Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [402]
Then he had thought of Godfrey. Godfrey, after all, was a gentleman: it was said he was even close to the bishop. He had prepared his case carefully and was on his way to his house at the very moment when he saw him walking away from the poultry cross.
His approach was masterful – which is to say that he bowed as low as if Godfrey were the bishop himself and humbly asked if he might speak a word.
“It’s the townspeople, sir,” he began. “Even Swayne. They won’t do anything for Saint Osmund.” And then he unfolded his tale. The great bishop might be canonised at any time, he explained, and surely it was fitting that the people of the city should contribute something to honour him. “But they won’t, sir. They only think about St Thomas’s,” he complained.
Godfrey listened carefully. What the bellmaker said was all too true. Though he himself took an active interest in the cathedral – from the library in the cloisters to the new strainer arches that were at last being built to reinforce the bending pillars under the tower – it always appalled him that there were so few in the town who shared his enthusiasm. There was an air of laxness in the close too – the spire needed repair, someone had even opened a shop on the ground floor of the belfry – and he deplored it.
“So what do you suggest?”
“A bell, sir. St Osmund’s bell, a present from the city, to call the priests to prayer.”
Godfrey considered the idea.
“And why are you telling me?”
Now Benedict Mason was ready with his master stroke.
“The town needs someone to give a lead, sir,” he said earnestly. “A gentleman with the ear of the bishop: someone the people would listen to with respect.” He watched Eustace’s reaction carefully. “As for the cost,” he added, as though as an afterthought, “for St Osmund, I’d make the finest bell for . . .” he spread his hands.
Godfrey could picture it. Indeed, as the implications of it dawned on him, he felt his pulse quicken with excitement. Although he had taken little interest in the doings of the town or its parish churches, it had annoyed him that when the landed families like the Godmanstones had been asked to contribute to the rebuilding of St Thomas’s, Swayne and his followers had not even bothered to approach him. He had nothing to contribute, but it irked him to be ignored. This new idea was better, though. He could take the lead himself, raise contributions. If Swayne could have his chapel, Eustace Godfrey could, for a much smaller expenditure, have his bell, and it would be a pleasant thing to be able to approach the bishop as a benefactor of the cathedral. The more he considered it, the more it pleased him.
“You’re right,” he told the bell founder. “Come to my house tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do.”
After all, by tomorrow, the family’s financial position should be much improved.
There were several reasons why John Wilson was known as the spider.
One was that, when other men wore brightly coloured clothes he was invariably dressed in black; another was his curious way of walking, which he seemed to do by fits and starts, hovering silently at a corner of the market place, then suddenly moving forward towards some object, so that it was hard to keep track of his movements. Yet another was that for half a century, no one in Sarum had ever been certain of the true size of the Wilson fortune, nor the extent of the family’s network of operations. All that was known was that since the time of Walter and his son Edward, it had been growing. John’s father had made one massive gain that the world knew about when he had traded huge quantities of inferior embroidered silk to other cities for a short time, before the cities in question protested. And more recently, a merchant vessel of John Wilson’s had captured a French ship –