Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [328]
It was worse than his humiliation by Cristina: at least he had brought that upon himself. But the recent sense of his failing powers, and now this sudden rejection by the masons’ guild were terrible blows he had done nothing to deserve. He felt suddenly weak and helpless.
Edward was passing round the corner of the building; he did not look back.
The mason’s shoulders hunched forward. He hung his head. “Then my life is over,” he murmured. Suddenly, he was an old man.
But then, as he stared at the cathedral he had loved, and that Edward was now entering, his round face suddenly contorted into a look of furious hatred and rage.
He loathed them all: his wife, the masons, even his own son.
“Do what you like then,” he muttered bitterly. “You can’t carve, but you’re still young.” And with a curse he turned his back on the cathedral.
For in all his life, this was the first time that Osmund had truly discovered the deadly sin of envy.
Shortly after the feast of Edward the Confessor, in the month of October 1289, King Edward I of England left Westminster and rode with his attendants to Sarum.
The party was in excellent spirits, for all knew that important plans, which might change the course of the island’s history, were ready to take shape. The king himself was in high good humour.
Indeed in 1289, King Edward had good reason to be optimistic.
His kingdom was at peace, and prospering mightily; its population was increasing, agriculture booming. Its huge exports of wool, except for a few years of dispute with Flanders the decade before, had grown continuously to the busy cities of France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. Five years before, he had also extended his territory when he had subdued the unruly Celtic chiefs of Wales, and garrisoned their mountainous country with the series of great castles like Caernarvon that he understood how to build so well. His son had been accepted by the warring Welsh as the first English Prince of Wales and their principality, for the first time since Roman days, had become united again with England.
Since then, Edward had spent three busy years in the last of his continental possessions, the rich province of Gascony whose Bordeaux wines the English loved, and whose affairs he had thoroughly organised as was his habit.
Now he had turned his attention back to England once again.
There were two great affairs of state to be dealt with. The first was a complete and overdue reform of the royal and feudal administration. There was petty corruption everywhere. And already, within two months of his return, the vigorous king set his chosen officials, fresh from their work in Gascony, on an investigation into abuses that had half the sheriffs and justices of England trembling.
The second affair of state was still more important: for it was nothing less than the joining of England and her warlike neighbour Scotland into a single kingdom.
The opportunity had come about by chance when King Alexander of Scotland had been killed in a fall from his horse at the age of only forty-four, leaving as heiress to his kingdom the child of his daughter and the King of Norway – a little girl, Margaret. She was known as the Maid of Norway and the regents governing Scotland had at once decided that she should return from Norway to her future kingdom; they also began to look for a husband for her.
It was a heaven-sent opportunity, and Edward seized it at once. If the Maid should be married to his own son, then at last the two kingdoms could merge – a spectacular piece of diplomacy to crown the other triumphs of his reign. He had already been negotiating from Gascony with the Scots. The negotiations had gone well: now, even as he rode towards the cathedral city, four Scots commissioners were on their way to Salisbury to meet his officials there.
He was a splendid figure: tall, broad-shouldered, with a long reach that made him formidable in the joust, but at the