Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [415]
She put her hand inside her cloak and felt the little purse at her belt. As she thought, there was a gold coin in it. She pulled it out.
“Here,” she said with a smile. “Take it. Good luck on your journey.”
He took the gold piece in astonishment. This was a major windfall. He took it quickly before the madwoman changed her mind. Then he hurried past.
A few minutes later, still watched by Lizzie, he rounded the corner of the lane and turned south towards the city.
He wandered about in the huge church for some time before approaching his objective. How magnificent it was, with its soaring arches and the richly painted chapels and chantries below. There were many of these splendid memorials to the great nobles like Lord Hungerford, where the priests said masses every day. Old Bishop Beauchamp was near to death now, it was said; no doubt there would soon be a new and splendid chantry built for him too. But though these sumptuous little chapels and impressive tombs reminded him of his own insignificance, there was only one monument in that great church that he approached with real religious awe.
The shrine of St Osmund was outwardly magnificent. It was not only painted and gilded: it was even studded with gems so that it glowed and glittered as the red and blue light from the high windows fell upon it. It was right, of course, that the saint should be honoured with all the ornaments that money could buy.
But to Will the little gleaming shrine was a magical place apart.
“God himself touches the spot,” the priest at Avonsford had told him, and he knew it was true. For in the cathedral, the holy body of the saint himself was present. The bodies of saints did not suffer corruption, like those of other men. He knew that too. They remained perfect and sometimes gave off a sweet odour. Some said there was even a warmth that came from the tombs. The very light that touched the jewelled shrine was holy, a direct shaft from the saint’s body to God.
“Touch the shrine,” the priest had assured him, “and you are touched by the saint himself.” Many had been healed of sickness by doing so.
Will knew about relics – they were holy objects you could touch. Once when he was ten, he met a pilgrim on the road outside Fisherton and the man showed him. in a little casket, a rusty sliver of metal. “It’s part of a nail from the true cross,” he confided, and Will looked at the nail with reverence and with awe. “You can touch it,” the pilgrim offered, but the boy had not dared, for he was suddenly overcome with the fear that if he touched a relic that had touched the body of Christ himself, he would probably be struck dead on the spot for his sins. He dreamed about the nail for years afterwards.
Almost every church had its relics, kept in little boxes and venerated by the people: shards of wood from the cross, a lock of hair belonging to one of the saints, a sliver of bone. But these were nothing compared with the holy shrine of St Osmund.
And so it was that now Will knelt before the gleaming shrine of Salisbury’s saint and prayed fervently:
“Which way shall I go? Guide me, Osmund. Send me a sign.”
He stayed there some time. The shrine glittered in the half light; and in the end, though no sign had yet come, he felt comforted. “I will watch for the sign,” he thought. “Osmund will send it.” And he made his way out.
It was while he was walking along the edge of the market place that his attention was distracted from his journey for a time by a curious sight.
It was a little procession: a priest, two acolytes carrying lighted tapers and six choirboys were solemnly leading a stiff old man round St Thomas’s churchyard. Behind the old man walked a little group of people who appeared to be family and friends, amongst whom he recognised the burly form of Benedict Mason the bellmaker. The choirboys sang a psalm while the old man, dressed in a coarse wool habit, like that of a friar, and with simple sandals on his feet, followed silently, his bald head bowed.
“What is it?” he asked a bystander.