by Ian Mortimer
The next alley I walk down ends in a courtyard of dilapidated houses. I feel raindrops on me. I come across an old woman standing in a doorway, who stares at me as I pass, turning her head as if her eyes were fixed immovably in her skull. I see three young urchins playing in a puddle with a stick, and two old women sitting and making cloth by twisting needles and thread together in the light of an open door. For all its outward smartness and pride, the city has as many pits of desperation as it ever had. For every haughty man with a silver-headed cane there’s a trio of children squatting in the gutter. The new houses on the main streets look handsome but, behind them, there are intersecting alleys of old buildings and crumbling halls, with windows that have no glass in them but which are blocked by planks of wood. A timber-framed wall shows great holes where the cob has fallen out and not been replaced: I can see straight through to the staircase in the dimness within. In one sad courtyard of mud and gravel, I see a stinking well which has moss growing over the lip of the shaft. I cannot find my way out of this chaos of dereliction, and I turn and turn, seeing decay, roughly patched walls and doors, and sheer neglect everywhere. The houses lean on their own decrepitude.
And then I find myself on a road I know: North Street. There is the old gate where William and I entered that night, when I was carrying Lazarus.
I walk purposefully back to the High Street. When I reach it, I see nothing familiar except the line of the street itself. There are buildings five storeys high with painted frontages, carved woodwork, balustrades and balconies. Most of the people here are gathered around the last few pens of unsold cows and sheep. As I watch a couple of bullocks being led up and down, I see a smiling fat woman distracting a man flirtatiously. She raises her hand to his cheek and a girl, who can be no more than nine, creeps up behind him. I presume this is the woman’s daughter. While the mother smiles and draws him closer to kiss, the daughter removes the purse from the pocket of the man’s coat. But the child is still learning her immoral craft. He notices the movement, breaks away from the mother, feels for the purse, then looks around and shouts in outrage as he sees the girl running away. He runs after her, dodging the other pedestrians, and catches her by the collar. He snatches back his purse and twists her ear before cuffing her. Then he shoves her hard, sending her sprawling across the mud of the street, and kicks her. A few people turn to watch and then they shift their attention back to the cattle auction.
Everyone here is fumbling his or her way through life. There seems to be no overarching design – no elegance to society. What good work could I do for them? They are all divided from each other, snatching, pilfering and deceiving. Even the houses are jostling for attention – those that are not are decaying into the mud. Haughty men with silvery hair – their vanity cries out from afar. The brandy has made my judgement poor – but not so poor that I cannot see the ugly side of life.
I walk under the arch of Broadgate, into the cathedral precinct.
The incompleteness of the recognition is painful. The cathedral yard has been fenced off, grassed, and made to look like a rich man’s garden. All the old canons’ houses of my time have gone, replaced by wide sandstone-fronted mansions. As for the cathedral, it feels as if I am looking at the corpse of a dear old friend who has been stripped of all her skin. The tracery of the windows is broken in places. The cloisters, where I carved that portrait of William with oversized ears, have gone. So much for my promise to William that he would always be remembered here. Now the space is filled by a line of tall buildings with walls of those small, rectangular stones that I first saw at the quay. Houses have been built right up against the north tower, dividing the cathedral green in two. The great screen of carved kings has lost all its paint. All the old stonework has decayed. My sculpture of Henry the Third has broken off at the chest. The angel beneath him, with her wing outstretched protecting the columns on which he stands, has had her eyes and nose obliterated, leaving her looking more like a ghoul from the underworld than an angel. My portrait of the kind canon treasurer has similarly had the features wiped smooth, so that his head resembles a worm with a horse’s mane. I had hoped to preserve his face forever, but all this new age has received from me is a mangled lump of rock, returned almost to its natural form.
The great west door of the cathedral is closed. But a lesser door just to the right is open. I cross myself as I walk inside and meet a man in a black cassock. He is young and clean-shaven but not tonsured as a priest should be. I try to step past him but he bars my way. I try to go the other side of him but he moves.
‘Tuppence, if you please,’ he says.
‘For what?’
‘For the glory of God.’ He gives me a smile, and waves at the roof.
‘Does everyone in this city put money before everything else?’
‘Two pence,’ he says firmly.
I shake my head.
‘Then you will have to leave.’
‘It is not right that you should deny a pilgrim access for want of a couple of coins.’
‘Your breath shows you are no pilgrim. You are drunk. Leave – or I will call the city beadles.’
I step forward and push him. ‘No. God has promised me that I will not die today – nor tomorrow either.’
‘You cannot enter!’
‘You are wrong. Most evidently, I can.’
I walk past him and turn left to the chapel of Saint Edmund. I go up to the wooden screen separating it from the body of the church. The gate is locked. I look through the opening, hoping to see the altarpiece containing my carving of William’s face. It has gone – the whole altarpiece has been removed. There is nothing there – not even an altar.
It is a chapel no longer. It is a stone box.
I hit the screen with my hand in anger, and stride up the nave. The area is now filled with wooden seats, as if people today were too weak to stand to listen to the word of God. I look up: almost every carved figure has gone. Altarpieces have been torn out and the altars removed. Effigies of the dead have been desecrated with graffiti. A beautiful female head carved by William Joy has had its jaw smashed off, leaving her face broken-lipped and ugly. The rood has gone from above the chancel screen, replaced with a huge block of timber and metal flutes. In the side chapels all the altars and all the paintings have gone, and the windows have been filled with plain clear glass.
They have pulled the teeth from the cathedral’s sweet smile, leaving blackened hollows.
‘You! You must leave,’ shouts a priest behind me. ‘You cannot enter. This is a holy place.’
‘It is no longer that,’ I reply, walking beneath the screen. Two more men in cassocks catch up with me. One tries to pull my hand away from the door through to the quire but I shake him off. The other tries to restrain me by grabbing my shoulder; I turn and push him away too.
‘Do not presume to interfere with my calling,’ I say. ‘The spittle of the Devil’s kiss lingers in my mouth and you would not wish it to taint you too.’
Immediately I turn and start walking through the quire. My anxiety grows ever greater as I see so much destruction about the place. The paint has gone from the walls. The altarpiece is no longer behind the high altar; it has been replaced by plain wooden panels. The great east window of the cathedral has lost its rose of blue and red light: smaller arches have been put in its place. Even Bishop Stapledon’s huge throne resembles the unpainted timbers of a wrecked ship.
Then I turn and enter the chapel of Saints Andrew and Catherine.
The first face I see is William’s. It no longer looks like a face, let alone that of my brother. It looks as if it has been rinsed away by the tides and is now just a vague shape. Next I turn to look at the face of my wife, by Saint Catherine’s altar. She is still there, a little damaged and stripped of her paint. Bird lime cascades down her wimple, as if someone had broken a dozen eggs over her head, and left them to rot. The face opposite, which William Joy modelled on my own features, shows a little crumbling of the jaw – and another dozen eggs
.
This is all that is left of us. This is all that will be left of anyone: small fragments, mutilated by people who do not care for the past nor understand what its relics signify.
It feels as though the whole building has been tossed, like a huge stone, into a deep pool. Now the small fish of mute priests swim in and out of the wreckage, blindly passing the figures of my life, not seeing them. A pike in a cassock flashes in the bright light of the stained-glass windows; bubbles rise up past the intricate beauty of a carved arch. The pike does not notice them, its cold eye is searching only for the silver gleam of another coin that might come tumbling down through the water, thrown by a visitor.
My eye shifts to a small carved head at the springing of a vault. I carved it in my twentieth year. It was a tiny thing, the head of a bald deacon, but it gained me the praise of my fellow workers. Now the deacon’s lips have been chiselled away, so there is a deep gash in the middle of his face and up one side of his cheek. It looks like a skull shrieking at eternity.
I turn to the chapel door. The three priests who pursued me are there. ‘You are heathens,’ I shout. ‘Would you chisel your mothers’ faces from their heads? Because that is what you’ve done to this place.’ I gesture to the walls around me and the vault above. ‘Every one of these stones was carved by a man. Every one of those men had fears and passions, and all of that feeling went into these stones. This cathedral was built to bring men and women together in the eyes of God, and thus to bring us all closer to Him. But your ungodly priesthood has turned it into a faceless pile of rubble – and all for the sake of devilish profit.’
‘Have you now said your piece?’ says one.
‘No,’ I reply. ‘Where are the beautiful sculptures that once graced this place? Where is the colour, the light? Where is the love?’
‘You must leave, now!’
‘Enough of this,’ snaps the oldest and most portly priest. ‘This man is going to the cells. Timothy, fetch the beadles. I want him up before the magistrates before sundown, and the skin lashed off his back.’
One of the younger men departs.
‘Your charity, priest, must flow out of your arse – for nothing charitable comes out of your mouth.’ The two remaining priests both advance on me and try to grab me but I kick the older one in the back of his lower leg and he sprawls forward. His companion tries to grab hold of my tunic but I beat his hand off, and give him a sharp punch on the nose. I run around the ambulatory, my footsteps echoing against the stone walls and vaulting. I pass the faces of the familiar long-dead: bishops staring up at their Creator; knights lying motionless on their sides, forever drawing their swords.
I hear shouts from somewhere in the nave and slip through into the quire to avoid my pursuers, running quickly past the bishop’s throne. But more men have entered and are spreading out, trying to trap me between the seats. I dodge the first, climb over a row of benches, push another man away by thrusting my palm in his face, and run hard for the door. Beadles or constables appear there too. I slow down, trying to evade them, and am seized from behind.
My hands are tied behind my back and I am marched out of the cathedral and across the city to the Guildhall, where they lock me in a cold, windowless cell. For over an hour I wait in the darkness, sitting on the floor with my hands still tied. I hear drips from the damp walls. I smell the dank air. I hear the great bell of the cathedral ring out the second hour of the afternoon. I feel I am losing the cathedral too, on top of losing my wife and family and my brother. It is being stolen from me, sculpture by sculpture.
Before the third hour can ring, the door opens. Once again, my eyes are squinting at the sudden onset of light.
Two beadles are standing there. One of them speaks. ‘This is Mister Birch. My name is William Green. We come on behalf of the mayor. He has heard the reports of your church-breaking at the cathedral, your striking of the priest, and your violent affray at the Bear Inn. He has decided that, because no damage was done to any property, no charges will be pressed. However, on account of the affray and the insult to the cathedral and its staff, you are to be taken to the workhouse at Heavitree and given twenty lashes. Afterwards you may stay in the workhouse for up to three days, on condition that you pay your way by working. After you leave you may not return to the city, on pain of further whipping and imprisonment in the castle.’
There are lines of houses now outside the East Gate, where once the town ditch lay filled with stagnant water and stinking rubbish. They are very regular in their proportions, built of the same red rectangular stones I first saw at the quay. On my right, adjacent to the area I know as Crulditch, is a flat green space where men in three-cornered hats are playing a game on a square of well-kept grass, rolling large black balls carefully towards a small white ball. There is a sense of order, and decency, as if nothing should disturb the equanimity of those that come here. I distrust it. If you look at one street of these new buildings, it looks elegant; if you look at all the rows of them, they look oppressive – for they are without curves. Here, the only concept of architectural flow is the straight line. Everything is calculated, squared off, measured and exact. The rules are cold, as if they were laid down by unimaginative men, not master masons hoping to please God.
Not long afterwards I see ahead a huge palace, set around three sides of a large quadrangle, with a garden and orchards on the near side and fields on the other. It is about twenty bays wide along the front and ten wide along each wing, and it is built of the same rectangular red stones. As we draw closer, I see a low wall running around the perimeter of the grounds, and an elaborate ironwork gate at the front of an impressive wide approach road. Two young men are racing their horses towards us; they pass and turn off to the north, disappearing with a splattering of mud and thundering hooves. An old farm cart trundles past. A woman and her children, carrying baskets covered with cloths, make their way into the quadrangle.
‘What stone is that palace made from?’ I ask.
‘That ain’t a palace,’ says one of the beadles, with a smirk. ‘That’s the workhouse. And it is not made out of stone but brick.’
The very word workhouse is hideous. It says that it doesn’t matter where you come from, or how kind you are; all that matters is your labour. You are nothing more than a draught animal. If you are a vagrant, then this is where you will be brought. The old God of forgiveness has given up and shut the gates of Heaven, directing the gatekeeper to tell all those seeking clemency to go to the workhouse. Yet is not poverty a virtue? If Christ were living in this day and age, would He not have ended up in a workhouse? Yes, even He would be treated as a draught animal in this godless age.
This realisation is crushing. What good can I possibly do in a world in which ‘goodness’ is something shunned by the majority? I cannot support this persecution of mankind with its absolutes, its straight lines, and its lack of tolerance of human weakness. I see no beauty in a world without curves, innocence and natural grace. And yet what I think should be a natural right – freely entering the cathedral – is abhorrent to these people. In the last century, at the house of Mister Parlebone, I was troubled by the changing nature of good and evil. Now I have to confront the possibility that there is no common ground between my sense of good and these people’s. What positive act can I do in this world if it will only be seen as sin?
My fear of the workhouse is not lessened by my entrance. Standing before the barred teeth of its front door, with the high roof towering over me like giant eyes, and its great wings enveloping me like those of an immense dragon, I feel its hunger to consume embodied souls and turn them into soulless bodies. Above the door is a giant version of one of those dials that formed the face of the clock in Farmer Hodges’ kitchen. One of the beadles knocks on the great door. I hear several locks being undone, and eventually it swings open. All the incremental horrors of control seem to be here in attendance. And as I pass into the building – into a stone-floored hall with corridors leading off on either side – I become a
nother body to be controlled.
The door closes behind me with a heavy thud and the fastening of the locks by a tired-looking, fat-faced man of about fifty in a black overtunic and white shirt. ‘Mister Birch, Mister Green, it is good to see you both,’ he says, taking up his position at a writing pedestal nearby. He has eye-windows like those worn by the man reading a book at the Bear Inn.
‘Mister Pethybridge, likewise,’ replies Mister Green. ‘Mayor’s orders, this one. A vagrant and church-breaker, found guilty of causing a violent affray and striking the cathedral choirmaster. The mayor wants him taught a lesson – twenty lashes. Following the punishment, he may stay for three nights, provided he works to reimburse the corporation. After which he is banished for life.’
Mister Pethybridge looks me up and down, and takes off his eye-windows. ‘It is all very well for the mayor to show clemency but you need to understand that it makes for extra work for all of us here. This man will have to be inspected for diseases, and disinfected in a bath. We’ll have to find him workhouse clothes for three days – and then wash them again at the time of his departure. We’ll have to have his clothes laundered in the meantime. We’ll have to feed him and find him somewhere to sleep. I’ve already got forty too many here as it is, and Mister Turner is not with me today. Nor is Mister Evans. I have an onerous duty as it is, sorting out the women who give notice and leave the institution one day only to play the squirrel all night at a bawdy house and beg to be readmitted the following morning. That means more clothes, more washing, more food and more paperwork. If the mayor wishes to reprimand men and women, he should just send them to prison or to the gallows, not here.’
‘I will certainly pass on your candid report,’ replies Mister Green. ‘You could not have made your position clearer.’
Mister Pethybridge sighs. ‘Doctor Hallett has not yet left, so at least the inmate can be examined. But there are only three of us here at present, so for punishment he’ll have to wait until Mister Kinner arrives.’
