“Is he alive?” Jocelin de Godefroi looked down sadly from his horse.
Shockley nodded. “Just.”
A light wind by the river stirred the dust that had gathered in the fallen man’s clothes.
The bridge was a busy, pleasant spot. Below its narrow arches, the river with its long green weeds flowed smoothly and strongly. Just above, on the city side, the bishop’s mills ground corn for the new city’s bread; a little below, the stream was briefly split by a narrow bar of land before it curved round the edge of the close, and here the poorer pilgrims on their journey east and local vagabonds, both wanting to escape the modest tolls on the bridge, would often try to ford it. The current was a little stronger than it looked and it was a favourite pastime for the city children to gather on the bridge, where they were tolerated, to watch the pilgrims downstream lose half their possessions in the water. Ducks and moorhens favoured the ford. The swans liked to nest a little below it. To the west of the bridge, a few dozen cottages straggled beside the road towards Wilton.
The figure huddled by the roadside was dressed in black. His feet were dirty and bare; his hood, which Peter Shockley had just lifted, had been pulled down over his face so that only the end of his stained and matted grey beard was visible; on his chest, the
tabula
sign that proclaimed him to be a Jew was, at the king’s orders, coloured bright yellow and considerably larger than it had been in earlier decades. Flies buzzed unchecked about his head and he was only semi-conscious.
The ruin of Aaron of Wilton had taken forty years to accomplish, but the process was now complete and represented a triumph of the God-fearing over the infidel. In a long series of edicts that otherwise enlightened monarch Edward I had followed the sporadic persecutions of his pious father Henry to their logical conclusion. The Jewish community had been taxed, forbidden to practise money-lending, forbidden to trade except on impossible terms, taxed yet again; and when a few years previously almost every active Jewish trader had been thrown into jail until he had paid another, stupendous fine, Aaron of Wilton had at last been successfully ruined.
He was too old to seek his fortune elsewhere. He had no family left. Together with the few others remaining in the little Wilton community, he had sometimes been able to scrape a miserable existence out of tiny trades in wool; more recently he had been reduced to begging. He had walked from Wilton at dawn that morning and collapsed by the bridge from sheer fatigue, and for several hours no one had cared to touch him.
The little party that stared down at him represented three generations. Frail, but still upright in the saddle, Jocelin de Godefroi had survived, carefully preserving the two estates in the valley for his grandson, for longer than he had dared to hope. And Roger de Godefroi was everything his grandfather might have hoped for: at twenty-seven he was a splendid representative of the knightly class, like his father before him, and the darling of the lists. That summer, when Jocelin had noticed that the tips of his fingers were turning blue, the knowledge that his grandson would soon inherit had only caused him to smile. The estates were in excellent condition, and not even the dry summer of the year before, when many of the sheep had contracted scab, nor the poor grain harvest of that summer could make more than a small dent in the prosperity that he had built up. He had even improved the manor house in a modest way, adding a small wing to the hall and enclosing the place with a courtyard wall. The old generation had done their work well.
Between these two in age was Peter Shockley; his large, stout, grizzled figure exuded authority; only the pressure of his constantly expanding business had prevented him from representing the borough as a burgess in the several parliaments of Edward’s reign. Since his marriage to Alicia, the merchant had known contentment. Though his wife was grey, her freckled skin had stayed almost miraculously young, and only small lines of contentment filled the corners of her face.
“I’m sixty, but she makes me feel half my age,” he would proudly announce.
Beside him in his cart sat two fair young people: his son Christopher and his daughter Mary.
All five gazed at the Jew, but they did so with very different feelings. Jocelin remembered the courtly aristocrat with whom he and old Edward Shockley had done business in their youth. Peter remember a middle-aged moneylender whom he had wanted to defend at the Parliament of Montfort. Young Roger de Godefroi saw an infidel whom his knightly class was supposed to despise, and the two Shockley children saw only an old tramp, whom they had never known, but whose misfortune they knew must be his own fault, for obstinately denying the true God.
And so the Shockley children gasped with horror when they heard Jocelin de Godefroi’s next words to his grandson.
“Pick him up and put him in the cart. We’ll take him to Avonsford.”
Roger frowned and hesitated. Must he touch this repulsive old figure? But a look from his grandfather was enough; he bowed his head respectfully and went forward. Peter Shockley helped him.
Slowly they raised him, still unconscious, and laid him in the back of the cart. The two Shockley children edged forward, so that he should not touch them.
As they completed the task, Roger allowed himself one questioning look at old Jocelin.
“Is this wise?” His grandfather was a respected knight of the shire, who had acted as a local coroner and as one of the crown escheators, and whose duty was to support the king in all things; and since it was well known that the king’s policy was now to harass the Jewish community as much as possible, surely they should leave the old man where he was. But the knight only shook his head.
“To Avonsford,” he ordered curtly. “He can recover or die there.” And the reluctant little procession moved on.
As it did so, no one noticed that, when they had lifted the old man into the cart, the seal with which he signed his documents had slipped out from the folds of his clothes and tumbled onto the dusty road.
It was John, son of William atte Brigge, who noticed it half an hour later. He stoooped and picked it up then put it carefully into the pouch that hung from his belt.
He did not yet know what, but he would find a use for it, he was sure.
While the cart bumped along from Salisbury into the courtyard of Avonsford manor, and while Aaron was carried into the house, Mary Shockley said nothing. But as soon as they were clear of Avonsford and rattling down the valley towards the city, she burst out: “Why does the knight pick up that old Jew? And why should we carry him?”
“Aaron helped my father start the mill,” Peter reminded her calmly.
“Then we should be ashamed,” she replied hotly. “He’s a usurer.”
Peter shrugged.
“I’d have thrown the old Jew in the river,” she added defiantly; at which her brother Christopher grinned. For Mary’s outbursts were well known.
She was a splendid figure – a twenty-year-old girl as big as her brother and probably stronger. With her fine, athletic body and her long flaxen hair she was a perfect throwback to her Saxon forebears, except in one respect. For from her mother she had taken two features: a band of light freckles across her forehead, and her extraordinary violet eyes. Unlike her mother, Mary’s eyes never varied: they were always violet and they were dazzling. As a child, she had been a tomboy, outrunning and outwrestling all the other children; and now, though she was a striking, blonde young woman, her father had to confess: “She’s a beauty, but she’s still like a man – and as obstinate as a donkey.” Even Alicia, with all her determination, had long since given up trying to make her daughter dress and behave in the demure manner proper to a young woman.
“If we ever find her a husband, he’ll have to take her as she is,” she admitted ruefully.
And when old Jocelin, chiding his handsome grandson for not yet having taken a wife, laughingly remarked that the merchant’s daughter, though hardly noble, was still a fine-looking girl, Roger, the hero of the joust, protested: “Why grandfather, she’d break me over her knee.”
At least her character made the settling of the Shockley properties very simple. “She’ll have the farm, of course,” Peter had said. “And Christopher will run the business.” Both children were content with this: for Christopher was already showing a quick grasp of the expanding Shockley affairs, whereas Mary was only happy when she was overseeing – or more likely working beside – the labourers on the farm.
But despite her tomboy appearance, Mary had one unexpected enthusiasm: she had an unshakeable belief in all things religious. Often she would be seen driving her cart from the farm to Wilton Abbey with gifts of provisions that should have been sold at the market. And though the abbey was one of the greatest landowners at Sarum, and so well known for its extravagant and lax ways that only two years before the Dean of Salisbury had been forced to threaten some of its senior members with excommunication if they did not pay some of their debts, Mary always obstinately – and to the huge amusement of her father – referred to the inmates as “the poor nuns”.
To Mary, the wishes of the nuns and the word of the priests were law. When the nuns sighed over the debts into which the wicked money-lenders had trapped them, or the vicar of the little church near the farm spoke harshly against the evil of the Jews and their usury, she knew that they must be right.
As the cart trundled down the valley, she banged on its side and swore to her father.
“No Jew shall ride with me again. Not if the king himself asks.”
In the cathedral close that morning, a painful scene was taking place. Indeed, as Osmund the Mason faced his son, he could only gasp in disbelief at the insult.
“You are telling me I may not work in the cathedral any more?”
Edward Mason looked embarrassed, but nodded.
“It’s what the guild of masons have decided,” he confessed.
It was hard to take it in. For a moment Osmund could not speak.
“But why?” he cried at last.
Since the completion of the chapter house and cloisters, Osmund the Mason had known peace. His wonderful carving there had earned him respect.
Each time the masons came to the great round table in the chapter house where their wages were paid, they would glance up at the wonderful carvings on the walls, and acknowledge no one had ever done anything better. Even the incident with Cristina, who had long since married William atte Brigge’s boy, had gradually been forgotten. And when the work on the tower had begun, he had been glad to have a new project.
The building of the tower involved the creation of a new world. First the carpenters constructed an enormous wooden platform over the great central crossing of the nave and transepts. Like a wooden table top, resting on the four central pillars, this platform sealed off the base of the tower from the empty spaces below. Once this was done, the old roof above was removed, leaving the square platform open to the sky, and it was here, in their new and separate world a hundred feet above the ground, that the masons began to raise the four wails of the tower. The walls were solid – though not as thick as the main walls of the church below – and like them they were filled with a mixture of lime, mortar and rubble. At each corner of the great tower there was a spiral staircase.
Osmund liked working in the tower, and as its walls slowly rose, he would often stand in the shadows they cast, staring up in admiration at their solemn mass, and at the square of sky even higher above. There were fewer masons now, but there was work for his clever hands to do, and around the huge stone lancet windows, he supervised a fine decoration of ballflowers.
One thing concerned him, however. The tower had no buttresses, no outside supports to hold its stone and rubble walls together.
“As they get higher, they will spring apart,” he complained to the canons. His fears were justified; careful plans were made, and he was only satisfied when an engineer showed him what they would do.
“We shall wrap the whole tower in bands of iron, all the way round, pinned in place with big bolts, right through the wall,” the man explained.
“But the bands will have to be thick,” the mason objected. “The strain could be enormous.”
“They will be,” the engineer promised. “They’ll last five hundred years.”
This was exactly what they did; as the walls of the huge tower slowly rose, the grey Chilmark stone was bound in with huge bands of iron.
He loved the separate world of the tower in the sky, almost silent except for the tapping of the masons, the occasional squeaking of winches raising the stones, and the rustle of the wind over the high walls above. And he was contented. Both his daughters were married. He was respected in his work. The only cause of annoyance in recent years had been his only son’s joining King Edward in his wars in Wales. When that mountainous country, for the first time since Roman days, had been subdued and the English had acquired from the Welsh not only a fine new principality, but also a new skill in the use of the great longbow, Edward Mason, with his short strong fingers, had discovered that he was well-suited to master the archer’s art and he had returned from the wars with honour and with a pouch stuffed with the king’s silver coin. His son’s skill as a longbowman had not pleased Osmund at all.