Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [366]
As for her faith in isolation from the plague, Nicholas did not believe in it.
The sun was up as he walked off the high ground into the city below, and the dew was glistening on the cathedral roof.
As he passed the city bar, his mind was already occupied with the work he intended to do in the cathedral that day and it was only when he reached the market place that he noticed that something was strange. Usually by now the place would be bustling, but today for some reason only half a dozen stalls seemed to be opening. He thought nothing of it and followed his usual tour round the eastern end of the market and down the High Street. Shockley’s store, he noticed, was still shut up for the night. No one in the High Street seemed to be stirring except for the black rats who were swimming after a little pile of rubbish that was drifting down the water channel in the middle of the street.
He turned along New Street; here too there were few people about, and concluding that for some reason the city was rising late that day, he turned left into Minster Street and through the fine new stone gate that led into the cathedral close.
Nicholas loved the close. A decade before when the king had given permission for the bishop to dismantle the old cathedral on the castle hill above, he had watched while they had carried the stones of the old building down into the valley and he had helped when they used them to replace the old ditch with a splendid new wall around the close. It had interested him to find the old masons’ marks on many of the stones he was using. The wall, with its stout stone gateways on the north east and southern sides had added greatly to the secluded dignity of the place, sealing it off with a resounding finality from the rest of the world like a vast cloister in the centre of which the stately grey cathedral with its gracious spire was set.
But why was the place so quiet? As he entered, the porter at the gate gave him a strange look, and as he gazed across the tranquil lawns there did not seem to be a priest in sight.
He went into the cathedral. That, too, was silent. He walked up the nave.
How he loved the soaring pillars with their gentle bend under the tower! Across the little transept in the choir, his father had built the strainer arches – shaped like the Gothic arches, one inverted above the other – that had helped to buttress the choir against the eastward drift it had suffered since the tower was built. One day, Nicholas believed, the canons would decide to put arches like that across the bending pillars at the great central crossing of the church. But no one wanted to spoil the unbroken line of the soaring pillars, and so far they had not bent anymore since the spire was completed.
“The spire holds up by our faith,” the priests liked to joke.
For an hour he went quietly about his work, a small repair in one corner of the cloisters; then, wondering why there was still no one about, he went out into the close again.
It was the porter at the gate who told him.
“You haven’t heard? The plague came to Sarum yesterday. They say it’s in the city now.”
“Who has it? How many?”
The man shrugged. “No one knows. Half the people are staying indoors.”
As Nicholas walked through the streets, he found it was true. The only crowd was outside Shockley’s store, and they were hammering on the door and on the shutters over the windows. When he asked one of the women why, she cried:
“He’s got herbs in there. Cures to prevent the plague. But he won’t open his doors to anyone. Coward,” she yelled. “Viper.” But the Shockley house remained silent.
He wandered all over the town, trying to get definite news. There was plague in the outlying farms, he heard, but no one knew which. A man had fallen into one of the water channels with it, a trader in the market told him; but no one else had heard of the incident. People