Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [279]
The canon flushed with anger. He knew that Godefroi and the Shockleys, watching in silence, were enjoying his discomfort.
“The king will deal with you before long.”
It was not altogether an idle threat. Henry had demonstrated mixed feelings about the Jews. He had allowed a ceremonial burning of the Talmud to take place four years before and had often given the Jewish exchequer into the hands of unscrupulous foreign favourites whom he had allowed to rob the community with impunity. But his extravagant building and complex foreign affairs had left him perpetually short of money, and he still needed this source of funds.
“The king received our gold at Westminster last year with his own hands.” The ceremony in which he had indeed taken the gold personally had caused some surprise, but Henry had seemed to be delighted.
“I am not concerned with that,” Portehors tried another tack. “I am concerned with building a house of God.”
Aaron nodded.
“And so, Canon Portehors, are we. For at this very moment the king is seeking a substantial loan from the Jewish community to rebuild his church of Westminster Abbey.”
Portehors’s jaw dropped. He had not known this. But the refounding of Edward the Confessor’s great church was indeed financed in part by a Jewish loan in 1245. Defeated, he stared at Aaron with loathing, and then at last, having no other insult to hand, he spoke the most bitter words he knew.
“What would you know, when the Jews are crucifiers of children?”
Of all the accusations made against Jews, heretics and other supposed enemies of the Church, one of the most monstrous but most widely believed was the accusation of ritual murder. It had started a century before when the body of a child, with what were claimed to be marks of crucifixion, was found at Norwich. Immediately a group of fanatical Churchmen had accused the local Jews of indulging in necromancy and ritual child murder. The absurd claim had surfaced several times since, when those embarrassed by debts hoped to find a way of attacking the creditors they blamed for their condition.
Against this outrageous insult there was no sensible reply to make. With a look of disgust on his face, Aaron turned his horse’s head and moved away. As he watched him go, a gleam of triumph appeared in Portehors’s eye. He might have lost the argument, but he had sent the Jew packing. With his sense of victory restored, his demeanour became calm and grave again, and he turned his attention back to Godefroi and Edward Shockley.
“If you take this young man from God’s work,” he threatened quietly, “to traffic with those who crucified Our Lord, you will be candidates for excommunication.”
It was a threat he probably could not carry out. There were no legal grounds for it. But as he saw that the canon was determined to make an issue of the matter, and as he had no desire for a quarrel with the Church authorities, Godefroi decided to give up. There were plenty of other masons.
“As you like,” he shrugged, and with a curt nod to the Shockleys, he moved away.
And so it was, in the year of Our Lord 1244, that Osmund the Mason was saved by Canon Portehors from the two deadly sins of avarice and sloth and transferred, at the wage of a penny farthing a day, to work on the new cathedral of our Blessed Lady Mary at New Salisbury.
That afternoon Peter Shockley walked with Alicia Le Portier through the town and told her the good news about the mill.
He pushed his fair hair back from his forehead and his blue eyes shone as he explained to her with pride: “We’ve got the mill and my father says I’m to be in charge of it.”
He was ambitious. She knew it. Ever since they were children, this simple, enthusiastic ambition had attracted her. Their conversation followed a familiar but delightful route as he walked beside her.
“I hope you’re up to it.” She could not resist deflating him a little: she liked to see him bounce back again.
He flushed.