Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [321]
They were getting near the river. But before reaching it the path passed through an open glade of grass about thirty yards long. That, he thought, was where he would catch her, and as they reached it, he hurled himself forward.
She was ahead of him, almost at the far end of the glade. She had stopped. She was turning. His face lit up in a smile of triumph.
It was when he was halfway along the glade that he heard the childrens’ voices. They were laughing. And they came from both sides of the glade.
Before he reached her he stopped and turned to look at them.
There were more than twenty children. He recognised most of them, for they were the children of Avonsford. They were standing all round the little glade beside the trees and he knew at once that they had been concealed there deliberately, waiting for him. They were laughing and several of them were pointing at his nakedness.
He looked at Cristina. She was gazing back at him, and he saw that she, too, was shaking with laughter. Then, turning quickly, she vanished into the trees, leaving him alone to stand there, in his absurd nakedness, in the middle of the circle of children.
There was nothing to do but go back the way he came.
As he made his way back along the path, the laughter of the children was ringing in his ears. He wondered how long the girl had planned this cruel practical joke, so perfectly designed to humiliate him. Was it her own idea? Had, possibly, her father’s jealous mind had some part in it? He would never know. But as the full implication of what had just taken place unfolded in a terrible vision before his eyes, he broke out in a cold sweat and his little hands clenched and unclenched in impotent fury. He saw exactly what it would mean: within an hour, all Avonsford would know; by the end of the morning, the whole of Sarum. The respected master mason in his leather apron would be transformed, probably for the rest of his life, into a figure of fun. People in the street would point at him and laugh as he passed; children – the children for whom he had so often carved little presents – would giggle when his name was spoken. As for his family . . .
He came to the place where he had stripped off his clothes. They were gone.
He was naked; now he would have to stay that way as he walked back to the village. It was the final humiliation. They had made sure that all his dignity was gone. As he considered the thought, the deliberate planning which must have gone into the morning’s episode, and the way that the children had been so carefully taken into the wood to witness it, he almost broke down. Keeping close to the edge of the trees, he began his slow walk home.
In the days that followed, the consequences were everything that he had foreseen. But there were some surprises. He had guessed that his two daughters would turn angrily against him; he had foreseen their looks of disgust and their angry silences if he entered the house, but he had not foreseen the shocked, only half-comprehending face of his little son, who knew only that his father had committed a terrible crime that he did not understand, and who now – encouraged by his elder sisters – stared at him with large, frightened eyes and refused to come near him.
Unexpectedly, his wife was kinder.
Ignoring completely the rage of her daughters or the expressive silences that greeted her in the village, she looked at the squat little mason, stripped of all his hard-won dignity, and she felt sorry for him. She knew that her pale, thin form held little excitement for him; their long marriage had held little hope of passion on either side, she would almost have been glad if, for a moment, one of them had found it. She did not reproach him but when she moved to his side to comfort him, she