Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [311]
“Osmund Mason,” he explained. “My mark goes on each piece I do.” This was not only a signature, but it also ensured that he would be correctly paid for each work he contributed to the cathedral. “And one day, you too will have a mason’s mark,” he told him. “Like this,” and with a piece of chalk he drew his own mark again, but this time he added an E below it for the boy’s name. “It’s our family mark,” he said with satisfaction, before taking his son back to rejoin the others.
“But will I work here?” the boy asked anxiously. “The church is nearly finished.”
Osmund smiled.
“There’s more to come,” he assured him. And he took him through a side door to where, running along the south of the nave, on the other side of the masons’ lodge, a spacious cloister had been laid out. Leading off this, the walls of a new octagonal building were almost complete.
“This will be the chapter house,” Osmund said, “where the canons and the deacons will hold their meetings. They say it will be a fine building, with many carvings. And after that we may extend the tower as well.” He beamed with the thought of it. “There’ll be colleges, more houses for the canons, hospitals . . .” He spread his little hands expansively: “There’s work for generations of masons in Salisbury.”
And indeed, as the boy walked around the close afterwards, it was plain that what his father said was true. Along the west walk that backed on to the river, fine new houses were still rising: not perhaps quite as splendid as the sumptuous hall with its leaded roof that old Elias de Dereham had built for himself – and whose colossal mortgage, twenty years after his death, was still being paid off – but handsome buildings all the same. Near the river, just before the little hospital, the new college of St Nicholas de Valle had just been built for scholars who were now coming to the new centre from Oxford. At St Ann’s Gate, near the little house of the Franciscans, a new grammar school had been founded; and on the south side of the cathedral, separated from the rest of the close in its own gracious grounds, the bishop’s impressive palace was constantly being enlarged.
“There’s no better place for a mason to be in England,” Osmund declared.
He could have added, for a priest to be, or a scholar. For under the patronage of the distinguished local scholar Walter de la Wyle, its present bishop, the new school by the river was already becoming a small but distinguished centre of learning, where not only theology but civil law, mathematics, classical literature and the elaborately precise logic of Aristotle were studied. This interest in science and the humanities, which had been stimulated by the crusaders’ discovery of the Arab scholars in the Middle East, was to be found in many scholarly communities; and the transfer of scholars from Oxford, which had been unsettled recently by several disputes with the townspeople and the papal legate, was not unusual either: a similar emigration a little before had already caused the setting up of another small college in the little East Anglian town of Cambridge.
In fact, only one thing at Sarum was lacking.
“If only the Pope in Rome would make our Bishop Osmund a saint,” the mason cried.
For a long time, the diocese of Salisbury had tried to have its saintly bishop canonised: partly, to be sure, on account of his undoubted piety but also, it could not be denied, because the existence of a shrine to the saint in the new city would bring with it, in those times when pilgrimage was so popular, a huge influx of visitors from whom the diocese and its new market town would profit enormously. So far they had not prevailed at Rome. But the campaign went on.
“One day,” declared the mason, who had himself been piously named after the great man, “we’ll have our shrine, and you,” he told Edward, “shall build it if I don’t.”
It was as he was returning to his workbench that afternoon that Osmund saw the girl.
At first, she did not particularly attract his notice. He was aware of a small blonde girl