Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [317]
With this idea taking over his very soul, he moved away from his hiding place into the empty nave.
But it was not empty.
In the opposite transept he suddenly saw a single, dark figure, motionless as a statue, staring at him.
He halted.
Canon Stephen Portehors, very thin, leaning on a stick, his hair white but his dark eyes still piercing and terrible, continued to stare at him fixedly, seeing all.
No word was spoken, but the trembling mason was sure: he knew.
The next morning he noticed that a new figure had just been completed in the archway to the chapter house. It was the cool, flowing figure of Lady Purity, subduing Lust at her feet; and when he saw this he hung his head in shame.
From that day, he evolved a new discipline; he began to walk like a monk, with his head bowed. By keeping his eyes always fixed on the ground or on his work and never looking up or from side to side, for the next three months until Christmas, the mason kept the deadly sin of lust at bay.
Putting the distraction behind him, Osmund found a renewed pleasure in his work. Each scene of the relief, which would finally form a continuous frieze around the chapter house wall, consisted of a broad, curving V between the arches opening out into a rectangle above, and this allowed the artist many opportunities for expressive arrangements. The first scene, which began on the left of the entrance, showed the figure of God parting the clouds as He emerged to create light; the second scene showed the bearded figure of God in flowing robes, raising His right hand to create the firmament, and the subsequent scenes, showing the other days of Creation, were all completed to Osmund’s satisfaction. Until he came to the sixth. This however was far more complex, for he had to depict both the Creation of the beasts, and of Adam and Eve, which required a difficult interweaving of forms that for the moment defeated him.
After several attempts he put it aside and completed the next scene, a far simpler one, in which God, depicted in a lozenge, rested on the seventh day.
But now he ran into another technical difficulty. For the design called for another five scenes on the story of Adam and Eve; and here, no matter what he tried, he could not get the figures right: his Adam was wooden, and Eve seemed to elude him completely.
The problem was an important one.
“How can I depict him – who must be every man? And how can I capture her?” he puzzled. “She must be a pure maiden, and yet the mother of all men; she is first innocent, yet she is the temptress who led Adam to his original sin: pure woman, lascivious whore, wife and mother.” The contradictions, which were so necessary to express the first man and woman, seemed beyond his art. Certainly, as he looked at the work of his colleagues on the Virtues and Vices, with their standardized grace and their almost comic depictions of evil, these reliefs called for a subtlety far beyond any of the other sculptures in the great church.
So finally, with a sigh, he put these carvings aside also and went on to the three more straightforward scenes representing Cain and Abel.
It was in this way that, oblivious to all distractions, even forgetting the girl Cristina, he laboured at the carving until Christmas.
On Christmas Eve he saw her again. It was his own fault. On leaving the church on the evening before the great festival he had relaxed and allowed his gaze to leave the floor. And as he walked happily down the nave, the first thing he saw was the girl. She was kneeling before a little side