There were three carts to carry the little party and their few remaining possessions slowly down the rutted lane that paralleled the lazy Avon river south through the villages of Fordingbridge and Ringwood, and along the western edge of the New Forest to Christchurch. Though the journey was only twenty-five miles, it took two days, and it was the night of Hallowe’en when they rattled on to the cobblestones of the little town of Christchurch with its fine Norman priory and its dark little castle on a hump of turf beside the harbour.
Aaron was remarkably serene. The rest at Avonsford had restored him to something approaching his former self. Besides insisting that he accept a small pouch of silver coins, old Jocelin had seen to it that his clothes were new and his grey beard was shaved to a crisp, chiselled end; his blue eyes were bright and clear again, and he sat up, calm but alert, watching the countryside as they went along. Although he was being banished from the country that had always been his home, as he told the knight of Avonsford, he was too old to be anything but philosophical about it.
“It seems God wishes me to see more of the world before I die,” he said wryly, and took his leave of the Godefrois and the Shockleys with surprising cheerfulness.
It was during this final journey from Sarum to the coast that Mary Shockley tried to convert him.
All day before the journey, Mary had pondered. Since her father had ordered her to take Aaron in the cart, she supposed that she must, and since she was taking him to banishment, it seemed to her that she was doing God’s work. But she was not happy with the task. She was a bluff, good-hearted girl, perfectly formed to farm and fight like her Saxon ancestors before her. She knew that the Jews would suffer hellfire if they did not convert, and the question of how to deal with them had always seemed simple to her. “Why doesn’t the king just order them to convert and kill them if they don’t?” she had once asked as a child. It was how Roman had converted Saxon and Saxon Dane, in better, simpler times. But now she was to be forced to sit for two days in the cart with an old infidel close to death; and the more she considered it, the more she realised that it must be her duty to convert him if she could. So as soon as they rattled over the Ayleswade bridge and set off on the road south, she told Aaron that this was her intention.
To his amusement, the elderly, sophisticated Jew sat in the creaking cart beside the almost illiterate and forthright young woman who had earnestly told him to repent even before they reached Britford or the cathedral tower was out of sight. She pleaded with him all the way to Fordingbridge, explaining the folly of Judaism and the greater authority of her church.
He did not argue much, but she could see that she was making little headway. She was not discouraged, though.
“Don’t worry old Jew; we’ll save your soul yet,” she told him cheerfully.
After they had crossed the river at Fordingbridge, she warned him of the danger of hellfire; she told him he must do penance for the crime of the Jews in sending Christ to the cross; she explained to him that those who, like him, saw the Saviour but closed their eyes would not be forgiven on the Day of Judgement. The old man answered her patiently, more amused than irritated by her persistence, as he explained that he had no wish to desert the God who had made His covenant with his ancestors.
They stopped at Ringwood for the night.
The second day, sensing that she had been defeated on the main issue, Mary changed her line of attack.
“Why do your practise usury,” she demanded, “when the Bible and the Church say usury is a sin?”
“I do not practise usury,” he replied.
She frowned.
“You lend money at interest.”
“Yes, but what the Bible calls usury is excessive interest, which is different,” he responded calmly. “All money must carry some interest, otherwise no one has any reason to lend.”
She shook her head. How ignorant the old man was.
“You’re not supposed to charge any interest,” she corrected. “The priests say so.”
Aaron sighed. The profound ignorance of simple finance that this invented doctrine showed was something he could only grieve over.
“Do you deny it?” she insisted.
He gazed at her and thought what a splendid creature she was, with her frank, violet eyes, her mass of long, yellow hair and her athletic figure. He bore her no ill will and wished now that she would stop arguing with him since he was tired. But his passion for accuracy made him reply:
“I do deny that it is wrong whatever the priests say. Excessive interest is a crime, and a destructive one, but there must be some interest.”
She could see he was sincere, and her face puckered in puzzlement as the old man, tired of the argument though he was, tried for the last time to set right the fundamental prejudice that dogged all financial transactions through the Middle Ages.
“When your grandfather invested in the mill, Mary, he could only do so if his investment yielded a return. It’s just the same if a man gets a farm and works it. You have to show a return or you give it up. When you sell your goods at the market, you exchange them for money. What if, now, you wish to finance someone else to build a mill or buy a farm with your money? Don’t you look for some return, just as you would if it was the mill or farm you were working yourself? The return on that money is your interest rate, that’s all.”
She considered. It sounded logical, but she did not like it. She was silent for several minutes as they rumbled along the lane. Then her face cleared.
“But I work on the land, and it raises crops; and my brother works in the mill to full cloth. That’s how we get money.”
“Of course,” he smiled. “But there’s no difference really. When you work, the money in the farm is working, and earning its return.”
Now she knew he was wrong!
“Money doesn’t work, Jew!” she cried, thumping the side of the cart with her fist. “I work!”
The simple abstract principle behind almost all economic activity and human civilisation offended her practical mind to its core. “You should have been made to work with your hands,” she said sternly.
For this was a solution to the Jewish problem that had been suggested many times before, not only by well-meaning landowners but even by such otherwise subtle intellects as the churchman Grosseteste and the great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas.
The prejudice of otherwise intelligent people against the rules of finance upon which their lives depended was too deep, Aaron reminded himself, to be argued with. But perhaps, he considered, as he felt the winter sun on his head, they will be wiser in another generation.
“Truly,” Mary thought to herself at the same time, “the old Jew is so steeped in sin that he cannot even see the difference between honest work and theft.”
And so, tolerating each other on their final journey together, they went on in silence towards the port.
On the morning of Hallowe’en, that most magical of days, when all men knew that the dead rose from their graves, a small, squat wooden ship, broad in the beam, with a single square-rigged sail, lurched away with a creak from Christchurch quay. In the hull of the boat, just able to see over its side, stood Aaron, three adults and four children from Wilton, for each of whom the captain had been paid a shilling in advance of the crossing.
The captain of this modest vessel was a stooped, narrow-faced man, one of the countless generations of river folk who had fished and traded along the rivers and the coast since long before the Romans came; he shoved his passengers roughly into a space near the mast where they would be no trouble to him. His crew consisted only of his two sons.
From the stout little boat, Aaron could see Mary Shockley as she waved a curt goodbye before turning her cart and clattering up past Christchurch Priory on to the Sarum road; and as the crew pushed off and made their way slowly into the calm, shallow harbour, he held on to the mast and strained to see all he could during his last hour in England. Hungrily, his eyes took in the long reeds that grew along the bank, and the flat, marshy area on the northern side of the harbour, where the swans nested and wild horses still roamed; to his right lay the remains of the two earthwork walls and the long, low headland that silently protected the harbour from the sea. The boat carried them past the sand bar that enclosed the harbour and through the narrow channel that led into the open sea. A few fishermen were standing on the sand bar with their boats and they silently watched the little vessel go by. Bobbing on the light swell, it pushed its blunt nose out, away from the headland, towards the Solent and the high chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight.
Twenty minutes passed. The sail was up but they made slow progress. He turned and looked back.
There, across the brown waters, under a grey sky, lay the headland.
“The isle in the sea,” he sighed. For centuries this was the name that the Jews of Europe had given to the island of Britain, hidden by its narrow Channel and shrouded in its soft, northern mists. The low, matter-of-fact headland lying quietly behind him on this cold, dull day, was so infinitely touching to him, such a sudden and poignant reminder that he was never to see England again, that, still holding onto the thick mast, he suddenly broke into tears.
The tide was very low, and the captain, chatting to his sons, seemed to be taking little notice of where they were going. It was thanks to his carelessness that suddenly, when it was a mile out from the headland, the little boat crunched aground on a sandbank in the bay. The passengers groaned and the captain cursed his own folly loudly.
There was nothing to do but for passengers and crew alike to clamber out in order to lighten the boat, and stand on the sandbank with the cold salt water coming up to their knees while the captain and his sons heaved and cursed as they rocked the boat to shift it. The process took several minutes, but finally they managed to get the little vessel free, and in order not to make the same mistake again, the captain and his sons waded several yards out to keep the boat off the sands while ordering the passengers to stay where they were. Only when it was well clear did the crew clamber on, while the captain tried to hold the bow.
Then the captain swung himself up into the boat, turning to face his passengers, still obediently waiting on the sandbank.
“How do we board?” one of the men cried.
The captain grinned.
“You don’t.”
The passengers looked at each other, bemused. Was this a strange joke of some kind?
“You don’t board, Jew,” the captain cried. “You stay on the sandbank.”
“But we paid our fares.”
“And this is where they get you,” he chuckled.
And now, suddenly his two sons pushed off with their oars, sending the boat skidding out into the deep water.
“Tide’s coming up,” the captain shouted. He looked at Aaron. “Remember Moses, old man, and you can part the waters!” He roared with laughter at this excellent joke. His sons swung the boat round, caught the wind, and as the sail filled out with a snap, the boat began to tack away towards the harbour.
Only now did the little group understand that the manoeuvre with the sandbank had been a trick. They gazed at the departing boat in astonishment, scarcely able to believe what was happening.
There was a shocked silence.
“What shall we do?” The younger of the two men turned to Aaron.
“Can you swim?”
“No.”
There were two men and a woman, none of them in condition to attempt any feats of physical endurance, even if they could swim. The three children were thin and silent, in a state of shock. Aaron looked around him. It was a mile to the headland and perhaps a mile and a half to the main line of the shore. The water was already over his knees.
“We’ll have to try to swim,” he said finally. He knew it was useless, but if they stayed there, it was obvious they would drown. No one responded.
“Perhaps someone will see us,” one of the men suggested.
The coastline was bare. By the sand bar at the end of the headland, he could see the fishermen were still there. But would they rescue them? Christchurch itself was far away, hidden from view by the headland.
“Perhaps the sailors will change their minds.”
Aaron did not reply.
“Better try to swim,” he suggested. Still nobody moved.
The woman began to cry for help.
It was only then that he saw the storm.
The black clouds that came over the bay had seemed insignificant when they appeared on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand. But then they had arisen suddenly and within minutes had spread out, blackening the west and rushing forward over the waters with terrible swiftness, like ominous birds of prey. The storm came in a fury. Its winds whipped the sea into a wild spray, hurling it against the headland and sending the grey black waves buffeting and thumping their weight onto the shingle shore with a crash and rattle. As the boat rounded the headland and reached the safety of the harbour, the group of fishermen who had watched the pathetic little party stranded on their sandbank and heard the faint cries across the water, had gone at last to their boat with the idea of rescuing them. But when they saw how fast the black clouds were coming, they realised that it was wiser not.