Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “I am leaving Sarum shortly, Mr Porters, so we may not meet again.”

  His cup rattled as he held it. He cursed himself inwardly.

  “Indeed?”

  “I am to go and train as a nurse. In London probably. I hope to join Miss Nightingale.”

  For a moment he did not speak.

  “I am sorry to hear it. You will be a great loss to Sarum, I’m sure.”

  “Sarum will do very well without me,” she laughed. “Glad to lose a Chartist, I expect.”

  He was silent for a little time.

  “How soon do you leave, Miss Shockley?”

  “Any day,” she smiled. “I fear we may not meet again.”

  She had done it. She had got rid of him, quite painlessly.

  But something was wrong. As she gazed at him now, she could sense it; his fingers were trembling, there was something in the attitude of his bowed head; he was clearing his throat. Just before he spoke, she saw it coming, with horror.

  “Miss Shockley,” he had to clear his throat again. He glanced up at her face, saw shock, but ploughed on. “Before you leave I must say something to you.”

  Should she stop him now? Was it crueller to cut him off or listen? She flushed with embarrassment at the choice. He saw the flush, mis-interpreted.

  “I believe – you have been kind enough to let me be your friend . . .”

  “Of course.” But it was only a whisper. What should she do?

  “I have observed that you are very different in your attitudes to most young ladies of your station.”

  Was she? Or was it only a pose? Faced with the awfulness of Mr Porters she was not sure.

  “I realise of course that I . . .” he faltered. That he was not a gentleman. It was too painful. He could not say it. “That I am a modest man with a modest fortune, but I dare to hope that you are aware how greatly I admire your extraordinary qualities of mind.”

  It was so terrible. For indeed, in his way, he was a better man than most she had met. But . . . he did not even understand. They would not be received.

  “Should you reconsider your intention to leave, Miss Shockley, it would do me the greatest honour to . . .” again he paused, suddenly uncertain of what expression to use . . . “ask for your hand.”

  It was over. She was completely silent. She tried in her mind to frame words of kindness, but they would not come. She sat, staring at the richly patterned carpet on the floor.

  The silence seemed eternal.

  At last, feeling he must say something, he spoke.

  “It is a remarkable coincidence, Miss Shockley, that you and I are already connected.” It had been his trump card, to be saved for use in time of social need. In the long silence, it seemed he might as well play it now. “My grandfather’s cousin lived here in Sarum, only he spelt our name differently: he was Canon Porteus.”

  His claim to gentility, to a sort of cousinship with her. It was worse than anything she could have imagined.

  “Thank you, Mr Porters. But I am afraid my mind is quite made up.”

  He hung his head.

  “May I hope?”

  Why, why did she hesitate when she must be firm? Because she was embarrassed and could not find words? It was no excuse.

  “I am truly touched, Mr Porters, but you see, I am quite determined to nurse.”

  “Should you ever reconsider . . .”

  “I thank you.”

  He got up to leave.

  “A curious coincidence about the canon.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  Then he had gone.

  She would have to go and nurse now.

  On October 21, 1854, the Salisbury Journal quoted the Times article on Scutari. It also noted that a letter from one Lieutenant Henry Foster, of the 95th, who had visited Scutari, completely denied there was anything amiss with the conditions there. It seemed, the Salisbury Journal concluded, that the Times correspondent was acting upon mere hearsay.

  “Perhaps Miss Jane,” Mrs Brown, the cook, suggested, “it’s as well you didn’t go after all.”

  On October 22, a letter came for her.

  It was from Africa.

  My dear Niece,

  Our dear friend Crowther, the astounding negro clergyman of whom I have told you so much, has returned in the Pleiad from a triumphant expedition up the Benue, which is you may remember a tributary of the Niger. He feels that the several kings and chiefs he encountered are ready for Christianity – praise God. Crowther speaks still, and most movingly of his meetings in England three years ago with that great man Palmerston and our queen and consort of Windsor. Indeed, it must surely have been thanks to royal interest in our mission that the government sent us the Pleiad. When I tell him he is lucky he only smiles and tells me – “God provides”.

  Jane had long admired the extraordinary black missionary Samuel Crowther with whom her uncle worked in the Niger. It thrilled her to think of his career, from slave, to lay preacher, to fully ordained clergyman. One day, her uncle had written her, he fully expected the dedicated Nigerian to be a bishop. God’s work done by a black man with a great soul. That was progress indeed. She read on.

  The expedition returned without any malaria. No sickness at all.

  But alas, the same cannot be said for your uncle. I fear my health is failing and I cannot continue here any longer. Indeed Crowther’s descriptions of all he saw in England have made me long to see it once again. I pray that God will spare me long enough to do so.

  I was sorry indeed to hear of the death of your dear mother. But God moves in mysterious ways. What a blessing now that you should be at Sarum at our old house, where I trust you will be glad to receive, if I fear somewhat briefly, your loving uncle, Stephen.

  P.S. I am to take the next packet which leaves, I understand, not long after this.

  She stared at the page in disbelief. Her uncle, the saintly missionary she so revered, was coming – and she was to keep house for him: there was no mistaking his meaning. Nor any doubt, she supposed, about her duty.

  Later that day, as she gazed at the railway lines by Milford station, it seemed to her they came together, closing her off.

  No nursing. No India. At least for the moment.

  But soon, she would get free.

  1861

  Jane Shockley’s passion began when she was thirty.

  She was standing on the steps of the guildhall, a big square building given to the town, like the hospital too, by Lord Radnor. It stood at the east side of the market, a reminder not only of the continuing presence, from their seat near old Clarendon, of the Bouverie family in Sarum’s affairs, but also, it always seemed to Jane, its strong lines reminded the beholder of a certain solid severity that was needed, but usually missing, in Sarum’s affairs.

  As if echoing such thoughts, the short, stout man at her side shook his large round head sadly, glanced up at her and announced:

  “Moral, not material progress is what is needed in Sarum now, Miss Shockley.”

  She nodded. Of course. And if anyone was going to provide it, she had no doubt it would be Mr Daniel Mason, Methodist and temperance enthusiast. She looked down at him fondly.

  “I shall convert you to temperance yet, Miss Shockley,” he declared pleasantly. “You see if I don’t.”

  And indeed, it was not only the non-conformists – the Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregationalists and others along with the now-tolerated Catholics, abounding in Sarum – who had joined in the mighty temperance cause. Two years before, when Mr Gough the temperance orator had come to Salisbury, no less than fifteen hundred, from every creed and class, had crowded into the markethouse to hear him. “Many of the Anglican clergy in the parishes are worried by the drink problem,” Mason assured her. Evangelicals like the great Shaftesbury with his reforms of factory conditions and public health: aristocrats and Roman Catholics: all, she knew, were equally anxious to take the moral high ground in this new age of progress. Why, Florence Nightingale, returned to England after the war
, had read Mr Lees’s tract on prohibition to Queen Victoria herself.

  “But reform is never easy,” Mason continued as he gazed around the market place. “Why,” he pointed, “just look at that.”

  She looked at the little group he had indicated, a drunken father and two pathetic children.

  “It is disgusting,” she agreed.

  He glanced at her quickly.

  “You agree temperance is needed for them?”

  “It certainly appears to be.”

  “Come then, Miss Shockley,” he said in triumph. “You shall meet them.”

  It was a Tuesday market day at the end of summer. Not a very lively one. It was late afternoon. An air of torpor hung over the area.

  Near the middle of the market place a line of cattle stood lethargically, tethered to rail; nearby were half a dozen pens made of hurdles, containing sheep – but the best had all been sold at the big fair in July. Carts, unhitched and resting at strange angles, some covered, some with open wood frame sides, stood everywhere, and with just as much apparent randomness, small stalls sprouted here and there, untidily from the ground. Carters in smocks, men in leggings and open shirts, farmers in great coats and stovepipe hats; here and there a woman in a big hooped crinoline, her dress and bonnet apparently the vehicle for as many small ribbons as they could carry: all seemed to move with an almost dreamy slowness in the large, warm, dusty space. Around the edge of the market place, the lines of shops sported heavy awnings which occasionally flapped reluctantly in the faint breeze. The movement of air brought familiar smells – of cattle, cow pat, dust, of a stall nearby selling jumblies – the popular gingerbread cooked on a griddle. And she could smell, too, the faint aroma of the heavy consumption, all around, of strong Wiltshire beer.

  It was the market as she had always known it – with one important and significant difference.

  At the far western end, beyond the old cheese market by St Thomas’s, stood a new building, with a big front of three Roman arches and a classical pediment in stone, that had given Mr Porters particular joy. It was the new covered market house. And it was also a railway station.

  In the last five years, Salisbury had at last become a railway town. The London and South Western to Southampton, the Andover to London line, the Wiltshire, Somerset and Weymouth’s line – part of the broad-gauge Great Western network – had all been gathered together at a handsome new station at Fisherton; and the short distance from this new complex to the market place was now covered by a special track.

  “At last,” Porters had exclaimed, “this is not only the centre of Salisbury Plain, but we’re part of the modern world.”

  In a sense he was right. The trains whisked in and out with a clamour and hiss of steam; the city grew as ever more people came from the outside world to see and often settle down by its ancient charm. But the old heartbeat of the five sleepy valleys, their innumerable hamlets, and the sweeping ancient spaces of the chalk ridges and their flocks of sheep – these, breathing slowly to the gentle rhythm of the Sarum market days, did not greatly change.

  And a market town was now what Salisbury was. It had reverted, though a few of its people knew it, to a far more ancient role in the place where the five rivers met – to a role before the great cloth trade of England arose, a role perhaps before even Wilton was built or the little staging post of Sorviodunum was founded. Like the Roman roads before them, the new metal tracks only overlaid a more ancient and unchanging pattern; once more Sarum was a market and religious centre at the great natural collecting point of the sweeping upland plain.

  Poor Mr Porters had wanted to change that. He had fought hard, with many on the city council, to obtain the big railway coach building works for the town.

  “A second Manchester,” he eagerly told her once again.

  They had failed. The new factories had been set up in Swindon, away to the north-east of the county.

  She was not sorry.

  The group that now confronted her consisted of a man and two small children – a girl of about six, she guessed, a little boy a year or two younger. The girl wore only a faded green cotton print dress with a tear down the back and old stockings, one white, one grey. The brown slippers on her feet were split at the toes. She had found, somewhere, a large woollen shawl with a fringe which, draped over her shoulders, hung down to her feet. The boy was even more dishevelled: ragged shirt, patched cotton trousers, bare feet. He was eating an orange which had smeared his face. They were sitting on the tail of a cart, viewing the world with apparent indifference.

  Inside the cart, propped up against a bale of straw and apparently sleeping, was a man of about forty.

  “My most depressing case,” Mason explained. “The mother died recently. Two children. Believe it or not, the man is a farmer.” He pointed to the sleeping figure, with his half untied neck-cloth and unshaven face who now opened his eyes. “Jethro Wilson.”

  The sleepy eyes had opened very slowly, but focused at once.

  “Waal . . . Miztur Mason.” It was a slow, easy drawl. He looked calmly from the determined Methodist to the young lady at his side. “Come to reform me, I suppose.” And with surprising ease, he got up.

  He had been handsome, she thought. His long hair, dirty and matted, might once have been a rich brown, like his side whiskers. His tall, lean body, his long aquiline face, suggested power. Was it laziness, drink or contempt for the world that made him move so slowly and carelessly about his business? He looked at his children and, with just a small motion of his head, sent them scurrying to harness the cart.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Mason accused.

  “Had a few. Slept it off.”

  “Your children are a disgrace, man. You know it.”

  Wilson looked at them thoughtfully.

  “They can harness the cart.”

  “I beg you, Wilson, consider them, if you don’t consider yourself.”

  “What would you do for them?”

  “Much. Educate them. Teach them to know God.”

  “They know the country.”

  “Not enough. You know it.”

  “Mebbe.”

  “We shall speak again.”

  “Mebbe.”

  The cart was ready. The two children scrambled in. He lifted a broad-brimmed hat and placed it on his head; then he gave the small pony a lazy flick with his whip and they began to move slowly away. After they had gone fifteen yards, he turned and, looking straight at Jane, slowly raised his hat, still silently looking at her for a moment after he had returned the hat to his head.

  “Impudent rogue,” Mason muttered; and turning to Jane he remarked: “If you could help me reform him, or at least save those children, Miss Shockley, I should think it the best of all our efforts.”

  They had often worked together, over the last few years. There were in Sarum, God knew, enough poor souls to care for.

  “And Miss Shockley,” he always told his family, “is most unusual.”

  She was indeed. She taught at a school, though she certainly had no financial need to do so. She spent weeks, during the long summer holidays, acting as a nurse in Lord Radnor’s Infirmary and never went there without a copy of Miss Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing tucked into a pocket of her dress.

  “We should have lost her long ago if it weren’t for her uncle,” Mason would say.

  The advent of her Uncle Stephen had been one of the great disappointments of her life. He was brought to Sarum, one bright December day, by the little steam train from Southampton – a thin, gaunt figure in his fifties, with blue eyes, which seemed never quite to focus, peering out of a yellowish face. He was liberally wrapped in a shawl and a blanket and walked stiffly with a stick. He spoke very quietly, always let her know what he required, and never considered, even for a moment, that his niece might ever wish to leave him or, if she did, that it would be possible for her to do so.

  It had never before crossed her mind that a lifetime of service might make a man selfish.


  “But I fear, my dear, my stay will not be long,” he had told her sadly when he first arrived. And so he did still, from time to time, as he moved stiffly about the town, enjoying the reverence that was his due; really, she admitted wryly to herself, predicting his departure had become almost more of a promise to her than a regret.

  “Can you really find time to teach when there is so much to be done here?” he would sometimes ask, a little querulously.

  “Oh yes, uncle,” she would reply, and escape, if she politely could, into the close.

  Porters had proposed once again, by the choristers’ green.

  “If it were a question of also looking after your uncle, then I should be honoured . . .”

  “Quite impossible,” she assured him, and begged him not to speak of it again.

  He had assumed a new role in her life now, which seemed to heal his wound and which she could tolerate – that of adviser. For it was clear to Porters that young Miss Shockley was still wayward and must be in need of advice.

  He had settled in the city. The new railway station and the influx of people had caused a huge building programme on the western Fisherton side of the town and on the northern side where some of the Wyndham family estates lay. Railway cottages in rows, suburban villas, even big, neo-gothic houses on handsome sites were springing up. There was plenty of work for Porters. He had bought a villa.

  And so thanks to these circumstances, Jane Shockley found herself still in Sarum, often busy with community service. If she was restless, she gave herself as little time to be so as possible.

  She liked Mr Mason and his Methodists. She even admired his efforts to get a regular temperance movement going in Salisbury, which despite much agreement on the subject in principle, had only met with sporadic success.

  “I really can’t say I’m prepared to go the whole way and never touch another glass of beer,” she declared. For she thought it one of the small delights of the era that the inhabitants of such genteel places as the close no longer disdained to drink a glass of beer in preference to wine. “I always do, at every meal,” she assured Mr Porters, who was not sure whether to be shocked or not.