Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [545]
Agnes had first come to Sarum three years before; and there was only, for poor Barnikel, one tragedy in this.
For Agnes had come as young Ralph Shockley’s wife.
Young Ralph Shockley. He was in fact the same age as himself, and for over a decade now he had been a schoolmaster, but his manner was still so boyish, his enthusiasms and flights of fancy so sudden, that Thaddeus still thought of him as young. It was Ralph’s boyish good looks and infectious humour that had first attracted Agnes. Thaddeus sometimes found them tiresome. But then, he considered ruefully, he was prejudiced.
It was because Ralph and Agnes’s own little house in New Street was being redecorated that Frances and Porteus had invited them to spend a month in their house in the close until the work was completed. Perversely, it was Ralph who insisted they accept the invitation.
Knowing what he did, Barnikel had felt a sense of foreboding ever since he heard of it; and he had no doubt that was why Porteus wanted to see him.
He glanced at the two women. Did they know why he was there this time? It was impossible to tell.
He sat politely, making demure conversation.
He was conscious of the long case clock ticking softly in the hallway outside; of the shaft of afternoon sunlight in one corner of the room, of the tiny particles of dust spiralling in the sunbeams; he was conscious of the dark, solemn portrait of Canon Porteus staring bleakly down from the wall opposite. He was conscious of the needles of the two women rising and plunging with a tiny tick through the canvas of their embroidery, and of Agnes Shockley’s breast quietly rising and falling.
She was nothing exceptional.
“But then,” he reflected with typical modesty, “nor am I.”
Why was it that, whenever he saw her he was filled with protective urge? Why was it that, when they spoke, there fell between them that wonderful silence of perfect understanding, the silence that made him yearn to take her in his arms and kiss her?
“Ah, if only,” he often thought. If only it had not been that pleasant, self-centred young fellow with his boyish good looks that she had met. “I should have known how to treat her,” he thought.
He saw her often in that small, genteel community. And the passion, which he strove so hard to conceal, only grew worse.
“I am constant,” he laughed at himself ruefully. “And quite without hope.”
There was nothing he could do about it.
Ten slow minutes passed. Then the canon arrived.
“Ah doctor,” he bowed gravely. “You are most kind to come. Let us speak in my study.”
Barnikel rose.
“I do not wish to be harsh.” Porteus fixed him with his black eyes. “I must show charity.” The last word sounded like the tolling of a dismal bell.
Nicodemus Porteus was a pillar of the community – straight and narrow. His thin hair, grey at the temples, was cut short on top but allowed to blossom out in curls at the sides, and it was a great pity that some fifteen years earlier, gentlemen had ceased to wear wigs or even to powder their hair; for Porteus’s high narrow head was made to wear a wig, and his hair, such as it was, would have looked better powdered. But since the French Revolution both these fashions had passed leaving Porteus, so to speak, stranded on his own. His appearance was as bleak as a winter tree. His clerical black silk stockings and black knee-breeches hugged the thinnest legs in Salisbury close; his black frock coat was tightly buttoned up the front, and the two starched white tabs of his clerical cravat poked over the top of it.
He was a careful man. Soon after he and Frances married,