London - Edward Rutherfurd [164]
It was a long time since he had bothered to visit St Bartholomew’s, and as Michael escorted him round, he could not help admiring the place. The priory consisted of a large Norman church, cloisters, a refectory and richly furnished monastic buildings. Not only was the priory well endowed, but every August, at the feast of St Bartholomew, it held an important cloth fair at Smithfield, from which it enjoyed a handsome profit. The members of the community, known as canons regular, were a small but distinguished company who lived in pleasant comfort.
The church itself was a noble structure with a broad, high nave, massive pillars, Roman arches and barrel vaults. The more intimate choir was especially fine, with a two-tiered screen of rounded pillars and arches forming a semicircle at the eastern end behind the altar. As the early autumn light filtered softly into this mellow interior, even the red-faced alderman was affected by its atmosphere, a mixture of Norman strength and Oriental warmth that conjured up images and echoes of the Host, the chalice, and of knights on crusade to the Holy Land.
Yet even though he tried to be agreeable, Bull could not help it if certain things began to irritate him. Somehow the sight of his brother’s bare toes and the faint slapping sound of his sandals upon the flagstones annoyed him. And why did this Barnikel woman with her strangely squinting eye keep staring at him so malevolently? As they toured the cloister, he was already breathing heavily.
Then came the moment Bull dreaded: they entered the hospital.
St Bartholomew’s Hospital was quite separate from the priory. Its brothers and sisters were not canons regular but a much humbler order of folk. The main building, to which Brother Michael now cheerfully led them, was a long, undecorated, rather narrow dormitory like a cloister walk, with a simple little chapel at one end.
Like most hospitals at that time, Bartholomew’s had begun as a hospice, a place of rest for weary travellers and pilgrims. But that had soon changed and Brother Michael and Sister Mabel were proud of their collection – now numbering over fifty – of the sick and helpless. There were three blind men, half a dozen crippled to some degree, several senile old women. There were men with ague, women with boils, the ill and suffering of every kind. As was the custom of the age, they were placed two, three or even more to a bed. The alderman looked at them with horror.
“Are any of them lepers?” he asked. Only a month before, a leprous baker had been discovered selling bread in the city.
“Not yet.”
Bull shuddered. What was he doing here? And what was his own brother, who might at least have upheld the family honour in a prestigious monastery, doing in such a disgusting place?
It was as they came out into the sunshine that Brother Michael made his move. The alderman had to admit that he did it with grace. Taking him gently by the arm and leading him a few paces away from Mabel, he began quietly: “My dear brother,” he said with obvious sincerity, “I’m sure our mother plagued you, but it has still touched my heart to see you here. You must forgive me, therefore,” he smiled, “if now, for a moment, I try to save your immortal soul.”
Bull grinned ruefully. “You think I’ll go to hell?”
His brother paused. “Since you ask, yes.”
“You wouldn’t want Bocton back in the family?”
“It is family pride, my dear brother, that is blinding you to your sin.”
“Someone else will buy Bocton if I don’t.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
They had turned round and were pacing back towards Mabel, whom they had both forgotten for a moment. It was then that Bull, with a sigh and a shake of his head, uttered the terrible words: “It’s all very well to lecture me, Brother Michael, but you’re wasting your time. I’m not afraid of damnation. The fact is, I don’t believe in God.”
Mabel gasped.
Yet it was not such a shocking statement.