Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [283]
“No. A little grey at the temples – but that can improve a man you know.” She smiled. “He’ll be here very shortly.”
Alicia went down the stairs first. The long dress felt very grown up: too grown up, she thought, for Peter Shockley.
Perhaps this knight would know how to appreciate her.
The third of the seven deadly sins which afflicted Osmund the Mason crept up upon him very slowly before it took him by surprise.
His life as a cathedral mason delighted him. For in entering the quiet close, he discovered another world.
On the canon’s instructions, he had been taken on as an apprentice, a step above the little army of some two hundred labourers who moved the stones and carted the rubble about, but an insignificant and almost unnoticed figure on the fringe of the fifty masons, of whom the master masons formed a small and dignified elite. Above the master masons were the revered master of masters, Nicholas of Ely and his deputy Robert, whom he often saw directing the work but to whom he had never dared to speak; and most godlike of all, more honoured by the builders than even the bishop himself, Elias de Dereham, the designer of the cathedral. He had designed other buildings, including the hallowed shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury; but Salisbury was known to be his masterpiece. Elias was an old man now, and was at present away from the city; Osmund was not even sure what he looked like.
The masons had admitted him as an apprentice, but since no one knew anything about him, his existence was almost ignored, even by the other apprentices. It might have been discouraging. But one thing he knew for certain the first day that he began: this was where he wanted to be.
For the time being he was used as a spare pair of hands and given only the lowliest tasks – sawing the blocks of grey stone and helping to dress them. But he was content. In the long, hot, dusty days under the cathedral’s slowly rising shadow, he was glad to watch the builders go quietly about their work in perfect order, closed off from the rest of the world in their spacious precincts. Several nights a week now he would stay in the masons’ quarters, a long line of sturdy wooden huts along the north and east perimeter of the close, and he was glad to sit deferentially outside the circle of masons and listen to their talk. As for his ambitions, he kept them to himself: the masons’ guild was a tight and secretive fraternity; even a new apprentice the masons knew was expected to attend to his duties patiently and wait to be spoken to.
There was one object in particular on the building site which fascinated him. In the eastern end of the cathedral, where the first chapel, lower than the main body of the church, was already roofed over, Elias de Dereham had placed a large wooden model on a table. It showed the cathedral in its finished form; any mason or labourer was free to wander in and inspect it, and Osmund used to visit this place each day.
The cathedral that he saw consisted of a long, narrow building whose simple rectangular line was broken only by the huge transepts at its centre, which gave it the form of a simple cross, and two smaller transepts near the east end. At the central crossing, the long roof line was divided into two equal parts by a low, square tower that rose some twenty feet above it and was topped with a flat roof. This was the standard design for many large churches all over Europe at that period and its plain, long, horizontal lines were the essence of simplicity.
But how elegant it was! Where the old Norman churches, like the cathedral on the castle hill, had been stout, heavy bastions with rounded arches and narrow windows set in fortress-like walls, this new building was a light and airy shell. Its windows, with their plain, gothic points, rose in two tiers – huge areas of glass that perfectly balanced the high, sheer surfaces of the building’s grey Chilmark stone. Nothing, it seemed to him, could be more pure, and natural.
It was one day when he was standing beside the model, wholly absorbed in it, that