Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [316]
Sometimes when he was alone with his wife at night, his mind was so full of the girl that he would turn from her irritably, shroud himself in silence and ignore her. Then Cristina would dance before him in his imagination. At other times, he would find himself so aroused by his thoughts of the girl that he would suddenly transfer his accumulated lust on to his wife and she would find herself driven before it and savagely used until she was gasping and sweating as he made love to her with an unexpected eagerness and power.
Somehow he managed to continue his work and at the start of September he showed his plans for the chapter house to Robert. He was still not satisfied with them himself, but after a few alterations the canons accepted them and told him to begin work. Some of the scenes he had designed did please him – the voyage of Noah’s ark which he had cleverly depicted with eight tiny arched windows out of which animal heads were looking, the building of the great tower of Babel, and the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, a riot of castle walls and towers tumbling down on top of each other in a crazy pattern that made him smile. But many of the other scenes disappointed him; the human figures lacked the life and movement that he wanted, and although the canons were satisfied, he would shake his head irritably as he stared at the wooden stiffness of his designs and mutter in exasperation: “It’s that girl. She is a curse to me. If only I could put her out of my mind.” Then he would rage against himself for his weakness and cry: “But the fault is mine, miserable sinner that I am.”
Yet the more he railed against himself in this way, the worse his infatuation became.
As the end of September approached he knew that he must somehow break the spell. He stopped his walks by Bartholomew’s house, and whenever the girl came into his mind, he forced himself to concentrate on something else. For a few days it would work, and Osmund would go about his business proudly; but then, just when he was not expecting it, she would appear again in the cathedral, or in the street as he made his way out of the town, and despite his new self-discipline, the feelings would return, even more sharply than before, and he would go once more to the chapel, fall on his knees and, in desperation pray: “God preserve my soul from sin.”
For this, he knew very well, was the deadly sin of lust.
But if only his sin had been his greatest woe! For now Osmund discovered an even more uncomfortable affliction, as a new fear began to torment him: he started to live in terror of being found out.
For his lust was so strong, he could not believe that others did not see it. He began to look nervously at his fellow masons, searching in their eyes for signs that they were laughing at him. If someone laughed, he turned abruptly. At times he even thought he heard their voices calling: “Osmund lusts after Bartholomew’s daughter – lusts after her day and night!” At home, he wondered that his wife did not accuse him, and he was surprised that the village children still clustered happily round him in the street and asked him to carve their models. One day, when he found himself face to face with Bartholomew, he discovered to his horror that he could hardly look at him for embarrassment.
Worse was to come. In the first week of October, just after Michaelmas, he was standing by the transept where the great pillars of Purbeck marble reached up into the tower, when he saw the girl come into the nave. Thinking he was alone, he moved back so that he could watch her without