,” he reminded him. “You know it is true that the Corsican adventurer has caused the death of nearly one and a quarter million men. Can you not see that, even if the old regimes were imperfect” – this was an astonishing admission from Porteus, Ralph had to admit – “yet the legitimate monarchs of Europe at least preserved order in the world?”

  “I agree that all Europe believes so,” Ralph replied. “And that itself may be enough to preserve peace.”

  In a way, he knew it was so. For a generation and more, the cause of “legitimacy” – invented by the subtle brain of France’s great statesman Talleyrand – was something more than a reactionary love of the old monarchic regimes. Legitimacy meant order; it meant that upstart adventurers could not overturn the world; it meant a return to peace and prosperity. In good conscience the monarchs of Europe, glad to be rid of Napoleon who had so humiliated them, and destroyed
their people, formed new general alliances to preserve a permanent peace throughout Europe, and the religious-minded Czar even tried to start a Holy Alliance dedicated to Christian principles.

  But as the years passed, the legitimist cause of the monarchies led to other, less attractive results: the revival of the Inquisition in Spain; the attempt by the Bourbon rulers to return all the South American trade to the old Spanish monopoly, and a general suppression of all dissidents because they might be revolutionaries. They were dark, repressive times.

  At home, not even Porteus could pretend that Britain’s own monarchy gave any cause for joy. While Wellington was still struggling to wear down the French in the Iberian peninsula, George III finally went mad and his extravagant son became Regent. The Regency and reign of George IV were marred not only by his wild spending but also by his separation from and quarrels with his wife Queen Caroline. When, at his coronation in front of a large and delighted crowd, she tried to force her way into Westminster Abbey but was turned away at the door, even Porteus acknowledged to Ralph:

  “It is hardly surprising that the republicans are encouraged when our monarchy allows such scenes to take place.”

  “I’m not sure George IV isn’t a little mad like his father,” Barnikel confided. “His fantasies and vanities grow even stranger than the palace he’s built at Brighton. You know that although he never set foot over the Channel, he has so persuaded himself he fought Bonaparte that he even told Wellington – Wellington if you please – that he led a charge at Waterloo!”

  It was in the second decade of the century that a sad rift took place in the Shockley family.

  “The truth is that Napoleon broke our friendship with our cousins,” Ralph said generously. He could have blamed Porteus.

  For during the long years of Britain’s isolation, Napoleon tried to bring her to her knees by enforcing a trade blockade. Thanks to her navy, the island could block Napoleon’s trade in turn; and for years the extraordinary system continued whereby both sides tried to block trade with third parties while, unofficially, enough English cloth was still getting through to the continent to clothe Napoleon’s armies, whom they were fighting.