Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [464]
Sir Henry Forest went first. Before leaving the hall he turned, his cautious black eyes taking in all the remaining family, and bowed stiffly. Sir Henry Forest, Baronet, their senior neighbour – their friend, if he was any man’s friend. Which side would he take in the coming conflict? Who knew? When he had gone, others followed suit: friends, neighbours, old Thomas Moody with his son Charles, from Shaftesbury; after them, tradesmen like the Mason family and others of Salisbury; lastly the farmworkers led by Jacob Godfrey. For three generations now, since Piers Godfrey the carpenter had worked for the Shockleys in Salisbury, the Godrey family had remained close to the Shockleys. Many had tears in their eyes: for all felt a real regret and affection for the memory of the widower William Shockley whose sudden death had taken Sarum by surprise.
Now the family was alone, but the hall was quiet – each of them knowing that, once this last silence was broken, they might never be at one again. The four Shockleys stood, as motionless as the banisters on the broad oak stairs that gleamed darkly behind them, waiting. From outside, where the footsteps had departed, they could hear the distant, sullen tolling of the church bell. Four of them: three brothers and their sister.
Margaret Shockley: twenty years old, magnificent, with her proud, strong body, her golden hair and blue eyes that could flash with such splendid anger that people in Sarum used laughingly to say: “She’s the best looking of all the boys.” Tall Margaret waited silently.
One thought filled her mind: the baby.
He was hers to take care of – hers and no one else’s – and they were not going to stop her, any of them. The baby, resting in an upper room. He needed her.
He was still so small and defenceless. He had been hers ever since her poor step-mother, during that terrible, endless labour two years before had turned to her and whispered: “If the child lives, Margaret, he’ll be yours.” Her three brothers had all been there too, she reminded herself, just three days ago when William Shockley mustered his breath to say:
“Margaret: whatever your brothers do, you must live here and look after Samuel.” Then he had paused before adding: “And my water meadows.”
Little Samuel – that tiny, fair-haired bundle of joy. Jacob Godfrey’s wife had had him to nurse at her breast – and how Margaret would have loved to be able to do that too. But it was she who had done everything else, rocked the baby in her arms, taken him with her into her bed and, week after week, lain happily, feeling his tiny warmth beside her.
Her father’s water meadows – those wonderful man-made irrigation systems running down beside the River Avon below the farm that he had bought when he was young. He had built them before she was born and they had made his farm the finest in the area; she would look after those too.
She looked at her brothers. Edmund, at thirty the eldest, the head of the family now: always serious, dutiful, sober, his brown hair cut straight just above the shoulder; he had their mother’s hazel eyes, their father’s broad, rather heavy-set figure. Obadiah, the Presbyterian minister, hater of priests and bishops; though he was only twenty-seven, the black hair that was plastered close around his pale oval face before curling up at the shoulders was already greying at the temples. His eyes were slate-blue, striking, even from a distance, such as when he was in the pulpit. Obadiah, with his arrogant, lisping speech; as a child he had been vain; he was full of spiritual indignation now he was a man: a born Puritan preacher, she thought. People did not love Obadiah. He knew it, and could not forgive them.
And Nathaniel: fair like herself, gallant, only twenty-three. Even now, how nonchalant he looked, his golden hair falling past his shoulders, his