Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [421]
“Mother of God and St Osmund,” he murmured at last. “It must be the sign.”
The sign did not point north-west to Bristol. It pointed east. Nothing could be more clear.
“I will go to London then,” he decided.
NEW WORLD
1553
A glorious new world was being born, and it was a dangerous place for people of conscience.
As Edward Shockley stood that April morning amongst the small crowd in St Thomas’s church who were watching Abigail Mason and her husband Peter set about their self-appointed task, he had a sudden premonition that they would soon be in danger. It was Abigail he feared for.
And yet, what they were doing would certainly meet with the approval of Bishop Capon, the justices of the peace, the king himself.
They were breaking one of the church windows.
Peter Mason was on his knees; Abigail stood over him. The pieces of stained glass already lay on the stone floor and Peter was pounding them carefully with a hammer. He glanced up frequently, his gentle, round face smiling, silently asking for approval which Abigail, very calm in her simple brown smock, quietly gave him.
“’Tis the Lord’s work thou dost, Peter,” she told him.
Yet it seemed to Shockley that her eyes were fixed on something beyond her husband while she encouraged him, as if this necessary but minor act of destruction almost bored her.
But then Abigail was a rare spirit – one of the few in Sarum with a fixed purpose in life. She had vision, and strength.
How he admired her for it.
“Abigail Mason knows what she believes,” he reminded himself sternly. “She does not lie.” And he shook his head sadly at his own weakness.
The little window which, three generations before, Benedict Mason had so proudly installed as a memorial to himself and his wife had lasted surprisingly long. The king’s commissioners had thought it too insignificant to bother with; and since Benedict had seven descendants living in Sarum now, Peter Mason, for fear of offending his cousins, had hesitated to deface the tiny memorial himself. But Abigail had been firm. She had spoken to him, lovingly but firmly again and again, and now at last it was done. No one had-dared to object. It was the Lord’s work.
She did not even glance at the little crowd who were watching. Though she was short, her pale face was set so firmly and her deep brown eyes were so calm that she seemed a being apart. Stern as she was, there was something about her, besides her courage, that Edward Shockley found strangely attractive – he could not formulate it into a thought, however, and whatever it was, the feeling was probably sinful. He turned away from the dutiful couple and looked about the church instead.
St Thomas’s Church had changed completely since he was a child. Even its name had been altered, for King Henry VIII, in the plenitude of his almost totalitarian power, had roundly declared that Thomas à Becket, the martyred archbishop who had defied the king, was no martyr but a rebellious subject. Accordingly the church beside the market place was no longer called St Thomas the Martyr but dedicated to another St Thomas, the Apostle, instead. It was the commissioners of the present boy king Edward VI, though, who had really altered the look of it. The old statue of St George had been torn down and smashed; most of the carvings had been broken up too. The chantries of Swayne and the Tailors’ Guild had been destroyed and their endowments confiscated. Two hundredweight of brass – thirty-six shillings’ worth – had been carted out of St Thomas’s alone, as well as most of the stained glass. The pride of the merchants and the guilds, their shrines, chantries and memorials, had all been humbled in the name of the true God. Why, even the great Doom painting had been white-washed over.
“There’ll be no more popish idols,” one of the workmen accomplishing the destruction had told him proudly. “We’ll soon have the place cleaned up.”
It was the same everywhere. St Edmund’s church was bare: the fraternity of the Jesus Mass was dissolved. As for the