The Butcher's Daughter by Victoria Glendinning

Author:Victoria Glendinning [GLENDINNING, VICTORIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC014000, FIC026000
ISBN: 9781468316346
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

6

SHERBORNE

I was persuaded by Eleanor to go with her to Sherborne where she said she had family. When we arrived she asked everywhere after her mother, but was told that she had left the town. So we were on our own now.

Those first days were desperate. We slept in the fields – not in the open fields, but in hedged closes, which gave some shelter. By asking around, we found an attic room at the top of that house which stands on the corner of Trendle Street and Acreman Street, a stone’s throw from the Abbey. We had it free, on condition that we kept an eye on the old gentleman on the ground floor.

His name was Master Anthony Palmer. I never learned what he had done to earn his living, because he himself did not remember. Maybe he never did anything, there are such people and they get by.

I was impressed by Sherborne. It is at least three times larger than Bruton, and there are always people sitting about, and walking about, in between the houses and up and down the roads. I do not know where they are going or what they are doing but they are friendly and ready to talk, which is how we found out what was going on. In Bruton, if it were not a market, or a fair day, there was often no one out of doors at all. Just, at daylight end, the men coming home from the fields and boys let out from the Abbey school behaving as schoolboys do.

*

The deserted Abbey squats in the centre of the town like a great holy toad. It is built of dark golden stone. The bells of the Abbey Church still ring and punctuate our days and nights. One bell was a gift from Cardinal Wolsey; I would like his daughter Dorothy to know that. Sir John Horsey did a great service in transferring the church – for a reasonable sum – to the people of Sherborne. The townspeople do not seem exactly grateful. They believe it is their right. As a mere parish church, it is of an extraordinary size and magnificence. The roof is criss-crossed with stone patterning of a delicacy to take the sight out of your eyes. (That is an expression I learnt from Mother Onion.)

I attempted to convey my impressions to Master Palmer as we sat with him slurping our soup, he propped up on his pallet, Eleanor and I cross-legged on the floor.

‘Rubble,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘Sherborne is built of rubble. Most of it just faced with stone. Rubble. Just like myself. Rubble.’

‘Even the Abbey?’

‘Even the Abbey. Rubble.’

Master Palmer was long and bony and unable to look after himself, in that he had lost the use of his legs and his mind wandered. One day when Eleanor and I came home, he looked at us in wonderment and asked:

‘Do you two know one another?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said.

‘We do and we do not,’ said Eleanor.

Another day, he asked

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