The Tide Mill Page 4

  “Remember who they are, Ralf. We depend on the Seigneur. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. But he’s not at all stuck up.”

  Her expression had become even more dubious. Ralf glanced at her uneasily. She seemed to be weighing, for the first time, his maturity, his judgement. Was she reflecting that she had given her permission too readily? Was she, contrary to all his experience, about to change her mind?

  Jacob, oblivious, asked Imogen to pass the greens.

  When, a moment later, Ralf dared to look at his mother again she gave a slight, curious smile and engaged his eyes. She knew what he had been thinking.

  “Don’t forget,” she said. “Not too late back.”

  4

  From then on, Ralf and Godric became firm friends. Two or three times a week, when Ralf had finished work, they would set out for the beach, lagoons, woods, or gorse. A pair of the Baron’s deerhounds might go with them, or, more often, the hobby, which, neat, compact, and indescribably graceful, had captivated Ralf from the start. As time went on Godric showed him how to carry the bird, to remove its leather hood, to let it fly and then bring it back, elegantly panting, to the glove. The hobby was Godric’s first falcon. If he treated it properly, if he learned all it could teach him, his father had said, he would, when he was older, have a man’s bird: a saker, a lanner, or, if he really showed ability, a peregrine or gyr.

  Ralf discovered that, like himself, Godric was wont to spend much time on his own, whether physically, on his solitary expeditions, or, which was less tolerable, mentally, in the presence of those who did not understand him. His two elder brothers, seventeen and twenty-two, were far too exalted to consider him worthy of notice. His elder sister, at nineteen, was already married and living elsewhere. With the other sister, a year younger than himself, Godric felt he had nothing in common.

  All this had emerged by degrees. Their conversation was usually light, even joshing, but Ralf realized early on that Godric not only retained everything that he heard said, but also thought about it later, as one or two of his remarks made plain.

  No further mention, however oblique, was made of the rescue. He had understood that Ralf did not wish him to feel beholden: that Ralf had acted instinctively, or impulsively, and without any reference to Godric’s identity; and that a sense of obligation would raise a barrier between them by implying that Godric’s condescension derived solely from gratitude.

  Their social difference he treated with the utmost delicacy. At no time did he attempt to play down his own father’s wealth or eminence, but he also spoke of Ralf’s family with due respect, and managed to convey his sympathetic conviction that their straits were as temporary as they were undeserved.

  He wanted to know about daily life in Alincester and the cathedral school. He himself was being tutored by his father’s clerk, and could already read and write Latin with some fluency. As the youngest son, he was destined for the Church, and at the age of fourteen would begin the course of training which, at twenty-one, would lead him into holy orders.

  Perceptive as he was, Godric did not seem conscious of the price Ralf paid for his friendship. There were ten or twelve other boys in the village of similar age, the sons of serfs, by whom Ralf had always been equably regarded, even if he was a freeman’s son. Now their manner towards him had become cautious, and it was spreading to their fathers and uncles. At the staith or games of football on the village green, Ralf felt himself becoming marginalized. He had trespassed on nothing that was theirs, but they resented him as if he had and at first he did not know how to respond. His pride would not let him curry favour; and anyway he did not see why he should. Then, one Sunday at the end of August, he realized that he did not care.

  The morning service proceeded as usual. The church was full. Standing between his mother and sister in a lowly place far from the altar, Ralf was letting his mind roam free. He liked the smell of incense and the meaningless sound of the mass, but that was all. He was surreptitiously studying the congregation and the garishly decorated interior of the building, wondering how the trusses of the roof had been put together and how many men it had taken to shape the stone blocks of the walls. There was a single stained-glass window, showing St Nicholas, the patron saint of mariners, to whom the church was dedicated. Compared with the windows at Alincester, it was crude indeed, just as the whole church was crudely made. It held communicants to match. Besides their senior retainers – the Steward, the Doorward, and the rest – only the de Maepes themselves would not have looked out of place in the Cathedral.

  A pillar blocked Ralf’s view of that family, but he had seen them going in: Godric, his parents, his sister, and two unmarried aunts. During the singing Ralf had heard the Baron’s voice, enthusiastically raised above all others. The contrast with Ralf’s own lacklustre efforts always made him smile.

  He had never met the Baron or any of Godric’s family. Nor had Godric ever called for him at Grandfather’s cottage. They always started from the Hall, where Godric would be waiting at the north door.

  When the service finished and Ralf, just behind Imogen, filed past the priest and emerged in the sunshine, he saw that Godric, the Baron, and the others of his family happened to be nearby, among the throng of people standing about in the churchyard. Godric saw him and waved. Ralf waved back. The Baron, noticing, looked at Ralf and then, inclining his head somewhat to be closer to his son, seemed to ask a question during which his hand, while not exactly pointing, indicated Ralf. A moment later, to Ralf’s consternation, and in full view of the whole village, Godric and his father were approaching.

  Linsell’s hat, which he had only just donned, was snatched off.

  “Good day to you, Master Grigg,” said the Baron, and smilingly acknowledged Anna and Jacob. Even Imogen, who, following her mother’s example, gave a deep curtsy, received an indulgent beam. “A splendid sermon, I thought. ‘The voice of the Lord is upon the waters.’ One always comes back to the Psalms.” He was of middle height, burly, grey beginning to appear in his hair. A gold ring with a brilliant green stone encircled his right forefinger; above his tunic of rust-coloured velvet he wore a say robe in cream, decorated along its edges with a wreathing, abstract pattern, like ivy.

  His brown eyes settled on Ralf. “So this is Godric’s friend. Ralf, I believe?”

  Ralf managed a passable bow. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Godric tells me you are skilled in drawing, Ralf. Father Pickard says the same, do you not?”

  Ralf turned to see that the priest had left the porch and joined them.

  “Skilled he is, sire,” said Father Pickard, and Ralf, as a proprietorial hand alighted on his shoulder, felt his cheeks and ears ablaze and wondered how much worse his embarrassment could get. Involuntarily he gave Godric a pleading look.

  “May Ralf come to the Hall this afternoon, Papa?”

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Ralf, will you be able?”

  When the Baron and his son had returned to their own party, Ralf wanted nothing more than to flee. All eyes had been upon him. Yet, when he eventually followed his parents and grandfather through the churchyard, he knew that he was not sorry to have met the Baron or to have been asked to the Hall. More than that, he was excited by the prospect of taking his drawings for inspection, as the Baron, in parting, had requested.

  Holding Imogen’s hand, Ralf passed through the lich-gate and started on the short walk home.

  “Well, well,” said Linsell. “His Lordship must like you, Ralf.”

  “No doubt of that,” Jacob said. “Dun him for a new roof, there’s a good lad.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Ralf,” said Anna, playfully pushing at her father. “Just be yourself.”

  That was not so easy. Before the noon meal Ralf ascended the steep, narrow staircase to the little room he shared with Imogen, opened the shutter so that he could see, and, from under his cot, dragged out the shallow box in which he kept his private things. He sat looking through t
he folder of drawings, which by now comprised sixty or seventy half-sheets, quarter-sheets, and even scraps of parchment and palimpsest. None were as he remembered. All now seemed lazy or artificial. Slowly, irresolutely, he chose the least bad and laid them out on the counterpane. A place in the final selection was assured only for two or three pages – including one covered with studies of the hobby – which Godric had already seen and had presumably recommended to his father.

  Ralf’s indecision after the meal was equally protracted. The only halfway presentable garments he owned were those he wore to church. The Baron had seen them this morning. If Ralf put them on again this afternoon it would not only make him look affected, especially in front of Godric, but also emphasize, even exaggerate, the poverty of his everyday clothes. But of these he had none that had not at some time or other been drenched in seawater, stained with fish-slime, or covered with burs or mud; and hardly any that showed no sign of mending, darning, or alteration.

  Finally he just put on the cleanest he had. He was poor; the people at the Hall were not to be competed with.

  In this frame of mind he arrived fifteen minutes later at the west door, under the tower, and was admitted by the ward.

  * * *

  Mape Hall was nearly two hundred years old, dating from 1070, but the original structure had been so badly damaged in a fire that the third baron had demolished most of it and started again. His centrepiece was a spacious hall-house, on two storeys, timber-framed, roofed with red tile. The buttery, kitchen and pantry served the large central hall. Beyond lay the solar, or accommodation for the lord and his family. This comprised two ground-floor rooms, a parlour and dayroom, and three chambers above, the largest of which was fitted with a garderobe, or privy, connected by a wooden conduit to its cesspit.

  Since then, the accommodation had been extended upstairs and down, quarters for the Steward had been attached to the north wall of the buttery, and some of the windows on the first floor had been glazed. But the main changes had occurred elsewhere. At the edge of the enclosure, outside the palisade, a new farmhouse, milking-parlour and barns had been built by the present baron’s father, the fifth Lord de Maepe. A cluster of single-storey buildings incorporated the stables, kennels, hawk mews, and offices for the Clerk and others of the staff.

  Mape had never come under serious threat. Gervase de Maepe’s military obligation to the King had long ago been commuted into scutage, money paid in lieu of service, and the garrison with its wooden tower had been left pretty well untouched for nearly a hundred years. Repairs to the palisade had left it as little more than an ornamental fence running through the shrubbery, and the west gates, once fitted with great locking-beams, had actually been removed as a nuisance and left leaning up behind a barn.

  Gervase’s obligations did not end with his scutage, onerous as it was. He was required to contribute to the dowry of the King’s eldest daughter on the occasion of her first marriage; to join with other barons in ransoming His Grace should he be captured by a foe; to attend court when required, and there give counsel; to fund one week of the County Assizes; and to be answerable to the Justiciar for the peace of the manor. And, even today, he still undertook commissions for the Crown, both here and abroad, to settle disputes or smooth ruffled feathers: at one time there had been many of these.

  His greatest burden remained a debt to the Treasury of four hundred and twenty marks. According to custom, a relief of one hundred pounds, or one hundred and fifty marks, was due to the Crown whenever a baron succeeded his father. The King effectively increased this amount by making his permission contingent on a gift which amounted to nothing more than a bribe. In the case of the present baron, four hundred pounds had been the price of the Manor of Mape. Since his succession seventeen years earlier, only a hundred and twenty had been paid back. The rents and scutage which he could himself demand of his tenants were in turn limited by their ability to pay. The price of wheat had been falling for twenty years, and most of the other revenue-bearing products of the manor also commanded lower prices than they had in his father’s time.

  Gervase tried to dwell not on the magnitude of his debts, but on the advantages of his rank. In return for his fealty to the King, he received political favour and military protection. His sons were entitled to knightly or ecclesiastical education with its promise of future preferment. And, despite the fact that his eldest daughter’s dowry – and the cost of her marriage licence, granted by the King – had worsened his position most gravely, Gervase had succeeded through her in allying himself, and thereby his faction at court, to the Earl of Warwick. He had similar hopes for her sister. In sixteen months’ time, at fourteen, Eloise would reach marriageable age.

  A baron was a vassal of the King. The King was a vassal of God. The archbishops who had presided at his coronation derived their authority from the Pope.

  The King was sovereign, above all. His court, his treasury, and his army were the visible symbols of his might; but the wealth and power of the Church, more shrewdly exercised, were no less. The revenues of the Alincester diocese alone were rumoured to be greater than the King’s.

  Eloise was thinking of its bishop as she heard Godric and his village friend approaching. According to Godric, the boy’s father, a craftsman, had worked on the Cathedral. She had been in Alincester earlier in the month, for the first time in nearly three years. The scaffolding was coming down now from the west front: the great window was in place; the soaring stonework, with statues of the saints, had been completed; and at the apex, so high up that it had made her dizzy just to bend her neck to look, the benign figure of St Oswin now gazed out over the densely packed city roofs to the walls, over the Broad Pond and onwards, all across the shire.

  A new flagstone walk approached the west front squarely across the cathedral precincts, leading in from Minster Street. Following it with her mother, looking up and yet further up as the Cathedral drew near, Eloise had felt herself not just marvelling, but awestruck. This, the building proclaimed, this is what Bishop William, through God’s grace, can do!

  The new cathedral replaced the minster where the relics of St Oswin had been housed. Since the tenth century Alincester had been a place of pilgrimage and miracle: the walls of the Minster had been hung with hundreds of abandoned crutches. The priceless gold and silver feretory enshrining the saint’s bones, donated by King Edwald in 967, still drew the sick and halt from all over the realm.

  The Benedictine monastery had also been rebuilt. Its scriptorium had produced the Alincester Bible, reputedly the most valuable book in the known world, made under the patronage of William of Briouze by a single scribe and six artists over a period of nineteen years. The skins of two hundred and fifty calves were said to have gone into its vellum pages. The decoration incorporated gold leaf and, even more costly, lapis lazuli, imported from the east. But the magnificent Bible, like all the other treasures, paled before the achievement of the building itself.

  Five hundred and thirty feet from east to west, in the plan of a cross with transepts to north and south, comprising tens of thousands of tons of stone, wood, iron, tile and lead, it rose from reclaimed water-meadows in the heart of a settlement which even under the Romans had been among the most prosperous in Britain. The structure was visible for miles around. It dominated the landscape and the city.

  Yet even this had left Eloise defenceless, unprepared for what lay behind the massive west doors. She had never been inside them before. During her previous visit, her first, at the age of nine, the Cathedral had been closed to all visitors while the vault of the nave was being finished.

  There were no words for it. Gaping, wondering, stunned, she had indeed been rendered speechless. And still the interior was incomplete. What would it be like when at last the workmen withdrew?

  Since then she had thought often about the Cathedral. It was worship made manifest, her father had said. They were not so much workmen as divines. To have one in the village was intriguing. She had seen him at a distance, mos
tly at church, with his wife and two children. The younger was a girl, quiet and very pretty. The elder, Godric’s friend, had the same fair hair, though he took more after the father. He also was well favoured, she thought: they all were.

  Godric had been showing him the grounds, probably lingering at the hawk mews or kennels. She had watched the two of them from her chamber window. Since then she had come downstairs and was now seated with her embroidery on a bench outside the parlour. Even here, out of the sun, she felt too warm, but indoors it had been stifling.

  The bench was almost touching the wall. On either side of it, between the house and the shingle path, lay a bed of flowers and low shrubs. Looking along it as the crunch of footfalls grew louder, she saw Godric and his friend turn the corner and come fully into view.

  They stopped in front of her.

  “Eloise, may I present Mr Ralf Grigg? Ralf, this is my sister, the Honourable Mademoiselle, Eloise de Maepe.”

  “How do you do,” she said.

  The boy made a bow, as befitted, not quite as formal as the one he had given her father, this morning, in the churchyard.

  “Have you been with the hawks?” she asked, for want of something to say.

  “Yes,” Godric said. “We have. Where’s Papa?”

  “He and Mr Caffyn have ridden out. To Eyton.” This was the other village in the manor, part of which her father held.

  “Ridden out?”

  “What of it?”

  “He said he wanted to see Mr Grigg’s drawings.”

  She had already noticed the half-sheet portfolio under his arm, made of two pieces of thin board tied with ribbon. “Well, I’m sorry for that,” she said.

  “When will he be back?” Godric said.

  “I don’t know. Late, I think.”

  “Never mind, Ralf.”

  The boy’s sunburned face showed no change of emotion, except perhaps a tightening of his lips. His eyes were neither blue nor grey, but something in between. For a moment they held her own.