At one side of the Doom painting there was a full length, life-sized portrait of St Osmund. Assuming that this was exactly what Salisbury’s saint must have looked like, he gazed at it with awe.
The painting disturbed him too much; it was overpowering, and a few minutes later he was outside, on his way out of the town.
But the painting did not disturb Benedict Mason the bell-founder at all. As far as he was concerned, the more colour and ornament in the church the better.
It was one feature in particular that he had gone inside to look at: a small window on the south side – or to be exact, the lower portion of the right hand light of one window. For here, only a week before, he had installed at his own expense about a yard of stained glass. Will had not even noticed it when he went in, but Benedict stared at it with pride. It depicted in orange, red and blue, the figure of St Christopher who was blessing two small standing figures below him which, though they were crudely formed, could be recognised as the stout bell-founder and his wife. Underneath them in a clumsy gothic script were the words:
Gloria Dei. Benedict Mason et uxor suis Margery.
It was a modest memorial, nothing like the fine chantries of the nobles of the richer merchants, just as year after year his gifts of candles, wool and cheese for the church had been modest. But together with the obits which would be said for his soul by the priests when he died and the bells in Wiltshire churches which bore his name, the little stained-glass window would ensure his immortality, and the thickset craftsman was satisfied.
Of his ancestor Osmund the Mason who had carved such wonders in the cathedral he knew nothing at all. And so it was with genuine pride that he told his wife:
“I’m the first of our family to leave his mark in this city.”
He did not notice young Will at all.
The dark thunderclouds that had appeared from the west had already gathered overhead as Will passed the deserted castle hill of Old Sarum.
They did not bother him.
But still he had not solved his problem: which way should he go? He had been watching carefully but there had been no sign.
The sun, shining through the thickening veils of brownish cloud, was filling the huge landscape with a threatening orange glow. The atmosphere was growing close and heavy, building up the trembling, almost tangible tension that presages the great electric release of a thunderstorm.
In front of him, as far as the eye could see, lay the bare rolling ridges of Salisbury Plain. The scene was varied: from where he stood, into the middle distance, cleared ground was interspersed with fields of growing corn. Further away, however, there was no corn, only a bare grey-green expanse like a sea, on which he could see the myriad tiny white dots of the distant sheep.
The sky itself seemed to be growing closer to the land, as though it was about to envelop it, take the whole rolling plateau in vast unseen hands and shake it to and fro.
He stood in front of the ancient dune, a pathetic, diminutive figure, homeless, orphaned, friendless, with two shillings and the gold coin to his name in the whole world. His long thin fingers grasped a stick he had broken from a tree on the way up to the high ground; his thin face with its small, narrow-set eyes, stared over the huge, threatening landscape ahead. He might indeed have been a wandering figure from an earlier age, when men still hunted for their food; and still he had no idea where to go.
And then he grinned.
The storm that was about to break did not bother him. The weather was not too cold. If he got wet, his clothes would dry on him. Empty and uninviting though the landscape looked, he knew that, if one searched carefully, there were always ways to survive. There were shelters built for sheep; there were farms, villages, hamlets where a boy could usually scrounge a meal. Better yet, there were religious houses – monasteries, priories, small granges – where the monks, for all the jokes people made about their easy life, never refused food and shelter to a stranger.
He had asked St Osmund for guidance. It had yet to come. But even so, though he could not say why, some ancient instinct deep inside him knew, with an infallible certainty, that he was a survivor.
In the absence of any sign, he must make a choice: there were several alternatives. He could head towards the north western settlements of Bradford or Trowbridge – both thriving cloth towns. Beyond, a few days’ journey further, lay the Severn river and the mighty port of Bristol. Or he could turn south east instead and make for Winchester or the port of Southampton. Further still, to the east, lay London itself. That was too far, he thought, though its unknown possibilities tempted him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he had turned his back on Sarum.
“I’ll try Bristol,” he finally decided; and began to walk.
The roadway, like most of England’s roads, was in reality no more than a recognised route over which people travelled. It had no surface, it was not marked out in any way: it was simply a broad path stretching across the high ground, trodden down by foot and scored with the marks of hoof prints and cartwheels which had passed that way over the centuries. In some places, where the ground was soft and travellers had fanned out to find a firmer surface, the trackways might spread hundreds of yards across; in others, a hard ridge between escarpments might narrow the road naturally to only a few. Ancient, as primitive as it had been in prehistoric times, this was the road.
He had gone a mile and was beside the last of the cornfields before the storm broke; when it did, it was not what he expected.
Will knew two kinds of storm at Sarum. The first, the more usual, was when the sky cracked and split open – with thunder and lightning, sheet or forked, that might seem like crashes and flashes of fury but which carried with them also a sense of relief. “The ground’s waiting for it,” he would say, to express the feeling that between sky and earth there was a complicity, as if the bare high ground willingly bore the powerful fury of the storm, its flashes of lightning and torrents of rain for a space, before it moved, with a departing rumble, to some other quarter of the distant ridges, or to the wooded valley in the south. He liked these storms. He enjoyed the noise and the thrill of the lightning, sensing the relief in the sky as the whole atmosphere concentrated itself to release its pent-up tension. He would grin with pleasure as, accompanied by the faraway muttering and distant flashing of the storm, the swollen rivulets and streams poured off the chalk ridges into the valley below.
But there was another, mercifully rarer kind of storm. And today, when he was a mile from cover of any kind, it was one of these that broke.
He thought, for nearly an hour, that he would die. It did not seem possible that any rage in the heavens could be so great. It seemed that the sky, the whole lowering dome of the universe about the high ground had come together not to release, but to destroy. The lightning did not crack nor the thunder roar: they came together with a single huge bang as though the world were staring up into the mouth of a cannon. And, scarcely pausing, this terrible assault of sky upon earth crashed again and again. Worse: the storm did not move, it stayed where it was, an electric maelstrom, directly above him, pouring its rage down upon him while the whole plateau trembled.
“God help me,” he cried. St Osmund’s comforting shrine seemed suddenly far away, ineffectual. “Mother of God,” he begged, “save me.”
But the great stanchions of forked lightning struck at the ground all around him, time and again until he could only believe that the storm was searching him out, personally, for destruction. He was utterly alone. Half a mile away, he knew, was a flock of sheep. Were they as frightened as he was? Might not the storm in its appalling rage choose some of them instead of him? The rain drove down so hard, so relentlessly, that he could not see even half way to the sheep.
At one point for a few moments he thought the storm had begun to move; but then it returned to him, even more furious than before, with all the force of nightmare. Survivor though he was, he fell to the ground, huddled into a ball like a baby and lay, feeling utterly naked, on the ground as the storm beat upon him.
It was then that the supernatural event, the terrible wonder occurred.
It was a single shaft of lightning. The bang was so loud, so absolutely sudden – the gigantic force of it seemed to cleave the ground apart so directly under him – that, for an instant, he thought he had been struck. He very nearly had.
But even his terror was forgotten as he stared in front of him.
For the lightning, having struck the ground some twenty feet from where he lay, had not vanished, but raced eastward along the surface of the earth, carving a swathe of fire in a dead straight line for a hundred yards through the field of growing corn. There before him, to his astonishment, where a second earlier had been a drenched field, lay a black and smouldering path like a giant pointer.
As he gazed at it, he suddenly became aware that the storm, having apparently caused this terrifying phenomenon, had begun to move away.
He got up slowly. The rain was already slackening off. Cautiously he went forward and inspected the spot where the lightning had struck. Except that it was now blackened, it seemed like any other spot on the ground.
But why should it leave this huge scorched trail, so absolutely straight, across a field of corn? He had never seen such a thing before.
And how indeed could Will – who had never heard of the Romans, or their legions, who knew nothing of the lost settlement of Sorviodunum or the villa of Porteus – how could he know that buried underneath the cornfield, for a thousand years, a small, metalled Roman road had lain hidden, along which, since it was a perfect conductor, the huge bolt of lightning had earthed itself?
For long minutes Will stood there, oblivious even to the storm rolling away over the ridges to the north. The charred path – the pointer – lay before him.
“Mother of God and St Osmund,” he murmured at last. “It must be the sign.”
The sign did not point north-west to Bristol. It pointed east. Nothing could be more clear.
“I will go to London then,” he decided.
NEW WORLD
1553
A glorious new world was being born, and it was a dangerous place for people of conscience.
As Edward Shockley stood that April morning amongst the small crowd in St Thomas’s church who were watching Abigail Mason and her husband Peter set about their self-appointed task, he had a sudden premonition that they would soon be in danger. It was Abigail he feared for.
And yet, what they were doing would certainly meet with the approval of Bishop Capon, the justices of the peace, the king himself.
They were breaking one of the church windows.
Peter Mason was on his knees; Abigail stood over him. The pieces of stained glass already lay on the stone floor and Peter was pounding them carefully with a hammer. He glanced up frequently, his gentle, round face smiling, silently asking for approval which Abigail, very calm in her simple brown smock, quietly gave him.
“’Tis the Lord’s work thou dost, Peter,” she told him.
Yet it seemed to Shockley that her eyes were fixed on something beyond her husband while she encouraged him, as if this necessary but minor act of destruction almost bored her.
But then Abigail was a rare spirit – one of the few in Sarum with a fixed purpose in life. She had vision, and strength.
How he admired her for it.
“Abigail Mason knows what she believes,” he reminded himself sternly. “She does not lie.” And he shook his head sadly at his own weakness.
The little window which, three generations before, Benedict Mason had so proudly installed as a memorial to himself and his wife had lasted surprisingly long. The king’s commissioners had thought it too insignificant to bother with; and since Benedict had seven descendants living in Sarum now, Peter Mason, for fear of offending his cousins, had hesitated to deface the tiny memorial himself. But Abigail had been firm. She had spoken to him, lovingly but firmly again and again, and now at last it was done. No one had-dared to object. It was the Lord’s work.
She did not even glance at the little crowd who were watching. Though she was short, her pale face was set so firmly and her deep brown eyes were so calm that she seemed a being apart. Stern as she was, there was something about her, besides her courage, that Edward Shockley found strangely attractive – he could not formulate it into a thought, however, and whatever it was, the feeling was probably sinful. He turned away from the dutiful couple and looked about the church instead.
St Thomas’s Church had changed completely since he was a child. Even its name had been altered, for King Henry VIII, in the plenitude of his almost totalitarian power, had roundly declared that Thomas à Becket, the martyred archbishop who had defied the king, was no martyr but a rebellious subject. Accordingly the church beside the market place was no longer called St Thomas the Martyr but dedicated to another St Thomas, the Apostle, instead. It was the commissioners of the present boy king Edward VI, though, who had really altered the look of it. The old statue of St George had been torn down and smashed; most of the carvings had been broken up too. The chantries of Swayne and the Tailors’ Guild had been destroyed and their endowments confiscated. Two hundredweight of brass – thirty-six shillings’ worth – had been carted out of St Thomas’s alone, as well as most of the stained glass. The pride of the merchants and the guilds, their shrines, chantries and memorials, had all been humbled in the name of the true God. Why, even the great Doom painting had been white-washed over.