Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [314]
As Osmund gazed at them he trembled. For what he was being asked to do was not to produce the usual, static figures and heads that he had already perfected, but fluid, flowing pictures in stone, full of movement and life. It was beyond anything he had ever attempted before and he knew that, more than anything else in the world, he wanted to try.
“Give me a few weeks,” he said, “and I can do it.”
All that summer, Osmund worked at the design; he made sketches of each scene; he practised, day after day, to achieve the lively, flowing lines that he wanted; he even made trial runs of half a dozen scenes, carving them on soft blocks of chalk that he could show the canons.
But while his two colleagues were progressing rapidly with their work on the statues of the virtues and vices, he could not seem to produce anything that quite satisfied him. Each time Robert asked him for his designs, he put him off until at the end of July the master mason had to warn him:
“The canons are growing impatient, Osmund. If you cannot produce the designs, I must give the work to someone else.”
“One more month,” the perfectionist mason pleaded.
And he returned to the task feverishly.
For days on end, he would think of nothing else, hardly noticing the other masons, or even his wife and children as he went to and from his work in a sort of daze. Sometimes he thought he could see them – all sixty scenes – laid out in perfect order before him; but as he tried to sketch what he saw, or tried to carve even one of the scenes with chisel on a slab of chalk, the vision would mysteriously vanish. Such a thing had never happened to him before and he could not account for it. When this had occurred, he would walk disconsolately home, or make his way quietly to the cool chapel at the east end of the choir where he would fall to his knees and pray: “Blessed Mary, Mother of God, give me strength to do this great work.”
How difficult it was. Sometimes, as he whispered his prayers it seemed to him that his low, pleading voice was lost in the deep shadows of the church and returned to him, unanswered, from its high walls. At other times, though no clear vision appeared, he would feel a sense of calmness and return to his workbench to try once again to make the carvings come alive. And even though the work was slow to take shape, he knew he must have faith and comforted himself by remembering the words from the gospel that he had heard the preachers utter so many times before: “If the son asks the father for bread, shall his father give him a stone?” Surely God would not now deny him the ability to do His work, he reasoned. Surely not, but then again, the work would obstinately refuse to take shape and he would cry out in despair:
“Why, why will this stone not take shape for me?”
He was in this unhappy frame of mind one hot August morning as he walked from Avonsford into the new city. He had chosen a different route that day, taking the little path along the river bank instead of the road above, hoping that perhaps the cool river waters and the stately swans might calm his unsettled mind, and he was walking meditatively when a little ahead of him he heard the sound of children’s voices laughing and shouting. There was, he knew, a large pond by a bend in the river just ahead where the children from the nearby village liked to swim and play, and thinking nothing of it, he continued towards them. A few moments later he came to a clump of reeds beside the path and as he glanced through them he saw the children in the river beyond. There were half a dozen of them, splashing gaily in the water, and as he looked at them, he stopped in his tracks and stared. But it was not the children that his eyes were fixed upon.
In the middle of the group was Bartholomew’s daughter, and now, just as he caught sight of her, she rose and slipped out of the water on to the bank.
Like the children, she was naked.
Her body was just as he had imagined: the small breasts and gently rounded hips were as perfectly formed