The Outcasts of Time

by Ian Mortimer

  Richard has stopped. He is not shouting. He is standing still, torn apart by the realisation that he let his daughter put a plague-infected child to her breast. And in that moment I am filled with remorse. I do not even pick up my travelling sack. I reach for the door, fumble for the drawbar, yank it open, and run out into the rain and the darkness.

  I cannot see where I am going, and trip on the uneven surface. I kneel in the pouring rain as the water soaks my face and my hair. The smells of the streets – the dung and the mud – rise up to choke me. I should go now, and throw myself into the plague pit with the dead, and wait for God’s judgement.

  The thought of my wife and children makes me raise my face. I spit out the grime that I taste on my lips and kneel there, as the rain pours on to my soaked back and through my hair. I get to my feet and start stumbling again, with no idea where I am in the darkness. My cloak is soon soaked through, and my tunic and shirt too. I see the lanterns of the city watchmen and stand still waiting for them to see me, but with the rain keeping their heads down, they do not.

  In the street leading to the South Gate, not far from the Bear Inn, I stop beneath the overhanging gate of a large mansion. I am so alone. All I want is to see a friendly face – but the only ones in this city now are those I carved myself.

  There is a high stone wall around the cathedral. It runs along one side of the cathedral precinct: you can climb up on to the parapet, down by South Gate, where the cottages are built right against the old walls. All you need to do is find a barrel to reach the roof of one of the cottages, and you can climb over the wooden shingles and from there to the wall. Once up on the parapet you can follow it around and jump down into the grounds of the bishop’s palace.

  It takes me ages to find the way. By the time I have reached the west front of the cathedral, it has stopped raining. I walk up to the screen of sculptures and reach forward to touch the lowest tier of angels, one by one, in the darkness. I run my hands over the wet stones, remembering when I carved this arm and that face. William Joy was my master then. He told me that my sculptures would be better if I loved them. ‘Let the figures themselves do the work,’ he would say. ‘Let them smile, if they want. Let them embrace; let them dance; let them have their own secrets.’ I cannot see them now yet I know they are there, still dancing, still whispering. I step up on to the plinth and reach up to feel the lower parts of the Old Testament kings that I carved above the angels: I cling to their legs – like a condemned man in the time of the Bible must have clung to the ankles of real kings, begging for mercy. The figure on the buttress to the right of the great west door was modelled on a drawing of King Henry the Third. Beneath him I carved an angel with her wing outstretched, protecting the columns on which the king stood. Another figure, higher up, I based on the old canon treasurer: he always said hello to us as we chipped away at the stones in the cathedral yard. One of the corbels is modelled on my father. It was so high up I thought no one would see it. No one, that is, except God. All of the masons created a part of the cathedral in the image of a loved one. If you were to pull it apart and examine it stone by stone you’d see the whole edifice is constructed out of our daily needs and aspirations – the loves of a hundred ordinary men. So it is with every great church. From the outside it appears huge, impersonal, dignified and mighty, but come up close enough to hear the heartbeat of the past and you realise it is made up of a thousand faces of lovers, mothers, fathers and friends – the little miracles we dream of while we work.

  I step down from the plinth and walk back to the north end of the screen, where years ago we made handholds to ascend the west front without having to rely on the scaffolding. I climb again as easily as ever I did: the act of curling my fingers around this figure’s shoulder or that sculpted leg invites my memory to come closer. Soon I am on top of the screen, running my hands over the shapes of the pinnacles. ‘Sculpture should be listened to,’ said William Joy. ‘If you listen to a beautifully produced figure, it fills your mind with beauty.’ Now I am listening. Whatever grief I have brought into the world, my work reassures me that my intentions are pure, and have good consequences too.

  But what next? Here I sit, in the freezing cold and damp air, unable to see anything. There is no sound except for the occasional distraught cry. I have difficulty believing Lazarus is dead. I begin to rock to and fro, and start to sing softly to myself. ‘Merry it is while summer lasts . . .’

  I remember my mother used to sing this to me when I was a boy. And that brings back a good memory. When Simon, William and I were young, being catechised one Sunday, the rector – a bullying man called Philip de Vautort, may the Devil never loosen his grip on him – told us that the psalms of David were the most beautiful music in the world. Simon asked how could he be so sure? And the priest said it was because he had knowledge and experience of these things. But when he sang, his voice was like a notched and rusty blade, and we didn’t understand any of the words, which were in Latin. So I raised my hand and told him that his psalms were not as beautiful as our mother singing ‘Merry it is’. For this I was beaten with a rod on my hands. I cried dreadfully and winced every time the rod rapped on my knuckles. I blurted out, ‘Why do you punish me for telling the truth?’ For this I was beaten again. But as soon as we were outside the church, my brothers slapped me on my back and shouted three cheers for me in the market square. As we approached Cranbrook they lifted me on their shoulders – our father saw them carrying me home. He was wiping his hands with a cloth after greasing the crank of the millwheel with fat. When they told him what I had said, he replied, ‘John, you’re a good lad. Never forget that the Lord Himself made your mother’s voice as sweet and pure as it is but God does not make priests, he merely makes men. Some are good and some are bad – and the only way to tell the difference is to speak the truth to them. You may carve the meat today at dinner as your reward.’

  I am snapped out of my memory by a scraping sound in the darkness nearby. Alarmed, I hold my breath and I hear it again.

  Someone else is up here on top of the stone screen, near me.

  I move away, holding my arm out in case he approaches and is dangerous. But he makes no attempt to conceal his presence. I hear him rub his hands together for warmth, and then cough. A few moments later, he starts to sing.

  Merry it is while summer lasts

  with birds’ song,

  but now draws near the winter’s blast

  and weather strong . . .

  It chills my blood. ‘Who’s there? Who are you?’

  The voice is not unlike my own. ‘You know me, John.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘John is what they call me.’

  ‘How did you find the way up here? Are you one of the masons?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘You are John of Coombe? The man who worked with me at Salisbury and went to the Giant’s Circle?’

  ‘No. I was born at Cranbrook. I live now at Wrayment, in the manor of Wray.’

  I am dumbfounded. ‘No! That is me. You are an impostor.’

  ‘No, I am you.’

  ‘Get away!’ I yell. And I hear the echo of my voice against the stone. Sounds of grief in turn come at me from the rooftops around the cathedral. I move further along the parapet.

  ‘You cannot get away from me,’ says the voice. I hear whispers of men and women from inside the cathedral, as if there are ten thousand ghosts in there, and their desperation is seeping out through the stones.

  ‘Where is my brother?’

  ‘I left him at the house of Richard the blacksmith, as you know well.’

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘I do not know because you do not know.’

  ‘You do not speak like me.’

  ‘Nor do I suffer from that bite that ails you, beneath your right arm.’

  Now the voice is on both sides of me. I kick out suddenly with my right foot but feel only air and the slipperiness of the wet lead.

  ‘Jesus Christ,
help me now,’ I mutter.

  ‘Our mother sings more beautifully than the priest,’ taunts the voice.

  ‘Stop!’ I shout. But the voice starts singing again, ‘Merry it is while summer lasts.’ I lash out again and strike nothing, only the stone parapet.

  I kneel and place my forehead on the cold lead, and pray in a whisper. ‘Oh Mary, Mother of God, and Saint Lazarus, of whose feast day this is the eve, and Saint Peter, who protects this church, save me from this madness.’

  ‘I am your conscience, John.’

  I am lost, like the sailors on the drifting ship. I am falling back into the darkest sea. ‘I believe in the One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth . . .’ But as I speak the words, I hear the voice repeating them, as if it is a chorus to my lead. ‘I believe in the One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth . . .’

  ‘Stop! Stop it!’ I shout, hitting the parapet, and striking the lead with my knuckles so that it hurts as much as it did that day when the priest punished me.

  I feel the presence near me, waiting. Whispers escape from the stones.

  ‘You shall not have my soul,’ I say. ‘You shall not have my soul.’

  ‘Do you not realise how little you have done to deserve the reward of Heaven?’

  ‘I . . . I tried to save the child.’

  ‘It was because of you that the infant died in the flames,’ replies the voice. ‘The blacksmith shall die now, and so too shall his daughter and her child.’

  ‘I am truly sorry. Truly, truly.’

  ‘What will you do to set things right?’

  ‘How can I? There is so much wrong in the world. How can I unspill all the spilled bowls in the city, mend all the broken smiles, and unbruise all the hurt hearts and stricken tongues? How can I seek to improve upon God’s Creation if He cannot?’

  There is silence.

  ‘Why do you suppose that God seeks only perfection?’ asks the voice. ‘If you believe that the Lord created everything in Heaven and on Earth, do you not believe He also created sin? Failure? Regret? Who do you think created damnation?’

  ‘I believe in the goodness of the Lord . . .’

  ‘Do you not believe,’ continues the voice, ‘that if God desired the perfection of the whole of Creation it would not happen in the sweetest and most sudden instant? How could there be goodness if there were no sin?’

  ‘How might I atone for what I have done?’

  The voice is silent. Only after a long time do I hear it. ‘You have seven days to save your soul. If you will obey me.’

  ‘Obey you? How?’

  ‘Go to Scorhill, to the circle of stones.’

  I wait to hear something more but there is no sound. No whispers, no song, no voice.

  I do not hear it depart. I do not see anything. I am just alone on the roof of the screen of the cathedral, in the darkness, shivering.

  In truth, I do not know whether I have been urged by an angel to save my soul or asked by a demon to sell it. Can the fate of a man really depend on such whispered words in the night? I do not know. But I do know that either God or the Devil has asked me a question, and the only way to find out which is by going to Scorhill.

  Chapter Two

  I do not sleep until dawn. But hardly have my eyes fallen than I am awake again. I see seagulls swooping over the cathedral and the precinct walls, crying their raucous curses on the people below. They perch on the roof of the church that stands to the west of the cathedral and cast a cold eye on the suffering city. The wind buffets my hood as I stare at them with an equally cold heart. It is the feast day of Saint Lazarus. I bite my lip, remembering the poor child. Yet now I see that his soul is just one of so many lost in the night. People are carrying out their dead and leaving their bodies for the carters – and staring in shock at the corpses that were, until the previous evening, much-loved sons and daughters.

  ‘John! John, are you up there?’

  I crawl forward and look over the edge of the parapet, jittery and shivering. William is looking up. He is dishevelled, holding my fardel in one hand and his own in the other.

  ‘Richard has gone to fetch the city beadles. He says that you knowingly brought the child into his house, to kill him. He is going to ask them to hang you.’

  I recall the voice in the night. Do I tell William?

  ‘Are you coming down? I’ve got your things.’

  All the events of the previous day stream through my mind, from seeing the leafless oak at Honyton to the fight at the blacksmith’s house. I don’t want to believe my memories but they are like deep wounds: they are so painful they cannot be ignored. I see a priest in a cassock walking across the cathedral yard. He notices two men coming towards him and steps aside, and walks through a patch of mud. Even here, on holy soil, men are avoiding each other. And yet, who truly wants to be alone?

  The disease not only causes suffering, it makes us inhuman.

  ‘Now! For the love of God, John!’ shouts William.

  I climb down from the top of the screen. He holds my travelling sack out to me, at arm’s length. I wonder, is he too cautious of my presence? He sees my expression and leans forward and embraces me. Then he turns and we set off towards the North Gate.

  There are bodies in the lanes to either side, awaiting collection. In North Street I see a dishevelled blonde woman with an upturned face and closed eyes, crouching over a child’s body; she does not leave it but moans constantly. Then suddenly a masked man grabs the body by a leg and flings it into the dead cart and she screams in raw anguish, and drags her nails over the wall of her house, and beats her fists on it. We watch that solitary cart as it is led down North Street: at the top of the road it had four corpses; but by the time it reaches the gate, it holds eight.

  The gatekeeper is nowhere to be seen, the gate ajar.

  Outside the city walls, and glad of the fact, we hasten down to the great bridge which stretches from the city’s West Gate to the suburb of Cowick on the other side of the river. As we cross I watch the rats scampering along the marshy bank, amid all the detritus thrown down there by the citizens – the sweepings of butchers’ stalls, contents of slop pails, trimmings of vegetables and a dead dog. The street in Cowick is deserted, half the shutters closed. A mile further on, heading up Dunsford Hill, which is a steep climb over loose stones in the deep ruts of frozen mud and leaves, the sun breaks out. I turn and look back at the cathedral, dominating the city behind us. How often I saw it from here in the old days: it was my soul’s salvation as well as my daily craft. Now its spire-topped towers stand like two final vestiges of hope, and I am walking in the other direction. What awaits me at home? And at Scorhill? These times are surely as terrible as anything in the Bible – the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Exodus from Egypt. Has there ever been anything like this pestilence since then?

  At the top of the hill we find another corpse. It is that of a boy, about twelve years of age, lying beneath a leafless tree a few feet from the road. He has sprawled across the mass of fallen leaves of brown, ochre, grey and yellow, as if he is a fallen leaf himself. There is a pool of vomit on the leaves near where his head stares at the earth. I look at his brown hair and his young face, marred though it is by the blotches and livid marks. I note the green dust on the back of his tunic. He must have leaned against the tree, or sat with his back to it. I do not doubt that he died alone, poor lad. No mother or father to hold his head. Not that they would have come near him if he had been at home. Perhaps it was a blessing for him to die here – and not be there to see himself deserted in his hour of greatest need by a parent.

  I think back to the voice on the cathedral screen. Even now it is haunting me. I cannot stop thinking that I have seven days to save my soul.

  ‘William, last night . . .’

  ‘I do not want to talk about last night.’

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘I was right. So what? Now I am cold and tired. I feel weak. I just want to get home.�
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  ‘I know. I am sorry. But I feel I must do something good. To make up for the ill I have done. I know now it is not enough just to mean well. I must do good works. To earn my place in Heaven.’

  He looks at me. ‘And what does that mean? What miracles are you going to do? Are you going to found a monastery? With what? Are you going to fight a crusade? Good luck. You are not a soldier of Christ, John, nor are you a saint. You are an out-of-work mason, nothing more. And if you make another attempt at a good work, like picking up orphans dying of the plague, it may well be the death of us both.’

  I stare at the leaves turning to mulch on the muddy road. Beech leaves still with tinges of green; some oak, now dark brown; others looking as if they have a crescent of orange. I kick them. What makes some plants lose their leaves? I wonder. There has to be some reason why some trees and plants lose their leaves and others, such as holly, do not. Perhaps it is God’s punishment on the plant for poisoning people and animals? But then, the chestnut loses its leaves even though its fruit is good to eat. As for the holly: its berries are noxious and its prickles cause pain – and yet it does not lose its leaves. And the yew, which poisons everything – birds and plants, so that nothing grows or even survives in its shade – lives forever.

  Seven days to save my soul.

  Do plants have souls? Can they go to Heaven? If not, surely they cannot commit sin, for they cannot be punished for it in the afterlife.

  Seven days to save my soul.

  Do our feelings grow in us like plants, with roots in our hearts and flowering in our minds? They flower in our smiles, and wilt in our frowns. And if so, do they return every year? Is one feeling of gladness the same as another, if it had a different cause?

  Seven days.

  What have I done to save my soul? I have worked hard, I have looked after my family, I have prayed and I have carved in praise of God. I would have thought that I had done more than most. Or, rather, I have sinned less than most. But perhaps absence of sin is not enough. Perhaps even the man who is entirely without sin still cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven if he has done no good works. Perhaps, in God’s eyes, it is not the sin we do not commit but our acts of faith that matter.