It was just after he had passed the George Inn that the figure of the bellfounder came puffing up beside him. His whole face was now as red as his pointed nose usually was, and the nose itself had taken on a deep magenta hue.
“Will you be seeing the bishop soon, sir, about the bell?” he panted.
He had forgotten the bell; even that failed to raise his spirits now.
“Soon, soon,” he promised, and continued on his way.
It was more in order to escape that he walked disconsolately through the gate into the quiet of the close. Even there, the sounds of the festivities of the summer solstice followed after him.
It was just before nine o’clock the next morning, as the members of the Tailors’ Guild, carrying their lighted tapers, were solemnly passing into St Thomas’s Church that William Swayne met Michael Shockley at the edge of the churchyard. The great merchant’s face was dark with anger.
“We’ve been cheated,” he exploded, “that cursed John Halle.”
Shockley stared at him in confusion.
“You mean the forty-eight?”
“I mean John Halle has another candidate no one knew about and he’s already got enough of his henchmen to support him. I can’t get you into the forty-eight.”
Shockley was silent for a moment.
“Who?” he asked finally.
“John Wilson – the one they call the spider.” Swayne grimaced in disgust. “God knows what he paid Halle for that.”
For, as usual, Wilson had moved quietly, but effectively. There was a great feast in the guildhall after the service. There were baked duck, roasted pheasants, hedgehog, peacock, hogs – all the delicacies of the splendid medieval cuisine. There were minstrels with harps, gitterns and trumpets. There was ale and mead.
And in the midst of these festivities, John Wilson, still dressed in black, led his son to the place where Curtis the butcher sat, and Lizzie looked up at the young man who was to be her husband. It was their first meeting in some years.
He smiled politely, but his eyes were cold.
Something told her that she might not be happy.
In the year of Our Lord 1457, the canonisation of St Osmund of Salisbury was made absolute. It had cost the dean and chapter the astounding sum of seven hundred and thirty-one pounds – as much as the yearly revenue of some bishoprics.
There is no record that any bell was made in his honour, although the guilds made his day, July 15, an occasion for another yearly procession through the town.
In 1465 a great dispute began between the citizens of Salisbury and Bishop Beauchamp. It was sparked off by a dispute between the two great rival merchants John Halle and William Swayne over who had the right to use a plot of land in the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr. The bishop as feudal overlord had granted Swayne the right to build a house for a chantry priest there, but Halle declared that the plot belonged to the town corporation. Swayne began to build. Halle and his men tore part of the building down. But the origin of this dispute was soon forgotten, for the real quarrel lay between the citizens, led by Halle, and their overlord the bishop. They were determined to end his feudal rule and Halle was summoned to appear before the king himself and his council, where he spoke so intemperately that even Henry VI decided to put him in gaol, where he remained for some time. The dispute dragged on for nine years before the King’s Council finally decided for the bishop.
“The charter is clear,” Godfrey told his family. “The city belongs to the bishop and there’s nothing the merchants can do about it.” The final triumph of the bishop was one of his few consolations, as his own fortune continued gradually but inevitably to decline. He paid Bishop Beauchamp a personal visit to congratulate him, and was delighted that he was received.
It was strange that when even those citizens who were Halle’s enemies, like Shockley, supported him in his fight against the bishop, John and Robert Wilson, to whom Halle had acted as a patron, remained completely silent during this time. No word of either condemnation or agreement came from the handsome house in the New Street chequer.
But then John Wilson already had other plans.
A JOURNEY FROM SARUM
1480
Young William Wilson did not move. He watched.
The damp, cold April morning mist had formed a fine coat over him; tiny droplets of which he was not even aware hung from the hairs of his thin eyebrows and his nose.
He had not eaten the day before.
But though he was cold, damp and hungry, he forgot those facts, and on his narrow sixteen-year-old face, there appeared a smile.
He could not see the river, though he knew it was there, a hundred yards in front of him; nor could he see the top of the ridges which were also enveloped in the mist. But he was beginning to see the outlines of the ground: a tree here and there, a hint of the track leading up to the high ground, for the sun was rising over the ridges now and starting to warm the hamlet and the manor of Avonsford.
He watched in the silence as slowly the yellow morning sun appeared and the mists began to dissolve. It was a moment he knew well and that he loved: for then the mists would slowly part, the upper layer drawing softly back like a veil up the valley slope before dissolving in the morning sunlight, leaving only the lower layer resting over the ground.
As he watched, two things happened.
Suddenly, from within the mist that covered the river water, he heard a beating of wings and then, out of its wreaths, came six swans. Their powerful wings whirred and moaned as they rose from the silent, invisible stream and swept down the valley.
At the same moment, the veil lifted off the foot of the slope behind the river and revealed the house.
How beautiful it was. Its long grey, uneven line with its gabled ends seemed to hover over the mist below, floating like a boat. Despite himself, he smiled.
He stayed quite still for whole minutes, wrapt in the beauty of it, almost forgetting that it was this house and its occupant who had destroyed everything he had. For this morning he had come to take his final leave.
“I will go,” he murmured sadly, “as soon as the swans return.”
The new manor house at Avonsford was certainly a fine affair – finer even than young Will could know, since he had never been inside.
It occupied the same site as the old building that had belonged to the Godefrois. But their crumbling house had been so neglected for fifty years that only bits of it had been incorporated into the new structure. Built of the same grey stone it was now a splendid residence.
“Fit for a gentleman to live in,” the owner had remarked with truth.
The owner of this gentleman’s house was Robert Forest.
It was ten years since John Wilson and his son Robert, merchants of Salisbury, had moved out of the city; and to mark this change in their social status from merchant to gentleman, they had taken a new surname, Forest, which seemed to them to suggest an ancient connection with the land.
For some years after that, John Wilson had continued his spider-like existence in the house in New Street chequer, seldom seen outside, but still becoming secretly richer each year, while Robert and his family had lived at Avonsford Manor. The manor was leased from its new overlord the Bishop of Salisbury for a term of three lives, but it was a lease which could be extended by future generations and the Forests had immediately set to work to make improvements that would make the house worthy of their newfound gentility.
It consisted of a spacious central hall, on each side of which was a large chamber with a handsome bay window. One of these, the larger, was a fine solar not unlike the original hall of the Godefroi knights. It had a high arched ceiling displaying dark oak beams and a bay window at one end with glass almost to the floor, which flooded the room with light. But it was the smaller room on the other side of the hall that was Robert Forest’s particular pride: for this was called the winter parlour. It had a fine window, too, though smaller, and a huge fireplace in front of which he and his family could sit; but its glory was the splendid wooden panelling round its walls, so perfect that once inside, the visitor felt as though he had entered an intricate wooden box, and every panel of this was carved in the new and elegant linenfold design.
When old John had seen it and queried the choice, Robert told him: “It’s the latest thing. All the gentry are doing it – those that can afford to.” And the old man had offered no further comment.
It was in the winter parlour, in a heavy oak display cupboard, that he also kept the small collection of books that belonged in a gentleman’s house. There were several books on heraldry and gentility; there was an illustrated manuscript of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
and also a new prose version of the tales of King Arthur. It was compiled by an obscure knight who had served at least one term in gaol for theft, called Thomas Malory, but since Robert Forest had heard a nobleman recommend it, he had purchased the book at once.
There was one other item of which he was proud.
“I saw it in London,” he told his father. “A man named Caxton, who was governor of the mercer’s guild, has started to make these things with a machine.” And he showed old John a handsomely bound book – a collection of philosophical sayings – that was of interest not because of its contents but because the letters had been made by a printing machine rather than by hand.
“With this printing machine he can turn out books by the yard,” Robert explained, and old John agreed that the new invention was remarkable. But he frowned nonetheless as he inspected the page.
“Why, these words are written in different dialects,” he complained. It was true. Caxton had, as most men did, his own views about how English words were to be pronounced and had chosen to spell them accordingly. The result on the newly printed page was a curious mixture of dialects from several different parts of the island.
“See – he writes ‘plough’ like a northerner,” the merchant-turned-gentleman complained: for as written, the word would have sounded more like ‘pluff’, or ‘rough’. “This won’t do.”
Robert said nothing. He was not interested. But his father was right, and the confused and illogical spelling chosen by Caxton’s whim was to be the hallmark of written English from then on.
Upstairs, above the parlour, were bedrooms with scented rushes on the floors, and behind the house was a courtyard with kitchens and storerooms grouped around.
Indeed, it was a remarkable fact, of which the present occupants could have no idea, that the newly laid out manor house fitted almost exactly over another, deeply buried floorplan – that of a Roman villa, that a family named Porteus had built on that site, with roughly the same degree of sophistication, more than a thousand years before.
Beside the house was a small family chapel with a little turret into which Benedict Mason had been commissioned to install a new bell. On the other side of the house was a squat stone tower, twenty feet high, and on top of that was a wooden structure pierced with numerous small entrance holes. This was the dovecote, around which several dozen doves made their peaceful cooing and fluttering. Just past the dovecote, Robert had built a walled garden in which neat rows of hedges formed a framework for arbours and beds of roses. The whole place was a little heaven.
Sometimes, it was true, there were screams and cries of pain from the house, but if they heard them the villagers only shrugged.
Robert Forest was a rich and increasingly powerful man. If the quiet, dark-eyed squire of Avonsford chose to beat his wife or his children for some offence, it was his right.
“There’s good order at the manor,” it was said, sometimes with a nervous laugh.
It was bad luck for young Will that Robert Forest had turned him out. There were several reasons.
He was the only one of a family of five children to survive. His mother had died when he was ten, and after struggling on for six more years in the little cottage in Avonsford, his father had died that January. This was the problem: for the family’s lease was a copyhold, expiring at the death of the tenant. The yearly rent had not been high, but rents were rising now, and not only would the new rent be higher, but the squire as lord of the manor had the right to the old heriot death duty and also to a new entry fine before he would renew the lease at all. And Will had no money.
The village was small: the few other tenants were poor: no one had offered to help him. They could not. Nor had Forest.
“If you can’t pay, you’re out,” the steward told him. “The master says so.”
Which was not surprising, for two reasons.
The first was that Robert Forest had other uses for the cottage.
Since the Black Death the century before, the village of Avonsford had never recovered. Its population had remained meagre and, by chance rather than any design, the families in the place had formed into two groups at opposite ends of the straggling village, while the houses between gradually decayed and were pulled down. The larger group lay at the south end; the smaller, where Will lived, at the north. The northern cluster was reduced to only four cottages now, but around them were outhouses and a plot of common land where they had the ancient right to graze livestock: a fact which made Robert Forest angry.