Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [525]
He spent one night in the Roman city of Bath, and drank one glass of mineral water in the morning, before taking the coach to Sarum.
How familiar it was, the rolling ridges, the empty spaces filled only with the white dots of sheep. He watched eagerly for the first sight of the spire peeping over the horizon.
When he was still five miles from Sarum he noticed one change in the surroundings: it was the sheep. For contrary to anything he would have expected, they seemed bigger.
Could it really be so? The sheep on the Wiltshire ridges had not changed in centuries – stout, sturdy animals with clumsy heads, moderately fine wool and, both rams and ewes, strong curling horns.
The horns were the same, but the sheep seemed to stand taller and to be more powerfully built in their forequarters. The wool seemed to have disappeared from their bellies. They were better looking than the sheep he remembered, but he was surprised at the change.
Sarum at last. It was late afternoon when he arrived. There was the spire, soaring over the city: the streets with their water channels down the middle seemed the same as ever. How calm it was.
The wars in Europe twenty years before, the present struggle in faraway America: these things had hardly touched the city: why should they? The stately cathedral, its quiet close, the medieval market town beside it – these things did not change with the centuries.
In Sarum, for a century, it had been a period of calm.
He made his way eagerly to the house in the close. He had sent a letter from Bristol before leaving, so that his father should be expecting him. As he came through the stout old gateway into the close he suddenly laughed. It was as though he were a child again.
The door was opened by a pleasant young maid in a modest green and white striped dress, a white apron on which she had spilt some flour, and a mob cap tied round with a kerchief over her hair, from which a roll of brown hair was peeping. She gave him a look of fearful wonder, as though he were General Washington himself, and fled down the hall crying: “’Tis the captain.”
A moment later his father appeared, hastily putting on his wig before holding out his hands.
“The hero returns.”
He was thinner, a little gaunt, and before the wig was on, Adam could see that there were only a few wisps of his own grey hair remaining: but otherwise Jonathan at sixty-seven was astonishingly unchanged. He wore the same long blue frock coat, somewhat frayed, that he remembered, the same white silk stockings and knee breeches of a gentleman.
“Your brother and sister return to the house shortly,” he said. “They are eager to meet you.”
How good it was to be back in the house. Little had changed. The wainscot in the parlour seemed to be stained a little darker; in his bedroom there was a fine new four poster bed and on the walls there was one of the bright new wallpapers that had only just been coming into fashion when he was a boy. He could detect many small changes made by his father’s wife – for Jonathan would certainly never had made any – but as he sat down opposite his father in the comfortable old leather-covered elbow chair, he felt very much at home.
His half brother and sister were a delight. If he had felt any secret jealousy of them before he came, it vanished the moment he saw them.
They both had dark hair, from their mother, but in other respects he saw all the Shockley looks in them – strong, broad faces, light skins, blue eyes. The girl, Frances, was fifteen; her brother Ralph was ten. They looked at him with shining eyes and before he could even rise, Frances ran across the room and kissed him.
He fell in love with her at once.
For the next hour he did nothing but answer their questions: about the war in America, the West Indies, about his whole life it seemed. But the first question of all came from Ralph who, as soon as he heard he had come from Bristol, gazed up at him with large solemn eyes and asked hopefully: