Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [494]
In later years Samuel always smiled to remember how she had applied to the city authorities to let her take half a dozen of the men, and how, when they had told her it was impossible since they might escape, she had come back the next day with a sword and pistol in her belt and told them firmly: “You are speaking to a Wiltshire Clubman.”
The Dutchmen had come. By winter the Shockley’s floated meadows would be better and more extensive than ever.
And Sir Henry Forest watched with envy.
The second event was very small and took place on the same day as the hiring of the Dutchmen. Though in a way, as he grew older, it seemed to Samuel Shockley more memorable than many greater happenings.
For just before visiting the cloisters, as he and Margaret were standing quietly near the huge north transept, they discovered something which only a few people, and certainly not Obadiah, knew at that time.
They discovered the secret of Salisbury Cathedral.
He appeared as if from nowhere, from behind a pillar, it seemed in the north aisle of the choir. He had not seen them.
He shuffled almost silently towards the chapel at the east end, and started when Margaret caught up with him: he was old, perhaps seventy, with a large round head on his small, stooped body, and his grey eyes stared at her defensively. He was carrying a little bag of tools.
“You work here?” she asked.
“Perhaps, lady. Perhaps not.”
“What is your name?”
“Zachary Mason.”
She noticed lime and mortar on his hands.
“Why, you’ve been repairing somewhere here. I’m sure of it.”
He did not reply.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, lady. You’re the sister of Obadiah Shockley.” There was a hint of bitterness in his voice.
“True. And my brother’s a fool,” she said impatiently. “I thought this place was neglected. Praise the Lord if it’s not.”
He looked at her cautiously.
“Are you the only one?” she asked.
“Perhaps not.”
A thought struck her.
“Who pays you?”
“We are paid.”
She reached into her purse and drew out a coin. The old man shook his head.
“We are paid,” he said quietly, and shuffled away.
“I believe,” she told Samuel a week later, “that it’s the Hydes who pay them.”
Certain it was that, throughout the period of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, workmen slipped quietly into the great cathedral and repaired it, almost unseen, thanks to the generosity of a noble local family.
A third event appeared to have no significance at all.
It was one day when the Dutchmen were working in the water meadows, guarded by Margaret and Samuel, that a little open carriage came along the lane above and stopped. When the single occupant stepped out however, the Dutchmen became excited and one of them begged Margaret to let them have words with the visitor.
“Who is he?” she demanded suspiciously.
“His name is Aaron,” the men told her.
‘What is he?”
“A merchant from our country,” the man explained. “A Jew,” he added.
Samuel gasped. One of the Biblical people of Israel. He stared at the single figure, fascinated.
For like most of the population of England, Samuel had never seen a Jew.
Surprisingly, it was Oliver Cromwell who let them in again, after their almost total absence for three hundred and sixty years. Indeed, it was one of the few complaints Obadiah had against the great leader that, being an army man, he was too tolerant of religious sectaries. Of late there seemed to have been more than ever – Baptists, Anabaptists, Brownists who insisted that each individual congregation received its own divine inspiration without requiring the guidance of any central body; there were the new folk, the followers of the preacher Fox, whom men called Quakers and who claimed an individual divine right. A lucid but infernal preacher called Penn had even had the audacity to preach their nonsense in Wiltshire. “He should have been whipped and bored through the tongue,” Obadiah had explained sadly to Samuel. As for letting in the Jews – that was insufferable.
They came, often, from Holland, whence