Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [582]
It was the market as she had always known it – with one important and significant difference.
At the far western end, beyond the old cheese market by St Thomas’s, stood a new building, with a big front of three Roman arches and a classical pediment in stone, that had given Mr Porters particular joy. It was the new covered market house. And it was also a railway station.
In the last five years, Salisbury had at last become a railway town. The London and South Western to Southampton, the Andover to London line, the Wiltshire, Somerset and Weymouth’s line – part of the broad-gauge Great Western network – had all been gathered together at a handsome new station at Fisherton; and the short distance from this new complex to the market place was now covered by a special track.
“At last,” Porters had exclaimed, “this is not only the centre of Salisbury Plain, but we’re part of the modern world.”
In a sense he was right. The trains whisked in and out with a clamour and hiss of steam; the city grew as ever more people came from the outside world to see and often settle down by its ancient charm. But the old heartbeat of the five sleepy valleys, their innumerable hamlets, and the sweeping ancient spaces of the chalk ridges and their flocks of sheep – these, breathing slowly to the gentle rhythm of the Sarum market days, did not greatly change.
And a market town was now what Salisbury was. It had reverted, though a few of its people knew it, to a far more ancient role in the place where the five rivers met – to a role before the great cloth trade of England arose, a role perhaps before even Wilton was built or the little staging post of Sorviodunum was founded. Like the Roman roads before them, the new metal tracks only overlaid a more ancient and unchanging pattern; once more Sarum was a market and religious centre at the great natural collecting point of the sweeping upland plain.
Poor Mr Porters had wanted to change that. He had fought hard, with many on the city council, to obtain the big railway coach building works for the town.
“A second Manchester,” he eagerly told her once again.
They had failed. The new factories had been set up in Swindon, away to the north-east of the county.
She was not sorry.
The group that now confronted her consisted of a man and two small children – a girl of about six, she guessed, a little boy a year or two younger. The girl wore only a faded green cotton print dress with a tear down the back and old stockings, one white, one grey. The brown slippers on her feet were split at the toes. She had found, somewhere, a large woollen shawl with a fringe which, draped over her shoulders, hung down to her feet. The boy was even more dishevelled: ragged shirt, patched cotton trousers, bare feet. He was eating an orange which had smeared his face. They were sitting on the tail of a cart, viewing the world with apparent indifference.
Inside the cart, propped up against a bale of straw and apparently sleeping, was a man of about forty.
“My most depressing case,” Mason explained. “The mother died recently. Two children. Believe it or not, the man is a farmer.” He pointed to the sleeping figure, with his half untied neck-cloth and unshaven