Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [326]
As the cart trundled down the valley, she banged on its side and swore to her father.
“No Jew shall ride with me again. Not if the king himself asks.”
In the cathedral close that morning, a painful scene was taking place. Indeed, as Osmund the Mason faced his son, he could only gasp in disbelief at the insult.
“You are telling me I may not work in the cathedral any more?”
Edward Mason looked embarrassed, but nodded.
“It’s what the guild of masons have decided,” he confessed.
It was hard to take it in. For a moment Osmund could not speak.
“But why?” he cried at last.
Since the completion of the chapter house and cloisters, Osmund the Mason had known peace. His wonderful carving there had earned him respect.
Each time the masons came to the great round table in the chapter house where their wages were paid, they would glance up at the wonderful carvings on the walls, and acknowledge no one had ever done anything better. Even the incident with Cristina, who had long since married William atte Brigge’s boy, had gradually been forgotten. And when the work on the tower had begun, he had been glad to have a new project.
The building of the tower involved the creation of a new world. First the carpenters constructed an enormous wooden platform over the great central crossing of the nave and transepts. Like a wooden table top, resting on the four central pillars, this platform sealed off the base of the tower from the empty spaces below. Once this was done, the old roof above was removed, leaving the square platform open to the sky, and it was here, in their new and separate world a hundred feet above the ground, that the masons began to raise the four wails of the tower. The walls were solid – though not as thick as the main walls of the church below – and like them they were filled with a mixture of lime, mortar and rubble. At each corner of the great tower there was a spiral staircase.
Osmund liked working in the tower, and as its walls slowly rose, he would often stand in the shadows they cast, staring up in admiration at their solemn mass, and at the square of sky even higher above. There were fewer masons now, but there was work for his clever hands to do, and around the huge stone lancet windows, he supervised a fine decoration of ballflowers.
One thing concerned him, however. The tower had no buttresses, no outside supports to hold its stone and rubble walls together.
“As they get higher, they will spring apart,” he complained to the canons. His fears were justified; careful plans were made, and he was only satisfied when an engineer showed him what they would do.
“We shall wrap the whole tower in bands of iron, all the way round, pinned in place with big bolts, right through the wall,” the man explained.
“But the bands will have to be thick,” the mason objected. “The strain could be enormous.”
“They will be,” the engineer promised. “They’ll last five hundred years.”
This was exactly what they did; as the walls of the huge tower slowly rose, the grey Chilmark stone was bound in with huge bands of iron.
He loved the separate world of the tower in the sky, almost silent except for the tapping of the masons, the occasional squeaking of winches raising the stones, and the rustle of the wind over the high walls above. And he was contented. Both his daughters were married. He was respected in his work. The only cause of annoyance in recent years had been his only son’s joining King Edward in his wars in Wales. When that mountainous country, for the first time since Roman days, had been subdued and the English had acquired from the Welsh not only a fine new principality, but also a new skill in the use of the great longbow, Edward Mason, with his short strong fingers, had discovered that he was well-suited to master the archer’s art and he had returned