Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [43]
He had been here before, too; although not at night. Viewing this, the interior of the chapel at Roslin, he had experienced, and recovered from, amazement and amusement, admiration and exasperation, and finally settled for good-natured acceptance. This ode to the Sinclairs, truncated at either end, aspirationally based on the plan of Solomon’s Temple, was not quite of the dimensions to carry the emblems with which it was loaded, coated and smothered, as in a kiosk in Tabriz. Except that here, you would say, the carvers had not been of uniform mind, or indeed of uniform training. The clustered shafts, the carved arcades, the canopied niches, the traceried windows, the figured and foliaceous capitals, the storeyed entablatures celebrated, as was to be expected, the triumphs of every known member of the family St Clair, since it left France to multiply in every promising corner of somebody else’s land it could reach, ending up several hundred years ago here.
But among the armorial devices, the country-style Biblical figures—the Dance of Death; the Seven Virtuous Acts—were other strange faces, wild and pagan and snarling, which had more to do with the dark empire of the great Viking Rognvald the Mighty, Jarl of the Orkneys, from whom all Sinclairs claimed descent. Good-natured acceptance was the attitude that Nicholas had chosen in the face of such wanton eccentricity. Acceptance of a benignity that allowed simple craftsmen free rein. A pride, an exuberance that had no fear of excess. The spirit, perhaps, of the Sinclairs.
Now it was dark. It was hard to imagine, indeed, what light had attracted him, for there was almost none now, and no sign of human activity. Seeds in the darkness, working lanterns swayed in the draught from his door, plucking monsters from the gloom. A stone demon sprang into being, and behind it a wild man, with foliage in his teeth. A mask leered. A grinning animal moved. An avenging sword flickered.
Nicholas said, ‘My God, you haven’t got on very far, have you? Leave you four years, and it’s shakier than it was when I saw it last. That pillar’s going to fall down.’
The pillar fell down with a smack, rousing all the dust on the floor.
‘I told you so,’ Nicholas said, scratching his nose and nearly blinding himself because someone, howling, slapped him on the shoulder and two other people jumped out of the dimness and rattled his arm. He grinned, his eyes watering, and shouted back in the increasing noise while, bit by bit, the whole dusty interior came into view as candles were relit and lamps turned up and men gathered round him. There were half a dozen, perhaps: Tam Cochrane’s team; and it was Cochrane who had hammered his shoulder, complaining. ‘Damn you for a cold-blooded bastard, you’re meant to shite yourself then!’
‘Then you’ll have to use better buckram, won’t you? How are you all, Tam?’
‘Wait till I tell you. Can ye stay a bit? What’re you here for?’
Nicholas explained, and the master listened and snorted. ‘More fool you, not to say you were coming. Mind you, Nowie’s maybe away. You can try again the morn’s morn. And we’ve got you the now. Ye’ve time tae come down?’
He had. ‘Down’ meant down the steps to the sacristy, the drawing-office, the booming underground cavern with the stools and the trestles and the mattresses where the arguing, the gossip, the eating and drinking went on as the work progressed and different experts came to serve their time in the dusty gloom far above. One day it would be the awful, chill heart of the church. Now it was the place for refreshment, creation and recreation: a haven of light and warmth under the ground. Trust masons.
Nicholas lingered as the others began to clatter down the stairs at the side of the Lady Chapel. He had been prepared by Abbot Archie for the changes in Cochrane. He looked as he always had: like a big florid Renfrewshire farmer, keen to drill you into the ground with detail about sheep prices and foot rot and fencing. Thomas Cochrane might have ended