Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [338]
“When your grandfather invested in the mill, Mary, he could only do so if his investment yielded a return. It’s just the same if a man gets a farm and works it. You have to show a return or you give it up. When you sell your goods at the market, you exchange them for money. What if, now, you wish to finance someone else to build a mill or buy a farm with your money? Don’t you look for some return, just as you would if it was the mill or farm you were working yourself? The return on that money is your interest rate, that’s all.”
She considered. It sounded logical, but she did not like it. She was silent for several minutes as they rumbled along the lane. Then her face cleared.
“But I work on the land, and it raises crops; and my brother works in the mill to full cloth. That’s how we get money.”
“Of course,” he smiled. “But there’s no difference really. When you work, the money in the farm is working, and earning its return.”
Now she knew he was wrong!
“Money doesn’t work, Jew!” she cried, thumping the side of the cart with her fist. “I work!”
The simple abstract principle behind almost all economic activity and human civilisation offended her practical mind to its core. “You should have been made to work with your hands,” she said sternly.
For this was a solution to the Jewish problem that had been suggested many times before, not only by well-meaning landowners but even by such otherwise subtle intellects as the churchman Grosseteste and the great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas.
The prejudice of otherwise intelligent people against the rules of finance upon which their lives depended was too deep, Aaron reminded himself, to be argued with. But perhaps, he considered, as he felt the winter sun on his head, they will be wiser in another generation.
“Truly,” Mary thought to herself at the same time, “the old Jew is so steeped in sin that he cannot even see the difference between honest work and theft.”
And so, tolerating each other on their final journey together, they went on in silence towards the port.
On the morning of Hallowe’en, that most magical of days, when all men knew that the dead rose from their graves, a small, squat wooden ship, broad in the beam, with a single square-rigged sail, lurched away with a creak from Christchurch quay. In the hull of the boat, just able to see over its side, stood Aaron, three adults and four children from Wilton, for each of whom the captain had been paid a shilling in advance of the crossing.
The captain of this modest vessel was a stooped, narrow-faced man, one of the countless generations of river folk who had fished and traded along the rivers and the coast since long before the Romans came; he shoved his passengers roughly into a space near the mast where they would be no trouble to him. His crew consisted only of his two sons.
From the stout little boat, Aaron could see Mary Shockley as she waved a curt goodbye before turning her cart and clattering up past Christchurch Priory on to the Sarum road; and as the crew pushed off and made their way slowly into the calm, shallow harbour, he held on to the mast and strained to see all he could during his last hour in England. Hungrily, his eyes took in the long reeds that grew along the bank, and the flat, marshy area on the northern side of the harbour, where the swans nested and wild horses still roamed; to his right lay the remains of the two earthwork walls and the long, low headland that silently protected the harbour from the sea. The boat carried them past the sand bar that enclosed the harbour and through the narrow channel that led into the open sea. A few fishermen were standing on the sand bar with their boats and they silently watched the little vessel go by. Bobbing on the light swell, it pushed its blunt nose out, away from the headland, towards the Solent and the high chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight.
Twenty minutes passed.