Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [324]
The ruin of Aaron of Wilton had taken forty years to accomplish, but the process was now complete and represented a triumph of the God-fearing over the infidel. In a long series of edicts that otherwise enlightened monarch Edward I had followed the sporadic persecutions of his pious father Henry to their logical conclusion. The Jewish community had been taxed, forbidden to practise money-lending, forbidden to trade except on impossible terms, taxed yet again; and when a few years previously almost every active Jewish trader had been thrown into jail until he had paid another, stupendous fine, Aaron of Wilton had at last been successfully ruined.
He was too old to seek his fortune elsewhere. He had no family left. Together with the few others remaining in the little Wilton community, he had sometimes been able to scrape a miserable existence out of tiny trades in wool; more recently he had been reduced to begging. He had walked from Wilton at dawn that morning and collapsed by the bridge from sheer fatigue, and for several hours no one had cared to touch him.
The little party that stared down at him represented three generations. Frail, but still upright in the saddle, Jocelin de Godefroi had survived, carefully preserving the two estates in the valley for his grandson, for longer than he had dared to hope. And Roger de Godefroi was everything his grandfather might have hoped for: at twenty-seven he was a splendid representative of the knightly class, like his father before him, and the darling of the lists. That summer, when Jocelin had noticed that the tips of his fingers were turning blue, the knowledge that his grandson would soon inherit had only caused him to smile. The estates were in excellent condition, and not even the dry summer of the year before, when many of the sheep had contracted scab, nor the poor grain harvest of that summer could make more than a small dent in the prosperity that he had built up. He had even improved the manor house in a modest way, adding a small wing to the hall and enclosing the place with a courtyard wall. The old generation had done their work well.
Between these two in age was Peter Shockley; his large, stout, grizzled figure exuded authority; only the pressure of his constantly expanding business had prevented him from representing the borough as a burgess in the several parliaments of Edward’s reign. Since his marriage to Alicia, the merchant had known contentment. Though his wife was grey, her freckled skin had stayed almost miraculously young, and only small lines of contentment filled the corners of her face.
“I’m sixty, but she makes me feel half my age,” he would proudly announce.
Beside him in his cart sat two fair young people: his son Christopher and his daughter Mary.
All five gazed at the Jew, but they did so with very different feelings. Jocelin remembered the courtly aristocrat with whom he and old Edward Shockley had done business in their youth. Peter remember a middle-aged moneylender whom he had wanted to defend at the Parliament of Montfort. Young Roger de Godefroi saw an infidel whom his knightly class was supposed to despise, and the two Shockley children saw only an old tramp, whom they had never known, but whose misfortune they knew must be his own fault, for obstinately denying the true God.
And so the Shockley children gasped with horror when they heard Jocelin de Godefroi’s next words to his grandson.
“Pick him up and put him in the cart. We’ll take him to Avonsford.”
Roger frowned and hesitated. Must he touch this repulsive old figure? But a look from his grandfather was enough; he bowed his head respectfully and went forward. Peter Shockley helped him.
Slowly they raised him, still unconscious, and laid him in the