Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [315]
She turned in the sunlight and, laughing at something – he did not know what – ran over to where her clothes were lying.
Suddenly, blushing in furious confusion at what he had seen and at the thought that she might have caught sight of him – the dignified master mason – peeping at her through the reeds like a boy, he stumbled back up the path the way that he had come, and cut across to the road above.
By the time he reached the city, he had put the incident from his mind. Or so he thought.
But the damage was done. Try as he might to suppress it, the tantalising vision of the girl would not leave his mind: all that day she rose up constantly before his eyes, haunting in her loveliness, tempting him, even in the middle of his work, to sudden thoughts of lust. And the image returned, several times, in the following days.
Not only the thought of her body, but the idea that she might have noticed him preyed on his mind; when, a week later, he saw her once again standing quietly by the west door, something compelled him to go over and speak to her.
He walked towards her slowly, trying to look dignified and unconcerned, pausing as though by a casual impulse and looking at her coolly.
“You are Bartholomew’s daughter?”
He had expected her to look down modestly as she replied; but instead she stared at him curiously.
“Yes.”
“And what is your name?”
“Cristina.”
For a moment he wondered what to say.
“Does your father know you are here?” he asked, as though he meant to send one of the junior masons to fetch him.
“Yes.”
Still she was staring at him. Was there a flicker of amusement in her eyes? Had she seen him after all, and was she sharing the secret with him? There seemed to be a hint of complicity in her look.
He felt himself beginning to blush before the girl’s steady gaze. He gave her a curt nod and turned away quickly to hide his confusion. As he walked away, he felt sure she was watching him, but when he got back to the place where he had been working and turned, he saw that she had vanished.
And it was from then, for no reason he could understand, that instead of slowly disappearing, the little mason’s obsession with the girl began to grow. Day after day, he seemed to see her wherever he went. Every time he caught sight of a fair-haired girl, it made him start. He would look up from his work and think he saw her in the nave or by the cloisters. His eyes would search for her in the close. Her presence seemed to fill the air wherever he was, at his work, in the town, even in the valley or at home; now, instead of being absorbed in the chapter house carvings, he could hardly concentrate on his work.
It grew worse. He knew that Bartholomew’s lodgings lay in the chequer just north east of the market place, taking up half a house in a row where tuckers fulled and sheared cloth in a series of small workshops and hung it out on tenting racks to dry in the allotments behind their houses. He started to walk home by this circuitous route each evening now, often pausing on some excuse to speak to one of the clothworkers who lived there, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the girl. He knew it was absurd, but he could not help himself.
Occasionally she did pass by. But then, he would give her a curt nod accompanied by a frown of disapproval with which he hoped to mask his true feelings, before burying his head in his work.
The obsession followed him home. Several times he snapped at his wife for no apparent reason; some evenings he could hardly eat,