Testament, p.10
Testament, page 10
There were cheers and jubilant air-punches, during which Damia sought Dominic’s ear.
‘I’ll go and see Dr Norris tomorrow,’ she said, heavily. ‘Thank you for allowing me to be here.’
Thirteen
Salster, August 1388
‘Does Henry not mind that you feed him yourself?’ Gwyneth asked as Alysoun opened her gown to put her four-month son to her breast.
‘You know Henry, mother. He still cannot look upon himself as a man who is served and waited upon. Cooks and kitchen boys he can allow, since he hardly sees them, but to have a woman sit with us and feed little Sim — his eyes pop out at the thought!’
‘And you, chick? Are you content?’
Alysoun looked at her shyly. ‘My friends laugh and shake their heads at me,’ she confided, ‘but since the minute he was born I have not been able to bear anybody else holding him.’ She looked at her mother. ‘It’s how you felt with Toby.’
Toby, sitting on his mother’s lap, started at his name and Gwyneth gentled him, stroking his hair and soothing his limbs into quiet once more. ‘Yes, but I thought it was long waiting made me feel like that.’
‘Whatever it is, you have passed it on to me.’
‘Not through my blood, chick.’
‘No.’ Alysoun met her mother’s eye. ‘But through your love, perhaps.’
They smiled, enjoying the intimacy that being alone with their children allowed.
‘Simon will miss his little namesake,’ Gwyneth said with a small nod in the direction of the baby Alysoun cradled, ‘while he’s away.’
‘Watching his church grow will make up for missing a month of Sim’s growing.’
‘Don’t be so sure. He loves that child, and not just because you named Sim for him.’ She took her eyes off Alysoun and bent to kiss the top of Toby’s head. ‘Besides, his patron in Norfolk is proving troublesome, which is why he has torn himself away from Salster yet again.’
Torn himself from Salster and Daker’s college, she thought, but gone gladly from me and his son.
They had exchanged harsh words the night before Simon had ridden for Norfolk and he had gone unforgiven and unforgiving. Little Sim had provoked the quarrel but, as always, its real subject had been Toby.
Gwyneth had watched all afternoon as Simon played with Alysoun and Henry’s baby son, dangling a key on a cord in front of him to watch him reach and grasp it; hiding his face in his hands and bobbing up; blowing on the child’s face and watching him screw up his eyes and chuckle. Gwyneth felt all the passionate tenderness of a grandmother towards Sim, but Simon’s besottedness was beginning to make her resentful of the child. She ached for Toby as his father ignored him and played delightedly with a child not his own. Having schooled herself long since to let Toby lie sometimes and watch what was going on about him, she had begun to carry him about with her once more. His taut, bony body — lighter than that of other three-years children — felt tense against her and she sought, by her gentling caresses, to make up for Simon’s cruel lack of notice.
When she laid him on his wool-stuffed pallet, she could see him watching Simon with the baby. Toby’s newborn squint had never straightened, his eyes could not work together and Gwyneth, feeling her son’s frustration, had tied a band of cloth around his head, covering the eye that seemed to wander most. Though his one eye rolled each time he moved his head or raised an arm, Gwyneth knew that Tobias was watching his father with Sim. He watched, and he saw, and in his troubled way he understood something.
Gwyneth’s heart bled for her damaged son and his pain caused her to rage against Simon.
‘How can you drool so over little Sim when you never so much as look at Toby? Do you not see the pain you cause your son?’
Simon, keeping his eyes resolutely from Toby, asleep on his pallet, said, ‘No. I do not see it. Because there is none. The child is incapable of pain — at least of that sort.’ He stared coldly at Gwyneth. ‘You will not believe me when I tell you that he cannot think and cannot feel, Gwyneth. But it is so. The child is an idiot — he has not the wit of a dog. At least a dog can come when it is called.’
‘A dog has power over its limbs! Toby knows when you call, and he feels the cruelty of your calling because you know he cannot come!’
‘That is what you choose to see, Gwyneth.’ Simon’s tone was flat and unemotional. ‘The mind is written in the face, Gwyneth — the slack-mouthed are idiots, those with intelligence have sharp eyes. His eyes roll despite your bandage, his features are ungoverned, I see not one spark of wit in him.’
‘You never look!’
‘I have looked, Gwyneth. I have. And I have given up looking because there is nothing to see. The child is deformed in body and mind. Better it had never been born.’ He fixed her with his implacable stare. ‘I prayed for a son to continue my name and my skill and God has laughed in my face. This —’ he flung out an arm in Toby’s direction, though his eyes held tight to Gwyneth’s — ‘is the son he gives me. This is the bag of twitching bones and wandering wits which is to inherit what I have.’
Gwyneth, unable to bear any more, had clamped her hands over her ears, her face contorting in pain as she tried to keep back her fierce and bitter tears.
For nearly three and a half years Gwyneth had poured out her love on Toby and had felt his love for her. She had wept her love over his inability to articulate any but the most broken sounds, over his difficulty in eating and drinking without most of what was put into his mouth escaping before he could swallow, over his pitiful, frustrated attempts to grasp and hold things.
It seemed that the harder he tried to do anything, the more it moved beyond his grasp. He could not stand, even if she held him; his arms flew up, causing his back to arch and his whole body to throw itself backwards. Neither could he crawl; placed prone upon their bed, Toby could not even raise his head and look about him, but merely gasped and snuffled into the cover.
But it was not Toby’s condition which had caused Gwyneth’s most acute pain, but Simon’s hardness towards their son. Simon, it seemed, had come to see Toby as a being without hope, a being whose needs for food and shelter must be met out of simple Christian duty and the end of whose life would come, if God was merciful, as swiftly as possible.
Toby had driven a wedge between them that Gwyneth was powerless to strike away.
‘When Simon gets back, the building season will be almost over,’ Alysoun said, refolding her gown and holding a happy, bloated Sim on her knee.
‘Yes. Barely a month more. Which is why he is so keen that all that can be done to further the work should be done.’
‘Is it really true that he will pay his masons to work all day on the lesser feast days?’
Gwyneth snorted a laugh. ‘Yes. It’s true.’ She shifted Toby’s weight slightly on her lap and, pointing to the window-ledge, said, ‘Look Toby — a bird!’
The bird disappeared in a flurry of wings as Toby, exerting himself to look where his mother pointed, agitated his ill-controlled limbs into flinging motion. Gwyneth, anticipating the action, had held his hands to prevent his arms flying upwards, but had not anticipated Toby’s sudden spasm which almost jerked him off her lap.
‘Steady, son,’ she said, pulling him gently back, ‘steady, now.’ She transferred her attention back to Alysoun. ‘You know what masons are, always grumbling about the loss of pay through feastdays coming around so often. Well, Simon has given them the chance to earn the money they are so keen to complain over. And it seems most of them will.’
But feastdays are holy days ordained by the Church, and it is rash to alter custom where the Church is concerned. As was his habit in the summer, Robert Copley, bishop of Salster, was resident in the city, and if Simon had expected to order his affairs as he chose while the bishop looked on, he was sadly mistaken.
Fourteen
Unable to face her office on arriving at work the day after the JCR meeting, Damia hurried across the yard through the tugging of a squally wind and scurried up the steps of the Octagon to the Great Hall. The silence within seemed absolute after the buffeting at her ears outside.
Though she had been at Toby a little less than two months, already the unique medieval architecture of the hall seemed familiar and welcoming, while the buildings in which she had spent all her previous working life had remained alien to her. Toby, with its unassailable air of permanence, of belonging, of having a rightful and deserved place in the world, had become a refuge into whose protective embrace she had gratefully allowed herself to be enfolded.
Six months ago, naming all eleven Salster colleges would have been beyond her; they were part of another world. Now, they were as much a part of her everyday world as the city’s high street chains and she could rhyme them off like a mnemonic. Kineton and Dacre and the other foundation colleges: Kings, Prince Edward’s, St Thomas’s, St Dunstan’s, Traherne; then the associates, Fakenham, Eversholt, John Wyclif, Dover and, of course, Northgate.
In a startlingly short time, Toby, and her little house within the city walls, had become home in a way nowhere else had ever been.
The work of conservation on the wall painting was in full, painstaking swing, the two conservators working their arcane magic on the mineral pigments and lime plaster. Damia had gathered that a debate had begun about the competing claims of display and preservation. Since the sunlight admitted by the hall’s enormous windows would inevitably fade and degrade the paintings, the conservative view maintained that the they should be protected from the light, disclosed only when tours came expressly to see the cycle. Opposing this, those who viewed the painting as an integral part of the Great Hall argued that the cycle had been intended for public display and that this should be respected.
Damia, with her instinct that the ‘Sin Cycle’ was far more than a conventional mural, gave her unsolicited support very firmly to the second view.
The silence in the air and the reverence with which the conservators carried out their work settled on Damia like a gentle caress and she moved quietly around the hall, exchanging muted smiles with the conservators as she made her way to the north-western wall.
Whilst the first of its twin ovals with its helpless human form and goading demons was intact, the second was in a far from perfect state of preservation. Damp or impurities in the plaster had dissolved away much of the distinctness of the painting and the right-hand portion of the scene was severely damaged. All that remained was the suggestion of a human form, standing, probably with its arms extended to the figure opposite. The demons of the previous oval were gone, but the Everyman figure’s powerlessness in the face of evil’s minions had not. His sinful condition no longer needed continual demonic prompting; now it had become hardened around him in the symbolic form of a cage.
Peering at the badly eroded figure on the right-hand side of the wall, Damia wondered whether the outstretched arms were those of Jesus, struggling to save the sinner, to draw him on to bliss, away from his state of sinful imprisonment.
A thought flashed, lightning-quick, across her brain. Imprisonment. The sinner was in a cage of sin. He was a prisoner.
‘Peter, re Statue’. She could see the Biz Book entry clearly in her mind’s eye, the unknown Charles’s flamboyant handwriting fluidly expressing his opinion. ‘Do you mean that horrible statue of the prisoner which — thank God — somebody had hidden behind the rhododendron?’
‘No,’ Neil replied, when he picked up the phone in his office ten minutes later, ‘there’s nothing about any statues in the letters. Well, not up to where I’ve read, anyway. But you know that, I told you all about it.’
They had talked of little else but the prior’s letters to his bishop when they had met for dinner the previous week.
‘Yeah, I know, it’s all about the Church trying to stop Dacre building the college. Have you found out why yet, by the way?’
Though she had asked the question as something to fill a silence rather than from any real expectation of a positive answer, Neil’s enthusiasm suddenly burst down the line.
‘Yes! I have!’
‘And?’
‘He was a Lollard.’
She said nothing, waiting for him to explain. His tendency to use technical terms as a way of aggrandising himself had always irritated her.
‘An early form of Protestant. Part of an anticlerical movement that started during the Black Death and gathered momentum in all the chaos of the later fourteenth century. People felt things were slipping out of control, that the Church must be doing something wrong for God to allow all these catastrophes.’
‘Anticlerical — so he was against the church and what it stood for?’
‘Against its power and worldliness, certainly. Daker wanted to set up a college which had nothing to do with the Church. That was ultra-radical in an age when — in England at least — all learning was controlled by the Church.’
‘Ultra-radical?’
‘According to the Church — in this context, the prior and the bishop — it amounted to heresy.’
Damia, still disappointed that he had no light to cast on the prisoner, forced herself to stop responding on automatic pilot and to think. ‘So, if the Church was so against everything he was doing, how did he succeed? Did he have some leverage against the bishop — know where the bodies were buried or something?’
‘No idea. But he will have been amazingly wealthy. I mean “vintner of the city of London” doesn’t mean he was a wine merchant. The vintners were one of the most powerful guilds in the City. They were fabulously rich. If Dacre didn’t bankroll the king at one stage or another, there were certainly others exactly like him who did.’
Damia took this in. ‘So the king might have protected him?’
‘Unlikely. Although Richard II was quite pro-Lollard early in his reign, certainly while John of Gaunt was running things, later on, when most of Kineton and Dacre was actually built, Richard had been deposed and Henry IV was on the throne. And he was no lover of Lollards at all.’
‘Right.’
Her disappointment must still have been evident in her tone because he said, ‘Sorry not to be able to help with the statue thing.’
Damia made an inarticulate noise.
‘Shall I come over after work,’ Neil said, ‘and we can have a look at the painting — see if I come up with anything you haven’t?’
Damia hesitated. Apart from the unguarded look she had caught as she entered the restaurant, Neil had not done or said anything that remotely confirmed Catz’s prejudices or her own recent suspicions about his feelings. And she did not want to give up any chance of solving ‘the Toby Enigma’ by cutting herself off from Neil and the information held in the prior’s letters.
‘Sure,’ she said with crisp decisiveness. ‘Come on round. I’ll be finished about five thirty.’
Then she went back to her emails.
From: Damia.Miller@kdc.sal.ac.uk
To: Peterdefries@dmlplc.co.uk
Subject: Biz Book 1968 / statue
Dear Peter
Many thanks for your email and for your description of the statue. Attached is a photograph of one of the Toby wall painting images. Though, unfortunately, this is the image which has sustained some damage, you will see that the ‘prisoner’ appears on the left-hand side of the oval. Is this anything like the statue that used to be in the Toby garden?
If so, what do you think we are to make of it?
Kind regards,
Damia
From: DamiaMiller@hotmail.com
To: CatzCampbell@hotmail.com
Subject: Neil
I need to tell you something about Neil, Catz. He’s turned up in Salster. Without Angie. They’ve split up. He’s the new cathedral archivist. And if you’ve been taking any notice of my emails you’ll know that that means he’s got the college papers. Which may explain what the wall painting is about. Which may help us find the deeds or something else that might help us out of the financial black hole.
Which means I’m seeing quite a lot of him.
Obviously, he thinks there’s something significant in the fact that you’re in the US for a year.
But he’s said nothing. About anything.
Damia stared at the screen. It lit up her little sitting room, the only source of light now that the Saturday dusk had fallen.
She wanted to write, ‘Come home, we’re losing each other.’
She wanted to write, ‘Have you thought about having a baby at all?’
She wanted to write, ‘I miss you.’
She looked at the screen again and, slowly, she deleted the message.
Fifteen
Salster, August 1388
Hard upon the heels of the first feastday working at the Daker site came the news that Hugh of Lewes, master mason to the priory, had raised his masons’ wages by a penny a day. Henceforth, all his journeymen would be paid seven pence a day instead of the six that all masons in Salster had earned before.
Since Gwyneth, in Simon’s absence, was not prepared to match such an increase — was not, anyway, certain that she wished to violate a statute of Parliament to do so — the masons put down their tools and no building was done on the college site. Worse, as the week wore on, there was a steady flow of masons away from Simon’s lodge to that of the priory church.
‘He cannot mean to sustain such payments,’ Henry said, ‘even if he considers himself beyond retribution, standing behind the priory’s walls. If he pays his journeymen seven pence then not a man on the site will work for the same as he did last week.’
Gwyneth looked up from her reckoning of accounts at the chequerboard. ‘This is the prior’s doing, not that of Hugh of Lewes. The prior, and his master, the bishop, are harrying us, Henry. They think, if they can force Master Daker to pay his masons more —’
‘What?’ Henry interrupted. ‘They think he will give up his college for that? They must know that Daker’s fortune stretches beyond a mere penny-a-day increase!’
