The Unburied (16 page)

‘And then one day Gambrill told him that a nephew of his wife’s was a gifted singer, and that the family was anxious that he should enter the college and have his education paid for in return for his services in the choir. Burgoyne declined to help on the grounds that the matter lay outside his authority. But it happened that a day or two later he encountered Gambrill with the boy in the Close and the youth was presented to him and for some reason Burgoyne changed his mind and agreed to persuade the Precentor to admit him to the college. The Precentor must have been surprised by Burgoyne’s suit to him but he was impressed enough by the boy’s singing to grant him a sizarship that would pay for his board and lodging. He was lodged in a part of the college which, conveniently enough, was beside Gambrill’s house – the Old Gatehouse on the same side of the Close.

‘If the Precentor had been surprised by Burgoyne’s change of heart, he was to be yet more astonished for from this moment Burgoyne abandoned himself to his passion for music with all the force of his austere personality. He began to haunt the Cathedral in order to listen for hours to the choir practising – neglecting his duties. His favourite place was in the organ-loft from where he could look down upon the choir without being observed. He set out to win the friendship of the Precentor whom he had previously despised as a man of low birth and to this end sent for instruments and printed music from London and became a kind of patron of the college. They became such good friends that the Precentor would lend him his keys so that he could come and go as he liked.

‘All this while Burgoyne, in his position as Treasurer, was making a prodigious effort to find the money required for the work he and Gambrill were planning: increasing rents and pursuing debtors with the full rigour of the law. Then he conceived his master-stroke: closing down the college of vicars-choral.’

‘Since he loved music,’ Mrs Locard said, ‘is it not strange that he should wish to do that?’

‘It is, and Dr Sheldrick suggests that his desire to close down the college arose from his fear that it represented a temptation to himself as much as to anyone else. He knew that this suggestion would be strongly resisted and so, before proposing it openly, he attempted to win over a majority within the Chapter. He set about trying to awaken the slumbering consciences of some of his fellow-canons by a quiet reference to various little personal failings and a reminder, in the more recalcitrant cases, of how their little lapses might be perceived if they should fall under the harsh light of public scrutiny.’

I saw Dr Sisterson smile and when he noticed my curiosity he said: ‘Dr Sheldrick has a very generous way of interpreting Burgoyne’s conduct.’

‘Do you think so? He seems a very admirable figure to me.’

‘Don’t you think’, he suggested, ‘that his high-minded fastidiousness for the worldly concerns of his colleagues was a kind of arrogance?’

‘No, I don’t believe so,’ I said, strangely stung. ‘He appears to me to have been a principled and ascetic man.’

‘I imagine that his wealthy and privileged background’, Mrs Locard put in mildly, ‘made it hard for him to sympathize with colleagues who did not have his advantages.’

Dr Sisterson and I nodded. I continued: ‘Events played into his hands. In the spring of the year before his death, a crack in the spire that had opened up decades earlier suddenly widened and it became obvious to even the most stubborn of the canons that a severe storm might well bring it crashing down. Now Burgoyne laid before the Chapter his proposal to sacrifice the college in order to save the Cathedral. He demanded a complete restoration of the spire and showed that it could largely be paid for by selling the college’s endowments which consisted of a manor-house and three farms in the village of Compton Monachorum. Against him he had all the most powerful canons – Freeth, the Librarian Hollingrake, the old Dean, the Sacrist and the Precentor – who argued that the Cathedral’s reputation for music-making was one of its proudest boasts. Burgoyne, however, had won over to his side those whose consciences he had touched, and the proposal was passed by a narrow majority amid great bitterness. Freeth and Hollingrake, however, forged a deed which your husband, Mrs Locard, was kind enough to show me this afternoon. This made it impossible for Burgoyne to suppress the college after all.’

‘We’re not sure that they forged it,’ Dr Sisterson objected. ‘It’s possible they found an earlier forgery and believed it to be genuine. But even if Freeth did forge it, who can say what his motives really were?’

‘Pretty contemptible,’ I said, turning to the two ladies. ‘You see, when Freeth was himself Dean a few years later he used the forged deed to close down the college and appropriate its endowments for his personal benefit.’

‘How shameful,’ Mrs Sisterson murmured.

‘Isn’t it possible’, Mrs Locard suggested, ‘that he foresaw the Civil War and wanted to keep the Foundation’s property from being sequestrated by Parliament?’

‘You’re very generous, but everything we know about him shows that he was extremely greedy,’ I objected.

Dr Sisterson glanced at the sleeping children and smiled. ‘As the father of a large and very young family myself, I find it hard to condemn him even if his motives were entirely worldly.’

I was startled for a moment until I saw that he must be joking. I went on: ‘To go back to Burgoyne’s story. He had been trumped by Freeth – and he was furious – but he did not abandon the struggle and very soon after he was able to play his own trump card. He managed to obtain promises for half of the necessary money from his uncle and other members of his family. Some of it would be spent on a memorial in the Cathedral dedicated to the previous Earl – his grandfather.’

‘The Burgoyne monument!’ Mrs Locard exclaimed.

‘Indeed so,’ I acknowledged. ‘When Burgoyne put this new proposal to the Chapter, Freeth saw immediately that the combination of the memorial and a large subvention for the restoration of the cathedral would constitute an indefeasible claim to the deanship on the part of Burgoyne himself. And yet it was hard to refuse such a gift. But the canons still baulked at the portion of the expense which would have to come from their own pockets. Then it was that Burgoyne made what turned out to be his fatal mistake – as Dr Sheldrick puts it. He asked Gambrill to draw up revised figures for doing the smallest amount of work necessary to save the spire. Gambrill was horrified at this betrayal by his ally. He insisted on taking the Treasurer up the tower to show him how unstable many of the timbers were by rocking them with one hand, and he pointed out how easily one of them might be made to come crashing down. Burgoyne, however, stuck to his decision. The Mason was only mollified by hearing of the Treasurer’s plans for the memorial which, it was understood, would be made by him and which he decided would be his masterpiece.

‘Now Burgoyne had Gambrill argue before the Chapter that the collapse of the spire would destroy not only the cathedral – a prospect which they were able to contemplate with some equanimity – but very probably some of the houses in the Close. Faced with this danger to their own lives and those of their households, the canons agreed to surrender from their own income the balance of the money that was required.

‘Burgoyne and Gambrill had got their way, and Dr Sheldrick writes that Gambrill triumphed over the Sacrist, losing no opportunity to outwit him, deceive him and humiliate him in front of the workmen with the consequence that the canon, never a man of robust health, fell ill and had to resign his duties.’

‘My heart goes out to that poor man,’ Dr Sisterson exclaimed with a smile.

‘Poor Dr Sisterson,’ said Mrs Locard. ‘You cannot be looking forward to tomorrow’s Chapter meeting.’

‘Indeed not. I will have to break the news that services in the Cathedral will be seriously disrupted for an indefinite period.’

He heaved a comical sigh which ended in a broad smile and a request to me to continue the story.

‘Burgoyne and Gambrill now had a free hand to do as they wished. In the months that followed, however, differences between them began to emerge. Burgoyne kept refusing to give Gambrill authority to repair the spire and instead required him to devote his resources to work that the Mason believed to be of much lower priority: for example, preparing for the removal of the communion table to the centre of the building.

‘The antagonism between the two men was held in check – or so at least it appeared – by Thomas Limbrick, Gambrill’s foreman. He was the son of the man who died in the accident in which Gambrill was injured and many in the town said that giving him employment showed Gambrill’s generosity – though some attributed his action to other motives. Limbrick was a hard-working and able young man who had the trust of both the Treasurer and the Mason and was therefore in a position to smooth the difficulties that lay between them.

‘Burgoyne now had what he desired: the Cathedral was being restored and would be reopened in a manner that would hugely strengthen his position. Yet he seemed far from happy and it began to appear that something was troubling him for although he had always been extremely fastidious, he now appeared on occasions unshaven and dishevelled. He was late for meetings of the Chapter, increasingly neglectful of his duties and even abstracted during services. Once or twice while preaching he broke off as if he had lost the thread of his thoughts. He took to pacing restlessly about the town during the hours of darkness and was stopped by the watch several times – to their profound confusion – before they grew accustomed to him and learnt to recognize him, in the utter darkness of the nights in those days, from his great height and his tall hat and clerical garb.’

‘Moreover, his habit of sobriety was apparently discarded,’ put in Dr Sisterson, ‘and he appeared on several occasions the worse for liquor.’

‘Indeed? Dr Sheldrick makes no mention of that. Everyone in the town wondered what secret passion might be tormenting the Canon ...’

‘He was in love,’ Mrs Sisterson said softly.

We all glanced at her in surprise and she smiled at her husband who blushed and glanced down.

‘Well,’ I went on, ‘although people gossiped about a woman, nobody ever saw him in the company of one. Dr Sheldrick, however, now reveals for the first time the true explanation.’

‘He does?’ Dr Sisterson said in surprise. He glanced towards his wife who at that moment was giving her full attention to the slumbering child in her lap.

‘The truth is that Burgoyne was going through a spiritual crisis occasioned by his discovery of a secret offence, something so dark and shocking that it threw into turmoil all his assumptions.’

‘Indeed? Dr Sheldrick says that?’ Dr Sisterson looked at Mrs Locard as he asked me: ‘And what does he say this secret was?’

‘Financial corruption on the part of Freeth. Burgoyne was overwhelmed with dismay when he realized how corrupt Freeth was.’

‘I see,’ Dr Sisterson said, leaning back with a smile. I wondered if he had expected something else. ‘But did he not already believe Freeth to be greedy and corrupt?’

‘Yes, but the extent and deliberateness of what he discovered shocked him immeasurably. And he also discovered, Dr Sheldrick suggests, that the trusted Gambrill was deeply implicated in Freeth’s misappropriations.’ I could see that he was sceptical and I myself found Dr Sheldrick’s revelation somewhat unconvincing. ‘Then what do you think caused this sudden change in his demeanour?’

‘I believe he did indeed discover something that profoundly disturbed him, but I don’t believe it was Freeth’s financial dishonesty.’

‘What do you think it was?’

He glanced at the two ladies whose attention was at that moment taken up by the child in Mrs Sisterson’s arms, and spoke quietly. ‘I can only conjecture and I have no wish to slander even a man who has been dead more than two centuries.’

I looked at him in surprise but he pursed his lips and shook his head very slightly to indicate that it was not a subject he could pursue in the presence of the ladies, so I went on: ‘In the April of that year, Burgoyne made a long visit to London. When he returned he admitted to Gambrill that he had decided to have the memorial executed by Italian workmen in the capital. Gambrill was deeply angered by this insult to his own craftsmanship. A day or two later, he announced that the spire had become so dangerous that he was going to bar access to the tower to everyone except himself and his workmen. Burgoyne, though infuriated by what he saw as an attempt to force him into releasing monies for its repair, could not challenge the Mason’s expertise and had to accept that restriction. So Gambrill sealed off the stair at the bottom of the tower by means of a stout door, the key to which only he and one of the canons held.

‘If Gambrill had been angered by Burgoyne’s decision to commission the memorial in London, his indignation was as nothing compared to his fury when, a few weeks later, he learnt where Burgoyne intended it to be placed: the most prominent position possible, just on the chancel side of the crossing. In order to do this Burgoyne intended to take out the pulpitum. Of course the other canons protested but by this date the political situation in the country had swung decisively in Burgoyne’s favour. Archbishop Laud was in the Tower, from which he would shortly be taken to be executed, and the victorious Calvinists were insisting upon the removal of all barriers between the congregation and the celebrants. The Chapter could do nothing. When Gambrill learnt from Limbrick what Burgoyne had ordered him to do he was horrified.’

‘So he must have been,’ Dr Sisterson said warmly. ‘The dismantling of so ancient and beautiful a part of the Cathedral – the building he loved and to whose preservation he had devoted his life and even sacrificed his eye – must have seemed an act of desecration.’

‘Dr Sheldrick has a rather different explanation. He claims that Gambrill was a clandestine Catholic – as were many in the sleepy old town. That placed him in grave danger of financial ruin and even imprisonment, but it also meant that in his judgement the Cathedral was still a Catholic place of worship which had illegally fallen into the hands of men dedicated to the destruction of everything that it represented. There was a scandalous scene in the Cathedral when the Mason bearded the Treasurer and loudly reproached him for the damage he was doing. Burgoyne stalked from the building and Gambrill pursued him into the Close and up to the very back-door of his house continuing to shout at him until Limbrick intervened to pull him away. That moment probably sealed the fate of both men.