Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [295]
All that night Osmund lay awake. He knew that he must do something about the meeting the day after, but he could only think of Bartholomew. His anger was hard now, and unyielding.
A little before dawn he decided to kill him.
He felt for his chisel. He knew what to do: a single blow with the chisel – tapped with his mallet, just as if he were attacking a block of stone – on his windpipe. And after that? He considered. He could run, perhaps. But where would he go? He shook his head in perplexity and rage.
Then he had his idea; it was a long shot, but there might still just be time. As the first light appeared, leaving Bartholomew unharmed, he rose from his bed and crept out of the hut. The cold, clear air was refreshing; the cathedral was silent. Picking up a small piece of Chilmark stone, he walked out of the close and headed towards Avonsford. It seemed to him that his anger had given him inspiration.
The evening of the next day, in the large upper room of the inn, the master mason stared at young Osmund thoughtfully. The boy looked pale. It was not surprising, since it was now two days since he had slept. The master mason was also aware that he had gone missing from his work the day before, and Bartholomew had put it about that he was unable to face the guild. But here he was and so he must receive the consideration as a candidate for masonry that he had been promised. The other masons who sat at the long tables round three sides of the room looked at young Osmund expectantly.
“You have work to show us?” the master mason asked.
Osmund nodded. He held it in a small bag.
“A fine roof boss I believe?”
“No sir.”
The master mason frowned.
“That is what we were promised.”
“It disappeared, sir. But I have something else.”
This did not augur well. Perhaps they had, after all, allowed the young man to proceed too fast.
“Show us your work,” he commanded.
Osmund drew a small object from his bag. It was a little torso, about twelve inches high, like those that stared out from some of the cathedral’s capitals. He stood it on the table and stepped back without a word.
And when the master mason inspected it, his eyes opened wide in surprise.
It was a figure of Bartholomew. It was Bartholomew to the life, from the mean but stupid look in his long face, to the persistent running sore on his neck. He was in the act of running away from something, but his head was thrust forward in an attitude of triumph, as though he were winning a race. His lips were parted in a malicious grin. And in his two outstretched hands he held a large round boss in the centre of which was depicted a tiny rose.
Silently the sculpture was passed around the tables. No word was said about the subject of the carving: the message was clear.
“How long did you take to do this work?” the master mason asked him.
“A day sir. And a night,” he added truthfully.
The master glanced round the table at his colleagues. Several of them were now grinning broadly. As his look fell on each one, he nodded approvingly.
“Welcome to our company, Osmund the Mason,” the chairman intoned.
And with those words, as suddenly as it had come, the deadly sin of anger left Osmund the Mason. It did not attack him with such terrible force again.
That night Osmund looked up at the huge unfinished cathedral and murmured:
“I think I shall work in the cathedral all my life.”
1264
If anyone had told Peter Shockley that parliamentary democracy was to be born that year he could have had no idea what was meant by those terms; and if they had been explained to him, he would have laughed out loud. The idea was preposterous.
Few men in Sarum were more respected for their solid judgement than Peter. The mill which he and his father had founded had been a great success, and the rhythmic pounding of its huge oak hammers had brought them considerable wealth. It was not the only such mill in the area. There was the mill at the busy town of Marlborough,