Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [600]
1889
To a casual visitor entering the quiet city of Salisbury on that warm Sunday morning it might have seemed impossible that anything could disturb its sedate calm.
Yet in fact the place was in a state of seething controversy in which, as in centuries past, a powerful bishop was at war with half the town.
Had the visitor entered the even greater stillness of the close itself, it would certainly have seemed that the brisk woman of sixty with her long white dress, her parasol and her elegant, buttoned kid walking boots, who was stepping into a landau in the north walk, must be the very quintessence of respectability. As respectable, say, as the severe, grey-haired man who was politely handing her in.
And indeed, in a general sense, when Miss Shockley and old Mr Porters set out together for Cranborne Chase that August morning, they still were.
It was very quiet. There was movement in the close, of course, but it was subdued, as if the place was patiently aware that the bell for matins was about to ring.
By the choristers’ green, an ancient water cart, that sprayed the road surface to keep down the dust, was making its creaking rounds, pulled by a horse which, like the battered straw hat on its head, had seen better, but not quieter days.
From Mompesson House, Miss Barbara Townsend, swathed in shawls, made her way across to the south gate, carrying her sketch pad and water colours. And now, through the gate from the High Street an ox cart lumbered slowly in containing no less a figure than one of the cathedral’s residentiary canons and his family, come to spend his obligatory three months in the close and perform his cathedral duties.
Today, however, Jane Shockley was in a state of suppressed excitement. For tomorrow she was going into battle against the bishop. And the day after that . . . She smiled inwardly. The day after that, she would cause an even bigger stir.
There had been no scandal attached to her for thirty years. Since her Uncle Stephen’s death she had lived alone in the house in the close. Ten years before, her brother Bernard had returned to England, but he had gone to live on the edge of the New Forest near Christchurch. She had become, in the manner of Victorian ladies of Salisbury close, rather formidable. The night with the gypsies had not, of course, been forgotten. But the young folk in the close no longer believed it. She was as respectable a figure as one of the Hammick, Hussey, Townsend, Eyre or Jacob families who formed the principal aristocracy of the place.
Indeed, so successful had she become over the years at projecting a forthright and rather daunting image of herself that her opinion was much sought after and she generally got her own way.
The landau began to roll out of the close.
It was just as it entered the High Street that a stout, elderly man hurried forward and hailed the coachman. As the landau stopped, he came beside it and looked in. For a moment his face fell.
Mr Porters and Mr Mason stared at each other with distaste: they were on opposite sides in the bishop’s great controversy. Then Mason addressed himself to Jane.
“You will not forget us tomorrow, Miss Shockley? You will come and speak?”
She looked at him evenly. The old relationship from the time when she had looked after Jethro had been replaced by something tougher.
“Yes, Mr Mason, if I can count on you in turn.”
He looked uncertain.
“If not, then of course . . .”
“You can count on me,” he said hurriedly. Her presence, evidently, was important to him.
She smiled.
“Drive on, Baynes,” she called to the coachman.
As the carriage left the city and began to rise up the slope to Harnham Hill, she felt quietly elated. She had secured Mason for her cause. He might not do much, but every person she could get was important. Now her eyes turned back to Porters. How upright he sat, his straight back hardly touching the carriage seat. He reminded her – it was a cruel thought