The message ended abruptly. Damia sat motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen, her heart thumping. With trembling fingers, she moved the mouse and reread the email, including Peter Defries’s introduction.

  Despite his suggestion, it seemed unlikely that the police would take an interest.

  Not knowing what else to do, Damia quickly printed the message and left her office.

  Finding that Ed Norris was scheduled to be out all morning, Damia had a brief conversation with his secretary about storage of email addresses and then went in search of Jason, the college’s IT technician.

  After an instructive thirty minutes, she made her way to the Great Hall, hoping that a change of scene would inspire a new train of thought.

  As she entered the hall, the gloom of a damp cloudy day was dispelled by the conservators’ working lights and Damia was immediately surrounded by vividly contrasting patches of brightness and shade. The unhurried work of the conservators, whose small movements barely disturbed the resonant silence, soothed her and she came to rest on a bench facing the ovals on the south-western wall.

  As she gazed at the mother and child, cocooned in their mutual adoration, the image came into Damia’s mind of a recently glimpsed print in a photographer’s studio window: a woman holding her small, naked child to her own unclothed body. The black and white photography and entwined limbs of mother and child had made it difficult, at first glance, to tell where baby ended and woman began. Their gaze, intense, unsmiling, had further reinforced the impression that each was equally unsure of the boundaries that separated them. In the indefinable way such impressions are created, Damia had known that the baby was a girl. Mother and daughter, unsmiling, rapt. Oblivious to all but each other.

  Now, with an eye trained by Catz to see intention as well as execution, Damia noted that the white-swaddled bundle clasped to the breast of the woman’s green kirtle found an echo in the white covering of her bent head. If the upper lines of the woman’s coif and the lower edge of the baby’s swaddlings had been extended to the point where they met, the shape formed would have been an ellipse, encircling mother and child in a visual unity.

  Damia’s eyes flicked back to the mason and the grotesquely emerging infant. Even without embracing Neil’s interpretation of the wall painting, these two ovals clearly represented two ways of looking at the same reality: the horror, pain and danger of birth coupled with the deceptive serenity of new motherhood.

  There were always two ways of looking at life, she reflected; sometimes simultaneously, sometimes consecutively. Orthodox Catholicism and Lollardy. Old beliefs, new ways of thinking. A time to weep and a time to laugh…

  Damia believed that now was a time to fight; Charles Northrop believed that it was a time to capitulate, to bow to the inevitable and make the best of it.

  Her eyes fell on the printout she was still carrying.

  Was Northrop behind this?

  She looked again at point two. Ms Damia Miller, new Marketing and Development Manager at the college, has stated that the appeal which funded the building of the accommodation block was incompetently managed. Only the people who had been on her interview panel were privy to that information. Either one of those four people — Ed Norris, Lesley Cochrane, Charles Northrop and the bursar Keith McKie — had sent this email or they had passed the information on. Northrop. It had to be him. Was he working with Baird? Or even Robert Hadstowe?

  She sprang up from the bench and marched over to the next pair of ovals. Her mind tangled with doubt and suspicion, she stared at the small, prostrate figure. The poor creature was being poked and goaded by demons whose lack of humanity was somehow emphasised by their grotesquely enlarged human features — teeth, hands and eyes were all of unnatural size. Like Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf-granny, these demons were superficially human and fundamentally beastly.

  Robert Hadstowe. Charles Northrop. Ian Baird. Was one of them trying to sabotage the ‘By, For and With’ campaign?

  ‘Fascinating, that one, isn’t it?’

  Damia looked up, startled, at the conservator’s approach. He clearly thought she had been absorbed in the wall painting.

  ‘Have you made any headway on finding the statue that might correspond to this one?’ He nodded at the prisoner in his cage.

  She shook her head. The putative ‘other Toby statue’ was something she had allowed to slide into the mental undergrowth.

  ‘If it ever turns up, I’d be fascinated to see if the construction of this so-called cage is the same,’ he said, eye-pointing at the prisoner.

  ‘Is it particularly unusual?’

  ‘Well, it’s not common to see a cage made out of wood, that’s all. If it’s supposed to be a metaphor, you’d expect the cage to be the strongest it could be, wouldn’t you? Heavy. Iron.’

  Damia turned to look at the prisoner’s cage. To her untutored eye it looked like the gibbet-cages in which the bodies of hanged men had been left on public display. Birdcage-shaped, its vertical bars converged at the top while its round cross section was made up of horizontal meridian-bars. But, unlike the cages in which felons were displayed, the Sin Cycle’s cage did not enclose the prisoner completely; his head rose free from its confinement, the cage apparently hanging from his shoulders.

  And she had to agree with the conservator — the bars of the cage were plainly not heavy, they were light and slender, though she had assumed that their dark brown colour was meant to imply aged metal.

  ‘How do you know it’s supposed to be wood?’

  The conservator stepped toward the oval. ‘These joints,’ he said, his finger extended explicitly but stopping short of the pristine surface of the newly restored painting. ‘They’re woodworking joints. In fact, they’re pretty heavy-duty woodworking joints, the kind you’d use if you wanted something to endure a lot of stresses and strains, rather than just looking good.’

  ‘OK,’ she said slowly, ‘so … what’s going on here — why wood?’

  The conservator rubbed his chin with his knuckles. ‘Well, these wall painters just painted what they knew. They had a message in mind and the pictures reflected that, but they only had their own experience to go on. If this guy had more experience of woodworking than metalworking, then it’s possible he just went right ahead and used what he knew.’

  Damia looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘But you don’t think so?’

  He coloured slightly, embarrassed at being read so easily. ‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t ring quite true, no.’

  Damia looked back at the oval with its struggling figure straining within the cage, the outstretched hands of the damp-obliterated figure reaching towards him.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but it does strike me as strange that this cage stops at his shoulders — wouldn’t it be more effective if he was peering out between the bars?’

  ‘The spirit willing but the flesh weak?’ she said, quoting an interpretation suggested to her by one of his colleagues.

  He nodded with more encouragement than conviction. ‘Maybe. But I really would like to see that statue.’

  ‘Listening to myself say all this makes it sound fantastically lurid,’ Damia admitted to Norris after he had read Peter Defries’s forwarded email and listened in calm silence to her suspicions.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied steadily, ‘but, lurid or not, someone did send this email to our alumni. And they didn’t do it to support “By, For and With”.’

  Much as Damia would have liked Norris to rant, rave and tear his hair in outrage, his measured words were, on the whole, a greater reassurance of her own sanity.

  ‘I need to make something clear,’ he said, leaning both his hands on the back of the chair that stood between them.

  Damia stared at him, alarmed at the sudden change in his tone.

  ‘This accusation that I sold documents. It’s true. No —’ he raised a hand to ward off her horror — ‘not the proof of age. What this anonymous person calls “unspecified other documents”. The cathedral archivist agreed to allow it to remain undisclosed at my request. Nobody, apart from he and I, knew about the additional find.’

  ‘Neil Gordon knew all about it?’

  Norris’s eyes narrowed at the accusation in her voice. ‘It was he who removed the documents from the statue. Yes.’

  Damia’s sense of betrayal at Neil’s failure to tell her about the other document was tempered by a certain admiration for his refusal to buy his way into her good graces.

  ‘So what was it?’

  Norris was silent for a beat, then he looked up to meet her eyes. ‘If I tell you, it must go no further, Damia.’

  Damia nodded, not breaking eye contact.

  ‘Very well. It was a crudely executed copy of a few pages of what we now know as Wyclif’s English New Testament.’

  Damia just looked at him, her mind a barging crowd of half-formed expressions of disbelief. ‘But … didn’t you … I mean — Edmund — that could have provided a revenue stream for us for years!’

  ‘It still will. I’ve agreed with the buyer that we won’t release the document to him until we’ve had an ultra-high resolution facsimile made.’

  ‘So we can use it, make it part of the exhibition on the wall painting?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  Damia could not begin to express what she felt. Proof, almost 100 per cent positive proof, that Simon of Kineton had shared his patron’s Lollard beliefs. Part of the Kinetons’ story. Gone.

  ‘Just so that you don’t think I went against the CAP committee’s recommendations entirely,’ Norris went on, ‘I did get Sotheby’s to value the Wyclif fragment, along with the proof of age. I made an appointment on the day of the CAP committee meeting, as we had agreed, and went down to London early in the New Year.’

  ‘And they put you in touch with somebody there and then who they knew would want it?’

  ‘No. Actually, we went through what I presume is the usual process. At the end they told me what they would suggest as a reserve, were we to allow them to handle the sale, and we agreed that once I’d spoken to the governing body we would schedule it for auction. The Wyclif, that is. I’d already decided on the basis of its likely value that we should keep the proof of age in college.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘That evening I received a phone call from a person claiming to act for someone he would only identify as “a noted collector of medieval biblical texts”. This agent said that he understood that a fragment of Wyclif’s New Testament was for sale and that his client would like to buy it. Privately. Without waiting for it to go to auction. He said his client would pay twice the Sotheby’s valuation figure, but only if I would agree — there and then — to sell the Wyclif fragment to him.’

  ‘What? And he was going to send round one of his men with a violin case in one hand and a briefcase full of money in the other?’

  ‘Nothing so melodramatic!’ Norris smiled, his eyes still wary. ‘He told me that his client was a well-known collector and that if the manuscript were to be auctioned, everyone would know that it was he who had bought it and he would come under constant pressure from other collectors to sell and from museums and collections to lend the piece. A private sale would avoid all of that and he was willing to pay for his anonymity. The agent made it clear that his client would want there to be no public announcement that the manuscript had come to light, much less that it was he who had bought it.’

  Damia acknowledged that this seemed plausible. ‘So somebody at Sotheby’s tipped him off?’

  ‘That’s what I assume.’

  ‘So who tipped off whoever sent that?’ Damia nodded at the email printout on Norris’s desk.

  Norris drew in a long breath. ‘I obviously explained my actions to the governing body as soon as I was able,’ he said, uncomfortably.

  ‘It all comes back to Northrop,’ Damia said, almost unable to believe that it could really be so. ‘Baird and Northrop.’

  Norris nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Thirty-one

  Salster, late summer 1389

  Dew-fall signals an end to the day’s labour for both masons and harvesters and a weary, stiff-backed draggle makes its way in through Salster’s east gate as dusk deepens. But some mason-harvesters are already within the city walls, summoned by rumour and outrage. Sickles thrown down, they are undoing the work that a cloudless day has seen others do. Stones are pulled from their courses and flung aside, mortar barrows upended, tools pulled from the safety of the lodge and scattered around the college site.

  The setting sun, low behind the surrounding buildings, casts dark and towering shadows over the wreckers, touching them with the edge of night’s concealment. A chill settles over the ravaged site as not just today’s labours but those of many precious dry days past are undone. Stones begin to build haphazard heaps where half an hour before saw them laid with plumb-line precision one upon another, the mortar-gaps between barely visible. Now, scattered on their sides and ends, the chiselled grooves that channel binding mortar are gashed open again and a thin limestone mud drips on to the ground, hardening the rutted dust into sharp peaks.

  ‘No! NO! Stop! I command you to stop!’

  Simon’s enraged bellows brought nothing from the rioting masons but black looks and a hail of still-wet mortar flung at him. Even as he laid about him with a pickaxe handle, reckless of his own safety, Simon knew his cause was useless. His own masons, the only men likely to listen to his yelled commands, were whipped up into a frenzy of righteous anger before ever they set foot on the site. Men Simon did not know had come twenty, thirty minutes ago, with sticks and staves in their angry fists, demanding not an explanation but retribution.

  ‘You shall not put hewers to setters’ work again,’ one of them shouted, pushing Simon from his path and setting to on the day’s building. ‘You presume too much, Master Mason. You are not God to give work ordained for one man to another.’

  ‘Setters may not do hewers’ work,’ another spat while his comrades began their work of destruction, ‘so why do you think you can put hewers to setting?’

  Simon flung himself, spread-eagled, against a wall. ‘You shall not do this! Leave this place! God damn you to hell — go!’

  The men he cursed barely hesitated before laying hands on him and dragging him aside, pushing him into the dust. One thickset fellow held him there, a boot in the middle of Simon’s chest. ‘Bide still, Master Mason and you will not be hurt.’ He had the calm of one who has been assured that his act is just, that this act of retribution will not be quashed by those with power to do so.

  But Simon was beyond either fear or reason and struggled to throw the man off-balance and get to his feet. His captor lurched backwards but retained his balance and, coming forward, dealt Simon a blow over the head that felled him on the spot.

  More and more men poured on to the site, oblivious of the senseless master mason; men with mayhem and blood-lust in their eyes and alehouse breath. Men who looked wildly about them, not knowing what to do but full of a will for destruction. These were not masons but men who could be relied upon to join any fray which offered itself, so long as somebody made it worth their while. Add a palm-greased raggle-taggle to masons whose pride was easily worked upon, and a vengeful mob was the work of moments.

  And now Simon’s own masons, the journeymen who had set these courses, the apprentices who had barrowed the mortar and carried the stone, were flocking from the stubbled fields to cut down walls and stook the stones in hammer-smashed heaps.

  The work of years, his masterwork, his long-awaited chance to prove his worth, fell before the wrath of men who, until today, had been his to command. Against sense, against reason, against Gwyneth’s express advice, he had gone his own way. He had not been able to bear to see such perfect building weather squandered for lack of men to set stone.

  Thwarted and humiliated by Brygge and the masons’ council, Simon had blinkered himself to the likely consequences and chosen to believe that as the college’s master mason he could do as he wished on his own site.

  Someone had taken the opportunity he had thus afforded them to show him how wrong he was.

  Richard Daker came, swift upon the heels of disaster, to remedy what could be remedied and to make the best of what remained. Upon the firm conviction being expressed by both Simon and Piers Mottis that the prior had had a hand in instigating the riot, Daker swiftly calculated ways in which his ultimate purpose would best be served and announced that he would make a gift of the land upon which the college stood to the Church and build, instead, outside the city walls.

  Simon was outraged. ‘We fought for that land and won in court! And now you give it to the Church without so much as a murmur when they have been coiled in the whole destruction of my work?’

  ‘You said it yourself, man,’ Daker rejoined. ‘They have destroyed your work. And if we continue to build under the prior’s eyes, the work may be destroyed again. But allow his pride to swell with this victory, allow him to take this gift and present it to Copley, and we may be out of sight and out of mind on the other side of the city wall.’

  ‘And we may very well be in sight of the French when they come marauding up the river and sack the place!’

  Daker laughed and laid a hand on Simon’s shoulder. ‘You are so English, my Simon! Never let it be a sunny day if there is so much as one small cloud in the sky!’

  Simon made an irritable gesture. ‘It sticks in my craw to give in to the bishop.’

  ‘But we are not giving in. We are giving him a bribe to forget us. We have challenged him too closely and he has warned us off. If we stick out our chins and defy him, we may fail altogether. If we turn aside, and sail a different tack, we may still arrive at our destination.’ His dark blue eyes held Simon in a powerful gaze. ‘And my destination is a college which is free of Church interference. I may do that better outside the walls than in, I suspect.’

  Simon fretted still. ‘But the rents from the shops where you wish to build were what supported the works. What will support it when the shops are gone?’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42