Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [546]
“Not by fifty feet,” he told Frances, and took the house.
He was a diligent man. It was he who discovered – this was the word he used – that the name Porters, which his father, the northern cloth manufactuer bore, must surely be a corruption of the ancient name of Porteus; so diligent was he that he had made this discovery already by the time he was nineteen and still an obscure undergraduate at Oxford university. Accordingly, and in deference to antiquity, he changed his name at once; besides it put a further distance between the cloth mill, which was, alas, middle class “trade”, and the gentleman he was determined to become. His delight in discovering, through the records in the cathedral library, that there had once been a Canon Portehors at Salisbury, knew no bounds. “Another variant of Porteus,” he claimed.
“Like the Poores,” he would quietly maintain, “the Porteus family may be said to have a . . .” he would pause to give effect to the understatement, “somewhat lengthy connection with Sarum.” Indeed, after a decade of saying it, he even believed it himself.
The fact, buried deep in the past, that his claim was true, that he really was descended from the old Porteus family who had fled Salisbury to escape the Black Death, was something that Nicodemus Porteus never knew.
He was observant. When he arrived at Sarum, with money but no friends, it did not take him long to discover that Frances Shockley was a favourite with the bishop, that she had no money, that she was considered a lady all the same, and that, if he were to marry her and take care of her young brother, the bishop, though he disliked him, would still favour his cause for Frances’s sake. And by taking careful thought, he even made himself so agreeable to Frances that she consented to marry him.
No man in the last, lax years of the eighteenth century was more assiduous in his duties than Nicodemus Porteus, no man more proper towards his wife and her family, no man more worthy, as the nineteenth century began, to be made a canon of the cathedral.
The ambition of Canon Porteus was one day to be dean. For of all the offices at Sarum, this was the jewel. The days when the huge estates of the middle ages produced vast revenues for the diocese were long past. Indeed, Salisbury diocese was now comparatively poor. But by accidents of history, certain offices had remained rich while others declined, and the office of Dean of Salisbury carried with it the fantastic income of some two thousand pounds a year. Even his own substantial means only gave him a fraction of such a sum.
“On that,” Porteus reminded Frances solemnly, “a man might live as a considerable gentleman.”
As dean he might almost move in the circle of Lord Pembroke, Lord Radnor, or at least Lord Forest, whom he had already assiduously cultivated. The dignity of the office, together with the income, would set the seal on his social ambitions. When he knelt before his bed with his wife each night and prayed aloud for the poor, those at sea, the sick and the diocese, it was always this unspoken prayer, from his innermost heart, that rose, pure and shining, into the night sky over Sarum:
“Lord, let me one day be dean.”
It was not surprising that Canon Porteus should be concerned about his brother-in-law, Ralph Shockley.
“I confess,” he now told Barnikel, “I confess to you, doctor, that he sometimes displeases me. But this,” he added regretfully, “it is my Christian duty to bear. No sir,” he went on, “it is a waywardness in his thoughts, a lack of judgement that I almost think could indicate . . .” he looked very grave, “a mental imbalance. I fear for him, doctor. I fear still more for his wife and two children.” He allowed his pale hand to rest on a large concordance that lay on his desk, as though the hand might absorb wisdom and patience from that weighty tome.