London - Edward Rutherfurd [425]
Yet he had never seen anything like this carving. He knew with absolute certainty that he would never find a master in all his life like this. He could hear Martha’s voice chiding him from above: “These are graven images – idolatry. A sin.” He knew it was true. This was a love of worldly beauty utterly at odds with all he knew to be Puritan and holy.
He looked at Meredith. He looked at the workshop. “I should like to work for Grinling Gibbons,” he said.
It was some months before his real woes began. The rebuilding of St Paul’s had been long delayed because the costs were huge. The solution to the problem, however, was simple. The authorities announced a tax on coal. Every time the ships from Newcastle docked at London with the coal for its home fires, the unloaded sacks were taxed. And for every three shillings of tax, fourpence halfpenny went straight to St Paul’s. Wren’s great cathedral would be paid for, therefore, with coal.
By now this fund was beginning to mount up, and a new plan had been called for. Gibbons had shown O Be Joyful the rough wooden mock-up that had been made of Wren’s initial design – a simple structure with galleries which had pleased Carpenter because it reminded him of a Protestant meeting house. But now, it seemed, the king wanted something grander. “They are making a model of the new church,” Gibbons explained. “And I am sending you to help them.”
The next morning, O Be Joyful had turned up at the workshop expecting to find one or two others at work on something the size of a small table. Instead, a team of craftsmen was already busy on a monumental model. At a scale of half an inch for every foot of the building itself, it was twenty feet long and almost eight feet high. More daunting yet, it was being made of oak, which was exceedingly hard to carve. And more impossible still, every detail, every cornice, was to be exactly reproduced inside and out. “Dear God,” he murmured, “it’ll be easier to build the real thing.”
The drawings from which they were to work were coming in piecemeal, but the outline of the building was clear: a splendid classical structure in the form of a Greek cross, with large Roman windows, and porticoes with pediments at the ends. The drawings for the roof had not been supplied yet so he did not know how that would look, but there was no shortage of work meanwhile. The columns and pilasters of the great basilica were all of the Corinthian order and he was set to work on these. He was delighted by their chaste simplicity. “But they’re the devil to carve,” he admitted. For more than a month he laboured, every day, as the walls rose. Wren would come in frequently, say a few words, then dart out. Despite himself, O Be Joyful began to feel quite proud of his task.
One afternoon, just as work was ending for the day, Meredith came by and, beckoning to O Be Joyful, said, “There’s something you should see.” A few minutes later, the two men were at the site of the old St Paul’s, where Meredith showed him a hole in the ground.
To ensure that his greatest work would last, perhaps to eternity, Wren had decreed that the foundations must be deep and firm. Boreholes had been sunk at the site to test the ground. Ten feet, twenty, thirty, down they had gone, past the existing foundations, past those of the church before that, past Saxon remains; but still the great architect had not been satisfied, and urged them: “Deeper still. Go deeper.”
“See –” Meredith opened a box nearby and showed Carpenter some fragments of Roman tiles and pottery, “this is what they found, from the days when the city was Roman.” But they had gone further still, finding sand and then seashells. Meredith smiled. “It seems that once this place lay under the sea. Perhaps in the time of Noah. Who knows?” And O Be Joyful marvelled to think that the foundations of the new church should grow in this manner from the days of the Flood. “Then at last they came to hard gravel, and clay,