Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [564]
He did not move for some time. By that tiny sign of affection she had told him that, although neither of them could ever mention the subject, she loved him. This moment was the crowning glory of Thaddeus Barnikel’s passion. He turned into the close and watched the soft rays of the sunset fall on the cathedral.
Ralph was surprised, a few days later, to receive a letter from Agnes saying that she did not wish to leave Sarum.
The years 1806 and 1807 brought two events that made Ralph Shockley more optimistic.
The first was that, after the tragic death of Pitt, and in an attempt to unite every shade of opinion in the country behind the government, Charles James Fox, his radical hero, was brought into the ministry. He was to die within the year, but before he did, he championed through Parliament that most noble piece of legislation, prepared by Wilberforce and other good men, the Act that prohibited British participation in the slave trade.
“England has turned her back on slavery. Perhaps soon she will stop the terrible traffic in children too,” he exclaimed hopefully.
Perhaps with this change of heart in the ministry, there would be a change of spirit in the country and in Sarum too.
There was not. By 1807, Fox had gone and the mood of the country was as belligerent and reactionary as ever.
“It is Bonaparte, by threatening us, who stops all change in England,” he concluded.
And still he had not solved the question – “how was he to get back to Sarum?”
In the year of Our Lord 1807, the old Bishop of Salisbury at last died. Canon Porteus was apprehensive.
“When a bishop dies,” he confessed to Frances, “one is always afraid there may be change.”
In July, the new bishop was enthroned. He was a pleasant-faced, intelligent, active man named John Fisher; he was destined to be one of Sarum’s finest bishops, and Mrs Porteus, Agnes and Doctor Barnikel were all given excellent seats to view the splendid ceremony in the cathedral.
It was in the Porteuses’ house afterwards, thinking himself alone, and overcome with love for the woman who sat quietly on the sofa beside him, that Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel committed his indiscretion.
Porteus was in his study; Frances had left the room for a moment. He looked across at her. When she smiled, as she did now, her smile was so gentle, so easy that he could not help thinking, “She is really, if the truth be told, mine.” And in an access of love, he allowed himself to reach out, take her hand, and kiss it. She did not stop him: how could she, after all his years of devotion? Their backs were to the door; and so they did not see that it had opened and that Frances was silently watching them.
She closed the door again. She did not blame either of them. But suddenly she knew what she must do.
“It is time for Ralph to return,” she murmured.
The next day, she went to see the new bishop. She was with him for nearly half an hour, and when she quietly emerged from the bishop’s palace, it might have been noticed that she was smiling – or to be exact, she was almost grinning, as she had not done since she was a girl.
That very evening, an extraordinary interview took place in Canon Porteus’s study.
There in the door, stood Frances. It seemed to Porteus that she looked different: her face was relaxed, fuller, somehow than he remembered seeing it of late. It reminded him of the rather wayward girl he had married all those years before. He frowned.
“It is time, Canon, that my brother came home.”
What was this?
“I prefer, Mrs Porteus, not to discuss the matter.”
“I must insist.”
He sighed. He must be reasonable. Taking off his spectacles he explained to her, quietly but with remorseless logic why, at present, such a thing was impossible. The political situation; the reputation of the family; the new bishop.
“You surely would not have me do something so . . . reckless to my reputation at the very moment when a new bishop has been installed. A bishop who,” the thought appalled him, “may wish to make changes.”
“Yet I must insist.”
She was leaning against the doorpost. The posture,