Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  There was much more, but she broke off. Dear Bernard. Ten years her senior. Ten years in India now; he always wrote her letters full of his practical business, just as though she were a man, which was why she so loved to receive them. She would keep the rest until later.

  She dressed quickly. Then she made straight for the cathedral.

  Whenever she had to make a major decision, Jane Shockley always walked in the cloisters. They were so quiet, so peaceful. In the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign, Bishop Denison had planted two cedars of Lebanon in the centre and already they were beginning to spread a small shade over the grass of the little graveyard there, making the place more delightful even than it had been before. She walked by the chapter house. Both cloisters and chapter house were being repaired that year by Mr Clutton the architect. Just recently the restoration of the wonderful series of low reliefs in the chapter house had been begun and, since the door was open, she walked in and spent several minutes admiring the lively carvings of the Creation and the other Old Testament scenes. She liked the silent antiquity of the place. During repairs to the walls recently, the workmen had found some coins from the time of Edward I, nearly six hundred years before.

  It was hard to decide. Now that the prospect of travel to the Crimea had gone, to be replaced by several years’ grinding hard work at a hospital, probably in London – was she still certain she wanted to be a nurse? Why not go out to India: that was a more exciting prospect. Or even stay here in Sarum, here with her friends, amongst these quiet scenes she loved? It was tempting.

  For once, she could not make up her mind. Annoyed with herself, she walked slowly out of the cloister and into the main body of the cathedral.

  And there she saw it.

  It was only a tattered object, on a stick: a single flag, hanging out at an angle just out of reach on the wall. They were the colours of the Wiltshire Regiment, and the little plaque beside them stated that they had been carried in Sicily in 1806–14, the United States of America, 1814–15, been lost by the Ganges 1842 and recovered eight months later. Placed in the cathedral April 1848.

  Why should that flag suddenly move her? Was it the far-off places, the thought of the soldiers there and in the Crimea? Was it the reminder of empire and service? Might it be guilt at her own easy life? Perhaps.

  Slowly she walked towards the door. A disused flag and a twenty-three-year-old girl. A strange combination.

  “But trailing clouds of glory do we come.”

  The line from her favourite Wordsworth poem, the Immortality Ode, suddenly came to haunt her. Clouds of glory. That was it. The tattered flag hanging so modestly there seemed, that morning, to bring her a fresh vision. A vision of service, and sacrifice, a vision of distant places and of her own heroism. She knew what she must do. It was time to write those letters to the hospitals.

  Joseph Porters stood, erect but with his head slightly bowed, and stared at the drains.

  “Progress, sir, and empire. That is our destiny. Make no mistake.”

  Porters nodded absently as Ebenezer Mickelthwaite, agent to Lord Forest, expressed these trenchant views.

  “And these drains, these houses?” he interposed quietly.

  “Safe. Safe as the Bank of England.”

  “I think not. They are pestilential. We shall have cholera here again.”

  Mickelthwaite eyed him. The lengthy disquisition he had just made on the empire was for the purpose of making Porters change the subject and it had not worked.

  “The expense of your improvements would be very great.”

  Porters shrugged.

  “It mainly falls on the council rates.”

  “Not all. Anyway, we pay rates.”

  They were standing in the middle of the chequer, looking up the centre strip into which the assorted refuse from some forty courtyards and tiny allotments seeped to form a black, muddy morass that was something between a drain and a swamp. It produced a dank, alkaline stench – a persistent presence in winter, in summer a vicious enemy that rose to strike.

  “The water is utterly foul.”

  “Yet I heard that when they sunk a new well hereabouts, they discovered a mineral spring.”

  “So it was thought, from the colour and pungency of the water, which people were drinking. In fact, Mr Mickelthwaite, they had penetrated a cess pit.”

  The situation in the city had become a scandal. The centres of the old chequers, where often no new drainage had been constructed in centuries, were disease-ridden. The water channels down the streets, though they seemed at high water to be clean, were in fact polluted and constantly drawing in more poison from the area around.

  “They call this city the English Venice,” Mickelthwaite said defensively.

  “I call it an open sewer.” He was getting impatient. “In any case, Mr Mickelthwaite, you have lost your battle, all of you, and I am recommending the complete drainage of this chequer, new sewers, drains for every house. It will be all dug up. And those workshops,” he pointed with disgust to a collection of buildings that resembled two lines of wooden hovels stacked one on top of the other – “those will have to go.”

  “We get rent from them,” Mickelthwaite growled.

  “Not any more. You’ll have to build again.”

  He started to go. Behind him he heard the agent mutter: “That damn doctor.” He smiled, and turned. “This is progress, Mr Mickelthwaite,” he said softly.

  The battle had been a fierce one. For many years, the water channels had been under the control of the city’s directors of highways, who had done little to improve them; as for the insides of the chequers, they were under the control of individual landlords who had usually done nothing at all.

  In 1849, cholera struck Salisbury. There were some fifteen hundred cases, deaths in hundreds. A certain Doctor Middleton, visiting the city and seeing its sanitation, was appalled. He protested. Reluctantly the council commissioned a survey of the water sources. Deep drainage was recommended. But that would be expensive. The council clerk did not record the medical evidence and threw Middleton’s letter away. And so Doctor Middleton began his campaign.

  There was one problem for the council: the Public Health Act of 1848 – another of the many acts that passed through the nineteenth century parliaments and began England’s modern education, sanitation and factory conditions. The council could be forced to appoint a board of health.

  “And then,” Mickelthwaite had explained gloomily to Lord Forest, “the whole matter will leave the highway directors’ control – the health board will oversee not only the water channels but the chequers as well. And worse, if they recommend improvements, they can be levied on the general rates.”

  “Which I pay.”

  “Exactly.”

  For Lord Forest, who had long since given up his grandfather’s house in the close, whose interests were all in the industrial north now, or in his Indian plantations, and who only twice visited Sarum in his life, still owned half of one of the city chequers.

  “Do what you can,” he told the agent.

  The battle had raged two years. A group of councillors who owned quantities of slums, and with whom Mickelthwaite had discreetly allied himself, fought tooth and nail. They lost.

  It had been early the previous year that Joseph Porters, civil engineer, had obtained a post in Salisbury and travelled down from Leicester to inspect the place.

  He set to work cheerfully, filling in the old water channels and inspecting the chequers. He had been as appalled as Doctor Middleton by what he had seen.

  But he enjoyed the sleepy close, with its comfortable gentry and ecclesiastics in tall black hats, the busy market town with its sudden influxes of livestock, the sheep fair at nearby Wilton, the racecourse up on the high ground.

  “There are years of work here,” he declared, with some satisfaction; and he looked for comfortable lodgings.

  Joseph Porters was thirty-seven. He wore, always, a buttoned frock coat, grey waistcoat, white shirt, ti
e in a small, neat bow, side-whiskers clipped rather short, and black top hat. His hair was sandy and thinning. He was not quite without humour, but did not feel sufficiently confident of himself to take any chances with his appearance. He had worn a moustache when young, but had abandoned it later because it did not seem to go with his half-moon spectacles.

  Since his arrival in Salisbury, two things had fascinated Joseph Porters. The first was in the drains. For as these were cleared, they revealed a fantastic quantity of articles, the refuse and careless droppings of six centuries – combs, shears, clay pipes, coins – a treasure trove for the antiquarian. Though he had no training in this field, he began to study them, and it was soon a regular occurrence for the workmen to stand back respectfully while Mr Porters so forgot his dignity, and the whiteness of his shirt, as to poke about in the mud for half an hour at a time before hurrying back to his lodgings in Castle Street to store his new found treasure and change his shirt.

  “In time,” he told the dean, “we shall need a small museum for all this, you know.”

  The second – it had taken Porters some time to dare to admit to himself the second thing that had fascinated him – was Miss Jane Shockley.

  The little library in the Shockley house was upon the main upstairs floor. It was a modest, pleasant room, and less full of the Victorian clutter that had now appeared in the drawing-room where heavy draperies on the table, two potted palms, an ornate clock, a bowl of wax flowers and four china figures had already forced their way in.

  The library only contained, besides its floor to ceiling bookshelves, two leather armchairs, an uncovered walnut table, and a bureau, at which Jane was writing.

  It was three in the afternoon and she had already composed four letters, when glancing out of the window, she saw Joseph Porters in the street below.

  “Oh dear.”

  Why had she ever spoken to him? She remembered their first meeting perfectly. It had been a year ago, not long after he had arrived: she had been in a boisterous mood with a group of other young ladies from the close when one of them had pointed to the thin, serious man standing beside his workmen and said: “That’s Porters. Drains. Very glum.” They burst out laughing and she, more to show off than anything, boldly marched across the street, gazed into the empty watercourse and declared: “Well, Mr Porters, I’ve come to inspect you and your drains.”

  He was so harmless, so dedicated. He had taken her quite seriously and, for half an hour, there and then, had explained every detail of the business to her, from the need to stop cholera to the medieval wonders lurking in the mud below. She had been trapped: without being rude she could not get away. For a full thirty minutes she stood there while he lectured her and her friends stood in the doorway of Surman’s Boot Shop and held their sides.

  “In fact,” she said defensively afterwards, “he was very interesting. And indeed,” she added, for she had listened to much of what he had told her, “the council behaved abominably.”

  It was hard, after this, not to speak to Mr Porters politely when she saw him. In fact, though the young ladies sometimes teased her by asking after her drains, she had more respect for Porters’s opinion than theirs. Almost in defiance of them, she consented to sit with him at the St Cecilia annual music festival and walked with him round the horticultural fête.

  “He is also a considerable expert on the subject of dahlias.” she informed her friends.

  Once they had even spent a day together – as members of a group, of course – when one of the canons had taken a party to visit a sarsen cutting works at Fyfield on the far side of the plain. Mr Porters had even given them a little talk explaining how the hard stones, now popular as curbing stones, were exactly those used thousands of years ago at Stonehenge.

  He was a remarkably interesting man and she enjoyed his company.

  But more than this – oh dear.

  Lizzie opened the door. His card was on the little silver salver.

  “Mr Porters, Miss Jane.”

  Could she say she was not at home? He would take it too much to heart. It was all her own fault.

  She laid down her pen.

  “Please show him up.” If only she could make him dislike her, it would all be so much easier.

  He had not been in the library before. What a light and pleasant room it was. He peered round quickly before remembering that it was bad manners to do so. Books round the walls. On the table, a catalogue from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of three years before; beside it, a more modest version of the Salisbury exhibition in the guildhall that had followed it.

  In the largest bookshelf, and given pride of place, stood huge leather-bound folios of Hoare’s mighty history of Wiltshire together with their companion, Hatcher’s history of Salisbury.

  No more impressive work had ever appeared in the county: a huge historical Domesday book that listed every parish in every hundred, with their monuments, country houses and the landed families who had owned them since feudal times. Every gentleman should have a set and indeed, the gentry of Wiltshire had widely subscribed to the project. The last volume, on the city, told a more modest though more detailed historical account of the doings of the townspeople over the centuries, and this had been prepared not by Hoare, a gentleman, but by Hatcher, a modest man of the middle classes like himself. When the books were issued, Hatcher’s work had been praised, but the poor author himself had been completely ignored.

  The sight of these huge volumes in her house momentarily depressed Porters.

  Beside the catalogues on the table lay three issues of Mr Dickens’s last serial Hard Times, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a copy of Wuthering Heights and a volume of Lord Byron’s poems. The last, though he had only glanced at them once, he thought rather unfitting for a lady, though he had been told that it was mostly ladies who read them.

  “I trust I do not intrude upon you.”

  “Not at all.”

  He glanced once more, disapprovingly, at the volume of Byron.

  “I fear I do not read poetry.”

  “No.” Her heart sank. He would not, of course. “Please sit down Mr Porters.”

  He flushed. She knew how much courage it had taken him to call upon a woman who still lived alone.

  “Lizzie will bring in tea directly,” she told him.

  Then, as usual, they talked. As long as he spoke of things he understood, he was very agreeable company. They discussed the new railway lines that must soon come to Sarum. It was a particular enthusiasm of his.

  “The council has already petitioned Parliament – it is absurd that we still only have the line to Southampton. Why, they are the new turnpike roads of the age. We need a London line. And the Great Western too. This town could still be the Manchester of the south, Miss Shockley.”

  She smiled at his enthusiasm.

  “I’m not sure the people in the close would like that, Mr Porters.”

  “And would you say they were right, in this age of progress?”

  “No. I think you are,” she told him frankly.

  He beamed.

  “It will come, I promise you.”

  They discussed the Great Exhibition in London and the marvellous Crystal Palace of glass that had contained it, to which no less than six million had come.

  “You know that Mr Beach’s cutlery was exhibited there?” She did not. He smiled. “He is very proud of the fact.”

  “You manage to know everything Mr Porters.” She would make a point of complimenting Mr Beach, all the same.

  “The Great Exhibition had an effect on this household,” she told him laughingly. “I bought a gas cooker for the kitchen.”

  “A noble invention,” he agreed. “And does your cook like it?” he asked quizzically.

  He was not stupid.

  “You unmask me at once. She tried to light it with a tinder box and took so long she nearly blew the house up. Now it sits there to mock me, Mr Porters, quite unused.”

  “Reforms take time.”

&nb
sp; She saw her opening.

  “I am become quite a reformer myself of late. I am quite persuaded of Chartism, Mr Porters.”

  She saw his mouth open. He closed it directly.

  “Chartism?”

  “Indeed.”

  “The Chartists were quite finished, Miss Shockley, when their great demonstration failed six years ago.”

  “But their cause is just.”

  “One man, one vote?”

  “Yes.”

  The Chartist movement with its call for secret ballots and universal suffrage for men had seemed like revolution to many and had certainly been successfully crushed. Yet when she thought about the matter, Jane had always found it hard to rebut the Chartists’ arguments. She feared them, of course; after all, if all men vote, and only a few have property, then might not the majority vote to destroy property of the few? It was exactly the fear her ancestors had faced in the Civil War two hundred years before.

  Did she truly believe what she said?

  She did not know. But it had shocked Mr Porters.

  “These are dangerous ideas, Miss Shockley.” He looked worried.

  “Why Mr Porters, surely you are not against reform? Look at the Mines and the Factory Acts of Lord Shaftesbury. Are you for repealing those reforms and putting children back in the mines as they used to be?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Or for taking away the Health Board and having cholera back in Salisbury?”

  “Naturally not.”

  “Then if you care for the welfare of the people you must agree with me.”

  He looked perplexed. Please God she had broken his attachment to her.

  “I cannot agree with you.”

  “Well, Mr Porters, there it is then.”

  They spoke of other things over tea. But as Porters gazed at her, his thoughts were not what she had intended.

  “She is a little wild,” he thought, “and discontented. She needs a husband to settle her, not a doubt about it. But what strength, what honesty.”

  It was after tea that she broke the news.