Testament, p.22
Testament, page 22
Edwin Gore strode amongst the piles of stone and hammering masons, signing stones with his inspection-mark. Simon had never liked his foreman, though he respected his skills and his knowledge of the masons who worked under him. He had no firm evidence that Edwin, like other masters, had joined with the rioting journeymen and apprentices, but he had made his own judgement. Edwin Gore was the one man who could have stopped the riot, and since it was inconceivable that he had not known of it, his failure to act condemned him.
His eyes met Simon’s and then slid away, his head inclining just enough to indicate the required respect.
As they moved on, Simon saw John draw aside to watch one of the masons at work. In response to the brightness of the day, many of the hewers had abandoned the lodge and carried bankers and stones outside. Little as he cared for them, when petitioned Simon had to agree that it was good for his masons to breathe in as little dust as possible and that dust hung less thickly in the stirring air outside than it did in the enclosed gloom of the lodge.
The young apprentice whom John stood next to was plainly unnerved by the presence of his patron’s son. His mallet and drag hung useless in his hands as he twitched and stammered answers to the boy’s questions.
John turned and called to Simon.
‘Master Daker, might I try my hand at this?’
‘At cutting stone?’ The boy was asking to do an apprentice’s task. It was inconceivable and yet … John was Daker’s son.
‘Walter,’ Simon said, striding up to the stammering young mason, Anne and Ralph following his sudden turn. ‘Go and fetch Master John a piece of stone, so that he may try himself.’
Walter looked at Simon uncomprehendingly. Only masons were allowed to cut stone, everybody knew that. How then could this boy be invited to do so?
‘Only a piece of spall, Walter, or a marred stone if there is any such in our lodge.’ Simon tried in vain to wring a smile out of Walter’s confusion. ‘Just for him to get the feel of the tools, nothing more.’
As Walter hurried off to do his master’s bidding, Simon turned to explain how stone was worked from rough-cut block to smooth-faced ashlar.
‘The stone is finished with a drag,’ he concluded, holding up the wide tool with its many teeth. ‘It’s used like this.’ He moved it in half-circles over an imaginary block of stone. ‘It smooths out the groove-marks of the claw-tool.’ Ralph and Anne nodded slightly, mildly interested, but John took the tool from him and examined it minutely.
‘Does it not get worn down from so much work with the stone?’
‘Of course. That’s why we have a smith here. He makes tools, mends them and also sharpens them.’
At the edge of the site, Simon saw the familiar, halting movement of Toby in his frame. With Gwyneth a little way behind him, the boy was coming to find his father. The masons on the site still regarded Toby with wariness and suspicion, and Simon had developed the habit of hailing his son as he came into view in order to signal his presence. Toby was delighted that his father should greet him so publicly, and the masons, though they would still prefer not to have had him on the building site at all, were happier in the knowledge that his disturbing presence was unlikely to come upon them unawares.
‘And what of these grooves here?’ John asked, just as Simon had his mouth open to shout a greeting.
The youth had turned the block on to its back and was running his fingers along the joggles in the sides. Simon turned back to him, satisfied as he heard Gwyneth’s carefully considered cry of, ‘Master Mason, here is your son.’
‘They are to carry the grout-mortar which binds each stone to the one on either side,’ he said, slightly distracted by Toby’s progress towards him. ‘In ashlar facing, the blocks are so precisely cut that a man’s eye can hardly see the gap that is left between them, so we must cut a gap for the mortar to sit in.’
John nodded. ‘And the gap where one stone sits upon another? Are they not so narrow?’
Simon smiled. ‘They are, yes. Less than the eighth part of an inch wide. So we use putty mortar — mortar made just from slaked lime with no sand in it. A thin layer is better than a thick one — limestone mortar dries and sets very slowly and a thick layer would make the wall unstable.’
‘What is slaked lime?’ John Daker displayed no resentment at not understanding Simon’s words, just simple curiosity.
Simon shook his head slightly. He was so used to the techniques of his trade that he forgot others did not know lime from sand. He turned to face east and pointed. ‘Do you see over there, on the bank of the river, great piles of pale rock?’
John nodded. ‘Yes, I know that’s limestone and I know that there are kilns there where the stone is burnt.’
‘Yes. That burnt limestone is quicklime.’
Behind them, Ralph and Anne had begun a murmured conversation. Walter, returning from the lodge with a hod-full of spall on his shoulder for Simon to choose from, stood awaiting instruction.
‘Quicklime is a treacherous matter,’ Simon continued, ignoring both the whisperers and Walter. ‘If it should come into contact with water, or any dampness, it will blow, producing an issue of heat. Sometimes it sets fire around it. So it must be transported carefully. They bring it here and we slake it ready to make into mortar.’
‘Can I see?’
Simon hesitated, looking out of the corner of his eye at Toby.
‘Very well. I will show you.’
He guided the boy over to the edge of the site, where the lime was slaked in tubs and then ladled out into pans to cool and to allow any unslaked lumps to blow. As they moved towards the cooling pits, Toby, seeing the direction his father was taking, changed tack and began pushing his frame along vigorously to meet him at the slaking tubs. Simon watched his son, noticing how, in the support of the frame, his movements were freer, less jerky. Toby gripped his hand-loops as if they, too, supported him, and now, with his back braced, he was able to move his legs in a jerky, jarring walk, pushing his cage along on its runners.
Simon was dimly aware that Ralph and Anne had not followed him towards the tubs but stood in the shade of the walls. Walter trailed in his master’s wake, waiting to be told how he should deal with the hod of stone on his shoulder. Simon was irritated — could the boy not see that he would do better to wait at the banker until John had been shown the slaking?
The man at the tubs, a day-labourer Simon did not recognise, had not heard them coming. His stooped shoulders moved rhythmically as he stirred the water in which the limestone bubbled and steamed, and as they approached he bent to pick up another shovelful of lime which he slid carefully into the tub.
Toby was labouring in his frame, his face writhing as he fought to be at the tubs before his father. Imperceptibly, Simon slowed his progress and John, slightly behind him, followed suit.
At that moment, the stoop-shouldered labourer, turning slightly in his stirring, caught sight of Toby’s gurning form lunging towards him, mouth agape and unpatched eye rolling. Startled and terrified at this ghastly approach, the man swung around as if to flee, his stirring-ladle still in his hand. As he twisted, the ladle flung outwards, its steaming contents slashing through the air and catching John Daker full in the eyes. The boy screamed and staggered backwards, almost falling as his feet scrabbled on the stone-strewn ground. Walter, whose pace had not slowed with Simon’s, was hard upon his heels and John, in his screaming agony, crashed into him, forcing the breath from his body. Walter gasped and doubled over, knocking John to the ground. As he fell, the hod full of stone on Walter’s shoulder tumbled forward. Abruptly, John’s screams were silenced.
For a moment, horror held each person in its grip. Then, into the absolute quiet that follows upon disaster’s heels, came the sound of Gwyneth running towards Toby.
Her action stirred Simon from his disbelief. He knelt and laid hands on the block of stone that lay across one side of John’s head. He pulled it away and, seeing what lay beneath, he retched. The left side of the boy’s head, from temple to crown, had been driven inwards. Blood, mixed with shattered shards of bone and a greyish pulpy mass, was too much for Simon’s stomach.
Gwyneth, leaving a confused and mewing Toby, knelt next to John’s head and put her fingers to his throat. She moved them around, pushed and probed and then put the flat of her palm upon his breast. Finally, she wet the back of her hand with her tongue and put it under the boy’s nose. She left it there for half a minute or more and then withdrew it, wiping the moisture away with the palm of her other hand.
Still looking only at John, she reached up and took the linen covering from her head. Unwinding it and stretching it into some semblance of smoothness, she laid it gently over the ruin of the boy’s head, covering his forehead.
Standing, she looked down at Simon and held out her hand. He did not take it but rose, clumsily, to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘He is not dead, Simon. His heart is still beating.’
Simon was appalled. He had been convinced that such injuries must result in immediate death. He gazed at John’s head, at the blood which was seeping slowly into the reforming folds of Gwyneth’s coif.
‘Dear God,’ he said softly, ‘what are we to do?’
‘We cannot leave him here. We must take him to Daker’s house.’
Where he can die decently, in peace. It hung, unspoken between them. Simon looked at his wife, knew she was remembering Alysoun’s father and his agonizing death on a beaten-earth floor. But this death would have no happy issue. There would be no child to be taken in, no mother-love to be satisfied. This death — for Simon did not fool himself for a moment that John would live, with injuries such as these — this death would bring with it only anger, and pain and loss.
Thirty-four
‘Bob?’ Damia leaned on the door jamb and swung her head and shoulders around the doorway to the porter’s lodge to see Bob sitting in front of the computer. ‘I’m just going out. If anybody wants me, I’m in a meeting with the archivist up at the cathedral.’
As Damia threaded her way between camera-toting tourists on Lady’s Walk and hurried along the busy streets towards the city centre and the cathedral she brooded over Neil’s words on the phone.
‘Damia, you’re not going to believe this — you know the so-called murder scene in the wall painting?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know what happened — it’s in the prior’s letters. It wasn’t a murder, it was an accident. And another thing — I don’t know who your boy statue is but it’s not Tobias Kineton — it can’t be.’
He had refused to tell her any more on the phone, insisting that she come to the cathedral so that he could show her the letter in which he had made his startling discovery.
Hurrying up Prince Edward Street, she glanced in through the huge college gate. The low winter sun shone on pale limestone buildings, making the walls glow almost with the intensity of the gilding on the clocktower’s finials opposite the main entrance. The grass of the quad was an even green that spoke of obsessive tending and a prohibitive attitude towards shortcuts across it. Beautiful, but in Damia’s view cold, without the intimacy and architectural uniqueness of Toby.
Dodging through a party of French schoolchildren, she slipped down Mint Lane and into the cathedral close, skirting around Henry Yevele’s extraordinary nave to the north cloisters on which the door to Neil’s dark office stood.
‘A cripple,’ she repeated.
‘Yeah, OK, not very PC. But that’s the literal translation of the Prior’s Latin — the Kinetons’ accursed cripple.’
‘Cursed?’
‘That’s William’s explanation for how John Dacre’s death came about. Not a simple accident like you got all the time on medieval building sites but something sinister brought about by malign forces.’
‘Does he say exactly what happened?’
‘That “the Kineton cripple” “caused” a hod-load of stone to be dropped on to John Dacre’s head.’
Exactly as shown in the ‘murder’ oval.
‘What does it mean, “caused”?’ Damia asked.
‘No explanation given.’ Neil scanned the text before him, his finger finally hovering over the appropriate phrase. ‘No, just that. Caused a load — actually the Latin word he uses is “bundle” but I’m guessing his Latin was just crap — a load of stone to fall on the head of John Dacre from a builder’s hod.’ He looked up, a small grin of derision creasing his cheek. ‘William didn’t have a Latin word for hod, so he just Latinises the English word.’
But Damia barely heard him. All she could hear were his words to her on the phone.
Whoever the statue is, it isn’t Tobias Kineton.
A small portion of Damia’s conscious mind guided her back through the streets and traffic of Salster to Toby while the greater part focused on the implications of what Neil had told her. If the statue was not Tobias, then who was it? And why would the college, for so long, have been known as Toby?
Neil felt it was unlikely that the statue was a tribute to John Dacre, as the prior’s letter referred to him as a ‘young man’ not a boy, whereas the statue was obviously the figure of a pre-pubescent child.
A representation of youth and innocence? Unlikely, given the medieval mindset.
And what was he looking at?
If he was peering over the Octo at the sinner in his cage, how did the sinner fit into this new scenario in which Toby Kineton — and not some Everyman sinner — was responsible for the specific death of John Dacre?
Toby Kineton. The Kinetons’ cripple. Accursed cripple.
Tiny Tim Cratchit with his angelic attitude and his pathetic little crutch; Indian beggars dragging withered legs; double amputees with high-tech wheelchairs. What kind of cripple was Tobias Kineton? Born or made?
If he had ‘caused’ a death, then, he was not likely to be sitting in a corner by the fire unable to move. Crutches, then?
Dating on the letter made calculations easy; at the time of John Dacre’s death, Tobias would have been eight years old. How, she asked herself, does a disabled eight-year-old cause somebody’s death?
‘Ms Miller. Ms Miller!’
Damia swerved towards the Octo in response to Bob’s call from the lodge.
‘Hi Bob, what’s up?’
‘There was a telephone call for you. About Jack Robinson.’
Damia took the vivid yellow message sheet and made her way to her office, reading as she went. The rush of excitement she had felt at Bob’s words turned to sick disappointment; Jack Robinson, it told her, had died in the late seventies. But, the message went on, he had had a daughter.
Annoyingly, the message leaver had no contact details for her and had declined to leave their own.
‘How are you going to find her?’ Neil asked, sipping at his pint. They had agreed to meet in the Unicorn, halfway between the cathedral and Toby, after work.
‘Don’t know yet. I’ll give it a week, see if anything else turns up. If it doesn’t, I’ll think of something.’
Neil let the subject drop and they drank in silence, surrounded by the forced garrulousness of after-work drinkers.
‘How’s your wine?’
‘It’s quite nice, actually, thanks.’ She caught his eye and, feeling a flare of their old intimacy, said ruefully, ‘It’s my only drug these days.’
His smile transformed his face; the calm, responsible cathedral functionary slipped away and in his place beamed the ardent, intense boy she had supposed herself in love with half a lifetime ago.
‘What kind of cripple do you think Tobias Kineton was?’ Damia asked abruptly, before he could speak.
Neil blinked ostentatiously and shook his head, pantomiming sudden confusion as he swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘What?’
‘Crippled. What does it mean?’
‘Shit, Mia, I don’t know!’
Damia took another sip from her glass, her hand slightly unsteady. ‘Must have felt like God was against them,’ she said, her eyes on his shirt collar, which was half in and half out of the crew-neck of his sweater, ‘waiting all that time for a child and then…’
She could feel Neil’s eyes on her as he grunted an agreement.
Twenty years! Twenty years ago — no, she corrected herself, twenty-two years ago — she had had a family; her father had not yet succumbed to heartbroken addiction, her mother had not rounded the fatal bend too fast for the failing brakes of the old bus, and Jimi…
‘Did you know Dad had to switch off the life-support machine on Jimi?’ she asked, almost conversationally.
This time, if Neil was thrown by the sudden dramatic dog-leg in her thoughts, he did not let it show. ‘Wow. No, I didn’t.’
She looked up, met his eyes. ‘After he’d been in intensive care for a week, the doctors told Dad he wasn’t going to recover, that the damage to his brain was too massive. They could keep him alive on the machine but he’d never be anything but an unresponsive lump.’
‘They didn’t —’ Neil began to protest at the harsh words but Damia interrupted.
‘No, of course they didn’t use those actual words, but it’s what they meant.’
‘And they made your dad…’
She took another gulp of wine, not tasting it, seeing again the face of her father, his dirty blond dreadlocks framing the ravages of grief and sleep deprivation. ‘No, they didn’t make him, it was his choice.’
Tony had not told her the truth at the time, simply coming home from the hospital and announcing, starkly, that her brother was dead. It had been as if something in her father had also died, some vital spark gone out of him. And it had never returned: he had passed the remainder of his life without any kind of animation.
