London - Edward Rutherfurd [424]
O Be Joyful Carpenter had never got over the Fire of London. Indeed, in a sense, it had destroyed him. The fire of truth had sought him out and exposed him, naked, for what he was: a coward. But no, it was worse than that. He was a Judas. Hadn’t his whole life afterwards proved it?
Until the death of Martha, the modest woodcarver had always supposed that he was one of the chosen. This was not out of any pride on his part: far from it. But hadn’t he walked with God, in the company of Gideon and Martha, all his life? Didn’t he carve for the Lord? Wasn’t he simply one of a family, therefore, whom God had chosen to do His work? He had been, until he had killed Martha. You let her burn, he had told himself again and again, to save your skin. Where was your trust in God? When God confronted you, you turned away. Your faith is a sham. And for many months he had suffered great agony in his soul.
One day in the spring after the fire he had gone down from Shoreditch to the ruined city. Even after all these months the buildings of London were still quietly smouldering. He could walk through the wider streets, but many of the blackened stones were still too hot to touch. Acre after acre of charred desolation, smoke arising in tiny columns from innumerable ruins, a tart, choking smell wherever he walked: this, he thought, must be like the endless burning marl of the pit of hell itself. And then, with a dull, blank despair, he realized he was not one of the chosen at all; he was one of the damned, and his hell had already begun.
He seemed to lose energy after that. He had to rouse himself to work, but the joy had gone out of it. He prayed only with his family, for form’s sake. He had little occasion to sin, but he made no great attempt to lead a godly life, since there was no longer any point.
He might have drifted still further into depression if there had not been so much to do. For in the years after the fire, houses had been going up by the thousand and as a journeyman carpenter, working for several masters, he had been kept busy. Doors, panelling, wood-carving of every kind – the demand for woodwork was huge.
It was a chance meeting with Meredith that had changed his life. Having known O Be Joyful all his life, Meredith had always kept on friendly terms. He had been delighted to help Carpenter’s friend, the young Huguenot, and he had already secured O Be Joyful several small commissions in his new parish of St Bride’s. Seeing the craftsman’s gloomy face coming down Ludgate Hill one morning he had suddenly had a happy thought, that might cheer him up.
“My friend Wren has recently engaged a wonderful woodcarver who needs assistants. Why not let me take you to him?” he suggested. Thanks to his entreaties, that very afternoon Carpenter had met the remarkable Mr Grinling Gibbons.
Gibbons was a quiet craftsman like himself. Carpenter had heard of him by repute some months before when, emerging from seclusion, he had presented a magnificent carving to the king. Now, for the first time, he saw Gibbons’s work; it was astounding. The human figure, animals, trees, fruit, flowers – there seemed to be nothing he could not carve. More than that, these were not just the usual forms of such things. Even a simple apple in a lavish festoon of fruit to decorate some piece of wooden panelling had such an individuality, a lightness about it that you almost reached out to touch it believing it was real and ready to be eaten. “He is a sculptor, not just a carver,” O Be Joyful whispered to Meredith as they looked round the master’s workshop.
“There’s no one in London who comes near him,” Meredith agreed. “My friend Wren is commissioning him,” he went on, “to work on his new churches. Would you like to join him?”
O Be Joyful gazed around in silence. What could he say? He might be condemned for all eternity himself, but there were things which out of a lifetime of habit he still could not bring himself to do. Martha and Gideon might now be looking down at him with pity or disgust; but to work in one of the king’s churches,