Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [308]
“Montfort’s gone,” Peter said to Alicia, “but they haven’t destroyed his work.”
He had more cause for satisfaction than just the political settlement. For in June 1265 Alicia bore him their first child: a chubby, healthy girl with blonde hair and the most beautiful violet blue eyes. They called her Mary.
“She shall have the farm,” Peter promised his wife, adding cheerfully: “All we need now is a son who shall have the house and the mill.”
Alicia smiled.
But all these great events, it seemed to Osmund the Mason, passed away and dwindled into insignificance in the quiet presence of the huge building of grey stone on the valley floor.
For in the year of Our Lord 1265, the main central body of the new cathedral was almost completed.
The church, with its simple cruciform design, its long nave, and its light and airy transepts, stood peacefully in the silence of the close – eighty-seven feet tall, nearly five hundred in length, its long lead roof only broken by the single low square tower that rose a few feet above it at the intersection of the transepts – serenely unaffected by all such temporal events. As though by an afterthought, a free-standing tower containing the massive bells to summon the church’s faithful to prayer, had been constructed near the north walk of the close, about forty yards from the main church, and in order that the tolling bells should be heard all over the valley, this stout stone belfry had been made two hundred feet high.
In the year of Our Lord 1265 Osmund the Mason was to begin his greatest work, and it was to be the year, also, when he fell under the spell of the deadly sin that almost destroyed him.
It was on a cold, dry day in March that he led his little family proudly into the cathedral close to see the work that he had done. This visit had become a yearly ritual ever since, ten years before, his son Edward had been born; he liked to feel that the boy, who was surely destined to be a mason too, was growing up consciously with the great church his father was building and on which he would one day work himself.
Accordingly he had escorted them down the valley from Avonsford, past the old castle hill and through the busy streets to the close. The party consisted of his wife Ann, his two daughters and the boy.
They were a strange little group. The mason, squat, short-legged with his big solemn head and a face which his veins made rather red, walked with a certain sense of his own dignity. He was, after all, a master mason now. In the city, he was a man of importance as he moved about in his heavy leather apron, and a figure of awe to the junior masons with whom he was fair, but stern. In the village of Avonsford however, he was best known as the kindly though respected figure who would often of an evening, surrounded by his family in their cottage, carve a wooden model in his wonderful craftsman’s hands for some village child while the child waited. The three women of the family all closely resembled each other: Ann was a thin, sallow woman, neither good-looking nor ugly, but about whom there always hung a faint sense of unspoken resentment. She liked to remain at her house at Avonsford with its four modest rooms and thatched roof: she had little interest in the town except when, occasionally, her two daughters took her to the market and made her buy some brightly coloured cloth or trinket after which she could be induced to smile unwillingly. She was a little taller than the mason.
Last of all came the little boy often, walking contentedly behind the women, with his chubby body and large head, unconsciously so closely imitating his father’s stolid walk that people grinned as the family passed.
It was to him, while the three women admired the great building, that Osmund addressed his remarks.
He showed him the splendid west front, the last part of the main building to be completed, that rose like an enormous stage set with tiers of empty niches flanking the door and a huge window in its centre.
“See, there are statues in some of the niches