Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [213]
There was an awed silence. Such churches, the first of the parish churches of England, were still a rarity; and a church of stone still more so. There had only been one other in the area, just south of the place where the five rivers met, at the little hamlet of Britford, where a former king had endowed a small structure on his estate there, using stones from the ruins of Roman Sorviodunum; but no one else in the area had done such an ambitious thing in a generation. The cost of such a building, even a modest structure, would be formidable and represented a major sacrifice even to a wealthy man like Aelfwald.
Port stared down at the table. His mind was in a whirl. As he thought of his own unwillingness to redeem his own vow to his sister he felt his face go scarlet with shame.
“I am unworthy to be a thane,” he moaned softly to himself.
And then, as Aelfwald sat down and the toasts were drunk again, he knew what he must do.
His face still flushed, his head spinning slightly, he rose a little unsteadily to his feet. As the hubbub around him died down, and the faces of the feasters turned towards him in surprise, he cried out, so that his thin voice echoed round the hall:
“I, Port, to redeem the pledge I gave my sister Edith, give to the nunnery of Wilton a fine gold cross, for the glory of God.”
He sank down. It was done. The people applauded. His honour was satisfied. And the money was gone.
He would never be a thane now.
He sat by his wife, hardly knowing what to think. He trembled with pride: yet, though he tried to disregard it, in the pit of his stomach, he felt a terrible coldness at the great opportunity he had lost. His face now burning, he stared down into his lap, and when from the head of the table Aelfwald gave him a warm smile of encouragement, he did not see it.
In the darkness outside the hall, a light snow had begun to fall over Sarum: a token, it seemed that this winter at least, there would be peace.
It was an hour after dawn. In the little wooden chapel where the six monks performed their simple devotions, Osric rose stiffly from his knees. There was a cold, hard January frost on the ground.
It was time to begin the day, and like all his days at the monastic cell, the boy was dreading it. For nearly half an hour he had been praying alone; but his prayers had brought him no comfort. One thought, and only one kept him going: “Six months more,” he whispered, “and then I’ll be sent to Canterbury.” If he could just work out how to get through them.
At the place where the two rivers, the Avon and the Stour, ran into the sheltered harbour by the sea, there was now a modest settlement of some two dozen houses protected by a palisade, which had acquired the name Twyneham. It meant the place by two rivers, and like Wilton, it was set in the angle between them. Opposite lay the long spit of land with its low hill that protected the shallow harbour from the turbulence of the English Channel; and along the northern side of the harbour, to the east of Twyneham, lay the broad, flat marshland that gradually turned into woods as one went further inland. It was here that Aelfwald owned a large hunting estate, and it was on the edge of the wood that he had carved a spacious, dry clearing on which the modest buildings