The Dean's Watch

by Elizabeth Goudge

  It was to be a lantern clock in the style of the late seventeenth century, the kind of timepiece Tompion himself had so delighted to create, the clock face surmounted by a fret that hid the base of the bell above. Isaac nearly always used the traditional eastern counties fret, a simple design that he liked, but for this clock he was designing his own, inspired by the famous Gothic fret which Tompion had been so fond of, only instead of the two dolphins and the flowers and fruit he saw two swans and the beautiful arrowhead reeds that grew upon the riverbank outside the city wall. Isaac could paint on ivory with the skill of a miniaturist, and his clock face was to be a dial of the heavens. The twelve hours were to be the twelve signs of the zodiac, painted small and delicate in the clearest and loveliest colors he could encompass. Each picture lived already in his mind, completely visualized down to the last scale on the glittering silver fish at twelve o’clock and the golden points of the little shoes the Virgin wore peeping from beneath her blue cloak at six o’clock.

  Within this circle of stars Isaac had planned the sun and moon balancing each other against a blue sky scattered over with tiny points of light that were the humbler stars, but whenever he stood and looked at this clock the sun would not stay where he wanted it, as did the moon, but swam upward and placed itself like a golden halo behind the fish. Again and again Isaac had replaced the sun floating just offshore from nine o’clock, but it was no good, it always went back to the meridian. And so now Isaac had given up and as he looked at his clock tonight he acknowledged the rightness of what he saw. The glittering silver fish and the golden sun formed one symbol, though of what he did not know. His heart beat fast and music chimed in his head. The bell of this clock was to strike the half-hour as well as the hour, for according to tradition the spheres were singing spirits. “There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest but in his motion like an angel sings.” Isaac did not believe it but he had the kind of mind that delights to collect the pretty colored fragments of old legends that lie about the floor of the world for the children to pick up. As man and craftsman he knew that he would touch the height of his being with the making of this clock. He covered the lovely thing with a cloth and turned away. It was hard to leave it even though there was nothing under the clock except a medley of bits of metal and some oily rags.

  He put on his caped greatcoat, which once had been black but was now so stained by age and wind and rain that it was as miraculously full of color as the plumage of a black cock, picked up his battered hat and the locked bag that contained the watches of the great, blew out his candle and felt his way to the door that led into the shop, lifted the latch and went in. He had not yet put up the shutters and the shop was faintly lit by one of the new gas street lamps that the city had recently installed. The shop was so small, and its bow window so crowded with clocks, all of them ticking, that the noise was almost deafening. It sounded like thousands of crickets chirping or bees buzzing and was to Isaac the most satisfying sound in the world. Standing behind the counter he listened to it for a moment with his eyes shut, especially to the ticking of the cuckoo clock that he had made just before he had started work on the celestial clock. It ticked louder than any of the others and the cuckoo in it was a gorgeously aggressive bird who exploded full-throated from his little door at every hour.

  Since the cuckoo clock had been in the window the children of the city were continually blocking the pavement outside the shop. Isaac was quite used now to looking up and seeing their faces pressed against the glass. There was someone there now even though it was late and dark. Isaac could see the pale gleam of a face, dark eyes and a thatch of untidy dark hair. A boy, he thought, and then suddenly it seemed to him that it was not a boy but a sprite beyond the window, light and eager like flame in the wind. But sprites were children’s tales. He was a convinced but hard-worked rationalist, always hard at it reconvincing himself of his convictions. During his bad times this was not difficult, but during his good times the bright shards on the floor of the world had a trick of turning into shining pools that reflected something, and he was distinctly startled until he saw a ragged sleeve come up and wipe the misted glass clear. Only a boy. He had been breathing on the glass as they all did and the lamplight had blurred beyond it and played a trick upon his eyes. He did not want to frighten the boy and he crept forward inch by inch, hoping to reach the shop door unobserved and call out a reassuring word as he opened it. But it was no good. The boy saw him and vanished.

  2.

  There was a look of sadness on Isaac’s face as he came out into the street, put up the shutters and locked the shop door. He had a Pied Piper attraction for boys and they did not usually flee from him, but he supposed he had looked grotesque in the half-dark, shuffling across the shop. For a few moments he was so grieved that he saw nothing as he stumped up the street, the moon behind his shoulder and a grotesque shadow of his tall hat bobbing along the pavement in front of him, and then the sorrow passed because nothing could sadden him for long during his happy times. He was ashamed of this, but he could not help it, any more than he could help it that in his dark times all the beauty and glory of the world did not gladden him. And of this too he was ashamed.

  He began to whistle one of his tunes, for the city about him was magical. His repertoire of tunes was small, all of them variations of a striking clock. He went through them one after the other almost without cessation when he was happy, driving his sister Emma almost crazy. In spite of the sharp incline he chimed twelve o’clock in every possible way all the way up Cockspur Street, his eyes on the crown of frosted stars above the Rollo tower of the Cathedral. Isaac did not like the Cathedral. It frightened him and he had never been inside it. Yet he always had to look at it. Everyone had to.

  At the top of Cockspur Street, which was so steep that all the little bow-windowed shops had short flights of steps leading up to their front doors, Isaac turned right and was in the market place. Here too there were shops on the ground floor of the tall old houses with their higgledy-piggledy roofs, and a small tavern, the Swan and Duck, where Isaac went sometimes when he was feeling low. The town hall with its fine Georgian pillars was here too, the Grammar School that Isaac had attended as a boy, and St. Peter’s that was nearly as old as the Cathedral itself, a little dark musty church, battered and apologetic. Isaac had not been inside it since his boyhood, and in those days had suffered much within it and had hated it, but now after so many years of passing it as he went backwards and forwards to his shop he had come to know that his misery within it was not its fault and to love its old scarred face, and the small dark porch with the notice board where the papers seemed always torn and askew. The bell in the low squat tower struck the half-hour as Isaac passed beneath it, and its cracked old voice seemed calling to him. “Good night,” said Isaac.

  Just beyond Joshua Appleby’s bookshop he turned sharply to the left and climbed a flight of steps between two high garden walls, a short cut to Angel Lane where he and Emma lived. It was a steep, twisting, cobbled lane bordered on each side by very old houses and crossed at its upper end by Worship Street, which curved about the great old wall which encircled the high plateau where the Cathedral towered, with the houses of the Close clustered about it. Those who lived within that wall were in the thought of the city the great men, the aristocrats, individually liked or disliked according to their individual characters but as a body venerated because they always had been venerated, the heirs of a tradition that was still sacrosanct. Worship Street was just one step down in the social scale, a gracious leisured street to which the ladies of the Close moved when their husbands or fathers died. The doctors and solicitors of the city lived here too, with a small sprinkling of retired generals and admirals whose fathers had once been deans or canons of the Cathedral. The city did not commend itself as a place of retirement to those whose roots were not in it, for the climate was bleak, but it had a way of drawing back to itself, sometimes almost against their will, any who had once lived in it.

  An
gel Lane to the west of the Close, with Silver Street to the east, housed those whom the city considered to be the more worthy and respectable among the tradesmen; not butchers or grocers or publicans, but Joshua Appleby of the bookshop, Isaac, the chemist and the veterinary surgeon, together with schoolmasters, lay clerks, and many poverty-stricken maiden ladies and widows who would rather have died than let anyone know how poor they were. The houses in Silver Street and Angel Lane were small, and their rents low, but their nearness to the Close and Worship Street, their age and picturesque appearance gave them an air of great gentility. In them one could be desperately poor and highly respectable at the same time.

  Isaac’s little house was nearly at the top of the lane, but before he turned to it he glanced eastward, and then stood spellbound by what he saw. Across Worship Street he could see the archway that led into the Close, the Porta flanked by two small towers, cavernously black against the brilliance of the moonlit wall. Beyond and above it was a darkness of motionless trees, the great elms and lime trees of the Close that rose even higher than the wall. Beyond and above that again were the three towers of the Cathedral, the Phillippa and Jocelyn towers to the right and left and the central tower, the Rollo, soaring above them into the starlit sky with a strength and splendor that was more awful in moonlight than at any other time. Like the moon herself dragging at great waters the Rollo tower in moonlight compelled without mercy.

  And the mailed figure above the clock face in the tower also compelled; above all he compelled a clockmaker, for he was the finest Jaccomarchiadus in England. Like a fly crawling up a wall Isaac crawled up Angel Lane toward him, scuttled across Worship Street, cowered beneath the Porta, got himself somehow across the moonlit expanse of the Cathedral green and then slowly mounted the flight of worn stone steps that led to the west door within the dark Porch of the Angels. At the top he stopped and looked up at the Rollo tower, trembling. Then suddenly his trembling ceased, for he was looking at the clock. He forgot his fear of the Cathedral, he forgot where he was, he forgot everything except the clock. He saw it from a distance every time he delivered watches in the Close but because of his fear of the Cathedral he was close to it only when as tonight he had been compelled. It was a Peter Lightfoot clock, less elaborate than Lightfoot’s Glastonbury clock which had later been removed to Wells Cathedral, but in Isaac’s opinion far more impressive. The Jaccomarchiadus stood high in an alcove in the tower, not like most Jacks an anonymous figure but Michael the Archangel. He was life size and stood upright with spread wings, his stern face gazing out across the fen country to where the far straight line of the horizon met the downward sweep of the great sky. Beneath his feet was the slain dragon, and his right foot rested on its crushed head. One mailed fist gripped the hilt of his sword, the other was raised ready to strike the bell that hung beside him. His stance was magnificent. Had he been a man it would have seemed defiant, but the great wings changed the defiance to the supreme certainty and confidence of the angelic breed. Below him, let into the wall, was a simple large dial with an hour hand only. Within the Cathedral Isaac had been told there was a second clock with above it a platform where Michael on horseback fought with the dragon at each hour and conquered him. But not even his longing to see this smaller Michael could drag Isaac inside the terrible Cathedral. No one could understand his fear. He could not entirely understand it himself. Yet every now and then, in spite of it, Michael compelled him to come and stand as he was standing now and look up at the clock, and then to turn and look out over the city from the central hub and peak of its history and glory.

  2. The City

  1.

  IT was a compact city, and on a night such as this one it climbed toward the stars like one of those turreted cities seen in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

  It was so compact because although the city wall had largely disappeared as such, existing now only built into the walls of houses or bordering a stableyard or vegetable garden, yet the city had not straggled beyond the old confines. Its population was not increasing because its chief industry, the making of osier baskets in the slum district at the North Gate, where the river came in a silver loop quite near to the city wall, did not attract the younger men and they were tending to leave the city and seek work in the distant towns. Yet the city remained fairly prosperous, for it was the market town for the surrounding country. On Saturday, market day, the market place was crowded, and on every fine day there was a constant gentle flow of traffic on the narrow roads that led from the villages out in the fen to the city.

  These villages were widely separated from each other; they existed only where a small hill had in old days made it possible to build above the floods, and they housed a courageous but dour and silent people. Life had been a tough and lonely struggle for them in days gone by and though now that the fens had been drained, and banks built against the menace of the river and the sea, they were a fairly prosperous farming community, they remained self-contained, suspicious of strangers and inclined to be morose even to each other. Great churches crowned the summit of each small hill but they were mostly empty. The fen people were not devout, and in the cold wind-swept vicarages their priests frequently despaired and died. There were lonely manor houses here and there where many a squire preferred to drown his loneliness in drink rather than be bothered to ride miles through the wet to forgather with anyone else, and where his wife and daughters lived chiefly for the days when he let them have the dogcart and go and shop in the city.

  There were happy days in the fen country as well as dour ones, glorious hot summer days when the harvest fields were gold as far as the blue horizon of the sea, spring days when riding parties cantered down the centuries-old grass roads between tall hedges of flowering crab apple trees, winter days when everyone went skating on the flooded fields close to the river, or sometimes in a very great frost on the river itself, while overhead the great sky flamed slowly to a sunset of almost dreadful splendor. Nowhere else in England could one see skies quite like those of the fen country. Something in the quality of the air gave them a weight of glory that seemed to crush antlike men and their tiny dwellings to dust upon the flat ground. Only the Cathedral could stand up against them, towering in black ferocity against the flame and gold. Yet the happiness did not predominate and those who went away from the fens to live elsewhere took with them a memory of endurance rather than joy.

  Within the city the atmosphere was different. The same tough breed dwelt there but greater safety and prosperity within the walls had fostered a greater gregariousness. The city had a long history and a civic pride and had always known something of the pleasures of pageantry, for the plateau at the top of the hill had from the days of the Norman Duke Rollo onward been one of those places where men feel that they must assert themselves. The strange tall hill rising into the vast sky out of the vast plain had seemed to challenge both, and on top of it men had felt themselves conquerors. Here they could see their enemies coming and defy them when they came. Here they could laugh at floods and storms. Here they could play the part of a god in the sky toward the poor peasants beneath, and oppress or relieve them as they chose.

  Duke Rollo, who had been the first to assert himself on the hilltop, had been an oppressor. His great castle had frowned angrily upon the poor folk who had toiled for him below, catching fish for him, tilling for him the few fields that could be salvaged from the waste of waters, fighting and dying for him when he bade them, afraid of him and hating him yet dependent on him for their life. A little town came into being below the castle and strong walls were built about it, a town of huddled houses and twisted unsavory streets housing the duke’s men-at-arms, armorers, grooms and scullions, with their toiling wives and savage half-clad children. These did not hate him as did the peasants, because he brought excitement into their lives. His banner streamed from the castle keep above their heads and his trumpets rang out from the walls. When he and his knights clattered up and down the narrow streets on their destriers they cheere
d him, for he was a mighty man, a great fighter and reveler, and they admired his courage and vitality and neither expected nor desired that he should pity them. He died suddenly, in full carousel in his banqueting hall, and the fearfulness of his death, unshriven in the midst of his sins and drunkenness, sobered the mind of his young son, Duke Jocelyn.

  In Jocelyn’s day mass was said daily in the castle chapel for the repose of the soul of Duke Rollo, monks as well as men-at-arms passed up and down the streets and the people no longer died in droves in times of famine; they had only to climb up to the castle and Jocelyn would give them all they needed. He was merciful to the poor. On Maundy Thursday he washed the feet of the twelve dirtiest old men whom his people could dig out of the slums around the North Gate and hound up the hill for that purpose. He kept vigil for long hours in the castle chapel and his people called him the Good Duke. Yet he did not win from them the admiration they had given to his father. They missed the pageantry of the good old days, the excitement and danger that had glamorized Rollo’s brutality. And they felt in some vague way that the old duke had embodied the spirit of the strong grim place which he had created. Jocelyn did not. He took after his mother, the Lady Phillippa who had died young of Rollo’s boisterousness. He was timid and anxious, delicate in body, increasingly obsessed as time went on with the thought of his father’s end and the fear of hell. He was already a dying man when the thought came to him that he should destroy the castle, whose stones were stained with the spilled blood and wine of his father’s murderings and feastings, and build in its place a great church, and a monastery for holy monks, in reparation for his father’s crimes. He would endow the monastery with all his wealth, and the monks should pray without ceasing for his father’s soul and for his own; for as his sickness increased so did his conviction of sin. He too, though men called him the Good Duke, had his secret mean little sins and they whispered about his bed at night when he tried to find rest there from his pain, and in the day they seemed to him an obscene fog that choked him when he tried to draw his breath.