“And the different sizes?”
“Simple again. As you go higher, the vaults open out wider, so we use bigger stones.” And he showed him an adjustable wooden mould that was used by the stone cutters.
“Now come down again,” he ordered, and led the boy back to the floor of the church. “The most important thing,” he pointed up at the soaring arches, “is that instead of all the weight of the roof falling evenly on the walls, now it’s the ribs that hold it all up, and they rest on the pillars. So the walls don’t have to be so thick any more and we can build these fine big windows.”
When Edward remembered the heavy old Norman cathedral he had seen, still standing but nearly unused, on the castle hill and compared it with this airy new building, he understood what Osmund meant.
But it was another feature, less important perhaps, and less easy to see, which was for the mason the church’s best feature. This was the series of carved heads in which he himself had specialised ever since the day he made the figure of Bartholomew twenty years before. They were everywhere, brightly and naturally coloured; peeping from the screen, from the aisles and the clerestory arches; but the finest of all were the highest up, at the end of the shafts where the broad vaulting ribs spread out to form the ceiling, so high that one had to peer carefully to see them at all.
“Yet they are the best,” the mason told him enthusiastically. “There are fifty-seven of them up there in the vaults,” he explained. “We’ve been adding them ever since the building first started.”
“And how many did you make,” the boy said.
“Eight,” Osmund said proudly. “No one has made more.”
Set just in the cleft of the V that begins the vaulting the heads were arranged in perfect symmetry: king opposite king, bishop matched with bishop, staring at each other or down into the softly echoing spaces below. They were of many kinds, by many hands: a few in Purbeck marble, most in the softer Chilmark stone.
It had taken him many years of study to perfect his technique. He had even travelled to Winchester where, the century before, King Stephen’s brother the bishop had collected pagan statues from Rome. But the stylised classical heads, and the wooden staring faces produced by many of his fellow masons had never caught his imagination. He searched always, as he had from the first, for a more natural, lively form, as though he was carving in wood; and in several of his heads he had achieved this wonderfully.
“See up there,” he pointed to Edward: and far above the boy suddenly saw the face of Canon Portehors, his deeply lined, frowning and disembodied face staring bleakly at them from its great height.
Afterwards he took the boy to where he had been working in the masons’ lodge. Masons like Osmund were known as bench-masons, so called because unlike the lesser stone cutters and labourers, they did their work at a bench. Here the mason showed him another head he had been working on, this time of a former bishop, and on the underneath, where it could never be seen unless the head was one day dislodged from its place, he showed Edward the small mark he had chiselled in the surface. It consisted of a capital M, in the centre of which was incised the letter O.
“Osmund Mason,” he explained. “My mark goes on each piece I do.” This was not only a signature, but it also ensured that he would be correctly paid for each work he contributed to the cathedral. “And one day, you too will have a mason’s mark,” he told him. “Like this,” and with a piece of chalk he drew his own mark again, but this time he added an E below it for the boy’s name. “It’s our family mark,” he said with satisfaction, before taking his son back to rejoin the others.
“But will I work here?” the boy asked anxiously. “The church is nearly finished.”
Osmund smiled.
“There’s more to come,” he assured him. And he took him through a side door to where, running along the south of the nave, on the other side of the masons’ lodge, a spacious cloister had been laid out. Leading off this, the walls of a new octagonal building were almost complete.
“This will be the chapter house,” Osmund said, “where the canons and the deacons will hold their meetings. They say it will be a fine building, with many carvings. And after that we may extend the tower as well.” He beamed with the thought of it. “There’ll be colleges, more houses for the canons, hospitals . . .” He spread his little hands expansively: “There’s work for generations of masons in Salisbury.”
And indeed, as the boy walked around the close afterwards, it was plain that what his father said was true. Along the west walk that backed on to the river, fine new houses were still rising: not perhaps quite as splendid as the sumptuous hall with its leaded roof that old Elias de Dereham had built for himself – and whose colossal mortgage, twenty years after his death, was still being paid off – but handsome buildings all the same. Near the river, just before the little hospital, the new college of St Nicholas de Valle had just been built for scholars who were now coming to the new centre from Oxford. At St Ann’s Gate, near the little house of the Franciscans, a new grammar school had been founded; and on the south side of the cathedral, separated from the rest of the close in its own gracious grounds, the bishop’s impressive palace was constantly being enlarged.
“There’s no better place for a mason to be in England,” Osmund declared.
He could have added, for a priest to be, or a scholar. For under the patronage of the distinguished local scholar Walter de la Wyle, its present bishop, the new school by the river was already becoming a small but distinguished centre of learning, where not only theology but civil law, mathematics, classical literature and the elaborately precise logic of Aristotle were studied. This interest in science and the humanities, which had been stimulated by the crusaders’ discovery of the Arab scholars in the Middle East, was to be found in many scholarly communities; and the transfer of scholars from Oxford, which had been unsettled recently by several disputes with the townspeople and the papal legate, was not unusual either: a similar emigration a little before had already caused the setting up of another small college in the little East Anglian town of Cambridge.
In fact, only one thing at Sarum was lacking.
“If only the Pope in Rome would make our Bishop Osmund a saint,” the mason cried.
For a long time, the diocese of Salisbury had tried to have its saintly bishop canonised: partly, to be sure, on account of his undoubted piety but also, it could not be denied, because the existence of a shrine to the saint in the new city would bring with it, in those times when pilgrimage was so popular, a huge influx of visitors from whom the diocese and its new market town would profit enormously. So far they had not prevailed at Rome. But the campaign went on.
“One day,” declared the mason, who had himself been piously named after the great man, “we’ll have our shrine, and you,” he told Edward, “shall build it if I don’t.”
It was as he was returning to his workbench that afternoon that Osmund saw the girl.
At first, she did not particularly attract his notice. He was aware of a small blonde girl of about fourteen moving quietly through the nave towards the cloisters, but he thought nothing more about it until, half an hour later, he saw her returning, and on enquiring who she was, a mason told him: “That’s Bartholomew’s daughter. She and her mother just moved into the town from Bemerton.”
It explained why he had not seen her before; but he was surprised to learn that this blonde child belonged to Bartholomew, who was tall and dark. His old adversary and he were on terms of distant politeness: his former mentor had never attempted to become a carver of figures, but his painstaking if unoriginal work had earned him some respect in the guild and he was now in charge of the masons who were building the cloisters. After a moment’s surprise however, Osmund put the matter out of his thoughts.
It was a week later when he saw her again. This time she was loitering by the west door, presumably waiting for her father and after a little while, out of idle curiosity, Osmund strolled over – ostensibly to look at a statue that was about to be installed in its niche in the west front – and inspected her.
She was indeed an unlikely child for Bartholomew; although, as he surreptitiously inspected her, he remembered being told that the tall mason with the weeping sore had beeen lucky in finding a pretty wife. Obviously the girl took after her mother. Although he did not want to pay her too much attention, his sculptor’s eye noted that under her cotte there was a slim but well-formed body. The torso, he judged, was a little longer than the legs and there was a hint of fullness about the waist that was not unpleasing. Her eyes were light blue; her skin was pale but, unlike in Bartholomew’s, he could detect no flaws. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a braid on each side of her face and then hung loose to halfway down her back. As the sunlight caught it he noticed that her hair had a tinge of red.
It was a habit with Osmund to look at any face that interested him to ask himself how he would sculpt it and he observed her expression carefully. Was her character, despite her different appearance, perhaps like her father’s? Superficially it was a simple, oval face with a sweet and innocent expression; yet he thought he detected something in the set of her eyes and the play of her lips that was – he tried to place it – feline perhaps, or even lecherous. He grinned to himself at his own imagination; it was probably playing tricks with him; and a few moments later returned to his work and forgot about her.
The months of April and May were busy. Two years ago the last bishop, Giles de Bridport, had died and Osmund had designed a tomb for the respected prelate that had particularly pleased him. Above the simple raised slab with its effigy, he had decided to erect a little monument with two arches on each side. It was a borrowed design, an exact copy of one of the little wooden shrines that were used to hold the relics of saints, and it had allowed him, in the elaborately carved detail depicting scenes from the bishop’s life, to show once again how stone could be carved like wood. As he now put the finishing touches to this little masterpiece, he was often in the main body of the church, and several times he saw the girl passing through on her way to see her father. Sometimes she would glance at him shyly as she passed, but usually he pretended to take no notice. Once or twice however, when she did not know he was looking, he found himself staring at her for long moments before resuming his work.
It was in the month of June, when the intricate labour on the tomb was completed, that he was introduced to the great new project that was to be his life’s greatest masterpiece.
It began with a summons to the quarters of Robert the chief mason.
There he found two other master masons, one who had come from London, the other from France, both men whose work he respected deeply. Robert himself, who had succeeded the great Nicholas of Ely many years ago, was now a grey-haired man. He welcomed them politely.
“You’re the best three masons,” he said without flattery. “And I have a big project for you.”
And without more ado he spread several large plans on parchment on the table before them.
“It’s the chapter house,” he began.
The chapter house, one of the greatest glories of the cathedral, was closely modelled upon the chapter at Henry III’s new church of Westminster Abbey. It was magnificent. Like Westminster, it consisted of a single high chamber with eight sides. It was fifty-six feet across and at its centre a single slender pillar rose elegantly some thirty feet before it spread out like a palm tree or a flower to form the ribs of the simple vaulting. In character with the rest of the cathedral, it was a pure, almost understated building. Years ago when Osmund had first inspected the design, it was the plans for each wall that amazed him.
“Why, they are all window!” he cried.
He was right. Each window, divided into four lights and supporting in its arch a tracery pattern in the form of a simple rose, took up the entire face of each wall from the height of about ten feet to the vaulting. The only masonry in the upper wall was therefore the solid cluster of pillars at each of the eight corners. Now it was nearing completion.
“It will be,” Osmund searched for a description, “just a container for light: an eight-sided barrel of light.”
Robert smiled.
“It will. That’s it exactly. But it’s the entrance and the lower part of the wall I want you to look at now.”
From the cloisters one entered a broad, almost square vestibule, and from there a handsome arch led directly into the octagon itself. Around the lower wall of the octagon was a running stone seat and behind it an arcade of little arches, five to each wall, each arch marking the place at which one of the church dignitaries would sit.
“Now there, in the big arch at the entrance, and there,” Robert indicated the lower walls of the octagon, “we have important plans.” And while the three men bent attentively over the plans he went through every detail.
The design that the dean and chapter had approved was elaborate. Within the broad arch at the entrance there were to be seven niches on each side, set and angled one on top of the other along the curved line of the arch and meeting at its point. In each of these narrow niches was to be a pair of almost free standing statues – a woman in free-flowing robes, who would represent one of the fourteen virtues, and at her feet, sinking submissively, the corresponding vice. Thus Justice would subdue Injustice, Patience Anger, Humility banish Pride. It was a fine conception, and a daunting technical challenge.