Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [401]
In those days he had been richer and more arrogant, and when his pretty little daughter Isabella, playing in the cathedral close with young Reginald Shockley one morning, ran up to him with the boy and announced: “Reginald will be my husband, papa, when I’m grown up,” he replied coldly but almost without thinking: “A Godfrey does not marry a mere merchant,” and sent the boy away. He was sorry for his words almost as soon as he said them, but they could not be unsaid. And when his tearful and humiliated little son told Michael Shockley about it, the merchant swore an oath.
“You’ll not marry the daughter of that damned lord-of-nothing either,” he exploded. And the two men had never spoken since.
Now, coming face to face at the poultry cross, the two men gazed straight through each other as they passed. But after Godfrey had gone the merchant grunted:
“You’ll never sit on the forty-eight. I’ll see to that.”
But at the corner of Cross Keys chequer a few moments later, Benedict Mason was delighted to see Godfrey. He had been looking for him.
The modest house of the Mason family lay in Culver Street where they occupied half a tenement in Swayne’s chequer. The street had also been the quarters of the town prostitutes until a few years before when Mason and other citizens of St Martin’s ward had persuaded the council to drive them out. Now it was a quiet street like any other. Though he only occupied part of the house, Benedict rented most of the workshop area behind, and here, with the help of two journeymen, he carried on his business as a bellfounder. Bells from Salisbury were installed all over southern England; but the work was sporadic and his own business was small; on a day to day basis, he was a brazier, turning out copper pans in his workshops, which regular trade allowed him to live comfortably and support his family of six children.
He was a short, stout man, with a round face punctuated by a long, pointed nose, the end of which glowed red in all weathers. When he and his equally short, squat wife waddled down Culver Street followed by their children they resembled nothing so much as a family of ducks.
Benedict Mason was a member of the Smiths’ Guild, which included goldsmiths and blacksmiths as well as braziers, and he was also one of a small fraternity who paid contributions to ensure that a mass was said for its members at St Edmund’s church at least once a year and that the great bell was rung – at the considerable cost of twelve pence – when any of its members departed the world.
But his pride and joy was in making bells. Near his furnace was the pit with its centre post in which the clay mould for a new bell would be made; every day when he went to work, he would look lovingly at the carefully shaped wooden boards which would be rotated round the centre post to shape and smooth the clay. When each bell was finished, it bore his name, carved in the metal: BEN. MASON ME MADE.
And of all the bells he had ever made, the one he wanted to make now would be the greatest.
For after two centuries of disappointment, it really seemed at last that Salisbury was to get its own saint. The envoys from the chapter had been in Rome for many long months now; hundreds of pounds had been spent and although nothing definite was known, he knew it was widely rumoured that this time the long quest might be successful and old Bishop Osmund finally receive the recognition due to him.
“And then they’ll be needing a bell,” he announced. He could see it clearly: a magnificent bell, four, perhaps five feet across, with a deep mellow tone. It would be placed in the belfry in the close, above the clock, and its splendid chime would summon the priests to mass.
The problem was – how to convince the cathedral canons? And how to secure the commission for himself?
Benedict Mason might be modest, but he was also