Sarum (88 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“You like the building?”
An elderly man with a broad, receding forehead and a hooked nose was standing there, gazing down at him curiously. Osmund wondered who he was.
“It’s so,” he hesitated: “so simple,” he said honestly.
To his surprise, the old man smiled.
“The best things always are. You see those windows: note how there is an absence of any but the simplest tracery. Across the Channel you will find the most elaborate patterns of masonry appearing in windows, and in the vaults,” he added. “But I dislike all that. It’s not Sarum,” he smiled, “not Sarum at all.”
“I think it must be the greatest cathedral in the world,” Osmund said.
The designer laughed.
“Oh no. The cathedral of Amiens in France,” he went on cheerfully, “is twice the volume of our church. But if you stand inside both, you will never be able to tell. And why? Because the proportions are perfect. See,” he became enthusiastic, “these piers of Purbeck marble that support the vaults: the marble is so hard that we can make them thin. And where the transepts cross at the centre, the four great columns at the corners of the crossing – there we have built huge pillars whose columns will fly straight up, with no intervening capitals from floor to vaulting in a single unbroken line. Simple nests of columns. Pure line. They soar.”
It was obvious to Osmund now who the old man must be. He was astonished that such a great man should speak to him.
Canon Elias de Dereham gave him a friendly look. “And are you a mason, young man?”
“No sir,” he answered modestly. “But I hope to be.”
“Can you carve?”
He knew that he could carve in wood. He was sure he would in stone.
“Yes,” he replied unhesitatingly.
The old man nodded, and then moved on.
It was two days later that one of the masons came up to him when he was working and began to question him.
“You wish to be a mason?”
He nodded.
“If you wish to join our guild and learn the mysteries of the mason’s craft, you must serve our apprentice until we decide you are worthy.”
The masons’ guild was still a fairly informal organisation, but he knew that usually a boy apprentice might have to serve as long as seven years before being admitted as a journeyman mason. He bowed his head.
“Very well,” the man said briskly. “See Bartholomew. He’ll be your mentor.” And he walked away.
And from that moment Osmund knew that his life as a proper mason had begun.
Bartholomew was an apprentice only two years older than himself: a pale, surly young fellow with a shock of dark hair, already thinning, that fell over his face, and a large, running boil on the right side of his neck. He greeted Osmund without enthusiasm, but told him he might work beside him in future and learn the beginnings of his craft.
The next day Robert the master mason came to him too, asked him a few questions about himself, and then gave him a curt nod.
“Learn from Bartholomew,” he ordered.
There was so much to learn. His surly mentor showed him how to turn his chisel, and explained to him the properties of the different kinds of stone.
He also showed him the many activities that went into the building, each of them with their own particular workshop.
It was a world full of wonder. He saw the great drawing board of the head mason, where, with compasses and set squares, he drew the designs for each part of the building on a linen sheet. He was surprised to see that the pencil he used was not made of lead, but of silver.
“Silver leaves a black line on linen,” Bartholomew informed him curtly. He had not known.
He learned to understand the work of the joiners and carpenters who not only fashioned the supports for the roofs, but who organised the scaffolding as well. He saw the huge saw pit and the waiting piles of timber from the nearby forest of Clarendon.
On the north-east side of the close, by the gate to the bishop’s palace grounds, he visited the glaziers, who were already preparing the huge quantities of stained glass that would be required – first painting and then firing the glass in their kilns. He smiled in delight to see the delicate designs of saints and biblical scenes that would gleam softly down from every wall.
There were the storehouses, the painters’ workshops, the refectories, kitchens, outhouses – two decades of work had already formed a little world within a world for the builders of the great cathedral.
But most important of all, stretching along the whole south side of the church’s long nave, was a wooden lean-to that formed the masons’ lodge.
There were all kinds of masons – hewers, carvers, men who laid the stones, others who set the tracery; there were turners who used their lathes to polish the marble; bench masons at their tables, who fashioned the hundreds of capitals and bosses that would be needed to seal and decorate the masonry of the mighty structure. There was the place on the floor where the complex arrangements of pillars could be drawn full size. There were stacks of wooden templates that were cut to give the mason his exact cross-sections when he carved the stone.
All these things a stonemason should thoroughly understand if he were ever to be master of his craft.
He was fascinated.
The stone used for Salisbury Cathedral came from two sources. The grey limestone used for most of the building came from the quarries of Chilmark, twelve miles west of the city along the valley past Wilton. It was a wonderful, cool greenish grey, soft to the touch and easy to work.
But for the pillars that must carry the heavy roof, a very different stone was used. This was the solid Purbeck marble, quarried on the south coast near the castle of Corfe. Much of it, he knew, was the gift of a single woman, Alice Brewer, who had given the new church as much marble as they could get from her Purbeck quarries in twelve years – one of the greatest of all the sumptuous gifts the cathedral received.
Osmund loved the grey Chilmark stone. Often he would take a small piece home with him when he walked up the valley to Avonsford, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling its texture, and studying its composition.
“Each stone,” Bartholomew had told him, “has a grain, exactly like wood. If you want to cut it, you must know that. And also, when you place stone in a wall, it will weather better depending on how the wind and rain strikes the grain.”
Sometimes Osmund could also detect a faint second colour in the stone: the subtlest hint of blue, or rusty red; and this too he loved.
Part of his apprenticeship, he knew, would be spent at the great quarry at Chilmark where the stone was rough hewn before being transported to Salisbury.
It was in August that he was sent there for the first time, and it was in a state of excitement that he set out at dawn one day to walk along the road past Wilton.
Only the deep cart tracks scored in the road told him that anything unusual came along the western valley; and only when the tracks veered suddenly off into a wood did he guess that he must have arrived at Chilmark. In fact, there was little sign of the quarry at all until he arrived at the camp itself. He saw the miners’ quarters and those of the masons who did the rough hewing. He saw the big lean-to where the stones were being cut, and the bay beside it where the carts were loaded. But where was the mine? He looked about eagerly.
As soon as he had explained his business, a friendly young miner pointed to a small cave entrance in the trees.
“That’s it.”
It seemed tiny. But when the young man took a torch and led him into the cave, he soon gasped with wonder.
He did not know quite what he had expected, but certainly not this.
At first, as one gently descended, the entrance opened out into a large gallery. But then, further into the rock began a huge sequence of halls, tunnels and cavernous spaces, leading in every direction – to right and left, above and far below – a labyrinth. It was only after he had been there two or three minutes, getting accustomed to the faint light from other distant torches in the shadows, that the little mason suddenly realised that the great network of halls and galleries had been so thoroughly worked that it was not so much a labyrinth, as a huge single space, subdivided by pillars of rock.
“Why,” he cried, “it’s like the cathedral, but underground.”
It was. The galleries disappeared into the distance like aisles. In places, the vaulted ceilings were as high as those in the great building. The quarry at Chilmark, with its soft echoing spaces, was truly like a great church.
“It’s the cathedral’s womb,” the young man at his side remarked. “And we’ve still enough stone down here to build a second church too.”
For two hours Osmund wandered, torch in hand, through the endless caves. It gave him a pleasure he could not explain to know that the great cathedral whose vaults would soar over him had been pulled by pick and human hand, out of the bowels of the earth.
He spent two weeks at the quarry that first time, and on his return, the carters going back to Salisbury let him ride with them. There were six carts of stone to be transported that day, but to his surprise he saw that a further six carts, full of rubble and debris from the mine shafts and workshop had been added to the little procession.
“What is that for?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” the carter told him. And sure enough, when they had travelled five miles the carters began, one after another, to shovel the contents of these carts on to the road. “We surface the road as we go,” his companion explained. “After all, not only stone comes out of a mine, and you’ve to put the rubbish somewhere.”
A month later, Osmund made a second, and more ambitious expedition for himself, this time down the river to the harbour. The little town by the coast now boasted both a tiny stone castle on a mound by the river, and a fine Norman priory church whose name, Christchurch, was generally applied to the town itself in preference to the old Saxon name of Twyneham. Here, looking across to the empty headland with its low protecting hill and its deserted earthwork walls, he saw the huge wooden barges enter the still harbour waters, bearing their precious load of marble from the western quarries along the coast, and begin to make their slow way up the river Avon to Sarum.
Always there was so much to learn. As the cathedral’s walls slowly rose, the labourers hauled up huge barrels of chalk, lime and flint which were poured into the gap between the inner and outer stone.
“It’s not only quicker than making the walls of solid stone,” Bartholomew explained, “but the lime rubble binds with the stone. It’s as solid as can be.”
And the mason marvelled as he realised that the rising cathedral was not only made of stone, but contained, locked within its walls, great cliffs of lime and chalk.
Another discovery he made one day, soon after his journey down the river, concerned the cathedral’s windows. Why he should have begun, during one of his daily inspections of the model, to count them he could not say, unless it was that there was no other feature of the model he did not know by heart. But count them he did; and so it was that, to his surprise, he discovered that there were three hundred and sixty-five.
“One for each day of the year!” he cried aloud with delight. And thinking he must have made a mistake, he counted again, keeping tally on a slate. It was exact: 365.
Was it by Elias’s design, or by accident? He did not dare to ask him. But one thing he was certain of: “It’s a sign from God,” he murmured, “that’s for sure.” And he crossed himself.
Osmund was a humble soul, and the more he learned, the more conscious he became of his own ignorance and of the greatness of those who had designed and organised the great cathedral. Often at the end of the day he would go to the little chapel and pray beside the model, whispering: “Blessed Mary, make me worthy to be a mason.”
And it was here, one evening a few months later that he had his second and last encounter with the great Elias. The canon had just walked over from the Leadenhall, the fine house with its leaded roof that he had built for himself beside the river; and he had entered the chapel quietly. But he stopped with surprise at the sight of the young mason who, not knowing he was being watched, had just fallen to his knees and crossed himself as he gazed up at the model of the great building. When he asked kindly “What is it, my son?” the intense young fellow with his oversized head and his solemn grey eyes looked up at him, and, echoing the words that Canon Portehors had spoken to him before, announced: “Oh father, I am unworthy; I am dust.”
To which the architect had replied with a smile: “You forget the words of Our Lord, my son: God the Father sees even the sparrows – and the sparrows, my young friend, have eyes themselves.” He tapped him on the shoulder. “Not dust, young mason: a sparrow – who uses his eyes.” And Elias de Dereham passed on.
Then for a moment Osmund knew an ecstasy of happiness he had never known before. And he had almost forgotten the deadly sins.
It was nearly the middle of the night.
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