Testament, p.2
Testament, page 2
Two
Kineton and Dacre College, 2019
The small fire in the Great Hall would have remained unnoticed by the last person waiting to be interviewed for the post of college marketing and development manager had it not precipitated an urgent visit by two of the college’s maintenance staff to the Regent Master’s office.
Damia Miller, sitting outside this office in a comfortable waiting room, could not help overhearing the subdued conversation. ‘Painting … on the wall behind the panels … weird … looks like there’s more…’
What part in her subsequent, successful, interview did Damia Miller’s instincts play? Instincts that led her to follow the Regent Master, at a discreet distance, across the yard to the college’s magnificent Octagon and up its curving stone staircase to the Great Hall. Instincts that led her to take her phone out and snap several shots of the terrible face revealed by a gap in the panelling.
This painting, she told the interview panel, represented a mystery, an enigma, a story hidden for so long that its very existence had been forgotten. Who was this mason? What was the reality behind this grotesque birth metaphor in which he vomited forth a child?
This mystery, she swiftly pointed out, and the story it would yield, could become the college’s unique selling point.
And she was the woman to do it.
Later, when film was being edited to precise seconds, the videotape editor’s first glimpse of Damia Miller was of a small, slight figure whose skin tone and braided hair made her exotic in the surrounding gloom of a drizzly September morning.
In contrast, Damia’s first impression of the camera crew was vague: a few individuals, their human outlines blurred in the damp grey air. Her eyes were on the focus of the camera crew’s attention: men and women occupying the pavement outside Kineton and Dacre College, standing silently behind large, wooden-framed placards which read, KINETON AND DACRE COLLEGE TENANTS’ (she noted the correct use of the apostrophe) RENT STRIKE. And, more emotive, 600 YEARS OF TRADITION UP FOR GRABS.
Damia would have been happier had her walk down Kybald Lane been accompanied by chanting from the strikers, but they had been silent as she advanced steadily towards them and angled her path to enter the college through the nearest archway. The strikers would not have guessed, from the calmness of her manner, that their hostile stares and silent stance raised atavistic hackles on the vulnerable nape of her neck as she turned her gaze away from them.
But she could not escape the camera crew. Possibly mistaking her for an undergraduate, they blocked her passage into Kineton and Dacre’s central yard and crowded around her with deft choreography. A microphone was thrust in her direction, its wielder asking whether she was aware of the underhand way in which the tenants — ‘these poor people’ — had been treated.
Her only answer was an arm uplifted, a palm raised to repel both questioners and their questions.
Edmund Norris, Regent Master of Kineton and Dacre College, found it considerably less easy to deflect Damia’s own questions.
‘I’m sorry that this has all blown up in your first week here, Damia, but the rent strike is the result of a breakdown in communication, that’s all. Once we sort out a few legal details, it’ll all blow over.’
‘What legal details?’
‘Honestly, Damia, you don’t need to get involved with this. It’s just —’
‘A little local difficulty?’
The Regent Master met her eye. Damia understood, both of them were feeling out the limits of their mutual comfort zone. But she could not afford a comfort zone, not yet.
‘Dr Norris —’
‘Edmund.’
‘Whatever. Edmund. If you’re going to keep me out of the loop, then I might just as well leave now. I’m not here to send out begging letters and make sure we’re fully booked with conferences and summer schools in the vacations. I thought we were agreed on that.’
He inclined his head, once, acknowledging the truth of this.
‘What we’ve agreed is a whole new twenty-first-century image for the college, and that little fiasco outside is absolutely not what we need. So, if you’d just fill me in on all the legal details we can talk about how we’re going to deal with it.’
The composure that she had maintained as Norris reluctantly but succinctly provided the background to the rent strike dropped away as Damia closed the door to her new office.
Stupid! she raged silently, leaning back against the door. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
How could a man as brilliant as Norris — a classical scholar of international reputation — allow himself to be so crassly ignorant of the group he was dealing with as to send out a standard letter to all college tenants; a letter which requested, politely, that they sign the enclosed form stating that the college had always been their landlord and that neither they nor — to the best of their knowledge — the tenants from whom they had bought or inherited their holdings had ever paid rent to any other person or body for the said holding? How could he do such a thing when a cursory glance at the tenant list would have shown him, approximately one third of the way down the page, one Robert Hadstowe, graduate of this very college?
Graduate in law.
Hadstowe had immediately inferred that the college was preparing to sell land but that — crucially — it did not possess the necessary documentation to prove title. The college authorities were, therefore, asking those who farmed its estates to prove it for them. He had immediately informed the other tenants of his suspicions and suggested that a rent strike would force Norris to the negotiating table. The silent vigil outside the college and the public embarrassment it was designed to cause was, obviously, the latest ratchet-notch of pressure.
‘Why aren’t you prepared to negotiate with them?’ Damia had asked.
Norris’s discomfort had told her, with uncomfortable clarity, that he was still far from convinced that she needed to be included in such decisions.
‘Edmund?’
‘We’ve put out an appeal to all traceable families of ex-Regent Masters for any documents relating to the college that they may still have in their possession.’
‘And you’re hoping that deeds or papers of endowment will turn up and make the statutory declarations you’ve asked the tenants to sign irrelevant?’
‘Yes.’
She would have preferred negotiation, but at least the position was clear.
Three
Salster, May 1385
Salster, four days’ ride from London. A small city when compared with the king’s capital but a thriving one. A city of monks and scholars, of religious houses and colleges. Built on flat land at the meeting of two rivers, Salster was surrounded by meadows as fertile as its merchant life.
As he rode in through the Pilgrim Gate, Simon of Kineton saw a city fattened on pilgrimage. From the sellers of pewter pilgrim badges and hawkers of trinkets to the smugly smiling keepers of the city’s inns, money was drawn from purse to coffer with the speed and sureness of a petty thief’s fingers. Simon, accustomed to brash and quick-tongued Londoners, was still amazed at the press of people suing for his attention and his money. With beggars imploring and ignored, sellers of everything from pies to ribbons crying their wares, and whores contracting ill-concealed business in narrow alleyways, he might as well have been walking through a preaching-friars’ play. The way of temptation — what vice, what beckoning sin will our pilgrim succumb to, what will empty his purse and fill him with shame? Covetousness, lechery, gluttony, self-love: all could be fed and satisfied here.
Looking about him, Simon’s London prejudices were astonished at what he saw. Surely Salster had more stone buildings than any city of its size had a right to? Sturdy three-storey rows from whose undercrofts spilled butchers, horn workers, leatherwrights, bakers, cutlers, silversmiths, candlestick makers, their doors thrown open to admit light and custom, the kennels at the sides of the street running with the offal and detritus of their trades. Proud churches, hardly two hundred yards apart, showed Salster’s antiquity — new towns, in Simon’s opinion, were no worse off with half as many. The defensive works which had brought Henry Ackland to Salster loomed massive and rawly new above the city, encasing it in stone armour, reinforcing the swagger of merchants’ houses that stood everywhere, newly built and still a-building.
Simon was so accustomed to the freedom of his own building sites that at first he did not see the scowls directed at his appraising stare by working masons. Finally sensing their resentment, he realised that, dressed in good clothes without a trace of masonry dust upon them, with nothing more hanging from his belt than his wallet and knife, he was anonymous. He was just one more pilgrim, gawping through the city.
Tearing his eyes away from masons at their work, he let his feet be drawn, like those of every other visitor, towards the priory’s cathedral church, resting place of the bones of Dernstan, Saxon saint and miracle-worker.
The church, as ever in its five-hundred-year history, was in the process of improvement. Robert Copley, bishop of Salster, whose ambition and worldliness were notorious even to Simon, was determined that his cathedral church should overtop any in England. To that end he had managed to procure the services of Henry Yevele, the king’s indispensable chief architect, a man of genius and some irascibility.
As he stepped into the priory’s precincts, Simon’s eyes fell upon the great church’s new nave, of which as yet only the outer walls were raised. Through the network of scaffolding he could see the Normandy stone shining white in the sunshine. In his mind’s eye he saw how the walls would look when stripped bare of walkways, how they would rise from their surroundings, towering to an immense height. A creator to his fingertips, Simon exulted in a work of such genius.
Stretching long and clean from the older eastern apse, barely interrupted by the slenderest of buttresses, the walls opened, like parchment spreading its fine paleness around a jewel of illumination, into windows whose sheer area — as yet unglassed — astonished Simon. Gazing at their half-hidden beauty, he felt a surge of joy as he saw how the nave would be flooded with light for the laity who stood listening as the monks sang the Opus Dei.
No longer confined between massive, barely windowed walls and bulky piers, no longer oppressed by domed, overarching roofs that bore down upon the supplicant soul, the laity would be raised up into a light-filled prefiguration of the presence of God, their eyes and their souls led towards heaven by the vaults that genius had placed so high and sunlit above them.
Transfixed, he watched the masons and their labourers in their purposeful comings and goings, saw the apprentices running here and there with sharpened tools, staggering to barrow large stones newly squared on the workbench. The foreman strode about marking stones with his inspection-mark and issuing orders with the air of one to whom authority comes easily. Simon looked about, but could not identify who might be the site-master. With Yevele away so much on the king’s commissions, there must be a master mason on site, someone to whom he entrusted the day-to-day execution of his plans.
Suddenly, Simon saw him. Tall and full-bearded like Simon himself, he was easily distinguishable from masons of lesser caste. Unlike those who surrounded him on the building works he wore no cap or coif and his hair was long and curling. Feeling Simon’s gaze, he looked around and Simon turned away before he could be recognised. He knew the mason: Hugh of Lewes. So Hugh was finally back from his dallying over the king’s business and goodness knows what else in France. Simon was intrigued to find him here. He was no great lover of churchmen and Simon had heard that he had fallen out with more than one French prelate. Still, men would swallow much to work with Yevele.
Simon turned away from the building work, running his fingers through his own uncapped hair. It might not be as luxuriant as that of Hugh of Lewes, but he was not an old man yet, and if he had his way, he would build something that would rival this nave.
On meeting Richard Daker, Henry’s keenness that Simon should build for him was explained; Henry had never altogether sloughed off his beggar-boy veneration of riches and nobility.
Standing half a hand taller than Simon, Daker was a man of olive complexion and a graceful, courteous manner that marked him — to Simon at least — as a man of the South, where the sea’s waters were the fabled warm blue of the Mediterranean. But his clothes were of fine English cloth and, though generously cut, Simon saw that they were the practical clothes of a man who disdains going about his affairs in court fashions that fit him for nothing but holding their trails out of the mud.
Having seen his guest seated and provided with wine and sweet cakes, Daker spoke directly.
‘Your drawings astonished me, Master Kineton. I knew from Henry Ackland that you had waited a long time to build something of significance, but even Henry — who gives you out as one of the finest masons in England — did not prepare me for what I saw in your drawings.’
His elbow on the arm of his chair, his fist supported his chin as he appraised Simon. His eyes, Simon noticed, were a deep twilight blue, quite at odds with his southern complexion.
‘Where have you travelled to see buildings like that?’
‘I have not travelled outside England,’ Simon began, slowly.
Daker raised a dark brow. ‘Then you’re rarer than even Henry was prepared to paint you. Unless they have seen wonders, the masons of my experience are content to build much as has been done before.’
‘That’s the way we do things,’ Simon replied, baldly. ‘In building you cannot afford to do anything too different — it might not stand. You have to build on what has already been done.’
‘But your drawings —’ Daker picked up a sheaf of papers from the floor next to his chair and waved them at Simon, who recognised his work — ‘they surely do not do that — they are completely new?’
‘No. They merely use old techniques in a new way —’
‘But this octagonal hall?’
‘Have you not been to Ely, Master Daker? Not seen the octagonal lantern tower of the cathedral church?’
Daker shook his head, and Simon had to remind himself that a craftsman’s marvel in his own profession might very well go unremarked by others.
‘There is nothing new here but the use to which each element has been put,’ he said carefully.
Daker gazed at him with penetrating eyes. Simon could feel himself being willed to say more, to state some sort of case.
‘Master Ackland maintains that your skill has not been given ample scope,’ Daker said suddenly. ‘Why have you been denied royal employment all these years, Master Kineton? You were once a King’s Mason, were you not?’
If he had expected prevarication and resentment, Daker was disappointed; this was a speech Simon had come prepared to make.
‘I am an independent man, Master Daker, I bow to no one in the matter of how a building should be constructed, not even my patron. Once he has seen my drawings and commissioned me, he must let me be. Even if he is the king.’
‘But it was your father’s similar opinions, was it not, which caused you both to be forbidden the style of King’s Mason? And by the old king, not the new?’
Simon set his jaw, feeling his face flame with remembered shame under his beard. So, Daker would play cat and mouse with him. If he had already heard the tale from Henry, why tease after it again?
‘My father was punished for not knowing the ways of courtiers,’ he said bluntly. ‘He did not understand that when the king expressed the opinion that a building should be built according to his whim and not in accordance with principles that would keep it standing, its builder should say, “Excellent, your Majesty,” and yet go on as before, once the king was gone. My father did him the courtesy of explaining why it was not possible to build as he had suggested.’
‘Upon which the king sought a second opinion, and asked you?’
If you know, why ask? ‘Yes.’
‘And you agreed with your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Simon kneaded the flesh of his face with the blunt fingers of one hand, easing away the unaccustomed wariness of his expression.
He saw the scene again, details fixed vividly in his mind down twenty years: the disputed building, the shape of the towers which had cost him so dear, the burst blood vessels beneath the crimson of the old king’s face as he stood to be instructed in building technique. Simon felt his blood surging hot and angry through him, rage shaking in the hands that held his wine cup. Twenty years was a long time measured on the scale of a man’s life; measured on the rule of his journey towards forgiveness they were no more than the blink of an eye.
Why?
Because the king’s simple question to him — ‘And is this your opinion, also?’ — had been a command: ‘Take the shame of correction from me, or risk a king’s displeasure.’ Simon had been his father’s apprentice and his journeyman; he was at that moment a fellow master, but he was first his son. No man should try to wrest a son’s loyalty from his father.
‘Yes, my liege,’ he had said, ‘it is also my opinion.’
If he had been more conciliatory, honeyed his defiance a little with ‘Your Majesty’ and ‘I regret’, perhaps things would have been different. If he had not looked the king boldly in the eye as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, would he have been asked to design for the king, given licence to use the combination of knowledge and imagination which had produced the sketches so recently scattered about his desk in the lodge?
His mind shrugged off such profitless questions. No matter how he had champed at his enforced littleness for twenty years and more, he did not regret his loyalty.
Simon looked away from the dead king into Daker’s eyes. ‘If his patron had been any other man,’ he said slowly, ‘my father would simply have told him that what he proposed was not possible. But for the king, he took time, explained why it could not be so, explained something of our craft to him.’ He hesitated fractionally. ‘The king did not understand the courtesy my father did him.’
