Testament, p.6
Testament, page 6
‘What do you mean, Daker doesn’t own the row?’ Simon demanded, interrupting Henry before he could finish the sentence that would have explained precisely what he meant.
‘Once Daker’s plans for the row became known —’
‘Known? How? He has hardly gone about the city trumpeting his intentions —’
‘Simon, this is not London, this is Salster. There is no corner so dark here that the bishop and his minions don’t see what is done in it. And they had no need of spies in this case — one of Daker’s tenants did not like the terms of his notice —’
Simon snorted. ‘His terms have been ridiculously generous!’
Precisely to avoid this turn of events.
‘Evidently somebody thought less of them than you do. Or perhaps he has other irons in the fire. There are always sound reasons for keeping in good standing with the Church, Simon.’
Simon began pacing the room. ‘So, the Church is laying claim to Daker’s land?’
Henry ran his fingers through his hair and rested one ankle on his other knee for comfort.
‘The land was granted to Master Daker’s father. When he first came to Salster, he rented the row of shops which lay on it from the priory but, as he became more wealthy, he received permission to pull down the row and built a hospital. He had acquired land outside the city wall by that time, hard up against the southern gate, and the revenue from that — such as it was — fed and clothed the hospital’s paupers. In recognition of his good work the priory granted to him the land on which the hospital stood.’
‘And now, grant or not, the positions are reversed.’ Simon’s tone was belligerent, as if Henry had arranged this transposition solely to confuse him. ‘When did shops become hospital and vice versa?’
‘Shortly after Daker’s father died, a fire consumed the hospital,’ Henry explained, ‘and the fabric of the building — timber-framed — was destroyed. Master Daker decided that a bigger hospital could be maintained if the shops were restored to the original site and the hospital moved to the site outside the gates.’
‘Fires happen.’ Simon stated it baldly, making it quite clear to Henry that he neither cared not desired to know whether the destruction of the hospital had been entirely accidental.
‘Indeed.’ Henry could play that game too.
‘And the shops have been in that row ever since, with never a squeak of protest from the Priory?’
‘Until now, yes.’
‘And what is it that the Priory finds to object to now? Apart from the fact of Daker’s wish to build a college upon the land.’
Henry rubbed at a stain on his boot with a licked forefinger, not meeting Simon’s eye. ‘The prior’s objection is given out as having to do with the hospital,’ he said. ‘It seems that whilst the land granted to Daker’s father was being used, in some way at least, to support a hospital, then the Church had no objection. Now, of course, things are different —’
‘If the Church granted the land to Daker’s father with good title, then objections are neither here nor there!’ Simon exploded.
‘The prior questions whether the land was granted with good title,’ Henry said, guardedly. ‘If you believe him, the Priory understood merely that it was waiving rent on the land to Daker and his heirs while there was a hospital upon it.’
‘There has not been a hospital upon it for twenty years and more! If the Church has waited till this to enforce what it conceives of as its rights, then there is more to it than the mere letter of the law!’
‘The prior’s excuse —’ Henry set tact aside — ‘is that without revenue from the shops, he fears that the hospital will founder. Colleges, as he pointed out, do not make money.’
‘Is he afraid he will have to dig into his own coffers?’ Simon asked, withering Henry with his scorn for the prior.
‘Look at it from his point of view, Simon. A well-endowed hospital is well worth having. If they stand by and watch Daker pull down the shops, they may well suspect that his next step will be to pull down the hospital, too.’
‘Henry, tell me truthfully, do you believe that this is anything more than an attempt to frustrate Daker’s college? And that the Priory and its bishop would even tolerate that if he were not a Lollard dissenter?’
Henry was silent, his eyes on the man who had saved him from poverty, raised him up to his present stature as master mason, respected citizen. ‘If Daker can prove good title to this land,’ he said, finally, ‘he will build his college, Prior William and his bishop notwithstanding.’
‘And if he cannot prove it?’
‘Let’s cross that bridge if we have to.’
Simon stared at him. ‘I once stood against a king and lost. If I now stand against the church and lose, too, I may never draw another building that comes to see stone.’
‘You are not opposing the Church.’
‘Not yet.’
Henry shook his head. ‘You make too much of it, Simon. This is nothing more than the usual wrangle over land.’
But land is money and money is power and power means getting what you want.
This was a creed familiar to Ralph Daker.
The existence of Ralph had been a surprise to William of Norwich, prior of the Benedictine foundation of Christchurch and its cathedral church. John, Daker’s young son, was well-known in Salster since he came to the city whenever his stepmother and father removed there; but Ralph had arrived in Salster, hot on the heels of his uncle’s intentions, unannounced and unexplained.
Prior William knew, to his cost, that unknown quantities had a habit of springing unpleasant surprises whilst they were allowed to remain unknown. Making them yield up their secrets, on the other hand, often made them very useful.
By long-accustomed means the prior had learned all that was known or suspected about Ralph, in either Salster or London.
He found that Ralph was Richard Daker’s nephew, his sister’s son. This was the first surprise, since the prior had taken their shared family name as evidence that Ralph was a brother’s son. It transpired that Ralph had quarrelled with his father and made his home with his uncle a dozen years before. Richard, at that time childless, had taken him into his own business and allowed him to adopt the Daker name.
Ralph had worked for his uncle ever since and was, according to the general report, treated like a son in every respect but the obvious and inescapable one of inheritance.
A rumour that was not generally reported, but had, nevertheless, come to Prior William’s ears, was that for the entire four years’ length of Richard Daker’s marriage to his second wife, Anne, he had been cuckolded by his nephew.
Anne, if hearsay was given weight, had chosen power and influence over youth for her marriage but, seeing that she might have both if she played her game discreetly, had taken Ralph to her bed on those many occasions when her husband was absent abroad.
The prior never made the mistake of believing everything he heard, but he did not discount this tale out of hand. If it were true, knowledge of it could prove extremely useful.
William of Norwich and Ralph Daker were unlikely allies, and yet no shop-tenant of Daker’s would have complained at his terms of notice, had it not been made worth his while.
Eight
From: Damia.Miller@kdc.sal.ac.uk
To: CatzCampbell@hotmail.com
Subject: Stop Press!
Against all the odds, Norris’s appeal to the families of ex-RMs for college documents has come up with the goods! A trunkful of stuff (trunk, btw = wicker, lined with calico, covered in what looks like tarpaper…) arrived today from the descendant of a Victorian RM who had removed the archive in order to write a college history and then promptly died, leaving the entire college archive at his summer residence! All the medieval papers have gone straight to the cathedral archivist because, apparently, they belong there, not here. Will tell you when I find out why.
Why was she withholding from Catz the fact that the cathedral archivist was not a stranger? Why was she not dispelling the image that she knew full well would spring to her lover’s mind of an elderly, stooped individual with thin white hair, leather elbow-patches and strained 1950s RP vowels? Why was she keeping to herself information about the cathedral archivist that would send to New York the image of a man not yet thirty-five, with a head of dark curly hair and a gap-toothed smile?
Why was she not telling Catz that — even before his appearance at Toby in response to Norris’s summons — she had known, from a few hastily emailed lines months ago, that the cathedral archivist was her one-time boyfriend, Neil Gordon?
Damia picked up the copy of the Salster Times and scanned through the report on the college:
The prospects for next summer’s Fairings are hotting up as this year’s victorious team, Kineton and Dacre College, have capped their win with another triumph, this time away from the cobbled streets and front quads in the financial world of corporate sponsorship.
Having been sponsored last year by bottled-water company Limestone, Kineton and Dacre College has, this year, set its sights on bigger game. Their prize, announced this week, is Atoz, the international sportswear and equipment company.
‘These were intense negotiations, as we needed to get a deal done quickly in order to support our athletes,’ said Damia Miller, the college’s recently appointed marketing and development manager. ‘We needed the kind of deal which would enable us to retain last year’s coach, Dean Epps, who could easily have gone on to more lucrative positions in college athletics in America.’
Mr Epps, a former Team GB middle-distance runner, has made no secret of the fact that offers ‘from overseas’ had been made but he has always maintained that he would wait to see what Salster colleges could bring to the table first.
‘The Fairings is unique,’ he told the Salster Times. ‘There is no athletics event like it in the world. It is the one truly amateur event left in elite athletics, but that doesn’t stop the standard being extraordinary.’
And this determinedly amateur spirit has always been at the heart of the worldwide appeal of the Fairings. Unlike the Boat Race, in which young people studying for any kind of degree at Oxsterbridge are eligible to row, only undergraduates studying for their first degree are allowed to run in their college’s Fairings team. It is a race for academically talented undergraduates who happen to be good runners and, despite a great deal of lobbying over the years from interested parties, it remains so. And, as running does not have the elitist connotations of rowing, Fairings teams tend to reflect the social diversity for which Salster, alone of the three Oxsterbridge universities, is justifiably applauded.
Atoz, who have previously been sponsors of Boat Race teams and Premiership football clubs, announced their sponsorship of Kineton and Dacre at a press conference at the college.
‘We are delighted to announce our partnership with the college’s athletes,’ their representative Kerry Kramer said, ‘and hope that our backing of a non-professional sporting team will encourage other people to enjoy running at whatever level they feel comfortable with. Though our company is associated with sports of various kinds, running has always been our heart and soul and we have a reputation, which we are very proud of, for producing running equipment of the highest quality.
‘Kineton and Dacre College runners will be attesting to this as they all run in their choice of Atoz running shoe and sponsored kit, next summer.’
Damia’s hands shook as she put the paper down. It was all positive — no reference to either the rent strike or the college’s financial position, thank God! Things could have been very different. From the outset, Damia had played the risky publicity card and used the college’s current media focus as a draw — talking up the campaign to unravel the mystery of The Sin Cycle as a counterweight to the very visible rent strikers and their campaign. She had also, unashamedly, sold the good PR it would give the company to be seen to be supporting a college team which took more than the Salster average of state school pupils.
The Fairings: the most famous footrace in the world after the Olympic marathon. Damia would, the following May, be included in scenes that she had only previously shared with tens of millions of other people via television coverage: the six teams in their college rigs; the traffic-free streets packed with people craning for a view of their favoured runners; interviews with team members glowing with youth, intelligence and the kind of fitness the human body evolved for — the ability to run at a sustained pace in pursuit of quarry.
Strictly speaking, there was no actual pursuit, since the quarry in the Fairings were roses, plucked by runners from specially erected trellises in each foundation college and, at the climax of the race, from the centuries-old rambler in the main quad at St Thomas’s.
The ancient rose of St Tom’s lay at the heart of the Fairings. Tradition maintained that the city’s medieval apprentices, drunk on May Day festivity, would dare each other to scale the forbidding college walls and emerge with a sweet-smelling, pale pink bloom as a Fairing gift for their sweetheart. The precise origins of the modern intercollegiate race were obscure, though most historians of the event agreed in implicating the idleness of Victorian varsity youth.
In the twenty-first century, Damia reflected, neither those who ran in the race nor the colleges that nurtured them could afford to be idle. While the athletes endured the dovetailing of training schedules with social and academic demands, the colleges’ finance officers went through a no less gruelling procedure in order to secure big-name backing for their teams. And, as financial pressures increased year on year, the money brought in by Fairings sponsorship played a more and more significant role in sustaining a college’s financial health.
Consequently, there was now far more at stake for the runners than the honour of simply taking part. Winning could make the difference between a household-name sponsor the following year and a less well-known and consequently less lucrative one. And since top-flight coaches followed the money, here as elsewhere, success bred success.
The Toby runners — Damia hugged herself with the thought — would now be able to hold on to Dean Epps.
Later the same day, Damia opened the door to Toby’s Junior Common Room and stepped from the warmth and brightness of a resolutely sunny October day into the muted cool of a largely empty room. As she took in her surroundings, she felt the confidence inspired by her position slipping away and was humiliated by the realisation that she was still capable of being intimidated by age-stained panelling, battered leather furniture and a sideboard stacked with willow-patterned china teacups.
She grinned slightly sheepishly at the common room’s mid-afternoon occupants — a young man with a lot of unruly russet hair sprawled on a sofa with a large hardbacked notebook and an underweight girl playing solitaire on her laptop with a frown that Damia hoped denoted concentration rather than annoyance at being disturbed.
‘Hi, sorry to invade your space — just here to meet the Fairings runners. I’m Damia Miller, the new marketing and development manager.’
‘Cool!’ the reader commented. Unexpectedly, he leaped to his feet and came to shake hands. Would he have jumped up quite so quickly and smilingly, Damia wondered, if she’d been white? At the Gardiner Centre her mixed race had gone largely unremarked, one of the least interesting things about her. Here, she couldn’t help worrying, things might be different. ‘Sam Kearns.’ His handshake was warm and confident. Perhaps he was just always like this. ‘The cheerful one over there is Lisa Gregory.’
Ms Gregory kept her eyes fixed balefully on her electronic cards and muttered a suggestion that Sam should attempt sex with himself.
Damia concentrated on the more appealing Mr Kearns. ‘Work?’ she asked, nodding at the book in his hand.
‘Nah — just the Biz Book.’ He offered it to her.
‘Sorry?’ she said, taking the book from him.
‘Biz Book — Toby JCR institution. You can write anything in it for anybody else to read — get something off your chest, tell a joke, have a dig at somebody, monger a bit of gossip, suggest things to be discussed at next JCR meeting — anything.’
‘So, Biz as in business?’
Sam lip-shrugged. ‘Dunno — never thought about it. But probably, yeah. I suppose it might originally have been a suggestions book — or a kind of working agenda for JCR meetings. But we’ve all got a lot more frivolous since then.’
‘Who’s the cartoonist?’ Damia asked, seeing what were evidently caricatures of college members as she flicked through the dog-eared book.
‘Stephan Kingsley — third-year classicist. Fantastic mimic too. You should see his Tommy Thomas.’
Damia looked up and shook her head slightly, confessing ignorance.
‘Tommy’s one of the angels,’ Sam explained, using the term by which Toby — in common with all other Salster colleges — referred to the domestic staff who looked after undergraduate rooms. Toby’s angels worked one to each pair of staircases, each angel taking responsibility for the cleanliness of twelve rooms and the low-key oversight of twelve young people. Toby was one of the few remaining colleges to employ its angels directly rather than through an agency, Norris had told Damia, and that made them fixtures, known — and sometimes loved — by the students. ‘I can’t do him,’ Sam continued, ‘but if ever you meet Stephan, get him to do Tommy for you. It’s perfect — even Tommy thinks so.’
First, Damia reflected, she would have to meet the original. It was high time she stepped aside from paperwork, websites, governing bodies and negotiations with sportswear manufacturers and became acquainted with the people who actually made the college work.
Sam’s gaze moved to the window that overlooked the Octo yard. ‘Here they are,’ he said, ‘at least the Toby runners — are you meeting the Northgate lot as well? That’s them, by the way, if you want to see them in all last year’s glory.’ He nodded to a point on the wall over her shoulder and Damia turned to see a huge, framed photograph of four laughing young people in the Toby rig, drenched in multicoloured silly-string, shaken champagne spurting over them from all directions.
