Testament, p.13
Testament, page 13
Damia sighed. ‘Fear, shame, total loss of any sense that you deserve something better than what you’ve got on the streets,’ she said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice; bitterness on behalf of all the people whom society had carelessly shut out — ex-cons; abused, neglected kids who’d been shuttled from one foster home to another; runaways too scared to look for any kind of help for fear they’d be shipped back to whatever they’d run away from; addicts; the mentally ill for whom care in the community had meant anything but.
‘Did you get them to come in?’
‘More than most outreach workers,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult to write somebody off as a middle-class do-gooder if they look like me.’
‘What did you do in between that and this?’ asked Hadstowe. ‘Or did you go from underclass to overprivileged in one giant leap?’
‘Got into fundraising, then marketing and PR,’ Damia replied, her eyeballs drying uncomfortably as she gazed, without blinking, at the brazier. She did not add that she had filled all those roles within the housing and homelessness sector; that she had, indeed, leapt from underclass to overprivileged. And though she loved her new job, loved the college as she had never loved employment before, there was still a part of her that was uneasy at her abandonment of the desperate and the disillusioned.
‘How are you finding the job here?’ Hadstowe obviously knew that she was recently appointed.
‘Surprising.’ She smiled around the group and they smiled back. ‘I wasn’t anticipating protesters on my doorstep at a Salster college!’
‘Maybe,’ said the man who’d spoken up earlier, a burly chap in a striped beanie, ‘you weren’t expecting underhand behaviour from those in charge of this sort of place.’
Damia nodded. ‘I think I had a lot of preconceptions before I came to Toby. It’s been a big learning curve.’
‘Shock to the system more like!’ said one of the others, the toe of his boot nudging moodily at a chip of tarmac flung from beneath the wheels of a car.
Damia half-smiled. He was quite young — possibly young enough to be Beanie’s offspring.
‘Have you spoken to Dr Norris recently?’ she asked Hadstowe disingenuously, knowing that he had refused several invitations to meet and discuss a way forward.
‘No need for me to speak. It’s for him to withdraw his polite request that we all sign his statutory declarations. When he does that, then we can talk about how we resolve the situation.’
‘You want to negotiate? It wouldn’t be enough for him just to withdraw the request?’
Hadstowe’s eyes searched her face as if for evidence that Norris really would keep her this poorly informed. ‘No. We’re not prepared to go back to the status quo with this hanging over us. We want assurances that if the college does proceed with the sale of land, then we — the tenants — will be given first refusal. To buy at agricultural rates,’ he continued forcefully, as if heading off an interruption from her. ‘We can’t be expected to compete with the kind of money developers can stump up.’
A silence filled only with the low hiss and crackle of the brazier fell into place behind his words as if at the pull of a cord. All eyes fixed themselves on the flickering flames and red-hot charcoal, hands not holding drinks offered themselves to the singeing heat.
Damia waited for Hadstowe to break the silence: for her to have done so would have looked like negotiation.
‘So, where do you stand on this?’ he asked. ‘Are you with Norris?’
Damia took a sip of her coffee, tasting the plastic taint of the lid. ‘I think,’ she said, choosing her words with immense care, ‘that I’m prepared to stand with him — he’s a man of integrity, who’s prepared to take the rap for things that weren’t his idea —’
‘A man of integrity!’ Hadstowe spat. ‘I don’t call selling our land from under us evidence of great integrity!’
Damia looked him full in the face. ‘One of the things he’s taken responsibility for,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’ The voice of the only woman in the group pulled Damia’s gaze away from Hadstowe. ‘You mean selling the land wasn’t Norris’s idea?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So whose was it?’ Hadstowe asked.
‘I don’t know. But I do know that it was Charles Northrop’s argument in favour that pushed the motion through.’
‘Northrop,’ the woman said, sharply, ‘but isn’t he —’ she faltered, her eyes fixed over Damia’s shoulder. When Damia turned, it was to see Hadstowe lowering an upraised hand.
‘If Charles Northrop has been presenting himself to you as an honest broker,’ Damia said, suspicion blooming, ‘I think you need to be very wary. And of Ian Baird and any promises he’s been making or implying.’
‘What promises do you imagine he’s been making?’ Hadstowe asked, his voice even. Damia, because she was looking for it, saw the tension beneath.
‘Well, I’d guess he might’ve said that if Northgate takes over Toby he’d give written assurances that would secure your tenancies on a long-term basis.’
Hadstowe’s unguarded expression told her she was right.
‘It wasn’t hard to work out what he would say to you,’ she said, ‘not when he’d already tried to woo me away, too.’
Baird’s attempt at recruiting Damia to his cause had come several weeks earlier, when, after a meeting with the principals of both colleges to finalise the sponsorship deal with Atoz, he had asked whether he could have a few minutes of her time.
‘It’s impressive,’ he had said, once they were in the privacy of her office, ‘the way you’ve played Atoz. Given the bad financial publicity there’s been and the social issues with the tenants, I never thought you’d do it.’
Though Damia wanted desperately not to be charmed by this man, she found that his compliments generated an instinctive urge to preen herself.
Baird seated himself comfortably on the couch facing the door. His trouser-leg and sock parted company to reveal a narrow strip of pale, hairy calf as he crossed his legs. He was, the gesture indicated, totally at his ease here, totally in control.
‘Damia, come and work for me.’
She stared at him, too surprised to reply.
‘You’re wasted here with this bunch of stuffed shirts and has-beens. Together, we could take Northgate to the top.’
Damia looked at him appraisingly. ‘Top of what, exactly? I thought you were all for a federal college structure — a proper university.’
‘Colleges will still function as separate institutions in most respects, they will simply cede functions which can be carried out more efficiently to a central administrative structure.’
‘Don’t you think it would be a bit disloyal of me?’ she asked, unable to keep an edge of judgement out of her voice. ‘Ed Norris has taken a gamble on me. I don’t have any kind of track record in higher education but he took me on. Coming to work for you would be a kick in the teeth.’
‘That’s how business is,’ Baird stated, flatly. ‘You can’t be sentimental. You’ve got to know where you want to get to and be prepared to do everything you can to get there.’
Damia’s eyes rested briefly on the dark-haired strip of shin beneath Baird’s trouser-leg. It repelled her.
‘So you think I should hitch my wagon to Northgate’s star?’
Baird raised his eyebrows slightly. He might just as well have said, ‘That’s a no-brainer, surely?’
‘In due course, I expect to be chair of a federation of Salster colleges.’ He looked at her, his eyes narrowing slightly in wary appraisal. ‘I would be in a position to recommend you as marketing manager for the whole of the new university structure.’
When she did not respond immediately he said, evenly, ‘It’s not the kind of job that comes up every day.’
Damia forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘It’s not a job that’s come up at all, yet. You’re counting a lot of unhatched chickens, Mr Baird.’
‘I assume his wooing didn’t work?’ the woman asked from the other side of the brazier.
Damia smiled tightly. ‘No.’
She hesitated and then, for reasons she would later sift through endlessly without coming to a satisfactory conclusion, she found herself laying all her cards before them. ‘I used to think that one Salster college — one Oxsterbridge college — was much like another. Different architecture, different quaint little traditions, but basically the same idea. But over the few months since coming to Toby I’ve realised I was wrong. If colleges were interchangeable I’d have grabbed Baird’s offer with both hands. Security over insecurity? Please, it’s not even a question! But they’re not interchangeable. Northgate is a base for the establishment of the Baird empire. He only cares about the college in so far as it serves his purposes and furthers his ambitions. But Ed Norris is a college man through and through. He believes in his position as first among equals. He takes it seriously.’
She felt the treacherous drooping of one corner of her mouth as the deeply emotional part of herself threatened to weep with the intensity of what she was saying.
‘That’s why he takes the rap for decisions that the governing body makes — it’s a collective decision. Even if he doesn’t agree, he has to go with it.’ She gritted her teeth and looked across at them, all but Hadstowe, who stood at her shoulder.
‘Toby is the sum of its parts,’ she finished. ‘Its people, its traditions, its values. Northgate is just Baird. I’m going to fight for Toby. If I lose my job trying, at least I’ll be able to live with myself.’
Nineteen
Salster, August 1388
On the walls of the Guildhall birds strut and flap and voice their particular sayings. From the mouth of the heron, poised with wings bent to take flight: ‘Bear no malice’. From the peacock, strutting away from its companions with tail-feathers held magnificently aloft, head haughtily upright: ‘Be not proud’. From the dove, settling on the roof of a cote like the holy spirit on the head of Christ: ‘Deal justly’.
The men sitting at two large tables under the eye of the wall-painted birds would do well to remember their advice. For there is malice here, and pride, and very little just dealing.
Later, as she and Henry tried to stem the flow of Alysoun’s questions by describing all that had happened in the Guildhall, Gwyneth’s thoughts began to disjoint, the tenons of ideas slipping from their mortices until the whole framework loosened and fell. She found she could recall snatches, vivid moments of seeing and understanding, but could not reconstruct for her foster-daughter the way in which loyalty and self-interest, collusion and opposition, hatred and resolution, had locked with one another as will met will. She left Henry to explain, and leaned her head against the back of her chair, resting her overtired eyes as Henry’s voice faded in and out.
She felt like the crane in the Guildhall’s wall of birds. The crane that stands sentinel whilst its fellows sleep, holding a stone in one uplifted claw so that if it, too, falls asleep, the dropping of the stone will wake it. She had held the stone for Simon and she had not slept. She had stood sentinel for him over his college and had not let it come to harm. She tried to conjure up Simon’s face, but could see only a hard, unforgiving stare. Would her dutiful fidelity not soften him a little? If he could be convinced of her desire to champion his cause would he turn towards her with love as he used to do?
If only she had the peacock’s many eyes, to see into the future. But, as peacocks moult, so man loses foresight as he lives and comes to know nothing but his own mind. She had declared to Edwin that she must be allowed to know Simon’s mind on the dispute over wages. Had she claimed too much?
Edwin himself had been silent at the Guildhall. She saw him now, in her mind’s eye, his coif still defiantly dusty, watching, waiting and listening. Had he understood the battle being fought out between Nicholas Brygge and Robert Copley? For it had become apparent to Gwyneth that neither the mayor nor the bishop was there to discuss the wages paid to journeymen. Their concern was a larger and more personal one: who was to rule in Salster.
Both might have had as their emblem the hawk that stooped down the deep-windowed wall, claws outstretched.
Copley had marched in to the Guildhall, pale with the effects of rage and exertion, his priests disregarded behind him. As he strode over to stand in front of the trestle table, the tension in his frame had been dangerously visible. Staring intently at Nicholas Brygge and ignoring every other soul in the room, Copley had said nothing until the mayor rose slowly to his feet.
‘Welcome … my Lord Bishop.’
Copley’s eyes pierced into Brygge, every particle of his combustible energy focused upon the mayor. ‘This meeting concerns priory business, priory labourers and priory property.’ His voice sliced through the tense air of the hall. ‘And its proper place is the chapter house of the priory, not here!’
Brygge, still standing and undiminished by his shortness of stature, did not so much as turn a hair. ‘Had you invited us, my Lord, we would have come,’ he said mildly. ‘As it was, we could hardly march into the chapter house at our whim.’
Nicholas Brygge, thought Gwyneth, possessed extraordinary speed. Not speed of hoofed foot, like the ostrich caught in a manlike run on the Guildhall wall, but speed of mind and tongue. And, like ostrich’s fabled ability to digest iron, nothing seemed to stick in the mayor’s craw.
The bishop having no rejoinder immediately to hand, Brygge pressed his message home. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it is not clear to me that the priory’s chapter house would be the proper place for a meeting that will seek to regulate the practice of a craft beyond your walls as well as within. This is where we conduct city business, particularly mercantile business, and since this is a matter of buying and selling, here we meet.’
‘Do you suggest that it is not my right to employ men as I see fit?’
‘I do,’ Brygge maintained with a smile, ‘if the reputation of my city is brought into disrepute as a result.’ Their stares locked. Still, no other presence in the room was acknowledged. ‘For instance, I am sure you are aware, My Lord, of the statute that prohibits any master from poaching another’s journeyman by offering him inducements. To say nothing of paying higher wages than those laid down by —’
‘Are you accusing me of lawbreaking?’
The mayor did not flinch at the implied challenge. ‘Without question, you overreach your authority.’
Gasps had greeted that suggestion, Gwyneth recalled, as she let out her own long breath in a sigh. Though masons might be used to audacity, the Salster clergy were not. Neither was Robert Copley. Leaning towards the mayor, he hissed through clenched teeth in a voice which, if he could, he would have forced solely into Brygge’s ear but which, given their proximity, could not fail to reach Gwyneth’s, too.
‘Do not try my authority or my patience too far, grocer, or you may find yourself the poorer for it.’
Brygge held his gaze. ‘I can bring out the whole city against you, Copley. At my word, tithes will go unpaid, priests will starve unless you divert priory funds to feed them, and you will be a laughing stock. Think on it. My Lord.’
‘And if I throw you in gaol and let you rot?’
‘That would not be wise.’
‘Try me and I will do it.’
Their faces were less than a hand’s-span apart. Each had forgotten that they were observed. Or if they had not forgotten, their self-conceit was such that they did not care.
‘Throw me in gaol and you will answer to Richard Daker. He is a city of London merchant and guildsman. He not only has the ear of the king, he has his balls, too. Financially speaking, of course.’
The bishop’s eyes grew narrow at the mention of royal patronage.
‘Beware, grocer. You may suppose yourself too valuable.’
‘Beware yourself, priest. For you may suppose yourself too powerful.’
Copley’s face twisted into a vicious parody of a smile. ‘Come then, let us put ourselves to the test.’
It was this reckless challenge and its tacit acceptance which had acted on Gwyneth like the crane’s stone. She was suddenly assailed by the thought that she might have erred in enlisting the mayor’s help, might have given too little thought to the independence of freemasons within the city.
She shook off her quietude and stood, knees quaking. ‘My Lord Bishop, I thank you most humbly for your attendance upon us. Will you be so good as to sit and allow us to begin? The freemasons of the city are gathered together and await the judgement of both priory and city authorities upon the conduct of freemasonry in Salster.’
She stopped, her eyes flicking from one man to the other and back again. If she wounded a powerful pride now, she was well aware that it would be as catastrophic for Simon as his youthful refusal to mend the injured self-esteem of a king. She could not afford to make an enemy of Brygge, but his smiling belligerence, if given its head, would leave Copley nowhere to go but to the bitter end in his fight against Daker’s college. She must give him some room to manoeuvre so that he would not have to back down.
Finally, under her pleading gaze, Copley marched around the table. At a swift signal from Prior William, his young secretary leaped up and took himself off to an uncomfortable seat on the masons’ benches and sat there looking as if he feared for his life, whilst Copley took his place without comment or thanks.
To everyone’s surprise, Gwyneth remained standing. Trembling in every limb, she began to speak. ‘Until now,’ she said, choosing her words with scrupulous care, ‘any man with a vision to build has been at liberty to hire whomsoever he will and, as every man here knows, masons have come to Salster for generations to build at the priory. But the city has prospered —’ she looked at both men, including them both in the implied congratulation — ‘and now, it appears, there is more work to be done than the masons of the city may well accomplish —’
Though she and everyone present knew this to be false, knew that in fact the priory works were currently employing more men than could truly be justified, it would do no harm to aggrandise Salster and its wealth, for each soul present would feel in some small way a greater man for it.
