He took the gold piece in astonishment. This was a major windfall. He took it quickly before the madwoman changed her mind. Then he hurried past.
A few minutes later, still watched by Lizzie, he rounded the corner of the lane and turned south towards the city.
He wandered about in the huge church for some time before approaching his objective. How magnificent it was, with its soaring arches and the richly painted chapels and chantries below. There were many of these splendid memorials to the great nobles like Lord Hungerford, where the priests said masses every day. Old Bishop Beauchamp was near to death now, it was said; no doubt there would soon be a new and splendid chantry built for him too. But though these sumptuous little chapels and impressive tombs reminded him of his own insignificance, there was only one monument in that great church that he approached with real religious awe.
The shrine of St Osmund was outwardly magnificent. It was not only painted and gilded: it was even studded with gems so that it glowed and glittered as the red and blue light from the high windows fell upon it. It was right, of course, that the saint should be honoured with all the ornaments that money could buy.
But to Will the little gleaming shrine was a magical place apart.
“God himself touches the spot,” the priest at Avonsford had told him, and he knew it was true. For in the cathedral, the holy body of the saint himself was present. The bodies of saints did not suffer corruption, like those of other men. He knew that too. They remained perfect and sometimes gave off a sweet odour. Some said there was even a warmth that came from the tombs. The very light that touched the jewelled shrine was holy, a direct shaft from the saint’s body to God.
“Touch the shrine,” the priest had assured him, “and you are touched by the saint himself.” Many had been healed of sickness by doing so.
Will knew about relics – they were holy objects you could touch. Once when he was ten, he met a pilgrim on the road outside Fisherton and the man showed him. in a little casket, a rusty sliver of metal. “It’s part of a nail from the true cross,” he confided, and Will looked at the nail with reverence and with awe. “You can touch it,” the pilgrim offered, but the boy had not dared, for he was suddenly overcome with the fear that if he touched a relic that had touched the body of Christ himself, he would probably be struck dead on the spot for his sins. He dreamed about the nail for years afterwards.
Almost every church had its relics, kept in little boxes and venerated by the people: shards of wood from the cross, a lock of hair belonging to one of the saints, a sliver of bone. But these were nothing compared with the holy shrine of St Osmund.
And so it was that now Will knelt before the gleaming shrine of Salisbury’s saint and prayed fervently:
“Which way shall I go? Guide me, Osmund. Send me a sign.”
He stayed there some time. The shrine glittered in the half light; and in the end, though no sign had yet come, he felt comforted. “I will watch for the sign,” he thought. “Osmund will send it.” And he made his way out.
It was while he was walking along the edge of the market place that his attention was distracted from his journey for a time by a curious sight.
It was a little procession: a priest, two acolytes carrying lighted tapers and six choirboys were solemnly leading a stiff old man round St Thomas’s churchyard. Behind the old man walked a little group of people who appeared to be family and friends, amongst whom he recognised the burly form of Benedict Mason the bellmaker. The choirboys sang a psalm while the old man, dressed in a coarse wool habit, like that of a friar, and with simple sandals on his feet, followed silently, his bald head bowed.
“What is it?” he asked a bystander.
“An enclosure,” the man told him, and seeing the boy’s look of puzzlement he explained: “He’s going to be a hermit. They’re taking him to his cell.”
Will had never seen such a thing before.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Eustace Godfrey.”
Will had never heard of him.
The ceremony of enclosure, as opposed to the agricultural practice of that name, was a grim and stately affair. First the priest had recited a mass for the dead in the church, at which Eustace had made his vows and put on the coarse woollen habit he was henceforward to wear. Now he was making the slow procession to his cell. Will watched, fascinated.
At the north door of the church, the little group stopped. In the recent rebuilding, a large porch had been added to this side of the church and over it was a large chamber that was reached by a staircase. This was to be Eustace’s cell, inside which he would remain in prayer and meditation until the day he died. Now, while Eustace waited below, the priest and his acolytes went up the stairs to bless the cell.
Will was not able to see the part of the ceremony which followed, since it took place inside. Its symbolism was gruesome.
First Eustace was summoned up the stairs. Inside the chamber he was ordered to lie down on the hard wooden board he was to sleep on in future and then, while he folded his hands as though he were dead, the priest said over him the funeral rites. One of the two acolytes swung a censer, the other held out a bag of earth from which the priest scooped up handfuls and scattered them over Eustace’s body. Then he sprinkled holy water over him.
“Eustace Godfrey,” he announced when it was done. “You are dead to the world. Eustace Godfrey,” he continued, “you are alive only unto God.”
Then he turned and all three came down the stairs, closing the door and ceremonially locking it behind them.
“Eustace Godfrey has entered his tomb,” he cried to the crowd of watchers. “Pray for his soul.”
In fact, his enclosure was not as complete as the ceremony suggested. Before being licensed to become a hermit, Eustace had had to satisfy the archdeacon at the cathedral not only that his desire and vocation for the spiritual life was genuine, but also that he could support himself in a decent state in the place chosen for him. Entombed though he was, a servant would bring him food and clean his chamber every day; his son and daughter could visit him. The retirement into a life of solitary prayer was not, at least in England, uncomfortable. On the other hand, he must stay where he was, perhaps for many years, until he died.
With this arrangement Eustace was quite content. Indeed, the step he was taking that day was not illogical. His attempts to come to terms with the busy city, attempts that he had made as conscientiously and valiantly as any of his ancestors had gone to war or ridden in the lists, had all ended in failure. His lovely daughter had finally, at the age of twenty-eight, married an elderly farmer from Townton. There were no children. His son had not gone to the Inns of Court or made his way in London: he had settled in a modest house in the Blue Boar chequer where he traded unsuccessfully in wool, and drank more than he should. Eustace had continued to invest his dwindling resources, sinking nearly half of what he had in a venture with a Scandinavian merchant while England was in dispute with the merchants of the German Hanseatic League. In 1474 a peace had been signed with the Hansa: the Germans had regained their trade, and Godfrey and his Scandinavian partner had been almost ruined.
It was the combination of these disasters working upon his own natural inclinations that had turned his mind finally to the mystical world. Year by year, he had gone to hear more masses each day; his readings had for a long time been confined to the works of the mystics: Thomas à Kempis,
The Cloud of Unknowing
and his favourite Julian of Norwich.
By the turn of the year he had no more desire to live in the house near St Ann’s Gate.
“I have done with the world,” he told his children. And it was true.
Nor was it unusual. There were hermits in most dioceses: it was a natural path for a man like Eustace to choose. If he could no longer be a courtly knight at Avonsford, if the busy, noisy merchants of Salisbury would not help him regain his fortune, God at least would accept him, in understanding silence, as a Christian gentleman. When the priest had left, he got up slowly and smiled. For the first time in many years he was happy.
One other figure who had watched the ceremony with particular approval was Benedict Mason.
The bellmaker, in his last years, had become successful, and also amazingly stout. Because he considered Godfrey to be a pillar of the church, Benedict had always felt there was a bond between them and he had bustled across the market that morning to make sure that he was present to witness such an important event. To do so, he had put on his brightest blue hose and red jerkin the combination of which gave him the appearance of a well fattened turkey cock. He crossed himself repeatedly during the mass and glowered at any of the others in the crowd who were not doing so too.
When the service was over and Godfrey was safely in his cell, he did not immediately depart, but lingered a few moments by the door. Then he went back into the church: there was something he wanted to look at, just once more.
Will followed him in.
The new church of St Thomas the Martyr was the showpiece of the town, and the town had much to be proud about. For never had the citizens of Salisbury been so wealthy.
York and Lancaster were still disputing for the throne; but while the great nobles like Warwick the Kingmaker might cynically change sides, the mayor and corporation of Salisbury had calmly sent money and troops to both sides at once. One by one the mighty feudal figures fell. The king’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, with his great park at Wardour just fifteen miles to the west, had been killed only recently – drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine it was rumoured. Another brother, the deformed Richard of Gloucester, who now held many of the old Earldom of Salisbury’s estates, was lurking in the wings. And Salisbury still cared not one jot for any of them.
The present king, Edward IV, was of the house of York. All that mattered to the citizens of Salisbury was that he was rich – both with land from magnates who had fallen in the feudal war, and with a huge payment from the French king, after he had threatened to invade France. Consequently he had no need to summon parliaments and demand taxes. Which was just what the citizens of Salisbury liked.
And Sarum, left in peace, grew rich. True, in the ten-year battle between Halle and the bishop, the townsmen had been forced in the end to give in. The bishop remained their feudal overlord. But no one else had bothered them.
The church of St Thomas the Martyr contained everything the townsmen could wish. There was the splendid chapel of the fraternity of St George; there were the chantries of Swayne and other leading families, and the chantry of the Tailors’ Guild. The other parish churches in the city, too, had similar memorials to their burgesses’ pride and wealth, but none were more lavish than those of the new church of St Thomas. Its staff of clergy was huge: over twenty priests, sixteen deacons, ten subdeacons, ten chantry priests – nearly sixty men in all, to serve a parish of two or three thousand souls. It seemed to Will, whenever he went past, that there was always a mass or obit being said – sometimes several at once, and when the offices were not being said, then candles were being lit.
The style of the new building was the so-called perpendicular – with thin spreading arches and broad windows. The roof did not have the sophisticated fan vaulting to be found in the greater churches like the new King’s College chapel at Cambridge or its sister church at Eton; instead it had a handsome wooden-beamed roof, from every joint of which there seemed to be staring a broad-cheeked angel; the walls were decorated with bright floral motifs. Everywhere there were little painted shields, some bearing the escutcheon of a local family, others the red cross of St George, and still more with the arms of one of the guilds on them. It was here that the mayor and corporation had their seats reserved, and here that the ceremony of making a new mayor was religiously performed.
But its greatest and most striking glory had only just been completed: this was the huge painting that spread from one side of the nave to the other above the chancel arch.
It was the painting of Doom.
Will was afraid of the Doom painting – with good reason. He could not read or write. He knew little even of religion except for what he had picked up from the occasional mumbled sermons of the priest at Avonsford or the knockabout religious mystery plays that the mummers sometimes performed in the city after Christmas. These plays, where one of the actors took the part of the devil, and another of his victim, were not unlike a Punch and Judy show; they reminded him that he would be soundly punished for his sins; but they were hardly frightening.
What he saw before him now was very frightening: for he had no doubt that it was an accurate picture of the terrible Day of Judgement. On the big wall over the arch that led to the choirstalls, towering over him and staring down into the nave, was the figure of Christ himself, seated on a rainbow, his hands raised and outstretched. Behind him were the splendid towers of the heavenly city. On his right hand, the naked dead were being raised by angels from their graves; some were escorted to the heavenly city: but many more were passing to the space on Christ’s left hand, the infernal regions where a great beast with a savage, gaping mouth was devouring them. It reminded Will of the ceremony he had seen one Whitsun at St Edmunds, where a huge painting, vividly depicting a skeleton in a grotesque, macabre dance, had been carried round the church to remind the people that they were soon to die. He would die soon – he knew that, and when he did, he would be shoved down the beast’s gaping mouth to the fires of hell; he was sure of it.